431–440 of 650 posts
Here is the State Department's rationale: https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/20...
Never heard of A/I and I have no idea what they are about, but rather than a government communication this statement reads like an angry rant with lots of unhelpful name-calling. I would expect a government to be professional and just stick to the (proven) facts and avoiding labels; that would also be more convincing. Oh well.
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Hacker news engages in ideological vetting against users. For example, try posting content encouraging violence.
HN only (lazily) filters content. It doesn't engage in ideological vetting, and doesn't need to either. A good amount of the commenters on this story probably would encourage violence, or at least agree with the sentiment on a different platform, yet here they are. I'm not even sure if they're real people or bots. We are having a discussion right now that would not be allowed if there was vetting.
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I'm a free speech absolutist (albeit one of apparently few people who actually knows what "free speech" is [0]) and I'm absolutely outraged and infuriated by this action and a long history of anti-speech actions by the USG, though this particular Administration is unprecedented in terms of censorship, general evil and authoritarianism in modern history. I also think it's unfortunate how many people in favor of all so…
I am not sure I see a fundamental distinction between HN censoring your speech on their platform or the government preventing you from speaking in public. Both are censoring you right? Is the difference the fact that HN is free to regulate its own platform as it wants to? For a large part I see people using digital platforms as a primary method of expressing their thoughts and opinions. Governments in both the US and…
Wrong. HN is not "censoring" you at all, which requires engaging in violence (or threat of violence) against you to inhibit you from speaking in public. HN is literally engaging in Free Speech itself. Take arguably the most fundamental free speech activity in a democracy: advocating to your peers for the candidate you wish to vote for and have elected to represent you. You've researched and listened to Alice, Bob and Carol. You decide the best is Alice, and to show your support you do the quintessential thing and put out a Vote For Alice lawn sign on your lawn. That's obviously free speech right? Now what if instead some volunteer from Alice's election team comes by and asks you if they can put up a sign on your property, and you say yes. That too clearly involves your free speech rights, even if you didn't pay for the sign. Now say Bob & Carol's campaigns turn up, and they ask to put up signs on your lawn too. You don't support them and say no. Have you censored them? Of course not, that's ridiculous. Free speech isn't "everything is equal nothing matters", everyone is trying collectively to iterate towards truth and value by making their cases and listening, without general use of force. To say that "I think this idea/person/item is the best choice" by definition is exclusionary, it's also saying "I think all the other ideas/persons/items are NOT the best choice". It can also simply be "I wish to engage with these subjects, not those". You can make a forum dedicated to airplanes & cats, and ban anyone who starts threads on boats & lizards. You may have nothing whatsoever against boats or lizards, but that's not what you personally want to focus on on your own forum you're paying for.
Hacker News is the private property of its owners. They have their own free speech rights. Exercising those rights is not censorship.
Others in turn are free to use their property and/or their voice on public property to make their cases, and they can try to convince you and vice versa. And there can be social consequences, if someone really dislikes your speech maybe they don't invite you to dinner anymore and urge others to do the same, who might agree (or go the other way, or just ignore it). Humans can get passionate sometimes. But by keeping violence out of the whole thing outside of narrow exceptions that undermine the approach itself, room is preserved for minds to be changed and rifts mended years or even decades later, and for ideas to come back around if someone cares enough.
Government enforcing things though always involves violence, either directly or one or more orders removed. But a general monopoly on the legitimate use of force is a defining feature of government. If government doesn't like Alice, and tells you take down the sign, or else, that's fundamental infringement. They're closing down the whole cycle (if a private person did that it'd also be a bunch of other crimes AND infringement, because private persons are not allowed to use violence against others at all by default outside of narrow exceptions). And if government tells you "oh you can leave up the sign about Alice, but it's not fair you censor Bob & Carol, you must put up signs for them too. Or else." that'd be equally infringing censorship. If everyone has a sign, it's the same message as nobody having one. It's still suppressing "I think Alice is the best choice".
>For a large part I see people using digital platforms as a primary method of expressing their thoughts and opinions.
It is easier and cheaper than any point in human history to put up your own website, including your own forum to try to form a community around. You have no right to an audience though.
>Governments in both the US and the EU have imposed restrictions on what platforms may host.
What? What restriction has government in the US imposed beyond the long standing and unchanged exceptions that prove the rule (which essentially boil down to threats of violence, comms integral to crime, defamation AFTER a court case to prove it, serious violations of personal self with zero public value like CSAM, and purely commercial speech engaging in fraud)?
>I think we have not reconciled yet how to reinterpret free speech online.
There is nothing to reinterpret. We've gotten it fine since the passage of Section 230. The problem are constant efforts to suppress what we've already got, in some cases coupled with completely orthogonal issues like failure to enforce ancient anti-trust legislation.
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> This is why Europe needs to detach itself from the American banking system. So far, what it's detached itself from its sources of fossil fuels. With a little help from its great American friends.
I love how Europeans get pumped up on anti-American rhetoric when they are far more submissive to the US than even a Ukraine or a South Korea is. I'm starting to think the rhetoric (always about what they're about to do, something about Trump, something about Musk) is being pumped to them by US admin think tanks. The US is going to be at peace with Russia, and still pumping anti-Russian rhetoric into Europe to keep t…
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I'm not familiar with A/I, but I'm familiar with americans, and they look completely ridiculous talking smack about others doing allegedly "bad things". And they have no defense about supporting war criminals or genocidaires.
Define genocide so we can all be sure we're talking about the same thing.
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Could someone point me to some background on this whole incident or write a quick one? I don't know who they are or what's going on but it seems important.
The US Republican party has been inventing an increasingly elaborate alternate reality fiction in order to convince their voters to keep voting for policy positions that obviously work against those voters' own interests. One component of this alternate reality is a fictional terrorist organization called "antifa." They claim that anyone who does not align with their policies is a member of this organization. This al…
Delusions of grandeur / superiority complex much? Have you considered a posibility, that these voters just dont agree with your idea of what their best interests are?
>fictional terrorist organization called "antifa."
An organization so fictional, that just a few months back multiple members were convicted in a terrorist attack
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/clyedgnyn4mo
Antifa defenders just hide behind the fact that the movement is decentralized and leaderless by design, but that doesn't make it fictional.
They are obviously a terrorist organization and it is good to go after their financing and communication channels.
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Here’s the thing though: if even some of the examples given in the state department page are true (some of them are rather silly), that A/I knowingly provided services to groups that verifiably did some rather violent things they are accused of, I’m not sure how they expected to hide behind their mission. My impression is that they didn’t say “hey we don’t have customer information but we don’t service violent groups…
> “we designed this to be anonymous and specifically intend/expect for it to be used in any way regardless of legality and are okay with it.” That is also what Signal does. Or absolutely any end-to-end encrypted communication service at all - these are explicitly designed not to retain details of communication. Do you want to declare them terrorists too?
Edit: just so we are clear, I’ve no idea what A/I is, the linked page gave no details, nor do the current top comments. The current top comment is rambling about free shell accounts and stuff. The ones I read after that were mourning the loss of this mysterious site/service/something. Does anyone want to clueinthe rest of us?
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> we’ve already established an okay-ish democratic system We have pardoned Jan 6ers convicted of "wielding force and violence" for political goals in goverment positions now. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beer_Hall_Putsch is uncomfortably close to the situation.
And everyone involved in hiring and pardoning them should go to prison. I can't speak for everyone, but many of us really do have a principled opposition to political violence.