Leaked Google briefing, admitting a “shift towards censorship”

Well, it usually starts with a genuine desire for civility, but as they say, power corrupts and once you give power over speech to censors (and you see this even on moderated boards), they tend to abuse their power for other purposes. It's not a problem because of repressive societies, they are the symptoms. It's a problem with human nature.

You can say that, but from the beginning, governments have put limits to speech based on "harm" from speech. Slander, libel, threats are all illegal due to the contention they cause harm. Taking no side is also similar to this, taking no side in a conflict as long as they are civil requires one to decide what is "civil" in the first place. Are comments about race considered "threats" if one person is of the race targeted? How about coarse comments like telling someone to "kill themselves." It isn't so simple and even being neutral is a stance of a kind.

BTW, I don't think being neutral in a conflict like censoring or not is the wrong stance, but it IS a stance with its own value judgements.

What central authority would that be? Because I'm pretty sure I can find speech along those line on the top five sites on the internet with little effort.

I always ask this but do you believe that was a mistake? Do you think people have that specific right to exercise their freedom of speech?

I think I'm unclear on what you're asking, but as an American who sees a great deal of value in that approach, and seeing the fruits of the opposite approach (my go-to example being the UK, where libel laws are significantly more open for abuse), then, yes, I do think people have that specific right - on the level of human rights, even.

Do you believe that to be a mistake, that they don't have the right to exercise their own beliefs?

That is a different question - speech and action are two different things.

Nobody has to tolerate such opinions.

Facebook, Twitter, etc. have block / unfriend options. It's extremely easy to avoid sites like Daily Stormer (or whatever the infamous white supremacist site is called?).

I intentionally don't hang out with racists, bigots, etc. It's the exact same manner of avoidance. You have to do it in real life, I don't see why the same premise wouldn't hold online. Don't spend time in such places, don't invest into such people on social media. You can't force racists to not be racist, you can choose not to associate with them.

> For example, would you believe it's bad for someone to be censored on HN because they talked about how much they hated black coders?

HN isn't a monpolist platform (such that it can heavily restrict information distribution across an entire nation or more), as is the case with Google and Facebook. HN strictly policing its own site in the manner it sees fit, doesn't qualify as censorship, in my opinion. When a monopoly platform does it, it is censorship (because the condition of it being a monopoly means there are limited or no alternatives).

> At a certain point we deemed as a society that those sort of views are considered bad. Do you think that was a mistake?

Not at all. There is widely a societal punishment for such terrible views: you become an outcast in many regards, particularly among the vast majority of people. That society deems such views terrible, does not simultaneously require they be banished / made illegal / censored from all publication (whether books or social media).

That cultural battle should in fact occur out in the open. There is no better platform for it than that. You can't nearly so well combat terrible ideas if they're not expressed.

When it comes to how a monopoly like Facebook should deal with it (in a context where one believes all people have a right to be able to use it): they should delete illegal posts (underage pornography as one example), and they should perhaps restrict blatantly offensive content to adult readers only (18+ in the US), and require an acknowledgement to view it. There are a few directions that Facebook could go with dealing with Alex Jones types for example, that doesn't involve a heavy handed censorship or ban. Limit the mass distribution of their content, as we might in a public square. We don't generally block people from having one to one, or one to few, offensive conversations in a public square, assuming it's discrete. We do generally stop them from mass distribution to all by shouting offensive things through a large audio setup or similar in public squares. It's an effective means of not denying someone access to public squares (eg banning them from Facebook), while still not turning a platform into an open amplification vehicle for terrible, abusive, offensive ideas.

What we're all really talking about here is: should people be censored from being able to offend other people. That central concept is what connects all of these varied speech discussions covering race, religion, sex, gender, political ideology, et al. Should offensiveness be banned? It can't be done, the result of trying to do it is entirely predictable ahead of time. We're seeing countries like Britain attempt it, it's a grotesque absurdity in result. Since what's offensive is inherently subjective and will always vary from one person to the next, it becomes a system of who has power to dictate from moment to moment what's offensive. It becomes a competition of an ever tightening restriction, as each power group adds items to the list (culminating in authoritarianism as freedom of speech essentially entirely disappears). The quest to banish offensiveness ('the right to not be offended'), is a fool's errand at best, and an authoritarian's dream at worst.

We actually have a good word for this: McCarthyism. If I don't like your opinion, you are a Soviet agent!