zlacker

>>dredmo+(OP)
Free speech balances delicately, and that should be debated vigorously, but it should not be treated as an absolute.

You shouldn't be free to incite violence. Nor should a company help that speech spread.

>>tarkin+a7
> "You shouldn't be free to incite violence. Nor should a company help that speech spread."

only the fringiest of fringes argue for absolutes. everyone (else) is arguing about where the line is drawn. for instance, if we take yours at face value, you'd be arguing against the american revolution.

>>clairi+j8
I find your absolutist interpretation hard to understand. I think if the occurrence of a situation in which violence is appropriate necessitates an exception to a rule, that doesn't necessarily indicate a bad rule. For example, even though the Founding Fathers were presumably well aware that circumstances may exist in which violent revolution would be justified, note that the constitution they drafted didn't make allowances for a new American Revolution to able to occur without any laws being broken.

>>fireth+Xa
the founding fathers didn't draw that line. they didn't say "free speech, except inciting revolution", they said "freedom of speech", particularly allowing for insurrection speech. the supreme court upheld this interpretation a number of times, for instance[0],

> "In Brandenburg, the US Supreme Court referred to the right even to speak openly of violent action and revolution in broad terms"

no one is breaking any rules or laws here, as far as the constitution is concerned.

but see, that's all beside the point regarding facebook. they have no binding legal requirement to that same standard of free speech. the debate there is how much corporate censorship people are willing to tolerate without injury to facebook's bottom line and stature.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_speech

>>clairi+Kc
> the debate there is how much corporate censorship people are willing to tolerate without injury to facebook's bottom line and stature.

Facebook doesn't need to respond to what its users think it should do, because its users aren't organized enough to achieve the collective action necessary to threaten its bottom line. More generally, what Facebook "should" do, from the perspective of the public good, is a wrong question. Facebook's business model is fundamentally misaligned with the public interest, so even if we could pool our strength to force it to the right policies, it couldn't be trusted to enforce them faithfully. What's right for Facebook isn't what's right for Us; with perpetual struggle we could at best narrow the gap.

In contrast, a federated structure, like Diaspora, is conducive to democracy, because Diaspora is not a company with its own interests. Diaspora is Us. In a federated system, the question is not "what speech do I wish the monopolistic enterprise I've subjected myself to would allow". The question is "what speech will I allow on my server" and "what servers do I want to network with". These questions are inherently more democratic. When the right model is chosen, the problem of endlessly tuning parameters disappears. Fit can be achieved without all the work of overfitting.

So I use Diaspora. I don't have any friends. But I know I'm right.