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"They should have the right to make that choice as a private entity." No they should not. And the analogy works: if you're getting filtered on the basis of yo

• kazagistar 6y ago
  There is clear regulation in many countries: nazi speech gets you thrown in jail, the rest is mostly fine. See njmerious european countries like Germany that aren't some dystopia hellscape. That reflects a lot of what happens voluntarily today anyway, but it can't of course be formalized into regulatory law in the USA, because such regulation is restricted by the first amendment. Your panic is unwarranted anyways, because many of those countries do allow free speech restrictions, yet no runaway crazy banning has happened yet. Its just a fictional slippery slope made up to protect hate speech. Words don't protect against tyrany anyways; actually fighting against tyranny does.
  • jariel 6y ago
    "Its just a fictional slippery slope made up to protect hate speech" Ah, and there is the ugly, authoritarian, Stalinist argument right there. "We only ban, denounce, destroy those who are GUILTY of Hate Crimes, so how could you have any worry about that?" People are banned all day long on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Stripe, comments sections etc. for any and all sorts of made up reasons that have nothing to do with hate speech. And FYI you can say things that are essentially hate speech, but in a political context may not be, so it's fine i.e. "White People Are a Disease" is a common thing on Twitter. No problems there apparently. And speaking as a former German resident, they have some real Nazis there, none of this kind of 'made up suff' like in the US. This is a problem that needs to be addressed. 'Freedom of Expression' is the #1 Amendment to the US Constitution and the #1 thing in the relatively new Canadian constitution (#11 in EU) for a very good reason: it took thousands of years for 'every day people' to be able to speak their minds without being shot. We can't leave this issue up to corporate CEO's, mostly trying to read the Twitter tea leaves.
    • kazagistar 6y ago
      > We can't leave this issue up to corporate CEO I agree completely. I think democratizing speech so that it cannot be controlled by any source of power, government or financial, does have real importance. But its not the most important right, compared to life or wellbeing: instead, its important because it supports what's actually important. But I have a message of good news: it turns out speech can be lightly restricted while leading to less authoritarianism or cronyism, as can be seen from numerous examples, by simply restricting speech in a way that is kept controlled by the specific people who are subject to it.
• thephyber 6y ago
  > There is no end to the insanity otherwise; we need basic, smart and clear regulation. I would argue that people should agree on what the right solution is before we enshrine it in law. Also, when you think of the US Congress, do you think of "basic, smart and clear" regulations?
  • jariel 6y ago
    I don't have a lot of faith that we will resolve this, but the 'Net Neutrality' vs. 'Ban Someone I Don't Like' hypocrisy is dizzying. The positions are ideological and naive - they are obviously contradictory - it's only that when they are framed in certain ways, often 'straw-man-ish', do people think they have clarity on them. For example, it's easy to understand why we don't want Verizon charging customers different prices based on the nature of the content. It's easy for us to want to 'ban Nazis' from Reddit. But both of those are unrealistic ideals (i.e. straw men) because neither contemplate the broader application. It's a very slippery slope. It's not a big deal that Nazis get banned from somewhere, and maybe it's not a big deal that Verizon wants to design services such that your profitable business costs 2x on their network - but those bounds expand very rapidly. On the front pages of CNN and Fox right now we have a completely ridiculous war over 'Goya' canned foods because of some arbitrary comments the founder made about Trump. This issue is only going to get much worse and more complicated over time. We have basically no choice but to define what kinds of businesses can use what thresholds, and try to infer what those thresholds are.
    • thephyber 6y ago
      > It's a very slippery slope. > This issue is only going to get much worse and more complicated over time. Slippery slope is a fallacy. Humans aren't required to follow the precedent of previous decisions like SCOTUS justices are. People eventually see the problems with previous choices once the consequences hit a tipping point. We are having multiple moral panics right now. They will pass. People will eventually get more tolerant of others making mistakes on social media; it will accelerate once more of us know someone who directly loses their job/status/etc to a moral panic. Also, there are examples of people who were targeted by moral panic mobs (eg. Colin Kaepernick) who survived the outrage and overcame it. Once enough people get {"cancelled", fired, boycotted, excommunicated, etc}, these calls carry less and less effect over time and social media mobs lose their power. > On the front pages of CNN and Fox right now we have a completely ridiculous war over 'Goya' canned foods because of some arbitrary comments the founder made about Trump. Those are bad gauges of anything except outrage-for-clicks. Those two webpages rile up their core viewership to generate eyeballs and collect web-ad revenue. Trump only got to the front of the 2016 Republican primary because the rest of the field was boring and he riled up moral panics and owned most of the news cycles since. > but those bounds expand very rapidly Not always. And this ignores the observable fact that there is almost always a regression to the mean. There are social frictions which prevent these moral panics from burning too long.