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Comment by johnisgood | Hacker News Reader

Problem is, that it sets a precedent, and next they will come for other websites whose ban will strike you as "bad".

Edit: I can definitely see them banning anything related to Linux and resources related to OSes because of how processes can be handled, e.g. "kill parent", "kill child", and so on. The term "kill" already has to be censored out on many websites. Of course context matters, but people really have difficulties with this these days.

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You can use this train of thought to argue against laws in general, it doesn't sound like a very strong argument

Within this context, how? I do not think it can be used to argue against laws in general. Plus we have a lot of experiences now about it setting a precedent and them coming for your beloved websites. It is not even debatable today.

Laws tend to set precedents (that may be used to justify other laws)

Yeah, so should we have something like Chat Control and more, similar regulation(s)? It really is not so far off from banning platforms. I remember when people were trash-talking China for doing this, and now "we" are doing the same thing we initially opposed. I suppose people may only start opposing it when it starts to affect them.

"we" do what china did because they're beating us at our own games. It's "free market" until BYD shows up, it's "no regulations" until tiktok shows up

Allowing everything from everyone doesn't automagically make "us" the good guys

> Allowing everything from everyone doesn't automagically make "us" the good guys

I never implied this, that would be silly on many fronts.

Are you in favor of Chat Control or not? Why?

I am also wary of things like government owned encryption backdoors and ChatControl, mostly because I feel like like society should be resilient to authoritarian takeovers (and they always seem to happen much faster than we would expect, we'll see if see the US gets another fair election in 2028)

I am just not swayed by the slippery slope argument because as someone else said, it can be used for anything.

Do we actually have a disagreement? I genuinely have no idea.

I do not care about Twitch and I consider Facebook outright harmful, but I do not think they should be banned. I have not fully read the article, but I bet it is "think of the children", a really old justification for "I want more control", a classic power grab.

First they forbade kids to smoke, and I said nothing

Then they forbade kids to drink, and I said nothing

Then they prevented kids to watch porn, I said nothing

And when the time came for me to complain about the price of cigarettes and booze, there weren't any kids to say anything.

Or something like that

While your slippery slope argument can be applied to literally anything that children are restricted from, it consistently fails to materialize.

Perhaps it's predictive power is not as expansive as you think.

They won't ban Linux for containing "kill" but because it teaches kids to "hack" :)

Talk to your kids about the danger of using 'linux' today!

https://www.zdnet.com/article/uk-police-distance-themselves-...

I think there is such thing as a moat on legislative and cultural movement, whether that moat is good or not. So rather than "slippery slope" I think of it more like reducing or building moats.

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