> I think we can maintain individual rights trivially while still sending people to jail who threaten to murder people.

Yes, we do that now.

> Other lines can be carefully drawn.

I challenge you to draw a careful line for what is considered “harmful crap”. If you think you can do this, you are most likely a person who sees everything in black and white, and we don’t want people like that enforcing laws or policies.

I called out a local individual for trying to scam people on the facebook market and got death threats from someone who lives an hour from me who wasn't banned from facebook.

They basically aren't doing anything.

But death threats are already illegal. What does your proposal bring? Making it extra illegal? A failure of the police and other authorities to act does not mean that the law is at fault.

I'm talking about enforcement and making social media platforms liable if they don't deal with such situations expeditiously.

We don't need such standards per se because neither of us is a lunatic but if I were in this very comment to make threats of horrific violence against you or your family you can be assured that hacker news tiny moderation team would waste little time in removing my ability to post because they give a fuck about the health of this community.

Facebook by contrast deals with a fraction of 1% of such issues.

Harmful crap defined. Statements that are either knowingly false or evidence a reckless disregard for the truth herein defined as being misinformation that a reasonable person would know it is false that would reasonably be said to lead to serious harm and death by actual persons.

For example telling people to bleach their autistic kids buttholes, that the vaccine contains a chip to track you or will kill you as part of a secret government plot, that covid isn't real, that you should prefer to treat covid with horse paste or take such as a preventative measure.

OK, so you’ve now basically outlawed sarcasm, parody, art, and a number of other worthwhile things. Try again, please.

Hard cases make bad law.

I don't think its hard to distinguish between telling people that they shouldn't get vaccinated against a deadly disease because the vaccine is part of an imaginary plot to kill you leading thousands of people to demonstrably die and sarcasm, parody, art, or those other unnamed worthwhile things.

Not only are some people unknowingly spreading such info but others are knowingly communicating such lies for the lols and for ad revenue.

When we enforce existing laws we take into account context and reasonable assertions of both judges and citizens to interpret situations and the law. The law books and case law is full of fuzzy situations we successfully litigate every day.