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Comment by lmz | Hacker News Reader

Yes, and they cheered when the power was aligned with them to deplatform the opposition.

No. "They" cheered when it was used to deplatform hate speech.

Deplatforming people organizing a peaceful protest is very different. If you cannot understand how that is different, then I worry about your critical thinking skills.

They aren't trying to think critically, they're trying to ragebait and "own the libs."

Who decides if it is a peaceful protest?

Ultimately the platform, and yes there are huge grey areas. I don’t think this instance lands in one of them and that’s why Facebook isn’t even claiming it does.

It seems like you’re trying to avoid dealing with the substance of the issue for some reason.

Usually local police if they are on the scene. If they start seeing violence, they start telling people to disperse, followed by tear gas and then rubber bullets.

was peaceful dissent about certain policies of 2020-2022 also "hate speech"? because, if I recall correctly, it was being suppressed with unprecedented zeal on every single platform. again, with applause.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Medical disinformation during a pandemic?

These conversations often end up in some weird motte and bailey where you argue that you care about free speech, but it turns out that you actually just thought COVID was not real/not significant/not dangerous/not an emergency. So your issue ends up not being that they made a decision on it (free speech concern), but that you feel it was the wrong decision (content-specific concern).

So before we go back and forth on the intricacies of content moderation, can you briefly describe your beliefs on COVID?

I agree 100% with scientific consensus on covid but I also don’t support deplatforming based on viewpoint (vs content).

What’s the distinction you’re drawing between viewpoint and content…?

and so the goalpost moves from "it's hate speech" to "it's whatever we unilaterally decide to be verbotten to speak about".

Well I wasn’t the one who said “it’s hate speech.” There are a number of things that get content-moderated.

Hate speech, porn, bullying, doxxing, disinformation, Islamist propaganda, violent imagery, revenge porn, animal abuse imagery, incitements to violence, criminal planning, drug dealing, arms dealing, gambling, fraud, etc

As a free speech maximalist, are you willing to defend all of those with the same vigor as the COVID case? Or do you too actually draw a content-based line somewhere (while pretending you don’t?)

what the platforms do is put "no porn" in the ToS, then turn a blind eye to the porn they like but apply talibanic definition of "porn" to things they dislike.

Do you actually read the comments you're replying to, or are you just picking a keyword that appears in the text and rattling off whatever comes to mind as a result?

I've long since learned to identify demagogues and ignore them when they play dumb ;)

Ooo ooo, do they use words like "talibanic" to try to draw some undefined-but-definitely-negative associations between dissimilar things?

oh, so you aren't just pretending. I'm sorry, I'll spell it out: that comment was not to be taken literally. I just chose porn to make my point, which was that I do not object to platforms having rules, I object to their practice of selective enforcement of those rules.

bless your heart, and thank you for your time.

Good luck defining a content moderation rule that doesn’t require discretion and judgment in how it’s applied lmao

Classic HN to take a problem like this and just assert it’s easily solvable while proposing no such solutions. Even SCOTUS couldn’t define porn and you’re expecting content platforms to define (without discretion!) a far broader set of far squishier concepts at far higher scale.

Truly classic HN.

Left wing speech is hate speech. Prove me wrong.

Both groups of people seem to harbor a lot of hatred, and they seem to want to express it a lot, so your distinction between what is and is not hate speech kind of seems to be based on whether you agree with it or not.

If you find this interpretation to be uncharitable, would you care to clarify what truths this interpretation overlooks?

Do you have some specific examples that you find equivalently egregious to disrupting an organized protest?

Personally I find censoring all links to the New York Post Hunter Biden laptop story a couple weeks before a presidential election to be much, much more egregious.

(To be perfectly clear disrupting protests is also very bad!)

The story that even the New York Post didn’t list an author on, for fear of it being a false story?

I agree this would be even more egregious if it was thought to be a real story, but even the tabloid that published it didn’t think so.

Pretty sure the link suppression was turned off within like a day, right?

What exactly is your argument here? That social media sites should prevent individuals from sharing content without an attributed author?

My argument is that the principle of election non-interference applied to this specific situation can reasonably yield “we should suppress sharing while we figure out what’s going on.”

It was absolutely reasonable to suspect (in the early hours) that a salacious, bombshell story involving stolen documents published on NYPost without a listed author could potentially have been an actual disinformation attack.

Under that set of facts, the “we should try to limit interference in the election” can reasonably yield the behavior that it did yield.

That's an absurd and frankly offensive standard, and I fear that you already know that.

The same standard could be used to trivially censor literally any information from any outlet. Conservatives could censor all NYTimes articles because they have compelling evidence the NYTimes newsroom is taking money from foreign sources (they are), has a history of releasing false information (they do, all news outlets eventually do), and being biased against conservatives.

In fact, your standard would censor precisely the MOST important stories, because these are the most likely to influence elections.

I didn’t propose a standard. I proposed a principle. The goal of a responsible platform should be to not put its thumb (as a platform) on the scales of an election.

But since you apparently have a better one, how about you propose a standard?

Is it that anyone can post anything?

Sorry, I'm getting distracted by this:

> The goal of a responsible platform should be to not put its thumb (as a platform) on the scales of an election.

You earnestly believe censoring the laptop story was congruent with this principle?

I'm sorry but I just cannot believe that you are a real person. *Obviously* putting their thumb on the scale was the entire point of the censorship! I'm in serious disbelief that you wrote this and posted it.

I've just articulated the logic by which that principle can produce the outcome.

If you disagree with the logic, then identify which part you disagree with. Here are your options:

1. Content moderation teams should not have been suspicious of an unsourced, anonymous story on NYPost based on allegedly stolen material

2. Content moderation teams should not impede content that they suspect are election interference attempts

Which is it?

The part I disagree with is that ""misinformation"" is ever a valid reason for censorship, period.

Even if some speech is known to be false (insofar as your epistemology allows), it should be criticized and proven to be false by more speech, not silenced through censorship.

In any case, I'm still baffled by how you think you've articulated logic that can supports that they "didn't put their finger on the scale". Obviously they did, obviously they knew they did. What other reason could they have for doing it? If your principle were instead "they should put their finger on the scale when opposing actors intentionally spreading false information" at least you'd be consistent.

Though then the irony of this whole thing is that the story was true the whole time.

It's a good principle but it's been empirically proven that it doesn't work out that way in reality. Misinformation does not get effectively countered by spreading true information after the misinformation has spread. Even spreading it alongside (like with community notes) gives mixed results.

Certain misinformation "works", but censorship also "works", so unless you can detect false information with 0.0% bias, that puts the platform's finger on the scale.

I'd much rather deal with information assymetries from individuals within the community than information assymetries from whoever happens to have control over the platforms, and is willing to use censorship.

I'd also like to add that a lot of these misinformation studies ironically wound up using information now accepted to be true or likely (such as that COVID most likely originated from a Chinese lab) as their "misinformation" - so in a way I'm glad that countering with "true" information didn't unilaterally work.

> I'd much rather deal with information assymetries from individuals within the community

Ah this must be why you're confused. You think the hazard that platforms are trying to manage is from "individuals within the community" and not, for example, foreign intelligence services.

> information now accepted to be true or likely (such as that COVID most likely originated from a Chinese lab)

Lmao uh oh. The mark of the terminally-online has been revealed! Hilarious how many Twitterites have come to simply believe that COVID originated from a lab over the last year or two despite zero new evidence emerging in favor of that theory, and actually tons of evidence against it emerging since then. It's almost like if read false information enough times, you'll just presume it to be true... Curious ain't it?

Ironically, the "new evidence" that emerged was in fact "old evidence" that was suppressed.

https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/media/reps/new-doc-drop-slack-m...

https://oversight.house.gov/release/classified-state-departm...

Try re-reading the above comment.

You are (mistakenly) substantiating it though: there has not been new evidence in favor of the lab leak in several years! You're right!

Meanwhile, evidence in favor of a natural origin has continued to pile up.

So that would be option (2), correct? Is there a reason why you didn't just say "Option 2: Content moderation teams should not impede content that they suspect are election interference attempts"

It's been a long time that I've had an engagement with someone with such bad faith. It's really disappointing to see it on Hacker News.

Ah yes, mister 50 day old account, carry on with your evasiveness.

It's telling that you refuse to just follow your own logic and rationale even just a single step further.

> Even if some speech is known to be false (insofar as your epistemology allows), it should be criticized and proven to be false by more speech, not silenced through censorship.

This is provably false, as in this is not how speech online functions.

The whole system of suppression today, is built around the idea of flooding the channels with more content than can be assessed and analyzed. A room full of people shouting and no one having the time to understand.

Do you think disrupting an organized protest is inherently egregious?

I think that limiting “vanilla” political speech in general is inherently egregious.

The boundaries around vanilla are certainly blurry, but I don’t think No Kings comes even remotely close to any of those blurry boundaries.

and nobody is arguing the reverse now that its not aligned with them

they're saying to avoid the whole argument entirely by not using a platform that can deplatform at all

This is bunk.

Most people haven’t spent any time moderating online communities, so they don’t have to test their beliefs against reality. This is fine, frankly you saved yourself being stuck in a fractal hell scape.

However holding to this idea that the “opposition” was deplatformed, is superstition.

I’ve seen communities start with 0 moderation, and become wastelands filled with hate speech, misogyny and harassment. Which then forces moderation to be introduced.

This happens so often, that this happened to the hate groups who were kicked off of Reddit.

Communities have celebrated the introduction of moderation, and celebrated the imposition of rules that mean you can’t be harassed, attacked and targeted.

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