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Comment by hirundo | Hacker News Reader

A better way to quell hate speech is to provide the tools for individuals to do it, however they want to define it. Call it a bubble construction kit.

If you think a post is hate speech, mark it as such to exclude it and its creator from your bubble. Allow other users to subscribe to your bubble, and visa versa, such that you share your include/exclude lists with them, out to a given degree of separation, with any exceptions you might list.

So I could add ACLU, NPR and SPLC and various friends, celebrities, and polticians to my bubble and share their exclusions, and you could add NRA, FOX, FedSoc, etc., to yours. We effectively each get our own bespoke hate speech filters while hosted on a common carrier. This is decentralized, scalable, hyperdemocratic moderation. People of all ideologies can peacefully share the same platform, singing Kumbaya in harmony.

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People should be empowered to create their own communities. The community aspect is really important and seems to get overlooked by the big social networks.

The big social networks aren't "overlooking" community. Communities with constructive relationships between humans who know each other on a personal level are _competition_ for the social networks whose goal to profit off being the middleman in every social transaction.

- If somebody shows you photos of their new baby in person, you don't have to go to Facebook and look at their ads to see them.

- If you need to buy a car, and you know somebody who is selling a car, you don't need to go to Facebook Marketplace and use them as an intermediary to buy a car from a stranger

- If politicians and businesses are interacting directly with constituents/customers in their community, they don't need to pay Facebook to boost their political ads.

It's not at all surprising, then, that social media companies (particularly Facebook) have done everything they could possibly do to undermine any community that risks drawing people away from the newsfeed.

I’d say you have an extremely zero sum view of the world

“ - If somebody shows you photos of their new baby in person, you don't have to go to Facebook and look at their ads to see them.”

If someone shows me their baby pictures I become better friends with that person. I’m more inclined to show them more of my pictures later on, online and offline. And then usually that’s reciprocated too

In addition to what you described, we can also add a bit more logic: "Only exclude if it is blocked by more than X subscribed lists" or "Only exclude if it is blocked by both Rachel Maddow and Ben Shapiro".

That's putting a lot of pressure on individuals to manually curate and block content. Interestingly, you might end up creating an entirely new class of job -- social media curator. You could sign up for an individual (or multiple) user's block list. Then they curate the information that's informative, accurate, and fits a particular community. It's almost like a return to the old-school newspaper editor...

I'd count blocks in the same way Facebook tracks likes. "2534 People didn't want to see this". Also let people sort content by how many people blocked it, either direction.

That's great!

What button do I click to opt out of hate-speech-fostered discrimination, harassment, abuse, and genocide?

https://www.forbes.com/sites/ewelinaochab/2021/09/23/faceboo...

I'd really like that.

This does not address the problem of “Michelle Obama is a chimpanzee” or the “holocaust did not happen” going viral in one of those communities!

If that community likes these ideas, that is not anybody else's business. Unless you believe there exists undeniable truth + an algorithm to find it, you have to accept that people can each decide what they believe is true - even [what you and I perceive as] hurtful and misguided ideas such as the above.

> If that community likes these ideas, that is not anybody else's business.

That's obviously not the case in most countries on this earth. Holocaust denial for example is illegal across the EU.

It is only illegal if done "in public" (whatever that is taken to mean). Arguably, a private Facebook group is not "in public".

I will also note that in most cases, these laws don't prohibit such speech unless it is done in a manner likely to lead to harm. How widely or narrowly that is commonly understood is a different question.

I think the point would be to let these things happen in smaller, isolated communities. You can wall them off from the rest of the world, but still let them share whatever they want.

I guess the benefit would be the ability to get updates from your crazy family members while not having to see everything they post?

Whether or not this is a net positive for the world is a different question.

That seems like an abuse of political power though. That policy would result in limiting exposure of views that are controversial or disagreeable to progressives, since Facebook/Twitter/Reddit/etc. clearly have a highly progressive employee base and moderation policies built around that worldview. Effectively, isolating exposure of some content in this way would tilt the political scales by only allowing other competing (un-isolated) views to benefit from network effects. That to me feels a lot like propaganda and it doesn't make it any more acceptable or holier that it is done by a domestic tech giant rather than a foreign state power.

Sure it would, as it would mean we didn’t have to see it.

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