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Comment by Spivak | Hacker News Reader

I the the way forward on this is to pass a national hate speech law and have it work kinda like the DMCA where platforms and people can submit complaints, and the people taken down can dispute in a public government process that has some accountability to the citizenry.

Build up some case law about what is and isn’t so it’s applied uniformly and take stronger measures against repeat offenders.

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Expanding the DMCA model to speech in general! Ten years ago I would have been very surprised to see this take on HN.

I think the calculus has changed a bit since then because we either have unaccountable megacorporations doing it or government.

Why would you think government would be any less accountable? If anything, government has everything to gain from this.

Governments all over (including our own) have already gotten caught removing things that are directly relevant to transparency for modern systems. Crazy to think they can be relied upon to exercise these types of powers wisely.

If your argument is that nobody can be trusted then that’s fine, but I’m throwing my hat in with government over Facebook or Twitter if I have to choose. Because “everyone just drop it” doesn’t seem like it’s gonna happen.

"Less unaccountable" is what I meant to write, but my point still stands.

"I think the calculus has changed a bit since then because we either have unaccountable megacorporations doing it or government. So let's give them even MORE power."

On other, less-enlightened forums, this would earn you a .jpg of a dog cocking its head to the side quizzically.

I was thinking the opposite, if they’re gonna ban you for hate speech there has to be a formal complaint, with a reason and citing exactly the content, there is a formal dispute process and the final decision is made by someone not part of the corporation.

This is an extremly bad idea, there is nothing even closely redeeming about it.

This will end up with masses flagging the current not popular thing. This is precisely why you need laws that ensure freedom of expression, self-determination and other human rights.

This is exactly what happens right now except the content moderators are employees of the platform. The world hasn’t ended. I want the process that every platform already implements but it works the same across the internet with public complaints, a formal dispute and restoration process, and the decision not depend on the temperature of the particular platform’s moderators.

HN’s flagging system is more aggressive than what I want with less oversight. If you feel like you have freedom of expression here then surely HN but with a looser grip ought to be even more, ya?

It was a pretty bad situations since some moderators have been instrumentalized for political purposes. And there is nobody that really called them out for it. This should have been the press and their silence is pretty loudly screaming about how you can depend on them. I don't care which political party was worse here.

We had content manipulation for political purposes. There is no guarantee that this will stop now, but changes were certainly needed. It isn't too great that it is now in the hands of Musk perhaps, but he at leaset has a different goal. Even if that is just a pretense it would still be an improvement. And no, some alleged bots are no excuse to just editorialize topics.

This inhibits people forming their own opinion if they will be fed with preapproved messages. So yes, it was a severe problem. Even European leaders called out Twitter when they banned Trump. And it was certainly not because they liked him.

I do believe that flagging is abused on HN from time to time. It just doesn't happen too often and HN isn't too relevant for public discourse. Twitter sadly is since a large part of journalism is about the latest Tweets people can be enraged about. Overall HN is tolerant of diverging opinions as far as I have seen.

How does one achieve that without KYC-type laws or mechanisms for platforms? In that sense I agree with GP that it's a rock and a hard place situation.

No thanks.

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