Comment by Covzire | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Covzire | Hacker News Reader

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We shouldn't need any new laws since it's so fundamentally and blatantly explained in the first amendment that no government official shall tell anyone what they can or can't say. SCOTUS has carved out certain language about credible threats of incitement of violence and the like and I'm ok with that.

Where it gets muddy though is during COVID+Social Media, we found a new threat against speech, e.g. the suppression of "reach" which accomplishes the exact same goal as suppressing speech, but it's legality is clouded by semantics.

So we desperately need new laws clarifying that government officials may not suppress 'reach' just because they don't like what a person or persons are saying, and most importantly we need it crystal clear that this applies even in the face of a pandemic, so that the government's embedded rent seekers can't once again force a lying narrative on the people that nobody can find their way out of, save for those who engage in 'conspiracy theories' and listen to 'conspiracy theorists'.

Government officials are permitted to issue recommendations to private entities. Private entities are permitted to follow or disregard those recommendations. For an example presumably compatible with your world view, a government official recommending a private company remove their Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) program; a company may choose to follow or disregard this advice.

If there is evidence of improper coersion by government employees, for example threatening to withhold public funding or permitting based on political views, that would likely be illegal and indeed should be handled by the judicial branch.

I think public health officials should be able to make content moderation recommendations to publishers. In fact, I think they have a responsibility to do so. If someone is knowingly publishing false information which could harm people, public health officials have a responsibility to at least offer counter-guidance to the publisher and make objections clear. They obviously don't have the right to silence them, but they don't do that already.

To me, we should be less concerned with how a platform is moderated and more concerned with the fact that the most successful, influential, and devious publishing empire in human history is essentially the personal property of one man.

The problem with this is that if you allow people to spread big enough lies you end up with things like the Rohingya massacre, or the resurgence of measles. You will of course reply "I don't care, my free speech is worth any number of lives of other humans", but other humans may take a different view.

History repeatedly shows the collective intelligence of the masses is superior to government bureaucrats. Every, single, time. I specifically mentioned COVID because everything we take for granted now as basic truths were revealed very early on in the pandemic, but got suppressed by bureaucrats who thought they knew better (or were paid not to know better).

> Every, single, time

No, it really doesn't.

The wisdom of the crowds has some domains where it's good, and others where it's bad.

Bandwagons, groupthink, whatever you want to call it, that effect is also real. If I pick a random person and ask them what they think the "basic truths" of COVID are, 20-40% of the stuff they will say will still be false today — it just doesn't matter any more that they're wrong.

I feel this should be easy to spot by having two large populations that hold mutually incompatible beliefs, such as the way Americans love the 2nd amendment while the UK bans not only guns but also knives in pubic without good reason.

> We shouldn't need any new laws since it's so fundamentally and blatantly explained in the first amendment that no government official shall tell anyone what they can or can't say.

That's neither what the First Amendment says explicitly nor how it is applied by the courts (though the way each of those differs from your description is quite distinct.)

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