Comment by krapp
16 hours ago
>Well, liquor quite famously is considered as something to be protected in the U.S.; we had widespread civil unrest about removing legal restrictions on it!
And yet there's no Constitutional right to liquor, nor is access to liquor generally recognized as a fundamental human right. The civil unrest was due to the obvious result of banning liquor being the creation of mafia-run black markets. Same as the "war on drugs." Banning drugs only makes black markets and cartels more effective.
>As for cigarettes: what's different about my right to express myself in speech and my right to put what I want in my body?
Cigarettes aren't speech. Speech has value, even if it can do harm. Social media, being a means of effecting speech, has value even if it can do harm. Cigarettes have no value and can only do harm.
>We also heavily restricted speech then; take off the rose-tinted history glasses. Broadcast media restrictions were insane.
Sure. The argument for regulating broadcast tv and radio was the spectrum being a limited resource - but the web is not a limited resource. No matter how big Facebook or Twitter get, we're not going to run out of internets for new platforms.
>I just don't think the way to do that is to stake out deliberately absolutist positions--either because you think an absolutist outcome is good or out of a flawed believe that an extreme position will somehow help move the consensus position in the direction of the extreme.
I don't believe my position is necessarily absolutist - although it gets interpreted as such - I believe that social media platforms have the right and the moral duty to police themselves and deplatform dangerous and extremist content. Free speech doesn't mean freedom from consequence nor does it oblige you a platform. I just don't believe that having governments step into that role is a good idea, and I think recent history in the US and UK back me up in that regard.
And yes, social media platforms may (and will) get things wrong, but they can't send men with guns to shoot me in the head.
But staking out extreme positions to the contrary is sometimes necessary when confronted with extreme positions. I consider the position that social media is more addictive and dangerous than heroin to be extremist, that algorithms need to be banned, that social media platforms need to be nationalized, all of that hyperbole is getting ridiculous to me, and it smacks of a moral panic. But almost no one seems willing to push against it or even question it.
The world at large seems to have descended into moral panic on all sorts of subjects and it's difficult for me to understand precisely how or why. Perhaps it's no coincidence that over the last decade and change there seems to have been broad political shifts to the right. Certainly the various moral panics would have interplay with that, but I'm not sure which came first if either.
Advertising is speech and it's often heavily regulated.
Advertising is speech by corporations, so there's a public interest in regulating it. What's the public interest in regulating your speech, or mine, just because we're on a platform that has an arbitrarily high userbase or uses algorithmic sorting?
Why should it be illegal for me to like fishing videos, and want to be shown more fishing videos if I watch fishing videos?
Or to post at all online without a license and account tied to my real identity?
If I run a car forum, why should it be illegal for me to ban Nazis just because Nazi speech is legal in the US?
Or if my forum gets some arbitrarily large userbase, why should I be forced to give control of my forum to the government to be regulated as a utility?
All of these are rational, likely results of policies that people on HN have advocated, along with banning social media entirely (which would destroy one of the few truly free hypermedia and communication models out there.)
I don't trust the intentions of people who want to regulate social media and I absolutely don't trust the intentions of governments.