How about denying round earth? How about deny Taiwan is part of China? Who do the fact checking for the latest news in a very remote part of world?

Silencing one thing can be simple.

But once you take of role of censorship, people will ask you to censor other stuff and give reason for censoring/not-censoring that. It will quickly grow into an unmanagable mess.

I am an administrator of a 1000 people group dedicated to political discussion in Facebook. I have been accused of being a Nazi and helping them. The people doing so were wrong, but they were convinced that I was doing that. My mother's family is Jewish.

Trust me, deciding what is hate speech is is impossible. And lots of people try to advance their agenda accusing others, trying to silence them. I have seen it a lot of times.

Regarding fake news, Facebook tried to suppress them. But they don't know how politics in my country work, so they leaned on another institution. The other institution is managed by the wife of a politician. I think you can guess the rest.

Who determines who to silence? Do you have some clear simple rules? How do you ensure you're not silencing somebody who will eventually convince large numbers of people to believe them, and become the dominant paradigm?

Why do you even want to silence anyone from posting in their own social network. I don't think companies should become moral authorities.

Leave it to the network to naturally filter out content they don't want.

What if I advocate for old-age pensions, sharing of profits of large enterprises, and the abolition of land rents -- all of which were platform tenants of the National Socialist German Worker's Party?

Who gets to define who a Nazi is?

If I say that 4 million died in the Holocaust rather than 6 million, is that Holocaust denial?

The issues raised by the article are not about morally grey areas, they are about overt Holocaust denial and InfoWars. InfoWars caused a person to shoot up a pizzeria. This is not a place where a slippery slope argument can be made.

Edit: funny that people are downvoting me because they think I'm speaking against free speech, thus silencing my opinion.

> InfoWars caused a person to shoot up a pizzeria.

You could say the Beatles caused Sharon Tate to get murdered.

You think some guy who's willing to shoot up a pizzeria is going to reevaluate his life choices because he can't post his conspiracy theories on Facebook?

How does your attempt to silence me add to this conversation in any way? I asked for an explanation of why this is so difficult. I'm not being unreasonable. Comments like this make me not want to participate here on HN

You're asking to silence others, you're getting a taste of your own medicine.

I'm glad I know the tenor of the conversation here. Enjoy yourselves

There are plenty of people on HN who go to some effort to comment with thoughtfulness and nuance, and who try hard to help others understand complex issues by discussing them in great depth.

In this case you've encountered people who don't comment in such a way, but that's more likely to happen when you invoke highly controversial issues without great caution.

Indeed this is why the HN guidelines ask people to avoid introducing flamewar topics, as reactions like this are inevitable, not just on HN, but anywhere on the internet.

Take it from someone who's been on HN for over 10 years: the good far outweighs the bad, but it's up to all of us to make the effort to keep the standard high.