Hacker News Reader

Comment by pjc50 | Hacker News Reader

> You can simply ignore people you don't like, or you deem "intolerant", etc.

Simply ignore the internet-radicalised mass shooters! Ignore the people raising funds for murderers. Ignore the people gathering molotovs to protest, and the others encouraging each other to run them over with cars. I'm sure none of that stuff will ever happen to you.

View on HN

If you change yourself and the internet because of these mass shooters, what did you achieve?

People protest for different reasons and I don't like all of them.

Homicide is actually something very rare in humans apart from formal war. A tiny subset is perhaps radicalized by internet content, but I would guess there are actually underlying issues for everyone.

Your reaction seems to indicate panic, not rational thought.

As if any of those things are actually scary. I'm more scared of not becoming north Korea.

As an LGBTQ immigrant a lot of those things are quite scary personally.

All of those things are incredibly rare occurrences, and there is still a greater probability that you will be the victim of one of them than that the country becomes North Korea.

That seems wrong. No matter how I slice it, risk of being North Korea (specifically) seems to clock in at somewhere between 0.1% and 2%, appreciably more than incredibly rare occurrences.

Is this the risk of, say, a randomly chosen person happening to be North Korean or the risk of the USA turning into North Korea? If the latter, I'd love to see how you end up at that number.

> there is still a greater probability that you will be the victim of one of them than that the country becomes North Korea.

I don't agree with this.

To be honestly, I would consider around 1/3rd of the world wide population to be currently living under authoritarian regimes of varying degrees of bad.

So ironic you would say that. Sounds like you’re ‘denying’ the possibility of a totalitarian genocide.

At the risk of being presumptuous, they're likely not scary to people who don't belong to the groups these events target.

Those things you worry about are already illegal. Direct threats of violence (through speech) are already illegal. Funding raising for terrorism is already illegal, including fundraising through speech.

Facebook is not the legislature. You can make Lessig-style Code Is Law arguments, but the fact remains they are not defining the bounds of legality, they are defining the bounds of acceptable on their platform.

Yeah, everyone already knows that. Facebook can do what they want. But they can't claim they support free speech at the same time they censor their platform.

If they came out and said "Facebook does not support free speech on it's platform", then at least they'd be hoenst.

> Those things you worry about are already illegal.

This is where free speech absolutists lose me. They say that all speech should be protected and as soon as they find an exception that is just labeled "not speech". Why then can't we use a definition of "not speech" that includes Blood Libel?

Exactly. This is not a binary choice between free speech and no free speech. It is a debate over where to place the line. We have plenty of speech that already falls on the illegal side of the line such as threats or libel. Some people want to move the line so a few more things are on the illegal side. Free speech absolutists aren't making a fair argument when they respond to that good faith request with "any change means the end of free speech".

The line is much less arbitrary when you make it “speech that clearly violates criminal law” versus “speech that I disagree with”.

When the govt starts talking about “speech to foments discord” that’s a hell of a slippery slope.

But "violates criminal law" is a statement about the population's beliefs. We pick what is illegal. It isn't some fundamental thing. In Germany, for example, holocaust denial is literally illegal.

Right, but the criminal law falls outside of purely speech. That's the line drawn at least in the US - you can say whatever you want, but if you start inciting crime, that's a problem.

In Germany, the line is drawn much further back. It doesn't matter if what you say incites crime, the speech in and of itself is illegal.

This fundraiser appears to be going just fine: https://www.insider.com/fundraising-efforts-kyle-rittenhouse...

We have to ignore it now because of this new rule. How are you going to respond to something you can't see?

I don't know if you remember the 90s, but a lot of people wanted to ban Marilyn Manson because school shooters.

Food for thought.

"A lot of people" want to ban their political opponents today because of violence from extremists.

Fomenting violence will always be a bad look for a leader. That is on them.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com