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Comment by srean | Hacker News Reader

Exactly. This makes fake news, propaganda etc a denial of service attack enabled by freedom of speech. The freedom comes at a cost.

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This is one of the most scary insinuations I've read in a while.

Careful, friend. This road does not lead where you think it leads...

Not entirely sure what you mean. Just in case you think so, I am not arguing for curbs on free speech. Its just another unhappy fact of life that freedom of speech by its very nature opens itself up to DDOS. The protectors of free speech have a much harder task on their hands than those who want to exploit it.

Pointing out that freedom comes at a cost doesn't necessarily mean they want freedom to be reduced. The principle is that the benefits almost always outweigh the costs.

I would not say that it's freedom of speech that makes it a DoS attack possibility. We've had freedom of speech for a while without having disinformation going rampant, because the distribution costs of bullshit were still about as large as those of valid facts, so even if creating the bullshit was cheaper than creating a rebuttal based on facts, the total cost of creation plus distribution was roughly equal.

It's the modern (social) media environment and its inherent ways of allocating attention that creates the extreme asymmetry in distribution costs, where it's now cheaper than ever to distribute attention-grabbing bullshit, but still pretty expensive to distribute comparatively-boring facts.

> We've had freedom of speech for a while without having disinformation going rampant

I'm confident that if you look at archived US publications going back to before the revolution you'll find rampant "misinformation" the whole time.

I'm confident that speculation—no matter how well-intentioned—is a form of misinformation.

In case it wasn't clear that wasn't the rhetorical "you" as in "one," but rather a suggestion that parent personally ought to spend some time learning about 17th, 18th, and 19th century publications by actually reading them and seeing how fast and loose they played with the truth to achieve desired political and economic goals.

https://xkcd.com/1357/

Then your employer sees the shitshow, fears the resonance and things become more intimate than just cancelling the show. Saying “oh, it’s only true between you and the govt” effectively revokes the claimed right in a society. As a result, only those can speak freely who agree with a vocal majoriry. But that just seems like an obvious default, not a progressive achievement. Or is that wrong?

It seems that people mistakenly cry 'censorship!' when most of the time cancel culture is really plain moderation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moderation

> most of the time cancel culture is really plain moderation

Most moderation ends with people losing their jobs? Really?

That would make vigilante justice, lynch mobs, all the way up to genocide examples of extreme "moderation". How do you differentiate moderation that kills someone from moderation that silences someone, kicks them out of their community, and costs them their jobs? They differ only in degree.

It's pretty easy actually, noone gets murdered or maimed.

A free society necessarily must permit some degree of what could be considered vigilantism - even if the vigilantism is intended to restrict someone or something else's freedom in some way. I'd call this the "meta-paradox of tolerance".

The difference in degree you mention is the boundary between legally (and sometimes morally) acceptable and unacceptable forms of vigilantism.

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