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Comment by tunesmith | Hacker News Reader

I'm having trouble even understanding the question, because I think your usage of "free speech" means something different than is normally intended. Free expression and free will always have an implied caveat, like "free will except where it impedes that of another". Free speech is always going to have a Venn diagram with "behavior", some of which is illegal. So if you're asking where you can go do illegal stuff, that's one question. If you're asking where you can talk about legal stuff and do legal stuff, but where you don't feel able to right now, that's more interesting.

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They also as much as said "There's places where you can do this but they're cesspools" which almost makes me feel like the real question is "Is there any way I can have the experience of moderated discussion without any risk of me being moderated?" to which the answer is 100% "Yes, your own forum, but don't be surprised if other people aren't sold on the value proposition."

This is the X model. Nobody moderates Musk!

I have friends that till get censored on X, it is free speech for some but not for others.

Yes, that's my point: it's the X model because Musk bought the platform so he can amplify himself and censor whomever he likes.

> Is there any way I can have the experience of moderated discussion without any risk of me being moderated?

Another answer to this is "Yes, with proper rules and moderation, you can keep your cake and eat it too".

First off, have a rule that every created thread in this forum need to have some sort of "basis for discussion". Any thread that doesn't, gets closed.

Secondly, have a rule that states that any posts in the threads need to be at least somehow related to the topic, and posts that are not nonsense or off-topic.

Thirdly, have a moderation team that is well aligned, and favors quality posts, removing the rest of the shit.

The end result is a forum where you can discuss any topic, as long as your own posts also add to the conversation, not just try to shut others down or post off-topic/nonsense.

Sure, it will contain opinions you disagree with, but it won't be a cesspool of just casual racism.

(These ideas are all based on a real forum online today where essentially any topic can be discussed without fear of facing real-life consequence for the opinions you hold, assuming your anonymous)

What you're missing is that people that complain about a lack of "free speech" on the internet largely aren't upset about moderation run amok, as much as they might want to suggest as much, they're upset about moderation at all.

They want 0 limits on their own speech. None. And that includes people blocking them. They want to have their say, no matter how noxious or unpleasant anyone else finds it. They want to "just ask questions" and "just have an open conversation."

But they absolutely want other people to be moderated. There's no amount of moderation of their that's small enough.

Basically, they're (internet speech) libertarians; they want to reap the benefits of a structured, cultivated society and community without be subject to any of the constraints that make it actually work.

I'd also argue there's a way to get a reasonable form of this in a more centralized world: You need functional KYC with a high degree of certainty that every participant in the discussion is human and culpable, and you need a system that allows users to block other users. That's really about it.

The problem with many of these social media platforms (X, Threads, Insta, etc) is that they are actively disincentivized to enforce the first requirement of those two. Strict KYC is (rightly) viewed by many as overtly invasive of privacy, it would hurt the volume of content on these platforms (because 90% of it is AI generated engagement bait), and it would hurt their user signup and retention metrics (being ignorant of how many bots and alts are on your platform is vastly better than knowing and doing something about it).

> You need functional KYC with a high degree of certainty that every participant in the discussion is human and culpable

This would actively lower the freedom of expression. There are opinions people hold that they're only comfortable sharing when they know it won't come back to them in real life, as holding such opinions can be dangerous. These people should still be allowed to share their views and discuss with others that disagree with them/they disagree with. This could be one of the only ways for them to even challenge their own world view.

If you're optimizing freedom of expression, then anonymity is a requirement.

I very clearly did not assert that your identity had to be shared publicly or shared with the people you are interacting with. I only said that the entity operating the centralized social network had to have a strong and confident sense of each users' identity. The purpose of this is to ensure that everyone interacting within the walled garden is human, and to ensure that blocked people cannot just go create an alt account to get around being blocked. Whether it is "@JimJohnson" or "@ButtDestroyer420" you're interacting with isn't relevant.

I understand the anonymity argument, even from the perspective that sometimes you don't want even the service operator to know who you are. I'll be blunt on my take on this: I think this is millenial/genx idealism, tossing coins into a wishing well for an internet that does not exist anymore and will never again. Generative AI is out of the bag, and social network service providers can either grow up and recognize that their Paramount Number 1 service they can offer is some reasonable guarantee of protection against generative AI, or they can stay addicted to their juiced engagement numbers and play dumb when it comes out that 99% of tweets are from bots trying to build rapport, sell products, and influence elections (bye bye advertisers!). Its their call. Twitter is making the wrong one. Meta is up next. Traditionally they've all done bot detection; this doesn't work. Bots are indistinguishable from humans now. You need human-detection; KYC, meat-space verification. If you don't like the anti-privacy angle, then don't participate; no one is forcing you, and you're welcome to start your own mastodon server out in the generative AI wildlands (and, by the way, you should always have that right; i'm not prescribing how the world should be ran, just how e.g. Threads should be).

It's pretty clear what he means by free speech here. In the grey area between legal and illegal are the topics we consider taboo. Many platforms simply censor these subjects, OP wants to understand why.

The simplest answer is that content moderation is an unsolved problem and certain topics are expensive to moderate. Freedom of speech matters but so does the culture of conduct. Further, as a site owner you risk your reputation by the activity you permit, and taboo subjects can attract folks you don't want on your site. Hence why they end up in the cesspool.

Not all sites end up like that.

HN is friendly to freedom of speech because the site probably doesn't attract people that are easy to act out when offended or those that like to report people whose content they do not like. Or because of the occasional comment that refocuses a discussion again.

I would even argue that some more strongly moderated sites can often even be larger cesspools. You can go to Instagram and say something negative about the next random pop start or influencer and people are going to get extremely vicious. Far more so than a message board with only anonymous users.

Also the amount of taboos seem to correlate with hostility for some reason.

> HN is friendly to freedom of speech because the site probably doesn't attract people that are easy to act out when offended or those that like to report people whose content they do not like. Or because of the occasional comment that refocuses a discussion again.

In other words, we're dealing with over-sensitive people on the internet? Children, because those are the only ones that cannot accept the truth. And, since everyone is so easily offended, they have to be protected by content editing?

No one in their right minds would spend a dime for an easily offended person. If this done, there are things at play here.

> Also the amount of taboos seem to correlate with hostility for some reason.

I noticed that too.

HN censors anything they don't like specially about their related startups/companies and is also biased to the left politically speaking

No, HN moderation is just biased to the non-sexist, non-racist, non-homophobic, non-transphobic, non-conspiracy-theorist. It's the right wing's choice that they're biased to the sexist, racist, homophobic, transphobic, and conspiracy theories. Don't blame it on the HN community that they aren't sociopathically biased the same as the right wing and Elon Musk, and don't tolerate all that bigotry. Clean up your own act, and take some responsibility for your own bigotry, instead of blaming others for not tolerating your intolerance and hatred.

Flagged dead green anonymous coward unog: If you mistakenly perceive that as a personal attack against you, it's only because you yourself are guilty of personally attacking innocent people with hate and bigotry by punching down and lying and bullying, and you totally deserve the same shit you dish out, but you just can't take it. You're guilty of and trying to justify and defend your own and other asshole's right wing sociopathic behavior, cultivated ignorance, racist and sexist and homophobic and transphobic bigotry, mental illness, and conspiracy theories, and that's a fair objective accurate diagnoses based on the evidence, not a personal attack. I'm just personally DEFENDING the people you love to personally ATTACK. You don't belong here, and you fucking well know it, because you're terrified to post that bullshit under your own name. Go away, bigot.

Mark Robinson's historic posts on internet forums clearly demonstrate the hypocrisy and self loathing and psychological projection that's really going on with people like you.

https://edition.cnn.com/2024/09/19/politics/kfile-mark-robin...

At least Mark Robinson has the gumption to post that shit under his own name. If you truly believe and stand by and think you can justify what you say, then you should give it a try, anonymous coward keyboard warrior.

Flagged dead green anonymous coward unog: nothing personal about it, because you're not a person nor a member of this community, just a cowardly shadow banned anonymous racist troll.

You are repeatedly and unashamedly breaking the site guidelines in this thread. Kindly stop.

I know. That's the point of my question: what is a place completely unmoderated?

Everywhere that allows free speech now has an angle. Some hide it better than others, and people can't see it.

The problem is that what is legal should not be decided by social media platforms or their users but by the law & the courts. But most often this is not the case.. maybe the OP is addressing this issue.

The platforms don't decide what is legal, but they do have the right, and in many cases the obligation, to moderate their platforms. They can be held liable for allowing CSAM for example. And these platforms have business goals that can be in conflict with, say, allowing anti-LGBTQ or Nazi content.

Sounds like the problem (for a platform like this) is that they have "business goals" in the first place. Freedom of speech shouldn't be up for sale, especially when it comes to discussing sensitive topics and creating a for-profit business around that would do just that.

so people shouldn't create apps/tools/sites where others can communicate with each other unless they're willing to forgo any moderation? how does that work?

Not every service with user-generated content need to try to cater to maximum freedom of expression, so it first of all doesn't apply to any service with user-generated content.

Secondly, my point is that if you do have a service that is trying to optimize for freedom of expression, mixing in needing to earn money on top of that, is bound to leave you almost penny-less, as advertisers don't like an environment like that and people needing to be anonymous aren't as happy to donate.

This is basically X's position – they will enforce countries speech laws, no more, no less.

But OP says:

> Other places such as x/twitter, has some liberty but not very much. Real subjects are not getting through.

So I'm not sure if they're saying that isn't what X is doing, or that they're criticising X for not going beyond the law (illegally), or that perhaps they feel that some legal speech is not treated equally?

> This is basically X's position – they will enforce countries speech laws, no more, no less.

It may be their stated position, but not their practice, as has been recently demonstrated in Brazil.

> So I'm not sure if they're saying that isn't what X is doing, or that they're criticising X for not going beyond the law (illegally), or that perhaps they feel that some legal speech is not treated equally?

I'm saying that posts get removed if they contain certain subjects. Nothing offensive is in them but only facts.

Social media companies are private companies. You can set up your own servers and no government will interfere with you as long as you aren’t doing something illegal

If I start spewing political speech on HN, you will soon be banned and dang and company have every right to do so.

> You can set up your own servers and no government will interfere with you as long as you aren’t doing something illegal

Might have been true in the past but no longer. Once your platform gets a large enough audience, governments will try to artificially sway public opinion on the platform. This has been true for every single large social platform so far.

Government always tries to sway opinion. They are made of politicians. I’m not in love with Musk by any means. But do you think the Biden administration could have convinced Musk to change his moderation policy!

unless they are some local jack booted thugs…

https://amp.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/aug/13/mari...

then don't make it a platform, just a self-hosted blog. then you can say anything you want.

The law is clear in the US: with a few carved out exemptions, the government cannot penalize you for what you say.

Private platforms and citizens can do what they want.

I am sure a forum where any and all speech is tolerated quickly turns to 4chan but with all kinds of extreme porn. I am sure those places exist on ToR. I do not know why you would want to go there.

Ironically, a lot of the forums which value free speech will kick you out for even sounding like you have the wrong opinions.

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