My favorite of these has always been the USA PATRIOT Act, or the "Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act". And that one predates LLMs, so… sheesh.
Some parts that really standout to me and still relevant today.
>And, of course, there is no doubt that if we lived in a police state, it would be easier to catch terrorists. If we lived in a country that allowed the police to search your home at any time for any reason; if we lived in a country that allowed the government to open your mail, eavesdrop on your phone conversations, or intercept your email communications; if we lived in a country that allowed the government to hold people in jail indefinitely based on what they write or think, or based on mere suspicion that they are up to no good, then the government would no doubt discover and arrest more terrorists. But that probably would not be a country in which we would want to live.
And
>Preserving our freedom is the reason that we are now engaged in this new war on terrorism. We will lose that war without firing a shot if we sacrifice the liberties of the American people.
And, this one. Which leaves me feeling heavyhearted.
>In the end, the high water mark for my three amendments was 13 votes – that was on the amendment to the computer trespass provision. Prior to that vote the majority leader of the Senate stood up and implored the Senate to vote down all of my amendments, not on their merits, but because a deal had been struck on this bill. This was not, in my view, the finest hour for the United States Senate. The debate on a bill that may have the most far reaching consequences on the civil liberties of the American people in a generation was a non-debate. The merits took a back seat to the deal.
There is no question in my mind that the terrorists won. The result of the Patriot Act has been exactly what was predicted: a country that no longer respects the fundamental freedoms that birthed it.
In my eyes, the US government itself transformed into the most active and prolific terrorist organization on the planet.
For a short time I maintained a GUI for abcde called abcdefghi - A Better CD Encoder For Gnome... and I neither remember what the H I stood for nor could I find any reference for it last time I looked. I think maybe two or three other people ever used it, I had already moved to KDE by late 2001.
Do people not read the article, or do they just read the clickbait title and comment?
Apparently they missed Ron Wyden (co-sponsor) of the bill is a Democrat and the bill is a bi-partisan effort?
Or the fact the EFF is actually in support of the bill:
EFF applauds Senators Cruz and Wyden for taking this critical issue seriously, and we look forward to working with Congress on this bipartisan bill as it moves through the process. We hope it lands on the right balance to provide additional protections for everyday users around freedom of expression.
> Apparently they missed Ron Wyden (co-sponsor) of the bill is a Democrat and the bill is a bi-partisan effort?
And thank god for that. I hope this is indicative of a larger trend in the opposite direction.
I'm not in the US, but here too free speech and other democratic values have been something the far right could contrast themselves on against the center and left. It pisses me off to no end that the issues I've been harping on about for years are now most effectively championed by a group that is otherwise ideologically opposed to me. I'm not mad at the right for this, I'm mad at the center and left who handed it to them.
What? The far right is against free speech. They only ever screech about free speech when someone is experiencing social consequences.
They whine about actual Nazi rhetoric earning bans on private companies' platforms, then turn around and open investigations on people criticizing their masked police force. Attending protests gets you added to the terrorist watchlist.
The proper response to that is to support free speech values in both circumstances. Otherwise, we’re just going to be fighting about the details of whether particular conduct falls within the letter of the free speech protections.
My objection to their comment is that the right does not protect these values.
I have zero idea what they're talking about contrasting against. They seem to be suggesting the center and left do not respect these rights and the far right does.
Party A vaguely claims to support X but fails to do so in practice. Party B uses this to their advantage, making lots of noise about supporting X. Sure, maybe they won't follow through with that if elected but they're still scoring points while campaigning. If you are broadly aligned with party A and also feel quite strongly about X then this will be an objectionable situation all around.
Nazi rhetoric earning bans on private platforms happens because a large number of people organize in protest against such rhetoric. Advertisers see this and don't want to be associated with it, so the ad-driven platforms make the obvious choice to remove the Nazis. This is an example of people exercising their free speech and their often overlooked freedom of/from association.
Nothing stops the Nazis from creating their own platform or buying out an existing one, which is why we have Gab, Truth Social, and X. They're also free to organize themselves and try convincing people to leave the platforms which banned them and/or convince advertisers to apply pressure to let them stay.
You have to appreciate the absurdity of getting airtime on nearly every right wing media platform to complain about being silenced, though.
Arguing private platforms should be forced to keep Nazi rhetoric around isn't meaningfully different from arguing I shouldn't be able to kick a guest out of my house when they start spouting intolerable bullshit.
It wasn’t just “Nazi rhetoric,” but mainstream political speech that some tried to shove into the box containing the taboo for actual nazism. And if you’re response is to draw “distinctions” then you’re inviting a commensurate response from the other side. We can split hairs and shave down the free speech values until they no longer cover the things we want to be able to suppress. But that erodes the free speech norm. Norms are two-way streets. Both sides have to put up with things they detest and trust that the other side will reciprocate. If there is no trust in reciprocity than neither side has an incentive to uphold the norm.
I would absolutely draw a distinction between government enforced censorship and private platforms censoring content.
Where it becomes a larger problem is if the private platform is an effective monopoly; using monopoly power to censor viewpoints would be a bad. Normally we would call a monopoly platform a common carrier and outlaw censorship by them.
The issue is that there are plenty of large companies that are effectively censoring legal views, and making it harder for people to setup alternative platforms that support them. For example, Visa and Mastercard control much of the payment infrastructure used online, and have far stricter rules about the type of content they allow payments for than what many countries actually allow. Same with Paypal to some extent, or Cloudflare, or cloud hosting platforms like AWS.
The problem you're describing isn't so much that private companies are allowed to choose who they do business with, but rather that the US has allowed far too much consolidation of markets to occur.
Regarding your example: I fully agree that Visa and Mastercard have way too much control over payment infrastructure. Before doing anything else, I'd break up their de facto duopoly. I'd focus on Visa in particular, as they control nearly 2/3 the market by themselves.
Currently a lot of thing labelled as Nazi in the last 15 years is literally things any centrist or even leftist in 1980s and 1990s would say and be considered fine.
I would agrer and I'd go further that with communist and socialist leadership in some states i would argue their worse then nazis. Blue states have serious exodus problem.
Meh. There is no communist or socialist leadership in any state. Socialism died in the US when socialists stopped bombing universities and kidnapping heiresses and ceased being an actual threat to power. Now they just exist as an ineffectual and endless purity spiral of shitposting and theory on social media.
Even Mamdani is at best a European style Democratic Socialist, which is still capitalist and nationalist in all but name. Pretending that is equivalent to Nazism is specious at best.
what a strange take for a non-US person. one 'side' takes a couple whacks at free speech. the other side calls them on it, gets in power, and then starts taking a chainsaw to it, and you find reason to be angry that's its side A making a fuss now? and not that side B went rogue?
Shouldn't you care more about the actual issue than who is writing the laws around it? Why are you so pissed off about the "who" instead of happy you are getting what you want?
I'm not getting what I want on free speech, because the center left form the ruling parties. And I wouldn't want the right to be in power anyways, though soon they couldn't do much worse to this democracy.
People here are getting police visits and legal mail because they called a politician a name on twitter or get investigated over a sign they held at a political protest.
and in the US we're having serious free speech issues with the right right now. sorry to be confusing, I just wonder why you think there's necessarily a direct equivalence between the left-right politics of two different countries, and not more concerned about actual rights violations instead of who's scoring political points.
Are you sure they are? Probably most people in your country would label you as far right for championing free speech, no other issues considered. Probably you are doing the same for others.
But this assumes that a bill is required to establish fundamental rights. Free speech unfortunately does not exist anywhere. Even the USA has restrictions, such as "speech aimed at inciting quick reaction/violence" or some other restrictions with regards to "offensive" words and minors or similar. Or, even simpler, to talk very loudly in public late at night. So free speech is not unlimited, despite its name.
> speech aimed at inciting quick reaction/violence
Speech alone isnt sufficient to be charged with that, which is why it passed supreme Court scrutiny. Similar to criminal conspiracy laws, where you have to pursue tangible actions IRL not just talk about it with a friend.
Credible threats of violence are illegal despite "only" being speech. Also "obscene" material without any other redeeming quality. So there are definitely exceptions in the US.
Also I believe you are wrong about incitement. It is the speech itself that is illegal, you (ie the speaker) don't have to do anything yourself or even really know or otherwise interact with the would be perpetrators.
Yeah. On pretty much every other topic important to me, their official positions are either diametrically opposed or lean into another direction far enough that supporting other parties would be a better choice.
> Apparently they missed Ron Wyden (co-sponsor) of the bill is a Democrat and the bill is a bi-partisan effort?
And why should that matter? Your assumption here is that these two parties are different to one another AND not corrupt. I don't see why these two assumptions should be true intrinsically. Can you explain why, if a Democrat does xyz, one should not be wary anymore?
As for "bi-partisan effort": look at public hearings recently. On simple questions such as was the storm of the capitol an attempt to overthrow a democratically elected government, all the clown members of the current clown administration dodged to answer that. Any more questions necessary here?
> Or the fact the EFF is actually in support of the bill
And why would that matter either? The EFF is not a holy shield that has taken away people's ability to think for themselves. I don't need any moral compass given by EFF or anyone else to know where and when and how corruption works.
Cynically, if I was looking at this as if both parties are protecting their interests - they might be realizing that this behavior going forward is going to be harmful to their donors, and thus themselves. State mandated TV/speech is not necessarily great for business, depending on the tastes and whims of whoever is in power at the moment.
Who are you referring to? At the time I'm replying to this, there are 4 other top-level comments on this thread, and the only one even implying that it was a partisan effort was someone mentioning the "current regime" in a joking sort of way. Everyone knows that Liberals also want to limit free speech. That's not new.
> At EFF, we’re continuing to fight back on behalf of those censored by government coercion. One recent example: we represent the creator of ICEBlock, an app that allows the public to report immigration enforcement activity in their communities.…
> EFF applauds Senators Cruz and Wyden for taking this critical issue seriously
Credit where it’s due, but I doubt that ICEBlock was the first thing Ted Cruz wanted to benefit from this bill
I am conflicted. On the one hand getting governments to wade into what is fair speech is absolutely a slippery slope. Yet, platform firms are not correctly incenvitived arbiters of speech either.
Square this circle:
1) Big Social Media firms have to make decisions on speech.
2) The ideals of free speech that everyone espouses are from an era where publishing and control of publishing was nascent.
3) As businesses, it is their job to ensure they take care of their shareholders, and thus this means driving engagement.
4) As humans, we respond and engage with certain stimului more actively than others.
5) As of 2026, moderation is still value driven. Private entities must now what is fair speech and moderate according to their values.
6) Platforms, following the incentives that are set out for them, create environments that are as addictive as possible for its users. This is what their job is.
You can make small enclaves for long form content. However, the majority of the voting population is drugged to the gills with enrapturing content.
This is not a recipie for a healthy information economy, this is the opium wars being waged by our own business structures on our own people - a druggie information economy.
Giving governments more power is ... oof... a bad idea. We need more genuine efforts to ensure a healthier content environment that works for society.
Do note, that while US based commenters are concerned, the situation is even worse in other nations, given that Authoritarianism is on an upswing. Figuring this out is not a trivial philosophical issue.
Well put. There are probably a few 100 other edge cases worth examination but you got it down to a digestible list.
One trick i always apply to products is to ask yourself what kind of people you are looking to create. Who are the resource and what do you want to change them into? Anything we say is manipulation so appealing to ignorance isn't an answer.
It seems we like people to be constructive and feel empowered to do useful things. We would want them to have access to useful educational information to guide them on their path to enlightenment. We want everyone to contribute to the wellbeing of humanity and the environment which starts by convincing them they can. Then we also don't want to force people into such a narrow scope that they can't express themselves freely anymore.
It would probably be funny to have a personalized LLM review your content contribution before you hit the submit button and present you with a harsh bullet list enummerating everything that is wrong with your contribution. Then if your writings meet certain criteria the right audience should be exposed to it.
We could make it even more spectaculaire by merging the contribution with similar ones under the guidance of its authors. In stead of 100 very similar recipes for apple pie have an AI assisted battle royale that arrives at one that describes the variations (and lists its 100 sources)
You might even identify and recruit some pâtissiers to write walls of text denouncing and/or praising some variations. Currants, sultanas or raisins? The world needs to know.
> Big Social Media firms have to make decisions on speech.
The fiction underlying their section 230 liability shield is that they don’t have to make those decisions. They’re just “dumb pipes” for user generated content. The Supreme Court punted on this issue in Twitter v. Taamneh but it’s going to get resolved eventually.
This is a common but backwards misconception. Section 230 was written to ensure that online platforms could make decisions on speech and did not have to just be dumb pipes. Congress was worried that a "dumb pipe only" regulatory regime was taking shape through court decisions, which would have forced platforms to choose between letting users post obscene rants and accepting liability for anything defamatory users might say.
This bill is about enhancing the protections of lawful free-speech under the US constitution.
Generally speaking, we deem various kinds of speech that harms people as NOT protected under the first amendment, and that kind of speech would not be protected here.
Yelling “Fire!” in a crowded theater, libel and slander, speech calling for violence, and fraudulent advertising are some typical examples of speech not protected by the first amendment.
It would be tricky, but we could reasonably categorize engagement algorithms with certain properties as harmful to people and not subject to first amendment protections. This would be consumer protection, like laws against fraudulent advertising and other misleading claims.
The exceptions you're listing are mostly real but much more narrow than you're thinking. Only threats of imminent violence are excepted; it's completely protected by the First Amendment to say things like "it's getting to a point where we might have to be violent" or "I would commit violence if suchandsuch were to happen to me", even if other people reasonably find those statements to be stressful and alarming. Similarly, while defamation as such is illegal, it's not defamatory to say something like "John is a stupid fool who can't be trusted", even if I know many people think he's smart and trustworthy and even if his reputation is ruined by my statement.
There's simply no general principle that speech which harms people can be restricted.
You're specifically arguing that speech that harms is disallowed, and algorithms could be construed as harmful, so hey, let's not protect them with free speech.
These are legal matters, so pedantry is part of the equation. The popehat piece is specifically written to refute this entire line of argument: free speech has extremely specific carveouts, and the way you're arguing isn't in line with how that would be expanded. This is outlined very specifically in the Popehat piece.
This is in no way a pedantic digression: I'm pointing out a fundamental flaw in your proposal, and citing work by lawyers that describes that flaw in detail.
The video is educational. It uses an extreme scenario to make its point, but that's because it's being illustrative.
Okay, so maybe you don't believe a lawyer. Let's try a different lawyer that's more famous.
> So, there you have it: obscenity, defamation, fraud, incitement, and speech integral to criminal conduct. Throw in true threats - which was left out of this list for some reason - and child pornography, and you’ve got the categories. Note that the Court specifically identifies them as well-known and historic, not as in flux.
> we could reasonably categorize engagement algorithms with certain properties as harmful to people and not subject to first amendment protections
This is a hope, however I have not seen any effort that wasn't scuppered, until recently.
The social media bans are a lurch in that direction.
I could separate them out into different strands:
1) Society saying that the engagement algorithms is not what we want to have in our lives or the lives of our children
2) Problematic technical implementations, or benign technical implementations that invade privacy and support government gaining more powers over speech.
Any regulation shaping algorithms is perilously close to shaping speech. Now if you say algorithms are speech or editorial decisions that platforms have their own freedom to choose, then you essentially strip them of their protections.
This would force a form of moderation that would have most people up in arms on HN.
I fully admit, I am being rough in my cuts; the point I am attempting to make is that any decision to decide what constitutes protected and unprotected speech is going to be government interference.
It may even be likely that the firms such as Meta or Tik Tok would end up as untenable under such rules.
The case which originated the "yelling fire in a crowded theater" analogy, Schenk v. US, was overturned more than half a century ago. And in that case, the proverbial fire-yellers were socialists distributing pamphlets.
> Generally speaking, we deem various kinds of speech that harms people as NOT protected under the first amendment, and that kind of speech would not be protected here.
That is not a general principle. Consider the following: it is now illegal to say the word “election” because it would harm the President.
I think "government pressure" needs to be defined. If vaccination misinformation is spreading like wildfire on social media, and measles and other deadly diseases are getting out of control, and the government urges social media to control the spread of misinformation, is that "government pressure" and should it be illegal?
Now you can argue that the right way to counter misinformation is by countering it with legit information, and that's certainly a valid argument.
But that idealistic approach quickly runs into a wall. As Bill Gates said on Oprah's show, "We were a bit naive: we thought the internet, with the availability of information, would make us all a lot more factual. The fact that people would seek out—kind of a niche of misinformation—we were a bit naive."
So yes, people seek out misinformation, because of some inherent belief that there is a vast conspiracy going on that they aren't aware of, and the more conspiratorial some news sounds, the more likely they are to believe it. So you can't necessarily fight misinformation with legit information, unfortunately. As a result, a public health crisis is likely if social media companies do nothing to control the spread of misinformation.
>the government urges social media to control the spread of misinformation
There's always an implied or else. Stop harming the public, because the government is obligated to stop harms to the public and if they have to step in, it won't be favorable to your company.
Honestly I never thought there was an implied or else, until the FCC started threatening pulling TV licenses. My understanding of the last administration was they were contacting platforms to say "hey, we found some postings that appear to be against your terms of service". I will agree that was a bad look, though.
> and the government urges social media to control the spread of misinformation, is that "government pressure" and should it be illegal?
Honestly, yeah. The government can counterprogram. But it shouldn’t be allowed to pressure anyone to take that content down (or limit its visibility).
Half the reason this anti-vax nonsense gained staying power is as a backlash to such government interventions.
The proper solution to misinformation is standard liability. If you say measles vaccines are useless and cause autism, neither of which is true, and someone’s kid dies of measles after listening to you, you cut them a cheque. (But don’t go to jail.)
There is an important difference between government persuasion and government coercion. The government should not be allowed to threaten platforms with punishment unless they remove lawful speech. But public-health officials should be allowed to tell platforms, "This claim is false, it is contributing to real-world harm, and we urge you to reduce its reach."
Just like you and I have a right to free speech, so does the government. The government can urge, warn, criticize, request, and share public-health information.
> public-health officials should be allowed to tell platforms, "This claim is false, it is contributing to real-world harm, and we urge you to reduce its reach."
I think the line between that and Brendan Carr calling ABC and saying “Jimmy Kimmel is lying, he is contributing to real-world harm, and I urge you to reduce his reach” while e.g. a merger is under review or licenses up for renewal is impossible to delineate.
And again, in any case, it didn’t work. It probably threw fuel on the fire. Government shouldn’t be saying what political speech is and isn’t said. That’s what the First Amendment ensconces.
Agree, it is hard to delineate, especially when the government is run by people that are thin-skinned and retaliatory. That's what makes this issue so challenging.
But is it fair to curtail speech because someone might perceive it as a threat? That question applies to the government as well as to individuals. I think it has to be resolved on a case-by-cases basis by courts.
A good reminder in the article about something a lot of folks here tend to forget:
> Finally, contrary to what many in Congress have been saying, social media platforms and other internet intermediaries have their own First Amendment rights to decide how they moderate users’ speech. They are not “state actors” and do not have an obligation under the First Amendment to allow all user speech on their platforms.
Private platforms do not have an obligation, legal, moral, or otherwise, to host or boost your harmful opinions and mis/disinformation campaigns.
Completely disagree, given algorithms artificially boost content. The comparison to being an "online town square" is inapt, and I think a lot of people pushing that particular narrative actually know it too.
Ultimtately, though, while the billionaires running the show are ruthless, their puppets in the current administration are really so incompetent that they will literally ruin everything, including their own corrupt ambitions.
So the EFF and ACLU seem to support this bill. I'm skeptical given one of the sponsors is Ted Cruz who famously said [1]:
> After earlier stating he first ran for Congress in 2012 “with the stated intention of being the leading defender of Israel in the United States Senate,”
Texas has laws that government contractors must promise not to boycott the state of Israel [2]. 35+ US states have similar laws [3]. This on its face seems like a government restriction on speech, squarely violating the First Amendment. The Supreme Court, who otherwise love to pay lip service to the First Amendment, go out of their way to avoid anti-BDS challenges [4]. Courts have generally split hairs here saying anti-BDS impacts commerce and is speec-neutral. That's a complete cop out.
So do I think that Ted Cruz really cares about free speech? Not for a second. I suspect that if this passes, it'll only ever be applied in cases where governments officials attack conservative misinformation (eg stolen elections, anti-vaxxer anything). Any speech contradicting US foreign policy will be labelled as domestic terrorism so First Amendment freedoms don't seem to apply (I suspect).
US tech platforms already have incredible conservative bias. Meta's policy chief, Jordana Cutler (who worked in Benjamin Netanyahu's office), boasts about taking down pro-Palestinian content [5]. Twitter is a Nazi shithole [6]. And worse [7]. The whole manosphere, which is an alt-right entry point, flourishes on every platform.
So, no, I have no confidence in anything Ted Cruz supports.
Huh? We have more free speech than ever online at this moment. The last regime colluded with the major social media companies to censor people they didn't like and it's also recently come to light that they attempted to get the Joe Rogan/Spotify deal nuked, all based on censoring speech they don't like.
The liberal government of the UK is moving toward complete online censorship with their bill to prevent children from going on social media sites. The reality is that they will now be able to identify and will arrest people for posting opinions they don't like. This has already been happening for the last couple of years and will now be even easier. This is exactly how it works in China.
If Democrats come into power again in the US, this will soon be coming to a computer near you.
This should be the #1 story on HN, but the tech community has been strangely silent on the subject....
I just wish the people claiming to be champions of free speech and rights will just admit that this all goes out the window when it applies to speech and people you don't like. It would make everything much easier.
Collusion is the wrong word. Coercion is more appropriate.
> I just wish the people claiming to be champions of free speech and rights will just admit that this all goes out the window when it applies to speech and people you don't like
Try using the word "cis-gender" on Twitter and let us know how that goes.
You are kidding yourself if you think this is a liberal vs conservative issue.
The current FCC chairman threatens the broadcast license and to block deals of networks who air shows the president doesn’t like. These threats appear to have lead directly to the cancellation of shows — a clear violation of the first amendment, though there have been no consequences so far.
If you really care about this issue, get out of your information bubble.
Whichever party is in power, Democrats or Republicans, liberals or conservatives, have tried to suppress speech they don’t like when they get in power. If we pretend this is a partisan issue we can’t stop them.
The level of doublethink from the right is completely insane.
Additionally, when I fact check what they're whining about, it is often like, "the White House requested Twitter ban medical misinformation about coronavirus, without threat of consequences, and they did."
I'll give you that Liberals are also antagonistic towards online free speech, but pretending that we have more free speech online right now than ever before is the most insane thing I've ever heard. Just because you can post nazi shit on Twitter now does not mean we have more online freedom.
Well sure. The police can arrest you whenever they want, we rely on the courts to sort it out. Qualified immunity is terrible law, but that doesn't have anything to do with free speech.
Larry Bushart was arrested and jailed for more than a month for posting a Charlie Kirk meme.
Douglass Mackey was arrested and convicted for posting satirical Clinton election ads, though this was later overturned after he spent months in prison.
When OP said we have more free speech than ever, and some here quibble with that, it's not necessarily about coercion under legislation. The early web saw a hell of a lot of racist or angry flamer posts on any site where any reader could comment. A classic example are GNAA posts in nearly every comment thread on Slashdot, HN's forebear.
Today's internet has, for the masses, contracted into a limited number of commercial platforms that have strict moderation for brand-protection reasons. Many platforms have outright removed fondly remembered discussion fora (e.g. IMDB, or Lonely Planet's Thorn Tree) just so they don't have to bear the expense of moderating and ensuring no posts threaten their brand image.
I imagine that most people here will deem the decline in highly toxic troll posts a good thing, but any veteran of the old internet will still notice that the range of speech met in daily net surfing is less than it once was.
It’s the official position of the US government that posting the number 8647 is a crime. I know this sounds like a crazy thing I made up, but they posted a detailed explainer (https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/federal-grand-jury-indicts-fo...): any reasonable person, they argue, would know that this number is a threat to kill the President.
It's also true, I should acknowledge, that the US has a strong system of checks and balances against stupid proclamations like this and a generally oppositional culture around speech restrictions. It's unlikely I'll be arrested for posting 8647, or indeed for pointing you to other illegal numbers like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Speech_Flag, and if I were I'd wear it as a badge of honor. But just because Americans are successfully fighting it doesn't mean there's no issue.
I wonder if the EFF had something specific to say when various PACs and a former president tried getting Spotify to take Joe Rogan off the air for his Covid opinions?
This is a new allegation Joe Rogan made offhand in a podcast two days ago, and he said while making it that he can't tell us which PACs or which presidents were involved. What specifics could the EFF offer in the absence of any meaningful details about what happened?
It is not that i think all right wing hosts are liars,they love to play the victim, but all I see as a source is "Joe Rogan says...". Quoting yourself is not a source.
But everyone here loves jawboning and agrees the government should suppress speech. Well, at least when their team is in office. Whether it's ICE Block or IVM Block, you can probably find a reason why you too think speech freedom is just a little too free for your tastes.
> But everyone here loves jawboning and agrees the government should suppress speech.
That sure is quite an assumption you're making.
Governments should have zero control over speech and zero ability to impose consequences on speech. Individuals and most groups should have absolute freedom of association, which is precisely what they're exercising when choosing not to associate with some speech and some speakers
> Perhaps you are an "absolute" free speech absolutist
Emphatically not, in the sense it's commonly used, but I think the distinction between "shunned by private individuals/groups/companies" and "prosecuted" is critically important.
I'm not going to go through all of these point-by-point, but as a couple of examples:
> - Swatting?
Inciting an action should be charged on the basis of the action and the probability of having incited it. Charge them with attempted murder. Also, fix the mechanisms that make it feasible for a person to too-easily call down excessive force on someone's home or office.
> - Yelling "Fire!" in the proverbial crowded theater?
Inciting a predictable panic that gets people injured should get you charged over the injuries. But also, the original version of that phrase was used as part of an abominably bad ruling restricting people speaking out against a military draft, so it's a bad example.
See also laws about fraud: the speech isn't the issue, the deception leading to swindling people out of something is.
Similarly, credible threats to commit a crime should be charged accordingly, not because of the speech but as prevention of an intended/planned crime. (With a great deal of caution, due to the balance between preventing it and the hazards of charging a crime that hasn't happened yet; Minority Report is not a blueprint.)
I suspect it goes to explain why this new bill is bipartisan. That case failed because the plaintiffs did not have a legal standing to sue.
"In a dissent that detailed emails, press conferences, and past decisions, Justice Alito painted the "jawboning" as "blatantly unconstitutional".
Wednesday's ruling, he wrote, "permits the successful campaign of coercion in this case to stand as an attractive model for future officials who want to control what the people say, hear, and think"."
Regardless if one agree with them, it do demonstrate that conservative side think that there is a risk that governments will attempt to persuade platforms to moderate content, and that this is a risk. This new bill seem to make it much easier to give people a legal standing to sue, thus allowing the supreme court to give a different verdict if a similar situation happen again.
> I suspect it goes to explain why this new bill is bipartisan. That case failed because the plaintiffs did not have a legal standing to sue.
In that case (Murthy v. Missouri), Missouri and Louisiana did not have standing to sue because they did not demonstrate a minimum of evidence that the government coerced (as opposed to requested) platforms to remove speech.
> This new bill seem to make it much easier to give people a legal standing to sue, thus allowing the supreme court to give a different verdict if a similar situation happen again.
The lack of standing was not due to something like "no law says you can sue for such a violation". This law solves a problem that courts did not consider in Murthy v. Missouri.
Obviously censorship of both the location of ICE agents (or other terrorist threats bearing state decals) and censorship of discourse over the science of respiratory pathogens has been awful; I don't recall anyone here on HN cheerleading either of them.
In fact, it seems to me that you've chosen precisely two areas between which a palpable bridge exists, contradicting the two-party zeitgeist.
HN, for all its many flaws, is one of the few places where important evidence such as the diamond princess dataset and the cochrane review of evidence of mask (in)efficacy received robust discussion and, seemingly, resulted in changed minds.
Likewise, I don't recall anyone but a few trolls suggesting that Apple's assistance to ICE in covering its tracks was a legitimate exercise of state (to the extent that pressure was a factor) or corporate (to the extent that it created market esteem) pressure.
>HN, for all its many flaws, is one of the few places where important evidence such as the diamond princess dataset and the cochrane review of evidence of mask (in)efficacy received robust discussion and, seemingly, resulted in changed minds.
I get the feeling we're not discussing this submission on HN
I get the feeling it's going to be flagged/dead in short order.
edit: Subarashi! How elegant. HN has flagged it less than 30 minutes after I made this comment. So much for the bastion of enlightenment and free speech known as HN, right?
JAWBONE == Justice Against Weaponized Bureaucratic Overreach to Networked Expression. Max Kudos. Ron and Ted owe a staffer (or staffers) a few drinks.
My favorite of these has always been the USA PATRIOT Act, or the "Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act". And that one predates LLMs, so… sheesh.
I always think of this when someone mentions the patriot act.
The single senator who opposed it.
http://www.archipelago.org/vol6-2/feingold.htm
Thanks for the link, a good read
Its a great little snapshot in time.
Some parts that really standout to me and still relevant today.
>And, of course, there is no doubt that if we lived in a police state, it would be easier to catch terrorists. If we lived in a country that allowed the police to search your home at any time for any reason; if we lived in a country that allowed the government to open your mail, eavesdrop on your phone conversations, or intercept your email communications; if we lived in a country that allowed the government to hold people in jail indefinitely based on what they write or think, or based on mere suspicion that they are up to no good, then the government would no doubt discover and arrest more terrorists. But that probably would not be a country in which we would want to live.
And
>Preserving our freedom is the reason that we are now engaged in this new war on terrorism. We will lose that war without firing a shot if we sacrifice the liberties of the American people.
And, this one. Which leaves me feeling heavyhearted.
>In the end, the high water mark for my three amendments was 13 votes – that was on the amendment to the computer trespass provision. Prior to that vote the majority leader of the Senate stood up and implored the Senate to vote down all of my amendments, not on their merits, but because a deal had been struck on this bill. This was not, in my view, the finest hour for the United States Senate. The debate on a bill that may have the most far reaching consequences on the civil liberties of the American people in a generation was a non-debate. The merits took a back seat to the deal.
There is no question in my mind that the terrorists won. The result of the Patriot Act has been exactly what was predicted: a country that no longer respects the fundamental freedoms that birthed it.
In my eyes, the US government itself transformed into the most active and prolific terrorist organization on the planet.
I like MAGIC CARPET "Maritime Augmented Guidance with Integrated Controls for Carrier Approach and Recovery Precision Enabling Technologies"
For a short time I maintained a GUI for abcde called abcdefghi - A Better CD Encoder For Gnome... and I neither remember what the H I stood for nor could I find any reference for it last time I looked. I think maybe two or three other people ever used it, I had already moved to KDE by late 2001.
Some gigachad on the IBM POWER team gave us the instruction for Enforce In-order Execution for I/O—eieio.
I believe that was Old MacDonald, yes, after a career change from agriculture.
Do people not read the article, or do they just read the clickbait title and comment?
Apparently they missed Ron Wyden (co-sponsor) of the bill is a Democrat and the bill is a bi-partisan effort?
Or the fact the EFF is actually in support of the bill:
EFF applauds Senators Cruz and Wyden for taking this critical issue seriously, and we look forward to working with Congress on this bipartisan bill as it moves through the process. We hope it lands on the right balance to provide additional protections for everyday users around freedom of expression.
> Apparently they missed Ron Wyden (co-sponsor) of the bill is a Democrat and the bill is a bi-partisan effort?
And thank god for that. I hope this is indicative of a larger trend in the opposite direction.
I'm not in the US, but here too free speech and other democratic values have been something the far right could contrast themselves on against the center and left. It pisses me off to no end that the issues I've been harping on about for years are now most effectively championed by a group that is otherwise ideologically opposed to me. I'm not mad at the right for this, I'm mad at the center and left who handed it to them.
What? The far right is against free speech. They only ever screech about free speech when someone is experiencing social consequences.
They whine about actual Nazi rhetoric earning bans on private companies' platforms, then turn around and open investigations on people criticizing their masked police force. Attending protests gets you added to the terrorist watchlist.
The proper response to that is to support free speech values in both circumstances. Otherwise, we’re just going to be fighting about the details of whether particular conduct falls within the letter of the free speech protections.
My objection to their comment is that the right does not protect these values.
I have zero idea what they're talking about contrasting against. They seem to be suggesting the center and left do not respect these rights and the far right does.
Party A vaguely claims to support X but fails to do so in practice. Party B uses this to their advantage, making lots of noise about supporting X. Sure, maybe they won't follow through with that if elected but they're still scoring points while campaigning. If you are broadly aligned with party A and also feel quite strongly about X then this will be an objectionable situation all around.
There's a very important distinction to be made.
Nazi rhetoric earning bans on private platforms happens because a large number of people organize in protest against such rhetoric. Advertisers see this and don't want to be associated with it, so the ad-driven platforms make the obvious choice to remove the Nazis. This is an example of people exercising their free speech and their often overlooked freedom of/from association.
Nothing stops the Nazis from creating their own platform or buying out an existing one, which is why we have Gab, Truth Social, and X. They're also free to organize themselves and try convincing people to leave the platforms which banned them and/or convince advertisers to apply pressure to let them stay.
You have to appreciate the absurdity of getting airtime on nearly every right wing media platform to complain about being silenced, though.
Arguing private platforms should be forced to keep Nazi rhetoric around isn't meaningfully different from arguing I shouldn't be able to kick a guest out of my house when they start spouting intolerable bullshit.
It wasn’t just “Nazi rhetoric,” but mainstream political speech that some tried to shove into the box containing the taboo for actual nazism. And if you’re response is to draw “distinctions” then you’re inviting a commensurate response from the other side. We can split hairs and shave down the free speech values until they no longer cover the things we want to be able to suppress. But that erodes the free speech norm. Norms are two-way streets. Both sides have to put up with things they detest and trust that the other side will reciprocate. If there is no trust in reciprocity than neither side has an incentive to uphold the norm.
I would absolutely draw a distinction between government enforced censorship and private platforms censoring content.
Where it becomes a larger problem is if the private platform is an effective monopoly; using monopoly power to censor viewpoints would be a bad. Normally we would call a monopoly platform a common carrier and outlaw censorship by them.
The issue is that there are plenty of large companies that are effectively censoring legal views, and making it harder for people to setup alternative platforms that support them. For example, Visa and Mastercard control much of the payment infrastructure used online, and have far stricter rules about the type of content they allow payments for than what many countries actually allow. Same with Paypal to some extent, or Cloudflare, or cloud hosting platforms like AWS.
The problem you're describing isn't so much that private companies are allowed to choose who they do business with, but rather that the US has allowed far too much consolidation of markets to occur.
Regarding your example: I fully agree that Visa and Mastercard have way too much control over payment infrastructure. Before doing anything else, I'd break up their de facto duopoly. I'd focus on Visa in particular, as they control nearly 2/3 the market by themselves.
>I would absolutely draw a distinction between government enforced censorship and private platforms censoring content.
I would absolutely not.
So... If I run a bbs, I can't delete spam or porn, or kick people off my platform? That's an infringement of free speech?
Or say I run a newspaper, I have to print every editorial letter somebody sends in? I can't pick and choose?
Do I as the platform owner lose my free speech?
Currently lot of mainstream political speech is literally things the nazis said
I agre, look at what that popular Maine democrat has said. He even has nazi tattoos. These nazis are taking over.
Currently a lot of thing labelled as Nazi in the last 15 years is literally things any centrist or even leftist in 1980s and 1990s would say and be considered fine.
Give an example?
That works where discussion happens between rational adults that might or might not disagree and see either as ok. Not in 2026.
I would agrer and I'd go further that with communist and socialist leadership in some states i would argue their worse then nazis. Blue states have serious exodus problem.
Meh. There is no communist or socialist leadership in any state. Socialism died in the US when socialists stopped bombing universities and kidnapping heiresses and ceased being an actual threat to power. Now they just exist as an ineffectual and endless purity spiral of shitposting and theory on social media.
Even Mamdani is at best a European style Democratic Socialist, which is still capitalist and nationalist in all but name. Pretending that is equivalent to Nazism is specious at best.
European style Democratic Socialist maybe is pretty great then?
what a strange take for a non-US person. one 'side' takes a couple whacks at free speech. the other side calls them on it, gets in power, and then starts taking a chainsaw to it, and you find reason to be angry that's its side A making a fuss now? and not that side B went rogue?
I've read this five times and I still can't reconcile it with what I said.
Shouldn't you care more about the actual issue than who is writing the laws around it? Why are you so pissed off about the "who" instead of happy you are getting what you want?
I'm not getting what I want on free speech, because the center left form the ruling parties. And I wouldn't want the right to be in power anyways, though soon they couldn't do much worse to this democracy.
People here are getting police visits and legal mail because they called a politician a name on twitter or get investigated over a sign they held at a political protest.
Thousands of cases at this point.
and in the US we're having serious free speech issues with the right right now. sorry to be confusing, I just wonder why you think there's necessarily a direct equivalence between the left-right politics of two different countries, and not more concerned about actual rights violations instead of who's scoring political points.
> ideologically opposed to me
Are you sure they are? Probably most people in your country would label you as far right for championing free speech, no other issues considered. Probably you are doing the same for others.
Every faction claims they support free speech and every faction also supports suppression of certain types of speech.
But do you agree this bill is positive?
But this assumes that a bill is required to establish fundamental rights. Free speech unfortunately does not exist anywhere. Even the USA has restrictions, such as "speech aimed at inciting quick reaction/violence" or some other restrictions with regards to "offensive" words and minors or similar. Or, even simpler, to talk very loudly in public late at night. So free speech is not unlimited, despite its name.
> this assumes that a bill is required to establish fundamental rights
No, it assumes a bill is required to establish consequences for fundamental rights being denied.
> speech aimed at inciting quick reaction/violence
Speech alone isnt sufficient to be charged with that, which is why it passed supreme Court scrutiny. Similar to criminal conspiracy laws, where you have to pursue tangible actions IRL not just talk about it with a friend.
Credible threats of violence are illegal despite "only" being speech. Also "obscene" material without any other redeeming quality. So there are definitely exceptions in the US.
Also I believe you are wrong about incitement. It is the speech itself that is illegal, you (ie the speaker) don't have to do anything yourself or even really know or otherwise interact with the would be perpetrators.
Yeah. On pretty much every other topic important to me, their official positions are either diametrically opposed or lean into another direction far enough that supporting other parties would be a better choice.
> Apparently they missed Ron Wyden (co-sponsor) of the bill is a Democrat and the bill is a bi-partisan effort?
And why should that matter? Your assumption here is that these two parties are different to one another AND not corrupt. I don't see why these two assumptions should be true intrinsically. Can you explain why, if a Democrat does xyz, one should not be wary anymore?
As for "bi-partisan effort": look at public hearings recently. On simple questions such as was the storm of the capitol an attempt to overthrow a democratically elected government, all the clown members of the current clown administration dodged to answer that. Any more questions necessary here?
> Or the fact the EFF is actually in support of the bill
And why would that matter either? The EFF is not a holy shield that has taken away people's ability to think for themselves. I don't need any moral compass given by EFF or anyone else to know where and when and how corruption works.
Cynically, if I was looking at this as if both parties are protecting their interests - they might be realizing that this behavior going forward is going to be harmful to their donors, and thus themselves. State mandated TV/speech is not necessarily great for business, depending on the tastes and whims of whoever is in power at the moment.
Who are you referring to? At the time I'm replying to this, there are 4 other top-level comments on this thread, and the only one even implying that it was a partisan effort was someone mentioning the "current regime" in a joking sort of way. Everyone knows that Liberals also want to limit free speech. That's not new.
Wydens bullied a man to death.
https://www.koin.com/news/oregon/lawsuit-claims-wydens-famil...
> At EFF, we’re continuing to fight back on behalf of those censored by government coercion. One recent example: we represent the creator of ICEBlock, an app that allows the public to report immigration enforcement activity in their communities.…
> EFF applauds Senators Cruz and Wyden for taking this critical issue seriously
Credit where it’s due, but I doubt that ICEBlock was the first thing Ted Cruz wanted to benefit from this bill
Another good bill for privacy that is actually good: https://www.surveillanceaccountability.com/
Remember fact checking, snopes and stuff? Yeah, maybe a bit too late.
I'm surprised to see Ted Cruz co-sponsoring this bill given Trump's proclivity to pressure TV networks into silencing and/or firing hosts.
Cruz was also an outspoken critic of the FCC pressuring/threatening late night shows.
I am conflicted. On the one hand getting governments to wade into what is fair speech is absolutely a slippery slope. Yet, platform firms are not correctly incenvitived arbiters of speech either.
Square this circle:
1) Big Social Media firms have to make decisions on speech.
2) The ideals of free speech that everyone espouses are from an era where publishing and control of publishing was nascent.
3) As businesses, it is their job to ensure they take care of their shareholders, and thus this means driving engagement.
4) As humans, we respond and engage with certain stimului more actively than others.
5) As of 2026, moderation is still value driven. Private entities must now what is fair speech and moderate according to their values.
6) Platforms, following the incentives that are set out for them, create environments that are as addictive as possible for its users. This is what their job is.
You can make small enclaves for long form content. However, the majority of the voting population is drugged to the gills with enrapturing content.
This is not a recipie for a healthy information economy, this is the opium wars being waged by our own business structures on our own people - a druggie information economy.
Giving governments more power is ... oof... a bad idea. We need more genuine efforts to ensure a healthier content environment that works for society.
Do note, that while US based commenters are concerned, the situation is even worse in other nations, given that Authoritarianism is on an upswing. Figuring this out is not a trivial philosophical issue.
Well put. There are probably a few 100 other edge cases worth examination but you got it down to a digestible list.
One trick i always apply to products is to ask yourself what kind of people you are looking to create. Who are the resource and what do you want to change them into? Anything we say is manipulation so appealing to ignorance isn't an answer.
It seems we like people to be constructive and feel empowered to do useful things. We would want them to have access to useful educational information to guide them on their path to enlightenment. We want everyone to contribute to the wellbeing of humanity and the environment which starts by convincing them they can. Then we also don't want to force people into such a narrow scope that they can't express themselves freely anymore.
It would probably be funny to have a personalized LLM review your content contribution before you hit the submit button and present you with a harsh bullet list enummerating everything that is wrong with your contribution. Then if your writings meet certain criteria the right audience should be exposed to it.
We could make it even more spectaculaire by merging the contribution with similar ones under the guidance of its authors. In stead of 100 very similar recipes for apple pie have an AI assisted battle royale that arrives at one that describes the variations (and lists its 100 sources)
You might even identify and recruit some pâtissiers to write walls of text denouncing and/or praising some variations. Currants, sultanas or raisins? The world needs to know.
> Big Social Media firms have to make decisions on speech.
The fiction underlying their section 230 liability shield is that they don’t have to make those decisions. They’re just “dumb pipes” for user generated content. The Supreme Court punted on this issue in Twitter v. Taamneh but it’s going to get resolved eventually.
This is a common but backwards misconception. Section 230 was written to ensure that online platforms could make decisions on speech and did not have to just be dumb pipes. Congress was worried that a "dumb pipe only" regulatory regime was taking shape through court decisions, which would have forced platforms to choose between letting users post obscene rants and accepting liability for anything defamatory users might say.
This bill is about enhancing the protections of lawful free-speech under the US constitution.
Generally speaking, we deem various kinds of speech that harms people as NOT protected under the first amendment, and that kind of speech would not be protected here.
Yelling “Fire!” in a crowded theater, libel and slander, speech calling for violence, and fraudulent advertising are some typical examples of speech not protected by the first amendment.
It would be tricky, but we could reasonably categorize engagement algorithms with certain properties as harmful to people and not subject to first amendment protections. This would be consumer protection, like laws against fraudulent advertising and other misleading claims.
The exceptions you're listing are mostly real but much more narrow than you're thinking. Only threats of imminent violence are excepted; it's completely protected by the First Amendment to say things like "it's getting to a point where we might have to be violent" or "I would commit violence if suchandsuch were to happen to me", even if other people reasonably find those statements to be stressful and alarming. Similarly, while defamation as such is illegal, it's not defamatory to say something like "John is a stupid fool who can't be trusted", even if I know many people think he's smart and trustworthy and even if his reputation is ruined by my statement.
There's simply no general principle that speech which harms people can be restricted.
For what it's worth, yelling fire in a crowded theater is First Amendment protected speech.
https://www.techdirt.com/2023/03/14/setting-1st-amendment-my...
I'm just stating facts.
https://www.popehat.com/p/the-first-amendment-isnt-absolute
Sigh. Yes, it depends on context. Like everything.
Yet, what’s the point of pedantic digressions that distract and muddy rather than clarify and communicate?
You're specifically arguing that speech that harms is disallowed, and algorithms could be construed as harmful, so hey, let's not protect them with free speech.
These are legal matters, so pedantry is part of the equation. The popehat piece is specifically written to refute this entire line of argument: free speech has extremely specific carveouts, and the way you're arguing isn't in line with how that would be expanded. This is outlined very specifically in the Popehat piece.
This is in no way a pedantic digression: I'm pointing out a fundamental flaw in your proposal, and citing work by lawyers that describes that flaw in detail.
This video was extremely disingenuous.
The video is educational. It uses an extreme scenario to make its point, but that's because it's being illustrative.
Okay, so maybe you don't believe a lawyer. Let's try a different lawyer that's more famous.
> So, there you have it: obscenity, defamation, fraud, incitement, and speech integral to criminal conduct. Throw in true threats - which was left out of this list for some reason - and child pornography, and you’ve got the categories. Note that the Court specifically identifies them as well-known and historic, not as in flux.
https://www.popehat.com/p/the-first-amendment-isnt-absolute
> we could reasonably categorize engagement algorithms with certain properties as harmful to people and not subject to first amendment protections
This is a hope, however I have not seen any effort that wasn't scuppered, until recently.
The social media bans are a lurch in that direction.
I could separate them out into different strands:
1) Society saying that the engagement algorithms is not what we want to have in our lives or the lives of our children
2) Problematic technical implementations, or benign technical implementations that invade privacy and support government gaining more powers over speech.
Any regulation shaping algorithms is perilously close to shaping speech. Now if you say algorithms are speech or editorial decisions that platforms have their own freedom to choose, then you essentially strip them of their protections.
This would force a form of moderation that would have most people up in arms on HN.
I fully admit, I am being rough in my cuts; the point I am attempting to make is that any decision to decide what constitutes protected and unprotected speech is going to be government interference.
It may even be likely that the firms such as Meta or Tik Tok would end up as untenable under such rules.
The case which originated the "yelling fire in a crowded theater" analogy, Schenk v. US, was overturned more than half a century ago. And in that case, the proverbial fire-yellers were socialists distributing pamphlets.
> Generally speaking, we deem various kinds of speech that harms people as NOT protected under the first amendment, and that kind of speech would not be protected here.
That is not a general principle. Consider the following: it is now illegal to say the word “election” because it would harm the President.
Yeah, we don't ban harmful speech, and we shouldn't. Harming people can be a legitimate and valuable consequence of speech.
We ban a subset of harmful speech with a direct link to clear harms, usually criminal.
Is that really what you think I said? It’s probably more productive to read with the goal to understand rather than the goal to misunderstand.
No need to square the circle when it’s already a hexagon. Commies can’t stand hexagons.
I think "government pressure" needs to be defined. If vaccination misinformation is spreading like wildfire on social media, and measles and other deadly diseases are getting out of control, and the government urges social media to control the spread of misinformation, is that "government pressure" and should it be illegal?
Now you can argue that the right way to counter misinformation is by countering it with legit information, and that's certainly a valid argument.
But that idealistic approach quickly runs into a wall. As Bill Gates said on Oprah's show, "We were a bit naive: we thought the internet, with the availability of information, would make us all a lot more factual. The fact that people would seek out—kind of a niche of misinformation—we were a bit naive."
So yes, people seek out misinformation, because of some inherent belief that there is a vast conspiracy going on that they aren't aware of, and the more conspiratorial some news sounds, the more likely they are to believe it. So you can't necessarily fight misinformation with legit information, unfortunately. As a result, a public health crisis is likely if social media companies do nothing to control the spread of misinformation.
>the government urges social media to control the spread of misinformation
There's always an implied or else. Stop harming the public, because the government is obligated to stop harms to the public and if they have to step in, it won't be favorable to your company.
or else in this case is that people die
why would the government need some other stick?
Honestly I never thought there was an implied or else, until the FCC started threatening pulling TV licenses. My understanding of the last administration was they were contacting platforms to say "hey, we found some postings that appear to be against your terms of service". I will agree that was a bad look, though.
> and the government urges social media to control the spread of misinformation, is that "government pressure" and should it be illegal?
Honestly, yeah. The government can counterprogram. But it shouldn’t be allowed to pressure anyone to take that content down (or limit its visibility).
Half the reason this anti-vax nonsense gained staying power is as a backlash to such government interventions.
The proper solution to misinformation is standard liability. If you say measles vaccines are useless and cause autism, neither of which is true, and someone’s kid dies of measles after listening to you, you cut them a cheque. (But don’t go to jail.)
There is an important difference between government persuasion and government coercion. The government should not be allowed to threaten platforms with punishment unless they remove lawful speech. But public-health officials should be allowed to tell platforms, "This claim is false, it is contributing to real-world harm, and we urge you to reduce its reach."
Just like you and I have a right to free speech, so does the government. The government can urge, warn, criticize, request, and share public-health information.
> public-health officials should be allowed to tell platforms, "This claim is false, it is contributing to real-world harm, and we urge you to reduce its reach."
I think the line between that and Brendan Carr calling ABC and saying “Jimmy Kimmel is lying, he is contributing to real-world harm, and I urge you to reduce his reach” while e.g. a merger is under review or licenses up for renewal is impossible to delineate.
And again, in any case, it didn’t work. It probably threw fuel on the fire. Government shouldn’t be saying what political speech is and isn’t said. That’s what the First Amendment ensconces.
Agree, it is hard to delineate, especially when the government is run by people that are thin-skinned and retaliatory. That's what makes this issue so challenging.
But is it fair to curtail speech because someone might perceive it as a threat? That question applies to the government as well as to individuals. I think it has to be resolved on a case-by-cases basis by courts.
> is it fair to curtail speech because someone might perceive it as a threat?
Plenty of speech is criminally curtailed. Credible threats of imminent violence. Fraud. Perjury. They’re just tightly defined ex ante.
Threat of imminent violence clearly falls on one side of the line. There are other cases that are on the border and you can't judge so easily.
A good reminder in the article about something a lot of folks here tend to forget:
> Finally, contrary to what many in Congress have been saying, social media platforms and other internet intermediaries have their own First Amendment rights to decide how they moderate users’ speech. They are not “state actors” and do not have an obligation under the First Amendment to allow all user speech on their platforms.
Private platforms do not have an obligation, legal, moral, or otherwise, to host or boost your harmful opinions and mis/disinformation campaigns.
They ought to be regulated as common carriers above a certain size IMO justified by network effects.
Which is too say I agree with you that they don't currently have a legal obligation but I think we should change that.
Completely disagree, given algorithms artificially boost content. The comparison to being an "online town square" is inapt, and I think a lot of people pushing that particular narrative actually know it too.
On the bright side: it means the current dictator clowns in charge, are afraid of people having their own opinion.
On the not so bright side: this is literally KGB textbook 101. Yuri explained this in the 1980s already: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9apDnRRSOCk
Ultimtately, though, while the billionaires running the show are ruthless, their puppets in the current administration are really so incompetent that they will literally ruin everything, including their own corrupt ambitions.
So the EFF and ACLU seem to support this bill. I'm skeptical given one of the sponsors is Ted Cruz who famously said [1]:
> After earlier stating he first ran for Congress in 2012 “with the stated intention of being the leading defender of Israel in the United States Senate,”
Texas has laws that government contractors must promise not to boycott the state of Israel [2]. 35+ US states have similar laws [3]. This on its face seems like a government restriction on speech, squarely violating the First Amendment. The Supreme Court, who otherwise love to pay lip service to the First Amendment, go out of their way to avoid anti-BDS challenges [4]. Courts have generally split hairs here saying anti-BDS impacts commerce and is speec-neutral. That's a complete cop out.
So do I think that Ted Cruz really cares about free speech? Not for a second. I suspect that if this passes, it'll only ever be applied in cases where governments officials attack conservative misinformation (eg stolen elections, anti-vaxxer anything). Any speech contradicting US foreign policy will be labelled as domestic terrorism so First Amendment freedoms don't seem to apply (I suspect).
US tech platforms already have incredible conservative bias. Meta's policy chief, Jordana Cutler (who worked in Benjamin Netanyahu's office), boasts about taking down pro-Palestinian content [5]. Twitter is a Nazi shithole [6]. And worse [7]. The whole manosphere, which is an alt-right entry point, flourishes on every platform.
So, no, I have no confidence in anything Ted Cruz supports.
[1]: https://www.christianpost.com/news/ted-cruz-cites-genesis-12...
[2]: https://gov.texas.gov/news/post/anti-israel-policies-are-ant...
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-BDS_laws
[4]: https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/supreme-court-declines-t...
[5]: https://theintercept.com/2024/10/21/instagram-israel-palesti...
[6]: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/x-twitter-elon-mus...
[7]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/conormurray/2023/07/27/twitter-...
Phew, they better be careful what they ask for. The current regime might find themselves hoisted upon their own petard.
Huh? We have more free speech than ever online at this moment. The last regime colluded with the major social media companies to censor people they didn't like and it's also recently come to light that they attempted to get the Joe Rogan/Spotify deal nuked, all based on censoring speech they don't like.
The liberal government of the UK is moving toward complete online censorship with their bill to prevent children from going on social media sites. The reality is that they will now be able to identify and will arrest people for posting opinions they don't like. This has already been happening for the last couple of years and will now be even easier. This is exactly how it works in China.
If Democrats come into power again in the US, this will soon be coming to a computer near you.
This should be the #1 story on HN, but the tech community has been strangely silent on the subject....
I just wish the people claiming to be champions of free speech and rights will just admit that this all goes out the window when it applies to speech and people you don't like. It would make everything much easier.
Collusion is the wrong word. Coercion is more appropriate.
> I just wish the people claiming to be champions of free speech and rights will just admit that this all goes out the window when it applies to speech and people you don't like
Try using the word "cis-gender" on Twitter and let us know how that goes.
Considering Twitter the bastion of _anything_ is as stupid now as it was 15 years ago.
You are kidding yourself if you think this is a liberal vs conservative issue.
The current FCC chairman threatens the broadcast license and to block deals of networks who air shows the president doesn’t like. These threats appear to have lead directly to the cancellation of shows — a clear violation of the first amendment, though there have been no consequences so far.
If you really care about this issue, get out of your information bubble.
Whichever party is in power, Democrats or Republicans, liberals or conservatives, have tried to suppress speech they don’t like when they get in power. If we pretend this is a partisan issue we can’t stop them.
The level of doublethink from the right is completely insane.
Additionally, when I fact check what they're whining about, it is often like, "the White House requested Twitter ban medical misinformation about coronavirus, without threat of consequences, and they did."
https://www.newsweek.com/pro-palestinian-protest-states-coll...
I'll give you that Liberals are also antagonistic towards online free speech, but pretending that we have more free speech online right now than ever before is the most insane thing I've ever heard. Just because you can post nazi shit on Twitter now does not mean we have more online freedom.
Please provide evidence that online speech in the USA is restricted in any way, unlike in Europe where you get fined and/or arrested for mean memes
This was pretty easy to find examples of.
https://www.aclu.org/news/free-speech/when-complaining-about...
https://ij.org/press-release/supreme-court-rejects-appeal-of...
https://www.rcfp.org/supreme-court-throws-out-1876-criminal-...
https://www.fire.org/cases/larry-bushart-v-perry-county
There's a lot more.
Well sure. The police can arrest you whenever they want, we rely on the courts to sort it out. Qualified immunity is terrible law, but that doesn't have anything to do with free speech.
Larry Bushart was arrested and jailed for more than a month for posting a Charlie Kirk meme.
Douglass Mackey was arrested and convicted for posting satirical Clinton election ads, though this was later overturned after he spent months in prison.
When OP said we have more free speech than ever, and some here quibble with that, it's not necessarily about coercion under legislation. The early web saw a hell of a lot of racist or angry flamer posts on any site where any reader could comment. A classic example are GNAA posts in nearly every comment thread on Slashdot, HN's forebear.
Today's internet has, for the masses, contracted into a limited number of commercial platforms that have strict moderation for brand-protection reasons. Many platforms have outright removed fondly remembered discussion fora (e.g. IMDB, or Lonely Planet's Thorn Tree) just so they don't have to bear the expense of moderating and ensuring no posts threaten their brand image.
I imagine that most people here will deem the decline in highly toxic troll posts a good thing, but any veteran of the old internet will still notice that the range of speech met in daily net surfing is less than it once was.
It’s the official position of the US government that posting the number 8647 is a crime. I know this sounds like a crazy thing I made up, but they posted a detailed explainer (https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/federal-grand-jury-indicts-fo...): any reasonable person, they argue, would know that this number is a threat to kill the President.
It's also true, I should acknowledge, that the US has a strong system of checks and balances against stupid proclamations like this and a generally oppositional culture around speech restrictions. It's unlikely I'll be arrested for posting 8647, or indeed for pointing you to other illegal numbers like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Speech_Flag, and if I were I'd wear it as a badge of honor. But just because Americans are successfully fighting it doesn't mean there's no issue.
Do I need to list the people who have been threatened with deportation for pro-palestine speech or can you find those yourself?
I wonder if the EFF had something specific to say when various PACs and a former president tried getting Spotify to take Joe Rogan off the air for his Covid opinions?
This act wouldn't apply to PACs or former presidents.
This is a new allegation Joe Rogan made offhand in a podcast two days ago, and he said while making it that he can't tell us which PACs or which presidents were involved. What specifics could the EFF offer in the absence of any meaningful details about what happened?
A PAC talking to Spotify is obviously protected speech. At least try to look like you have principles.
"Government coercion" are important keywords used by EFF here.
You have a source for that??
It is not that i think all right wing hosts are liars,they love to play the victim, but all I see as a source is "Joe Rogan says...". Quoting yourself is not a source.
But everyone here loves jawboning and agrees the government should suppress speech. Well, at least when their team is in office. Whether it's ICE Block or IVM Block, you can probably find a reason why you too think speech freedom is just a little too free for your tastes.
> But everyone here loves jawboning and agrees the government should suppress speech.
That sure is quite an assumption you're making.
Governments should have zero control over speech and zero ability to impose consequences on speech. Individuals and most groups should have absolute freedom of association, which is precisely what they're exercising when choosing not to associate with some speech and some speakers
> Governments should have zero control over speech and zero ability to impose consequences on speech...
Perhaps you are an "absolute" free speech absolutist, but does that include:
- Swatting?
- Doxxing?
- Yelling "Fire!" in the proverbial crowded theater?
- Liable and Slander?
- Spreading nude pictures (real or faked) or personal medical information without consent?
- Threatening (relatively) defenseless individuals with physical harm?
- Impersonation?
- Blackmail?
> Perhaps you are an "absolute" free speech absolutist
Emphatically not, in the sense it's commonly used, but I think the distinction between "shunned by private individuals/groups/companies" and "prosecuted" is critically important.
I'm not going to go through all of these point-by-point, but as a couple of examples:
> - Swatting?
Inciting an action should be charged on the basis of the action and the probability of having incited it. Charge them with attempted murder. Also, fix the mechanisms that make it feasible for a person to too-easily call down excessive force on someone's home or office.
> - Yelling "Fire!" in the proverbial crowded theater?
Inciting a predictable panic that gets people injured should get you charged over the injuries. But also, the original version of that phrase was used as part of an abominably bad ruling restricting people speaking out against a military draft, so it's a bad example.
See also laws about fraud: the speech isn't the issue, the deception leading to swindling people out of something is.
Similarly, credible threats to commit a crime should be charged accordingly, not because of the speech but as prevention of an intended/planned crime. (With a great deal of caution, due to the balance between preventing it and the hazards of charging a crime that hasn't happened yet; Minority Report is not a blueprint.)
the problem with swatting is that the police are too armed and do no investigation when instead they can destroy stuff and kill people
its just fine to call the cops. its not ok for the government to act on it thoughtlessly.
if people had yelled fire in that swiss club, maybe more people would have survived the fire?
why shouldnt i be able to put on an elvis costume and a bad accent?
The things you are listing really arent a big deal, and to be bad, have to include something more than just speech, eg. commerce
What are those things? Googling didn’t help.
The later is the case that then supreme court ruled on in 2024 (https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c100l6jrjvno).
I suspect it goes to explain why this new bill is bipartisan. That case failed because the plaintiffs did not have a legal standing to sue.
"In a dissent that detailed emails, press conferences, and past decisions, Justice Alito painted the "jawboning" as "blatantly unconstitutional".
Wednesday's ruling, he wrote, "permits the successful campaign of coercion in this case to stand as an attractive model for future officials who want to control what the people say, hear, and think"."
Regardless if one agree with them, it do demonstrate that conservative side think that there is a risk that governments will attempt to persuade platforms to moderate content, and that this is a risk. This new bill seem to make it much easier to give people a legal standing to sue, thus allowing the supreme court to give a different verdict if a similar situation happen again.
> The later is the case that then supreme court ruled on in 2024 (https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c100l6jrjvno).
> I suspect it goes to explain why this new bill is bipartisan. That case failed because the plaintiffs did not have a legal standing to sue.
In that case (Murthy v. Missouri), Missouri and Louisiana did not have standing to sue because they did not demonstrate a minimum of evidence that the government coerced (as opposed to requested) platforms to remove speech.
> This new bill seem to make it much easier to give people a legal standing to sue, thus allowing the supreme court to give a different verdict if a similar situation happen again.
The lack of standing was not due to something like "no law says you can sue for such a violation". This law solves a problem that courts did not consider in Murthy v. Missouri.
Obviously censorship of both the location of ICE agents (or other terrorist threats bearing state decals) and censorship of discourse over the science of respiratory pathogens has been awful; I don't recall anyone here on HN cheerleading either of them.
In fact, it seems to me that you've chosen precisely two areas between which a palpable bridge exists, contradicting the two-party zeitgeist.
HN, for all its many flaws, is one of the few places where important evidence such as the diamond princess dataset and the cochrane review of evidence of mask (in)efficacy received robust discussion and, seemingly, resulted in changed minds.
Likewise, I don't recall anyone but a few trolls suggesting that Apple's assistance to ICE in covering its tracks was a legitimate exercise of state (to the extent that pressure was a factor) or corporate (to the extent that it created market esteem) pressure.
>HN, for all its many flaws, is one of the few places where important evidence such as the diamond princess dataset and the cochrane review of evidence of mask (in)efficacy received robust discussion and, seemingly, resulted in changed minds.
I get the feeling we're not discussing this submission on HN
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48605139
I get the feeling it's going to be flagged/dead in short order.
edit: Subarashi! How elegant. HN has flagged it less than 30 minutes after I made this comment. So much for the bastion of enlightenment and free speech known as HN, right?