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Comment by oldtownroad | Hacker News Reader

That’s the point though, right? Encouraging illegal activity may not itself be illegal but moderators aren’t arbiters of the law, they’re protecting the integrity of the website for the intended user base. If you want to allow people to encourage cocaine usage on your website, you have to be prepared to deal with law enforcement — because when someone follows the advice and dies with the website open on their computer, the website operators will get a call… — and not many people want to risk their entire company because “it’s legal to encourage people to take cocaine!”

Moderation is hard and that example is… the perfect example. User reports are rarely accurate but still valuable.

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Certainly social media companies can choose to disallow suggestions that people take illegal actions. But that's not what the moderation policy for "illegal" content says.

It says "Content that violates local or international laws or regulations."

I don't know all the laws of all the countries, but my local laws make very little content illegal. Various types of obscenity, true threats, etc. "You should do drugs while you watch a movie about drugs" is definitely not one of those.

It would be very easy, if that's what they want, to change it to "Content that encourages breaking local or international laws or regulations."

Visit a platform like LinkedIn, Twitter or Facebook and try to report content: the complex decision tree of what to report and why will be a good demonstration or how unintuitive the reality of content moderation is. Every user of every platform has a different understanding of even simple concepts, like “scam” and “spam”. Report reasons are not an accurate classification from a trained expert, they’re a thing a user chooses from a list that has to be designed to both provide valuable context to a moderator and capture the wide range of different understandings different users have.

Suggesting that a reason should be added for the specific situation you’ve encountered demonstrates the naive understanding most people have of moderation and that’s what this game is good at.

Platforms like Facebook and Twitter will have spent tens of thousands of people hours thinking about something as simple as the list of report reasons.

There are plenty of difficult judgment calls in content moderating.

But the difference between "illegal content" and "content that promotes breaking the law" isn't really one of them to be made by the moderator. This is just bad instructions from the game maker.

You don’t think content moderators have to deal with: “hey kid, you should go shoot up a school?”

Just cleanly not in their domain?

I think that content moderators often have to deal with that issue, and they are given rules like "remove posts that suggest that others commit violent acts" or something like that. And those are reasonable rules for moderators to enforce.

But the rules that this game give do not include that rule, and it's a mark of a poorly designed game that the rule says "don't allow illegal content" and then when you (correctly!) apply that rule, the game says "you should have not allowed this because it's suggesting that someone do something illegal". Those aren't the same rule!

ETA: Like lots of places have rules against reposting copyrighted content. But a post that said "Psst, kid, you should go download a movie from the Pirate Bay" should not be removed under that rule. Because the content of the post isn't copyrighted. If they also had a rule that said "don't encourage piracy", they could reasonably take it down under that rule.

I see I see now what you’re saying. You’ve convinced me :)

Always great to have a discussion with open-minded people. Cheers, internet buddy!

You know, I'm nearly certain that that post does violate some "international law or regulation".

Do I know which one? Nope, not a clue. But many countries have pretty weak free speech protections, and pretty strict drug laws. The idea that that violates none of them seems quite unlikely.

The fact that your local laws have strong free speech protections doesn't really matter when the criteria is "local or international". If it violates north korea's, china's, or singapores laws it still violates that restriction.

Maybe the policy should be rewritten then. If no content is allowed that violates any country's free speech restriction, then it probably means the site will remove criticism of the government of North Korea.

Well, that's a problem that social media companies have with China and India, both of which are big markets.

These are actual problems.

How is this different from moderation?

This is exactly what I encountered - mods would debate these specific issues. Is the spirit of the rule or the word of the rule met.

For global teams it’s even worse.

The rules tend to be American, and they apply globally - which means that things that are illegal locally are given a pass, and this creates the same debate in the mod team.

Moderation is phyrric. Today you come up with a good argument for behavior, tomorrow you churn your team and have 60% new people. The same argument comes up and its decided in the other direction.

> the website operators will get a call

Then what we actually need isn't more content moderation, we need explicit laws explicitly _protecting_ website operators and any other publishers who are actually following the law.

I mean not really... sometimes some content just sucks and you don't want it on your site regardless of its legality.

Start shitposting here on HN and see how long your posts hang around.

But then that becomes a site owner editorial decision rather than a fear of legal reprisals decision.

How can one protect the integrity of a website if they're undermining free speech rights and simultaneously derailing conversations and fragmenting communities while doing so?

Though we didn't first define what "integrity" meant, it now seems impossible to formulate a meaning for it that isn't absurdly ironic given the actions performed to protect it.

One could be forgiven if we were talking about a forum or website that exists in a totalitarian regime like China... better that there be some conversation than the only other option, none at all. But in the US or Europe or any other nation that considers itself even minimally enlightened?

Moderation is not the solution. It may even be the problem.

> How can one protect the integrity of a website if they're undermining free speech rights

What free speech rights? You have no legal right to compel someone else to display your words on their website.

That's an interesting theory. I'm not sure you understand the implications of it though. Were it so simple, then it is plausible enough to construct a society where you have no free speech at all, anywhere, without your legal rights being violated.

In fact, you all seem to be constructing that society even as we speak. Given the audience of this particular forum, more than a few of you are literally doing just that, rather than being accomplices and bystanders.

I'm more of a free speech fundamentalist myself.

Leaping from "I get to decide what's on my website" to "you've created a society" is pretty silly. Your argument is missing any meaningful linkages. It would be stronger if you articulated them instead of handwaving about plausibility.

Personally I don't think social media speech is that important. It's ad-based, convenience-driven, and fickle. If it were to disappear people would just move to different media.

If some magical event occurred where it did disappear, what do you imagine would be the media that people would move to?

I'm coming up blank. Could it even be non-electronic in this day and age? If it were, it'd almost certainly look identical to current social media. If it didn't look like that, what, we'd all get ham licenses and tap out our opinions in Morse? Maybe we'd set up landline partylines and gossip until the wee hours of the morning?

Would people start mailing in letters to the editor again to magazine printed on cheap acid-soaked paper? Wearing sandwich signs and walking down the sidewalks in major metropolitan areas?

It's a "Jump to Conclusions Mat". You see, you have this mat, with different conclusions written on it that you could jump to!

It's not a theory, it's literally how free speech works in the real world. Private entities can't be compelled by the government to to publish content they don't want to publish, just like they also can't be silenced by that government.

What you seem to be asking for is a world where the government can override the autonomy of publications and force them to publish specific items. How is that "free" speech?

No, that's not how it works in the real world. that's how it works in your low-fidelity perception of the real world. You've never much bothered to check if your model matches the observations you might make.

Look at the statement "private entities can't be compelled by the government". Which government are we even talking about here? It's quite clear that many governments do actually compel such things when it suits them. Have you never noticed?

You might switch to making the argument that "private governments shouldn't x", and I suppose if you were clever they might even be good arguments. You might also make the argument that this government or that government doesn't currently do it... but that boils down to "I want it to continue not compelling x". Hardly an argument, except maybe for the status quo.

You don't know what I'm asking for. It's an idea far enough outside your narrow cone of comprehension and even narrower cone of imagination that we might as well not even be speaking the same language.

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