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Comment by giancarlostoro | Hacker News Reader

Censorship on spam is probably agreed upon by everyone but spammers. Censorship on the opinions of people is dangerous on the other hand. Like I say on HN many times: today it's the opinions you disagree with that get censored, tomorrow it's your voice.

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Isn’t that the crux of the issue? A lot of egregious hate speech — say, what Richard Spencer said in the recently leaked audio — is agreed upon by everyone but racists. But every time someone suggests censoring that, people invoke the same slippery slope fallacy. Today it’s the spam that gets censored, tomorrow it’s your voice!

Because the criteria for deciding what speech gets censored is always subjective.

Sure, we can probably find one statement that most contemporary people would agree is wrong and shouldn't be allowed to be said. Like 99.99% of contemporary people.

But what percentage do we cut it off at? 75%? 30%? And why is it a popular vote to begin with? Is morality or ethics something that is relative to popular ideas or are there some concepts that are just plain right or wrong?

I'm not afraid of people saying stupid stuff. I'm afraid of people with the power to curtail speech. Because that invariably gets used against the public.

And "the freedom to do what is right" is not really freedom. You must have the freedom to do something stupid.

That’s my point. What’s the criteria for deciding what spam is? And yet no one complains when comments like “Wow! I made $X from my couch!” are censored — even though that’s every bit as subjective as Richard Spencer’s comments.

Do you consider it censorship when comments or articles are flagged on HN?

I would say if the mods do it yes, if it’s the hoi polloi then no.

> If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.

-- John Stuart Mill

Point is, Mill lived in an era where dissemination of information was barely at a steam-engine equivalent, whereas now we've got automated opinion-generating rocket systems in orbit ready to barrage millions of info missiles at any online discussion at any point in any language within 300 nanoseconds.

New realities need new quotes.

I started reading through On Liberty recently and I was surprised by how topical it was. This discussion doesn't seem to have changed much over the past 150 years. Mill spends a long time addressing arguments for censorship that I still see used today.

A lot is lost when a book-length discussion is reduced to a single sentence. In his work, there's a very thorough discussion of why this liberty is essential. I don't like how the grandparent used the quote so flippantly. Without the supporting context, it's a baseless statement that encourages low-quality discussion.

One of things Mill did really well is that he thoroughly described his opponents' position before arguing why it was incorrect. You haven't done that, which is why it's unclear what part of his argument is invalidated by improvements in communications.

Here's an excerpt of an argument by Marcuse (by no means the only one to argue against Mill, in fact there are philosophers who question the entire justification for free speech, and I think they have a more interesting point, though they don't directly address Mill):

>Now in recalling John Stuart Mill's passage, I drew attention to the premise hidden in this assumption: free and equal discussion can fulfill the function attributed to it only if it is rational expression and development of independent thinking, free from indoctrination, manipulation, extraneous authority. The notion of pluralism and countervailing powers is no substitute for this requirement. One might in theory construct a state in which a multitude of different pressures, interests, and authorities balance each other out and result in a truly general and rational interest. However, such a construction badly fits a society in which powers are and remain unequal and even increase their unequal weight when they run their own course. It fits even worse when the variety of pressures unifies and coagulates into an overwhelming whole, integrating the particular countervailing powers by virtue of an increasing standard of living and an increasing concentration of power.

(From https://www.marcuse.org/herbert/publications/1960s/1965-repr... published 1965.)

> I don't like how the grandparent used the quote so flippantly. Without the supporting context, it's a baseless statement that encourages low-quality discussion.

The context was someone saying they have no problem with users flagging stories, as long as it's not the mods. I disagree, and I might just as well have said "personally, I don't like it either (when some of the hoi polloi take it on them to decide what the rest should discuss, insted of using the "hide" feature)". Instead I said it with a quote.

That doesn't "encourage" ignoring that context, a non-sequitur slogan like "new realities need new quotes", and equating any verbal or written statement, even lies or auto-generated spam, with persons holding an opinion.

For what it's worth, I had upvoted you. The shallowness of the discussion wasn't something you started, and I'm not sure you really had a responsibility to end it. I just wanted to see us do better as a community.

I don't, because you can still see such comments (it may require an account and flipping a switch). And in fact I browse Hacker News with showdead turned on, and I often start from /active so I can see stories and comments other people don't want me to see. This isn't censorship because Hacker News itself still makes them visible: it's more like spam filtering in that regard, where content is being categorised but not censored.

Spam filters in particular are not censorship because they are ultimately just labelling devices. Because of their accuracy many people often accept and act on those labels automatically, but they don't have to, and actually recently Gmail's filters got terrible and so I have to check my spam folder all the time now.

In some cases spam filters flat-out reject messages and don't even show them to the recipient, not even in a spam folder. I understand the technical reasons for that (full storage and processing of spam is expensive), but, that gets much much closer to the border of censorship, with the only real difference being one of intent.

Depends on the case, but as far as I can tell, most of the time comments are flagged and removed, it's because too many people disagreed with the poster (including the HN moderators), rather than somebody spamming the site, so yeah, a lot of the moderation here is censorship in any way you could define it. You see this over and over again on public forums: a means of controlling spammers who are not actually participating in what the forum was designed for is introduced and is immediately abused by people who want to limit actual participation.

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