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Comment by blast | Hacker News Reader

I agree with you about that, but I also (might) agree with them about this.

Not that you said otherwise, but... I think we should go back to a transactional mix-and-match style of politics, with different coalitions per issue, instead of the "agree with your friend tribe and disagree with your enemy tribe about everything" style that we seem to be locked into these days. There shouldn't be any shame in being part of the same coalition on one issue with people who are reprehensible on other issues. Agreeing with the Florida government about some point of social media regulation doesn't imply I agree with them about anything else.

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Isn't it consistent to say the government deciding not distribute books is wrong for the same reason the government telling private companies they must distribute speech they disagree with is wrong? Both clearly violate free speech. Maybe you don't actually think free speech is the standard, maybe it's something more vague like an open society, but I don't see this as any different than the state mandating churches reserve 15 minutes at the start of each sermon for anyone who wants to get up and say something

There are many responses here, but I think one of the most relevant is that of natural monopolies. If you created a competitor that was somehow objectively superior to Facebook in every possible technical way, it would still almost certainly fail. Because Facebook's product isn't their software, but access to the billions of people using it. They are effectively doing little more than acting as a carrier for access to society. And you can't compete against that.

This immediately puts massive scale social media in a very unique place. By contrast, public school libraries are anything but a monopoly. If they don't offer a book you want, there are countless other ways to get it that are no less convenient, to say nothing of the digital age and searching for 'book i want pdf.' This generalizes to other scenarios as well. At one time it was believed that private businesses out be able to restrict employment or service based on things like the race or religion of their customers/applicants. But as this started to become a more substantial issue in terms of scale, society decided otherwise.

> Because Facebook's product isn't their software, but access to the billions of people using it. They are effectively doing little more than acting as a carrier for access to society. And you can't compete against that.

But that's an argument against Facebook in particular, not against social media as a category.

Fundamentally, the problem is that we have allowed the modern "public square" to be in these spaces entirely owned by private companies.

What we really need is an open protocol for a federated social network that works very much like Facebook (so, not something like Mastodon, which is designed to work like Twitter, for instance—though it would probably be worthwhile to do the same with it) and have the government operate some public "reference servers" that anyone can join, while others can also operate servers that can federate with them. That way, you're still able to connect to people even if they're not on your particular server...provided they don't belong to a server that's been blocked from federation due to hate speech or something.

This is the problem today.

Everyone says they want free speech. But deep down they don't. Some don't want gay marriage written in books, and some don't want anti-vaxxers to post misinformation. Those are 2 sides of the same coin.

Freedom of speech is a critical cornerstone of liberal government. The fact that so many sides want to reduce this right is what is scary.

Very well said - and inspired me to chime in.

We have much less freedom than we think, and the freedom we do have we pay a very high price for. I often use the phrase "What price freedom?" in conversations, and unfortunately most don't understand what it means.

What does it mean?

I think of it as having these meanings:

1. Your freedom can cause problems to me an to society as a whole

2. We pay much in blood and treasure to maintain our freedom

3. There are unintended consequences and knock-on effects to most all rules regarding freedom.

Or to generalize: "Freedom isn't free"

But there isn't an enlightened centrist middle ground here where we allow all speech off of principle. First off, because that has never happened in American history (or any country's history?). So there is no good ol days to look back on when speech was more free. Second of all, people are way too stupid to process information on their own. Governments are at their best when they are paternalistic, that's why we have seatbelts, no lead in gasoline etc. Of course the question is "who can decide what's good for you?" but it's definitely not Florida's government. Or the demographic that frequently shows up on r/hermancainaward

> Governments are at their best when they are paternalistic, that's why we have seatbelts, no lead in gasoline etc.

The same paternalism has justified poisoning one's own people in a "war" against alcohol, dictated who was allowed to have sex with whom in privacy of their own home, and resulted in human experimentation for the supposed betterment of society.

Of course the law should dictate who you sleep with. In the 13 colonies adultery was rightly a capital crime.

> I think we should go back to a transactional mix-and-match style of politics, with different coalitions per issue, instead of the "agree with your friend tribe and disagree with your enemy tribe about everything" style that we seem to be locked into these days.

There is a way to get there: it's changing our voting method.

Single-choice, first-past-the-post, winner-take-all voting is effectively guaranteed to result in a two-party system.

There are a number of alternative voting systems, and all of them that I've heard of have flaws, but Ranked Choice Voting is one of the better ones, and seems to be gaining some traction recently in a few places.

If you really want to break our political duopoly, push for Ranked Choice Voting at every level you have influence over. It'll be easier the more local you get, and the more jurisdictions adopt it, the easier it will be to get others to do the same.

Unfortunately political power is not generally distributed on a per-issue basis. In most cases it simply is not an option for an individual citizen to support increasing personA's political power to regulate social networks without increasing personA's overall political power.

I am a one-issue voter (whenever it's on the ballot) and my issue is voting reform because, in my view, the two party system America (and almost Canada!) is stuck with is just making inter-party discussions on policies impossible. Once the political class has stratified like it has in America and can box out anyone who doesn't pass a litmus test of dozens of issues (Oh, you're pro-gun rights but also pro-abortion access? Sorry, neither us nor the other guys want you) then the political system will quickly break down.

We desperately need elections where more than just the two dominant parties can compete without a spoiler effect.

This is happening, just FYI, up in Canada right now - there are four parties worth talking about - Liberals, Conservatives, NDP, Bloc Quebecois - the last two are essentially just regional parties which do occasionally win surprise seats but mostly just exist within a localized area. That is enough, in our parliamentary system to force cooperation at a federal level - but without serious action I can't see any ending in sight other than slowly devolving to American politics.

"you're pro-gun rights but also pro-abortion access? Sorry, neither us nor the other guys want you"

Uhm... you do realize there are plenty of us on the left who adopt exactly those positions?

Isn't that his point? Plenty of you exist, yet your party will not represent your interests. The "left" party that you vote for has chosen a set of values that are contradictory to your own, and you have no recourse because who else will you vote for?

You seem to think kthe left wants to ban guns. Nope.

You continue to ignore the point. Your party. The one you vote for. Not "the left", whatever that means.

It depends on the specific politician but I think a generally accurate characterization of the left is that they want to restrict gun access (some of us would say that'd be a "sensible restriction" while others would disagree). There are some notable exceptions here from rural states. One of my Senators, Bernie Sanders, is actually rather pro-gun rights coming from a state that has a strong hunting tradition - though he is less in favor of handgun access.

The thing is, even just a few non party affiliate votes in parliament can have a huge impact. Both parties could get more of a chance of their pet policies being implemented under a multi party system. That is, if you were to take the political parties at face value as caring about the issues they promote.

The reality is, the parties are systemically more interested in self preservation than governing. So neither seem to support serious reform.

Campaign finance reform should be part of that. It's legalized bribery.

I don't see how letting governments regulate social media is in any way good. I don't know how anyone who is "libertarian" can now support this initiative of government overreach.

Imagine creating a forum and now the Florida government dictates what you can and can't moderate. Disastrous.

In an ideal world that's true, but in reality it's probably not a good approach to treat political alliances on issues as independent transactions to be taken at purely face value. If you're an advocate for free speech, it's probably worth being extremely dubious of Republican efforts aimed at "big tech" even if they claim to care about the same issue you do. For one thing, those efforts are clearly motivated by very specific speech and even if you hope that translates into better protection for speech in general, it's worth considering if that's actually what your new allies are actually aiming for. There's a long history of policies claiming to be for the general good ending up exclusively benefiting a select few in practice. That's not always the case of course, but especially worth keeping an eye out for when the folks advocating for the policy are making it fairly clear up front that's their agenda.

The other issue is a bit more strategic. Policy victory brings electoral victory, and you don't get to pick and choose which other policies come along for the ride when someone wins. Nobody agrees with a politician or political party on every issues of course, but it's probably not a good idea to ignore the rest of their views entirely just because they happen to back at least one policy you agree with. At the risk of invoking Goodwin, if you weren't a fan of that Hitler fellow but supported him anyways because you liked road construction, you might have regretted your choice.

Well put. Welcome to contemporary political discussions. Objectivity is really scarce. The entire discussion goes down the toilet due to some form of 1) whataboutism 2) moral superiority complex 3) strawmanning 4) gas lighting. Add a dozen or so common biases and you've got a toxic brew of non-productivity. Furthermore, reconition of biases from a list like this [1] can be both good or bad. Bad in a way that it can be weaponized to shutdown conversation. Basically, everything you ever say (including this comment) would violate one of these cognitive biases, its a huge list. Feel free to use them as weapons! /s. There are also eggregious misuse of 2) which comes in the form of "For the children" or "Killing babies" or "For the good of the planet", etc.

Modernity has brought us closer to subjectivism than ever.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases

It's literally impossible to implement with this system of government. The current two party system is the most efficient form of your idea that can be implemented in America.

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