Comment by adamiscool8 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by adamiscool8 | Hacker News Reader

>DHS will also train analysts on tracking social media and how to distinguish a threat from the exercise of free speech. DHS officials say the goal is to better monitor and respond to story lines percolating on social media that could incite violence.

Where have I heard this before...

>China’s constitution affords its citizens freedom of speech and press, but the opacity of Chinese media regulations allows authorities to crack down by claiming that they endanger the country. [0]

Seems like a good model for the West to follow...

>China has around two million people policing public opinion online, according to a state media report that sheds light on the country’s secretive internet surveillance operations. Dubbed “public opinion analysts,” they work for the Chinese Communist Party’s propaganda department, major Chinese news websites and commercial corporations

[0] https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/media-censorship-china

[1] https://www.cnn.com/2013/10/07/world/asia/china-internet-mon...

Yep. Regardless of which party has more of the "reigns of government", this is not a good path to go down. Modern McCarthyism.

The extent to which this lends itself to abuse largely hinges on how precisely/narrowly and neutrally we define 'extremism'. We have to do better than the bipartisan counter-terrorism legislation of the 2000s, for example.

Based on a cursory google search, domestic extremism results in ~40 deaths per year.[0]

With that in mind, I'd like to pose a related question; would you be cool if the government monitored our speech to help end the scourge of death by lawn mower? Probably not, because it's not a serious threat, right? And yet, you're 20x more likely to be killed by a lawn mower than to be killed by a domestic extremist.

This isn't a matter of precision, it's a matter of scope. And given that these people are, collectively, 95% less deadly than the fearsome lawnmower, I'd say the appropriate scope is zero.

[0]https://www.adl.org/media/12480/download [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning_strike#Epidemiology

That seems like a fair point. No doubt the news cycle distorts the importance of these things. If the capitol hill security were capable of repelling LARPers we probably wouldn’t be having this debate (though no doubt some equally silly debate would have ensued).

Department of Healthy Speech? I can see how in just 10 years media will ban people practicing misleading and unhealthy speech and there will be an AI bot looking for malicious sarcasm.

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