Comment by switchbak | Hacker News Reader

Comment by switchbak | Hacker News Reader

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Once you install "guardrails" (ie: limits to acceptable speech), they then immediately become the lever of power that the extremes vie to control.

"Unacceptable views" could include: Covid came from a wet market, the Iraq war was about WMD, etc. Pick your controlversial topic, there's going to be a battle over even the limits of rational debate - ones you agree with and ones you definitely don't.

You may be happy with the censorship flavour of the month now, but wait until a government comes into power that you dislike. Imagine what G.W. Bush would have done with the censorship powers available now?

You're opening the floodgates to massive governmental and corporate control. I want no part of that, and I don't want my democracy to be destroyed by the broader effects that would have. If you're consciously advocating for that, then I disagree with you in the strongest terms. Yes, there's an ocean of trolls out there. And the effects of strong censorship are far worse.

> You're opening the floodgates to massive governmental and corporate control.

The irony of this statement in a discussion about taking a public company private

Can you please explain the irony?

Public companies are subject to attacks by billionaires using shorting and disinformation. No sensible company should go public in today's world.

Going public is usually massively profitable for the founders although.

Speech has always had guardrails...

"common limitations or boundaries to freedom of speech relate to libel, slander, obscenity, pornography, sedition, incitement, fighting words, classified information, copyright violation, trade secrets, food labeling, non-disclosure agreements, the right to privacy, dignity, the right to be forgotten, public security, and perjury."

Then read his comment as "more restrictive guardrails" or "moving the guardrails", to understand his point.

His point is moot because twitter has never claimed to be a free speech platform and I wouldn't expect rights guaranteed to protect me from the US government apply to a private corporate entity.

That Twitter never claimed to be a free speech platform? Please check the history of Jack Dorsey's statements, he was very much a proponent of free speech on his platform.

Regardless of if his or the company's official claims, when network effects centralize virtually everyone into a small number of platforms, it becomes a defacto utility. This has wide ranging and damaging effects on actual democracy. I don't particularly care what statements Twitter has made, if their platform has such wide ranging negative effects then it becomes an issue that needs to be addressed. How that's addressed is another question, but being a private entity doesn't magically free them from accountability of the negative effects of their platform.

The terms of service you agreed to when you signed up for twitter determined that was a lie. People say all sorts of things that aren't true, especially in the business world. If you're taking people at face value, that is your problem, not mine.

Twitter is a business and it literally has nothing to do with democracy at all. Using twitter is a personal choice, if you don't like it, don't use it. That's the solution. Your perception of their business being negative or even positive is neither here nor there.

Yeah, but then it turned out "being a free speech platform" meant the thing was flooded with nothing but spam. Getting rid of the spammers took a massive hit in the public market because their numbers plunged dramatically, but it saved Twitter from becoming completely irrelevant. People have a right to speak, but they don't have a right to be published.

Once that was done, they noticed that people aren't free to speak & won't use a platform where they are constantly under attack from racists, sexists & harassers. As a private entity, Twitter cared more about people feeling comfortable participating than it did about other people's "right" to bully, harass or send dick pics.

They also realized that if they kept letting their platform be used to radicalize terrorists, the government was going to shut them down because they were harmful to the community. It's also possible that they didn't feel great about helping people murder people they hated. Repeatedly.

By that point Jack had realized that "Free Speech" is a lot more nuanced than he imagined as a 29 year old with no background in sociology, philosophy, law or political science. Jack still believes in freedom: he just knows now, experimentally, that you can't achieve that by letting might make right.

It's still possible, and useful, to talk about these things, in the context of a private company, especially much of what he said happened. The concept of social media is new. It's ok to talk about that new thing, in order to understand it and what it's doing to society as a whole.

Nobody is arguing that constitutional rights directly apply here. They're arguing that free speech is important, especially when the government has been pushing around that private company: https://www.forbes.com/sites/emmawoollacott/2021/07/15/gover...

That's from the 3rd paragraph here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech

You open the floodgates no matter what. What voices do you actually see dominating a completely free environment like this? To me it will just be government and corporate bot farms instead of actual people.

I think a much better guardrail would be better context. Unfortunately much of the average population may not be interested in that so much as getting their rage or cute animal picture hit, and that's going to be a huge societal challenge going forward as misinformation itself is now its own lever of power. Just muddying the water exerts a powerful influence on societal stability. But a platform designed explicitly to fill in the details surrounding an issue so that simple mistruths lose some of their power could help. Using dark algorithms and UI for light instead, and using all those carefully researched nudges to get people to find facts instead of rage mob.

That's an interesting proposition. I'm interested in the platforms out there to add in the missing nuance, but I must say I'm sad by what's happened with both Snopes and these 'fact checker' sites.

I think a big problem is the short attention span of most people - myself absolutely included. But finding ways to amplify the influence of those who have paid attention and reduce it from those who only read the titles - that could be interesting as well. There's lots of info out there to use ML to discern low quality input, it'd be interesting to see it applied for good instead of evil!

Maybe this is OpenAI's next challenge :)

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