Comment by intended | Hacker News Reader

Comment by intended | Hacker News Reader

I am conflicted. On the one hand getting governments to wade into what is fair speech is absolutely a slippery slope. Yet, platform firms are not correctly incenvitived arbiters of speech either.

Square this circle:

1) Big Social Media firms have to make decisions on speech.

2) The ideals of free speech that everyone espouses are from an era where publishing and control of publishing was nascent.

3) As businesses, it is their job to ensure they take care of their shareholders, and thus this means driving engagement.

4) As humans, we respond and engage with certain stimului more actively than others.

5) As of 2026, moderation is still value driven. Private entities must now what is fair speech and moderate according to their values.

6) Platforms, following the incentives that are set out for them, create environments that are as addictive as possible for its users. This is what their job is.

You can make small enclaves for long form content. However, the majority of the voting population is drugged to the gills with enrapturing content.

This is not a recipie for a healthy information economy, this is the opium wars being waged by our own business structures on our own people - a druggie information economy.

Giving governments more power is ... oof... a bad idea. We need more genuine efforts to ensure a healthier content environment that works for society.

Do note, that while US based commenters are concerned, the situation is even worse in other nations, given that Authoritarianism is on an upswing. Figuring this out is not a trivial philosophical issue.

> Big Social Media firms have to make decisions on speech.

The fiction underlying their section 230 liability shield is that they don’t have to make those decisions. They’re just “dumb pipes” for user generated content. The Supreme Court punted on this issue in Twitter v. Taamneh but it’s going to get resolved eventually.

This is a common but backwards misconception. Section 230 was written to ensure that online platforms could make decisions on speech and did not have to just be dumb pipes. Congress was worried that a "dumb pipe only" regulatory regime was taking shape through court decisions, which would have forced platforms to choose between letting users post obscene rants and accepting liability for anything defamatory users might say.

Well put. There are probably a few 100 other edge cases worth examination but you got it down to a digestible list.

One trick i always apply to products is to ask yourself what kind of people you are looking to create. Who are the resource and what do you want to change them into? Anything we say is manipulation so appealing to ignorance isn't an answer.

It seems we like people to be constructive and feel empowered to do useful things. We would want them to have access to useful educational information to guide them on their path to enlightenment. We want everyone to contribute to the wellbeing of humanity and the environment which starts by convincing them they can. Then we also don't want to force people into such a narrow scope that they can't express themselves freely anymore.

It would probably be funny to have a personalized LLM review your content contribution before you hit the submit button and present you with a harsh bullet list enummerating everything that is wrong with your contribution. Then if your writings meet certain criteria the right audience should be exposed to it.

We could make it even more spectaculaire by merging the contribution with similar ones under the guidance of its authors. In stead of 100 very similar recipes for apple pie have an AI assisted battle royale that arrives at one that describes the variations (and lists its 100 sources)

You might even identify and recruit some pâtissiers to write walls of text denouncing and/or praising some variations. Currants, sultanas or raisins? The world needs to know.

This bill is about enhancing the protections of lawful free-speech under the US constitution.

Generally speaking, we deem various kinds of speech that harms people as NOT protected under the first amendment, and that kind of speech would not be protected here.

Yelling “Fire!” in a crowded theater, libel and slander, speech calling for violence, and fraudulent advertising are some typical examples of speech not protected by the first amendment.

It would be tricky, but we could reasonably categorize engagement algorithms with certain properties as harmful to people and not subject to first amendment protections. This would be consumer protection, like laws against fraudulent advertising and other misleading claims.

For what it's worth, yelling fire in a crowded theater is First Amendment protected speech.

https://www.techdirt.com/2023/03/14/setting-1st-amendment-my...

I'm just stating facts.

https://www.popehat.com/p/the-first-amendment-isnt-absolute

This video was extremely disingenuous.

The video is educational. It uses an extreme scenario to make its point, but that's because it's being illustrative.

Okay, so maybe you don't believe a lawyer. Let's try a different lawyer that's more famous.

> So, there you have it: obscenity, defamation, fraud, incitement, and speech integral to criminal conduct. Throw in true threats - which was left out of this list for some reason - and child pornography, and you’ve got the categories. Note that the Court specifically identifies them as well-known and historic, not as in flux.

https://www.popehat.com/p/the-first-amendment-isnt-absolute

Sigh. Yes, it depends on context. Like everything.

Yet, what’s the point of pedantic digressions that distract and muddy rather than clarify and communicate?

You're specifically arguing that speech that harms is disallowed, and algorithms could be construed as harmful, so hey, let's not protect them with free speech.

These are legal matters, so pedantry is part of the equation. The popehat piece is specifically written to refute this entire line of argument: free speech has extremely specific carveouts, and the way you're arguing isn't in line with how that would be expanded. This is outlined very specifically in the Popehat piece.

This is in no way a pedantic digression: I'm pointing out a fundamental flaw in your proposal, and citing work by lawyers that describes that flaw in detail.

> Generally speaking, we deem various kinds of speech that harms people as NOT protected under the first amendment, and that kind of speech would not be protected here.

That is not a general principle. Consider the following: it is now illegal to say the word “election” because it would harm the President.

Yeah, we don't ban harmful speech, and we shouldn't. Harming people can be a legitimate and valuable consequence of speech.

We ban a subset of harmful speech with a direct link to clear harms, usually criminal.

Is that really what you think I said? It’s probably more productive to read with the goal to understand rather than the goal to misunderstand.

Yes, that’s how I read your comment. There are narrow circumstances but no general principle. To generalize from narrow circumstances is simply misguided, so I commented.

> we could reasonably categorize engagement algorithms with certain properties as harmful to people and not subject to first amendment protections

This is a hope, however I have not seen any effort that wasn't scuppered, until recently.

The social media bans are a lurch in that direction.

I could separate them out into different strands:

1) Society saying that the engagement algorithms is not what we want to have in our lives or the lives of our children

2) Problematic technical implementations, or benign technical implementations that invade privacy and support government gaining more powers over speech.

Any regulation shaping algorithms is perilously close to shaping speech. Now if you say algorithms are speech or editorial decisions that platforms have their own freedom to choose, then you essentially strip them of their protections.

This would force a form of moderation that would have most people up in arms on HN.

I fully admit, I am being rough in my cuts; the point I am attempting to make is that any decision to decide what constitutes protected and unprotected speech is going to be government interference.

It may even be likely that the firms such as Meta or Tik Tok would end up as untenable under such rules.

The exceptions you're listing are mostly real but much more narrow than you're thinking. Only threats of imminent violence are excepted; it's completely protected by the First Amendment to say things like "it's getting to a point where we might have to be violent" or "I would commit violence if suchandsuch were to happen to me", even if other people reasonably find those statements to be stressful and alarming. Similarly, while defamation as such is illegal, it's not defamatory to say something like "John is a stupid fool who can't be trusted", even if I know many people think he's smart and trustworthy and even if his reputation is ruined by my statement.

There's simply no general principle that speech which harms people can be restricted.

The case which originated the "yelling fire in a crowded theater" analogy, Schenk v. US, was overturned more than half a century ago. And in that case, the proverbial fire-yellers were socialists distributing pamphlets.

No need to square the circle when it’s already a hexagon. Commies can’t stand hexagons.

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