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Comment by Dig1t | Hacker News Reader

“Hate speech” is a broad term that can mean basically any speech that you don’t like.

Twitter’s new policy is “freedom of speech, but not necessarily freedom of reach” and it seems to be going okay.

You should be able to say what you want but that doesn’t mean that it’ll be able to trend. It also means that Twitter is not in the business of making judgements on what is socially acceptable to say.

Also the new community notes feature has been great for countering misinformation/extremely biased takes. They only appear when a mix of people who have diverse backgrounds have said that they are useful, which I think is pretty balanced.

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> Twitter’s new policy is “freedom of speech, but not necessarily freedom of reach” and it seems to be going okay.

> You should be able to say what you want but that doesn’t mean that it’ll be able to trend. It also means that Twitter is not in the business of making judgements on what is socially acceptable to say.

Unless you say something which annoys Elon, or try to tell people about Mastadon.

https://observer.com/2022/12/elon-musk-suspend-twitter-accou...

Or say negative things about Erdogan right before an election...

Elon publicly admitted that the Mastodon policy was a mistake and has since retracted that policy.

WRT the elonjet thing, they have a policy against doxxing.

>Twitter also banned Sweeney’s personal account and his other two accounts tracking the private jets of Donald Trump and Mark Zuckerberg.

Seems like it was applied fairly to me.

1) You are essentially then just saying "Twitter's policies are, in fact, not about freedom of speech, as there is a policy--that you feel was correctly enforced--which somewhat obviously conflicts with that entire concept".

2) If the actual policies are back in play for this discussion--rather than the entirely-not-the-case thing about freedom of speech being upheld without a freedom of reach--then I recommend you read them as they definitely cover the content being cited in this article.

https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/twitter-rules

(But like, the article also directly quotes the policy and juxtaposes it with the problematic content... which is also what you are doing to defend yourself against me trying to show that your own claim is false... so I hope you can see that your position is internally inconsistent?)

Hate speech is defined by the Cambridge Dictionary as "public speech that expresses hate or encourages violence towards a person or group based on something such as race, religion, sex, or sexual orientation".

This I believe is the definition being used in the link, not just "basically any speech that you don't like."

We have in recent memory seen valid criticisms against, for example, Kamala Harris dismissed as racist/sexist, criticisms of Ilhan Omar as "islamophobic", criticisms of George Soros as "anti-Semitic", criticisms of drag shows for kids and grown men in girl's dressing rooms as "transphobia" and "literal violence".

"Hate speech" is the new "think of the children". An easy (and socially acceptable, apparently) way to silence and smear critics.

The irony of using the drags show for kids as one of your examples and then referencing “think of the children”.

The problem, I think, is that "encourages violence" can mean anything. Any negative thing or insult can be construed to be encouraging violence, all it takes is for someone to say "hey this is encouraging violence against me" and it becomes hate speech.

The Babylon Bee is the perfect example of this. They were banned from Twitter for making an obvious joke about a trans person, because any joke at the expense of trans people was considered hate speech. Why? Well because they consider anything negative said about them to be encouraging violence. There was no objective measure, it was all about feelings.

In my, and some other peoples', opinion, Free speech is broken in a world where I can silence you by claiming you made me feel attacked.

There are a million other examples of this kind of thing happening under the old Twitter leadership.

That may be true of individuals in the general public, but we're talking about a single corporate entity and applying standards to it. With regard to inciting violence, there is a clear legal standard in the Brandenburg test.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/brandenburg_test

It's not a huge leap to apply this standard to protected classes.

> It also means that Twitter is not in the business of making judgements on what is socially acceptable to say

On the surface this makes sense, except it's ignoring the reality that online-based communications sidesteps all our built-in controls that exist around behaving/communicating in a "socially acceptable" manner. Nobody needs to police what we say to each other face-to-face because there will be repercussions if you make a habit of saying regularly hateful things (esp. in a manner that's broadcast/audible by a large audience), but the same isn't true by default on a platform like Twitter.

I think cancel culture is exactly the example of what you're talking about though. There ARE consequences for people who say socially unacceptable things on social media, so much so that it has its own phrase in our lexicon now.

How many times has some famous, or non-famous for that matter, person faced backlash because of something they said on social media? It's such a thing that there's an entire episode of Family Guy about it, where Brian gets cancelled and people stand outside his house telling him to kill himself for making a bad joke on Twitter.

What percentage of content online is posted by famous people though? At any rate you'd hardly agree that such a reaction is a healthy way to enforce social norms.

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