Hacker News Reader

Comment by otherme123 | Hacker News Reader

There was this old site called voat.co, a reddit clone with almost no restrictions to what you could post. IIRC, only child porn and bestiality was off limits. It was located in Switzerland.

Soon the site filled with nazi stuff among other things, so the author in fear of getting in trouble, relocated the site to a more free-speech country. Where? To the USA.

A free speech country is not the same as a country where some companies have restrictive policies. You cannot post a nipple in Instagram and then cry "muh freedom of speech". Use one of the endless sites to post such things or roll your own: the government won't stop you.

View on HN

You clearly don‘t know what you are talking about.

The problem is specifically that the government won't stop you. American free speech principles have been warped and distorted to give platforms total control and no responsibility over what they host. Hell, back during the last wave of Net Neutrality regulation, Comcast was arguing in court that common carrier regulations were a free speech violation. Which is absolutely insane.

Additionally, we should stop measuring the size of a country's free speech commitment by how legally easy it is to host Nazi bullshit. Let us not forget that Nazis hate freedom of speech and use all sorts of extralegal bullshit to stifle it. A country or platform in which it is legal or permitted to express Nazi political opinions is one where you have less freedom of speech, not more.

Freedom of speech is a balancing act in which we tie the hands of people in power to allow those out of power to speak their mind.

I live in a country with laws against certain hate speech forms. All we really got is not less hate (we have plenty of nazi bullshit), but comedians, musicians, journalists... heavily fined, exiled or in jail.

For example: https://www.eldiario.es/politica/supremo-confirma-condena-re... a small humoristic newspaper fined 40K€ for a face swapping like the one with Trump and Hilary you see, but with a local bullfighter.

https://www.publico.es/sociedad/estos-son-seis-tuits-supremo... a musician sentenced to a year in jail for six tweets abut terrorism, later revoked.

A woman almost two years to jail for dark joking about a guy killed in 1975: https://es.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caso_Cassandra. Later revoked in the Supreme Court. The jokes were all well known, I've been hearing them since the 1980's.

There's even a lawyer firm that only exists to sue people for offending christian beliefs (https://abogadoscristianos.es/), the modernized version of the spanish inquisition you didn't expect.

If you live in the USA be careful if you want to limit freedom of expression, because you will end with a tool to bully people. You dislike a newspaper? Sue them and hope it goes well. Nazis are at least gone? I'm afraid, but no: they are stronger than ever in the last 50 years.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com