HN Theater @HNTheaterMonth

Disagree, there is no absolute freedom of speech, for example you can't yell "fire" in a crowded theater.

Also disagree that such unrestricted free speech is constructive or beneficial. Sacha Baron Cohen explains it best: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymaWq5yZIYM

⬐ filoleg

> You can't yell "fire" in a crowded theater.

I am so tired of seeing this overplayed urban myth. The precedent you mention was set by Schenck v. United States in 1919, but it was partially overturned later in Brandenburg v. Ohio in 1969 [0]. Which is the part that people who bring up this myth every time conveniently forget about.

So no, you can yell "fire" in a crowded theater or whatever else you want, as long as it doesn't meet the legal standard for imminent lawless action (e.g., a riot). And the legal standard for imminent lawless action is much higher than you think it is.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shouting_fire_in_a_crowded_the...

⬐ hypersoar

The other part of the myth people forget is that the metaphorical fire-yellers were socialists distributing anti-draft pamphlets. It's hardly a good thing to cite today on freedom of speech.

⬐ petilon

> as long as it doesn't meet the legal standard for imminent lawless action

So there is no absolute free speech then. Which is the point of bringing up the "fire" example.

If you're a visitor in my house there is no free speech at all. If you say something I don't like I'll legally kick you out. Private companies such as Twitter and Facebook have the same right. Their platform, their rules.

⬐ filoleg

If someone is a visitor in your house, you can kick them out for literally any reason you want or no reason at all.

No idea how this is relevant to your claim that "yelling fire in a crowded theater isn't allowed under free speech". It is legally allowed under free speech, it isn't a crime, despite what a lot of people claim. The theater might kick you out or ban you, but that has nothing to do with free speech.

I am going to let Sacha Baron Cohen, of all people, answer your question [1]:

Voltaire was right when he said "Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities." And social media lets authoritarians push absurdities to millions of people. President Trump using Twitter has spread conspiracy theories more than 1700 times to his 67 million followers.

Freedom of speech is not freedom of reach. Sadly There will always be racists, misogynists, anti-Semites, and child abusers. We should not be giving bigots and pedophiles a free platform to amplify their views and target their victims.

Zuckerberg says people should decide what's credible, not tech companies. When 2/3rds of millennials have not heard of Auschwitz how are they supposed to know what's true? There is such a thing as objective truth. Facts do exist.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymaWq5yZIYM

⬐ mft_

Unless I'm misunderstanding the quote, that's very much not answering my question: it discusses limiting reach (i.e. ability to disseminate one's views widely and easily) and explicitly not free speech itself?

⬐ hey2022

How can you separate speech and reach in this specific case? Twitter could allow all speech but limit reach, ie shadow ban. Would that satisfy your notion of free speech?

⬐ salawat

Communication, as the atomic element of networking, requires both transmission and receipt to be said to have happened.

Speech is transmission.

Reach is landing at a receiver.

Substituting /dev/null in place of a human being does not satisfy speech having occurred. A concordance must be reached between the speaker and at least one other individual.

⬐ petilon

Free speech doesn't have a single meaning. Freedom is relative. There is no right to absolute free speech anywhere. For example, you can't yell "fire" in a crowded theater. On social media owned by private corporations, "fire" isn't the only thing you aren't allowed to yell. Subverting democracy, inciting violence, propaganda from foreign governments pretending to be grassroots movement inside the US, etc., are all banned, and yet I would consider Twitter a free platform, albeit with sensible limits. But you're right, that's not absolute freedom.

⬐ salawat

For the love of God, don't bring up that old turkey.

https://www.popehat.com/2012/09/19/three-generations-of-a-ha...

Fire in a theatre came up in the context of squashing a protestor against the draft, from a judge who thought eugenics may have something going for it.

Just let it die. Please.

It sounds like you have an opinion but would rather sea lion. In the event that you are being genuine, there have been multitudes of instances.

- Post jan 6 insurrection has left Republicans trying to justify their seditious invasion of the U.S. capital as protests protected by speech: https://knightfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/KF_F...

- The "Cancel culture" pejorative has created a double standard where a certain political party cries foul for being censored on private platforms (for violating TOS) and push for government regulation of said platforms to protect their political opinions. They are even trying to redefine private websites as the public square to do it.

- Sacha Baron Cohen also sums it up nicely in his speech: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymaWq5yZIYM

If you really are genuine with your questions and asking for citations, you can google more topics about any of the above.

⬐ nonrandomstring

> It sounds like you have an opinion but would rather sea lion.

I had to look this up. That's a pretty sad accusation off the bat isn't it? One of my opinions I'll share is that I think even HN, supposedly one of the better discussion forums - why I write things here - is also blighted by "toxic internet culture" of assuming the worst in everybody. Also I think the "move fast" design is deliberately not conducive to conversation, so I am wondering if you will see this response.

From a British perspective I think the rioters attempting a coup and then backtracking to calling it "a protest" is laughable. At least one should have the courage of ones convictions. If you're going to try a coup you damn well better know it's going to succeed - as the alternative in every other historical example is getting lined up against the wall. If what you say is true then saying "oops only joking... it was just a fun legitimate protest" makes them cowards. So I simply can't entertain an argument that anyone defending a failed coup as "free speech" is serious.

Mr Cohen has a lot of good things to say, and I think I get what you're talking about after watching the clip you linked, thank you.

> "the age of evidential argument is ending and knowledge is de-legitimised.... by a handful of internet companies that amount to the greatest propaganda machine in history."

Couldn't have put it better myself. Pleased that he cited what is the subject of a chapter in my book Digital Vegan; the role of Facebook in Myanmar - which sadly few people will touch. How SBC actually puts it is "freedom of speech is not freedom of reach" - a nice turn. But then he flounders a little, not coming right out against Zuckerberg's "bullshit" reasoning as a purely driven by greed, he softens it as the "ideological imperialism" of the 'Silicon Six'. Cohen being accused of anti-Semitism isn't something I'd imagine can't happen these days either.

But in the end, SBC's beef seems to be with the unelected power of BigTech, and unfortunately he isn't a great philosophical scholar, by his own introductory remarks. What is to be done? He doesn't seem to know how to frame those who disingenuously deploy good arguments for bad ends... which is what I think the nub of your "lots of people equate freedom of speech with freedom from consequences" line. Zuckerberg couldn't give a fuck, and Cohen is correct in calling him a "bullshitter" in the strictest sense of Harry Frankfurt's definition. But to suggest that FB or any other company could "purge lies and conspiracies from their platform" is naive. There wouldn't be much left, especially of politicians and business people have to say - and when he hits that Cohen turns it into a damn joke to soften it! That's why comedians can say certain things that other's can't... up to a point. And then they risk losing their platform. So, much as I love Sascha Baron-Cohen he drifts into waters out of his depth. That said, I'm 99% with him (not afraid to be out of my depth).

Conspiracy theories once confined to the fringe are going mainstream. It is as if the age of reason -- the era of evidential argument -- is ending. Knowledge is de-legitimized and scientific consensus is dismissed. Democracy which depends on shared truths is in retreat, and autocracy, which depends on shared lies, is on the march. All this hate and violence is being facilitated by a handful of internet companies that amount to the greatest propaganda machine in history.

The above is by Sacha Baron Cohen, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymaWq5yZIYM

More excerpts:

Voltaire was right when he said "Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities." And social media lets authoritarians push absurdities to millions of people. President Trump using Twitter has spread conspiracy theories more than 1700 times to his 67 million followers.

Freedom of speech is not freedom of reach. Sadly There will always be racists, misogynists, anti-Semites, and child abusers. We should not be giving bigots and pedophiles a free platform to amplify their views and target their victims.

Zuckerberg says people should decide what's credible, not tech companies. When 2/3rds of millennials have not heard of Auschwitz how are they supposed to know what's true? There is such a thing as objective truth. Facts do exist.

⬐ randompwd

> When 2/3rds of millennials have not heard of Auschwitz how are they supposed to know what's true? There is such a thing as objective truth. Facts do exist.

Probably better to qualify the statistic when you are using it as a prelude to declaring "Facts do exist"

Maybe making the quote more exact slightly dampens the hyperbole you were aiming for:

first result for the line:

> 2/3rds of millennials have not heard of Auschwitz

gives https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2018/04...

which includes the excerpt of: > Two-thirds of American millennials

> how are they supposed to know what's true

Please do explain the equivalence of not knowing what is true with not knowing what Auschwitz is?

⬐ redisman

> 2/3rds of millennials have not heard of Auschwitz

If this is true - which I very much doubt as a millenial, isn't that a giant failing of the US school system first and foremost?

⬐ selimthegrim

There was a Tablet magazine piece some years ago that claimed Spielberg hadn’t heard of Auschwitz until his 30s

> do we really want a handful of unelected billionaires deciding what is acceptable speech

Historically newspapers, television and radio have decided what is acceptable to be published through their media. There is no reason modern internet-based media should be any different.

On the internet everything can appear equally legitimate. Breitbart looks as legit as the BBC. Sacha Baron Cohen https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymaWq5yZIYM

Excerpts:

Voltaire was right when he said "Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities." And social media lets authoritarians push absurdities to millions of people. President Trump using Twitter has spread conspiracy theories more than 1700 times to his 67 million followers.

Freedom of speech is not freedom of reach. Sadly There will always be racists, misogynists, anti-Semites, and child abusers. We should not be giving bigots and pedophiles a free platform to amplify their views and target their victims.

Zuckerberg says people should decide what's credible, not tech companies. When 2/3rds of millennials have not heard of Auschwitz how are they supposed to know what's true? There is such a thing as objective truth. Facts do exist.

On the internet everything can appear equally legitimate. Breitbart looks as legit as the BBC. Sacha Baron Cohen https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymaWq5yZIYM

Excerpts:

Voltaire was right when he said "Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities." And social media lets authoritarians push absurdities to millions of people. President Trump using Twitter has spread conspiracy theories more than 1700 times to his 67 million followers.

Freedom of speech is not freedom of reach. Sadly There will always be racists, misogynists, anti-Semites, and child abusers. We should not be giving bigots and pedophiles a free platform to amplify their views and target their victims.

Zuckerberg says people should decide what's credible, not tech companies. When 2/3rds of millennials have not heard of Auschwitz how are they supposed to know what's true? There is such a thing as objective truth. Facts do exist.

⬐ gjs278

lol you’re the one spreading misinformation now. 2/3 of millennials have heard of auschwitz. you just made that stat up or are citing a false report with questions that don’t explicitly ask that. you should be banned for fake news under your own system.

⬐ anadem

Thank you, I'd missed that and will share it

We won't have that problem here. There will still be New York Times, Wall Street Journal, etc. More weight should be given to these legit sources than to social media. On the internet everything can appear equally legitimate. Breitbart looks as legit as the BBC. That's a problem. More on that by Sacha Baron Cohen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymaWq5yZIYM

⬐ Darmody

Yeah, thank God you'll have a couple big companies owned by the same people to tell you what is the real truth.

China has different media as well. I'd like to see one of them saying the CCP should leave or something against them.

⬐ Apocryphon

Who do you think is the true arbiter of real truth?

⬐ knowaveragejoe

Why are you so convinced of a grand conspiracy to suppress the "truth" being peddled by obvious grift artists?

⬐ Apocryphon

I'm not convinced of anything. I just asked a simple question to another poster.

⬐ AnimalMuppet

That's sometimes called "Just Asking Questions", and is sometimes a passive-aggressive way of arguing with someone. You don't state a position, you just ask (leading) questions, without ever stating a position that can be refuted. When someone calls you on it, you say that you're "just asking questions".

It can be a real dishonest, manipulative technique. You're running close enough to that to set off peoples' defense mechanisms. So, even if you're doing it in complete innocence, if you want to not have people upset with the way you're carrying out the conversation, change your style.

⬐ scoutt

OTOH, asking question is at the base of the Socratic Method.

⬐ AnimalMuppet

Sure. But when I'm trying to have a conversation, it's a total pain to have the other side trying to go Socratic Method on me. State your position, and I'll state mine, and then we'll talk. Trying to talk with someone who won't state their own position, but wants to make you answer questions about yours, is... not much of a "dialog", frankly.

⬐ Apocryphon

Yes, yes, I'm well aware that's a common tactic. However, it is completely fair given the conversational context to ask the poster for clarification for their actual beliefs in what determines "real truth", given that they have stated multiple situations that they find disagreeable for ascertaining "real truth." To shut down valid discussion and shout down fair questioners by throwing around accusations of logical fallacies is not conducive to debate and discussion. It creates a chilling effect that poisons the conversational well.

⬐ AnimalMuppet

By the time you asked your question, I thought it was rather clear that darmoddy didn't think there was a real arbiter of truth. That tipped the scales somewhat toward me thinking you were manipulative rather than honest. Even so, I was careful not to actually accuse you of dishonest manipulation.

⬐ Darmody

A better question, is there really an arbiter?

The only thing we have is freedom of speech to challenge ideas, debate and find what is true by ourselves, if such truth exists.

⬐ flowerlad

Some say if you disagree with someone else's speech you should not just ban them, you should defeat them by arguing against their ideas. But when state-sponsored actors spread fake news and divisive ads at a massive scale on social media you can’t simply defeat them by arguing against their ideas. How do you counter it? By buying opposing ads on Facebook? Even if you have pockets as deep as Putin’s, what a waste of money that would be! This is a new world and the old methods are no longer applicable. Communities and social media companies will need to engage in some censorship.

⬐ alickz

Long term I think better education and promoting critical thinking is the only way that doesn't erode democracy.

Short term I have no idea. Silencing people you deem are running misinformation campaigns is probably the quickest, and easiest. Or try weather it out while doing the long term plan of education.

Unfortunately it seems the more democratic a state is the more it's open to misinformation by rival, less democratic states.

On the internet everything can appear equally legitimate. Breitbart looks as legit as the BBC. Sacha Baron Cohen https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymaWq5yZIYM

Excerpts:

Voltaire was right when he said "Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities." And social media lets authoritarians push absurdities to millions of people. President Trump using Twitter has spread conspiracy theories more than 1700 times to his 67 million followers.

Freedom of speech is not freedom of reach. Sadly There will always be racists, misogynists, anti-Semites, and child abusers. We should not be giving bigots and pedophiles a free platform to amplify their views and target their victims.

Zuckerberg says people should decide what's credible, not tech companies. When 2/3rds of millennials have not heard of Auschwitz how are they supposed to know what's true? There is such a thing as objective truth. Facts do exist.

⬐ buisi

What views are these pedophiles espousing? How common is this? I see many people who would be considered bigots, but I have yet to encounter truly pedophilic views on any mainstream media.

What I see, rather are experts being accused of being pedophiles, for pushing controversial ideas about how to prevent pedophiles from committing crimes, and being censored accordingly.

I think this came up after Sacha Baron Cohen gave his famous speech at the ADL[1]. What makes social media political campaign so much more dangerous then traditional campaigns is that the investigative journalists don’t have the same access to the campaign claims as the targets, and hence cannot scrutinize, contextualize and compare them.

You are not alone in not seeing any evidence. Professional journalists with years of experience have the same problem.

But until we either learn how to overcome this limitation with new investigative techniques, or—better yet—regulate political campaigns with national laws, I suggest we remember the fact that: “Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”[2]

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymaWq5yZIYM

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_ignorance#Absenc...

Mark is lazy and value signalling.

--There are a number of areas where I believe governments establishing clearer rules would be helpful, including around elections, harmful content, privacy, and data portability.

Mark could do a lot on his own without waiting for government.

Mark could: Ban harmful content, he is a US citizen and could start with keeping a tighter lid on content that doesn't conform with non extremist western values. And then integrate other value systems shortly over time.

Mark could: get out of all election advertising and push Facebook to be a place where everyone doesn't talk about that stuff and ban targeted political adds and just do other stuff.

Mark could: Easily respect peoples privacy. I hardened my facebook profile a while back to remove most public content and the level of granularity to the privacy controls seemed like it was intentionally made difficult to do what I was doing. Dark patterns.

Mark could show leadership. he really could, he doesn't.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymaWq5yZIYM

I can convince you in the same degree you are willing to understand any evidence I give, a similar challenge arises with anti-vaxxers, a group that few years ago was just a laughing stock but now thanks to the online fear propaganda through social media now has created some focus of kids without vaccines creating disease risks believed to be long gone, such risks of social network are measureable, but there are things that are practically harder to measure like if the "pedophile hillary pizza place" changed what people think about that political candidate; in general the way people are influenciated by propaganda is not immediate but take years to slowly aggregate with other falsehoods or uncorrelated facts in order to disrupt society.

Of course I see the problem of trying to separate truth/false stuff and you can get all philosophical about it but at the end of the day just trying to remove the blatant lies like "Hillary is an alien" and "Vaccines cause autism" would give a better outcome than doing nothing at all that is what Facebook does right now about it.

This guy can explain it better than I do: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymaWq5yZIYM

⬐ thu2111

I think anti-vaxxers and people who reject modern medicine in general predate Facebook. You know, Steve Jobs managed to get himself killed by trying to cure his cancer using homeopathic/spirit medicine and I don't think he was brainwashed by random people on his Facebook news feed. His fatal attraction to 'alternative medicine' can be traced back to his hippie roots travelling through India:

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/apple/8841347/Steve-J...

The MMR autism scare originates in the early 1990s so it predates widespread usage of the web, let alone social networks. Vaccines are an especially difficult case that are structurally guaranteed to produce something like the modern anti-vaxx movement, no help from Facebook needed. It's a classic tragedy of the commons. The logic goes like this:

1. Vaccines are complex and new, and involve injecting my kids with some kind of modified viruses. I heard from other parents that there might sometimes be side effects.

2. Medicines frequently have side effects so I can believe that. Even if it's very rare, side effects are bad. I don't want to take the risk of harming my kids. Keeping my kids safe is my number 1 priority as a parent.

3. But I could opt out. I'm allowed to, and I learned about herd immunity. If I quietly avoid vaccinating my kids I eliminate 100% of the risk because other parents are taking it for me.

4. Why would I not opt out? Even if I think the risk of taking a vaccine is only 0.1% that's still more than zero, and my child's welfare is the most important thing in my universe. If I gambled and lost I would never forgive myself. Opting out is the responsible thing to do.

In other words being anti-vaxx only looks stupid from a society-wide level. From the perspective of a parent who doesn't care about wider social trends but only their own kids, opting out appears to make sense for as long as they believe herd immunity exists, and it doesn't matter how often you tell people there's no real risks: nobody sane believes experts are always right and it's hard for someone to know what the risk "really" is, they can only go on what they themselves have heard from various sources of differing reliability.

The fix for tragic commons is usually a law and that'll be the fix here too. Facebook is really just irrelevant. Trying to suppress anti-vaxx speech will just make the problem worse because it looks like a coverup. Censorship is the last resort of people who lost an argument after all.

He gets into the relevant details in his speech at below timestamp [1]:

> "Just imagine what Goebbels [2] could have done with Facebook"

I think the bottom line is he is good at social engineering, and he recognizes the signs of manipulation at scale. Beyond that, he is smart enough to consume the literature.

Note: Video is his award speech from ADL. But has sensitive wording and is NSFW. I found it to be pretty well put together - maybe reaching a bit in parts.

[1] - https://youtu.be/ymaWq5yZIYM?t=247

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Goebbels

From the Anti-Defamation League:

> Sacha Baron Cohen is the well-deserved recipient of ADL’s International Leadership Award, which goes to exceptional individuals who combine professional success with a profound personal commitment to community involvement and to crossing borders and barriers with a message of diversity and equal opportunity.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymaWq5yZIYM

⬐ larnmar

This seems like a second degree argument from authority.

“I hate this guy because some guy told me to, and I trust that guy because someone else I trust told me to.”

⬐ LegitShady

Argument from authority from someone else. This isn't a logical argument.

Having just watched this it seems like TikTok is working to solve what is a real problem for our society.

https://youtu.be/ymaWq5yZIYM

https://youtu.be/ymaWq5yZIYM

⬐ dang

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21604394

This is a thought-provoking speech.

Do yourself a favor and watch it in its entirety -- before commenting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymaWq5yZIYM

Among the many thorny issues and questions raised by Cohen:

* The business model of social media companies is powered by engagement, which is greatest for content that arouses the basest instincts and feelings of human beings, including fear and hatred. Social media companies earn more with the basest content.

* Social media companies are ideal propaganda machines, enabling anyone willing to appeal to the worst in human nature to reach billions of people with a click.

* Do social media companies bear responsibility for the negative impact their products have on society, in the same way that, say, car companies bear responsibility for faulty engines or airplane manufacturers bear responsibility for faulty plane designs?

* Are social media companies publishers, like broadcast TV networks, magazines, and newspapers? Should social media companies be held to decency standards, like all publishers?

I'm barely scratching the surface.

Do yourself a favor and watch the whole thing!

⬐ dang

Please don't post duplicate comments to HN! It lowers signal-noise ratio and makes it hard to merge threads. Now that the threads are merged, we have to go find the other copies and kill them, and if they have replies, move the replies to the surviving copy. That takes REPL work and is a pain.

Here's what to do instead: when you notice that a discussion has forked and your comment is languishing in the losing branch, email [email protected] and get us to merge them. Then your comment will get moved to the winning branch, and you've benefited the whole community with an un-split discussion.

⬐ cs702

dang: Will do from now on.

Funnily enough, right before you posted this comment I had responded to you, explaining my decision to post twice, here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21609044

Please feel free to delete my parent comment :-)

This is a thought-provoking speech.

Do yourself a favor and watch it in its entirety -- before commenting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymaWq5yZIYM

Among the many thorny issues and questions raised by Cohen:

* The business model of social media companies is powered by engagement, which is greatest for content that arouses the basest instincts and feelings of human beings, including fear and hatred. Social media companies earn more with the basest content.

* Social media companies are ideal propaganda machines, enabling anyone willing to appeal to the worst in human nature to reach billions of people with a click.

* Do social media companies bear responsibility for the negative impact their products have on society, in the same way that, say, car companies bear responsibility for faulty engines or airplane manufacturers bear responsibility for faulty plane designs?

* Are social media companies publishers, like broadcast TV networks, magazines, and newspapers? Should social media companies be held to decency standards, like all publishers?

I'm barely scratching the surface.

Do yourself a favor and watch the whole thing!

⬐ account73466

I watched it entirely. He is arguing for censorship (because terrorism, pedophiles and racism), nothing new here. Attacking Facebook of course helps to gain attention of people who are happy to be separated from freedom.

⬐ daed

Maybe I need to rewatch it, but what I got from it was that he's not arguing against the right to free speech, he's arguing against allowing the right to free speech to impinge on other rights - specifically in his words, the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

⬐ Sammi

In that case any anti propaganda regulation is censorship.

We can't just reduce things down to being either censorship or free speech. Real life is messier than that.

⬐ slg

>he's arguing against allowing the right to free speech to impinge on other rights

This is what so many people miss in this debate. We already outlaw a wide variety of speech that infringes on the rights of others. You can't threaten violence against me because that infringes on my rights. You can't slander me because it infringes on my rights. You can't reproduce my copyrighted speech because it infringes on my rights. You can't use my image to advertise your product because it infringes on my rights.

The debate isn't free speech versus no free speech. We already decided against universal free speech. The debate is now where do we draw the line between one person's rights and another person's rights.

⬐ iudqnolq

Assuming you refer to US law your right to not be threatened with violence is extremely limited. Furthermore, when deciding if speech is protected US courts generally do not balance one person's rights against another's. They look at whether the speech falls into a set of well defined categories (which the Supreme Court has refused to expand on many occasions recently).

Unfortunately a lot of the debate around free speech online relies on flawed assumptions about current US law. I'm not sure what restrictions should be in place, but I think incorrectly understanding the current legal standards won't help us figure out the answer.

For example, the trite phrase "Shout fire in a crowded theater" was coined in a Supreme Court decision written by Justice Oliver Wendall Holms during WW1 to argue that a communist activist who wrote pamflets urging people to hide if they were drafted violated the law and should be imprisoned. Thankfully the Supreme Court subsequently realized that criticing the government in wartime and urging people not to cooperate with the military should not be illegal. The phrase is completely outdated nowadays.

Two of the excluded categories I find most frequently misapplied in this sort of debate are "true threats" and "fighting words". In general, they don't apply to most things you might expect them to.

> A statement is only a "true threat" if a reasonable person would interpret the words, in their context, as an expression of actual intent to do harm. In addition, the speaker must either intend that the words be taken as a statement of intent to do harm, or at least must be reckless about whether or not they would be interpreted that way (that's still a bit up in the air, legally).

https://www.popehat.com/2016/11/16/true-threats-v-protected-...

Similarly, the doctrine of fighting words almost never applies in real life

> In 1942 the Supreme Court held that the government could prohibit "fighting words" — "those which by their very utterance inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace." The Supreme Court has been retreating from that pronouncement ever since. If the "fighting words" doctrine survives — that's in serious doubt — it's limited to face-to-face insults likely to provoke a reasonable person to violent retaliation. The Supreme Court has rejected every opportunity to use the doctrine to support restrictions on speech. The "which by their very utterance inflict injury" language the Supreme Court dropped in passing finds no support whatsoever in modern law — the only remaining focus is on whether the speech will provoke immediate face-to-face violence.

https://www.popehat.com/2015/05/19/how-to-spot-and-critique-...

(I'm citing Ken White because I find his writing amusing and easy to read. If you don't like his presentation googling keywords will trivially lead you to more academically oriented sources that say essentially the same thing)

⬐ remarkEon

Of course the problem, though, is that certain folks have imagined a right “not to be offended” into existence out of thin air. Or imagined that certain speech is “literally violence”.

⬐ slg

In almost any debate there are going to be people that take one side to an necessary extreme. But at least those people who claim to have a right not to be offended are engaging in discussion. The people who demand we adhere to absolute free speech are both by definition unwilling to compromise and are coming to the conversation under false pretenses that we currently have absolute free speech in the first place.

Although I do want push back against your "literally violence" point since we handle that differently on an individual versus group basis currently. For example, if we start with the idea that slander of an individual infringes on the rights of someone, why is slandering an entire protected class of people okay? Cohen could sue me if I called him miserly (to use one of the examples of hate from his speech), but it is fine to say all Jews are miserly including Cohen? That doesn't make much logical sense to me.

⬐ remarkEon

Your point is specious. The people who claim a right not to be offended are engaging in “discussion” only to redefine the limits of what’s allowed to be discussed. The limits become arbitrary, and grounded in nothing except whatever the current moral panic is. The free speech “absolutist”, such as they actually exist, are of course bounded by the actual law.

I don’t know what your example about Cohen and Jews is attempting to show. Neither example is “violence”.

⬐ mkane848

>The people who claim a right not to be offended are engaging in “discussion” only to redefine the limits of what’s allowed to be discussed.

I've gotta say, this sounds real similar to the "very fine people on both sides" type logic that tries to equate antifa to white supremacists.

⬐ leereeves

Anyone who uses violence as a political tool is dangerous. Why try to distinguish them?

⬐ remarkEon

I don’t understand your point. How is antifa or white supremacists at all related to this?

⬐ slg

>Your point is specious. The people who claim a right not to be offended are engaging in “discussion” only to redefine the limits of what’s allowed to be discussed. The limits become arbitrary, and grounded in nothing except whatever the current moral panic is. The free speech “absolutist”, such as they actually exist, are of course bounded by the actual law.

Well, yeah, this is a debate about free speech so of course one side wants to redefine what is allowed to be discussed. The difference is one side says "these are the things we don't want to be acceptable anymore" the other says "any change is unacceptable". Which side do you think is more likely to compromise? And free speech absolutists definitely exist, there are plenty in the comment sections here defending Facebook and their practice of allowing nearly anything to be posted.

>I don’t know what your example about Cohen and Jews is attempting to show. Neither example is “violence”.

I was assuming your "literally violence" comment was in relation to hate speech since that is the only time I have seen that type of language used. I was pointing out that banning hate speech can basically be viewed as simply an extension of our existing laws banning speech like defamation.

⬐ iudqnolq

Banning hate speech may well be a good idea, but it'd be much more complicated than our restrictions on defamation.

An accusation of defamation can be countered by showing the statement is true. And, even still, we significantly weaken our laws against defamation when the person being defamed is a public figure, especially a politician, because the people who wrote US law have been extremely concerned about restrictions on political speech.

Hate speech is not defined in US law, and defining and banning it would not in any way be "simple".

⬐ slg

It is pretty sad if we believe it is a good idea, but don't even try because it isn't "simple".

⬐ iudqnolq

It'd also be pretty sad if we apply a simplistic solution to a complex problem and make everything worse.

I wasn't answering the question of if we should try, I was narrowly responding to a single claim that laws restricting hate speech would be easy to write because it would simply be a matter of applying existing laws slightly differently. That isn't the case. Irregardless of what you think of the merits, nothing analogous to a ban on hate speech is currently on the books in the US

⬐ cblum

That’s exactly what I got from it. What he’s proposing is censorship. Have everything posted anywhere be vetted by someone.

I also think that saying “Google shows you all these neonazi sites” (probably not an accurate quote, but he said something of that sort) demonstrates ignorance of what Google is supposed to be.

⬐ thih9

> what Google is supposed to be

And what Google is supposed to be?

They stopped being a dictionary-like search engine some time ago.

These days they seem to show personalized web page recommendations, loosely based on the search terms.

⬐ neogodless

Do you think that anyone should be able to pay network TVs to display any political message (including lies) that they want?

Should accumulated wealth be the equivalent of having the loudest megaphone?

I think there's a line there between free users of social media vs. paid advertisements. Still, I'm not sure social media is public space rather than an establishment, so the idea of how you apply freedom of speech has to be carefully weighed.

⬐ hughpeters

"Speech is not reach" - he's clearly not supporting censoring posts. He is advocating for Facebook to restrict the type of messages that can be amplified with their insanely effective programatic advertising tools (have you ever used lookalike audiences!? it's amazing.. and a little scary). Posts are speech ads are not.

⬐ hypewatch

This is the subtle point that people often miss. Ironically, conflating ads with free speech damages poor people’s free speech. Zuck is simply playing the monopolist in the internet age.

⬐ ajg360

Thank you for providing a summary of this, and suggesting that the whole video should be watched before commenting. I attempted to produce a similar summary when posting the video, but I wasn't able to create one as succinct and eloquent as this one.

⬐ yters

Why is this unique to social media? This is the media establishment as a whole. E.g. news capitalizes on constant doom and gloom b/c that's been getting them the eyeballs for the longest. Notice how all the blockbusters are full of violence, horror and sex.

Oh, this applies to social media too. Super surprised. Thanks Sacha.

⬐ slg

In his speech he specifically says it isn't different than other media establishments. He goes on to point out that other media establishments can't get away with what happens on social media. He certainly speaks from experience on that as someone who has routinely fought against the standards and practices of the MPAA and various television networks. So why does social media get away without those same restrictions?

⬐ yters

Well, I'd say the established media gets away with much more than on social media, but established media is more uniform in their output so it is easier to squash dissenting voices. Also, the movie industry regularly outputs much more extreme content than has appeared on any social media.

In my opinion the real complaint is the old guard against the up and coming media, and they feel threatened and are looking for a way to bring the new media into conformity with their worldview monopoly.

⬐ manysmallbears

In the video, Sacha mentions the New Zealand mass murder streamed on Facebook[1] and the promotion of explicit holocaust denial and antisemitic propaganda via social media.

These are not examples I see occur in established media without reprisal.

1. https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/03/19/new-zealand...

⬐ yters

These occur in social media without reprisal?

And it is partly a matter of worldview. I consider abortion to be murder, and it is glamorized across both the news media and in the fictional media. That's why I say the problem is more that the old guard has achieved better uniformity with its output.

⬐ foobarian

I grew up in a tightly controlled communist place but I always thought their censorship/propaganda bureaus would have salivated over the power of the social media platforms for that sort of thing.

⬐ tyri_kai_psomi

> The business model of social media companies is powered by engagement

This is the business model of many companies and industries, including advertising and marketing, legacy media companies, and gaming.

⬐ Braggadocious

I've done a lot of reading on this, from neil postman, to nicholas carr, sherry turkle, jaron lanier, tim wu, to plato's allegory of the cave. We've been worried about these issues for eternity. As a consumer of information, how do you tell what is real and what isnt? As a publisher, what role do you have to tell people what is real and what isnt? As a content provider, how do you separate the wheat from the chaff?

As a software developer myself I'm always looking to discuss this topic with layman and other software developers since we're always looking to develop a new architecture/a new paradigm for conveying better and more concise data to clients. Even without the business model, how would you create a scalable model for all of humanity, regardless of culture or creed, that displays the information people need to do what they need to do? And what does that even mean, "information people need to do what they need to do?" The toughest part of programming is designing scalable architecture. It's so complicated and difficult that we've all but given up on trying to figure this shit out and now we're just building AI hoping something computationally faster and less human can possibly do it better.

⬐ throwaway122378

These are all valid points but as humans we’ve never encountered anything like this so we shouldn’t think about it using old world examples.

Also think to yourself why this is front and center? Whereas cigarettes literally kill millions a year and they are perfectly legal. Why? Because politicians cant control their agendas with open social media platforms.

Corporates should not be responsible for regulating their content, unless they are publishers. Social media platforms should be open with the onus on society to teach truth and government to prevent threatening behavior.

Publishers should then be directly held accountable for anything that’s posted on their sites. Fake news, racism, slander, etc.

⬐ chachachoney

>> Also think to yourself why this is front and center? Whereas cigarettes literally kill millions a year and they are perfectly legal. Why? Because politicians cant control their agendas with open social media platforms.

The current crop of populist politicians are benefiting far more from social media platforms than they are from cigarettes.

⬐ AlexandrB

> Also think to yourself why this is front and center? Whereas cigarettes literally kill millions a year and they are perfectly legal.

This is a flimsy comparison. The sale and use of cigarettes is tightly regulated, with sale banned to minors and use banned in most public and commercial spaces. If there was anywhere close to this level of restriction on social media usage you might have a point.

P.S. Facebook also contributed to the killing of thousands in Myanmar. So there’s that.

⬐ ignoramous

A UI-free YouTube link: https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/ymaWq5yZIYM

⬐ dublinben

Another alternate link without the usual Youtube junk: https://www.invidio.us/watch?v=ymaWq5yZIYM

⬐ rnotaro

I don't know what is that website but it took 35 seconds to have a DOM on a 50Mbps connection.

I might prefer Youtube-nocookie.

⬐ throwaway74342

> Do yourself a favor and watch the whole thing!

I did. I guess you have to be fan. I agreed there's an issue. I didn't agree with any of his suggested solutions.

> * The business model of social media companies is powered by engagement,

How would you change it? All media is powered by engagement. Look at the covers of most magazines at the checkout counter. They'll are covered in sensational titles.

> * Do social media companies bear responsibility for the negative impact their products have on society, in the same way that, say, car companies bear responsibility for faulty engines or airplane manufacturers bear responsibility for faulty plane designs?

That analogy breaks pretty quick it seems to me. If 15% of Ford drivers started running over children is that Ford's fault? I'd say no. So who's fault is it when my dad posts climate change is a lie posts on Facebook? It's my dad's fault.

I'm as worried as everyone else about how to deal with this but I'm having a hard time finding a cure that's not worse than symptoms. It's hard for me not to imagine too many false positives in targeting fake news. It would be interesting to make a quick site and have people judge what they'd take down. I suspect it would show in issue pretty quick. I'm also not sure how you couldn't get around it just by hedging. "Many scientists say X is false". Who decides what's "many"? It doesn't say "all". It doesn't say "most" or "a majority".

Let's take an example (i'm not taking a side here, only pointing out what I perceive as difficult).

Mr. Cohen mentioned getting some white middle America guy to profess his racism against muslims. Another POV might look at what Muslim's profess to want and think "No, if that's what they want then they are not welcome". Examples

> In South Asia, high percentages in all the countries surveyed support making sharia the official law, including nearly universal support among Muslims in Afghanistan (99%). More than eight-in-ten Muslims in Pakistan (84%) and Bangladesh (82%) also hold this view. The percentage of Muslims who say they favor making Islamic law the official law in their country is nearly as high across the Southeast Asian countries surveyed (86% in Malaysia, 77% in Thailand and 72% in Indonesia)

You can go through sharia law and find that you likely wouldn't agree with it.

I'm not trying to single out Islam or sharia here. Older Christian beliefs are just as bad. The difference is, at least at the moment, few Christians are actually calling for things like stoning your wife for various reason where as

> at least half of Muslims who favor making sharia the law of the land also favor stoning unfaithful spouses

Note, the point above is not to pick a side. I have no idea if those facts are correct. The point is Mr. Cohen seemed to be saying bring up topic like that should be banned because it's racist against Muslims. It's arguable there's more to it. It should be discussable but of someone says "The majority of muslims want to stone adulterous women and force them to hide their faces and bodies therefore I don't want them here" who decides if that's a racist statement or a prudent one given certain data?

https://www.pewforum.org/2013/04/30/the-worlds-muslims-relig...

I have muslim friends and they're great and seem mostly tolerant but I get an ear full from my non-Muslim Malaysian friends about all the ways the law in Malaysia favors Muslims over non-Muslims. The point being there's an arguably valid POV to be worried about the influence of a lot of people coming into your neighborhood with those beliefs.

⬐ dwild

> How would you change it? All media is powered by engagement. Look at the covers of most magazines at the checkout counter. They'll are covered in sensational titles.

Sure they are, but a magazine is liable for what he does, both from a social stand point, but also a legal one.

We all have a similar power as theses magazines through social media, but Facebook promote the worst kinds because they are the most sensational ones. If something wrong come outs of its, they just push the responsibility to the one that made the post/ads. A magazine can't do that, because they still chose to publish it nonetheless.

> If 15% of Ford drivers started running over children is that Ford's fault?

I'm pretty sure that would certainly trigger some kinds of major investigation which would certainly affect Ford itself. There's no way there wouldn't be any kind of regulation added on Ford cars in that case.

> The difference is, at least at the moment, few Christians are actually calling for things like stoning your wife for various reason where as

Why do you think that happens? Is it because we hated Christians for theses older beliefs or because we hated theses older beliefs? It's pretty hard to make someone change his whole belief at once, I'm pretty sure it's actually impossible. What you can do though, is to change the issues that come from that belief and for that, you need to accept him to be able to interact with him in a civil manners.

> The majority of muslims want to stone adulterous women and force them to hide their faces and bodies therefore I don't want them here

The issue is with the end of that sentence. them is the muslims or the majority? The thing is, most people is saying the former, which is the racist part of it. Condemn the wrong behavior, that's fine, but don't put everyone in the same bucket.

I find it funny that you believe that Ford shouldn't be liable for belief of others, but you certainly believe that if it's a Muslim.

⬐ enumjorge

Agreed. It’s disappointing to see multiple comments here with ad hominem attacks on Cohen instead of discussing what he said.

Here is the video link hosted on the "greatest propaganda machine in history": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymaWq5yZIYM

⬐ jedberg

Thank you, that was excellent.

⬐ gfodor

I mean, it's a nice speech but it's not surfacing any new thinking or ideas.

SBC's argument is self-contradictory. On the one hand, he paints tech companies as greedy, untrustworthy, and arguably evil. At the same time, he feels that these companies should be trusted to regulate speech to a degree beyond what they already are doing. (In his example, through regulatory force telling them to do so.)

In general, he wants the end (no "bad" speech) but doesn't provide a clear picture of the means to get there. This is common.

The argument against companies regulating more speech is that people who are not Nazis will be caught in the crossfire, and that will lead to unintended consequences. In his speech, SBC admits as much, citing Twitter's claim that algorithmic regulation of speech would result in de-platforming politicians. SBC claims that this may not be a bad thing. This illustrates the problem: SBC like many others are perfectly fine with people being de-platformed not just for true hate speech, but for speech they disagree with, because it is algorithmically similar to hate speech. This is the crux of the issue, and it's at least good for someone to admit it: typically proponents of centralized speech regulation pretend like the issue of false positives doesn't exist. Such false positives will result in law-abiding citizens being de-platformed, and that is unacceptable to many.

To whatever degree that strategy is taken, you can bet your money on these companies losing their power to decentralized platforms. If it's no longer possible to post on social media without a reasonable risk that your words will get nuked because of being mis-flagged (and your reputation unjustly soiled) -- people will move elsewhere. The irony will be that the net effect will be way worse than today: completely unmoderated, unregulated speech with global reach. (this is probably inevitable for a variety of reasons, but this current dynamic probably accelerates it.)

edit: appreciate the downvotes, feel free to check back here in 10 years when facebook + twitter are no longer serious platforms because they're policed by over-zealous, government-mandated moderators, and anyone posting anything interesting is on a decentralized platform or some new centralized platform which has yet to be put under public scrutiny.

⬐ wyldfire

> In general, he wants the end (no "bad" speech) but doesn't provide a clear picture of the means to get there. This is common.

The MPAA example is a perfect and very clear example. Lots of publishers have gone through the same thing: regulate yourself or be regulated by the people.

⬐ gfodor

As long the Internet is not subject to government packet filtering based upon content (ie, the US doesn't become China), there's no way to prevent the eventual outcome that someone can say bad things and it reach millions of people. If that person breaks the law, the legal system can hold them accountable. But if they are not breaking the law, it seems to me that in the limit such speech cannot somehow be stopped from being spread. It's not a new lesson. It's hundreds of years old, all that is different now is the speed of dissemination and scale of reach. The current centralized platforms are transitional technology. There's some kind of Nash equilibrium where they can exist in a regime where a certain level of legal speech is stifled, but as soon as that threshold is breached and a sufficient sub-network of people conclude their speech needs to go around any centralized provider, the incentives are there to do the work to make it possible -- and internet infrastructure which already exists would arguably be the hardest problem they'd need to solve.

⬐ CharlesColeman

> But if they are not breaking the law, it seems to me that in the limit such speech cannot somehow be stopped from being spread.

It can't be stopped, but it can be severely limited. See: 8chan and Stormfront.

⬐ gfodor

I agree that the centralization of internet infrastructure (like Cloudflare, who was involved to the sites you mention) is a corollary to my claim that government packet filtering as a potential regime which could result in limiting global speech.

⬐ wyldfire

> As long the Internet is not subject to government packet filtering based upon content (ie, the US doesn't become China), there's no way to prevent the eventual outcome that someone can say bad things and it reach millions of people.

Here's the cool thing about trade group regulation like MPAA: we have much less to worry about with respect to slippery slopes. If there's someone who's too small to be a member, then yes: they do get to distribute their content. This means that people can still host individually horrible pages and blogs that few care about. But managing legal liability / responsibility for all those horrible blogs would be a real challenge for wordpress or github, e.g. Writing legislation to thread those kinds of holes but still be upheld in courts might also be difficult. But that's the threat.

If the lion's share of deceptive "news" and bogus claims are spread via Youtube/Twitter/FB, just think of how valuable it would be for those three to come together and have a trade group like the MPAA that would set standards for them to audit content.

⬐ oska

I agree with pretty much all of your comment. The only thing I don't agree with is this:

> The irony will be that the net effect will be way worse than today: completely unmoderated, unregulated speech with global reach.

I certainly don't see unregulated speech on decentralised platforms with global reach as a bad thing. Indeed, I see it as the goal. And as to moderation (which can be a good thing), that can be applied by a third party of the user's choosing, without requiring regulation or policing i.e. everyone gets to say whatever they like and you can look at it raw or you can choose what subset you see determined by a moderator of your (not the government's, nor the hosting platform's) choice.

⬐ gfodor

I actually agree with you -- my point was more about things being worse than today because, much like today, the future we are headed into will be fallen into unintentionally if we don't recognize now that we should be designing for what we want it to look like and come to a common understanding of what ethics that system should enforce.

For example, it seems likely these decentralized networks will have their designs (such as moderation) iterated upon in response to points of crisis, as opposed to being methodically designed around a collective set of ethics that serve as a foundational bedrock for decision-making. To do so will require "adult decisions" which will have distinct tradeoffs. Without that, the loudest or most powerful voices will end up driving the ultimate long term structure, and we will be left almost certainly with a suboptimal outcome.

You can see this happening today with Mastodon: there's a huge amount of contention around what is the proper ethics with regards to developing software that would allow connectivity agnostic to content, vs stipulating that clients could not be used by certain groups (despite the network itself being inherently decentralized.)

The fact that this kind of question wasn't answered from the beginning before the first line of code was written, but is being answered in response to a blatantly predictable 'crisis' in the form of the arrival of a node like Gab full of Nazis, shows that many participants building these networks have actually failed to come to a meaningful consensus about how they think things ought to work and what the optimum social system is to balance these competing concerns of decentralization and harm minimization. It's trivial to design a decentralized system that works as long as nobody comes along who has counter incentives to the system designers.

It seems like we need to have a wider conversation, along with education, about what the various end states of this can be, recognize that the future will not necessarily represent the present, and then design incentives and legal structures to guide towards the ones we want to actually see happen.

Currently, we are being almost entirely reactionary and have an incredible lack of imagination (and in turn, optimism.)

⬐ Jare

> he feels that these companies should be trusted to regulate speech to a degree beyond what they already are doing

My extended interpretation: he feels that, if we are going to tolerate them, we should at least require them to dampen the worst of the ill effects they have on society. If, in doing so, they lose presence and that leads them to wither and die, too bad^W^Wthat's ok.

⬐ VBprogrammer

I've had an account on HN for more than 10 years. I'm sure we used to have the convention that you should not down vote comments just because you disagree with them. I don't see it in the FAQs anymore but I sorely wish we could go back to those days.

⬐ wglb

This is not the case. See dang's note https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16131314

The first link was posted by PG in 2008.

⬐ wordsworst

Characterizing the state limiting the actions a corporation may take, by regulation, as the state “trusting” the corporation is absurd.

Acting like we are talking about nebulously “bad” speech when the primary subject is 1) denial of the factual event of the Holocaust and 2) incitement towards a future Holocaust is deeply insensitive to the present and growing fear of that exact thing.

Pretending that any white supremacist or anti-semitic propaganda which comes from a politician must simply be “algorithmically similar to hate speech”, and could not conceivably be hate speech per se, is the pinnacle of politically motivated reasoning.

And somehow we put all of that together to arrive at the dramatic conclusion that... the status quo is fine with me, and nothing should change. It’s a nice speech, mind you.

I can’t possibly replace HN with another platform— where else am I going to find such passionately incoherent arguments from the radical middlebrow?

⬐ gfodor

Algorithmic regulation of speech necessarily requires arguments around global effects, counterfactuals, and long term consequences. Focusing on a specific, extreme example to inductively derive a plan around making platform-wide, global scale, centralized enforcement of speech is something I expect of a child, not an adult. Anyone who has worked on machine learning understands this: if you are going to ignore false positives, it's trivial to make an algorithm with 100% accuracy. The challenge becomes what confusion matrix is acceptable. It's fundamentally impossible to avoid all Type I and Type II errors for anything but the most basic underlying function: I don't think anyone here suspects a system for labelling unacceptable speech is even close to such a problem.

In our justice system, we highly prefer to not send the innocent to jail. A similar level of tolerance should be articulated here. It is not being done, and the issue of false positives is largely glossed over by stirring up emotions around extreme examples.

This is similar to seeing people getting angry over when a suspected guilty person walks free in an individual case, winning due to proper legal reasons like insufficient evidence to prove guilt. We accept that outcome, not because we want the guilty to be free, but because the system we have designed has made tradeoffs where that outcome can happen in favor of minimizing the liklihood of the innocent from being imprisoned.

People should be forced to articulate what degree of non-hate speech they are willing to see silenced in favor of increasing the silencing of hate speech, and those who are happy with the status quo or who are interested in reduced regulation of speech should articulate the degree of acceptable hate speech that is let to continue so non-hate speech will not be inadvertently silenced.

> and could not conceivably be hate speech per se, is the pinnacle of politically motivated reasoning.

Nowhere did I state that political speech could not conceivably be hate speech. The inverse proposition, that political speech by politicians that isn't hate speech could be mis-labeled, was my claim. This isn't even a claim, it's self evident if we're talking about having a system that is labeling all instances of online speech as being either hate speech or not. Type I and Type II errors are unavoidable. Arguing the inverse shows you did not understand my logic.

My claim is that people who shrug their shoulders at the impact of false positives (like SBC) either underestimate the magnitude of them or are revealing fundamental beliefs about what world they think is acceptable to live in. (Namely, that these platforms should be willing to silence more people today than they are doing already, even if they are innocent, in the name of preventing others who are bad actors.) I'm sure there have been millions of people who have strongly argued in favor of a justice system where you must prove your innocence. A similar tack is being taken when you have people who wouldn't mind seeing people de-platformed who actually were not spreading hate, if it meant less dissemination of actual hate speech.

I don't blame celebrities for not understanding the nature of Type I and Type II errors, and the nature of unintended consequences, but I sure as heck expect more from commenters here.

And anyway, my point wasn't about what I think ought to be, what but I think will happen inevitably. Due to the Internet, all of these arguments are moot. Unless the government starts packet filtering, there will ultimately be no way to prevent non-illegal speech from spreading rapidly across the globe. I'd rather people focus on what we want the world to look like under a system where any voice can be heard by anyone, and how we can optimize that scenario, instead of focusing on the present-day system where a few centralized actors happen to have these artificial hammers they can use to clamp down the spread of speech. Leveraging those hammers for good or evil will not result in a good, long-term, sustainable outcome, since they are going to eventually evaporate and we will be back exactly where we started, if not in a worse scenario due to solving for the wrong problem.

⬐ basch

And not just law abiding speech being deplatformed, but what will AI do with new speech it has never seen before? Will it understand its context, its references, its sarcasm, its wink, its intention? It's another way to trap us into only having conversations that have already been pre-approved by the past.

⬐ franzmafka

I hope he does Borat and Ali g.

⬐ bmsd_0923

Ironic coming from a guy whose entire career is built on racist, classist, and homophobic caricatures.

⬐ mcguire

Duplicate?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21606642

⬐ xaedes

Not sure if he is serious (sounds a lot like ministry of truth and stuff) or if it is just his best performance so far. I think it is the latter and he is trolling his audience yet again. He is doing it in the same way he described his previous performances. Just geniuos.

⬐ dang

Comments moved to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21604394, which was posted first.

From the video: https://youtu.be/ymaWq5yZIYM?t=723

"This is ideological imperialism. Six unelected individuals in silicon valley imposing their vision on the rest of the world, unaccountable to any government..."

"Now here's an idea, instead of letting the silicon six decide the fate of the world, let our elected representatives voted for by the people of every democracy of the world have at least some say..."

Democracy is a political system, not a system of rational inquiry. It can not establish facts, outside of voting statistics. Dressing up censorship with the pretenses of democracy is nothing more than appealing to the tyranny of the masses. Democracy as we know it requires a free and open forum for discussion.

The trend towards 'fact checking' disappoints me. Individuals must be capable of processing and consuming information without authoritarian hand-holding. To pessimistically dismiss this possibility is to refute the premises of democracy. It baffles me how proponents of censorship feel that they can have it both ways here.

Furthermore, the underlying philosophy of fact-checking dismisses the fallible nature of man. Information is constantly emerging. The horizon is contentious by definition. What would fact checkers have said to Copernicus? That a scientific consensus has already been formed?

The popular view that we have somehow escaped these human limitations is nothing more than special pleading: "This time is different. This is the age of reason and science. Dogma is dead."

This time is not different. Progress will continue to unfold and regressive ideologies will continue to limit us. On the historical scale we are becoming more tolerant. One has to wonder if the pessimistic view which highlights hatred is accurate.

Is it a meaningful assertion to say that you are intolerant of intolerance? Should we applaud this as noble? Perhaps a more rational inquiry would be to ask who would benefit from the proposed censorship and fact-checking regime.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_pleading