UK government’s plans to regulate the internet are a threat to free speech • Hacker News Board

Re: UK government’s plans to regulate the internet are a threat to free speech

#101

Post by TheOtherHobbes » Thu, Sep 17, 2020, 4:52 PM UTC

john_moscow wrote: post #44

umvi wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The problem with freedom is that people abuse it and cause harm to others." Edit: (to be clear, I do not personally believe this, just offering a little insight as to how the "not insignificant majority" think)

I think, being offended at words is mostly a sign of one's own personal insecurity. Can you imagine a successful doctor or a business owner being seriously offended because someone on the Internet called them a bad word? I bet they would respond same way I do when my son calls me a "bad papa" for insisting he finishes lunch before getting a desert. The bigger, much bigger problem is the growing amount of people that…

The bigger, much bigger problem is that free speech is always managed speech. A quick stroll around the Internet shows that virtually no one has any truly original political insights, and those that do are more likely to be sidelined than praised.

So where is the freedom in repeating tropes put together by media professionals for cut-and-paste public consumption?

Just $10m a year will buy you an effective social media troll farm or an operation to rival QAnon. It's super-cheap, and - if you're that way inclined - super-effective.

Real free speech wouldn't be battery farmed like this. But it would mean getting rid of any number of giant corporations, so it's unlikely to happen any time soon.

Re: UK government’s plans to regulate the internet are a threat to free speech

#102

Post by crocodiletears » Thu, Sep 17, 2020, 4:56 PM UTC

Could somebody in the know explain what this would change with respect to free speech in the UK, outside of just taking things a little upstream?

The country's government's already attempted to imprison a guy who taught a dog to perform the Nazi salute as a prank[0], sentenced a woman to community service for posting rap lyrics[1], visit your house for having the wrong opinions on the internet[2, 3, 4, 5]…

So exactly what is being preserved by taking things a little further, and just preventing the speech it doesn't like in the first place?

[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2018/03...

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-merseyside-43816921

[2] https://www.thestranger.com/slog/2018/12/20/37275129/fightin...

[3] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-surrey-47638527

[4] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/01/24/man-investigated...

[5] https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/police-arresting-nine-peo...

Re: UK government’s plans to regulate the internet are a threat to free speech

#103

Post by yarrel » Thu, Sep 17, 2020, 4:59 PM UTC

john_moscow wrote: post #44

umvi wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The problem with freedom is that people abuse it and cause harm to others." Edit: (to be clear, I do not personally believe this, just offering a little insight as to how the "not insignificant majority" think)

I think, being offended at words is mostly a sign of one's own personal insecurity. Can you imagine a successful doctor or a business owner being seriously offended because someone on the Internet called them a bad word? I bet they would respond same way I do when my son calls me a "bad papa" for insisting he finishes lunch before getting a desert. The bigger, much bigger problem is the growing amount of people that…

Yes, yes, people are such snowflakes now, who would have been offended by for example being called a communist or gay in America in the 1950s?

There is absolutely a dynamic of status anxiety to some of this, but to claim that this is all that is happening amounts to asking some people to be bad bayesians.

So yes I don't want tribal society. But you can't privatise the public problem of people who are organizing to actually physically harm you, where they are, as a personal moral failing of being insufficiently stoic.

Political action rather than spiritual retreat is needed.

Re: UK government’s plans to regulate the internet are a threat to free speech

#104

Post by monkeynotes » Thu, Sep 17, 2020, 5:02 PM UTC

sgt101 wrote: post #51

umvi wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The problem with freedom is that people abuse it and cause harm to others." Edit: (to be clear, I do not personally believe this, just offering a little insight as to how the "not insignificant majority" think)

The misunderstanding is that freedoms exist without constraint due to the damage that their exercise does to others. I have freedom to act in any way I choose, but I am not allowed to smash my neighbors windows or set a fire in their garden. The harm that I would do necessarily defines the parameters of my freedom. Likewise screaming Fire! in a crowded space is not allowed as free speech. People could die, you could…

I don't think it's as simple as that. Since people are not literally screaming fire in a theatre who defines what is analogous? We used to be able to practice political descent freely. In times passed it was quite ok to have and share openly an opinion that medication is a scam (this is certainly not a new idea).

It is broadly understood it's not ok to incite violence, but much of what is being labelled as damaging speech is only labelled as such because of the broad platform it's being spoken from.

Re: UK government’s plans to regulate the internet are a threat to free speech

#105

Post by AnthonyMouse » Thu, Sep 17, 2020, 5:03 PM UTC

_pd19 wrote: post #100

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They cruelly punished disobedience. And this is really where the "but you I just told him to kill that man, I didn't pull the trigger" argument falls apart. Because it's not the telling them which is inducing them to do it, it's that doing it is the only way for the trigger man to get paid or not get fired or killed themselves. And it's the payment, or the expected retaliation, which makes the crime. Not the speech…

> the only way for the trigger man to get paid or not get fired or killed themselves That's not necessarily even true of many killings by order, nor is it the morally relevant part. If I tell you to kill someone and tell you I will kill you if you don't follow through, then I am still only using words. Your claim is that if the person I threaten kills the other person, I am not morally culpable because I didn't actua…

> If I tell you to kill someone and tell you I will kill you if you don't follow through, then I am still only using words.

No you're not, you're using violence. The violence travels back in time to compel action on the part of the recipient in order to prevent your anticipated violent action. If there was no expectation on the part of the recipient of any negative consequences from not following your order, the order itself wouldn't cause them to do it and there would be no harm.

Compare the scenario where you threaten to kill someone if they don't kill someone else while enacting a play. The threat of violence isn't really there, even though the words are identical. Clearly the words aren't the source of the crime.

Re: UK government’s plans to regulate the internet are a threat to free speech

#106

Post by Sargos » Thu, Sep 17, 2020, 5:06 PM UTC

msla wrote: post #97

rootsudo wrote: post #91

We're okay with social media companies regulating free speech, but draw the line at governments. Ironic, isn't it? And yes, I'm well aware that Governments should endorse and not stifle free speech, but this message is propagated on social media platforms. The very systems that enable voice and disable voices because it's a violation of "Terms of Services" or in other words, revenue. But then again, governments grant…

> We're okay with social media companies regulating free speech, but draw the line at governments. > Ironic, isn't it? Not unless you're Alanis Morissette. The difference is the concept of monopoly: A government has a monopoly on being a government in a given region. That's pretty fundamental to what a government even is, as per Weber and Westphalia. A social media company isn't a monopoly on being a social media com…

You can talk in the physical world without being in any particular country so none of the governments have a monopoly either. With that definition we don't even really need the concept of free speech as you always have a choice of where to speak.

Social media sites have network effects and if you make your own site to put your speech on then nobody will ever see it. If you actually want to interact with others then you need to go on a big site that has a monopoly on the speech of that group of people. It's not that much different than a government and if we want to keep the concept of freedom of speech then we need to discuss whether those rights also apply in some way to public forums.

Re: UK government’s plans to regulate the internet are a threat to free speech

#107

Post by monkeynotes » Thu, Sep 17, 2020, 5:09 PM UTC

Karunamon wrote: post #41

MiroF wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> bullying can drive people to suicide or indeed bring them to commit terrorist acts. You think bullying on twitter has caused 0 deaths?

If we're talking about only the contents of twitter.com and not harassment that extends into real life and just happens to also happen on twitter? I'll take that bet.

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/death-...

You owe me.

To be clear, I don't necessarily advocate policing Twitter to weed out trolls and I recognize some people who are emotionally unstable are more at risk and can not be considered the norm for basing policy on.

Re: UK government’s plans to regulate the internet are a threat to free speech

#108

Post by tialaramex » Thu, Sep 17, 2020, 5:10 PM UTC

12elephant wrote: post #60

tialaramex wrote: post #45

I'm going to guess that many readers from this US-focused site have assumed this is like the ACLU or something but for Britain. It er... is not. It's a platform for Toby Young in particular, and a cadre of fragile Right Wing "intellectuals" to insist that it's wrong for anybody to even criticise their bullshit. This gives you some sort of idea: https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/4agqbn/toby-young-free-sp... I actuall…

Is it really that they don't want people to criticize their bullshit? Or is it that they don't want their bullshit to be censored off the face of the planet? Whether or not we agree with their views, should they not be able to express themselves, and how they truly feel? Imagine if your criticism of their viewpoints was being censored instead, so they got to speak un-opposed and un-criticized. I constantly hear that…

> Is it really that they don't want people to criticize their bullshit?

Yes. Specifically the idea is to insist on the usual "balance" argument. If this BLM activist can say that police shot the unarmed black man in the back seven times for no apparent reason then a 9/11 Truther ought to be able to say that Jews blew up the Twin Towers using mind control.

If you say wait a second, but one of those is a fact about the world and the other is an insane conspiracy theory, then to them you're now a censor, an opponent of Free Speech.

They actually give the example of fact checking interventions from popular social media sites. In their opinion this fact checking is biased against them. If you watch a typical Flat Earth conspiracy video on Youtube for example it will add a fact checking piece to the UI that explains that er, no, it isn't and here's how we know.

People like Toby think that ought not to happen, because who are we to go around dismissing things as untrue just because of all the evidence against them?

Now, a cynic might think that professional contrarian Toby Young, who makes his living saying stuff that's obviously wrong benefits enormously from this useless "balance" and that's why he is in favour of it.

But who am I to assume such base motives. Maybe Toby is just very stupid and actually believes every word he says.

Re: UK government’s plans to regulate the internet are a threat to free speech

#109

Post by MiroF » Thu, Sep 17, 2020, 5:11 PM UTC

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #105

_pd19 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the only way for the trigger man to get paid or not get fired or killed themselves That's not necessarily even true of many killings by order, nor is it the morally relevant part. If I tell you to kill someone and tell you I will kill you if you don't follow through, then I am still only using words. Your claim is that if the person I threaten kills the other person, I am not morally culpable because I didn't actua…

> If I tell you to kill someone and tell you I will kill you if you don't follow through, then I am still only using words. No you're not, you're using violence. The violence travels back in time to compel action on the part of the recipient in order to prevent your anticipated violent action. If there was no expectation on the part of the recipient of any negative consequences from not following your order, the orde…

> The violence travels back in time to compel action on the part of the recipient in order to prevent your anticipated violent action.

So in order to defend your interpretation of free speech, I am now morally culpable for actions that "travel back in time"? If it never occurs how can it travel back in time?

What is it that causes the violence to travel back in time? If I had planned to kill the speaker if they didn't do the action, but didn't tell them (and they don't have an expectation that I would kill them) - then they killed the person, would I not be responsible?

It seems that the key action here that causes this "travel back in time" effect is speech and the expectations it produces.

Re: UK government’s plans to regulate the internet are a threat to free speech

#110

Post by likpok » Thu, Sep 17, 2020, 5:13 PM UTC

throwawayffffas wrote: post #66

rayiner wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But I think decentralization and legal liability are better solutions. Drop section 230 and it becomes legally fraught and prohibitively expensive for Facebook to allow disinformation and hate groups to organize on its platform. No it doesn’t. Because of free speech laws in the US, there is no legal liability for whatever it is you are calling “disinformation and hate groups.” Moderation has created remedies agains…

> No it doesn’t. Because of free speech laws in the US, there is no legal liability for whatever it is you are calling “disinformation and hate groups.” Moderation has created remedies against speech that have never existed before Section 230 absolves online platforms that feature user generated content from publisher liabilities, by revoking it facebook would be liable for everything on its platform. For example if…

Section 230 allows Facebook to do moderation without exposing it to liability for everything on the platform. Look at the original motivation: Stratton Oakmont v. Prodigy, where Prodigy's anti-porn moderation meant that Stratton was able to sue them for defamation.

Revoking it would mean Facebook would do less moderating. I do not think this will have the effect on disinformation that you want.

One thing to note here: Stratton Oakmont was suing Prodigy because someone posted a comment saying that they were criminals. The subject of the comment, Danny Porush, went to federal prison for securities fraud. All this is to say: the original comment was likely true and the lawsuit was disinformation.