Europe Needs Digital Public Spaces That Are Independently Moderated and Hosted | Hacker News Reader

Europe Needs Digital Public Spaces That Are Independently Moderated and Hosted

wikimedia.brussels

31 pointsZacnyLos73 comments

Yes it is weird that europe has public television, public education etc, but we don't have a public Mastodon. Even if it s not very popular, it is a necessity.

An additional benefit of publicly-ran communications is that they can't be censored unless it s something unlawful.

Yes, I’d very much like to pay a new tax in addition to the television tax (even though I never used it).

And yes, let some guys decide what’s “misinformation” and what isn’t. My guess is that anything that’s not aligned with a state’s foreign policy is “misinformation”.

- Why do we even pay for TV anymore? i dont think additional funding is needed, mastodon is much cheaper than any tv production

- It's much better when the limits of speech are determined by the courts than by private company owners

The part that people can't do themselves is the massive storage and indexing of posts/content/uploaded data (because expensive). I'm envisioning a more or less public (hosting is publically funded) API where anyone can build and host their own frontend, with each custom frontend having their own content discovery algorithm(s) and custom moderation options based on the underlying data and indexes provided by the API.

What I mean is that the publically hosted API itself will be minimally moderated, hosting anything except for illegal material. The rest will be solved by (highly granular and specific) indexing/tagging or similar such that each frontend can choose to leave out or otherwise moderate the presentation of certain material. That indexing will also be the basis of writing custom content discovery algorithms.

The API could even allow training of AI models on usage data (for recommendation or moderation) without leaking anything by declaring a set of available parameters and offering to train and deploy models proposed by the public.

This way we won't have to leave the innovation and the making-it-fun-and-usable parts fully up to the government, and we will hopefully avoid government-enforced censorship.

this already exists. problem is they're not popular

Right? Isn't this just... a forum? PHPBB is still kickin' baby; probably has a one-click deployment, somewhere out there, too. What's stopping y'all, Article OP?

IMO it's naive to think there is going to be some large public space where reasonable and thoughtful free speech occurs. In my experience running public forums on an e-commerce site, you can have this for small groups of people, but as it gets larger, there are inevitably a few troublemakers that will turn it into a cesspool. You can't moderate them without violating their "free speech" rights, and once they are there, the reasonable, thoughtful people will leave.

I think it's a much better idea for individuals to have their own blogs, with comments enabled if they choose, and let them moderate these as they see fit.

I have a question, in the USA we have some common law basis of some public spaces being public commons in terms of free assembly and speech. In Europe there are two common law systems, one is the USA one based on non-roman common law and of course the roman common law used in Italy.

With those two common law systems in Europe are there public free speech assembly spaces that might be then copied onto the electronic world?

A good initiative in my opinion. As for oifjsidjf's criticism below, neither are they suggesting that a government would be in charge nor are all government services bad.

If the gov't will be in charge of it then it will be shit as all government services are in general.

If there is no profit in it for someone the platform won't improve.

It's the classic "the capitalist owns a restaurant vs the people own a restaurant, but which has better food".

I’ve been to restaurants owned by communists and the food was great.

You’re just repeating cliches IMO

Because they operated on the free market around them, forcing them to have good quality or they wouldn't get paid.

I lived in communism where the state owned practically everything - and everything, not just the food, was shit, and you couldn't get it anyways, we didn't even have toilet paper. Don't get me started on women's hygienic accessories. The recommendation from government was to use old newspaper - because propaganda is more important than hygiene, right?

Sure. And what OP is proposing here is communism ?

Do you believe your life experience allows you to predict the future?

Idk, you seemed to be claiming that communism works, I'm telling you it doesn't and that your example is true only because of the free market around these communist-owned restaurants. That's it.

Edit because I can't reply: because I hate it when people say that communism works even though they never lived through it and have no idea what it actually is to live in it. It's terrible, an entire country of multiple millions of humans is condemned to horrible life. Don't do it, there is enough examples of how bad it is already.

We're talking about experiences of hundreds of millions of people (most of whom don't speak English and don't frequent US forums but they still exist). Yes, their experience can predict the future. Communism always and very quickly failed and then became (or simply started as) oligarchist dictatorship.

Why did you create an account just to comment on this ?

> The recommendation from government was to use old newspaper

Ahhh, that takes me back. I was only there until the age of 8 or so, but I vividly remember our stack of newspaper squares. And, of course, you can't flush them so you have to put them in a bin (and presumably empty the bin, but I wasn't there for that part). Also we only had running water part of the day so we had to store some up in buckets for peak times. It seemed normal at the time, but looking back it's fucking crazy.

Can’t be worse than privately owned Twitter or Facebook.

It would be worse in different ways.

1. There’s a lot of backlash against Twitter’s new owner for his change in editorial policy. Users or tweets that would have been previously removed are no longer being censored. On a government-run platform protected by the first amendment, no censorship would be permitted. That’s mean you would have, for better or worse, a ton of racist content, conspiracy theories, violent images, pornographic images, and fake news.

2. There’s a lot of concern of data security and privacy. If you don’t trust Zuckerberg with your data, would you trust the government?

3. People flock to services that other people widely use. There are numerous social network alternatives these days, but people still flock to the major ones like FB, IG, TikTok, etc. Would anyone want to use FedBook? I have my doubts that a government-run social media platform would gain any real traction.

Spare me. Private medicine is a disaster, private utilities are disasters where they are tried, private roads are a disaster.

Governments screw a lot of things up. So do private companies. Arguing about which is better in the abstract is like arguing whether even or odd numbers are “better”: only possible for tribalists.

I am seeing a lot of 0 karma and less than a day old accounts posting here. I think we may be getting botted.

EU is heavily targeted every time is mentioned here.

Don't know why, but it's something that is happening and I also noticed that the same arguments are used Evey time

- EU is not free

- EU is descending into authoritarianism

- You can be jailed for saying things

- EU politicians are puppets working for some gray entities that want to cancel the right to privacy for (reason unknown)

and so on

I am not sure whether it is about the EU per se. It seems to trace more to the nowadays highly toxic questions of free speech and alleged censorship. Although much of values and rights are shared across all Western countries, the freedom of expression has always diverged between the US and the rest. Of course, they have a right to point out that this freedom is (slightly) restricted in most European countries. Personally, I've never quite understood the obsession of many Americans on this particular right, given that there are so many other important rights and liberties in the Constitution.

EDIT: While someone with a background in comparative legal analysis would be needed for a verification, I could also posit a hypothesis that both the EU's Charter and the national constitutions of most European countries grant more rights than the Constitution. That said, more is not always better from a constitutional law perspective, as the reform proposals in Chile clearly have showed.

Seeing a lot of the replies here focus on the EU's prevalence of anti-hate speech laws, there's clearly one genus of the audience that sees the EU as being "restrictive" on their kind of free speech. Which is not surprising in the least.

As an American, I see nothing wrong with the EU's measures against hate speech. In the past decade, I've seen exactly where no limits on it leads to.

My rule of thumb for evaluating laws: what could the most malicious person you can imagine do with that power?

'Hate speech' is a highly subjective category, and most proposals for hate speech laws that I've seen could be abused terribly.

And my response to that is: Laws and decrees have to be written in what manner they can oppress the least, but its on the public to hold the right people accountable so these laws remain fair.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com