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This is a dangerous path to go down. Much better to allow anyone to post anything they like that's not illegal. If you don't like it, unfriend/unfollow/block th

• gadders 10y ago
  I agree. "I hate you, you stupid [insert bad word]" whilst wrong, should be permitted. "I hate you, you stupid [insert bad word] and I am going to come to your house and attack/kill/rape you" - get out the ban hammer.
  • sametmax 10y ago
    But again, who draw the line ? I don't feel threaten by somebody saying that to me on the net. I don't censor it even on my comments. Maybe somebody will feel threaten by something about going to "see what've done with your shitty new restaurant". Are you going to remove that too ? And are you really sure the sure the line will not be moved after ? Because this is such an opportunity for politics. But also just for any entities with a moral or economic agenda. And will the censorship be done by humans ? Or will machine will stop a quotation from a book or a movie containing it ?
    • gadders 10y ago
      Well, would threatening to kill someone in the real world be legal? I don't believe so. Or do you think the threat is less credible if given online?
      • sametmax 10y ago
        That's not the point. The point is that it's a pandora box.
        • jasonlotito 10y ago
          > That's not the point. The point is that it's a pandora box. If it's a "box," then frankly, that box was opened long ago, long before the internet or computers.
          • 0x6c6f6c 10y ago
            `Censorship of hate speech on the internet` was opened long before the internet?
            • jasonlotito 10y ago
              Censorship of hate speech through various mediums. Don't be pedantic.
        • st3v3r 10y ago
          I disagree. Banning threats like that would not have any negative consequences. If anything, it would encourage people to post more, as they no longer have to worry about dealing with that huge mountain of shit, which is incredibly demoralizing and discourages people from posting.
          • tehrei 10y ago
            Well... I personally have been hellbanned at least thrice total on several websites. What led to that? I have no idea. How do I deal with it? I make a new account. Do I change what I post? Well I try to post less controversial opinions. At least that's on my pseudonymous accounts. On my real-life-linked accounts, I'm quite a lot more cautious, since I can't just make a new facebook. So I post once a blue moon and make sure it's as devoid of opinion as possible.
      • 10y ago
    • soundwave106 10y ago
      Well, this is politics. I gather that this is largely driven by the European Union... http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-16-1937_en.htm http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-16-1937_en.htm ... so "the line" is basically whatever European Union says is "illegal hate speech" as per this announcement. (The announcement makes it seem that it is largely targeted at terrorism and racism, at least for now). I agree with you, though, in that personally I'm not the biggest fan of "hate speech" laws. They seem like a ripe target for political abuse.
      • dsfyu404ed 10y ago
        One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter.
      • talmand 10y ago
        >> They seem like a ripe target for political abuse. What? It is already is in several places around the world.
  • relaytheurgency 10y ago
    Threatening to kill/harm someone is already illegal if the person on the receiving end of the threat has fear for their safety resulting from the threat. If people are so afraid they should consider the already existing methods we have of deterring criminal behavior.
• sametmax 10y ago
  Exactly. And there are so many ways it can go wrong. That's a problem with big companies. They need to please a mass of people that are very different with each others. Eventually they settle with the lowest common denominator, and eliminate more and more things that can offend. Among them you will find: - new ideas which you can't know if they are bad or good yet and need assessment but will feel inconfortable. - old ideas becoming relevant in our new context (or that we are evolved enough to accept now) that have been put asides for long because of habits. - ideas that are important for a part of the population and unsettling for another part. - distrupting or creative things, arts, that just need to exist for humanity to keep grow, even if it's not always good. - bad things that people need to know exist. You can't exercice criticism if you don't have the material to criticise. People need to be able to read "Mein Kampf" so we can argument against it. If you remove all the things that is offensive to everyone, the only thing left is a white sheet. Wait, not necessarily white, I didn't mean to imply... Well yes, sheets are made from trees I realize it has an impact on the planet but... Ok then there's nothing left. What do you mean I can't think outside of my white-sheetist stereotypes ? What if I identify as a nihilist ? You are offending me!
  • ams6110 10y ago
    White sheets?? Are you in the KKK?
    • cm3 10y ago
      As in paper.
      • copperheart 10y ago
        Woosh!
  • mozumder 10y ago
    You can get all of that by visiting another website. You don't need to go to Facebook or Twitter to get that. I don't get why people feel the need for Facebook or Twitter need to host those items on their own servers? Do people not realize that these are private companies with editorial discretion?
• 20years 10y ago
  Agree! I am all for playing nice but I am also an advocate for freedom of speech. I fear we are losing that. The whole safe space movement was stifling freedom of speech and now this will hurt it even more.
  • JacobJans 10y ago
    > The whole safe space movement was stifling freedom of speech Consider that certain people's freedom of speech is already stifled. What should we do about that? Want to trade places with them?
    • Karunamon 10y ago
      Could you be more specific? Who's? If we're talking about an online context, barring the kind of censorship we're talking about here, that's strictly false. A tweet is a tweet is a tweet.
    • ZoF 10y ago
      This comment makes zero sense in this context. The parent poster said he was for defending free speech, why would he want to switch places to somewhere where it's restricted? What is your objection even? That because free speech is restricted in e.g. North Korea we should start restricting it elsewhere? Or are you implying that oppressed demographics(e.g. homosexuals, black people, etc.) are having their freedom of speech stifled and therefore restrictions in free speech as a result of the 'safe space' movement are justified? That's the only reasonably understandable(albeit flawed in my personal opinion) interpretation of your comment I can really make. Care to clarify?
      • stonecraftwolf 10y ago
        How is it flawed? A TOS that discourages hate speech and enforces some sort of standard seems far less stifling than intimidation by rape and death threats. It's funny to see people get bent out of shape at the idea that they might have to watch what they say when the consequences of saying something offensive are just that a platform might not let them publish everything they want to while there are large groups of people who already have to watch what they say because the consequences of saying something that another group disagrees with are rape threats, death threats, and harassment campaigns.
• balls187 10y ago
  What should happen when a person's twitter account is mentioned in an article that creates viral outrage, and they are bombarded with death threats, hate speech, and so forth? Do they: Block all the nasty tweets? Set their account to private? Ignore it?
  • cuckcuckspruce 10y ago
    There's nothing wrong with Twitter providing tools to help someone being harassed. That, in and of itself, does not prevent free speech. If someone's Twitter goes viral and they don't want to deal with messages directed at them then give them a whitelist that they can add people they want to receive comments from and the drop the rest. This only affects the view of the person affected while not constraining what can be seen by the public.
    • balls187 10y ago
      > There's nothing wrong with Twitter providing tools to help someone being harassed. Nothing wrong, except those tools don't exist today.
      • ZoF 10y ago
        Sure, that doesn't mean that arbitrarily defining things as 'hate-speech' and censoring them completely for everyone is the right solution.
        • st3v3r 10y ago
          I don't think there's anything arbitrary about defining death/rape threats as hate speech.
          • deleted 10y ago
            [deleted]
          • nitrogen 10y ago
            So define and ban those things directly, rather than something nebulous.
• beyti 10y ago
  Agreed, hate cannot be distinguished by 1/0, but only men. And men is proved to be biased.
• lbebber 10y ago
  You are wrong in that it's only a matter of 'unfriend/unfollow/block them' - that is only a solution for people who might get one or two harassers, but there are people who just get bombarded with it - just look at the gamer gate thing to see a prominent example.
  • mpnordland 10y ago
    Then what about a whitelist? You can limit to hearing just from those you've followed.
  • giancarlostoro 10y ago
    What happens when those harassers report posts in the masses and get people silenced? It's a mess when you try to define whatever you think is not right. I had a friend tell me he tried to post a dream he had on Facebook and Facebook didn't let him post it, something about his dream was deemed hate speech somehow. A dream of all things. Lots of issues with this.
  • PKop 10y ago
    How can this not just be blocked / igonored?
    • evan_ 10y ago
      Because harassers can just register a new account in 10 seconds (and frequently do).
      • CaptSpify 10y ago
        Then there should be settings for you to not allow communication except from those in your friends circle. I agree that there are ways around that, but there will always be ways around it. Pretending that filtering speech will make the harassment go away is pretty naive.
        • animeweedlord 10y ago
• FussyZeus 10y ago
  You do not have the right to free speech on Facebook/Twitter/Whatever. You have the right to speak your mind, but no one must give you a podium to do it from.
  • mpnordland 10y ago
    This is an unfortunate truth. It's just so frustrating that the network effect means that moving off of Facebook means loosing a whole bunch of connections that won't go elsewhere.
    • cookiecaper 10y ago
      It wouldn't be this way if we fixed our technology access and intellectual property laws. There are a lot of phenomena in the ethos right now that people find perplexing and internally recognize don't really make sense, but they have a hard time figuring out what causes it. Those people are intentionally deprived of the information necessary to make the connection to the laws that enforce extant monopolies. The network effect works the way it does because we have granted super-restrictive monopoly rights that prevent competition. There was once a company that tried to allow you to export your data from Facebook. It was called Power Ventures. They were sued and shut down by Facebook. The corporate veil was pierced and the founder was found personally liable for $3 million in supposed damages. The technology exists, but we've made laws for companies like Facebook to make sure that their monopolies are not threatened.
      • FussyZeus 10y ago
        When you create things with Facebook, Facebook owns that data. It's in the ToS and they have the right to tell you what you can or cannot do with it. If that's a problem for you don't use Facebook. Networks exist because not everyone is an admin and web developer and wants to build their own website, and unless you own the pipe to the servers, the servers themselves, the software running on the server, and so on you have exactly whatever rights your provider of choice says you have and not one iota more.
• st3v3r 10y ago
  Yeah, no. You've clearly never been on the receiving end of the Internet Hate Brigade, but doing that is not a solution.
• wavelattice 10y ago
  What's wrong with a curated forum for speech, especially if the guidelines are a part of the terms of service? Why does everything need to be all about free speech? No one forces you to use these tools, if they start censoring too much stuff, users can move onto another service. I'd much rather use sites where I can post without worrying about getting bombarded with hate messages. HN is such a kind place compared to twitter and Facebook.
  • Siwi 10y ago
    This is not about no-platforming, where the private company sets the terms of conduct for its users. This is about freedom of expression being encroached upon; the government (EC) is telling companies owned privately by shareholders, and used by its citizens, what opinions they can and can't express without fear of ramifications.
  • alanwatts 10y ago
    >Every dictatorship has ultimately strangled in the web of repression it wove for its people, making mistakes that could not be corrected because criticism was prohibited. -RFK, "Value of Dissent" (21 March 1968) The problem is that of blindness and group think. Every major advancement of human rights has been against the "terms of service" and were extremely uncomfortable ideas for the majority of people. Getting your feelings hurt every now and again can be used as a catalyst for personal and moral growth just like exercising causes pain but increases health.
• balls187 10y ago
  > This is a dangerous path to go down. Much better to allow anyone to post anything they like that's not illegal. > Why is this bad? Because hate speech is not clearly defined. Legality by which jurisdiction? If someone posted the 1-line perl script for DeCSS, would that be blocked? In Turkey, I believe posting anything defamatory regarding AtaTurk is illegal. What about posting Nazi Propaganda in Germany?
• eplanit 10y ago
  Exactly...and as an example, also in today's news is the story of a former Miss Turkey was punished for insulting a public official: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/05/31/former-miss-turkey-gets-suspended-sentence-for-insulting-erdogan/ http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/05/31/former-miss-turke...
• Angostura 10y ago
  > Much better to allow anyone to post anything they like that's not illegal. Do you advocate this approach for Hacker News too? If not, why not?
  • cookiecaper 10y ago
    Not the OP, but HN is a trade forum that addresses a specific audience/niche. It makes sense to cull the submission load to something that fits the forum's designated purpose. Twitter and Facebook are supposed to be platforms for discussing/sharing anything one finds interesting, so restrictions are less sensible there.
• mathattack 10y ago
  This was my first reaction - how do you define Hate Speech? It's similar to the quote about pornography, "I know it when I see it." But today's hate speech was yesteryear's vernacular. My inclination is this is still a good thing to do. Facebook doesn't need to provide a public forum for hate mongers.
• tehrei 10y ago
  > Much better to allow anyone to post anything they like that's not illegal. Isn't that what they're doing though? Hate speech is illegal, so they're removing it.
• psychometry 10y ago
  These are private companies, though. They can police their content however they want and might determine that more restrictive rules are better for the product than loose ones. The host simply accepts the consequences of making the wrong choice. They are not in the business of providing a platform for free speech. Just look at reddit for an example. The quality of their product has suffered because they allowed (and continue to allow) racist and misogynistic subreddits to proliferate. Thus, these segments of their user base also proliferate. At various points, they decided to take action. Whether those actions improved their product or not is debateable. Social media platform users have no right to free speech on the site. They do have a right to start a competing website that allows free speech, though.
  • AnthonyMouse 10y ago
    > Social media platform users have no right to free speech on the site. They do have a right to start a competing website that allows free speech, though. And then the new website becomes popular, and then authoritarians start demanding that the new website ban speech they don't like, and then people who want free speech say that we don't want that and you come back to tell us that they're a private company that can do what they want. They're also a private company that can do what we want.
• deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
• api 10y ago
  An obvious candidate for a next step in this slippery slope is criticism of religion. Will comments criticizing fundamentalist beliefs (young Earth creationism, etc.) be deleted within 24 hours? Identity politics is normally associated with the nominally "left," but really it's the right and especially the religious right who have been experts in the weaponized use of identity politics in the last few decades. The entire Reagan and Bush eras were built on the use of identity politics to mobilize the "base" and keep critics on the defensive. Liberals invent identity politics plays, but conservatives take it to production at scale. I expect to see right-wingers totally co-opt this bandwagon real soon now. The Larry Flynt principle still stands: the measure of freedom of speech is the freedom afforded the most offensive or idiotic speakers. I don't support haters, but I support their right to spew it. Unfriend and block exist for a reason.
• VOYD 10y ago
  It's "recommended" that you only say "positive" things.