Hacker News Reader

Comment by edgyquant | Hacker News Reader

[flagged]

Removing hate from a privately-run platform is not censorship. It just feels like censorship to reactionaries because their political beliefs are hateful and do not respect the categorical imperative.

Just to complete the set of views expressed in this thread: it is censorship, and it's also absolutely necessary if you want to have a civil society. Otherwise the whole thing - society, not just the platform - evolves into competitive death threats and thence into actual violence. This includes state violence.

You can no more run a social media website without moderation than you can run a nuclear reactor without a moderator.

It is censorship. Banning any content of any form for any reason, including legality, is censorship.

What people don't want to admit to themselves is that censorship isn't always a bad thing. Realizing that requires a degree of nuance that the internet currently doesn't support.

Also: censoring your own site is perfectly constitutional.

HN commenters always seem to forget the paradox of intolerance

I heard it described once that leftist thinking typically focuses on the justice of the outcome of systems, whereas rightward thinking often focuses on justice of the system itself.

A right leaning person might say, it is just to prevent people with means from receiving welfare. A left leaning person might say, means testing can leave gaps where some people are unserved.

The right leaning person says, "it is unjust to censor", the left leaning person says, "that system has a side effect -- if you are tolerant of hate speech, others will leave".

I don't know if this holds always, but now that it's pointed out, I see it in a lot of places.

Try to have a rational and calm discourse about trans folks on X. You will necessarily need to compare the lived experiences of trans people and people who are not trans, which will probably result in you using the prefix "cis" (which is the literal opposite of the prefix trans). You will get moderated for doing so.

I refuse to use "cis". I'm not a subtype.

Cis didn't originate from gender. Cislunar, cisalpine, etc.

And it's ok for you to not identify as cis. You get to have whatever identity you want.

We are discussing a platform that censors discussion when that discussion includes trans and not trans people. Unless you are X, the platform, I don't think your identity is germane. (And once again, you are valid.)

That isn't justification to censor the term.

Can you provide some data about the scale of 'conservative voices... censored prior to 2022'? I have used the platform a long time, trying to take in a balanced set of news sources. I do not believe that conservatives ever had a problem getting their voice heard on the platform... All of Charlie Kirk's (vile) tweets are still up, for example.

Anecdata and all that, but my observation as a long time Twitter user is that it was always possible to find conservative voices on the platform. What has changed with Elon is the proliferation of accounts with names like PatriotMom1776 positing hundreds of times a day exclusively about how Democrats are Islamist Communists. Ironically, I've found it harder now to find good content from real conservative posters who I might not agree with but who offer a different perspective to my own.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com