Alex Stamos: Asking tech companies to police hate speech is “a dangerous path” • Hacker News Board

Re: Alex Stamos: Asking tech companies to police hate speech is “a dangerous path”

#211

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Oct 23, 2018, 8:53 PM UTC

School-Cotton wrote: post #150

snackbugs wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're discussing the clear and defined understanding of what hate speech is. You lost the thread of the conversation the moment someone confronted your belief that it doesn't have a clear definition. The reason you lost the thread is because you're struggling with the internal contradiction of your belief.

So, (if the definition is so clear) do you think claiming capital punishment should be legal is hate speech, as the person I was originally replying to has claimed elsewhere in this subthread?

[deleted]

Re: Alex Stamos: Asking tech companies to police hate speech is “a dangerous path”

#212

Post by snowwrestler » Tue, Oct 23, 2018, 8:53 PM UTC

commandlinefan wrote: post #78

snowwrestler wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Deplatforming is about deciding which ideas are granted resources (pushed above the cultural baseline), not who is punished for speaking (pushed below the cultural baseline). People without platforms are still free to speak. If dang banned me from HN I could still go stand on the corner and read my posts aloud and no one would arrest me. Free speech does not mean I'm entitled to someone else's platform.

You're changing the argument, though (in fact, you're completely inverting it). The discussion _here_ is whether or not tech companies should be forced to police hate speech. You're trying to conflate that into whether or not they should be allowed to.

This sub-thread is about whether de-platforming (voluntary or otherwise) works to limit objectionable content. That's what the Motherboard article above me is about.

Re: Alex Stamos: Asking tech companies to police hate speech is “a dangerous path”

#213

Post by snackbugs » Tue, Oct 23, 2018, 8:57 PM UTC

School-Cotton wrote: post #187

snackbugs wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a vacuum, I would not say that's hate speech. But there are complexities in the advocacy for capital punishment in the current context of the US's criminal justice system. Our carceral system is widely recognized to be deeply racist in practice and in philosophy. This being the case, it's not an unbelievable stretch to say that when someone holds a belief in capital punishment, there is a good chance they also hav…

Who said anything about the US? Let's imagine you work at a social media company. You see the comment: "capital punishment should be legal". You don't know anything about the carceral system of the jurisdiction the commenter lives in. Do you remove the comment for being hate speech, or not? But the main point is that since the other commenter reached the conclusion that this would be hate speech, and you reached the…

Remove it or not based on your company's rules and values.

I don't know how to make this any more explicit. Hate speech having a clear and defined concept (which both you and that other commenter can research on your own) gives us a way to define whether or not the comment and context is harmful or not. I'm not going to hold your hand here, you need to read about it.

Re: Alex Stamos: Asking tech companies to police hate speech is “a dangerous path”

#214

Post by School-Cotton » Tue, Oct 23, 2018, 9:01 PM UTC

snackbugs wrote: post #213

School-Cotton wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who said anything about the US? Let's imagine you work at a social media company. You see the comment: "capital punishment should be legal". You don't know anything about the carceral system of the jurisdiction the commenter lives in. Do you remove the comment for being hate speech, or not? But the main point is that since the other commenter reached the conclusion that this would be hate speech, and you reached the…

Remove it or not based on your company's rules and values. I don't know how to make this any more explicit. Hate speech having a clear and defined concept (which both you and that other commenter can research on your own) gives us a way to define whether or not the comment and context is harmful or not. I'm not going to hold your hand here, you need to read about it.

Okay, let's back up because I think you are misreading me.

I am not discussing whether or not hate speech is clearly defined. I was discussing whether "Speech that explicitly or direct line implicitly dehumanizes anyone" is a useful definition. Do you think that's a useful definition, or not?

If that wasn't the point you were arguing against, then we're going nowhere.

Re: Alex Stamos: Asking tech companies to police hate speech is “a dangerous path”

#215

Post by aeternus » Tue, Oct 23, 2018, 9:09 PM UTC

neves wrote: post #83

Well, these unnamed "tech companies" are responsible for the proliferation of absurd lies that will elect a far right authoritarian candidate in my country, Brazil. The spread of this lies happens with the support of a well financed organization. I always thought that the Internet would be a democratic platform that would improve the debate in society. Maybe we would go back to a democracy without intermediaries. I w…

What should these tech companies have done to prevent this?

Re: Alex Stamos: Asking tech companies to police hate speech is “a dangerous path”

#216

Post by snowwrestler » Tue, Oct 23, 2018, 9:13 PM UTC

menacingly wrote: post #91

wccrawford wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>This is problematic in ways that used to be obvious to people in free societies, but for some reason seems lost now. I don't think this is true. I think some people always got it, and some people still do. The difference is that the internet allows anyone to post their opinions, but it used to be a lot harder to reach other people. We still have people that we hold up on pedestals for saying the right things, and th…

This might be true. When I was a kid, I saw a full hooded KKK march on TV, and I said "why do we let them march?" and my mom said "because you have to hear from people you don't want to hear from to know free speech is working" I cannot fathom that this conversation would even be considered good parenting today.

We let them march because they are using public streets to do so. A KKK march through a shopping mall would be quickly broken up.

You don't have to allow the KKK to use your private property, and neither does anyone else.

Re: Alex Stamos: Asking tech companies to police hate speech is “a dangerous path”

#217

Post by bilbo0s » Tue, Oct 23, 2018, 9:14 PM UTC

manfredo wrote: post #207

bilbo0s wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm going to gently suggest that the proliferation of screens, the proliferation of choice, the proliferation of personalization, in and of themselves, demonstrates that the principles of the free market place of ideas is well understood. The kids just choose ideas that perhaps we would not choose. (Or in most cases, ideas that we would definitely not choose.) But this is the essence of the free market of ideas that…

You're still missing the above commenter's point. > When I was a kid, I saw a full hooded KKK march on TV, and I said "why do we let them march?" and my mom said "because you have to hear from people you don't want to hear from to know free speech is working" The point is, exposure of reprehensible ideas is part of free speech. The fact that we consume media differently today does not change this. Maybe the 21st cent…

I think you're still not understanding the dynamic between children and parents these days.

Things are not how they were 30 years ago. Children are exposed to a myriad of information on a myriad number of ideas in a myriad number of ways every day of their lives. Here's the reality of being a parent today, your children will have set ideas about many many topics long before they would ever speak to you about it. So the idea that a child would come out of their room, or come home from their friends house, or from practice or whatever, and ask you about the weighty issues of the day, is fundamentally flawed. Children will Google it. Whatever more they need to know will come from their friends via snapchat.

Here's the bad news for all the new parents out there, YOU, will be the last person they will ask about anything like that. And they will attach the least importance to your opinion. (And they will attach no importance to your opinion if your opinion deviates from information on Google or Wikipedia).

Does this mean you will have no impact on your child's development of ideas? No. But it does mean that you have to set your expectations reasonably. The combative and argumentative parent-child relationships in my own opinion, usually arise due to parents not having a realistic set of expectations in this regard.

As a parent, you have to adapt to this new reality. I'm not going to tell people how to parent in the new reality, or even in the old reality. But I will say this, launching into a lecture about the importance of free speech is a REALLY good way to lose the room when dealing with kids. (A lecture sounding speech on anything is a good way to lose the room.)

Or maybe lectures do work for some kids. And maybe there are some kids out there who talk to their parents about these things instead of simply googling them. But my last kid is going to college next year, and that was never my experience.

As I said initially, I really don't think that the scenario that you are envisioning, would happen very often in today's America. Kids today will already have these sorts of ideas set long before you even think to talk with them about it.

(And if that's too much for prospective parents to think about, I won't even let you in on the fun that awaits with respect to the subject of sex, or drugs.)

Re: Alex Stamos: Asking tech companies to police hate speech is “a dangerous path”

#218

Post by mundo » Tue, Oct 23, 2018, 9:16 PM UTC

charlesism wrote: post #176

mundo wrote: post #103

This strikes me as a timely and important sentiment. When we demand that Twitter ban anti-semitic tweets, or that Cloudflare block white supremacist websites, or that Youtube deplatform Alex Jones, we are taking the power to limit speech (which the founders felt was too important to be wielded by the government) and handing it to middle managers at software companies. The de jure rule is "Freedom of Speech shall not…

> we are taking the power to limit speech (which the > founders felt was too important to be wielded by the > government) Someone spray-paints a swastika on your car. Do you think the founders would mind if you painted it over?

My point was that American free speech is not based on the belief that all speech is good or that no speech is bad. It's based on the idea that there's no one we trust to distinguish the good speech from the bad speech. Pointing out examples of obviously-bad speech doesn't disprove this, because it's not the existence of bad speech that's in question, it's the exact location of the borderline separating good from bad.

Re: Alex Stamos: Asking tech companies to police hate speech is “a dangerous path”

#219

Post by pnw_hazor » Tue, Oct 23, 2018, 9:17 PM UTC

irishloop wrote: post #11

chrisco255 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speech isn't "dangerous". You know what you do about people that say stupid things: you call them out on it. The answer to hate speech is more speech.

Speech can absolutely be dangerous. Much of the run-up to the Holocaust was in dehumanizing and characterizing the Jews as money-sucking leeches bleeding Germany dry.

WW2 era Germans were dangerous. Speech didn't kill anyone.

Re: Alex Stamos: Asking tech companies to police hate speech is “a dangerous path”

#220

Post by mundo » Tue, Oct 23, 2018, 9:19 PM UTC

manfredo wrote: post #201

charlesism wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That is not comparable to platforms > censoring certain views. Historically, it has been. If someone had sent a letter to The Pennsylvania Chronicle, containing a recipe for baking a turd pie, I don't think Ben Franklin would have felt the need to print it. Facebook, Twitter, Google... they're the ones footing the bill to host their users' content.

The Pennsylvania Chronicle isn't a platform. It's a publisher. Readers' letters getting published is the exception, not the norm. The ideas discussed here would be more like a telecoms provider specifically refusing to do business with someone because they disagree with their politics.

What's the difference? AFAICT the idea that when a website gets big enough it becomes de facto infrastructure and gets governed by different rules is pure imagination.