Ask HN: Is there any place on the internet capable of freedom of speech?
When people say freedom of speech, they don't mean in its totality, but a portion of it. If you talk about the world's problems - all of them - you will get removed.
The places that aren't moderated are filled with political crap such as to tarnish their credibility, so that the people will stay away by their own will.
Other places such as x/twitter, has some liberty but not very much. Real subjects are not getting through.
Anything else besides hosting my own servers, and be killed by search engines? This is because even if you do it right, no search engine will index your content. I'm looking for solutions of anything other that the usual "let them kill each other", which is exactly what they are doing.
112 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 191 ms ] threadI think you summed it up. One would have to host their own platforms and intentionally block search engines, bots, etc... In my opinion discoverability would be limited to word of mouth on chat and forum platforms until those platforms block the domain names in question and this is even assuming the platform is text-only. I assume the entry points would have to be ever changing and rotating domain names as landing points into the main site.
Any major platform that claims to support complete free speech will eventually be compelled to do otherwise in my opinion. Competing platforms, agent provocateurs and unhinged people will quickly contaminate the platform thus giving reason for governments to shut it down. One would need really good human moderators, automation, algorithms and ACL's or ranks to weed out toxicity in order to keep the platform alive which is technically a form of censorship and would not meet your requirements.
Those communities are typically on the darknet (remember that?) in unregulated peer to peer communities like freenet and such, and to a lesser extent TOR. There was a lot of shady shit on Napster/Limewire too, back in the day, before censorship technologies and regulations caught up. I think these days there are other places like that, but I haven't kept up.
Even less-moderated communities (the chans and old reddit) still have to abide by legal regulations wherever they're hosted/registered or risk getting shut down or at least blocked by ISPs.
So if you really want liberty, you have to exist in a network layer that can't be easily moderated by anyone. Monitored, yes, but not easily moderated.
But guess what... you go there, and the content is obscure, slow, and usually trashy and toxic and often outright illegal and dangerous and abusive. Turns out extreme liberty can bring out the worst in people (or at least daylight the worst people), and normies tend to flee those places in droves and go back to arguing about gender on Twitter or whatever.
This implies _intent_. I mean, it sounds like what you want is just a different content policy, really? A ban on politics? Would make for a rather boring social media site, I suspect; everything is ultimately politics.
This could always be the heart of the matter.
Whether strictly moderated or casually self-adjusting, once an extreme or somewhat non-mainstream "groupthink" starts to dominate, numerically or some other way, then any opposite viewpoints will be repressed to an increasing degree.
The best you can probably do is to engage where you are compatible with the content as it has already devolved.
As I implied in my other comment, probably the only time there is any chance for nothing to have devolved in terms of free speech, is if you get in at the very beginning. Or with greater certainty, it does seem intuitive, hosting it your dang self.
And, incredibly, it is.
>hosting my own servers
You might have answered your own question here.
Or consider that a baseline, and it still may not allow as much freedom as you have in mind.
Plus I don't think there is as much risk of a search engine killing a free-speech utopia unless it was a search engine that brought it to life in the first place, or was keeping it on life support beyond it's natural healthy lifespan.
Getting though how? Just because you have free speech doesn't mean others must listen to you, or that you even need to use specific platforms.
The platforms manipulating what speech gets shown is in a way their own form of speech. I think this can be dangerous, but that's more a condemnation of how we use those private services than the services themselves.
Seems like an assumption that “the people” don’t start producing crap when talking about politics/social. It’s a naturally complex topic with all sorts of obstacles to truth. People take simplified and/or incorrect positions and divide arbitrarily due to natural limitations. It turns into garbage on its own, no need for a sneaky party to help it.
This is unsolvable and the term is loaded, the faster you get it, the easier the life.
Just go with the reasoning you have, you don’t need to share it cause those able to pick it up already know.
As anyone could guess, the result is ... edgy.
... Wait, what does that mean? They don't censor, except for the censorship?
What people normally mean when they say “free speech” is in the US first amendment sense, not in the “you can post videos of horrible crimes you’ve committed” sense.
Gabs content policy is pretty short and basically just says this. No CP and other criminal content, anything protected by first amendment is ok.
Free speech conversations tend to devolve very quickly into americentrism, which is fine until those with mass power try to impose their specific views on other countries.
In fairness, the US has about the strongest free-speech protections, so that kind of makes sense?
Censors have learned that they don't need to deny people the right to speak, they just need to drown it out with infinite noise.
There is no simple or easy resolution to this problem. The only useful platforms for the free exchange of ideas must find ways to balance the signal:noise ratio, which is isomorphic to moderation. And if you ask, "who does the moderation?", yes, that's precisely the problem. Unfortunately, the alternative, no moderation, is trivial to censor in practice.
Furthermore, keep in mind that free speech is a means, not an end. Free society is the end.
Secondly, my point is that if you do have a service that is trying to optimize for freedom of expression, mixing in needing to earn money on top of that, is bound to leave you almost penny-less, as advertisers don't like an environment like that and people needing to be anonymous aren't as happy to donate.
But OP says:
> Other places such as x/twitter, has some liberty but not very much. Real subjects are not getting through.
So I'm not sure if they're saying that isn't what X is doing, or that they're criticising X for not going beyond the law (illegally), or that perhaps they feel that some legal speech is not treated equally?
It may be their stated position, but not their practice, as has been recently demonstrated in Brazil.
I'm saying that posts get removed if they contain certain subjects. Nothing offensive is in them but only facts.
If I start spewing political speech on HN, you will soon be banned and dang and company have every right to do so.
Might have been true in the past but no longer. Once your platform gets a large enough audience, governments will try to artificially sway public opinion on the platform. This has been true for every single large social platform so far.
unless they are some local jack booted thugs…
https://amp.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/aug/13/mari...
Private platforms and citizens can do what they want.
I am sure a forum where any and all speech is tolerated quickly turns to 4chan but with all kinds of extreme porn. I am sure those places exist on ToR. I do not know why you would want to go there.
Ironically, a lot of the forums which value free speech will kick you out for even sounding like you have the wrong opinions.
Another answer to this is "Yes, with proper rules and moderation, you can keep your cake and eat it too".
First off, have a rule that every created thread in this forum need to have some sort of "basis for discussion". Any thread that doesn't, gets closed.
Secondly, have a rule that states that any posts in the threads need to be at least somehow related to the topic, and posts that are not nonsense or off-topic.
Thirdly, have a moderation team that is well aligned, and favors quality posts, removing the rest of the shit.
The end result is a forum where you can discuss any topic, as long as your own posts also add to the conversation, not just try to shut others down or post off-topic/nonsense.
Sure, it will contain opinions you disagree with, but it won't be a cesspool of just casual racism.
(These ideas are all based on a real forum online today where essentially any topic can be discussed without fear of facing real-life consequence for the opinions you hold, assuming your anonymous)
They want 0 limits on their own speech. None. And that includes people blocking them. They want to have their say, no matter how noxious or unpleasant anyone else finds it. They want to "just ask questions" and "just have an open conversation."
But they absolutely want other people to be moderated. There's no amount of moderation of their that's small enough.
Basically, they're (internet speech) libertarians; they want to reap the benefits of a structured, cultivated society and community without be subject to any of the constraints that make it actually work.
The problem with many of these social media platforms (X, Threads, Insta, etc) is that they are actively disincentivized to enforce the first requirement of those two. Strict KYC is (rightly) viewed by many as overtly invasive of privacy, it would hurt the volume of content on these platforms (because 90% of it is AI generated engagement bait), and it would hurt their user signup and retention metrics (being ignorant of how many bots and alts are on your platform is vastly better than knowing and doing something about it).
This would actively lower the freedom of expression. There are opinions people hold that they're only comfortable sharing when they know it won't come back to them in real life, as holding such opinions can be dangerous. These people should still be allowed to share their views and discuss with others that disagree with them/they disagree with. This could be one of the only ways for them to even challenge their own world view.
If you're optimizing freedom of expression, then anonymity is a requirement.
I understand the anonymity argument, even from the perspective that sometimes you don't want even the service operator to know who you are. I'll be blunt on my take on this: I think this is millenial/genx idealism, tossing coins into a wishing well for an internet that does not exist anymore and will never again. Generative AI is out of the bag, and social network service providers can either grow up and recognize that their Paramount Number 1 service they can offer is some reasonable guarantee of protection against generative AI, or they can stay addicted to their juiced engagement numbers and play dumb when it comes out that 99% of tweets are from bots trying to build rapport, sell products, and influence elections (bye bye advertisers!). Its their call. Twitter is making the wrong one. Meta is up next. Traditionally they've all done bot detection; this doesn't work. Bots are indistinguishable from humans now. You need human-detection; KYC, meat-space verification. If you don't like the anti-privacy angle, then don't participate; no one is forcing you, and you're welcome to start your own mastodon server out in the generative AI wildlands (and, by the way, you should always have that right; i'm not prescribing how the world should be ran, just how e.g. Threads should be).
The simplest answer is that content moderation is an unsolved problem and certain topics are expensive to moderate. Freedom of speech matters but so does the culture of conduct. Further, as a site owner you risk your reputation by the activity you permit, and taboo subjects can attract folks you don't want on your site. Hence why they end up in the cesspool.
HN is friendly to freedom of speech because the site probably doesn't attract people that are easy to act out when offended or those that like to report people whose content they do not like. Or because of the occasional comment that refocuses a discussion again.
I would even argue that some more strongly moderated sites can often even be larger cesspools. You can go to Instagram and say something negative about the next random pop start or influencer and people are going to get extremely vicious. Far more so than a message board with only anonymous users.
Also the amount of taboos seem to correlate with hostility for some reason.
In other words, we're dealing with over-sensitive people on the internet? Children, because those are the only ones that cannot accept the truth. And, since everyone is so easily offended, they have to be protected by content editing?
No one in their right minds would spend a dime for an easily offended person. If this done, there are things at play here.
> Also the amount of taboos seem to correlate with hostility for some reason.
I noticed that too.
Mark Robinson's historic posts on internet forums clearly demonstrate the hypocrisy and self loathing and psychological projection that's really going on with people like you.
https://edition.cnn.com/2024/09/19/politics/kfile-mark-robin...
At least Mark Robinson has the gumption to post that shit under his own name. If you truly believe and stand by and think you can justify what you say, then you should give it a try, anonymous coward keyboard warrior.
Everywhere that allows free speech now has an angle. Some hide it better than others, and people can't see it.
Rich feature set, ability to be ingested by other services (other M servers, Bluesky, etc.), can self-host.
I don't know too much about search engine indexing, but I guess in the day and age you'd have to find your audience by other means anyway.
And you want to force search engines you index you?
I'm not sure that this request is terribly coherent.
Freedom of speech != "all speech".
A platform with heavy moderation is required to actually enable the highest degree of freedom when it comes to speech, otherwise you allow people to impede others freedom for speech.
Even hosting your own server at home is NOT safe, because if you publish something that rubs the wrong way with powerful entities(could be much less than government even these days), expect to be dumped and blocked by your ISP.
You basically want no moderation, but for people to self censor because otherwise it devolves into garbage. That’s still moderation.
And this also presumes people would actually want to visit this site. If you give people the option of scrolling through funny videos on TikTok or getting into an internet argument with someone, they would not choose the latter.
As you yourself point out, you’re entirely free to say whatever you want on your own setup. But what you want is everyone to pay attention to what you’re saying. There is no guarantee for that.
Everyone has limits.
Another question - why do you personally need free speech?
Because the population is getting stupider by the day (their doing) and it's being programmed. I don't like a re-programmed populations.
Check my profile and follow the link, the entire theme of a little that I have written assumes that a large part of the population. Head up: trigger warning for people who think some how the population at large can be 'educated'
Population at large = https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2xlQaimsGg
You literally have far-leftists discussing with nazis, among computer nerds, among gardeners, among pedophiles, among drug users, among economists, among car fanatics and everyone in-between. Literally any walks of life is present on the forum.
It puts a huge weight on anonymity, and really strict moderation about the rules and puts quality above quantity when it comes to what gets to stay on the forum.
It's text only (with allowed URLs) which presumably covers the forum a lot better when it comes to people trying to take it down.
Of course it's not without its problems, which it has been in Swedish media a lot for, but it also has a ton of benefits in that it allows all these different people to communicate and discuss with each other. I think one big cornerstone to the success of this forum is it's really strict moderation of the messages.
I'm sure 99% of all the Swedish people already know what forum I'm talking about, as it is the most popular forum in the Nordics, but for the rest of you, the forum is called Flashback Forum and started as a kind of revolutionary fanzine back in the 80s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flashback_Media_Group
It is a really radical place (compared to how discussions are usually held in Sweden) so worth highlighting. Yours truly also used to moderate some of the categories in the forum so happy to answer any questions. Seeing the current atmosphere on the internet where discussing topics with people you disagree with is really difficult, I've been thinking about maybe trying to replicate something like Flashback but for a world-wide audience.
Ultimately, like most problems, this is not a technological problem but a people problem. The moderation has to be 99% right for this to even work, and the moderation team needs to have proper tools available to do their job, and everyone on that team has to be 100% aligned. I think this is probably why Flashback ended up so successful.
> This is because even if you do it right, no search engine will index your content.
Flashback is pretty much a "anything goes text-only forum" but even with that, Google ranks Flashback really high in Sweden. It's unlikely you search for anything on Swedish Google and there are no hits from Flashback on the first page or two.