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Comment by lII1lIlI11ll | Hacker News Reader

This only applies if you take all those "protect the children" initiatives at face value. It seems to me that the actual reasons are different. Governments want to police speech online and be able to arrest people who say things they don't approve of, so they are pushing platforms to collect user's PID. Some also want to discourage people from doing things they don't want them to do but that are politically unfeasible to criminalize (watching videos of consenting adults engaging in all kinds of sexual acts) and adding more and more friction to the process (no pun intended!) is the best thing they can get. And the internet companies want more of your data to track you.

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Yeah I 100% agree - but if you give them an alternative way to do the same thing without everyone having to get IDed - then I’d they still want that they’ll have to come out and be explicit.

Like the UK, where you can tweet that someone should burn down a hotel full of migrants, and you can be arrested for tweeting that.

Or like Russia, where you can tweet that you don't like the president, and you can be arrested for tweeting that?

Like both, of course!

When you build a panopticon for some group you perceive as "good guys" to use keep in mind that eventually it will be controlled by "bad guys".

The burn down a hotel thing wasn't about panopticons - Lucy Connolly posted publicly with her own name and photo. (https://www.reddit.com/r/TheRestIsPolitics/comments/1lvrepk/...)

The sentence was probably excessive though.

UK also apparently arrest people for posting videos of zieg heiling dogs and other such nonsense. Which is exactly my point - once the instruments to track and de-anonymize people online are set up, they eventually will be used for all kinds of purposes.

Yeah but that doesn't seem to be the purpose or design of the current tech. Like anyone can still make an anonymous account and post whatever.

X requires email and phone number verification and your tweets are still buried if you don't pay (with a credit card)

Should it be legal to tweet a sieg heiling dog in Germany, when it's your dog, and you taught it to sieg heil, and you filmed it at Auschwitz? Or what's the exact boundary between acceptable and unacceptable?

> Should it be legal to tweet a sieg heiling dog in Germany, when it's your dog, and you taught it to sieg heil, and you filmed it at Auschwitz? Or what's the exact boundary between acceptable and unacceptable?

Yes? Yes, of course? Being an idiot on internet has traditionally been legal in civilized liberal western countries. Such person could be banned by a platform that doesn't want such content and ostracized by their peers (they guy who made sieg heiling dog video claimed he did it for his girlfriend or something and I would dump him, if I was her) but I don't want my government to build a panopticon to prevent such behavior and I don't want my taxes wasted on policing it.

In Germany it's illegal to venerate the Holocaust in any way whatsoever — for obvious reasons. Are you suggesting that should change?

Yes, absolutely. It should be perfectly legal to venerate whatever people want to venerate, that's basic freedom of conscience.

> someone should burn down a hotel full of migrants

> you don't like the president

One of these things is not like the other. In the second case, it's expressing disagreement with a political figure that has directed multiple mass murders of vulnerable people.

But in the first, it's promoting the mass murder of vulnerable people. Free speech isn't freedom to promote hate crimes.

> Like the UK, where you can tweet that someone should burn down a hotel full of migrants, and you can be arrested for tweeting that.

During the middle of a riot where people were actively trying to set fire to a hotel full of migrants.

Look up how people were prosecuted in the US during the 1950s and onwards for having "communist sympathies" or being against racism.

Do you think someone should be arrested for encouraging the burning down of a hotel full of people in real life? If so, why should it be different online? If not, well then you have more serious problems.

I do, but a lot of people don't think it should be possible for the government to track down the person who tweeted let's burn down the migrants hotel.

Does not having government-controlled cameras in our apartments make it impossible for police to prosecute wife-beaters? Can police do some actual work to catch "bad people" as opposed to making internet a panopticon?

I don't think that's a goal, but as a side effect of truly respecting privacy, I'm fine with that.

Do you have someone announce you when entering somewhere in real life, and if not why should it be any different online?

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