[_zgx0]

The amount of folks here supporting Alex Jones is completely shocking to me.

He built a business out of attacking and re-victimizing parents whose children were murdered. He's scum of the earth.

That business was taken away from him, and folks think that's too much? What the actual fuck.

[Eextra953]

It shocking to me too. I can't understand how people are 'both sides-ing' this or just supporting him under some free speech argument. Free speech has limits and a court found Jones went too far and that cost him his business.

[kypro]

People have been arguing the same bogus free speech point in the UK recently because people have been arrested for saying things that are anti-immigration and offensive online.

People have free speech, but obviously that doesn't mean you are free to say things that could be considered hateful or factually untrue. If you go around tweeting hateful things about the Royal family and the courts find you guilty, don't be surprised if that costs you your freedom. It's pretty simple.

Alex is legally free to saying whatever he wants, but he had the wrong views on Sandy Hook and his wrong views hurt the families affected, therefore he deserves to lose his business.

[throw10920]

> because people have been arrested for saying things that are anti-immigration and offensive online.

What does immigration have to do with this? Nobody has a right to immigrate. Pointing out that there have been a massive influx of immigrants in the UK by any reasonable standard, that the majority of the UK population supports limiting/restricting immigration to at least some extent, that the UK does not have the resources to support the current rate of immigration, that the number of rapes in the UK has quintupled over the past 12 years, and that the rape increase coincides with the increase in immigration are all (1) factually true (2) non-hateful and (3) covered by free speech.

> People have free speech, but obviously that doesn't mean you are free to say things that could be considered hateful or factually untrue

That's literally the definition of "free speech". "Free speech" does not have clauses for "hateful" or "truthiness".

Additionally, any normal person who thinks about the problem for more than a few seconds can easily see that even if free speech did have those clauses, deciding whether things are "true" or "hateful" in general is completely impossible - it's not that hard to understand. It's also certainly not something you'd want the government deciding.

The arguments made by free speech advocates are not "bogus" - what's bogus is ignorant statements of yours that get the definition of "free speech" wrong and ignore basic knowledge about reality.

[leadingthenet]

> People have free speech, but obviously that doesn't mean you are free to say things that could be considered hateful or factually untrue.

So people don't actually have free speech.

[lesuorac]

It's really Alex Jones was alleged to pay people to harass Sandy Hook families at all hours of the day. He then proceeded to lie in court and after it become known refused to continue to participate and had a default judgement entered against him.

If I were to follow you around 24/7 for weeks shouting into a microphone is that not illegal?

[llamaimperative]

Reflexive contrarianism runs amok in these parts. It’s pretty pathetic.

[dnissley]

To be clear I haven't seen a single comment that could be charitably characterized as "supporting Alex Jones". I see a lot of comments that are pointing out that the judgment against him seems unreasonable given the damage he did to these families.

[jotux]

I see a few instance of people defending his actions as "free speech."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42384921#42387916

"View it for what it is: a deliberate attack on free speech. This is essentially legislating from the bench. They can't ban him from speaking but they can make it very VERY expensive to do so, and warn anyone else at the same time."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42384921#42385358

"Maybe the “victims” should go after the actual shooter for a billion dollars then.

Instead we have people crying that free speech is the actual evil crime here."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42384921#42389350

[fzeroracer]

The people pointing out that the judgment is 'unreasonable' are either intentionally lying or extremely ignorant.

The context is that the judge awarded a default judgment because Alex Jones literally refused to participate in the legal system. He committed overt perjury (and was outright caught on this) and proceeded to just stop complying entirely.

If any of us received a court summons and refused to show up or defend ourselves the court isn't going to shrug and say the case goes away. In a system of law you can't just ignore the law and expect the judge to take pity on you.

[Pxtl]

Torts are not just about damage, they're also about deterrence. Jones repeatedly demonstrated in the court battle that no deterrence would work on him.

His entire business is built on this kind of defamation -- how much proceeds of this kind of business should he be allowed to keep?

[thfuran]

About -200% seems fair to me.

[hoten]

It is unreasonable imo. He deserves to see jail time.

[ThunderSizzle]

Free speech means protecting speech of people you disagree with.

So what if he claims Sandy Hook was an FBI psy-op. Don't agree with him? Then just walk the other way. The amount of vitoral against the theory just goes to prove that perhaps the FBI and ATF knew a lot more than they like to admit.

[krapp]

>The amount of vitoral against the theory just goes to prove that perhaps the FBI and ATF knew a lot more than they like to admit.

The vitriol is because the spread of the "theory" led directly to the harassment of Sandy Hook victims by people who believed they were "crisis actors."

Most people possessed of common decency and a moral core would find that objectionable.

[hoten]

Intentionally lying to sell ads at the expense of innocent people being targeted and harassed over years is probably not covered by free speech rights in the US.

And if you want to turn this into an argument about the necessary evils of a society practicing free speech, I'll just say that even if it were "covered", I'm not interested in that "right" existing in that form. Though I'm pretty sure willful lies that result in actual, predictable harm is not protected speech.

Don't even know what your last sentences are about. Are you suggesting a conspiracy of some sort?

[talldayo]

It's Hacker News. I hate to say it, but this is all the website is known for at this point. Bring it up in passing conversation with the in-crowd and you'll get laughed out of the room for using "Orange Site" and fraternizing with drug-addled Elon worshipers and "soloprenuers" that beg for recognition for their dogshit SaaS product. The score has been known for years, the political leaning of Hacker News is basically the same as the "curious individuals" that inform themselves via JRE and random X accounts from Russia.

The people using Hacker News are regularly a stone's throw away from the sort of people that use 4chan. Except Hacker News has usernames and karma so it tends to create cults of personality around people that say what people want to hear.

[LordDragonfang]

The thing is, this (admittedly common) opinion is as facile as the opinions of progressives who act as though all of reddit is /r/TheDonald. Overall, both are actually very left-leaning websites (in reddit's case, almost overwhelmingly so), they just tolerate the existence of pockets of very right-leaning individuals - because of lofty ideals of "free speech". However, even then, you'll usually see legitimate social conservatism get downvoted pretty heavily, and even fiscal conservatism will garner rapid disagree in most cases.

(That said, to a lot of those people, it doesn't matter if the "majority" are left leaning. And for some of those (e.g. trans people), they're even somewhat justified in that stance, since it doesn't make a difference if the harassment they get from being brought to the attention of "orange site" users comes from the majority or the minority)

[WWLink]

Eh? I always figured hackernews was full of silicon valley types who listen to peter thiel podcasts on their way home in their stickshift subaru (or FSD tesla).

[defrost]

There's a few of them, if that's all it was I likely wouldn't be here quite so much.

[archagon]

Consciously or unconsciously, people begin with an unshakable feeling of “my tribe good,” then reverse engineer a justification for whatever issue is being politicized. Even if it involves defending a repugnant conman and slanderer like Jones.

It just goes to show that far too many people have no fundamental values, only political affiliations.

[crossroadsguy]

When the right wing Govt was elected in my country suddenly right wing nutjobs appeared out of the woodwork on country/cities subreddits (seen quite sometimes here on hn as well) overnight as if they were just always there and were just dormant waiting for a time to show up in the right climate. No, they were not immediate new inserts from some IT Cell at all. They were always there.

I do not find anything shocking about Jones support in this post. A great social mistake has been thinking that people supporting nefarious stuff or shady, disgusting, and pathetic people do not know any better - but they do. Thing is - that is exactly what they want!

[ljsprague]

>he built a business out of attacking and re-victimizing parents whose children were murdered

That not what he built his business on. That was one (bad) thing he did.

[lbwtaylor]

That is exactly what he built his business on - attacking people with bald face lies and using the generated outrage to sell snake oil.

[TheFreim]

> He built a business out of attacking and re-victimizing *parents whose children were murdered.* He's scum of the earth.

> attacking *people* with bald face lies and using the generated outrage to sell snake oil.

You made a specific claim, were refuted because that specific claim is clearly false, and now you've made a general claim while presenting it as if it's the same as the specific claim. This is not intellectually honest.

[lbwtaylor]

The poster suggested that Jones actions on Sandy Hook were an outlier. One 'bad' action. They were not. He built his business on Sandy Hook and similar actions, and that's clearly what my original post intended and I stand by it.

I think it's intellectually dishonest to suggest Jones faced consequences because of one bad action. I have stronger words for it honestly but I'm trying to stick to the rules of this forum.

This whole thread only shows me it's time for me to leave HN. You're welcome to it.

[TheFreim]

You claimed: "He built a business out of attacking and re-victimizing parents whose children were murdered."

This is false, as he obviously didn't build his operation solely on his claims about Sandy Hook as you claimed. The other comment pointed this out, so you changed what you were saying without admitting what you said was inaccurate. Now you are bizarrely claiming that you didn't say what you said, even though everyone can read what you wrote. Alex Jones was sued because of what he said about Sandy Hook, he was not sued for these other actions which were not relevant to the case. Whatever you think about Jones, it doesn't do anyone any good to portray the Sandy Hook case as being about other things.

[lbwtaylor]

I meant that he built the business out of attaching sandy hook parents and similar actions. I think that's the obvious reading for anyone who knows anything about Jones.

I sure could have been clearer. But what exactly are you saying? That he didn't build his business this way? Or are you just trying to attack the words I used.

What are you hoping to accomplish by parsing my words technically?

>> Whatever you think about Jones, it doesn't do anyone any good to portray the Sandy Hook case as being about other things.

What do you mean? My whole point is that Sandy Hook is not different from what Jones did every single day, and you don't seem willing to disagree with me. You just seem to want to parse my words.

Why? What exactly is your point here? Why are you arguing this specific turn of phrase? Unless you think that Alex Jones is a voice you want to hear and protect. Why don't you just say that?

[uv-depression]

You're surprised? In any vaguely political thread HN is pretty much just a more well-spoken 4chan. Moderation here is entirely based on tone, not content, which along with its techno-libertarian origins makes it the perfect breeding ground for fascists and pseudo-intellectualism.

[dang]

This is a common claim, but it only ever seems to be made by people with a strong ideological commitment who are mad that the opposing commitment isn't banned on the site. In other words, the complaint is that we don't moderate HN based on ideology. Since to do that would contradict HN's reason for existing (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...), I'm not inclined to start.

The irony is that people with the opposing ideological passion—the ones you refer to as techno-libertarian pseudo-intellectual fascists—make exactly the same complaint that you do, just with the ideological bit flipped. They think that HN is (let me see...) full of uber sensitive, far left ideologues [1], not only socialists but delusional anti-socials [2], full of leftist ideas and anti-capitalism snark [3]. Virtually every leftist post is upvoted [4], anything that can be remotely considered right wing is automatically flagged and/or downvoted [5], and only the most extreme progressive positions can be posted here, because I have destroyed this site! [6]

It's not really ironic, because these perceptions are only opposed to each other on the surface—just one bit is flipped, as I said. The underlying mechanisms have to be the same.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42160087

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42330143

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41846634

[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41851430

[5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41799361

[6] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42076694

[frankish]

I <3 you so much, @dang. Thank you for the reminder to stay curious.

[uv-depression]

This is a very late reply, but I think it's quite revealing that you seem to be implying that having an ideological stance is (a) optional, and (b) value-neutral. Why yes, people who are opposed politically don't think the other is right, and hope for their views to be promoted at the cost of the other's. That's as trite an observation as I can think of. It's like pointing out that every political ideology supports some violence but disavows violence from others; it's the political analysis of a child, or someone who thinks they are above ideology because their ideology is the dominant worldview of their culture. Ideology has substance and verifiable consequences that can be judged.

But I think you've read into what I'm saying too much in order to defend yourself and the terrible job you do moderating this website; my position isn't that those people should be banned for their political views. They should be banned if and when their speech has negative real-world consequences. Speech does have consequences, even if it's polite. But you would rather have liars spreading disinformation and bigots spreading hate than be seen as taking a side, so here we are. That's the charitable interpretation, anyways.

[dang]

I haven't implied that, and in fact am careful never to imply nor assume it. I'm making an empirical observation about the conditions under which this complaint comes up, and how similar they are.

> my position isn't that those people should be banned for their political views. They should be banned if and when their speech has negative real-world consequences.

That sounds fine in principle, but in practice it just shifts the language from 'what is the correct ideology' to 'what speech has negative consequences'. Since you can easily predict the latter from the former—that is, if you know what a person says about the first, it's easy to predict what they will say about the second—I don't see much difference there.

> But you would rather have liars spreading disinformation and bigots spreading hate

Same again here: your (or whoever's) definitions of 'disinformation' and 'hate' are functions of your/their ideological view, so this amounts to the complaint that the mods aren't following your/their ideology. It's just a more aggressive way of saying it.

One can be on board with the critique of naive neutrality which you refer to in your first sentence (and which, btw, is so often repeated that, if we're going to call things trite, we should include that one), without agreeing that a community like this must be run by mods who publicly consign themselves to a single ideological box and moderate based on the definitions it dictates. That may be what committed ideologues would like, but the majority of the community would not. It's also incompatible with the intellectual curiosity that the site is trying to organize around, so we don't have the option anyhow, if we want HN to exist for its intended purpose.

[uv-depression]

But you absolutely are implying that, because you're implying that you're acting without ideological commitment. You're obviously not saying it, but the implication is that I'm ideologically committed (and therefore myopic, foolish, not intellectually curious) and you're either not or able to act as though you're not.

> Same again here: your (or whoever's) definitions of 'disinformation' and 'hate' are functions of your/their ideological view, so this amounts to the complaint that the mods aren't following your/their ideology. It's just a more aggressive way of saying it.

This sounds to me like a slippery slope argument (or perhaps an argument for a strong form of moral relativism): because someone, somewhere might disagree that something is misinformation, it's actually impossible (or maybe just undesirable) to definitively say something is or isn't that. There are certainly gray areas and practical limits (I'd be totally incapable of judging whether any article on chemistry contains disinformation, for example). That's not a reason not to try.

Optimizing the site for "intellectual curiosity", narrowly defined as a _free marketplace of ideas_, is itself a strong ideological commitment. Intellectual curiosity is absolutely good, but restricting misinformation and hate significantly improves the signal to noise ratio of that discussion. I understand the fear that fringe points of view with merit might be drowned out, since historically some things we now broadly regard as true were fringe positions.

But at the same time the quality of discussion here is through the floor when certain topics come up because large volumes of people who know nothing on the subject are simply regurgitating culture war nonsense and abusing the voting system to prevent actual knowledge on the subject from spreading. This site ends up just being another avenue for bad-faith argumentation and outright lies to drown out the truth. This is especially obvious when discussions on some minorities happen: because the people spreading outright lies or repeating culture war talking points are numerous, loud, and _polite_, actual discussion is utterly impossible. The moderation policy serves to provide a shield to bad-faith actors (for example, through "just asking questions"[1]) while silencing those who are actually intellectually curious through inaction.

For a concrete example, some of the most curious and intelligent people I know happen to be transgender. The subject of transgender people is one of the worst topics on this site right now because that group is the scapegoat du jour for the far right. When those people try to argue against commonplace lies and share actual information, they're shut down through the voting system and are outnumbered. They're subject to being called all sorts of horrible, false things... politely and indirectly. As such, they've left. The quality of discussion everywhere goes down, anyone _actually_ curious about the subject only has the loudest but wrong opinions available, and my friends end up feeling isolated and hated. Who benefits from that? Not those of us interested in good discussion. Only the people spreading misinformation for their own political purposes and people who have more emotionally invested in the idea of a free marketplace of ideas than in the truth.

Anyways, I realize your opinion on the matter is unchangeable. I just wish that the site were more honest about its own strong ideological commitments.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_Asking_Questions

[dang]

I feel like we're hitting a point where we'd have to clarify what we mean by some of these phrases or risk talking past each other, and that's too hard to do in this context. (For example we probably mean something different by "ideological commitment".) I'd like to add a few things though—and of course you're also welcome to do that if you want.

One thing is, I personally wouldn't put the HN concept of "optimizing for intellectual curiosity" anywhere near the phrase "free marketplace of ideas". The word "marketplace" has many associations, some of which are inimical to what we want here. Ditto for "free". Neither word belongs to, let's call it, the domain language of HN moderation (and I could even say bad things about "ideas").

For me, "optimizing for intellectual curiosity" has to do with (1) learning from each other (which implies community, and a marketplace is not a community); and above all, (2) avoiding tedious repetition. The problem with political and ideological battle (on HN) is that it falls on the undesirable side of both lines: its endless hammering of talking points is repetitive; and its pitch of high indignation is destructive to openness and curiosity. If this is a 2x2 matrix, that's the bad/bad quadrant—and note that it's the bad/bad quadrant regardless of which ideology generates the content.

Another thing is, this community has lots of transgender members, they're as welcome as anyone, and some who I know of make some of the best contributions to the site. We don't tolerate slurs or abuse, and warn and/or ban accounts that post those. The community also does a good job of flagging them. Some stick around for a while, but people are welcome to (and do) email [e-mail] when they see them, and we always follow up. The topic, of course, is fraught on HN, just as in society at large, and people inevitably have conflicting ideas about what constitutes a slur or an abuse as opposed to, say, a wrong opinion. But I don't believe the site is as bad as you say it is on this front. If it is, then there are a lot of posts going unflagged and unmoderated that I'm unaware of.

Last thing is, what does 'misinformation' mean if not 'falsehood'? But then you're asking mods to decide what's true vs. what's false and impose those decisions—which strikes me as absurd. How on earth would we do that? We don't have a truth meter [1, 2]. We have our views about what's true vs. false like anyone does, but I'm not so hubristic as to imagine that my views are the correct ones and wield power with them. That is the worst quality I can imagine in a moderator, and the thing the community would most reject. (I'm also not so hubristic as to imagine that I don't do that, unintentionally—at most I can say that I've spent 10 years trying to get better at not doing it, and practice has an effect.)

Eager ideologues of every flavour say "you don't have a misinformation meter? no problem - use mine!" But the power to decide and enforce what counts as misinformation is literally the power to decide what's true and thereby control the site. Now I'm repeating what I said at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42418981 and we're in a cycle.

Moderation, at least as I understand it on HN, simply can't work on such principles (deciding contentious questions by decree). It needs principles on a different level that can foster the kind of community and discussion that has a chance of remaining curious, and then maybe the community can do the job of figuring out what's true vs. false together.

That doesn't mean I'm reducing this to relativism and I suspect if we were to look at a list of borderline posts together, we'd end up agreeing about many. Maybe most. I don't want culture war talking points, for example, or just-asking-questions baiting, any more than you do. But I want grounds for saying "we don't want that here" other than "you are wrong according to my ideology"—and indeed, I don't want culture war talking points or just-asking-questions baiting in any direction. It's not as if it's ok for curiosity one way and then not ok if you flip an ideological bit.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38787789

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

[LaMarseillaise]

The top comment on this very thread at the time I write this is clear bad-faith disinformation. Life is a Cabaret, but the Cabaret is not life. The tone here has changed for the worse, especially since the election, and I cannot keep pretending.

[dang]

Do you mean https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42385079? I have zero idea what the technicalities of the bankruptcy judgment are or should be, but what I do know after an embarrassing number of years doing this job is:

(1) there's no such thing as "clear bad-faith" - to decide that would require knowing someone else's inner state. We don't have access to that about each other, and people are far too quick to draw conclusions about it—thousands of times too quick;

(2) usually the person who seems to be in bad faith just has a different working set of information and a very different background than you; they may be wrong of course, but that's not a crime or sin. We're all wrong anyhow.

(3) the only response to "disinformation" that works (or has a hope of working) is to answer false claims with true ones and bad arguments with better arguments.

I can also tell you that HN hasn't much changed since the election. Or if it has, I haven't noticed, or seen data suggesting it. People have often felt over the years like HN has changed since $X, but at most there are fluctuations that revert to the mean. Whatever real trends there are, they're longer-term than that, and determined by fundamentals.

[someothherguyy]

> people have often felt over the years like HN has changed since $X, but at most there are fluctuations that revert to the mean. Whatever the real trends there are, they're longer-term than that, and determined by fundamentals.

I think it is generally agreed upon that the volume of shared misinformation and individuals believing misinformation has been dramatically increasing over the last decade as preferences in media has shifted.

It would be interesting if the population of HN wasn't following this trend.

[dang]

Oh - no doubt HN is not immune from macro trends, and I didn't mean to imply that it was!

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

I just mean that whatever macro trends we're subject to, they're longer-term than discrete events like an election.

[andrewmcwatters]

> Moderation here is entirely based on tone, not content

My least favorite thing about reading HN, by far. Glad someone else said it.

[dang]

I don't want to pick on you personally (so I apologize if it feels that way), but I also don't want to leave this unresponded to when we've had to ask you so many times to stop breaking the site guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40910766).

I think most HN readers are glad that we ask users not to personally attack others (questioning whether they can read, calling them morons and rubes, telling them to grow up, that they should be ashamed, are out of touch with reality, and so on), —or that we ask commenters not to post that women are asking for too much, that European capital rightfully belongs to the United States, and so on.

Is that "moderation based entirely on tone, not content"? I don't think so; I think that distinction is unsupportable. But whether it is or not, it's clear that we can't have people attacking each other like this, and I'm pretty confident that the community agrees.

[andrewmcwatters]

Of course it's based on tone. You repeatedly let users antagonize one other, until someone breaks guidelines, you advocated for a startup that was named "fucking awesome," after the concept that they were taking advantage of labor arbitrage, you seem to ignore the realities of mainstream sentiments when they are controversial in order to make your job as a message board janitor easier, and you pick and choose when to ignore hyperbole.

All a reader has to do is observe your behavior, and it's clear what kind of person you are. You make it obvious by your retelling of your personal judgement of my commentaries here. I didn't realize you were St. Peter, Dan.

So Dan, if you don't want people to think you're an asshole, don't be an asshole. But don't tell me Hacker News janitorial moderation isn't based on tone when the guidelines themselves dictate it.

You're bullshitting every reader here and you're showing every user that you're comfortable opening up your admin tools and regurgitating pinned comments without context to stick it to me, and any other reader who dares question your methodology.

Oh and by the way, thank you for privately downweighting my account and numerous other people's here when I had previously consistently been a top comment in a number of threads. When it was inconvenient for you and a comment had well over a hundred upvotes, it's so nice that you can hide behind moderation tools and just send that comment straight to the bottom of a thread.

Don't lie. I have what, hundreds? Thousands? Of comments here? You thought a single percent? A tenth of a percent? Were distasteful? I've been here for probably 15 years and yeah, you pick on people personally.

It's supportable, but unlike what moderation tools you have, Hacker News' codebase doesn't allow me to pin your comments unless I want them to end up in my general pool. And unlike you, I'm not paid a salary to pour over people's comments online.

Don't do this. You do this bad faith stuff all the time and have for years. Don't lie to me and everyone else by saying sorry and then acting like an asshole the next few sentences. Oh whoops. Sorry, didn't mean to pick on you. Then reading off everything you can.

Really? You think people are that stupid?

[phatfish]

This articulates something I couldn't put my finger on. I think it comes from the internet becoming the main propaganda tool of -- well could be any government -- but for the audience here nation states or actors hostile to the English speaking "west".

The well-spoken troll gets people that are not caught by the meme gifs/jpgs. It requires more work on the propaganda side, but persistence pays off it seems.

Memes alone are not enough to turn most people here, but an account spewing hard-to-disprove nonsense on social media, or someone willing to shill on podcasts tickles the "DYOR" itch.

This feeds back into the comments here and "talking points" are spread.

[dtquad]

>The amount of folks here supporting Alex Jones is completely shocking to me

That shouldn't be a surprise considering how many American libertarian techbros are fans of Alex Jones Lite (Joe Rogan).

[anigbrowl]

About 30% of people are assholes, and birds of a feather flock together.