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Comment by mullen | Hacker News Reader

> FWIW, the American government also requests removals from social media sites.

No, they don't. Any American Government official requesting a removal of anything from social media sites would probably lose their job. That's saying a lot because American Government officials rarely ever lose their jobs.

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https://www.theguardian.com/media/2010/dec/01/wikileaks-webs...

Amazon was pressured to stop hosting Wikileaks.

> Any American Government official requesting a removal of anything from social media sites would probably lose their job

You missed FOSTA/SESTA then? That forced the removal of anything that even looks vaguely like sex work from social media.

Crickets... no answer.

Everybody answering this with examples of Congresspeople is clearly missing that elected officials can't lose their jobs. You have to vote them out of office. It's why politicians can get away with saying and doing way more outrageous things than any ordinary employee, and arguably can just flat-out break the law in many cases if the rest of the government refuses to enforce laws against their own party members, claiming all attempts at enforcement action to be politically motivated from the other side.

An actual civil servant enjoys no such impunity from normal rules of conduct.

I thought that there was American government pressure to remove Al Qaeda/ISIS propaganda from social media sites. If not, then I hope the american gov takes a stronger stance against terrorism.

You mean like when AOC asked Google and Apple to ban Parler and they complied?

I'm sure AOC's demand was critical in their decision to ban such a vibrant, positive application.

Ignoratio Elenchi: refuting an opponent while actually disproving something not asserted.

Your opponent was elaborating on the original claim that "If any American Government official requesting a removal of anything from social media sites would probably lose their job", then "AOC should also lose her job when she requested removal of Parler"

Your counter argument, "I'm sure AOC's demand was critical in their decision to ban such a vibrant, positive application" is an unfair redirection of what your opponent was asserting.

AOC doesn't have a job to be fired from, she has a position that she was elected to.

And a public plea for a company to take a certain course of action is different than a direct request. The latter carries much more "or else" subtext. An upset Congressperson doesn't carry the same potential for immediate disaster as having the DOJ on your back.

Then why is Pelosi still employed? https://sputniknews.com/world/202002081078259986-facebook-tw...

Twitter declined this time, but I have a hard time believing the Democrats had no hand in twitter blocking the Biden laptop story or removing Trump from the platform

You don’t think the US can have things removed from social networks for “national security” reasons?

Probably not. First Amendment and Streisand Effect.

Yes they do. Not personally, but they do. The amount of child exploitation that falls through the filters is not zero, and sometimes the government of the US intervenes and asks for the content to be removed.

Removing that kind of illegal content by the police is 100% different from political officials asking to have content critical of the gov't removed.

The point is that India is a sovereign republic and has its own laws about what is illegal and is not. According to India's laws, spreading false rumours about the police shooting a farmer when there is clear evidence that the person actually died by running his tractor into a barricade is illegal. And when Twitter failed to comply with government's orders to remove these tweets, they didn't have any point of contact from the company they could turn to for accountability. That's why the need for the compliance officer.

Also, criticizing the government is not illegal according to Indian laws.

Who determines that their is "clear evidence". Shouldn't a judge be involved?

>Who determines that their is "clear evidence".

In this case, anyone with an eye.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qgSLaOMEzHY

That video is of such poor quality that it's hard to determine anything from it. Yes, a tractor hit a barrier, flipped, and caught fire. Unclear why it hit the barrier. Did the driver intentionally run it into the barrier? Did the police shoot him and then the tractor continued on into the barrier?

Not saying it wasn't the simple explanation, but that video is not really evidence of anything either way.

Erm, you are requiring the kind of rigor that is needed to establish someone's guilt for establishing someone's innocence. Innocence is the null hypothesis.

The quality of evidence supporting the rumor that the person had been shot by the police was extremely sketchy and the evidence that is available points to the incident being an accident.

Illegal is just whatever the law says is illegal. If you make a law making dissent illegal, then that content is illegal. So now you have to define 'real'-illegal and 'I do not like your opinion'-illegal in the law of some other country.

ok, so removal of obvious illegal content like child exploitation is not equivilent to removal of content like "I don't agree with your political view" -- which is basically IMHO what this hashtag thing in india amounts to...?

> "I don't agree with your political view" > which is basically IMHO what this hashtag thing in india amounts to...?

No, it doesn't. The tweets under that hashtag were spreading a false rumour that the police had shot at a farmer when there was a CCTV footage showing clearly that the said person had died in an accident caused by him running his tractor into a barricade.

I don't quite understand this need to quickly pass judgements on complex politics of a different country, without spending the minimum required time and effort to familiarize yourself with the topic.

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