You can absolutely mock people (even groups of people) in a hateful way for their looks, body weight, or success in the sexual marketplace. The obvious solution is to add more protected classes! And I'm afraid that is what will happen, simply because it creates administrative work and a nice distraction from everything else (just like adding new emoji every year). And then people will find new ways to hate someone.
I much prefer HN's moderation stance. Either a comment adds value to the discussion, or it tries to derail it. And even though I hate the CCP, I don't think 共匪 is useful, except maybe in a self-ironic kind of way.
Difficult. Yet commonly done. (With respect to protected classes, I mean.)
> Then to project that to the world is harder
This is not a requirement. My beef is with Google exporting China's censorship regime to New Yorkers like me. I'm not thrilled with China censoring what its people see. But that's a different category of problem.
At which point Google should decide on what countries they operate in. If they operate in a country where political affiliation is a protected class, go ahead and hide those comments to users in that country. But don't export that country's values to mine.
One, governments who don't like this have ways of fixing it. Two, this true for other media--I can ship my friend a book banned in their country. And three, tough. Nobody has global jurisdiction.
And depending on the country your friend might end up in jail, not very friendly but you never know how undemocratic countries/institutions will overreact.
So Europe gets a YouTube without guns but with nudity?
This is hard. But it's a different category of hard from the problem Google has chosen for itself.
Let's assume California has a protected class that New York doesn't. China has protected classes the U.K. doesn't. That could mean a comment visible in New York isn't in California. Or it could mean something else.
This isn't an easy problem. One needs to map comments to various protected classes and then measure "hatefulness" according to local constructs. One needs to decide what to do with content so flagged. But that's objectively easier than doing all of that plus coming up with the definitions for protected classes.
Viewed through this framework, deleting a comment, as Google is doing here, is almost always wrong.
> it essentially legalizes political persecution
The First Amendment is supposed to protect against this. Protected classes govern private actors.
This is where the legal concept of protected classes may be helpful. They're sets of attributes society has deemed one cannot discriminate against. That tends to line up well with said society's line between insulting and hateful.
As a legal definition, these class definitions tend to be precise. That makes them convenient for exporting.
Notably, political affiliation is not a protected class under U.S. law.