alt Hacker NewsI’d much rather get arrested in Britain than Russia or Iran. And I certainly wouldn’t put the UK in the same bucket as Russia and Iran. Not even close.
Hate speech is a problem. If it wasn’t, why are Russia and China spending so much on troll farms? It’s a direct attack on a democracy’s ability to form consensus. I don’t think we’ve found the right, effective way to deal with this problem yet, but I applaud any democratic country that tries sth in that area.
I also think Tor is great, just for the record.
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If you live anywhere in the west, you should be more concerned by being arrested by your own government then by some government in the other part of the world.
I'd rather get arrested in the UK too, but that's completely irrelevant.
> Hate speech is a problem. If it wasn’t, why are Russia and China spending so much on troll farms?
Non-sequitur. The existence of troll farms doesn’t mean it's such a big problem that we should give up our rights surrounding speech and communication that we fought hard for.
> Hate speech is a problem.
I agree, 100%. Donald Trump should have the power to jail people for things they say online.
The problem is that it is really difficult to define what hate speech is, and more often than not it's used as a cudgel to silence the opposition.
For Iran and Russia, it is what Khamenei and Putin don't want to hear,
in the UK it's what Starmer doesn't want to hear.
"[A] direct attack on a democracy’s ability to form consensus" is a wonderfully precise term.
Splitting democratic nations through fearmongering targeted at everyone's online profile is an incredible weapon.
No, external influence is an attack on democracy’s ability to form consensus. No hate speech required to drive a wedge between constituents and make people focus on the wrong things.
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So to be clear, your sole expectation of a liberal democracy is that it have a better judicial system than Russia or Iran.
And beyond that, you applaud any democratic country's efforts to reign in speech by arresting their own citizens in order to combat foreign influence operations?
And the fulcrum of this argument is that we believe that Russia and China have uniquely pernicious influence operations and there are no other state-level actors domestically or semi-domestically whose intelligence services also exert influence through the passage of laws restricting speech?
Having seen the last two years of politics in the UK and the US, your impression is that there is an overwhelming Chinese-Russian troll farm operation which self-evidently justifies rolling back the last two centuries worth of hard-fought and incremental precedents won for free speech and free press.
And again, the water-line we need to stay above is merely "this is still better than being arrested in Russia or Iran", keeping in mind that many countries we would not consider to be democracies at all also meet this bar.