Misinformation spreads like wildfire.
The notion that good speech counters bad speech relies on rational, well informed, critical thinking skills that are lacking in a significant portion of the populace.
It is fundamentally different that a company wants to exercise its right to free speech in choosing what is said on its platform than for a government to use free speech as a fig leaf cover for dissent.
Putting up no fight against misinformation and hate speech is not a winning strategy. Society loses much more from nonsense spreading than it does from having to wait 24 hours for high quality chess content to get remoderated.
It’s about silencing legitimate speech that you disagree with, whether it’s on a factual level or other motivations.
Perfect example, coronavirus being manufactured in a lab rather than originating in the wild. Anyone that suggested it was from a lab has been moderated heavily until a report came out that in fact it did.
Was this not damaging to society?
And to your point of hate speech, can you give me a definition of the term? You can’t because there isn’t one that a) covers all scenarios and, more importantly, b) doesn’t cover legitimate speech.
It is up to me to think for myself, not up to someone else to do it for me.
Because if you allow humans to moderate then those humans start acquiring power. Which is something FAANG companies strive to prevent at all costs.
The only way this can make sense - especially on HN - is if the people who advocate for company control of regular peoples’ lives work at these companies.
I used to live in a communist country (probably the same one that Mr. Radic lives/lived in), where "hate speech" -- which was called anti-state, or anti-establishment speech back then -- was punishable by a middle-of-the-night visit by dark-clad police. Yet, people still found ways to openly criticize the Party, and there were even popular songs that openly defied them, which only demonstrates that not even human pattern recognition is good enough to detect these things, as you state in your first sentence.
It's a waste of time, but more importantly it is detrimental to society.