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Comment by pfdietz | Hacker News Reader

I don't care about offense. What I care about is lying. If someone distributes provable untruths, that should be legally actionable -- if not by government, then in civil court by the people harmed by the lies.

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And who exactly should be the authority of what "truth" and "proof" is? The government?

The courts. Settling such questions is what they're for.

> Settling such questions is what they're for.

No, they're there to deliver justice. Truth in courts can and does change often when new evidence is brought into view.

The idea that a single entity could somehow have a priori knowledge of truth, good enough to decide what is/isn't true in general, is a juvenile God fantasy. Truth is a tricky concept.

Courts are very much about establishing truth. I mean, they put people to death based on determinations of what actually happened. The word "fact" is derived from legal language. The purpose of all this may be the delivery of justice, but the machinery is all about establishment of what is and is not true.

Let's say your premise is granted. So in this hypothetical, courts are going to become moderation organizations for online content, in addition to their usual responsibilities?

Courts are already the arbiter of expression, we have slander and libel in the states. They generally require you to prove that the parties involved knew what they are saying is a lie, which makes them a little toothless in practice. You are free to repeat anything you like as long as you do no due diligence on the info.

Hell, alex jones literally just got slapped for his speech.

I think the question here is how that'd scale. UK already has a massive backlog of court cases that keeps growing, and that's just enforcing the existing laws. If "posting false things on the Internet" becomes a crime, we'd need orders of magnitude more courts to keep up.

At some point, you have to ask if banning something that's so pervasive that most (or even a significant minority) is a good idea to begin with.

A $1.44 billion fine is just a slap?

> in addition to their usual responsibilities

Courts have always been responsible for determining the truth. Libel is a crime. Every criminal case has a guilty/not guilty decision that must be grounded in the truth.

Not for determining the truth of all statements made. At the most just of those made about people when the people they're about make a complaint.

Not every court puts people to death. For most of them it is precisely because they cannot determine truth without leaving doubt.

https://www.signaturelitigation.com/high-court-confirms-that...

No, courts exist to decide if laws were broken. "Justice" is a squishy and subjective concept.

Justice could be defined as punishing people who've broken the law. At least that's the way I meant it.

I agree that justice, in a philosophical sense, is a subjective concept.

That's an interesting position. Is there currently any country on earth which has a general law against telling lies?

Most countries have some form of civil defamation law, but generally you have have to be lying about a _specific person or entity_. Some countries (not as many as you may think; a lot of things described as hate speech laws are really incitement to hatred laws, which is a little different) also have hate speech laws which in principle may prevent maliciously lying about specified groups of people, but in practice, the bar for actually prosecuting someone under these is usually extremely high.

I'm not sure anywhere has a ban on _all_ lies, though. You can generally say that the sky is green, or even usually tell lies about non-protected groups ("all lawyers are criminals" is clearly a lie, say, but unless the context makes it clear that you're using it about a particular lawyer, you're probably fine).

That inevitably leads to the truth being banned. Nobody, and least of all a government, should be trusted to decide what is the truth.

Let's say there is a government body that decides what is true or not, and decides who to punish for lying.

It would be naive to think such a government body would be impervious to corruption, or groupthink, or mistakes. In fact, it would be the worlds largest target for anyone who wanted to promote misinformation or bribe/threaten people to weaponize it against their enemies.

Every time a new political party came into power, their opponents would be censored and imprisoned. And at the same time, the people in that government body who get to decide what is true or not would miraculously see their personal wealth increase. What a strange coincidence!

Bad things can even happen by accident: look at how many people were shouted down for saying masks were a good idea when Covid started, and then were shouted down for not wearing masks a few months later. Or look at who was shouted down for saying that missile that landed in Poland might not be Russian.

When the censors get things wrong, and they have the authority of the government behind them, the consequences will be terrible. It would ultimately result the end of free society, and it would not take very long for that to happen.

Doesn't that argument prove too much? I mean, it applies to anything the court system does.

The media lie all the time and change their story later, but its not okay for normal people to lie?

Why would the media be excluded?

I doubt such a system would ever be put in place, because politicians would be the biggest targets.

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