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Comment by BoredPositron | Hacker News Reader

>> I'm currently waiting for a knock at my door along with 65 million of Brits who have posted inaccurate information online from time to time. Legal note: if anything I have said here is inaccurate I was unaware of it at the time of posting.

how fucking funny. Everytime when something like this is getting discussed the only response is sarcasm and hybris. No acknowledgment of the problem, no ideas, just fucking bad one liners. It's a real problem and you can be glad that you haven't had to deal with it. Yeah, ofc what they are doing now is absolute shite but sometimes you could at least acknowledge the law in it's meaning and not the shitty execution of it and no I don't care about your sarcasm "disclaimer" you are not five.

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I think part of the problem at hand is when laws written poorly can be enforced in ways that don't align with the meaning behind the original laws.

The solution really is simple - write clearly defined and contained laws or don't write any at all. Most people wouldn't be comfortable with that, though, and in a world where news stories and political debates are forgotten in a matter of weeks people won't find it acceptable if legislators spend months or years writing laws that are easy to understand and don't come with a mountain of edge cases and loopholes.

Yeah, that's a cop out no law will ever be satisfactory initially with your requirements. Every constitution gets amendments and the same can go for a law like we are discussing now. That the only conclusion is "do nothing at all" is mind boggling.

Its not a cop out. How can you as a citizen try to stay on the right side of the law when laws are horribly verbose, difficult to understand, and full of gray area?

I wouldn't expect a law to be absolutely 100% buttoned up but we're very, very far from that today.

Laws are difficult to understand? Is it the first one you've read? Oh no you haven't read it... because the one we are talking about is pretty straight cut. Sorry but you are really not commenting in good faith here. It's just straw man argument after straw man argument.

It's just liberté and nothing else for you I guess.

For the average person, yes laws are absolutely difficult to understand. We wouldn't need to involve lawyers nearly as often if laws were easy to understand and the process, defined by laws, was clear.

It isn't just about liberté for me. The law in discussion here may be pretty straight cut with regards to understanding what's on the page, but not with understanding what power the government is actually granted or when/how it will be enforced. The whole point in this thread was that the law is unclear as to how the government will define content posted online that may turn out to be inaccurate as illegal and worthy of leading to prosecution.

Consider it this way - if you handed said law to 10 people in the UK, would they all walk away with the same understanding of where the line is that they shouldn't cross?

Oh stop the straw man arguments ask 10 people on the street about traffic laws and you get the same results for what you are fishing now. Ofc everyone will know that a Red Light means stop but than there are more obscure ones like the "Move Over" law in the US which even varies between states.

How is this a straw mab argument? I'm not saying poll any random 10 people on what they currently know of laws already on the book, I'd expect that to end poorly.

With regards to this specific law being clear and understandable by those who must follow it, I'm proposing that asking 10 of those people to read it and they wouldn't agree what the law means and when it will be enforced. I don't see that being a straw man, though I could very well be missing something there.

Because if you give traffic laws to 10 random people on the street to read they might understand the gist of it but not every detail.

Okay we may be getting to the cote of where we disagree, regardless of free speech issues.

Do you not see it as a problem for the average person to be unable to understand the laws they are meant to follow?

For me, that's a real problem. In the example of traffic laws, either the laws are important to keep us safe on the road and the fact that people can't understand the laws as written puts us all at risk. Alternatively, if we're happy enough with road safety despite the fact that people can't understand traffic laws then the laws aren't serving a purpose and aren't needed. On top of that, people will be at risk of being fined or imprisoned for breaking laws that they didn't realize they broke, even when they took the time to read and try to understand the laws.

The problem isn't the hate speech or the enforcement really.

The problem is that these powers have, can, and will be abused by petty bureaucrats, power-hungry law enforcement, the government itself and, as a result, enable actual tyranny.

Because there is no other way in a democracy to handle overreach... it's always the same straw man argument.

"We'll end up in a dystopian autocratic tyranny nightmare TOMORROW if we do anything against it. With the only conclusion let's do nothing at all."

Great input.

Rather than disregarding the concern, how would you propose the overreach should be handled? And is it possible to handle the overreach before it harms citizens caught in the middle, or can it only be dealt with after innocent people are on the wrong end of the overreach?

And innocent people that get harmed by non action are irrelevant? Laws can and will always be abused but if they are about online discourse the only possibility seems to be that there will be nothing but abuse. As long as you are in a country with an intact democracy and separation of power you'll be fine and if not vote against it.

Who is harmed specifically by online speech? Speech can certainly lead to people deciding to take some kind of action, but that action is what harms people and those actions are very likely already illegal.

When it comes to separation of powers, that's a much bigger discussion but I have concerns over how our three branches operate in the US today. Our legislative branch has outsourced much of their power to the executive branch, though the overturn of Chevron may eventually help that. I wish it were as simply as voting, but I'm generally only offered one or two options for most elected positions and when it comes down to it neither party will allow anyone on the ballot that wants to actually reform anything meaningful about how the system works.

Civil servants desperately trying to hide their mistakes won't believe they are overreaching, and neither will their friends or the politicians who would held responsible by the media.

Tyranny doesn't require an autocratic dystopia to make life absolute hell.

They are actively being be abused. The UK, Canada, Oz and NZ are excellent examples.

What do you want people to do?

Be serious?

Totalitarian regimes don't win when the majority believes the general line. That never happens. Totalitarian regimes win when the people give in to despair. That's why people use the one-liners. They are coping.

I saw your deleted comment and I am not gonna engage with you because of it.

I'm sorry that you didn't think my one liner was funny.

I don’t think they can say the serious thing without being charged as a terrorist.

Heh. Sorry, it was a silly joke. I agree.

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