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Comment by cwkoss | Hacker News Reader

Some people are probably going to call for legislation to address this twitter thread. What kinds of laws or regulations do you think could solve this?

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None, because the government shouldn’t be interfering in speech.

The whole point of this is that government is already interfering in speech.

This one specifically is pretty strong IMO (Biden team telling Twitter to manipulate speech): https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1598827602403160064

Yes yes, someone has already said something about one of them being a dick pic, remove that one, whatever. But do you think they are ALL dick picks? This email is one out of many.

The point being made by the commenter you replied to, which I think you missed, is that if the government passed a law preventing one private entity (a political campaign) from emailing another private entity (a business), that would be government interference in speech.

> This one specifically is pretty strong IMO

That was from October 2020. Biden was not in government then.

Conspiring to suppress true information to influence an election seems worse.

But that is still within the company's First Amendment right. This was settled when the Supreme Court ruled that political donations are a company's First Amendment right. So now companies are allowed to have a direct influence on elections.

what if you use the report button to do the same, and succeed? have you influenced the election? perhaps marginally. your tweets do the same.

Step back and think how your position is anti-free speech

I'm in favour of free speech, without censorship from government or private entities. Which is why I think censoring the laptop story was wrong.

So tell me, how is that anti free speech?

How are non-consensual dick pics free speech?

> The whole point of this is that government is already interfering in speech.

Nah. The point of this is right-wing propaganda.

Hopefully ones requiring this kind of transparency regarding moderation actions on platforms of sufficiently large size. A lot of concerns about bias would go away if platforms had to give proper reasoning/justification for moderation actions in more definite terms than the vague statements we're used to. It might be a bit much to expect that for every moderation action, so maybe something that balances the required detail against the visibility of the action.

For example, banning spambots should basically only need overall statistics on the bans, whereas bans/suspensions of news or public figures should require detailed insight into what happened. As a side effect it might force platforms to have some insight into automated bans instead of relying on people managing to stir up enough of a ruckus on another platform to get in touch with a human.

Any laws “solving” this would actually be first amendment violations.

Well, the one party wants to require more censorship, which would be bad (and unconstitutional here in the US), and the other party wants to ban censorship, which would also be bad (and unconstitutional here in the US).

Maybe something about transparency would be workable? Even if the policy that whichever site is being transparent about is "all decisions are arbitrary", at least people would know that that's the policy.

No, each party wants things they disagree with censored.

Term limits!

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