Comment by bavell | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bavell | Hacker News Reader

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> hate speech is the thing that some people try to defend under the banner of free speech.

I think it's more of an acknowledgement that there's a price to freedom/liberty and there are fundamental trade-offs involved. I.e. can't have our cake and eat it too.

The difficulty is in finding where exactly the draw the line. For better or worse, currently there are many technically legal yet unsavory views allowed under "freedom of speech".

You've spelled out pretty well the dangers of free speech but if we err to much on the side of caution, that itself causes animosity and discord from (perceived or actual) loss of liberties. And of course, if left unchecked, it can create a culture which embraces more centralized concentration of power, inviting corruption and further concentration.

I'm still wrestling with my own thoughts on where to draw the line and how to balance freedom with safety.

Exactly. I'm not going to claim there's an easy solution to any of this. The line between "valid political opinion" and "hurting someone" can be very thin indeed. Sometimes they overlap, and then what?

All I'm saying is: we should be honest about these trade-offs, and not pretend there's such a thing as "absolute free speech". And I also think we'd better err on the side of allowing too much speech than on the side of too little. But at the same time, I also think events of the past couple of years warrant a reevaluation of those tradeoffs and there we draw those lines. And I don't think Twitter, Musk, or any other social media should be making those decisions for us, but they probably should be a voice in that discussion.

Completely agreed. Although I'm not sure the balance of trade-offs needs to change due to recent events, I certainly believe it's worth discussing.

There’s free speech from a legal perspective and free speech from PR perspective. I’d argue that free speech from a legal perspective is actually pretty free in most western countries.

From a libertarian perspective private platforms should freely decide what they allow and what they won’t. The public can also freely criticise them and move away. Advertisers can freely decide if they want to advertise there.

Every libertarian should visit a true neo-nazi site like Stormfront to see how much we are allowed to say.

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