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Comment by notahacker | Hacker News Reader

> Free speech absolutism is possible and is beneficial once you ensure that someone is not gaming the system, i.e. someone pretending to be more than one person

You can have free speech absolutism or controls to stop gaming the system. Pick one.

After that it becomes a debate over which controls to have, and the argument that multiple accounts is worse than incitement to racial hatred or antivax nonsense isn't a clear cut one.

A lot of the "free speech" complaints about social media amount to complaints about social media platforms adding content warnings about [alleged] sensational lies or penalising their reputation anyway.

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Facebook blocking valid NY Post articles (just one last week) is not a content warning… it’s flat out censorship

You realize NYPost are the ones who slutshame a NYC EMT for moonlighting on OnlyFans to make ends meet because their salary is criminally low? You know, they find the fact she's making some X-rated content more wrong than her salary being at the poverty level.

There is no "valid" content from that tabloid.

OK... who cares? Who's to say that your world view / morality is more correct than the view in the NYPost article?

> Who's to say that your world view / morality is more correct than the view in the NYPost article?

The platform you’re using to blast it, within the confines of their platform.

And, I don't want my platform to say anything about this. See https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/about/terms#tcontent for the proper model.

> I don't want my platform to say anything about this

You should have the freedom to start such a forum without being regulated out of existence and join such a forum without fear of isolation. You should not be able to force other privately owned forums to adopt your view.

By this logic, it seems like you're asking Twitter to adopt your view. Screw mine and anyone else's and derank discussion that you don't agree with.

If they ask Twitter or some other platform to derank your view and manage to convince the platform to do so, that’s an end result of free speech.

One of the main arguments for free speech is that you let everyone talk without government interference and let private actors decide what are good and bad ideas.

Everyone in this post who wants these public platforms to be forced to host all speech sound like what they really need is to have these platforms to be nationalized and run with government rules. What’s confusing to me is the majority of the people I see who want these platforms to host all speech are also in the same group that thinks everything should be done by companies and not the government

This is exactly what's going on. Twitter censors one type of opinion and elevates another. People with the opinions which are currently being elevated are terrified of the potential loss of social power.

For what it's worth, I think this fear is misplaced. Unless Elon can figure out how to run Twitter without ads, woke-bigotry is safe as long as advertisers are using woke politics to distract from their evils.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights should be a pretty good baseline.

> Art. 12: No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.

Which article is currently being blocked?

And, as is always the question, to what extent is this one-off example representative of the totality of Facebook's efforts to stop the spread of misinformation?

Are 50% of the "censored" posts regular reporting? 1%? 0.00001%? Shouldn't a detail like that matter?

If I could make the rules, my rule for conversations about one-off examples would be that you have to immediately follow up by talking about how representative that example is of the phenomenon you are using it to illustrate.

>A lot of the "free speech" complaints about social media amount to complaints about social media platforms adding content warnings about [alleged] sensational lies or penalising their reputation anyway.

Exactly. And I would add, nobody who claims they are a "free speech absolutist" can stay consistent with that declaration after even one or two simple questions.

Does free speech absolutism mean unmoderated ISIS and Al-Qaeda posts are fine? Because we need to expose them to healthy debate for the benefit of societal progress? The answer typically is "well that's not speech, that's _____", and then it's a debate over why there's a special different word for the type of speech they want to prohibit.

> Does free speech absolutism mean unmoderated ISIS and Al-Qaeda posts are fine?

As a free speech absolutist, "yes".

That's literally literally what the word "absolutism" in "free speech absolutism" means.

That is a laudable position of intellectual consistency! I agree that it is what the "absolutism" part means.

You may do, but the self-proclaimed "free speech absolutist" trying to buy Twitter thinks that making certain claims and revealing certain information about his companies is not at all fine, hence all the litigation against critical former employees

> nobody who claims they are a "free speech absolutist" can stay consistent with that declaration after even one or two simple questions.

Try me.

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