alt Hacker NewsIt depends on who is creating the definition of evil. Once you have a mechanism like this, it isn't long after that it becomes an ideological battleground. Social media moderation is an example of this. It was inevitable for AI usage, but I think folks were hoping the libertarian ideal would hold on a little longer.
It’s notable that the existence of the watchman problem doesn’t invalidate the necessity of regulation; it’s just a question of how you prevent capture of the regulating authority such that regulation is not abused to prevent competitors from emerging. This isn’t a problem unique to statism; you see the same abuse in nominally free markets that exploit the existence of natural monopolies.
Anti-State libertarians posit that preventing this capture at the state level is either impossible (you can never stop worrying about who will watch the watchmen until you abolish the category of watchmen) or so expensive as to not be worth doing (you can regulate it but doing so ends up with systems that are basically totalitarian insofar as the system cannot tolerate insurrection, factionalism, and in many cases, dissent).
The UK and Canada are the best examples of the latter issue; procedures are basically open (you don’t have to worry about disappearing in either country), but you have a governing authority built on wildly unpopular ideas that the systems rely upon for their justification—they cannot tolerate these ideas being criticized.