Comment by belorn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by belorn | Hacker News Reader

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> Moderating spam is very interesting: it is almost universally regarded as okay to ban (i.e. CENSORSHIP) but spam is in no way illegal.

Interesting, in my country spam is very much illegal and I would hazard a guess that it is also illegal in the US, similar to how littering, putting up posters on peoples buildings/cars/walls, graffiti (a form of spam), and so on is also illegal. If I received the amount of spam I get in email as phone calls I would go as far as calling it harassment, and of course robot phone calls are also illegal. Unsolicited email spam is also again the law.

And if spam is against the service agreement on twitter then that could be a computer crime. If the advertisement is fraudulent (as is most spam), it is fraud. Countries also have laws about advertisement, which most spam are unlikely to honor.

So I would make the claim that there is plenty of principled reasons for banning spam, all backed up by laws of the countries that the users and the operators live in.

Unsolicited phone calls are somewhat illegal, but it's dependent on circumstances. It's the same with email spam and mail spam. One person's spam is another person's cold call. Where do you draw the line? Is mailing a flier with coupons spam? Technically yes, but some people find value in it.

In the US, spam is protected speech, but as always, no company is required to give anybody a platform.

> In the US, spam is protected speech, but as always, no company is required to give anybody a platform.

Commercial speech in the US is not protected speech and may be subject to a host of government regulation [0]. The government has broad powers to regulate the time, place, and content of commercial speech in ways that it does not for ordinary speech.

[0] See https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/commercial_speech

Not all spam is commercial.

In fact, US legislators specifically made political spam legal in the CAN-SPAM bill.

It is dependent on circumstances, and the people who would draw the line in the end would be the government followed by the court.

Not all speech is protected speech. Graffiti is speech, and the words being spoken could be argued as protected, but the act of spraying other people properties with it is not protected. Free speech rights does not overwrite other rights. As a defense in a court I would not bet my money on free speech in order to get away with crimes that happens to involves speech.

Historically the US court has defined speech into multiple different categories. One of those are called fraudulent speech which is not protected by free speech rights. An other category is illustrated with the anti-spam law in Washington State, which was found to not be in violation of First Amendment rights because it prevent misleading emails. Washington’s statue regulate deceptive commercial speech and thus passed the constitutional test. An other court ruling, this one in Maryland, confirmed that commercial speech was less protected than other forms of speech and that commercial speech had no protection when it was demonstrably false.

In theory a spammer could make non-commercial, non-misleading, non-fraudulent speech, and a site like twitter would then actually have to think about questions like first-amendment. I can't say I have ever received or seen spam like that.

> In theory a spammer could make non-commercial, non-misleading, non-fraudulent speech, and a site like twitter would then actually have to think about questions like first-amendment. I can't say I have ever received or seen spam like that.

While I don't think I have seen it on Twitter (then again I only read it when it's linked) I have seen plenty of it in some older forums & IRC. Generally it's just nonsense like "jqrfefafasok" or ":DDDDDD" being posted lots of times in quick succession, often to either flood out other things, to draw attention to poster or to show annoyance about something (like being banned previously).

You got a point. Demonstration as a form of free speech is an interesting dilemma. Review spam/bombing for example can be non-commercial, non-misleading, non-fraudulent, while still being a bit of a grey-zone. Removing them is also fairly controversial. Outside the web we have a similar problem when demonstrations and strikes are causing disruption in society. Obviously demonstration and strikes should be legal and are protected by free speech, but at the same time there are exceptions when they are not.

I am unsure if one would construct a objective fair model for how to moderate such activity.

>a site like twitter would then actually have to think about questions like first-amendment.

I wish people understood that the first amendment does not have anything to do with social media sites allowing people to say anything. Twitter is not a public square, no matter how much you want it to be.

> In the US, spam is protected speech

[citation needed]

Doesn't the CAN-SPAM act explicitly declare otherwise?

I was under the impression that CAN-SPAM applies to email, not user generated content on the internet at large

It is both yes, and no. CAN-SPAM do only apply to electronic mail messages, usually shorten down to email. However...

In late March, a federal court in California held that Facebook postings fit within the definition of "commercial electronic mail message" under the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act ("CAN-SPAM Act;" 15 U.S.C. § 7701, et seq.). Facebook, Inc. v. MAXBOUNTY, Inc., Case No. CV-10-4712-JF (N.D. Cal. March 28, 2011).

There is also two other court cases: MySpace v. The Globe.com and MySpace v. Wallace.

In the later, the court concluded that "[t]o interpret the Act in the limited manner as advocated by [d]efendant would conflict with the express language of the Act and would undercut the purpose for which it was passed." Id. This Court agrees that the Act should be interpreted expansively and in accordance with its broad legislative purpose.

The court defined "electronic mail address" as meaning nothing more specific than "a destination . . . to which an electronic mail message can be sent, and the references to local part and domain part and all other descriptors set off in the statute by commas represent only one possible way in which a destination can be expressed.

Basically, in order to follow the spirit of the law the definition of "email" expanded, with traditional email like user@example.invalid being just one example of many forms of "email".

Nudity and porn are other examples of legal speech that have broad acceptance among the public (at least the U.S. public) to moderate or ban on social media platforms.

Yishan's point is, most people's opinions on how well a platform delivers free speech vs censorship will index more to the content of the speech, rather than the pattern of behavior around it.

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