I am conflicted. On the one hand getting governments to wade into what is fair speech is absolutely a slippery slope. Yet, platform firms are not correctly incenvitived arbiters of speech either.
Square this circle:
1) Big Social Media firms have to make decisions on speech.
2) The ideals of free speech that everyone espouses are from an era where publishing and control of publishing was nascent.
3) As businesses, it is their job to ensure they take care of their shareholders, and thus this means driving engagement.
4) As humans, we respond and engage with certain stimului more actively than others.
5) As of 2026, moderation is still value driven. Private entities must now what is fair speech and moderate according to their values.
6) Platforms, following the incentives that are set out for them, create environments that are as addictive as possible for its users. This is what their job is.
You can make small enclaves for long form content. However, the majority of the voting population is drugged to the gills with enrapturing content.
This is not a recipie for a healthy information economy, this is the opium wars being waged by our own business structures on our own people - a druggie information economy.
Giving governments more power is ... oof... a bad idea. We need more genuine efforts to ensure a healthier content environment that works for society.
Do note, that while US based commenters are concerned, the situation is even worse in other nations, given that Authoritarianism is on an upswing. Figuring this out is not a trivial philosophical issue.
> Big Social Media firms have to make decisions on speech.
The fiction underlying their section 230 liability shield is that they don’t have to make those decisions. They’re just “dumb pipes” for user generated content. The Supreme Court punted on this issue in Twitter v. Taamneh but it’s going to get resolved eventually.
This bill is about enhancing the protections of lawful free-speech under the US constitution.
Generally speaking, we deem various kinds of speech that harms people as NOT protected under the first amendment, and that kind of speech would not be protected here.
Yelling “Fire!” in a crowded theater, libel and slander, speech calling for violence, and fraudulent advertising are some typical examples of speech not protected by the first amendment.
It would be tricky, but we could reasonably categorize engagement algorithms with certain properties as harmful to people and not subject to first amendment protections. This would be consumer protection, like laws against fraudulent advertising and other misleading claims.
> we could reasonably categorize engagement algorithms with certain properties as harmful to people and not subject to first amendment protections
This is a hope, however I have not seen any effort that wasn't scuppered, until recently.
The social media bans are a lurch in that direction.
I could separate them out into different strands:
1) Society saying that the engagement algorithms is not what we want to have in our lives or the lives of our children
2) Problematic technical implementations, or benign technical implementations that invade privacy and support government gaining more powers over speech.
Any regulation shaping algorithms is perilously close to shaping speech. Now if you say algorithms are speech or editorial decisions that platforms have their own freedom to choose, then you essentially strip them of their protections.
This would force a form of moderation that would have most people up in arms on HN.
I fully admit, I am being rough in my cuts; the point I am attempting to make is that any decision to decide what constitutes protected and unprotected speech is going to be government interference.
It may even be likely that the firms such as Meta or Tik Tok would end up as untenable under such rules.
> Generally speaking, we deem various kinds of speech that harms people as NOT protected under the first amendment, and that kind of speech would not be protected here.
That is not a general principle. Consider the following: it is now illegal to say the word “election” because it would harm the President.
Do people not read the article, or do they just read the clickbait title and comment?
Apparently they missed Ron Wyden (co-sponsor) of the bill is a Democrat and the bill is a bi-partisan effort?
Or the fact the EFF is actually in support of the bill:
EFF applauds Senators Cruz and Wyden for taking this critical issue seriously, and we look forward to working with Congress on this bipartisan bill as it moves through the process. We hope it lands on the right balance to provide additional protections for everyday users around freedom of expression.
> Apparently they missed Ron Wyden (co-sponsor) of the bill is a Democrat and the bill is a bi-partisan effort?
And thank god for that. I hope this is indicative of a larger trend in the opposite direction.
I'm not in the US, but here too free speech and other democratic values have been something the far right could contrast themselves on against the center and left. It pisses me off to no end that the issues I've been harping on about for years are now most effectively championed by a group that is otherwise ideologically opposed to me. I'm not mad at the right for this, I'm mad at the center and left who handed it to them.
Are you sure they are? Probably most people in your country would label you as far right for championing free speech, no other issues considered. Probably you are doing the same for others.
Yeah. On pretty much every other topic important to me, their official positions are either diametrically opposed or lean into another direction far enough that supporting other parties would be a better choice.
What? The far right is against free speech. They only ever screech about free speech when someone is experiencing social consequences.
They whine about actual Nazi rhetoric earning bans on private companies' platforms, then turn around and open investigations on people criticizing their masked police force. Attending protests gets you added to the terrorist watchlist.
what a strange take for a non-US person. one 'side' takes a couple whacks at free speech. the other side calls them on it, gets in power, and then starts taking a chainsaw to it, and you find reason to be angry that's its side A making a fuss now? and not that side B went rogue?
Shouldn't you care more about the actual issue than who is writing the laws around it? Why are you so pissed off about the "who" instead of happy you are getting what you want?
I'm not getting what I want on free speech, because the center left form the ruling parties, restricting speech more and more.
People here are getting police visits and legal mail because they called a politician a name on twitter. Tens of thousands of cases of that at this point.
Who are you referring to? At the time I'm replying to this, there are 4 other top-level comments on this thread, and the only one even implying that it was a partisan effort was someone mentioning the "current regime" in a joking sort of way. Everyone knows that Liberals also want to limit free speech. That's not new.
Huh? We have more free speech than ever online at this moment. The last regime colluded with the major social media companies to censor people they didn't like and it's also recently come to light that they attempted to get the Joe Rogan/Spotify deal nuked, all based on censoring speech they don't like.
The liberal government of the UK is moving toward complete online censorship with their bill to prevent children from going on social media sites. The reality is that they will now be able to identify and will arrest people for posting opinions they don't like. This has already been happening for the last couple of years and will now be even easier. This is exactly how it works in China.
If Democrats come into power again in the US, this will soon be coming to a computer near you.
This should be the #1 story on HN, but the tech community has been strangely silent on the subject....
I just wish the people claiming to be champions of free speech and rights will just admit that this all goes out the window when it applies to speech and people you don't like. It would make everything much easier.
You are kidding yourself if you think this is a liberal vs conservative issue.
The current FCC chairman threatens the broadcast license and to block deals of networks who air shows the president doesn’t like. These threats appear to have lead directly to the cancellation of shows — a clear violation of the first amendment, though there have been no consequences so far.
If you really care about this issue, get out of your information bubble.
Whichever party is in power, Democrats or Republicans, liberals or conservatives, have tried to suppress speech they don’t like when they get in power. If we pretend this is a partisan issue we can’t stop them.
I'll give you that Liberals are also antagonistic towards online free speech, but pretending that we have more free speech online right now than ever before is the most insane thing I've ever heard. Just because you can post nazi shit on Twitter now does not mean we have more online freedom.
It’s the official position of the US government that posting the number 8647 is a crime. I know this sounds like a crazy thing I made up, but they posted a detailed explainer (https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/federal-grand-jury-indicts-fo...): any reasonable person, they argue, would know that this number is a threat to kill the President.
But everyone here loves jawboning and agrees the government should suppress speech. Well, at least when their team is in office. Whether it's ICE Block or IVM Block, you can probably find a reason why you too think speech freedom is just a little too free for your tastes.
> But everyone here loves jawboning and agrees the government should suppress speech.
That sure is quite an assumption you're making.
Governments should have zero control over speech and zero ability to impose consequences on speech. Individuals and most groups should have absolute freedom of association, which is precisely what they're exercising when choosing not to associate with some speech and some speakers
ICE Block is the app mentioned in the article which the Trump administration pressured Apple to remove from the app store. It allowed you to notify people in the area when you see ICE (presumably to give illegal aliens an opportunity to evade ICE enforcement).
IVM Block is my tongue in cheek reference to the Biden administration doing everything in their power to block discussion of a safe and effective treatment for Covid which would eliminate the legal justification for the EUA on Covid vaccines and spoil their giant investments in those pharma companies.
IIRC any FB post claiming that the Wuhan coronavirus originated in the Wuhan coronavirus lab, would be removed and could result in user ban, at request of the federal government.
The revolving door of corruption between the FDA and Pharma industry is pretty well documented. But it looks like my speech freedom is going to cost me some more karma. Darned consequences of speech freedom are at it again.
Firstly, freedom of speech does not guarantee you freedom from consequences of your speech. The government can't stop you from saying stupid shit, however it also can't stop other people from telling you you're stupid.
Second, horse dewormer doesn't cure COVID. Censoring dangerous misinformation from fools like yourself who will believe it because it's given to them via the right mouthpiece is a good idea, because if you don't, then you end up with fools like yourself, years after the fact, still regurgitating it.
> Firstly, freedom of speech does not guarantee you freedom from consequences of your speech.
It really does, that's the entire point. If you go find somebody and physically attack them for what they've written on HN about for example medicine, that makes you the law-breaker.
I understand from the way you write that you might consider it your right to do such things to other people who don't have the same opinions as you, but freedom of speech protects them against retribution from you or anybody else, including from the government.
Although I agree that ICE block and its various sibling apps and spinoffs are important and do accomplish something meaningful, it's certainly not a "fake thing" that many of the world's foremost experts on the relevant topics were censored with regard to epidemic response.
Facebook's treatment of the BMJ investigation of the unblinding of the Pfizer trial (which of course, turned out to be spot-on) was absolutely shocking, and is just one of the many instances of "ICE block-level" censorship.
Obviously censorship of both the location of ICE agents (or other terrorist threats bearing state decals) and censorship of discourse over the science of respiratory pathogens has been awful; I don't recall anyone here on HN cheerleading either of them.
In fact, it seems to me that you've chosen precisely two areas between which a palpable bridge exists, contradicting the two-party zeitgeist.
HN, for all its many flaws, is one of the few places where important evidence such as the diamond princess dataset and the cochrane review of evidence of mask (in)efficacy received robust discussion and, seemingly, resulted in changed minds.
Likewise, I don't recall anyone but a few trolls suggesting that Apple's assistance to ICE in covering its tracks was a legitimate exercise of state (to the extent that pressure was a factor) or corporate (to the extent that it created market esteem) pressure.
JAWBONE == Justice Against Weaponized Bureaucratic Overreach to Networked Expression. Max Kudos. Ron and Ted owe a staffer (or staffers) a few drinks.
Another good bill for privacy that is actually good: https://www.surveillanceaccountability.com/
I am conflicted. On the one hand getting governments to wade into what is fair speech is absolutely a slippery slope. Yet, platform firms are not correctly incenvitived arbiters of speech either.
Square this circle:
1) Big Social Media firms have to make decisions on speech.
2) The ideals of free speech that everyone espouses are from an era where publishing and control of publishing was nascent.
3) As businesses, it is their job to ensure they take care of their shareholders, and thus this means driving engagement.
4) As humans, we respond and engage with certain stimului more actively than others.
5) As of 2026, moderation is still value driven. Private entities must now what is fair speech and moderate according to their values.
6) Platforms, following the incentives that are set out for them, create environments that are as addictive as possible for its users. This is what their job is.
You can make small enclaves for long form content. However, the majority of the voting population is drugged to the gills with enrapturing content.
This is not a recipie for a healthy information economy, this is the opium wars being waged by our own business structures on our own people - a druggie information economy.
Giving governments more power is ... oof... a bad idea. We need more genuine efforts to ensure a healthier content environment that works for society.
Do note, that while US based commenters are concerned, the situation is even worse in other nations, given that Authoritarianism is on an upswing. Figuring this out is not a trivial philosophical issue.
> Big Social Media firms have to make decisions on speech.
The fiction underlying their section 230 liability shield is that they don’t have to make those decisions. They’re just “dumb pipes” for user generated content. The Supreme Court punted on this issue in Twitter v. Taamneh but it’s going to get resolved eventually.
This bill is about enhancing the protections of lawful free-speech under the US constitution.
Generally speaking, we deem various kinds of speech that harms people as NOT protected under the first amendment, and that kind of speech would not be protected here.
Yelling “Fire!” in a crowded theater, libel and slander, speech calling for violence, and fraudulent advertising are some typical examples of speech not protected by the first amendment.
It would be tricky, but we could reasonably categorize engagement algorithms with certain properties as harmful to people and not subject to first amendment protections. This would be consumer protection, like laws against fraudulent advertising and other misleading claims.
> we could reasonably categorize engagement algorithms with certain properties as harmful to people and not subject to first amendment protections
This is a hope, however I have not seen any effort that wasn't scuppered, until recently.
The social media bans are a lurch in that direction.
I could separate them out into different strands:
1) Society saying that the engagement algorithms is not what we want to have in our lives or the lives of our children
2) Problematic technical implementations, or benign technical implementations that invade privacy and support government gaining more powers over speech.
Any regulation shaping algorithms is perilously close to shaping speech. Now if you say algorithms are speech or editorial decisions that platforms have their own freedom to choose, then you essentially strip them of their protections.
This would force a form of moderation that would have most people up in arms on HN.
I fully admit, I am being rough in my cuts; the point I am attempting to make is that any decision to decide what constitutes protected and unprotected speech is going to be government interference.
It may even be likely that the firms such as Meta or Tik Tok would end up as untenable under such rules.
For what it's worth, yelling fire in a crowded theater is First Amendment protected speech.
https://www.techdirt.com/2023/03/14/setting-1st-amendment-my...
> Generally speaking, we deem various kinds of speech that harms people as NOT protected under the first amendment, and that kind of speech would not be protected here.
That is not a general principle. Consider the following: it is now illegal to say the word “election” because it would harm the President.
No need to square the circle when it’s already a hexagon. Commies can’t stand hexagons.
Do people not read the article, or do they just read the clickbait title and comment?
Apparently they missed Ron Wyden (co-sponsor) of the bill is a Democrat and the bill is a bi-partisan effort?
Or the fact the EFF is actually in support of the bill:
EFF applauds Senators Cruz and Wyden for taking this critical issue seriously, and we look forward to working with Congress on this bipartisan bill as it moves through the process. We hope it lands on the right balance to provide additional protections for everyday users around freedom of expression.
> Apparently they missed Ron Wyden (co-sponsor) of the bill is a Democrat and the bill is a bi-partisan effort?
And thank god for that. I hope this is indicative of a larger trend in the opposite direction.
I'm not in the US, but here too free speech and other democratic values have been something the far right could contrast themselves on against the center and left. It pisses me off to no end that the issues I've been harping on about for years are now most effectively championed by a group that is otherwise ideologically opposed to me. I'm not mad at the right for this, I'm mad at the center and left who handed it to them.
> ideologically opposed to me
Are you sure they are? Probably most people in your country would label you as far right for championing free speech, no other issues considered. Probably you are doing the same for others.
Yeah. On pretty much every other topic important to me, their official positions are either diametrically opposed or lean into another direction far enough that supporting other parties would be a better choice.
What? The far right is against free speech. They only ever screech about free speech when someone is experiencing social consequences.
They whine about actual Nazi rhetoric earning bans on private companies' platforms, then turn around and open investigations on people criticizing their masked police force. Attending protests gets you added to the terrorist watchlist.
what a strange take for a non-US person. one 'side' takes a couple whacks at free speech. the other side calls them on it, gets in power, and then starts taking a chainsaw to it, and you find reason to be angry that's its side A making a fuss now? and not that side B went rogue?
I've read this five times and I still can't reconcile it with what I said.
Shouldn't you care more about the actual issue than who is writing the laws around it? Why are you so pissed off about the "who" instead of happy you are getting what you want?
I'm not getting what I want on free speech, because the center left form the ruling parties, restricting speech more and more.
People here are getting police visits and legal mail because they called a politician a name on twitter. Tens of thousands of cases of that at this point.
Who are you referring to? At the time I'm replying to this, there are 4 other top-level comments on this thread, and the only one even implying that it was a partisan effort was someone mentioning the "current regime" in a joking sort of way. Everyone knows that Liberals also want to limit free speech. That's not new.
Phew, they better be careful what they ask for. The current regime might find themselves hoisted upon their own petard.
Huh? We have more free speech than ever online at this moment. The last regime colluded with the major social media companies to censor people they didn't like and it's also recently come to light that they attempted to get the Joe Rogan/Spotify deal nuked, all based on censoring speech they don't like.
The liberal government of the UK is moving toward complete online censorship with their bill to prevent children from going on social media sites. The reality is that they will now be able to identify and will arrest people for posting opinions they don't like. This has already been happening for the last couple of years and will now be even easier. This is exactly how it works in China.
If Democrats come into power again in the US, this will soon be coming to a computer near you.
This should be the #1 story on HN, but the tech community has been strangely silent on the subject....
I just wish the people claiming to be champions of free speech and rights will just admit that this all goes out the window when it applies to speech and people you don't like. It would make everything much easier.
https://www.newsweek.com/pro-palestinian-protest-states-coll...
You are kidding yourself if you think this is a liberal vs conservative issue.
The current FCC chairman threatens the broadcast license and to block deals of networks who air shows the president doesn’t like. These threats appear to have lead directly to the cancellation of shows — a clear violation of the first amendment, though there have been no consequences so far.
If you really care about this issue, get out of your information bubble.
Whichever party is in power, Democrats or Republicans, liberals or conservatives, have tried to suppress speech they don’t like when they get in power. If we pretend this is a partisan issue we can’t stop them.
I'll give you that Liberals are also antagonistic towards online free speech, but pretending that we have more free speech online right now than ever before is the most insane thing I've ever heard. Just because you can post nazi shit on Twitter now does not mean we have more online freedom.
Please provide evidence that online speech in the USA is restricted in any way, unlike in Europe where you get fined and/or arrested for mean memes
It’s the official position of the US government that posting the number 8647 is a crime. I know this sounds like a crazy thing I made up, but they posted a detailed explainer (https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/federal-grand-jury-indicts-fo...): any reasonable person, they argue, would know that this number is a threat to kill the President.
But everyone here loves jawboning and agrees the government should suppress speech. Well, at least when their team is in office. Whether it's ICE Block or IVM Block, you can probably find a reason why you too think speech freedom is just a little too free for your tastes.
> But everyone here loves jawboning and agrees the government should suppress speech.
That sure is quite an assumption you're making.
Governments should have zero control over speech and zero ability to impose consequences on speech. Individuals and most groups should have absolute freedom of association, which is precisely what they're exercising when choosing not to associate with some speech and some speakers
What are those things? Googling didn’t help.
ICE Block is the app mentioned in the article which the Trump administration pressured Apple to remove from the app store. It allowed you to notify people in the area when you see ICE (presumably to give illegal aliens an opportunity to evade ICE enforcement).
IVM Block is my tongue in cheek reference to the Biden administration doing everything in their power to block discussion of a safe and effective treatment for Covid which would eliminate the legal justification for the EUA on Covid vaccines and spoil their giant investments in those pharma companies.
So a real thing that people actually made to accomplish something and a fake thing you made up in your head to be angry about.
IIRC any FB post claiming that the Wuhan coronavirus originated in the Wuhan coronavirus lab, would be removed and could result in user ban, at request of the federal government.
That was true for a period of time. Something like a couple months if I remember right.
What were the consequences for this "request" not being implemented?
The revolving door of corruption between the FDA and Pharma industry is pretty well documented. But it looks like my speech freedom is going to cost me some more karma. Darned consequences of speech freedom are at it again.
Firstly, freedom of speech does not guarantee you freedom from consequences of your speech. The government can't stop you from saying stupid shit, however it also can't stop other people from telling you you're stupid.
Second, horse dewormer doesn't cure COVID. Censoring dangerous misinformation from fools like yourself who will believe it because it's given to them via the right mouthpiece is a good idea, because if you don't, then you end up with fools like yourself, years after the fact, still regurgitating it.
> Firstly, freedom of speech does not guarantee you freedom from consequences of your speech.
It really does, that's the entire point. If you go find somebody and physically attack them for what they've written on HN about for example medicine, that makes you the law-breaker.
I understand from the way you write that you might consider it your right to do such things to other people who don't have the same opinions as you, but freedom of speech protects them against retribution from you or anybody else, including from the government.
Although I agree that ICE block and its various sibling apps and spinoffs are important and do accomplish something meaningful, it's certainly not a "fake thing" that many of the world's foremost experts on the relevant topics were censored with regard to epidemic response.
Facebook's treatment of the BMJ investigation of the unblinding of the Pfizer trial (which of course, turned out to be spot-on) was absolutely shocking, and is just one of the many instances of "ICE block-level" censorship.
(In case you need a refresher on the Facebook-censors-BMJ drama, I summarized it a few months ago here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46232902 )
Obviously censorship of both the location of ICE agents (or other terrorist threats bearing state decals) and censorship of discourse over the science of respiratory pathogens has been awful; I don't recall anyone here on HN cheerleading either of them.
In fact, it seems to me that you've chosen precisely two areas between which a palpable bridge exists, contradicting the two-party zeitgeist.
HN, for all its many flaws, is one of the few places where important evidence such as the diamond princess dataset and the cochrane review of evidence of mask (in)efficacy received robust discussion and, seemingly, resulted in changed minds.
Likewise, I don't recall anyone but a few trolls suggesting that Apple's assistance to ICE in covering its tracks was a legitimate exercise of state (to the extent that pressure was a factor) or corporate (to the extent that it created market esteem) pressure.