Comment by devtul | Hacker News Reader

Comment by devtul | Hacker News Reader

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I don't want a private owned platform that as far as today plays a huge role in being a place for the public discourse to regulate speech.

Of course, and it pains me to have to state the obvious for fear of strawmaning, saved the applicable boundaries like distribution of child porn, terrorist groups recruiting pages and so on.

Take Twitter as an example, does an abhorrent job on that, they have no standard other than liked/disliked people.

- They have no transparency, people you follow will get banned and you won't be notified. - People will get banned for tweeting exactly what "liked" people tweeted. - They made the utterly stupid decision of changing the interpretation of their Verified mark from "This is the real person" which is perfect, to "we kind of support whatever this verified person says" which makes no freaking sense. Can you imagine a Bell PR guy saying at a press conference "We are sorry for what one of our landlines customers said on the phone, we turned their line off"?

It is transparent to me that any effort in making platforms like Facebook, Twitter and so on to take the role of speech regulators isn't coming from regular people, it comes to the detriment of the common folk like me and you.

> I don't want a private owned platform that as far as today plays a huge role in being a place for the public discourse to regulate speech.

They aren't anymore influential than news broadcasters for television were two generations ago. And yet, we managed to create satisfactory regulations for broadcast networks that did nothing to impede free speech.

I think we have a choice: regulate them such that a bare minimum of due diligence is required to post political ads; or let the problem persist until someone else "solves" the problem for us. Enemies of the USA are using Facebook as a weapon to undermine our country. There's no longer a doubt in my mind that, left unchecked, a persistent, well-orchestrated propaganda campaign (through Facebook) have Americans embracing a truly authoritarian regime. At which point, we won't need to worry about free speech anymore.

Maybe its selection bias, but I know a whole lot people who were radicalized by FB.

> I don't want a private owned platform that as far as today plays a huge role in being a place for the public discourse to regulate speech.

You also have to remember that part of speech is the fact that I won't be using a platform that deliberately enabled dis/mis-information.

There's also a clear case to make against allowing explicitly false things being run as ads.

If something is provably false I have no problem with them blocking it. There are not free speech arguments to be made here. There's no benefit to allowing it.

I downvoted you because you are basically saying that if we don't agree with you, we're not regular people or common folk.

> I downvoted you

I initially frowned upon your comment, interpreting it as self-involved, ego-stroking, grandstanding. Upon further reflection, this is a forum, and one that that aims specifically for intellectual discourse. If we are not simply to degenerate into some kind of karma farm, i think opening the conversation in this manner is a good idea.

No, the comment was about the source of the driving force of the effort. Even if there are regular people who share the same sentiment, the fact is that the effort is being coopted by those special interests. Have you heard of the term "astroturf"?

Exactly, thank you. It is clear some regular people approve, support, and demand that too. But I think the bulk of the effort comes from big companies and ONGs, pressure groups.

This is at least true for my country, to put it brutally short, European influences are guiding legislative efforts regarding Fake News and media control.

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