The bigger problem, IMO, is that many tech companies have started handing out kool-aid that data collection and analytics is ethical. They justify it by saying that it helps people avoid spam, or get better advertisements, or whatever, and then the engineers think they are being ethical and beneficial to society by building these systems.

I took a business ethics course in undergrad, and it was surprising how many students advocated all sorts of (to me) aberrant ethical views. (Note I’m pretty traditional, morally speaking. The environment was strongly postmodern, and this was before all the modern insanity about “free speech is bad because some people say bad/offensive things”.)

Not that I minded personally, but it was a strong lesson to me that teaching people categories and how to think won’t give them a desire to respect any particular brand of morality.

To be totally fair, the idea "free speech is bad because some people say bad things" is older than the mind of man can remember.

Yes, it's just that we've only recently been allowed to talk about it openly.

Would you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here? We'd appreciate it.

You've concluded that the absolute morality expressed by public consciousness should be the arbiter of publicly expressible speech. Maybe the next thing that gets people killed is not allowing public discourse to challenge socially accepted, morally unacceptable beliefs.

Many people use “free speech” to describe more than what is covered by the First Amendment in the USA. For instance, freedom from retaliation, by being fired from your job. According to that view, entities other than the government can engage in suppressing free speech.

As for the argument that, opinion gets people killed, I can only reply with the following.

Opinions don't kill people. People kill people. It is important to know the difference.

More seriously, limiting speech should not be necessary in a good society were people don't let such stuff spread. But that doesn't seem to be how humans work. The marketplace of ideas does not necessarily prevent bad outcomes. And pretending that a root cause analysis for a genocide doesn't include speech as a vital segment in the chain leading to that atrocity seems illusory to me.

So yes, having reasonable rules doesn't seem that wrong to me. It certainly comes with all the usual problems of gov/regulation. I'm kind of fine with what we have here in Germany. Not that its perfect... but it kind of reminds me of that saying about aerospace rules... they are written in blood.

For the record, I personally dislike German approach despite understanding its genesis.

I can't really speak for aerospace rules, but I am not certain they say that much about speech.

edit. I just remembered. Internet has all manner of rather dangerous information out there. Materials may be highly difficult to procure, but knowledge is still at your fingertips.

The objective of those ethical classes is to move the neutral/good majority in hope in hope to counterbalance the unethical minority.

On top of that, companies which are usually regarded as some of the most unethical companies on the planet (especially in regards to privacy) are companies like Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google, which are worshipped by and have computer science people scrambling to get hired by them. Going back a little further in history, before FAANG, the companies that were revered by the tech world were the very same ISPs that this post is railing against.

Programmers as a whole seem to have no problem at all being unethical as long as it gets them either money or the chance to work on the latest tech fad.

Just look at the resistance on this forum to the idea of GDPR or data privacy bills. This is one of the most self-aware forums on the internet and still probably a majority of users are not only aware of who (and what) is signing their paychecks, but they actively endorse it in their personal discourse during their time off too.