Sad
One day you have kente cloths and taking the knee everywhere, and before you know it, right-winger bloggers are running the law enforcement.
This is no way to live, 80%+ of the population is neither committed progressives nor committed conservatives/reactionaries, but they rule (or ruled) the social networks and thus dominate(d) in elections.
By the grace of the algorithm, you majesty the king.
I started Ask Me Anything on reddit, does being a moderator in that capacity mean I limited free speech of Americans?
Frankly this was inevitable. There is a reckoning that has been put off, within the groups that champion free speech. Mods happen to be the people who see how the sausage is made, but have no real ability to be heard.
The Zeitgeist is still happy to say “censorship bad”, thus moderation bad. The work of ensuring “healthy” communities or debate is left to the magic of the “market place of ideas”.
Except the market place is well and truly broken, captured and unfair for regular users. We have a dark forest for content consumers.
This conversation needs to be had.
Edit: tried to make the tone less frustrated.
Attaching your real world identity to every interaction you have on the internet is no more objectively natural than doing otherwise, and more of a burden than we place on interactions in the real world. I don't exchange my drivers license and SSL with everyone I talk to.
We don't need to have the serious conversation, we've had it, and the false dichotomy you're presenting here is invalid. We don't have to choose one or the other. Anonymity has been well established in every free society as legally and morally defensible and a necessity for free speech and a free state for decades, to the point of including some degree of anonymity from one's own government.
Moderation beyond strictly legal content is acceptable. Anonymity is also acceptable. 4chan can be 4chan, and other places can not be 4chan. Free speech does not guarantee you a platform, much less all platforms. It doesn't require me to put a target on my back, either.
Communication with people half the way across the globe at the speed of light is objectively unnatural too, should we ban that? There's no "we" calling for the end of online anonymity excepts for spooks and people who believe people should be identified and punished for expressing opinions they disagree with.
Is it so hard to reproduce the entire damn thing so readers can form their own opinion of what it says?
How are we supposed to fact-check this!
https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/News/visas-news/a...
Asking people for their social media accounts is not new, it's a part of the visa application process since Trump's first term.
What's new is that now on top of that, they're asking people for those social media accounts to be public.
(I have family and lots of close friends in the US. I miss them all. But I don't intend to visit given the way things are over there these days. _Maybe_ after the next administration change? Depending on how things change? But I've come to accept I may never visit again.)
To describe their job poorly, they're there as a way of reducing odds of a lawsuit. At one of my previous jobs, there was a whole fact-checking team that wrote no stories themselves, but every story had to be run through them as a part of the publishing pipeline.
In serious news organizations, there's quite a few steps between a journalist writing a draft and that draft being published. Fact-checking is one of them, having a competent "boss" (called an editor) is another.
Most news orgs have both a "serious" department and a "publish as much as possible" department, with far different requirements. In general, if you're publishing something along the lines of "X said Y", you don't need a rigorous process. If you're doing an investigation in which you're accusing someone of doing something illegal, then you need a far more rigorous process.
This is so vague as to be meaningless.
Like, of course it's "problematic", that's why you're talking about it. Be more specific or it sounds like an applause light.
To show the outside view: I'm thinking of a recent (pointless) discussion I had, it's akin to when people who hate asylum seekers say most of those asylum seekers are "fighting age": of course most of them are, very few others are fit enough to make the trip.
(If I judge you right from a very short comment, you'd describe the phrase "fighting age" as itself "problematic"?)
It"s a stepping stone on the way to make it illegal to refuse to publish the "right" sort of lies.
Typical free speech advocate was considering criticism, fact checking and mockery of right to be attack on free speech for years now. Even in HN, you frequently seen the definition of free speech as "dont mind nazi speech and is actively helping nazi when they are in trouble". It never applied to nazi opposition.
First, this dates back to MAY of this year. Nothing new.
Second, it is obvious that nobody took the time to research, read the policy and understand it. Most comments are nonsense based on a complete lack of context.
Finally,
The restrictions apply to foreign nationals who are involved in:
- Issuing or threatening legal action, such as arrest warrants, against US citizens or residents for social media posts made while they are physically present on US soil.
So, any foreign official or person who threatens to, for example, arrest a US citizen based on what you post online WHILE YOU ARE IN THE US will be denied a visa.
What's your objection to this?
- Demanding that US tech platforms adopt content moderation policies or engage in censorship that extends beyond the foreign government's jurisdiction and affects protected speech in the US.
Someone not from the US who tries to censor you in the US and beyond the limits of their own national jurisdiction will be denied a visa. Or, government officials in Peru demanding that HN prevent you from posting your drivel while in the US (outside their government's jurisdiction) will be denied a visa.
What's your objection to this one?
- Directing or participating in content moderation initiatives or "fact-checking" that the US administration considers a form of censorship of Americans' speech.
Anyone that, from foreign soil, attempts to limit your right to free speech in the US while hiding under the "fact checking" or "content moderation" excuse will be denied a visa. Remember that your constitutional right of free speech in the US does not come with a fact-checking or content moderation limitation. As this thread easily demonstrates, you can post absolutely nonsense, lies and distortions and you would be protected. Fact-checking isn't a magical tool that allows someone to bypass constitutional rights to silence someone else.
What's your problem with this?
Of course, there are nuanced and not so nuanced elements to what constitutes free speech, where and under what circumstances. The key here is that outsiders don't get to mess with it or try to arrest you for this right you have in the US. If they do try, it's OK, they just can't get a visa to come here. Small price to pay.
So, yeah, nothing to see here. This is actually good. It means someone who, from, for example, Poland, acts to affect your free speech rights in the US or have you arrested while you visit Europe for something you posted online while in the US will not be allowed to come into the US.
Stop being lazy and ignorant. Take the time to research, read and understand before forming ideas and, worse, opening your mouth.
What would make me even more happy is if we linked our foreign policy, especially our trade and aid policies, to align with our Constitution.
Other governments can do what they want, but we should prefer to interact with governments that share our values, and we should not reward or prefer governments that don’t.
(A french judge was cut off by most US servies, because trump didn't like his ruling. One could say trump.... censored him)
In fact, the Executive Order that imposed these sanctions is very broad and gives "immunity" to pretty much everyone affiliated with the US. If the ICC tries to prosecute anyone from NATO or anyone from a "major non-NATO ally" (Australia, Egypt, Israel, Japan, Jordan, Argentina, the Republic of Korea, and New Zealand), the current administration will put sanctions on those judges.
So there's 40 or so countries whose governments are effectively "immune" from being prosecuted from the ICC, but the president has authority to add literally any country to that list.
It will, no doubt, be every bit as effective as the "thoughts and prayers" that follow the weekly school shootings that no other nation on earth have.
What values are those exactly? Because the current administration doesn't seem to be representing the values expressed in the American founding documents, or the values held by a majority of Americans, very well at all. In many ways, they're diametrically opposed to those values.
Case in point - full pardon for former Honduran president on drug trafficking, while at the same time they are trying to use drug trafficking as pretext on war with Venezuela.
Same thing with arabs/muslims/immigrants being bad (look at how they were during Mamdami campaign), though literal al-Qaeda members and murderers acting as arabian royalty are "great leaders" and "things (murders) happen".
Even on "simpler" issues like family values - they preach against queers, about "traditional family values", kids, etc. But most of them have 3+ divorces, multiple kids that they don't take care of, imported/immigrant trophy wives, numerous scandals of adultery, while destroying policies for children education/health/food, etc.
An interviewer asked Trump in 2016 how people will know that America is great again. He replied: “cause I’m gonna tell em”. :)
Pope is not like Vance, despite Vance pointificating about by values and pope beong christan.
Definitely weird to be "happy" that the government is cracking down on people who help prevent the propagation of fraud, scams, and CSAM.
If that sentence from the article is accurate, the parent poster's response makes complete and perfect sense. You don't have to like the current administration, to like a specific thing they are doing.
Now is this actually what is happening? I don't know. And of course, that's a different conversation, and not what the parent poster was talking about.
The only way "an applicant was responsible for, or complicit in, censorship or attempted censorship in the United States" would be if they were an employee of the US government and they somehow violated US law to enact censorship.
To review: censorship is when the government doesn't allow you to say things with your printing press. Censorship is not when private parties don't let you use their printing press.
> censor (verb): to examine in order to suppress (see suppress sense 2) or delete anything considered objectionable.
> also: to suppress or delete as objectionable
Government censorship is a very notable class of censorship, but the word has a broader meaning.
If we valued banning all censorship we'd make laws banning that. We don't: we value private property and free speech instead. Taking the rights of private parties to control what they publish tramples both of those rights. It's not complicated: you have a right to own your 'press' and do whatever you want with it. You don't have a right to someone else's press.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46156979
98% of current foreign service officers who responded to a survey said morale is lower, plus the administration is laying off 1300 of them:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/02/us/politics/state-departm...
(Answer: they don't care about protected expression or pesky laws, they are lawless and reward other lawless types like themselves)
I mean... This is HN... You should see people's reaction when Apple decided to do something about it...