The Weimar Republic was a free society. How'd that work out? It was destroyed by outright lies, racism, etc.
Far from it. It's well known that the Nazis exploited Weimar-era censorship laws to their own ends after seizing power.
And even before seizing power.
“Contrary to what most people think, Weimar Germany did have hate-speech laws, and they were applied quite frequently. The assertion that Nazi propaganda played a significant role in mobilising anti-Jewish sentiment is, of course, irrefutable. But to claim that the Holocaust could have been prevented if only anti-Semitic speech and Nazi propaganda had been banned has little basis in reality. Leading Nazis such as Joseph Goebbels, Theodor Fritsch and Julius Streicher were all prosecuted for anti-Semitic speech.
“Pre-Hitler Germany had laws very much like the anti-hate laws of today, and they were enforced with some vigour.” [1]
"In the decade from 1923 to 1933, the Nazi propaganda magazine Der Stürmer — of which Streicher was the executive publisher — was confiscated or had its editors taken to court no fewer than 36 times. The more charges Streicher faced, the more the admiration of his supporters grew. In fact, the courts became an important platform for Streicher’s campaign against the Jews." [2]
Actually it's been pretty conclusively shown that removing extremist content from mainstream channels pretty much prevents the ideas from propagating in the mainstream. If the cockroaches want to crawl under the fridge there's not much you can do to stop them but you can stop them from breeding on the table.
What if that 'extremist content' is pro-LGBT content somewhere else? What if it's criticism of religion? There's no consensus that those aren't equivalent to extremist content around the world, so such censorship does just as good a job at stopping what we once, in the West, considered abhorrent and obscene, as whatever we consider abhorrent today. I don't get how you can consistently square that circle.
Well, rascist content tends to denigrate and harm people, it causes people to get killed and injured, while pro-LGBT content tends to call for love and allow people to love who they want.
I can see the difference, can you?
You make it sound like some slippery slope fallacy, but it's not the same speech. Calling for hate is wrong and should be shuttered in the darkness.
I have no familiarity with David Icke, but I wonder how much of his "popularity" was fueled by the Youtube algorithm recommending his gullible viewers more and more of the same kind of conspiracy content. I remember speaking to a Flat-Earther once (yes, they actually exist), and it seemed he basically became a flat-earther because he watched one flat-earth video and Youtube kept recommending him more similar content…
Why should the size of the community matter? Under what rationale are you going to decide that HN can moderate but YT cannot?
Because Youtube presents itself as being agnostic to the content and letting anyone upload anything (excluding porn and dark stuff that any reasonable person would deem inappropriate like ISIS propaganda or child abuse). If Youtube presented itself as being a video platform for from the getgo, then I wouldn't see a legal problem with moderating videos containing opposing views.
Youtube also presents itself as an international platform, so what you say about ISIS might have very different perceptions e.g. in comparison to a US Navy ad in the US than in the Middle East. Or do only US standards of what is reasonable free speech apply? Why is porn obviously not free speech less than lizard people conspiracies (that's what Dike is propagating).
I very strongly feel that we should be very careful to avoid adopting a legalistic attitude towards freedom of speech. That is, I am opposed to the argument that private corporations are not bound by the first amendment, and therefore it's okay for them to suppress content. I agree that they're not bound by the first amendment (I don't claim to understand the nuances of the "platform" laws so I won't address that), b…
> Hacker News Guidelines > What to Submit > Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic. > In Comments > Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion…
"Community" is meaningless enough, "highly effective community" means even less, and squeezing everyone on the planet into one "community" means something else entirely.
The first amendment is about the government. Your speech is not illegal. The government cannot persecute you for your opinion or beliefs. It has absolutely nothing to do with your ability to be heard on the internet.
I must admit I find your reply a bit frustrating, because I literally began my comment by addressing what I feel is exactly your argument : > I very strongly feel that we should be very careful to avoid adopting a legalistic attitude towards freedom of speech . That is, I am opposed to the argument that private corporations are not bound by the first amendment, and therefore it's okay for them to suppress content. I…
I understand your letter of the law/spirit of the law position on free speech. I agree that the dichotomy is frustrating, for a ton of issues beside speech.
I disagree that "platforms" answer to a higher calling than I do. The first amendment is a contract between a US citizen and the US government. I'm not shrugging off your argument as "this is how things are"; I believe this is how things should be.
Many of the comments in this thread focus on large players' significant influence on the information that Americans consume. I don't think this has anything to do with free speech law; if anything, it's an anti-trust issue. Forcing for-profit, non-governmental organizations to publish all speech of all Americans sounds like a nightmare. I don't want to live in that society.
I very strongly feel that we should be very careful to avoid adopting a legalistic attitude towards freedom of speech. That is, I am opposed to the argument that private corporations are not bound by the first amendment, and therefore it's okay for them to suppress content. I agree that they're not bound by the first amendment (I don't claim to understand the nuances of the "platform" laws so I won't address that), b…
I very strongly feel that we should be very careful to avoid adopting a legalistic attitude towards freedom of speech. That is, I am opposed to the argument that private corporations are not bound by the first amendment, and therefore it's okay for them to suppress content. I agree that they're not bound by the first amendment (I don't claim to understand the nuances of the "platform" laws so I won't address that), b…
> COVID-19 has added the additional element of this new concept of "disinformation". The argument is seductively simple: "being exposed to this information could lead you to engage in patterns of behavior that harm society. Therefore we can conceptualize this speech as being an indirect form of violence/negligence and therefore we have a moral obligation to remove such content". Which is actually extremely funny, sin…
Wouldn't you want a health organization to be able to quickly adjust their advice if needed, if new information has been found? Or if a fault in the old studies or information has been found? Or how would you have them behave instead?
> Hacker News Guidelines > What to Submit > Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic. > In Comments > Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion…
My actual answer is in the last line, but I'll ramble a bit first. You make an interesting point, but I think there are times in which we can prohibit certain types of posts and comments that might technically be censorship (using the definition of suppression or prohibition of things that are considered obscene, politically unacceptable, or a threat to security), but they aren't bad censorship. I would place some so…
I find troubling that everyone in an argument pro freedom of speech and first amendment always says it is OK for YouTube to censor "illegal" content, but isn't making content illegal the definition of government censorship? It is a weird argument to come from the free speech proponents.
If I'm interested in content not on HN, I'll find it elsewhere. Why is it any different for YouTube? Now, if you'd said to me that Google doesn't prioritize other content, I'd argue that those wanting to talk about other content always have smaller forums to do it in, they just might be more local or viral in other ways. To me it's the difference between national broadcast TV "I'll know it's wrong when I see it," and…
Have you found any new blogs or websites you visit on a frequent basis in the last 3 months? You can’t discover the voice of the little guy, there’s too much noise.
I’m probably not the best target audience as yes, I have. I use an RSS reader and manually curate a list of blogs to follow and podcasts to listen to, in addition to, yes, YouTube playlists I subscribe to as well. I even support content authors directly on Patreon. But not all good content is on YouTube — I’ve actually purchased content on Vimeo, for example, and have bookmarked a number of non-YouTube content sources, some of which are aggregators but some of which aren’t. How do you find it? Same way you always did... by following links, subscribing to email lists, searching Google with plus signs, err double quotes, and so on. Don’t get me wrong, YouTube is “easy” but sometimes it’s impossible to find that video you were watching the other day (if you have history disabled). As I said before, though, the problem is some folks want a worldwide platform to broadcast their ideas, no audience or community necessary. I think it’s just fine for such an audience to have content moderation strings attached. Nothing’s free, not even the soap box. If you really want an audience, work for it, and if you just want clicks in exchange for ad dollars, it shouldn’t be at the detriment of what’s considered acceptable by society. And yes, that might, indeed, mean censorship, but as pointed out, that’s the compromise we made for broadcast radio, TV and to some degree, newspapers. Any platform with enough viewers seems to inevitably become a cesspool without community reinforcement and guidelines. Not to say there shouldn’t be choices of platform, I don’t think ISPs or AWS should be banning individuals from the Internet, that’s something local police and judicial systems can determine. But if anything I’d say the opposite, the more unknown something is, the less culturally censored it should be, the more famous, the more cautious we should be, as a society... I don’t want to support regimes but I do support political systems and political discourse in general, and I think societal norms eventually change as needed, they have in the past without such widespread individual broadcasting platforms...