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Comment by jordigh | Hacker News Reader

I hate the idea that just because it's fuzzy to define what constitutes unwanted behaviour online that we must allow all behaviour. That we'll be censors destroying free speech if we ban trolls.

That's just not how society works. All of our laws are fuzzy and open to interpretation. Everything is uncertain. But just because we can't robotically and unambiguously define all undesirable behaviour doesn't meant that we have to allow all of it. We don't have to let everyone do whatever they want in the comments section of every website online. We should do with online undesirables the same thing with do with any other kind of undesirable: shun them and remove them from polite society.

Automatic moderation won't be perfect, but neither will human moderation. I, for one, would be super happy if the bottom half of the internet were readable again.

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I'm not against moderation at all. But I feel really weird about it when it comes to politics.

I was a moderator on a default subreddit for a year or two. I saw mods censor even relatively polite and thought out comments that had the "wrong" political message. In some cases nuking entire threads because they didn't like the ideas being discussed. This article gives solid examples of this tool filtering comments that happen to discuss Islam or terrorism. Likely the person who trained it had some kind of political bias that this tool is reinforcing.

On the other side of the coin, the vast majority of comments that should be removed aren't targeted by this tool at all. E.g. inane joke comments by people who were adding nothing to the conversation. These aren't "toxic" or harmful, but they take over and crowd out actual discussion.

I guess Chinese government shares the same idea.

Joking aside, this is why social science is inherently intractable. The only way to mitigate is to educate citizens, not censorship or regulations. But education is not only hard, also highly profitable...

The whole point of his post is that ALL governments are founded on this idea. You would not have a need for government in the first place if it wasn't for undesirable people doing undesirable things. In the United States, we founded our government on the principle that governments shouldn't get involved with the concept of free speech. This doesn't mean all speech is free. We put certain limits on when free speech takes effect, and this is actually a perfect example of how the law must take imprecise definitions into consideration. [Insert the usual, "free speech isn't really what you think it is" that I'm sure the internet has seen millions of times over].

The poster's point was that commercial platforms must address the same issue of undesirables. People realized that allowing the government to prohibit certain forms of speech has the negative externality that governments also gain the power to regulate all speech. On the other hand, corporations can never feasibly have that much power. They can only limit speech on their own platform. There's always another place to speak freely if you wish.

This is why I find the "free speech" argument for not regulating internet comments intractable. It assumes that since we don't want governments regulating all speech, we don't want corporations regulating speech on their platform. But that simply doesn't make sense for idealogical reasons, which I believe was the top-level poster's point.

> On the other hand, corporations can never feasibly have that much power. They can only limit speech on their own platform.

Facebook has more users than any government in the world.

Moderation is fine. We only run into a problem when one company can influence the conversation to such an extent that their moderation choices determine what information people are exposed to.

> I hate the idea that just because it's fuzzy to define what constitutes unwanted behaviour online that we must allow all behaviour. That we'll be censors destroying free speech if we ban trolls.

I think the correct idea is somewhat different. That we should be very careful in classifying speech as "troll" and extend the maximum effort in not using "unwanted behavior" as an easy substitution for suppressing dissenting opinion. There should be boundaries, and they should be wide enough to allow proper discussion - including challenging dominating opinions and expressing controversial and upsetting views.

> Automatic moderation won't be perfect, but neither will human moderation.

The concern is not that it will be imperfect, it's a given. The concern is that it would be less perfect than human one, while being perceived of being more perfect, due to the aura of "objectivity" that algorithms have. If a moderator unfairly targets you, you could complain about this moderator's biases, you could quote your interaction, you could appeal to other moderators or wider audience, you have plenty of options human interaction allows. You would not always get a just outcome, but there's some chance. If you are declared toxic by Google bot, what your options are? Argue with a bot?

I think your post makes an interesting point, but it is telling that you use the word "behaviour" and not "speech." In US law (and I assume many other countries) there is a strong distinction made between speech and conduct. It is not a perfect distinction, and there are cases where the two become inextricably intertwined (threats, fraud, and child pornography to name a few). But the two are handled very differently, and no, for the most part, laws cannot regulate speech (at least not in the US).

Though some cases of online speech fall into illegal areas like harassment or threats, most "trolling" is just run of the mill speech. However nasty or mindless, it is for the most part protected speech.

Now of course Google and Facebook are not the government and are not bound by the first amendment, but you drew a comparison with laws. I think this is a poor choice of analogy as in this case, were google's program a law, it would be unequivocally unconstitutional.

But IRL trolling isn't banned, why should it be on the internet?

When I used to wait tables, I kicked out plenty of people for being too drunk or for refusing to shut up their screaming toddlers throwing food everywhere. You're going to tell me what I can and can't do?

You can do whatever you want at your business but in principle it shouldn't be against the law.

While you are not wrong from an idealistic perspective, it's not such a clear cut issue. Pretty much all multi-billion dollar businesses with large captive audiences are influenced and backed by entrenched interests who have no qualms about directing and filtering the narrative according to their interests. In fact I would assert that the majority of the corporate censorship is done in the service of powerful and moneyed interests rather than any concern for morals or the enjoyment of their userbase.

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