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Comment by tracker1 | Hacker News Reader

They've also announced, they're re-establishing "trust and safety" (censorship) teams under a different name/brand.

It is values not censorship to say that you value protecting people from harmful speech in a private company.

The two aren't mutually exclusive.

When did everyone become so afraid of what other people might say? Or maybe it's when did it become so fashionable to be afraid of what other people might say?

When people realized that violent speech can be considered violent action as random people took the fearmongering and attacked other people or threatened to bomb hospitals and libraries in stochastic terrorist attacks.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stochastic_terrorism

Violence is the use of physical force to injure, abuse, damage, or destroy.

Writing and speech does none of those things. It may inspire people to take those actions, but that does not make it violence in and of itself.

We can discuss the morality of speech and writing that stimulates others to violent action without the coercive construction of attempting to convince people they are the same thing.

If it creates a pervasive atmosphere of fear that results in physical violence or calls people to violence directly or indirectly, then I'd say speech can be violent. I disagree with free-speech absolutism that pretends speech is simultaneously capable of moving the world and also either not an action or an action that cannot be violent.

There are ways to accomplish allocation of responsibility (or blame) that don't include muddying the waters by declaring equivalence.

Alice tells Bob to kill Charlie. Bob murders Charlie with a knife. Bob is a moral agent and is the one who committed the violence. Alice instigated it. The questions that must be answered as to how much or how little Alice is to blame are:

1. Does Alice have authority or coercive power over Bob, making her urging carry more weight? (Was it a command that Bob had some degree of need to carry out?)

2. Is Bob's moral reasoning (will) impaired, and does Alice know this?

3. Did Alice know that her urging would result in Charlie's death?

4. Did Alice intend for Charlie to be harmed?

The answers to these questions attach guilt of varying levels to Alice. They also weigh on the punishment. If Alice is a commander ordering troops to commit war crimes, she's absolutely culpable. She has not been violent, but she is responsible.

If however, Alice is a stranger on the ground who shouts at Bob to push Charlie off a ledge at random, Bob bears the majority of the responsibility. Alice is still to blame, but Bob made the decision to act and should bear the brunt of the punishment.

This has nothing to do with free speech absolutism. It has everything to do with clarity. Yelling "fire!" in a crowded theater is not violence, but it is morally wrong, and punishable by law. Speech can cause violence, but that doesn't mean that it is violence, nor does it have to be seen as violence in order to attach blame and consequences.

If only the world were so simple and clear as your ABC example. However, I agree with your last paragraph so, to reframe, the kinds of speech I'm referring to, which I would call violent speech, but are not necessary to be understood as violence, fit into the category of morally wrong and should be punishable by law. At the very least, a private platform (like X or Reddit or whatever) can and should make choices about whether to allow speech that creates an atmosphere that fosters violence.

What about yelling "fire!" in a crowded theater?

Risk of imminent harm due to panic. Fundamentally different from saying something and someone deciding to act based on that a while after hearing/reading it.

I'm not so sure it's fundamentally different. I've been seeing a lot of violence that, while premeditated, seems to very much trace back to speech causing panic.

That's a quote from Schenck v. United States which was decided in 1919, and overturned by Bandenburg v. Ohio in 1969. It's by no means the law (it came 150 years after the law was written), and it was never a particularly good analogy.

Oliver Wendell Holmes was talking about handing out anti-war pamphlets as akin to "shouting fire in a crowded theatre" and thus ruled that the First Amendment didn't protect protests during wartime—a decision even today's most anti-free-speech advocates would probably disagree with. He later backtracked on it.

Using "fire in a crowded theater" to justify suppressing speech is like quoting Pope Urban VIII as support for your argument that the sun revolves around the Earth.

We haven't figured out a great solution yet, but bad actors and the cognitively challenged have been handed a megaphone in the Internet and social media algorithms have given them echo chambers. Speech informs action, so bad speech will hurt some number of people. It hurts flat-earthers to people drinking bleach https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/0...

I don't know how Twitter will reimplement content moderation, but I'd support something like what Google has whenever somebody mentions 9-11 or COVID, etc, there is a factual blurb there to attempt to moor readers to reality.

One explanation I've seen is it's the need for emotional, and now intellectual comfort. The average mind is small and can deal with few ideas at a time. When such a mind is exposed to a different idea, it's already overwhelmed with the few it already has, and instinctively rejects the new idea.

The use of a spam filter suggests that some moderation is widely acceptable. Another problem is how disinformation spreads, which can cause significant harm when it influences people's perspectives to not get the whooping cough vaccine, for a fairly controversial example.

People are monkeys. Monkey see, monkey do.

A spam filter blocks messages the recipient doesn't want. Censorship blocks messages the recipient does want.

(This also implies that a spam filter that can't be configured or disabled by the user can result in censorship.)

> A spam filter blocks messages the recipient doesn't want. Censorship blocks messages the recipient does want.

This is only true if these companies only ever show you content from the people you have explicitly followed/subscribed to.

They often do block content from the people you have explicitly followed/subscribed to.

But suppose they write a generic algorithm that tries to show people what it think they will like. Then they find that some people like sexiness and political memes from The Other Tribe, so they modify the algorithm to not show those things to people even if it's what they want to see. Clearly and intentionally censorship.

You could even plausibly argue that not allowing the user to substitute an algorithm of their own (or one of their choosing from an independent third party) is censorship, if the only way to receive the data on that platform is through their algorithm which will not show you information that you want.

By this definition, censorship is in the eye of the beholder? I understand the slippery slope argument, but I don't think I have much of an issue with the vast majority of stuff that gets highlighted as being blocked. Spam, antivaxxers, Nazis... all content I don't want to receive.

It's not in the eye of the beholder. It's blocking which is not in the control of the recipient. There is nothing wrong with a filter that tries to block anti-vaxxers, as long as you're explicitly aware that it's happening and can freely and easily turn it off.

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