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Comment by mattmaroon | Hacker News Reader

The problem with this argument, and why free speech absolutism is the only stance that makes sense, is that someone always has a good reason why you need to throw the bathwater out right now, baby be dammed.

The end result is worse than the disinformation.

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Free speech absolutism is not necessary at all. We can be thoughtful about it. Think about the American criminal justice system and the criminal culpability standard of "guilty beyond a reasonable doubt". We have the concept of being "reasonable" at the core of our justice system for centuries and it works far more often than it fails. And certainly no one has come up with anything better.

I'm also reminded of the last time Matthew Prince was locked in the horns of a free speech issue when there was outcry for Cloudflare to stop platforming Daily Stormer and Kiwi Farms. Sites that were claiming their free speech rights to not only spread hate, but to doxx and threaten and, by extension, chill the speech of people they disliked. Hence, free speech is not unlimited. Some speech restricts the speech of others. And then it is very much the responsibility of regulators to step in and make a judgment.

How do you know the end result is worse than disinformation? If the Russian disinformation allow Russia to destroy the freedom and democracy in Europe, and allow Russia to take over, that seems to me to much worse than limiting the publication of lies and slander.

Because whoever gets to determine what lies and slander are become your new dictators.

If the problem is Russian bots, there’s a much easier way to solve it: make Facebook and the platforms that allow them to spread financially liable.

You’re unironically arguing that giving up your freedom is a protection against losing your freedom.

Hear me out, but: You can elect a commission of experts to be deciding this. Term limits. Separate independent institution from the government.

That's not a dictator. You're just grasping for hyperbole to prop up an ideological point.

It’s called a jury. We have those. They’re the commission that determines if something is slander.

Something doesn't need to be slander to be information warfare. We need something much larger scale and more powerful to fight back the hybrid warfare from Russia and increasingly also the US.

Is it possible that that belief is itself influenced by the propaganda you’re worried about? If I were Russia I’d do my best to create a rift between the US and Europe.

Freedom is a scale, not binary. I'm willing to move a bit on that scale to avoid going completely to one of the opposites. I completely disagree with your suggestion that if you don't have complete freedom, you're at the complete opposite end, I.e. zero freedom.

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