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Comment by csee | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately the real world doesn't work like that. If misinformation about COVID persuades large numbers to avoid the vaccine, and the hospitals get clogged, that invariably impacts me. If misinformation persuades the population to elect a populist, that invariable impacts me. If climate change misinformation persuades the population to block the transition to renewables, that impacts me. If hate speech galvanizes the population against my ethnic group, which causes a 300% spike in hate crimes against that ethnic group, that impacts me.

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You have no right to only see information that doesn't impact you. Such a right, which doesn't exist, wouldn't even be possible.

I am not talking about absolutes (at least I wasn't attempting to). The person talking about absolutes was the person I was responding to, not me.

I have no right to complete silence in my apartment block, but I do have a right to not have to listen to my neighbor's loud music at 3am in the morning.

I have no right to never breathe in second hand smoke, but I do have a right to not have to breath it in inside small enclosed rooms.

Our society and the law makes these kinds of trade-offs all the time.

Also, the issue isn't people having to read the speech, it is the speech negatively impacting people (sometimes severely if you are an Asian person that just got knifed on the street) in indirect ways. There is this false belief that speech can't be mortally harmful unless it's a direct call to violence, which I hope we can dispense with since the evidence doesn't line up with that narrative.

I agree that information can do harm. I wouldn't even consider that an opinion, rather an observable fact.

"Harm" is very fuzzy though. Twitter's extremophiles call reading something they don't like "genocide". So basically, anything is harm. Harm can be real, imagined, perceived, understated, overstated, direct, indirect, grasping at straws.

Further, any matter of importance or division has no clear-cut right or wrong. There's always a gray zone.

Yes I agree. The people who go overboard like this are dangerous in their own way, and I'd say are even more dangerous than the free speech absolutists who insist on constraining private companies in a way that is actually anti-1A.

What I advocate for is basically what we have now. Non-governmental, voluntary and minimal censorship of things that are likely to cause outsized harm in the real world. Also called moderation. I want these platforms to voluntarily remove ISIS propaganda, outright hate speech, election misinformation, and a few other categories, and otherwise allow open discourse. These are all slippery slopes (especially election misinformation removal), but that shouldn't resign us to simply throw up our hands and allow Kremlin propaganda to destabilize democracies.

Sure.

But here's the thing: you aren't qualified to act as the arbiter of what constitutes 'misinformation'. No one is.

You may rail against this because asserting an (unearned) claim over objective reality - what is true and what is false - is advantageous in spreading narratives favor to your personal interest. But let's be clear: that's all it is, and that's all it will ever be.

The corrolarly of this absolutist perspective is to allow Twitter/Wikipedia/Arxiv/Facebook/HackerNews to become 8chan, which is a reductio ad absurdum of your position that all ideas are equally valid, objective facts can't be agreed upon (or perhaps don't even exist) and one can't possibly design a good moderation system. I reject this position on purely empirical grounds, simply contrast the tightly moderated HackerNews with the unmoderated sewer that is 8chan.

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