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Comment by jimmywanger | Hacker News Reader

From the Facebook TOS, and YouTube's is much the same, with different, more casual verbiage:

You will not bully, intimidate, or harass any user. You will not post content that: is hate speech, threatening, or pornographic; incites violence; or contains nudity or graphic or gratuitous violence.

That is such a broad swathe that any unpopular opinion can get disqualified. Is me posting a video of how to sharpen a kitchen knife threatening? Or someone advocating that the Civil War should have never happened because of the right of states to withdraw from the Union?

We need the freedom of speech to protect unpopular opinions, not popular ones.

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Or as US Supreme Court Justice Stewart said:

"I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description, and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that."

Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_I_see_it

That was in reference to identifying "hardcore pornography" but seems appropriate in talking about hate speech, threats, bullying, and a variety of other issues.

They need broad rules because whatever rule you come up with, some clown is going to try and get around it. Or just post something obviously against the spirit of the rules then argue about it. Users don't have a stake in Facebook, YouTube etc, but the companies running them do. They'd probably all prefer to just have "don't be a dick" but we live in a world full of pedants and lawyers and professional irritants so by having something a little more concrete it preempts a lot of rather tedious complaints.

If you're a rebel prophet with something exciting to say then no-ones stopping you paying a small amount of money for a domain name and hosting and away you go. If you can't do that then I'd agree there's censorship and there's a problem. Other than that, you should have absolutely no expectation that other people are going to do the heavy lifting for you, whether that's paying for your hosting/bandwidth, or taking the heat when users, advertisers etc complain about your content.

I guess I didn't make myself clear enough.

The guidelines are all very subjective. Pornographic is a gray area, but "bully, intimidate, or harass". Who decides that? The victim?

And the guideline "Don't be a dick" is the exact opposite of what my point is. Unpleasant people, pendants, trolls, irritants, those are the people the free speech are designed to protect.

If you're generally pleasant and say nothing controversial, you don't need any legal protection. A firm belief that people who espouse unpleasant and unpopular opinions are what a democracy needs is what we need to protect, cause those are the people who effect change or inject new ideas into society.

So what exactly is your solution? Are you happy with facebook leaving up nasty cyberbullying, which then results in people killing themselves? What about people posting and sharing plans to blow up schools? Or how about if I posted something on facebook saying that jimmywanger is a pedophile, and your neighbours saw it and then drove you out of your home?

A lot of these things are covered by libel, cyberbullying and hate speech laws, and it is a jury of your peers who decides whether or not it fulfils the critera. It seems to make sense - from both a moral and legal standpoint - for companies to nip this stuff in the bud before it reaches the point of going to court.

My solution is just to let people post stuff that is legal (with existing statues).

"Hate speech", "cyberbullying" are both ill defined terms that can apply to both every type of speech and no type of speech.

It's interesting how quickly you leap to suicide, explosives, and pedophilia as your examples. Those are all absolute worst case scenarios, and all these things are currently illegal.

Nip this in the bud? Is this minority report? Last I checked, you had to do something substantive to get penalties, not "Your thought patterns don't agree with public opinion, therefore private companies should as a public service suppress them."

>My solution is just to let people post stuff that is legal (with existing statues).

That simply doesn't work. Are you familiar with any unmoderated forums? It's fine if you just want anarchy, e.g. 4chan. However if want a place like HN where people can actually discuss reasonably, you have to have some kind of moderation.

Are you aware of the huge amount of moderation that already happens on youtube? A customer of mine got their account put on probation for posting a test video of a firefox session that was mostly static. I'm actually quite glad in a way that they are doing this, as it means they might finally stop all of the "click here to view the full episode/movie" spam that litters youtube today.

>Nip this in the bud? Is this minority report?

I was referring to blocking illegal content before it reaches that point.

If you want a forum where people can post anything, you're welcome to set one up. I'm not sure it will be terribly useful though.

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