So, so far I haven't seen anyone on here take the strong free speech absolutist position -- that nothing should be censored ever, including calls to violence. I've seen several comments that basically say "don't censor in general, but do remove calls to violence," so that seems like it's not a controversial opinion at least in this discussion.

Why are calls to violence bad, but spreading misinformation about a pandemic (whether it's that it is a hoax, that it is not transmissible, or that you can cure it by drinking bleach) is okay?

It seems to me that, if you're saying calls to violence can be censored because they will inspire people to act badly, then you've crossed the line into saying people can't be trusted to act appropriately.

Why ban that, but not misinformation about the pandemic?

>Why ban that, but not misinformation about the pandemic?

Wearing Mask a few months ago was misinformation by many. Which most of the world finally revert course later but still not agreed by WHO.

So who is to define what is "misinformation"?

For every single downvote I got on HN for stating Hong Kong got it right with mask in March, do I get a brownie point for every single US citizen that is wearing a mask now?

I dont have an answer, but I am leaning towards the same thinking as OP. Because everything I said right now is considered as misinformation by the Hong Kong government. Personally I think "misinformation" is a pandora box that should never be opened / used.

>Why are calls to violence bad, but spreading misinformation about a pandemic

How do you know what is 'misinformation' ? WHO claimed that face masks were worthless, now you are forced to wear them in lots of places. WHO also claimed that there was no human to human transmission of COVID-19, etc.

The powers that be will not stop spreading misinformation when it suits them, they just want no one to be able to question it. The right to question is something we can't give up just to avoid bad actors.

It looks like you've been caught-up in misinformation as well, as the WHO never said that masks were "worthless" nor that there was "no" human-to-human transmission. Those are distortions of more nuanced and qualified statements by the WHO. You can argue that these more nuanced statements were still harmful, but you're pushing misinformation by claiming the WHO said what you merely think they said.

Claim what you want, but on Jan 14 the WHO stated the following "Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel #coronavirus (2019-nCoV) identified in #Wuhan, #China🇨🇳."[0]

The nuance is that they were repeating Chinese propaganda.

[0]: https://mobile.twitter.com/who/status/1217043229427761152?la...

"no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission" is not the same as "no human-to-human transmission"

I don't know how to define what is "misinformation" but I could surely call out a couple examples. Maybe we can figure out what makes them misinformation.

1) 5G causes COVID-19 2) COVID-19 doesn't exist, i.e. it's all a hoax 3) Aquarium cleaning solution is a cure for COVID

I don't know what makes those different from "masks are worthless" but they seem qualitatively different. Maybe for a couple of reasons.

Maybe for #1, there's no plausible mechanism of action linking 5G and covid. But the people claim there is! Using a nested series of faulty reasoning and unreproduceable evidence to back it up.

Maybe for #2, there's no observable evidence that it's a hoax, i.e. people claiming otherwise are doing so with no supporting evidence, only reasoning that they (subjectively) do not trust government or media, therefore their claim is supportable.

But I don't know. I don't think the answer is that it's unknowable (which you may or may not have been getting at).

For me misinformation as a characteristic is a big umbrella, that the discretion for it depends on the measurer. Which makes it an unreliable characteristic to censor content by.

As an example of things that can follow into the misinformation umbrella parody, humour, good/bad science, good/bad journalism, misinterpretation of intent, paranormal reports, religion. It done for the greater good. People have done surgeries in their garage, I can't believe it's from lack of credible information, and that making a general policy from the exception is a sign of a bad design.

Why do you assume that the "powers that be will not stop spreading misinformation" like they do it on purpose?

Could it not be that this is a very complex issue and they were simply wrong in the first place? More data came in and they revised their position.

They certainly were spreading it on purpose. What's unknown is whether they knew it was misinformation at the time. Perhaps they thought this was a good way to manage supply shocks and keep masks flowing to medical workers. Or perhaps they truly thought masks were useless. That's hard to believe, but not impossible.

But they wouldn't have backed off as quickly without pushback from others taking the opposite position that masks were critical. And at the time, that was contrary to the officially espoused position by both CDC and WHO. Even now WHO haven't fully reversed course, they have only stopped anti-recommending face masks as hard. Banning spreading this countervailing opinion would have been a grave mistake.

WHO: https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2...

> If you are healthy, you only need to wear a mask if you are taking care of a person with COVID-19.

CDC: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/prevent-getting-si...

> In light of this new evidence, CDC recommends wearing cloth face coverings in public settings where other social distancing measures are difficult to maintain (e.g., grocery stores and pharmacies) especially in areas of significant community-based transmission.

And the powers that be want to call for violence (and often do) so why do you want to restrict everyone else from doing it?

> Rather I am saying - and this was my fault for not being clear enough - that I reject the notion that we should try to pick a side to suppress. Because the same part of human nature that leads to rampant spread of disinformation is the part of human nature that tries to decide what the capital-T Truth is.

Yes, we really can't have it both ways. Either we have free speech for everyone, or we have censorship. There are exceptions, of course: calls to violence, libel against non-public people, and so on. And yes, also inciting panic by crying "fire" falsely in public places. But I believe that's distinguishable from spreading "fake news".

The problem with censorship is needing to trust censors. And even if we have honest censors, how do we know what the "truth" is? Do we trust "authorities"? That seems iffy, given how often we've learned that they've been dishonest or just plain wrong.

Also, authoritarians always start with the edge cases. And then they widen the scope. By the time your position -- which always seemed so reasonable -- becomes unacceptable, it's too late.

Isn't spreading dangerously false information about a viral pandemic similar to shouting "fire" in a theatre? I'm not sure it's always so easy to distinguish that actively dangerous conduct from fake news.

Not that this difficulty means we shouldn't try.

The "shouting 'fire' in a theatre" meme comes from a case where the Supreme Court used the Espionage Act to restrict speech because the speech in question didn't sufficiently support entering into a World War and advocated against the draft.

Not exactly the best way to convince people that restricting speech is actually good.

The fact that you need to explain that sort of demonstrates that it isn't relevant to the use of the argument. Good arguments can come from poor sources.

Most people agree that shouting fire in a crowded theatre is the sort of speech which should be restricted, wherever the argument came from.

> Good arguments can come from poor sources.

All the more reason to not silence cranks and conspiracy theorists.

From John Stuart Mill's On Liberty:

> But the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/On_Liberty/Chapter_2

"the dictum that truth always triumphs over persecution, is one of those pleasant falsehoods which men repeat after one another till they pass into commonplaces, but which all experience refutes. History teems with instances of truth put down by persecution. If not suppressed forever, it may be thrown back for centuries."

– John Stuart Mill, On Liberty https://www.utilitarianism.com/ol/two.html

That's what I would argue If I had a conspiracy in mind.

By far the most dangerous and most widely spread "information" in this pandemic has come from the same authorities that are being allowed to decide what is so-called correct and what needs to be censored. The only check on their extremism and self-centred attention seeking has come from the grassroots blogging and video making community - those same people YouTube (really I suspect, Wojcicki) is trying to wipe out.

OK, so I admit that Icke's thing about 5G and COVID-19 is batshit insane. I truly can't imagine how someone could argue that in good faith. He must be trolling, doing it for the lulz.

But still, that's arguably distinguishable from creating a panic by shouting "fire" in a crowded theater that's undoubtedly not burning. In that crowded theater, it's the stampede that gets people killed in the moment. I do see the analogy to Internet meme explosions. But connections between actions and consequences are weaker and slower enough.

There are people attacking cell phone towers and threatening workers who work on them. It’s directly connected to the 5G coronavirus garbage.

Icke is one of, if not the, originator of the theories of shapeshifting reptilians controlling society. His own descriptions of himself coincide strongly with paranoid schizophrenia.

Huh. That's pretty wild.[0]

> A poll of Americans in 2013 by Public Policy Polling indicated that 4% of registered voters (±2.8%) believed in David Icke's ideas.

But at least some of them were joking, right?

0) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reptilian_conspiracy_theory

Calls for violance can be, and are, very subtile. Just removing open calls for violance wouldn't change a bit, propaganda doesn't work that way. Nor does psychology. So in the end, both of your examples about $Group can lead to violance against that group.

EDIT: Typos

Yes, but I think trying to map out indirect violence gets into very dangerous territory. So, that's why I draw the line at "directly" advocating violence.

Of course, the lines as always get blurry. To use a random example that comes to mind, when Kathy Griffin posted the severed head of Trump - was that a direct call to violence? That's a tough one to answer. My first intuition is that it does cross the line, but I could very easily see an argument that it's not.

So unfortunately there will always be that difficulty, unless we committed to an absolutist position of not removing ANY speech. I drink a lot of the kool-aid, and even I don't go that far.

> not removing ANY speech.

That causes genocides to happen though -- are you okay with that or did you not know

No, people with guns and uniforms cause genocide. People with pens and typewriters have never harmed a hair on anyone's head.

To disagree is to argue that human beings are nothing but programmable devices. If that's your position, fine, but we'll have to disagree.

Goebbels might want to have a word.

Sorry, can you clarify? Are you saying removing speech causes genocides, or not removing speech at all?

So we should expect schools to teach our schools that the earth is flat, and the earth is round, and hope the kids pick the right option? Or where exactly do you draw the line in "we shouldn't suppress speech, just because it's provably false?"

Just saw this comment. Saying "don't censor expression of opinions on online platforms" is not saying "teach creationism" in schools, nor "teach that the earth is flat".

In other words I think that's very much a red herring.

> Remove blatant calls for violence,

Not ok to kill people via violence, but ok to do the same by (contributing to) spreading a pandemic?

OK. I guess we should let anti-vaxers spread disinformation causing a whole bunch of people dying unnecessarily because people believed it.

I agree anti Vaxers are ridiculous. But just to play devils advocate. What if there ever was a dangerous vaccine out there, wouldn’t we want people to be able to speak out?

Honestly I don’t have any solutions. I don’t like either option.

Right. In general contradiction arises when we try to prevent people from doing stupid things. It becomes very difficult to maintain a logically consistent view on what's okay to censor and what's not.

Most of us agree anti-vaxxers are ill-informed and that adopting their beliefs causes people to engage in patterns of behavior (avoiding vaccines) that are not in what we think is their best interest.

What about other beliefs? If someone posts a video saying that they don't think seatbelts are effective in preventing injuries during car crashes, should they be suppressed?

What about someone who claims that vaping is safe and popularizes the practice? Do we ban that?

It's easy to pick a few almost-universally hated groups and rally against them: racists, anti-vaxxers, flat earthers. Few things are that cut-and-dry. And watching the widespread rise of "benevolent censorship" wrt COVID-19 has really shown me how far we can take the idea of "protect people from information that could harm them".

For example, I recently submitted a highly controversial 7500+ word blog post that advocated for ending lockdown in the US. I got some matters of scientific fact wrong (and have since addressed or am currently working on addressing those), i.e. things like accounting for the phenomenom of "overshoot". Some sections probably did not give a perfectly fair view of "each side" and could be/were criticized as being cherry-picked. And I think I got a lot of things very right. I've now had 9 people e-mail me in the last 24 hours saying that they tried to share my post on Facebook/Messenger and that the entire domain is now blocked for violating the community guidelines. Is that something worth banning? It advocates for a position that could easily be argued will lead to death, and therefore reading it could kill people. So it's a very easy argument to make, if you take the position that we should suppress "harmful" information.

As I said at the start of this thread, I basically reject the entire concept of "disinformation" for that reason; it inevitably gets used to suppress even the most good-faith and well-researched (or in my case, somewhat-well-researched :P) arguments. Therefore I think the entire concept is inherently dangerous to a free society.

Okay, that's enough rambling for one night. I'll let everyone else duke it out :)

Furthermore, there is zero guarantee that the censors won't eventually develop a taste for antivaxxing themselves, and now any information about potential benefits of vaccines is actively suppressed.

There indeed were a few dangerous vaccines, about three generations ago. That's exactly why we have the elaborate clinical trial system today: they stop potentially unsafe vaccines all the time. A large fraction of the COVID vaccines might go this way. Nobody is against banning unsafe vaccines, but some are for banning people from spreading baseless, conspiratorial anti-vax bullshit.

Exactly. But who are we trusting to tell the difference between bullshit and not? Would you trust youtube employees with that?

No, which is exactly why I'm happy they defer to the WHO. I don't trust the WHO unconditionally either, but I trust it much much more than David Icke.

But will youtube defer to the right group on every issue? Is there always a right group?

This issue will pass but now they have a precedent.

There have been issues more recently with vaccine safety. Or at least, there were enough lawsuits to start frightening off vaccine manufacturers. Since 1986, however, they've been insulated from lawsuits under federal law:[0]

> The National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986, ..., as amended, created the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP), a no-fault alternative to the traditional tort system. It provides compensation to people found to be injured by certain vaccines. Even in cases in which such a finding is not made, petitioners may receive compensation through a settlement.

> The VICP was established after lawsuits against vaccine manufacturers and healthcare providers threatened to cause vaccine shortages and reduce vaccination rates. The Program began accepting petitions (also called claims) in 1988.

The current anti-vaccination movement began largely over concern that thiomersal preservative in many childhood vaccines was causing autism. Although multiple epidemiological studies indicated that there was no appreciable risk, "the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) asked vaccine makers to remove thiomersal from vaccines as quickly as possible as a precautionary measure", and it was ~gone by 2001.[1]

0) https://www.hrsa.gov/vaccine-compensation/about/index.html

1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thiomersal_and_vaccines

A business decision to avoid risk of costly litigation is not at all the same as actual harm. If you have any information on actual harm, please share it. Otherwise, please leave your FUD at the door.

So you don't believe that people ought to have the right to sue when injured?

Also, calling stuff "FUD" is a classic strategy to escape responsibility. For example, the tobacco industry claimed that lung cancer risk was FUD for decades. Other examples include groundwater pollution, asbestos, and lead paint.

Not to mention human overpopulation. Which is arguably the root cause of the COVID-19 pandemic. Along with HIV and Ebola, and likely more to come. And of course global climate change, which may well kick serious ass in coming decades.

The irony with your comment is that it's the tobacco industry which started (and is still significantly funding) the whole anti science/evidence campaigns. In fact the whole antivax movement is part of a big FUD campaign. So historically these campaigns have almost always come from a certain direction to discredit established scientific evidence. The current antilockdown campaigns come from the same corner/often the same people so yes people are sceptical about them, I'm sorry that you got banned for your "well reasoned" post.

Maybe the solution is a law that if someone posts/airs clearly wrong facts. Or if someone's theories/facts... Get later disproven they need to post/air a correction at the same time at least as long (maybe better twice as long) and give it as much prominence. Maybe then outlets would be more careful about posting obvious untruths.

Huh. I didn't know that, and I'd appreciate references.

I am aware that the ad agency behind the "tobacco doesn't cause cancer" campaign got into the "lead paint is safe" and other pro-industry campaigns, including the climate change contrarians. And the Tea Party. Funded by folks like the Koch brothers.

> Maybe then outlets would be more careful about posting obvious untruths.

That's a very slippery slope. As I've said before, you may be surprised when you become the pariah.

I would absolutely agree that those who are harmed need adequate remedies under the law. I also know that vaccines provide an immense public benefit. If the specifics of the tort system were causing companies to exit the vaccine business (and they were) , that's certainly something the government ought to step in to fix. However, that doesn't mean there were "issues with safety" as you claim. The implications in your comment are actively harmful to the public health.

If you read the background for that law, you'll find that people were in fact being injured by vaccines. And some still are. Just as virtually all medicines injure some people. Because there's great variability in responses.

The law didn't get enacted just to prevent lawsuits, but also to compensate those who were injured.

> The implications in your comment are actively harmful to the public health.

That way lies totalitarianism.

For example, there's considerable pressure in many countries to outlaw secure end-to-end encryption. To protect against terrorists, child abusers, and other criminals.

So how would we feel if support for secure end-to-end encryption were censored in social media?

Yes, vaccines have side effects, just as any other medication or treatment does. Nobody has claimed otherwise.

The reason your comment is harmful is because you make implications that have no basis in evidence, but which serve to advance dubious claims accepted by a small but growing and very vocal group of antivaxxers that have had a clear negative impact on our society.

If you have some new evidence or analysis to add, please add it. If all you have is fear, uncertainty, and doubt, please don't throw gasoline on this fire.

Well, I think that you're overreacting. Considering risks is important. We've suffered too much from denial. Pollution of groundwater. Fallout from nuclear weapons testing. Toxic chemicals in food packaging. And I could easily come up with another dozen examples.

> The reason your comment is harmful is because you make implications that have no basis in evidence, ...

That's exactly what attorneys for polluters always say. There's this thing called the precautionary principle. So you act when damage is possible, long before there's conclusive evidence.

Edit: If you like, I can probably find defendants' briefs and expert reports from landmark cases, asserting that plaintiffs have provided insufficient evidence of causation to support their claims.

Here's the thing: either you're simply naive to the tactics of anti-vaxxers and unaware that your comments play into their hand, or you're actively advancing their interests.

Yes, it's important to consider the risks of any medical treatment. Your comments make it seem like that hasn't been done, as if doctors and public health officials are just pretending that side effects don't exist. That's simply untrue -- rigorous clinical trials and careful reporting mean that modern vaccines are really quite safe. When you lucidly compare the incidence of side effects against the impact of contracting illnesses that vaccines prevent, there is only one reasonable position to take.

Your initial comments about thiomersal are pure FUD. You acknowledge that there's not real medical concern there, but choose to bring it up anyway? What could your motivation possibly be? If you'd like to discuss it objectively, here's how to do it: Someone with a financial interest who is no longer allowed to practice medicine falsified data in an effort to mislead the public about a supposed danger of a preservative in vaccines. Many people siezed onto that lie, despite the clear evidence that it was flawed, and continue to espouse it, causing lasting damage to society.

> So you act when damage is possible, long before there's conclusive evidence.

The damage that's real here is the damage caused by anti-vaxxers. That's actual damage that's caused harm to real people in the real world. Your comments help advance that agenda, which is why they are harmful.

Refusing medical treatment for children on religious grounds is legal to varying degrees in 43 states.

https://www.healthline.com/health-news/parents-beliefs-about...

Anti-vaxing is not an organized religion but I could see organized religions adopting anti-vaxing beliefs.

> Remove blatant calls for violence

So you are in favor of censorship, just with different parameters.

I completely agree. For the simple fact that no human or organisation can be trusted with the power to silence anyone or any group.

I Think this should apply to functional social monopolys as well. YouTube/facebook/instagram etc shouldn't be allowed to remove content they deem untrue.

HN has a monopoly on discussion between people with (slightly) above-average critical thinking skills. Should we ban their moderation as well?

15 years ago the idea of an internet video monopoly didn't even exist and if it did no one would have cared.

What you are suggesting is impossible to enforce or even reason about.

If HN moderators started censoring posts because they disagreed with them, or thought the ideas were "too dangerous" (rather than just because they were spam) then yeah people would start complaining about it.

I don't think HN has a monopoly on discussion between people with (slightly) above-average critical thinking skills. Many sub-reddits fit that definition as well.

I don't follow how this would be impossible to enforce. The person whose content on youtube is removed for example is going to complain. It's dead simple to slap youtube with a couple million dollar fine for such things.