[dumpsterdiver]

> (parent) Right but I don't want some wanker at Twitter or Facebook office decide that.

> What's legal or illegal evolves with politics and culture. So there's no fundamental purchase there for the kind of moral conversation you were trying to elicit. If in a few years the people you accuse of wanting to control other people's speech are able to get some laws passed making the speech they want controlled properly illegal, I'd venture you would resist accepting that as suddenly legitimate - even if those things would be "straight up illegal" at that point.

The parent commenter was simply saying that the abhorrent examples you provided were not a point of contention, and not relevant to a conversation about free speech. They weren't attempting to put the word of the law onto a pedestal as you seem to suggest, they were simply pointing out that the things you mentioned are universally considered bad all around the planet, whereas freedom of speech is not.

The situation you've outlined in which one political party successfully silences their opponents through legal means is exactly why a "Site deciding this or that political view is now bad" is so dangerous.

[kannanvijayan]

Copyright violations are a violations against a legal abstraction. Deepfakes are a new form of deception (I didn't imply sexual deepfakes). I used the language of "minors" to explicitly reference those gray legal areas around boundaries and teens sexting each other (which has landed those children in legal quagmires). None of those examples are "abhorrent" as much as "complicated".

> "Site deciding this or that political view is now bad" is so dangerous.

I'll admit again: I was quite happy when accounts supporting and promoting ISIS were banned from various social networks. I was more active on social media then (less so now), and it made me feel very uncomfortable to be on the same platform being leveraged to the ends of those radicals. They were just using it so _gleefully_.

I don't know if I'll be accused of wanting to control what people read, because that's what that is. But I think that falls into the political views most of us agree we don't mind if a social network purges. Violent revolutionary religious politics. It's somewhat natural that they'd have a business interest in maybe not hosting that stuff.

So is violent revolutionary religious politics the boundary? Companies should be free to police those political accounts, but less free to police others? Is it a sliding scale or a hard boundary? Who determines the degree of violence? Is implied violence included? If so how do we determine implied violence?

I'm not attempting to answer those questions. I'm saying those are the questions that a statement to the effect of "You want to control speech (and I don't)" is trying to avoid.

That said, those questions are hard, and maybe arguing about them and answering them actually requires a long time and a lot of consideration and doesn't fit neatly into a hacker news thread.

[dumpsterdiver]

> Copyright violations. Beheading videos. "Pornography" or pseudo-"pornography" involving minors. Direct threats of violence towards individuals or groups. Deepfakes generated without consent. Etc. Etc.

> None of those examples are "abhorrent" as much as "complicated".

Uhh, if you say so. They are your words after all, not mine.

> So is violent revolutionary religious politics the boundary?

I think the parent commenter's point was that you were both pretty much on the same page as far as being fine with illegal content being moderated, but the one thing they absolutely were not okay with is when powerful political entities (read: social networks) censor their political opponents in order to consolidate power for their own party.

[kannanvijayan]

> Uhh, if you say so. They are your words after all, not mine

Was there a particular reason you ignored the elaboration and re-quoted the original comment? And if there is something you want to express about it please do. This is kind of a meaningless retort.

> I think the parent commenter's point was that you were both pretty much on the same page as far as being fine with illegal content

I don't remember a due process being followed for most of those ISIS accounts being banned. I don't remember the social networks restricting their bans to those people that had been convicted of illegal communications.

And yet I supported that move. I understood that the network would not want that sort of crap on its airwaves, and that might see a business interest in not having its platform associated with that movement, and want to eliminate the ability of that movement to use their platforms to further their aims.

As much as one might want to reach for "illegality" is some clearcut dividing line, that simply doesn't apply here. Most of us supported accounts getting banned with no due process, no oversight, or anything - when it was violent revolutionary religious politics that we disagreed with.

[ilyt]

>I don't remember a due process being followed for most of those ISIS accounts being banned. I don't remember the social networks restricting their bans to those people that had been convicted of illegal communications.

> And yet I supported that move. I understood that the network would not want that sort of crap on its airwaves, and that might see a business interest in not having its platform associated with that movement, and want to eliminate the ability of that movement to use their platforms to further their aims.

Again, you're missing the point, blocking proven terrorists is not the same as the politic you don't like.

You're trying to excuse blocking benign stuff by desperately trying to group them with stuff most people would agree is probably borderline illegal and harmful

[dumpsterdiver]

Yes there is a reason I used your original comment, it was an attempt to hold you accountable for your words after you backtracked. The actions you mentioned in your original remark was more along the lines of abhorrent than questionable and I wanted to make that clear.