Comment by intopieces | Hacker News Reader

Comment by intopieces | Hacker News Reader

This is nothing that has not been said before, and does not illuminate anything about "the damage of social media." Yes, lack of real-world speech consequences allows people who lack empathy to amplify their voice. Yes, kids spend a lot of time on the Internet.

But this article lacks anything for us to do about it. The subset of "travelfordifference.com" readers probably has little overlap with the people who post in /b/.

This article lacks focus, lacks a clear audience, and lacks a clear path to action.

As well, there are some misconceptions in this article.

>You do have the right to say what you please and your opinion certainly is valid.

You don't always have the right to say what you please and just because you do say it doesn't make your opinion 'valid'. There are plenty of invalid "opinions."

>But there is a time and place for everything, and upsetting someone through your words is not achieving a thing.

There is not a time and place for everything. For example, there is no time and no place for slander. And upsetting someone validates the speaker's ability to affect another person -- thus, the 'upsetter' is accomplishing their goal.

>If someone is demonizing you, attacking you or upsetting you.. they are not worth your time, your emotions or your words. Your life is better than theirs. Be the bigger person and show social media how it should be done.

Just because someone is attacking you verbally does not mean your life is better than theirs. In fact, if you are severely, adversely affected by online hate-speech, your life is not better than theirs, and you need to change that. "Being the bigger person" does nothing. Social media very, very rarely rewards calm discourse on its own.

> You don't always have the right to say what you please and just because you do say it doesn't make your opinion 'valid'. There are plenty of invalid "opinions."

The First Amendment, at least in the US, protects the right of the people to say what they please. It is a very important right, because it prevents that form of power from being concentrated in a small group, and certain topics never being brought up.

You may perceive many opinions as invalid, but you don't know how people arrived at them - from their perspective, they're perfectly valid. This is true for all humans, as we do not possess perfect information. Effectively all of our opinions are invalid. This is not useful, and we're saying other peoples' opinions are valid not because they're 100% factually correct, but as a sign of respect and understanding that information processing is difficult and that we acknowledge that the opinion is reasonable from their end.

> The First Amendment, at least in the US, protects the right of the people to say what they please.

Rather, it prevents the government from suppressing speech. Jack Dorsey can suppress your speech all he likes.

Which makes it a right. The Bill of Rights is a document describing the rights of the people as well as protecting the people from the government. In the context of the parent's comment, it confirms that people, at least in the US, have the right of free speech.

Neither the parent nor Jack Dorsey can override that right beyond their own back yard, which does not at all equate to suppressing speech. Getting moderated on a forum isn't speech suppression and doesn't in any way violate the First Amendment.

That something appears "true" to the person speaking it has no bearing on the validity of the it.

And no, not every person's opinion about everything deserves respect, and not every person deserves respect. Respect is earned, not given. We respect the opinions of doctors (about medicine) because they have dedicated a significant portion if their waking lives to the pursuit of medicine. We do not respect the opinions of people (about women's rights) who believe the rape of women is justified by the clothes they wear. This is not a matter of a missed memo, not a matter misprocessed information.

We respect people who share our values.

Let's not mistake understanding someone for respect. There is some information that is not difficult to process.

I already addressed that point. It being absolutely true is not the point. Most of your opinions are also not absolutely true. If we could just figure out how to only have true opinions, we could solve a lot of problems. We do not yet have that luxury, most of our opinions are, in one way or another, wrong, and some more than others.

We have a long history of people not treating women well. It is not limited to any particular tribe or group of people. If that's not a matter of missed memo, I don't know what is. It clearly seems that a given tribe needs to be taught this, and even then, something pulls them back. Long have people believed that they simply were born extra ethical and extra moral, and it wasn't their culture and civilization that made them so, do you still believe this?

So much bad history, why do you think these things are obvious?

And how is our track record for caring about women's rights when it's too troublesome? Wars, for instance? What's going on? What are these values that you think we share?

Unless you really think you were born extra ethical or moral, I would recommend to think about how people turn badly, because it is not something you're protected from. If anything, mistreatment of women seems to be a universal human trait, and treating them well is the exception.

> We respect people who share our values.

That would create a very limited set of exposure. I don't know how you can consider your values valid with that view. It's highly unlikely that all your opinions are absolutely true, so why would you base respect on someone else having exactly the same opinions as you? A person should not blindly copy the opinions of another, but develop their own from information available to them. That would be highly unlikely to lead to the same opinions as yours, which is a good thing. If everyone always has the same opinions as everyone else, there's no exploration. This also means sometimes the resulting opinions are bad. But the correct solution to that is criticizing the opinion itself, not the person developing their own opinion, or the right to have opinions in the first place. That leads to people copying opinions, and they're not at all guaranteed to be the ones you like.

>If we could just figure out how to only have true opinions, we could solve a lot of problems.

This is the foundation of law, ethics, and science. The constant pursuit and revision of what is the true opinion. Do they fail? Often. But the framework they provide is vital to a functionimg society.

>I don't know how you can consider your values valid with that view

Not sure what you mean here. My values and "valid" inherently, or they wouldn't be my values.

>But the correct solution to that is criticizing the opinion itself, not the person developing their own opinion.

This is true in many case, but also patently not true in many others. Some opinions -- those derived from a clear lack of empathy or from the holder's refusl to acknowledge facts -- do not deserve criticism. Some matters require no more debate, and engaging in that debate only reduces the opinion-holder's heinous ethical shortcoming to a simple disagreement.

In this case, the person deserves criticism for their actions, and not respect.

>The First Amendment, at least in the US, protects the right of the people to say what they please.

Unless it's under copyright.

>You may perceive many opinions as invalid, but you don't know how people arrived at them - from their perspective, they're perfectly valid.

Of course. But this has no relationship at all with their actual validity.

>a sign of respect and understanding that information processing is difficult and that we acknowledge that the opinion is reasonable from their end.

But it's not about opinion, it's about the effect of those opinions on other people.

I don't really care if some people think the EU is an organisation of Satanic Communists who plan to take over the world, and that Britain has been cheated out of its empire and self-respect by EU membership.

They're perfectly entitled to their opinion, even if I think it's nuts.

I most certainly do care if those people have the political effect of depriving me of my right to travel and work in neighbouring countries. Then it's no longer just about opinions, but about someone imposing a crazy world view on other people and having a real effect on their lives.

The opinions can be dismissed. The political effects can't.

And that's the real problem. Free speech doesn't just mean the freedom to criticise the government - it also means the freedom to try to persuade others of the validity of a point of view, and to convert that persuasion into political power.

Which is a problem, because it allows bad faith actors. Currently as a voter I have more legal redress if I buy a toaster and it stops working than if a politician wilfully and knowingly lies to me during a campaign of persuasion. Similarly, there is very little redress against media outlets that lie or make up content to further a political agenda.

I'd suggest both of those need to change. The action of deliberately and knowingly misleading the public should be not be protected by free speech laws. Politicians and media companies that do it should be held accountable.

The rationale is simple - professional liars benefit no one except themselves. There is no case to be made for allowing wilful, deliberate dishonesty in public discourse.

The assumptions behind "unlimited full free speech" is that 1) speech is just speech and has no consequences, and 2) it is all or nothing, either anyone can say anything they want, anywhere, or there's no free speech.

Another point is that both politics and consumerism is about swaying people to make them do what is profitable for the candidate or the seller, so all in all it's better to have a very malleable population. Strong individualism, a mark of many Western societies, significantly contributes to the general lack of empathy and solidarity; as a consequence, the "losers" of the individualistic competition are just ignored ("they must be stupid, or lazy"), and this makes them all the more prone to being manipulated.

When you are in the business of selling little stories to people, you don't want to face a well-educated community with strong ties.

What determines the validity of an opinion?

Sometimes the validity of an opinion can be refuted by logic (e.g. if it is internally inconsistent), science (e.g. if it can be experimentally refuted) or morality (e.g. if it violates basic human rights).

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