Bad Speech | Hacker News Reader

Bad Speech

amadeuspagel.com

33 pointsamadeuspagel45 comments

"My solution is to close the tab and to read a book."

Exactly. Exchange off-the-cuff zero cost near-anonymous speech with well considered, edited, personally identifiable speech with a significant cost to publish. Without knowing anything about the content of the speech you can still usefully predict that the later will be more dense with meaning and generally more worth your time.

HN is a good place to sift through the former to discover the later. So yeah, you have to put up with both.

There is however value in anonymity. In some situations there are things that should be said or explored that could cause bad consequences for the sayer - women's rights discussed by an Iranian or Saudi for example.

> HN is a good place to sift through the former to discover the later.

HN is one of the worst places for speech, on the level of Reddit.

This is a good individual choice, but I was hoping the essay would delve further into the fact that there's a market for speech and engagement farming is highly profitable for both platforms and some skilled farmers - arguably to the general detriment.

This article is profoundly unhelpful for people who's job is to determine what speech is promoted and what speech isn't.

I don’t think that was the intended audience.

So the whole point of the article was "read a book dummies"?

I think it’s more like “rather than engaging with toxic material by you being toxic, just go to books that are high quality and now there’s less toxicity in your world.”

I find this a helpful reminder.

Their employer should be providing them guidance on the matter. This article is for the rest of us.

"I see a lot of bad speech scrolling through twitter, speech that would not be worth engaging with in any context and speech that is not worth engaging in a context where engagement is a metric the platform optimizes for.

What is my solution to this? To ban this speech? To ban twitter, as a platform that is optimized for anger and hatred? My solution is to close the tab and to read a book.

The most basic decision is not what to say, but what to listen to, since what we say is in some sense a response to that, and we will always respond in kind."

This is advice for the layperson.

For me, the times when I compulsively engage with something is more akin to a threat-response. The scary things I react to are things like a twitter-mob forming to take someone down, or some policy proposal to enrich billionaires, or a politician offering a feel-good one-liner built on broken math.

I could go read a book, but blissful ignorance only lasts until the torches are burning down my own door. Perhaps it's better to try to engage in hopes of putting out the fires early? The foundation of democracy's is civic engagement.

The agora in which civic engagement is happening is crowded by assholes with speakers, and bots, and anonymous posters.

This is not conducive to progress.

If you have problems with the world around you, you can act on these problems. Writing on social media is akin to making a powerpoint to change the world. It's just the wrong tool.

Instead of getting worked up writing, sit down and think about the levers you have access to.

You probably are in the 1% of the people with the most means in history right now, typing a few lines is very well below your means.

What to do is left as an exercise to the reader.

I do still believe that the pen is mightier than the sword, though!

Here's a read if this is a subject you're interested in:

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/peter-gelderloos-how...

"But if you want money for people with minds that hate

All I can tell you is brother you have to wait"

Why the fuck is that a job? Shouldn't what speech someone follows be up to their own discretion?

a) because services like Twitter and Facebook have to show something in the timeline. What they show is this job

b) because in practice, an approach too laissez-faire here has negative impact both on customer adoption (most people don't actually enjoy cesspools, and they leave when they decide a service is one) and regulation (even in countries with broad free-speech protections, some communication is de facto illegal and there are consequences for a service taking no responsibility for keeping their house in order).

Almost like these services are more trouble than they're worth.

if only we could trust people to make informed decisions..

About what to censor.

Whether or not people are worthy of the trust, we must place it in them.

Not when they can't be trusted not to kill, harass, or beat people. And it really doesn't do us any good to go tsk-tsk after they've done so.

If there's someone we can't trust to kill/harass/assault people, they need to be in prison, not having speech policed for them as if they were a child. That's one of the core purposes of imprisonment, in fact.

But the reality is that we can, in fact, trust most people to not do those things. And yes, that means sometimes we will be wrong and we will have to pick up the pieces after someone does something awful. That is simply part and parcel of living in a free society.

The people being threatened disagree with you. They aren't living in a free society. They are forced to protect themselves, both in real life and online.

Personally, I'd be in favor of enforcing existing laws about threats. Make a death threat, go to jail. Law enforcement is pretty bad at that, with the excuse that most death threats turn into action, and it's very difficult to track down an anonymous commenter.

But I'd like to see what would happen if they took the existing laws seriously. Maybe then I'd find it easier to credit the notion of unrestricted free speech that doesn't rise to the level of criminality. I'm not convinced, but I'd at least be able to consider it.

Meantime, "Somebody threatened to kill you and that's your problem until you're actually dead" does not seem like an acceptable situation.

Telling a random person you don't know that you know exactly what's good for them is dumb

It's called a search engineer, and this isn't left to people's own discretion because they don't have the time or inclination to make their own search engines / recommendation engines.

I would feel a lot better about these discussions here if there was any acknowledgement whatsoever from self-described "free-speech absolutists" that large-scale mass propagation of disinformation can be manipulated by the powerful as a destructive force, and that this is a serious problem.

Do I want to ban speech? No. Am I pro-censorship? No! But democracy is in real trouble, and I'd love to be able to talk about possible solutions besides "they should teach critical thinking in schools" or "if you don't like it, read a book".

I imagine you are from the US. US democracy has been in trouble for a long long time. The problem isn't average people believing in wrongthink.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...

Honestly, Twitter is fantastic. I don't have to engage with this stuff because when people start posting about it, I just unfollow them. And the only thing I see is two steps from me in my graph, i.e. the things by people I follow and the things that people I follow like.

And some people like to wallow in the filth and then blame the filth. But you can wash yourself clean if you feel like it.

The Great Banality Laser is working precisely as designed. Even with Elon Musk pointing it at the planet's core in the hopes of blowing it up.

Deciding not to engage with $BAD yourself is great; but then you've shirked your responsibility to decide what $BAD is for the rest of the world!

Just because you have the intelligence and judgement to perceive and avoid $BAD doesn't mean that you can trust your fellow citizens to do the same. They must be shielded from everything that you disagree with so as to protect you!

Seriously; the admission that you can't make decisions about what others should be reading is an embrace of humility that more people should attempt. I'm not sure when "we can agree to disagree" became a Sin but its has.

> I'm not sure when "we can agree to disagree" became a Sin but its has.

If you're talking America, around the time Trump was elected after what can plausibly be deduced was a Russian-funded propaganda campaign. A lot of trust of fellow citizens was lost when that happened, and a lot of people began to wonder whether they do bear some responsibility for what others see and hear... Because if they don't grasp that responsibility, propaganda manufacturers were more than willing to grasp it instead. This has led to people looking into why their fellow citizens believe what they do and discovering it's because a lot of their fellow citizens listen to some absolute crap and form strong opinions as a result. As is their right. But "the cure to bad speech is more speech" doesn't exactly work when bad speech is coming from the pulpit and/or funded by billionaires.

I don't think we have good answers to the questions raised yet, but make no mistake: that question is now on the table for a generation that thought the issue pretty settled.

> Deciding not to engage with $BAD yourself is great; but then you've shirked your responsibility to decide what $BAD is for the rest of the world!

There's a reason "The only thing necessary for evil to triumph in the world is that good men do nothing" exists as an aphorism. There are clearly variable bindings we can swizzle in that make that statement non-controversial (child pornography is the obvious one). So the operative question becomes whether, and how much, speech binds to $BAD and the notion is still true.

That aphorism presumes a world where good/evil and doing something/nothing are both binary.

It may not be a binary, but there sure is a spectrum. And plenty of things fall on the wrong end of it.

Definitely agree, but I don't think most of what we see scrolling Twitter is clearly on one side or the other.

I also think "doing something" is a spectrum as well, and making a conscious choosing to ignore something is a valid response. I'm sympathetic to the idea that this is a form of privilege, but I'm not the alternative is actually any better.

There is zero evidence that Russian propaganda actually changed any Electoral College votes in the 2016 election.

That full end-to-end story would be very hard to prove beyond a reasonable doubt.

The existence of the propaganda campaign and the active attempts to exfiltrate voter data are public record and plausible enough for the FBI to have issued arrest warrants regarding the infiltrations.

I'm not saying it's necessary for Russians to have stolen the election for Americans to be questioning the nature of free flow of information online. I'm saying there is more than enough of a preponderance of evidence that an attack along that vector was attempted for people to be asking reasonable questions about the harms of unfiltered information access and how it can be exploited by clever propagandists.

Questions about the "harms" of unfiltered information access aren't reasonable. The people asking those questions are being disingenuous. They are fundamentally unprincipled and are simply looking for plausible sounding reasons to restrict speech that they don't like.

> Questions about the "harms" of unfiltered information access aren't reasonable

Can you clarify why they are not reasonable? Peer threads to this one provide examples of how speech can sometimes cause harm, and how some categories of speech are already regulated for that reason.

> The people asking those questions are being disingenuous

I don't doubt some have a hidden agenda. But I believe from my own experience many are trying to find new common ground now that previous assumptions have been thrown into question.

Twitter and Facebook, for example, aren't at all interested in regulating speech; they'd much prefer to be out of the business and continue the much easier task of "collecting attention rent by selling eyeballs to advertisers." But the messages that flowed over their networks during the January 6th attack were enough to make their leadership concerned that they could be hauled in front of Congress to testify about aiding and abetting treason. They want bright lines on this stuff because they don't want to be in prison.

Free speech doesn't cause harm, with the narrow exception of the "fighting words" doctrine.

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

There was never any risk of Twitter and Facebook employees going to prison over the January 6 attack. Stop exaggerating. And I have no respect for anyone who is afraid of being called to testify to Congress. Anyone with principles should be thrilled for an opportunity to participate in the public discourse and express their thoughts in such a forum.

Well, the fighting words doctrine, defamation, fraud, deprivation of right to vote via intentional misinformation, copyright infringement, market manipulation, child pornography... It's a short list but not an empty list. The law in the US is loathe to impose prior restraint but may punish for all manner of transgression, even when the nature of the transgression is words or images alone.

> Stop exaggerating

I believe I have a free-speech right to exaggerate, so I shall respectfully decline.

> And I have no respect for anyone who is afraid of being called to testify to Congress.

Far be it from me to try and instill a sense of respect in anyone for Silicon Valley CEOs. Or an idea they have principles.

... But how comfortable should we be with the unprincipled having this much control over what people see and read?

Anyway, I'd love to continue this thread, but I've nudged up against my site-imposed quota of HN posts today. ;)

> But the messages that flowed over their networks during the January 6th attack were enough to make their leadership concerned that they could be hauled in front of Congress to testify about aiding and abetting treason.

Seems like a pretty unfounded concern, given that a) treason would've had to happen and b) they would have had to be actual witting participants.

This line of thinking ignores the power of speech. Speech has real impact and it can be used to infringe on the rights of others. That is why no country fully embraces absolute free speech. We outlaw things like fraud, defamation, distribution of child porn, and all sorts of other speech because that bad speech infringes on the rights of others. When you simply ignore that bad speech, you are allowing that infringement of rights to continue. Apathy to that isn't humility. If anything, it is arrogant to suggest there is a clear line on what speech should and should not be allowed. It is an incredibly complicated issue that requires nuance.

It’s also arrogant to believe you are an honest arbiter of what crosses the line. There is a good reason the U.S. errs on the side of free speech.

People forget we used to throw people in the stocks for gossiping about their neighbors or spreading rumors about priests (even if all true)

>It’s also arrogant to believe you are an honest arbiter of what crosses the line.

Once again, this is removing the nuance of the issue. I don't think anyone would say it is arrogant to suggest that child porn crosses the line into bad speech.

And to be clear, I'm not trying to draw the line myself. I am asking that we have an open debate about that line. It is the free speech absolutists that are taking the arrogant position by refusing the debate and establishing that line themselves.

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