Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by nonethewiser 29 days ago
>Just to be sure to point out the obvious here, I think the main police effort should be on catching the sources of such material.

Uhhh how about both? It is vital the material be taken down as well.

2 comments

Sure, but let's prioritize catching actual criminals, right? Somehow US started completely ignoring the actual criminals and demanding platforms to play police and not try to punish the actual sources of lawbreaking.
I think they should catch the criminals as well, like I already clearly stated. They just aren’t mutually exclusive.
They are, however, mutually overlapping. If the creators are in prison then they're not distributing any content, nor causing any more to be created which subsequently gets distributed. Which means that 99% of effort should be focused on stopping the creators and censorship is something that you should only do when it isn't a trade off against anything important.

In particular, it means that we don't need prior restraint or intermediary liability. If someone is posting something so bad that it's a crime then it will come out at the poster's trial and their deterrent to posting it is the criminal penalties, not YouTube's account strike random number generator. If something isn't that bad then it doesn't need to be censored whatsoever.

Notice also that the premise that we can actually censor the things you're using as your example is contrary to evidence. What are you going to do about a server in another jurisdiction? Do we need a censorship apparatus which is only effective for suppressing dissenting mass market content while being useless for the thing used as the example to justify its existence?

Enforcement budget is limited. If you have $1, would you rather spend it to fight crime, or to chase whatever gets distributed online?