Hacker News Reader

Comment by r3trohack3r | Hacker News Reader

> The fundamental issue to me is that society still wants to protect against pedophiles or drug dealers or whatever other group more than protect privacy.

Speaking from a U.S. perspective here.

A pedophile with a cameraphone is terrible. But law enforcement without the 4th amendment is worse.

A racist with a social media account is terrible. But a president without the 1st amendment is worse.

There are people who do terrible things in this world. Unfortunately people who do terrible things can run for government and be appointed to positions of power.

There are darker things down the path of eroding our protections from our government than whatever evil they’re asking us to yield for.

View on HN

I had to look this up, so here's my attempt at translation for non-Americans:

> A pedophile with a cameraphone is terrible. But law enforcement that can search and seize property at will is worse.

> A racist with a social media account is terrible. But a president that can deny people their freedom of expression & assembly is worse.

I agree.

(ps. offtopic meta remark, the American enthusiasm for remembering laws by number never ceases to amaze me)

that's only specifically the first 10 amendments, which are generally referred to as the bill of rights as they were added to the constitution when it was ratified and cover most basic freedoms so they're taught in school

other rights-granting amendments are the post civil war ones which are slightly less well known but also covered in school

Nah I often see people talking about stuff like prop <some number> expecting everyone to know what that refers to.

Most Americans won't know those, because those are state-specific (usually for California; most states don't even have Propositions that citizens can vote on).

Every American knows what the 1st Amendment is, by contrast.

They are more than just a law, they are part of the constitution (much harder to change).

And the reason why the first 10 (the Bill of Rights) and some others are learned by all schoolchildren is because the rights delineated within directly address many dire problems Americans had suffered as British colonies (and why there was a war, so is said), and so the reasons why America was formed by its founders in the first place. Part of the mythology and moral license.

> There are darker things down the path of eroding our protections from our government than whatever evil they’re asking us to yield for.

I agree with you, but this illustrates part of the problem of our messaging. These policies are still just tools which don't have an inherent moral value. The evil comes from their abuse on a mass scale, and the huge temptation to abuse them, with the emphasis on how easily the powerful can be corrupted.

This is prone to being called out for being a slippery slope fallacy, but we need to just back it up with historical precedent, like how similar policies were abused in the US as revealed by Snowden.

What does the first amendment have to do with social media companies?

There are people who would like the government to outlaw racism/hate speech on social media. The first amendment prevents that. I think r3trohack3r's point is that eroding those 1st amendment rights to outlaw hate speech would be worse than the actual hate speech.

I believe the general concensus is that it doesn't because private media companies aren't public spaces, so the company rules. How far the company enjoys freespeech, whether it extenda to their users and who gets to define hate speech I don't know, but lible is criminalized already and further analogies aren't impossible.

I mean, I could call a hackernews a punk ass neoliberal cunt and wait what happens next.

This stops being true when U.S. government officials (including publicly elected officials and folks in 3 letter agencies) get involved with those moderation policies.

I think it’s still an open question whether it’s acceptable for government officials to be involved in any way with the moderation policies of a company outside of the 1st amendment including:

* asking for changes to moderation policies

* asking for enforcement of existing policies

* passing lists of users to be watched for policy violations

* etc.

Which has happened, is happening, and will continue to happen until the courts figure out whether or not the U.S. government is allowed to launder away 1st amendment protections through collaboration with private companies.

This is true, but the first amendment should also prevent the government from pressuring said companies to censor speech as well. This would be the government using it's power and coercion to violate people's 1st amendment rights via a third party. Think "hiring someone to murder someone is still murder for the person hiring," or a police soliciting a trespass.

The recent "Twitter files" showed that the government is/was working directly with Twitter and probably all the media companies to censor speech. The government, on multiple occasions, provided specific tweets and people to censor and Twitter complied. I believe they had weekly meetings to do just that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com