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Comment by chernevik | Hacker News Reader

I'm sure everything is happening very fast right now, but I hope you arrive at a policy more carefully drawn than this.

All terrorists suck, and they haven't any right to use services like yours to coordinate hurting other people. Nor does anyone have the right to incite violence. But people do have a right to political opinions, and some such might be interpreted as "remotely pro terrorist", without actually being coordination or incitement.

Finding the right lines for these determinations is hard, and I don't envy anyone the task of drawing them. And again, things may be moving fast now, and I understand that if there are real concerns about safety that a broad brush might be the first starting point for you. Even so, I hope that whatever policy you adopt iterates over the fullness of time to something that respects people's rights to express their opinions.

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> All terrorists suck

Being the descendant in a family that was host of several terrorists, I have to disagree with you. See once the war was over and nazi germany got booted out, all those terrorists in my family instantly turned into resistance heroes.

Turns out those terrorists in my family were just ordinary people who got into this for reason as simple as having a bike allowing them to move around and relay messages, sort of an internet over bike and some of them got caught and executed for that.

Terrorist can be a loaded word in a political context. We have terms like "freedom fighter", " revolutionary", and "rebel", but these don't quite have neural connotations either.

"Insurgent" is used by the media quite frequently, but pundits have twisted this word into little more than an alias for "terrorist". My brain subconsciously makes this mapping despite my knowledge of a contrary meaning; I think maybe language is too pliable in politics.

Maybe we need yet new language to escape the difficulty of communicating without biases inherent in the vocabulary (our minds already do enough to short-circuit logic already without the English language making the matter worse). "Terrorism" and "unrest" are at such a forefront in the global consciousness that the whole subject is deserving of the few extra mental bytes that would be needed to disambiguate the mess.

If I were in charge of such a task, I would try to borrow words associated with certain well-known historical anecdotes in a hope that the pundits wouldn't simply redefine the words from under us. Hopefully such vocabulary would have enough of a semantic anchor in our generation to dispel such attempts, conscious or not.

To press on the issue further, it seems like it would be wise to engineer our language in a way that leads to better thinking. I suppose that would be too artificial to ever be accepted though.

I doubt anyone resisting Nazi invasion killed any innocent people. What would be the point? The only innocents in their country would be their own countrymen, little point in killing them. Collaborators? Not innocent.

Terrorists _target_ innocent people to gain advantage through intimidation. That's wrong, everywhere and always.

>Collaborators? Not innocent.

Not muslim/chiite/sunnite ? Not innocent.

The parent used the word "Terrorist", but in that context, I think of it as a "Resistance Fighter". It would have been the people in charge, in this case the Nazis, who would have used the label "Terrorist".

I appreciate your comments. Snipt is a very low-traffic site so I doubt my decisions along these lines will ever have much impact on very many people in general, but I am filing for DMCA agent status and will adopt an official Terms of Use and all that jazz.

As a tiny (open-source) side project, this stuff is no fun, but I realize it's now a requirement if I want to continue leaving the site up.

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