Sad to see anti free speech sentiments all over the world. It was constrained to only some areas but now it’s normalized even in places like the UK. I guess with all that’s happening, Nepal doesn’t surprise me.
Free speech existed before social media, so banning social media can't be any less free speech than how things were then. Also the USA has for decades been an outlier in taking an extreme interpretation of free speech that considers, say, Fox News an acceptable use of free speech. Plenty of countries where the regulator would find Fox News unacceptable rank higher than the USA on freedom & democracy indices, so there was always going to be pushback from other countries if the USA attempted to impose the Fox-Newsification of social media on others.
Freedom of speech existed before almost everything. Before the wheel, before the airplane, before newspapers, before radio and TV, and even before pen and paper. I wonder how much less free we'd feel if those things were banned as well?
These platforms themselves don't support free speech. On top of that everything is now heavily algorithmically driven. Everyone is pushed to consume the same type of content while thinking they have free will in their choice not realising they are being subtly manipulated right below their ability to recognise it.
At this point, YouTube probably has a better idea what you will consume next than you yourself do.
i believe a true(tm) free speech platform would allow itself to be flooded with spam. few spaces like that exist sadly, and they're rarely intentional :(
Lol. Every fucking forum has people constantly bellyache about the moderation systems. Hivemind is a dead giveaway for thoughtless criticism. It's so tiresome. If it's flagged on HN it's almost always lowest common denominator mindless drivel or flamebait. No one serious would advocate for a system where comments can't be flagged as such.
You should enable showdead in your user preferences, I think you may be surprised to see what gets flagged.
I think the big issue is new accounts aren't allowed to downvote posts, but can flag them. In effect, the "flag" merely becomes the new downvote, leading to unpopular but relatively high-efffort coments becoming dead and invisible rather than downvoted.
Honestly just switching the two around (anyone can downvote, but only 500+ karma can flag) would go a long way to ensure only actual low-effort posts and spam get flagged, and unpopular posts get downvoted. As it is now, I rarely see an unpopular opinion that was downvoted and isn't already flagged.
"Its free speech when I talk, but if you, someone who says things I disagree with talks, then you're merely an asshole being shown the door"
I wonder what his opinion on pro-Palestinians getting banned on twitter is? Is it different then? What about the canning of Stephen Colbert?
I love these smug posts about how "free speech as a concept only applies to the government censoring people" that were made a couple years ago, where now the same figures are unbelievably opposed to sites like Twitter "excercising their right" to ban dissidents.
Turns out this free speech thing might be a pretty useful ability to have, huh?
> Turns out this free speech thing might be a pretty useful ability to have, huh?
> "Its free speech when I talk, but if you, someone who says things I disagree with talks, then you're merely an asshole being shown the door"
Did you mean to demonstrate this with that strawman of a quote? Not exactly a stellar display of free speech's utility and benefits I'd say. I'm sure you will also passionately go around telling everyone how you just got unfairly censored for it if you even manage to get it flagged. It's especially rich considering this started with the dude above pulling out the hivemind card, which is also notoriously useful and productive of course.
this one has nothing to do with free speech though. they want to know who's providing the megaphone. they requested for a named employee to be responsible for what the business chooses to do in their country.
On the one hand, curtailing free speech is a problem and a lot of governments have started doing it to a massive degree.
On the other hand, social networks are a cancer that are used to spread misinformation, steal information, and invade privacy like nothing else before.
In that regard I do believe that banning them is a net benefit to society, but I fear that for the most part it is done out of the wrong intentions with more sinister goals.
> On the other hand, social networks are a cancer that are used to spread misinformation, steal information, and invade privacy like nothing else before.
There're plenty of things far worse than social network which society has found to acceptable for many decades if not centuries. Things like alcohol, carbonated drinks, sugar etc are all consumed by people in whatever amount they want knowingly full well how much damage it might cause them. We don't need a few people baby-sitting our consumption of diet, be it food or information.
That has always been a feature of having free speech. If only "good" free speech is allowed, it's not free speech. Much of it is going to be disagreeable to some people's views and/or objectively harmful in some ways. There is allowance for a red line, but it only covers a sliver of the universe. That of course begs the parallel to social media being harmful and over the red line - the equivalent of "yelling fire in a movie theater" - and this worthy of a ban within a free speech framework, but I think that is disingenuous, and it's more like banning harmful political tabloids and misinformation (which is at the root of the history of free speech itself).
Moving the red line of acceptability back essentially results in a China style state controlled system, where maybe social media is allowed, but "harmful" aspects are banned by the state. (An outright band of all social media would be quite a bit more extreme than China).
I'm not saying that the latter is necessarily a bad solution, to be clear. There are benefits and drawbacks to both approaches. I certainly don't have the authority or cultural knowledge to project views onto Nepal. On the other hand, I do feel quite confident in saying that the Chinese state control approach to social media is incompatible with any western democracy that is built with values of freedom and free speech. There are other good options for western democracies though, such as Britain and the BBC (before they went through the privatization wave specifically) - state sponsored options don't have to be the only option, stronger regulations for children, and even strong legal restrictions in certain specific areas like dangerous misinformation on public health (which quite arguably passes the red line test even in a liberal free speech framework) or knowingly making up disparaging statements about other people that hurts them. Of course sanctity of the democratic process itself has always been an area where democracies have tighter regulations, and necessarily so. Now for a country like America especially, most of that may be idiologically "off the table" in the views of some, but if we take a more moderate European democracy for example, when I'm ultimately getting out is that there is a lot of middle ground to explore. Ban vs allow is too black or white, especially after being realistic about the fact that bans don't work - people will move to the next paradigm after TikTok/after VR gains mass scale, etc.
