[timsayshey]

I've been following Hacker News for over a decade and my sense of the community is that it has always been overwhelmingly pro free speech at any cost (even in the cases where it would protect something outright illegal). Now I'm hearing from many in the same community that free speech has been "weaponized" and must be controlled for the greater good. What happened? Seriously.

[AnimalMuppet]

HN is what it is because it is not free speech absolutist. Posts get flagged. People get banned. This keeps spam and shills down to a level that signal can stand out from the noise.

So in theory, people here may be "free speech absolutists", but in practice, we enjoy the environment that the moderation here enables. At some level, we know via experience that free speech absolutism is not where we want to live.

And yet, the "censorship" has a pretty light touch. It doesn't censor for viewpoint (in the ideal), but for false or misleading comments, or for personal attacks. (Yes, I know, HN doesn't always live up to that ideal.)

It could be that HN's theory is coming around into alignment with it's practice. We're seeing in the wider world that free speech absolutism can cause problems, and that heavy-handed censorship also causes problems. Speaking broadly, what HN is realizing is that we want a wider world that is more HN-like.

[young_unixer]

I'm a "free speech absolutist", meaning: you can't be imprisoned or physically attacked for what you say.

HN is a private space. It can have its own arbitrary acceptance rules, and that has nothing to do with free speech.

[AnimalMuppet]

I'd be fine with prison for phone spammers who ignore the "do not call" list. You could argue "free speech", but there's more to it than that - they're invading my space and time when I don't want them.

[skynet-9000]

You can say anything you want, as long as you do not infringe on my rights, such as by consuming my resources (time, telecom services, fax paper, etc) when I explicitly said not to (via a Do Not Call listing, etc.)

It's similar to a No Trespassing sign; you can picket on public property (free speech), but doing that on private property (when marked with a sign that fit certain criteria, in most states) might get you arrested and charged with a crime.

In the U.S., the rights of the individual generally trump "public interest".

[dragonwriter]

> No one will argue free speech for that, because you're now consuming someone else's resource (time, mobile minutes, etc) when they explicitly told you not to.

All of the arguments for “free speech” against platform content policies are exactly arguing for consuming someone else's reseources against their expressed direction, so it's provably false that that is sufficient to prevent people from arguing for entitlement based on “free speech”.

[skynet-9000]

In that case, the rights of the (private) service provider are in tension with those of the (also private) individual, so it's a matter for legislation and the courts. Congress has passed laws protecting the speech of the individual within certain types of service providers, i.e. telecom/ISP/website publishers.

[ulisesrmzroche]

You can’t be banned or have your posts deleted. Thats absolute free speech.

[skynet-9000]

Things change; the liberal become illiberal.

Twitter used to be "the free speech wing of the free speech party"[0]

The American left used to stand up and fight for free speech. Only eight years ago, the ACLU defended the KKK in court.[1]

0. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/twitter-still-free-speech-win...

1. https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/aclu-em-defends-kkks-rig...

[shrimpx]

Traditional unamplified speech is ok in all shapes, but I think the amplification power of social media has shown the damage hate speech can do at scale, and people have become more cautious about what’s ok to amplify.

[AbrahamParangi]

Many individual beliefs are really tribe beliefs. If the tribe beliefs change then the individual beliefs will change too, because the individual was never really committed to them.

This happened recently in 2020 from Jan to May on the Coronavirus. The party of “no big deal” reoriented from left to right and many people reoriented with it.

Tribe beliefs on free speech have changed and those who align with those tribes have changed with it.

[undefined1]

nailed it. most people outsource their beliefs and simply echo the positions and words of their tribal leaders.

[JeremyNT]

> Now I'm hearing from many in the same community that free speech has been "weaponized" and must be controlled for the greater good. What happened? Seriously.

Is this really an opinion espoused here (in non-greyed-out downvoted comments) or is this a straw man / exaggeration? This is an actual question, not meant as a flame.

I would suggest that HN broadly is in fact more accepting of the idea that platform holders should somehow moderate their content than it used to be, but HN also remains (broadly) very skeptical of the platform holders' ability or will to execute such policies well or fairly.

The truth is that platform holders have de-facto moderation - that is, their algorithmic feeds that decide what to amplify and what to bury in the name of generating ad revenue. It seems to me personally that these approaches are failing us all, a fact that has only become really obvious in recent years. I would say this development has now opened up a lot of room for discussion.

[iSnow]

I don't feel the same sentiment here. But for the sake of argument, two things have happened:

- data driven manipulation by platforms reaching the majority of the population. Pushing the spiciest posts to the top to increase emotional interaction

- the emergence of new fascists under the guise of free speech. With the downfall of traditional gatekeepers in media, new gatekeepers have emerged - and they are not the benevolent kind.

[pfraze]

I don’t think people are less pro free speech. I think people are grappling with it being a leaky abstraction. The binary framing doesn’t really help us figure out how to deal with nasty replies from randos in your notifications, or the implications of algorithm design which scores the discovery of information, or the simple fact that a motivated party can run propaganda campaigns using sockpuppets. Dealing with these things isn’t about censorship, it’s about maintaining a healthy community.

I dont see these conversations as being anti free speech so much as “agreed, but what next?”

[ulisesrmzroche]

People disdain the humanities here, so they learn some lessons the hard way.

The real question is if people actually want to live in a society with absolute free speech. I think that’s a no.

Hate speech is protected as long as it doesn’t involve violence, but in practice, hate speech almost always leads to violence.

Something people never talk about is how the founding fathers thought that virtue was a necessary quality for a democracy. If we lived in a society that held virtue in high esteem, there would be no limits to speech. But we don’t, our society values fame over everything, even money.

Plus, we live in a post truth era. People hate truth-tellers here.

That’s why we can’t have free speech.

[faitswulff]

Well...there was the small matter of a violent insurrection at the Capitol Building by people who variously: flew the Confederate flag, believed Democrats eat babies, refuse to believe the results of the election, all of which are nonsense beliefs or causes that were magnified on social media.

At some point people in general - and HN in particular - have to decide when to rein in bad actors crying wolf. Otherwise they take over - literally.

[folknor]

I just have to point out that your comment reads to me like you are crying wolf.

However, I'm not a US citizen so I don't follow the situation closely.

[andrewflnr]

US citizen here who followed the situation: they're not crying wolf.

[ulisesrmzroche]

Don’t be lazy, you can confirm the post with a quick search.

What are you trying to say anyway? Cool, so you don’t know what’s going on, and don’t particularly care. So what?

[x86_64Ubuntu]

It's always been free speech because the government doesn't kick in your door based on what you write on HN.

[hackinthebochs]

The size of the community has likely grown significantly over the years, and with it a change in the demographic of your average commenter. What started as place for tech entrepreneurs, entrepreneur hopefuls, and technologists with some years under their belt has changed into something that is more representative of the young tech worker population as a whole. The earlier demographic likely had a strongly libertarian bent, whereas the current demographic likely has a strongly progressive bent.

[ed25519FUUU]

I also used to hear things like we can never trust the intelligence agencies and that elections and electronic voting machines were easily hackable.

[tzs]

Every society that grows past the point where people are largely self-sufficient needs some way to settle on common truth if it is to remain stable. But it also needs a way to update what it considers to be true, because sometimes what it decided is true turns out to be wrong or later becomes wrong as circumstances change.

That update mechanism needs to have some friction, though, so that you don't make too many wrong updates.

Free speech is a mechanism that helps with the updates, and up until maybe 30 years ago we also had an effective form of friction on it.

That friction took the form of the cost of getting an audience. You could say or publish pretty much anything you wanted other than things that were outright illegal. But it cost money to get your speech to a wide audience. The bigger the audience, generally the more the cost.

If what you wanted to say was close to the current common truth, it was a lot cheaper. The farther from that you got, the harder it was to find someone who would pay to get you a large audience.

In those cases where what you wanted to say was far from the common truth and so you could not come up with the money to get a large audience, you'd have to resort to spreading your message on a small scale. You might even have to start out spreading it in person one on one or by writing letters to people one on one.

If what you were trying to spread was actually true, it would eventually overcome that friction. You'd slowly convince people, until you might have enough who would pay for your self-published book or subscribe to a newsletter. They might start spreading it. It might take a while but eventually you'll get there.

If what you were trying to promote was just flat out wrong and borderline insane, such as that California's large wildfires last summer were actually ignited by space lasers run by the jews, or that the elites are kidnapping children and drilling holes into their heads to harvest adrenochrome, you'd have a real hard time getting that message out. And if you did manage and it started to gain a little traction, debunkers would quickly get debunkings out which would spread faster, making it harder for your thing to spread.

With a lot of people getting almost all their information from social media, that form of friction has to a large extent gone away. It is a lot easier and cheaper to get a large audience.

Debunking takes time, and by the time a debunking is out there for the false stuff to have already taken root. On top of that, people are now exposed to a lot more information (both true and false), leaving much less time per item for evaluation. And it is much easier to create new false things than new true things. This means that even if a debunking of something does come around to your social media feed, you might miss it in the flood of new false stuff in there.

And on top of all that, its not just cranks and crackpots producing the false ideas now. First, you've got state sponsored entities doing it to try to harm rival states. Second, you've got content farms that make up sensationalistic stuff designed to generate clicks, so that they can run ads on it.

We need some mechanism to put friction back.

[pid_0]

Free speech absolutionism is stupid. You can limit free speech without actually harming anyone (please don’t mention the slippery slope fallacy)

Some things just DONT need to be said. Racial slurs in the wrong context (attacks), holocaust denials, etc. these things have NO positive outcome. None. Nothing at all in the world will change if you ban these things.

We can have free speech while stopping extremism and getting rid of scum like Gab and parlor is the first step.

It’s not a black or white situation.