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Comment by twblalock | Hacker News Reader

Should our society have free speech, or free speech for everyone except idiots?

If you agree with the second formulation, who do you think ought to be in charge of deciding who the idiots are? Surely Mark Zuckerberg would not be your first choice.

Maybe there is a third option: no free speech for anyone, all speech must be moderated for lies and misinformation. Is that what you want? In that case, who gets to decide what is true and what is not? Surely Zuckerberg wouldn't be your first choice for that either, right? And what should happen when Facebook blocks "misinformation" that turns out to actually be truthful?

Those who want Facebook to regulate "misinformation" and gatekeep who (and what) is allowed on the site need to admit that they don't actually believe in free speech -- they believe in limited speech regulated by corporations.

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Take any of these arguments about Facebook, replace "Facebook" with "printing press" and everything still makes sense, which tells you what this really is:

Cultural elites wanting to control what their perceived inferiors think, believe, and most importantly, vote for.

The same class of people who wanted to regulate the printing press in Europe during the 15th and 16th centuries are the ones who want to regulate the internet today.

To be fair there is also a large contingent of well-intentioned people who don't realize the full implications of what they are asking for.

Ironically many of those people would say they oppose the concentration of corporate power, yet they are asking a very large capitalist corporation to exercise power over one of the most fundamental freedoms.

I believe speech should be free but people should be responsible for their speech.

People behave completely differently when there are consequences to what they say.

Speech for "everybody but idiots" is not free speech.

What should the consequences be?

Removal of speech is not a consequence of speech -- it's preventing speech in the first place. That's what happens when Facebook blocks or deletes "misinformation" -- they are removing the speech itself. That's not the same thing as "consequences" for speech.

Look at what HN mods do -- they ban trolls, but they don't delete what the trolls posted. It's there for everyone to see -- in fact, if you look at "dead" comments you can see flagged stuff too. In terms of free speech, that's very different from deleting the comments entirely, which is what people seem to want Facebook to do.

And for the sake of argument, even if we accept that "consequences" ought to include the right to free speech being taken away from bad actors -- who can be trusted to decide who ought to be punished? Again, surely not Facebook. Surely not the government either -- the winners of every election would punish their enemies by taking away their rights. So even if we could tell, 100% reliably, who were trolls and who were not, we still should not give any corporation or government the power to take away the right of free speech.

Yes, removal is not a consequence.

What should be consequences? What are consequences when you say something stupid to your family or friends? What should be consequences when you knowingly lie to slander somebody?

> And for the sake of argument, even if we accept that "consequences" ought to include the right to free speech being taken away from bad actors

This already exists in the law. Just as your right to move freely is taken away in certain situations (for example due to restraining order).

> What should the consequences be?

The usual when you get up in front of a group and act like a jackass: social shame and ostracization. Something that's hard to do on internet platforms. Even when people are not anonymous, they have plenty of ways to "hide", and it's easy to unfollow and block people who criticize you for spreading misinformation.

So I don't know. Removal and deplatforming, IMO, is not the answer. You don't fix extremism through censorship; that just makes it worse and drives it underground.

Facebook should ban or suspend accounts which spread objective untruths that will tend to be harmful if spread.

You can have your free speech on your own website.

Objective untruths like COVID being the result of a lab leak?

This.

People who support these kinds of activities are youthful and arrogant enough to have any form of humility about things they once passionately believed to be true turning out to be incorrect.

In the 90's, eggs were thought to be as deadly as cigarettes. A bowl of cheerios was considered to be vastly superior nutrition wise to a plate of eggs. This is the opposite of what we know to be true today. If I had tried to argue against this with the current form of Facebook, I'd be censored. (They also thought avocados were bad for you in the 90s.)

The elevation of a collectively determined "objective" truth over the freedom of individuals to exchange ideas is the first step towards creating an environment for authoritarianism to flourish. Subjugation of the individual to the collective is the norm in most of history, and it's not an accident that our current prosperity emerged when in the times and places where it was lifted.

> People who support these kinds of activities are youthful and arrogant enough to have any form of humility about things they once passionately believed to be true turning out to be incorrect.

It's not just that. Usually the folks you'll see on forums like HN, or many other tech spaces, aren't the people who would have had trouble having their voice heard in a pre-internet age. They're usually the (generally not brown or black) children of wealthy families, many of them being 2nd generation scientists or engineers, and would have had privileged access to publishing houses, financial news, or high quality PSTN lines. This is why these spaces usually see so much more of the bad associated with these technologies than the good. The old status quo was very much a benefit to them, their families, and the milieu they grew up in.

Ask someone who grew up or had family in a country where PSTN over copper was a crapshoot and where sending exorbitantly expensive telegraphs and mail out of the country were really the only ways to get your voice heard, and you'll hear a very different story.

That's not to say Facebook, Twitter and other social media companies have society's best interest in mind (I doubt they do) nor that they are impartial operators (I really don't think they are), nor that they shouldn't be regulated as any other neutral communications carrier, but simply that this is one of the main reasons why tech forums tend to hate so much on social media.

If your basis for believing it's the result of a lab leak is it would make a really juicy story with no basis in reality then it's an obvious untruth at time of telling even if it later turns out to be true.

I want free speech for everyone except idiots.

> who do you think ought to be in charge of deciding who the idiots are?

Think about it. Engineering disciplines have mostly solved this issue. Lets take structural/civil engineering and something that affects many people - bridges. Through a combination of law, codes, and government, not any joe schome can build a bridge. Existing bridges generally work well and can be trusted. Sometimes bad things happen like the FIU collapse, but generally that's very rare.

I don't understand why there can't be a group of people, large or small educated and from diverse backgrounds, that can set basic standards on what is and is not misinformation, with due-process like things such as appeals, etc. It's not an impossible task.

> Those who want Facebook to regulate "misinformation" and gatekeep who (and what) is allowed on the site need to admit that they don't actually believe in free speech -- they believe in limited speech regulated by corporations.

If you're going to use a third party for communication and that third party is not owned by the people (i.e. a government entity) then it follows from the above statement that you don't believe in private property rights.

> It's not an impossible task.

Ok, set it up and then maybe removing idiotic speech can be considered. Until then you have nothing but a desire to define what is undesirable.

How do you ensure that this Ministry of Truth you are proposing will remain free of political pressure and corruption?

And how do you expect a panel of experts to escape groupthink and rule fairly in cases where the expert consensus turns out to be incorrect?

Both of those goals are impossible to achieve.

There is a difference between defining absolute truth and identifying obvious lies.

If a medication is approved and then a new risk factor is identified the issue goes from unproven to validated but if it wasn't based on nothing it was never a lie.

The covid vaccine containing a chip to track you was always a lie.

We don't need a ministry of Truth we need a ministry of obvious bullshit.

Under the -- very rocky -- assumption that a Ministry of Obvious Bullshit could still avoid scope creep into moderating truth, I still don't think this would fix things. People who actively want to spread bullshit will find a way. It's like spam vs. anti-spam, ads vs. ad-blockers.

People who want to commit murder might still find a way too but we still have laws, police, prosecutors, etc. Perfect should not be the enemy of good.

That's quite the leap from moderating information to a murder investigation

Optimum number of murders is 0. So we take steps to prevent murder. This doesn't make the number of murders 0, but we take the steps because we want to reduce murder as much as possible, because we've agreed it's unacceptable.

Substitute "online misinformation postings" for "murders" above.

The point is just because something is difficult to eliminate is not a good reason to give up trying to eliminate it.

> I don't understand why there can't be a group of people, large or small educated and from diverse backgrounds, that can set basic standards on what is and is not misinformation, with due-process like things such as appeals, etc. It's not an impossible task.

This seems incredibly naive to me. It seems what’s happening there is we give people a list of important figures to bribe to allow their speech to be considered information (or for a competitors speech to be considered misinformation).

And even if these were incorruptible humans, there are several statements that are heavily under debate currently as fact or fiction, such as the validity of neopronouns, whether or not Spanish speakers anywhere use latinx, who is the bad art friend, if kyle rittenhouse should’ve been convicted for murder, do trans children exist and if so can they perform any transitioning or puberty delay, what is critical race theory, is the Covid vaccine rollout speed sinister and if trump lost the 2020 presidential election legitimately. And that’s just all in America.

Your comment can be loosely translated to the following:

"Authoritarianism can work. It's just the wrong people were in charge. If me and other people like me had the same power as Stalin/Hitler/Mao/Mussolini/Putin, everything would be better because they were dumb, but we know better. We can create Utopia when nobody else could. We are uniquely prescient and intelligent."

The amount of arrogance and utter lack of humility is shocking.

If you thought the world is bad with aggressive bullies in power, wait until you see how bad it gets with aggrieved nerds in power.

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