Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Supreme Court is about to decide the future of online speech

theverge.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 54 posts

Re: The Supreme Court is about to decide the future of online speech

#31

Post by krapp »

Spivak wrote: post #2

This is gonna be a weird ruling if it goes in favor of the states. If you run a public bulletin board tearing down fliers is absolutely a form of speech, and if you do it to people you disagree with it becomes political speech. I can't imagine even this court ruling that the government is allowed to regulate political speech. That would kick the door open to an easily constitutional broadly applied national hate spee…

Unfortunately, I think it's inevitable. Both parties have talked themselves into a justification for regulating speech on the internet. One side wants to force platforms to publish speech against their will, the other wants to force platforms to police speech against their will. Both positions fall afoul of the spirit of the First Amendment, which is that only the people have the right to abridge freedom of speech (and explicitly not the federal government, except in certain narrowly-defined circumstances.) And the Supreme Court is stacked with ideologues who seem dedicated to defederalizing the government and ceding power to the states, whose restrictions on speech would be far more radical than the federal government would be capable of.

Re: The Supreme Court is about to decide the future of online speech

#32

Post by hackinthebochs »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #30
hackinthebochs wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The point is starting with a list of carve-outs to any framework is an early sign it's fucked. While I think this is a fair point in general, in specific cases it can be legitimate. We should not be powerless to legislate unless we're able to articulate some ideal discriminator that picks out only the intended target and nothing else. The world is almost never that tidy. We can probably agree in broad strokes what…

> in specific cases it can be legitimate. We should not be powerless to legislate unless we're able to articulate some ideal discriminator that picks out only the intended target and nothing else Sure, but there should be a guiding principle. The point isn't we're powerless to act. It's that we should act thoughtfuly. Defaulting to carve-outs indicates the idea is inchoate. Even in this thread, we've expanded from ma…

That the problem is big and requires care doesn't strike me as a substantive objection to the effort of addressing it using the tools that we have (legislation, however imperfect).

Re: The Supreme Court is about to decide the future of online speech

#33

Post by JumpCrisscross »

hackinthebochs wrote: post #32
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> in specific cases it can be legitimate. We should not be powerless to legislate unless we're able to articulate some ideal discriminator that picks out only the intended target and nothing else Sure, but there should be a guiding principle. The point isn't we're powerless to act. It's that we should act thoughtfuly. Defaulting to carve-outs indicates the idea is inchoate. Even in this thread, we've expanded from ma…

That the problem is big and requires care doesn't strike me as a substantive objection to the effort of addressing it using the tools that we have (legislation, however imperfect).

> That the problem is big and requires care doesn't strike me as a substantive objection to the effort of addressing it using the tools that we have (legislation, however imperfect)

Again, not disagreeing. Just saying the solution as presented is obviously flawed. And I haven't seen a solution whose proponents don't similarly throw their hands up with generalities the moment it's poked.

Re: The Supreme Court is about to decide the future of online speech

#34

Post by hackinthebochs »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #33
hackinthebochs wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That the problem is big and requires care doesn't strike me as a substantive objection to the effort of addressing it using the tools that we have (legislation, however imperfect).

> That the problem is big and requires care doesn't strike me as a substantive objection to the effort of addressing it using the tools that we have (legislation, however imperfect) Again, not disagreeing. Just saying the solution as presented is obviously flawed. And I haven't seen a solution whose proponents don't similarly throw their hands up with generalities the moment it's poked.

"Throw my hands up" doesn't seem like a fair characterization. I wasn't offering legislation, I was offering a framework within which the details can be fleshed out that perhaps would lead to practical legislation (I mean, this is an HN comment after all, there's only so much you can reasonably expect). You seemed to disagree with the effort entirely, but your critique merely points to difficulties inherent in legislating nebulous phenomena. I certainly don't disagree, but I fail to see why that should short-circuit the effort. If that wasn't your intention, then perhaps we don't disagree much at all.

Re: The Supreme Court is about to decide the future of online speech

#35

Post by hellojesus »

vacuity wrote: post #29
thegrim33 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're portraying it as if there's not a small number of de-facto public square "boards" that the vast majority of people get almost all of their information from. Manipulation of those boards has an absolutely massive effect, and saying "well, you could go out in the woods and create your own public forum that a handful of people would ever see" isn't really an acceptable alternative.

This is why I wish there was a megaforum where anyone can isolate themselves into smaller forums as they wish. Then no one gets deplatformed by the feds or corporations or whatever (unless they call for violence or doxx someone, something like that), and yet no one has to see what they don't want to. Still but a stopgap to foster better communities, alas.

Isn't that essentially reddit?

Re: The Supreme Court is about to decide the future of online speech

#36

Post by vacuity »

hellojesus wrote: post #35
vacuity wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why I wish there was a megaforum where anyone can isolate themselves into smaller forums as they wish. Then no one gets deplatformed by the feds or corporations or whatever (unless they call for violence or doxx someone, something like that), and yet no one has to see what they don't want to. Still but a stopgap to foster better communities, alas.

Isn't that essentially reddit?

I suppose, but more general ways to structure the forum, moderation, how to do upvotes or likes, and so on. Maybe decentralized and federated. Make the whole Internet message passing, even!

Re: The Supreme Court is about to decide the future of online speech

#37

Post by krapp »

vacuity wrote: post #36
hellojesus wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't that essentially reddit?

I suppose, but more general ways to structure the forum, moderation, how to do upvotes or likes, and so on. Maybe decentralized and federated. Make the whole Internet message passing, even!

Isn't that Mastodon?

Re: The Supreme Court is about to decide the future of online speech

#38

Post by vacuity »

krapp wrote: post #37
vacuity wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suppose, but more general ways to structure the forum, moderation, how to do upvotes or likes, and so on. Maybe decentralized and federated. Make the whole Internet message passing, even!

Isn't that Mastodon?

Sure, if Mastodon works as broadly as I described. It just needs to be more widespread then.

Re: The Supreme Court is about to decide the future of online speech

#39

Post by WWLink »

thegrim33 wrote: post #11
WarOnPrivacy wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you run a public bulletin board tearing down fliers is absolutely a form of speech I'd say where the protection starts is that the board is yours. You can make it as open or restricted or curated or nonsensical as you wish. Other individuals can put up their own boards and they can display whatever they wish. This is what the 1A protects. In a reality where an opinion can be displayed from millions of boards - I…

You're portraying it as if there's not a small number of de-facto public square "boards" that the vast majority of people get almost all of their information from. Manipulation of those boards has an absolutely massive effect, and saying "well, you could go out in the woods and create your own public forum that a handful of people would ever see" isn't really an acceptable alternative.

You're assuming that the vast majority of people want to hear your message. Maybe they like that site because it doesn't allow messages like that.

Re: The Supreme Court is about to decide the future of online speech

#40

Post by 15457345234 »

WarOnPrivacy wrote: post #12
WarOnPrivacy wrote: post #5

Ordering people to say things the government likes is compelled speech. The First Amendment broadly prohibits it and that broadly benefits us . It's in our interest to safeguard and preserve rights that protect our speech.

> It's in our interest to safeguard and preserve rights that protect our speech. In this context, 'our' includes people who (I fervently believe) use their speech to make the world a worse place. Because that's what it means. It also means that I do not have to carry, parrot, amplify or provide a space for their speech.

> It also means that I do not have to carry, parrot, amplify or provide a space for their speech.

You don't, if you're a private individual, but if you're a huge company that provides a space that's become a de-facto public square then you do, because if you don't, you're affecting freedom of speech in a meaningful way by providing everyone apart from a certain few individuals with a giant megaphone, pushing up the background noise level.

To clarify: Twitter and FB are de-facto public squares, this is fact.

Free speech includes the freedom to be heard, and giving everyone a vuvuzela apart from a few prevents those people from having the freedom to be heard.

Of course - if you're such a company - you also have the freedom to not do business at all. Which would probably be better.

Post reply on HN