Trump Considers Forming Panel to Review Complaints of Online Bias | Hacker News Reader

Trump Considers Forming Panel to Review Complaints of Online Bias

wsj.com

4 pointssharkweek5 comments

Honestly. I’m for this (hello downvotes). There are a lot of platforms that have been censoring right wingers for years. And while they may indeed be “private companies”, they nevertheless function as public spaces with significant public trust, and monopoly power on public discourse in their respective mediums.

Should a platform be coerced into allowing harassment and hate speech just because that happens to be someone’s political stance?

Apple's and oranges. Harassment is a specific legally definable thing that we have legal processes in place to handle. I don't see why platforms can't model their harassment policies off of that, and enforce them impartially, or just have the courts handle it.

Hate speech is not something you can nail down, because it's not a real thing. The working definition of hate speech, as it's actually used is "Anything I don't like". I could very well say that you are being hateful against right wingers (I'm not saying that, but I COULD), and it would be about as sound an argument as any other for hate speech.

So yes, if a platform has a monopoly, then they should be coerced into allowing "hate speech".

EDIT: I should probably make it clear that my preferred solution is to force (yes, force) Twitter and Facebook to make themselves compatible with API's like activitypub or similar. I understand that's a pandora's box, but we seem to be in Pandora's emporium in this situation, and must open some box or other.

If you believe in freedom of speech, you should believe in a company's right to censor. Otherwise you are violating their freedom of speech to not speak.

There is no justification to force someone to make available what someone else uploaded on their servers.

From a practical level, the internet is a new medium, and were constantly transitioning from one state to another, and are far from settling down yet. Therefore, any rule you make will be out of date a few years down the road.

And I say this as someone who doesn't believe “hatespeech” should be censored or punished in any way.

Based on Trump’s various statements to the press and past tweets, I have very little faith that this will be a fair and balanced look at online bias. If this happens, it is almost guaranteed to be a farce that plays up biases against his party and ignores biases against his political enemies.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com