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Comment by moomin | Hacker News Reader

I guarantee you that if I started filling every HackerNews thread with My Little Pony memes, every “Free Speech Absolutist” would manage to grasp the point that sometimes you want to remove legal content.

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But this is missing the issue entirely. Your spammy posts would be removed because nobody here wants to see them if they even could after the deluge of downvotes. What is happening in Europe is that people are posting things that users do want to see, but the government doesn't want people to see it.

Given that 99% of the removed comments were legal, it doesn't seem like it's the governments that are restricting what people are seeing.

Something doesn't have to be "officially" illegal for laws to suppress it. If the law gives no penalty for a false-positive block, but very high penalties for any false-negative failure to censor, then companies will be incentivized to err on the side of censoring legal speech.

I don't disagree about the risk of chilling effects, but the methodology of this report is so embarrassingly, deceptively bad that I don't think any conclusion can be drawn from it. They basically snapshot a comment section, then return repeatedly, and enumerate the comments that disappeared. Without any insight into who (ie the platform, the poster, or the channel/page owner) removed the comment and why, this is like performing a legal analysis of the leaves that disappeared from lawns in autumn.

It has the same quality of any research or report that suggest there to be negative effects if people do see such content.

And if in doubt, content removal should be done defensively.

Yes, that's the primary complaint of the article, but the actual report just doesn't back that up. There's no mention of false positives or negatives. Probably because, as the report notes, it doesn't know who removed the comment, let alone what the rationale was. So it could be that they are attempting to comply with broad and vague laws, or they could just be against hosting MLP memes.

This isn't the argument of "free speech absolutists" at all. I gladly take up that derogative term for that matter.

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