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Comment by RpFLCL | Hacker News Reader

I heard from a friend last night that they were unable to see posts on X about current protests in their country because those were considered "adult" content which can now only be viewed after submitting to an ID check. Not porn, video of a protest.

You're 100% right that it's happening today.

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It’s really important to remember in this context that “the purpose of a system is what it does.”

Do not think for a moment that ID verification primarily protects children and only incidentally enables authoritarian restrictions on speech. Do not think for a second that verification initiatives are designed without anticipating this outcome.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...

> "the purpose of a system is what it does"

So then the purpose of the internet was to share cat pics? This quote is so wrong in every way.

> Do not think for a moment

I will decide what I think thank you. It's very ironic when arguments against "censorship" go this way.

That's a typical "reductio absurdum"

The purpose of a system is not what it does.

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/come-on-obviously-the-purpo...

I think you're taking it too literally. A more generous interpretation would be "what it does can be a better indicator of what the true hidden motive was for nefarious state programs".

I have to agree that this is problematic in the sense of ascribing malicious intent, but it is actually a useful concept when performing an honest/truthful analysis and trying to acquire new knowledge and perspectives so you can compare them. i.e. the analysis of what it ought to do versus what it actually does.

Given a software product, there are often marketers/advertisers telling you what use cases they envisioned for their product, but you as the customer actually know more about your core business and your own needs. Hence you choose the products not based on what the vendor claims about the product i.e. the intended/prescribed purpose, you care more about what the product can do for your business and that includes discovering ways to use the product that the vendor could have never imagined in the first place.

The phrase does not mean that you can pick any single effect of a system and claim that is its purpose, as your linked article does in its examples. (Ironically, a form of reducto as absurdum.) It is a heuristic, a pattern of thought to attempt to overcome the bias towards judging systems based on the intentions behind them instead of the outcomes they produce. The point is that when you choose a course of action, you are implicitly choosing its negative effects as well, and the choice should be judged on all its effects. You are making a cost / benefit analysis, and if that is not explicit, it can easily be wrong.

So the purpose of a hospital is to kill people?

Does your hospital kill more people than it saves? If so, you might be describing the 19th century Vienna General Hospital, which had two maternal wards: one staffed by trained physicians, suffering up to 30% mortality, the other by midwives, only experiencing 2~10% rates. The difference was so pronounced, local women desperately avoided the first ward, begging to give birth in the streets rather than be admitted there. Ignaz Semmelweis later attributed the disparity to doctors having performed autopsies before attending births without disinfecting their clothes, hands, or tools, dropping to only a few percent with disinfection.

Or if you limit your demographics, perhaps you might be thinking of the Tuskegee syphilis study, where treatment was intentionally withheld for a progressive, life-threatening disease without the consent of the patients, making its purpose to slowly kill the participants by its own admission?

Yes, if your hospital does seem to kill more people than most and there's no alternative explanation like accepting more severe cases, then its purpose might be inverse or orthogonal to its stated goal.

Hospitals save orders and orders of magnitude more people than they accidently kill.

Infant mortality for hospital babies is what, well under 1/1000? Infant mortality was 25% for the vast majority of human history.

Modern medicine is legitimately indistinguishable from magic.

Sadly the old guard of free speech and privacy activists on the internet has long gone, drowned by a sea of unprincipled populist reactionaries - if their team decided that the content is "problematic", then they are entirely justified in censoring and punishing the speakers for daring to speak it, and entirely justified in protecting everybody else from having to suffer the horror of reading/seeing/hearing it, and it matters not whether the mechanisms are legal or ethical because the ends justify the means.

>the old guard of free speech and privacy activists on the internet has long gone, drowned by a sea of unprincipled populist reactionaries

which is an unnecessary ideological divide if your concern is free speech and privacy; too bad the old guard of activists chose sides and alienated additional support for their cause.

> >the old guard of free speech and privacy activists on the internet has long gone, drowned by a sea of unprincipled populist reactionaries

> which is an unnecessary ideological divide if your concern is free speech and privacy;

What do you mean by this, an unnecessary ideological divide?

> too bad the old guard of activists chose sides and alienated additional support for their cause.

What sides did they choose and whose additional support did they alienate?

I guess "The old guard of free speech" went to be rightie libertarians

As a group, those who bang the free speech and privacy drum be seen as being more to the right than 20 years ago, but I doubt it is significantly because individuals changed their other political opinions. More because some of the group dropped out as they have been silenced by fear or just changed their outlook on it as political landscape has changed. Also in some part because those remaining in the group are just viewed as being more to one side of the political spectrum than they used to be simply because of this view.

I parsed this entirety as a single noun cluster: "the old guard of free speech and privacy activists on the internet"

and to me that can be summed up as "the EFF", and the EFF is decidedly left whinge, and does not attract the support of others who are concerned about free speech.

free speech on the pre-web internet didn't really need a group, it was a given and generally accepted by all parties

But in that case, the EFF didn't go to be rightie libertarians. They if anything may have gone further left, it's just that they no longer champion free speech. Which is basically what I said, just applied to the group rather than individuals.

If the "rightie libertarians" from sibling is correct, then it actually describe the dynamic I have noticed.

It is free speech as long as you are politically right, no matter how far extreme right you are or what you are saying. But, if you are left or oppose the far right, then criticizing those is not free speech, but rather a restriction on it. Suddenly you should shut up, all sorts of additional rules apply to you. It is wrong to argue with far right, to say things that are uncomfortable for them or call them names, call them nazi even when it is clearly the case. But if you are just a little radical feminist, you are valid target for any amount of abuse which suddenly counts as free speech. Your leftist or feminist speech does not count as valid free speech.

Eventually, it started to look like "free speech" is tactically used expression to create an asymmetry and applies only to certain ideas. Or certain people ideas.

I don't understand what you're getting at.

You're saying some "dynamic" of people you have noticed do not really support free speech in some cases?

Lots of people don't support free speech. My original post bemoaned exactly that.

I am saying that "I support free speech" ended up associated with "I am pro far right, but do not want to openly admit so, but I will gladly accept suppression of left, progressives, liberals and anyone who criticizes right".

And that eventually we realized that "old school free speech groups" just wanted to shut up opposition to far right.

It ended up associated with the far right, by people on the left who are against free speech I suppose, yes.

> And that eventually we realized that "old school free speech groups" just wanted to shut up opposition to far right.

That's untrue.

It ended up associated with the far right, because poster child for "defending speech" was only and exclusively far right. Really.

It was never "I strongly disagree with an annoying progressive, but I will defend their right to say it". It was always "how dare you criticize far right or call someone far right, you are preventing their speech by opposing them".

> people on the left who are against free speech I suppose, yes.

Funny enough, far right and conservatives were openly against free speech again and again and again. Including in very practical ways. And we see that right now with Trump, Thiel, Musk, Vance and the rest.

People "on the right" nor self styled free speech advocates never minded that. There was never any fascist movement for freedom, the openly stated goal was always to remove the freedom. But if you are not one of them say so and mean it as a criticism, you are somehow supposedly preventing their free speech.

> It ended up associated with the far right, because poster child for "defending speech" was only and exclusively far right. Really.

It ended up being associated with the far right by far leftists. Really. Go outside internet bubbles and ask normal people on the street. People don't think free speech is "far right". Really.

> It was never "I strongly disagree with an annoying progressive, but I will defend their right to say it". It was always "how dare you criticize far right or call someone far right, you are preventing their speech by opposing them".

I've heard that a lot, so that's false.

> Funny enough, far right and conservatives were openly against free speech again and again and again. Including in very practical ways. And we see that right now with Trump, Thiel, Musk, Vance and the rest.

I'm not seeing where the humor is.

> People "on the right" nor self styled free speech advocates never minded that.

Also wrong, many free speech advocates have greatly minded conservative efforts to censor speech in the past.

> There was never any fascist movement for freedom,

No, but that appears to be a strawman of your own construction by equating free speech advocates with fascists.

At least the old guard never spoke in riddles.

> Not porn, video of a protest

Not commenting on ID checks but depending on the protest, some images can be violent and definitely "adult".

I never understood why we go out of our way to "protect" children against seeing naked people, but real people in a pool of blood, nah, no problem. I think that people bloodily fighting each other for causes that I have a hard time understanding even as an adult may not be what we want children to be exposed to without control. Images of violence create a visceral reaction and I don't think it is how we should approach political problems, in the same way that porn may not be the best approach to sex, the same argument for why we don't let children access porn applies to political violence too.

The point I wanted to make is that whatever your opinion is on ID checks to access to adult content, "adult" doesn't and shouldn't just mean "porn".

Well that's kind of exactly my point, really.

Ostensibly these laws are to protect kids from porn, but that isn't really the case. They instantly expand to everything else "adult", and it's very easy to argue that talking about politics, or discussing evidence of war crimes or genocide, or apparently showing a real and current protest, are "adult" conversations.

And with laws like this, people, adults, everyone, lose the ability to participate in those conversations without doxxing themselves. Some of these things are difficult to discuss when you fear retribution.

It's not about the porn. It was never actually about the porn. The porn is just the difficult-to-defend-without-looking-like-a-pervert smokescreen. It's designed to curtail the free flow of information and expression in far more areas. The people behind these laws are liars.

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