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Comment by fixermark | Hacker News Reader

Does "Just don't feed the trolls" continue to work in a world where trolls know that SWATting someone is as easy as picking up a phone, and doxxing someone can have significant long-term consequences?

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Unfortunately most humans -- and this includes the humans posting on this thread, including me -- suffer from tribalism, and "it's okay when my side does it" overrides all the other rules.

Fixing this is really hard and requires constant application of lots of energy.

It is less "its ok because it is my tribe" and more "i will not risk my standing within the tribe by speaking up against this".

It's better than feeding them. One step at a time; stop feeding the trolls, then fix SWATing and online harassment.

Step one of "How to Deal with Bullies": Show minimal reaction. [1]

1: http://www.wikihow.com/Deal-With-Bullies

Should we repeal the first amendment because people sometimes used racial or ethnic slurs? Or they deny the moon landing? Or say things that your preferred political party happens to disagree with? Or maybe only things that YOU disagree with?

Nobody is recommending a repeal of the First Amendment. At best, the conversation is about whether orgs like Reddit have any obligation (moral, business, or otherwise) to allow people screaming racial or ethnic slurs to stand on (metaphorically speaking) their property and use their megaphones.

Usenet still exists, and nobody is stopping people from using it. It's just not where trolls go to be heard anymore, because nobody is there to hear them. ;)

"Nobody wants to take away your right to free speech, we're just trying to create social norms that discourage, or hinder, the freedom to express views we don't like. Ignore the fact that social norms inevitably become codified in law."

Reddit does not owe you free speech. You can say whatever you want, and they can choose not to broadcast it to millions of people.

That's a non-sequitur to the claim that social norms (of the variety that Reddit is attempting to establish) tend to become codified into law, for better or worse.

Of course, that's a non-sequitur to the claim that Reddit is an entity that has no obligation to be a platform for entirely-uncensored expression, though even that is a cop-out argument against those who cite Reddit as having a reputation of free expression.

Basically, this whole discussion is gibberish.

Or does it? Now, no company would owe you freedom of speech just for existing, but in the previous promises Reddit made, it did promise to be a bastion of free speech. It wasn't an explicit contract that they can be taken to court over, but do we really want to say that, unless there is an explicit contract, there cannot be any agreements?

Can't they change their mind?

Can you change your mind on a verbal agreement? That a court is likely to not find sufficient evidence to enforce it doesn't make changing you mind about it right/ethical once you've gained benefit from the agreement.

If I get the community to help me build a orphanage, it is wrong for me to decide I rather do something else with the building once built.

I believe you're conflating laws which are objective and shared with morals/ethics which are subjective and personal. Something legal to you and me can be unethical to you while being ethical to me. Something illegal to you and me can be unethical to you while being ethical to me.

I believe you are confused about the law. Laws are not objective. There are many, many cases brought before the courts where the facts are not in dispute.

Can you clarify?

Which part isn't clear?

All of the parts are unclear. I'm confused because the objectivity of a law depends on the facts in court cases being in dispute?

When I use the word subjective, it means that an individual personally gets to decide the truth of something. You can't make something illegal just by changing your mind, but you can make it immoral. We probably have different understandings of subjectivity and objectivity.

Inconveniently, juries (and judges in non-criminal cases) do, in fact, make something legal or illegal by changing their minds. It is the function of a jury to decide questions of fact, because determining absolute objective truth in a courtroom scenario (from a scientific sense of the word) is often functionally impossible. So you're left with the situation where the plaintiff and defendant provide evidence that their respective versions of the truth are the objective reality, and the jury's subjective opinion of their case determines what the law agrees upon as objective.

This interface between objective and subjective is the "magic" of the legal system. If you can argue in a court of law, successfully enough to convince a jury (or judge, depending on the criminal / civil nature of the case), that, say for instance, a corporation is a person in the same sense as an individual human being, then as far as the law is concerned it is now an objective truth that corporations are people.

I'm not even talking about deciding questions of fact. If you take a set of facts as a given, it's still often not clear if something is legal or not. Legislation is often written in broad strokes and it is up to the courts to fill in the details. There are always new cases coming up that don't fit the same fact pattern as existing cases and hence no one is quite sure what the law says on such matter.

Given a set of facts, it isn't always clear if something is legal or not. Hence, case law, and appeals and so on. Was obamacare illegal? It wasn't clear. A judgement has been made at this point, but to suggest it was an "objective" decision wouldn't be accurate. The supreme court judges could have just "decided" it was illegal if that was their opinion. Several did. The very existence of the supreme courts highlights the fact that the law is a subjective thing, there isn't some nice big leather bound book which you can just consult for every single situation and go "yep, ok, that's legal".

I see what you're saying, somebody has to decide what the law actually is. They do it in collaboration with a huge system of legal training, case law, appointment, election, and the opinions of other judges, but that a single person's opinion counts for so much does introduce subjectivity. Obama makes decisions, but half of us (or whatever) agreed that it was good for him to do so. We place a similar confidence in scientists.

I generally think of a continuum where 100% subjective means only you agree and 100% objective means everybody on the planet agrees. Questions of legality tend towards the objective side of the continuum, and questions of morality tend towards the subjective side. Very little is at either end of it. (Maybe ice cream is 98% objectively delicious or something.) It would have helped if I clarified this before just spitting out that laws != morals because objective != subjective.

No, I'm not saying that. I'm saying that right now, this very second, there are many things which may or may not be legal, it's uncertain. There are circumstances where (usually) companies will get legal advice from a top-tier firm, and that advice will be "we are not certain if this is legal or not", because there are no cases where this has been tested. This is more common than you might realize. It comes up often where new legislation is passed. Dodd-Frank introduced legislation and none of it had been tested in court and many banks didn't know if X was legal or not, because the legislation didn't explicitly say anything about X, but X might be covered under Y which is explicitly said to be legal or not. There are companies doing things right now and they aren't certain if what they are doing is legal.

Your personal opinion about whether a piece of untested legislation is good or bad according to your own morals/values/ethics is more subjective than a judge's legal opinion about what that legislation means in terms of regulating behavior in accordance with everything else in the legal system.

Agreed, the law is less subjective. But that isn't even close to making the law objective.

Okay, so compare and contrast with science. Is it fair to say that murder is to Dodd-Frank what classical mechanics is to string theory? By the way, thanks for the discussion so far.

I don't know. Classical mechanics is useful but has proven to be wrong in various places, I don't know how useful string theory is but, at least to my knowledge, it has never been proven wrong. Whether a set of facts adds up to "murder" is debatable and what is and is not legal under Dodd-Frank is also debatable.

Technically Reddit doesn't owe anyone anything. However, if an outlet is significant enough, their private right to censor becomes, for all practical purposes, political censorship of public space. If you have no practical means of exercising your right to free speech, it might as well not exist, because it is then just a dead letter on a piece of paper. (Whether Reddit is actually significant to such an extent is debatable.)

When the value of that property is determined entierly by the size and engagement of the community using it (a community that gathered largely around the ethos of Free Speech), it's not necessarily a smart thing to attack them.

It's quite trendy now to push the meaning of censorship all the way back to a legal definition around the first amendment and say things like private companies can't censor people. That's simply not true. Removing information is censorship.

Reddit was born on the spirit of freedom of speech and repealing it, while fully with their rights, will be the death of Reddit.

> Reddit was born on the spirit of freedom of speech

Was it though?

"back when I was running things, if there was anything racist, sexist, or homophobic I'd ban it right away. I don't think there's a place for such things on reddit. Of course, now that reddit is much bigger, I understand if maybe things are different." http://www.vox.com/2015/7/15/8967721/reddit-yishan-wong-elle...

It was, right after the new CEO said it's NOT a bastion of free speech someone found a quote from a founder saying that it was precisely that:

https://np.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/3dautm/conten...

Also first sentence on http://www.reddit.com/rules "reddit is a pretty open platform and free speech place, but there are a few rules"

Better example would be anti-vaxxers. You can point to actual cases of dead children and say this is the penalty of free speech.

Speaking of which, why is anti-vaxxer rhetoric protected even though it contributes to the harm of children. I can think of illegal speech that was banned because of it being harmful to children (and which is likely less lethal than anti-vaxxer rhetoric).

> I can think of illegal speech that was banned because of it being harmful to children (and which is likely less lethal than anti-vaxxer rhetoric).

That's very interesting. Could you elaborate please? I'd really like to know more.

Images/videos are considered speech. There was actually a few different First Amendment cases concerning different images/videos being made illegal, but of those only one ban clearly stuck (a second ban was struck down but reinstated with slightly different laws and is still waiting a second SCOTUS ruling on it).

(As a side note to any lawyers, is text protected speech when it originates as a description of an actual harmful act of which video/images would not be legal speech? I don't think it was made illegal, but I wonder if it could be (at least if it were at some level of detail).)

Ah, okay that makes a lot more sense then. Thanks for sharing!

If the autoimmune disease of our society is so fucked up that SWATing is a viable tactic, things need to be fixed. If these media outlets spent half as much effort addressing that sort of shortcoming, maybe things would be better.

Instead, they use their power for clickbait, and that means that the few times they do cover it they're dismissed as just another one of those "This unemployed veteran consumed bath salts--you'll never guess what happened next" or "1 easy tip for getting out of criminal charges--the ACLU hates this (white) guy".

SWATing is bad, but rare, and imo it speak more volumes for the really low threshold police have for using a SWAT team for things. That can be addressed in other ways. SWAT teams raid the wrong houses all the time. If someone SWATs someone they should be thrown in jail, imo, but it also, again speak volumes to the mentality of modern police departments who will SWAT someone based on nothing but a phone call.

I would argue the easily-exploitable 911 infrastructure is the larger problem. Concerns about police militarization aside, I don't fault their low threshold for response. If I report a violent crime in progress I don't want the 911 operator saying "That's a pretty bold claim, sir. Is there anyone else I could speak to?".

Have there been instances where this happened out of the blue? If so, I would appreciate some more information on those incedents.

A recent example of SWATting - https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140828/13313928352/count...

It does happen.

That said, I don't know if I agree with the comment you have replied to.

The magnitude of those long-term consequences will have to diminish over time, as incidences increase in frequency. i.e. social progress

Swating seems to me to go beyond trolling.

They are effectively abusing public resources with potentially fatal outcomes.

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