Item — HN Reader

I posted this yesterday, it was flagged.

Today, I am posting it again because I believe the HN readers will benefit from it. Why? The majority of HN readers work in IT or adjacent information fields; we communicate information with strings aka words.

3 comments

It has been flagged again after being #1 on frontpage.

Falsehoods programmers believe about strings: All strings are words.

More seriously: While I find the topic appropriate for HN, connecting the topicality to the use of strings in IT is weird. If the ban only applied to audio or sign language, the topic wouldn’t be any less appropriate.

I flagged it because it is hyper-partisan hyperbole. Censorship is when the government prevents others from speaking. When the government decides what the government itself will or will not say, that is not censorship, and—from a First Amendment perspective—it is perfectly appropriate. See Walker v. Texas Division, Sons of Confederate Veterans, 576 U.S. 200, 115 S.Ct. 2239 (2015).

Yes, it definitely is censorship, because scientists employed by the government may not report findings, existing government information is being erased, and the public cannot access it. So studies about racial concerns are cancelled, programs measuring the rate of climate change are being cancelled and the data and even the data collecting instrumentation is destroyed. This list of banned words is just one aspect of the censorship ... taken as a whole, this is an unconstitutional censorship of data that has public health and public safety implications. Does it qualify as Hacker News? Well, does Hacker News even exist when we no longer have access to critical data? Is that not topical? And does this kind of post suddenly become relevant when the government starts censoring the website directly? And how would we know when that starts to happen? Are you going to magically send us all letters in the mail? Or will you just silently acquiesce?

Flatly incorrect in all respects. Justice Breyer had an extreme minority concurrence in Summum that might have been sympathetic to your view—he would have used a balancing test even in government speech cases—but it quite simply is not the law.

And that is flat ignorance of all the other context of destruction of data going on right now. Ignoring that research data is being maintained by private citizens to protect it doesn't support your point. Censorship of government websites is just a small piece of this, ignoring it doesn't help anyone but a rank partisan, which you clearly are.

"Censorship of government websites" is an oxymoron. The sooner you understand the fundamental category error you are making, the sooner you can move on to reasoned discussion of the downsides of what the administration is doing. But until then, the things you are saying are extreme partisan hyperbole and have no place on this site.

the mention of which can now result in research grants or other agreements with the federal government getting nixed.

That sounds like censorship to me.

That's definitionally unsound. Again. The government deciding what government speech will be is not censorship.

No it's the government deciding what you are and are not allowed to say in your grant.

That string of words is nonsensical. Literally nothing in the OP is talking about "your grant."

If you want to start your own grant, either personally or through a foundation you start, nothing in the OP pertains to you.

The OP is only about whether the government will endorse speech contained in your application for a government grant, which—again—is categorically different from what you said and fundamentally not censorship.

A government by the people. Of the people. For the people.

That is a fundamental aspect of the American political foundation that the Revolutionary war was waged over.

There is not simply one government in the US.

It seems the federal executive admin is censoring government websites of all levels and branches of government.

Also, it's just clearly not true, even for the government? For example, here is the CDC mentioning Opioids, which are ostensibly "banned:" https://www.cdc.gov/overdose-prevention/about/understanding-... . Similarly, "female:" https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/images/databriefs/451-500/db491-fig...

Many of the rest are clearly editorial or phrasing preferences (e.g., "Latinx" in place of "Latino/a"), which are reasonable to have; I'm sure any mainstream publication like the NYT also has its own preferred language and style guidelines.

True. And a lot of examples from the previous administration, for example, where you weren't allowed to say "gay" or "equality" or "equal opportunity."

Even still, this list is passed around at my university where researchers are censoring their proposals to not include these words. That's called a chilling effect, and it's against the ideals of free speech.

This is a decent point but still falls flat for now. Their proposals are just that: proposals for government-funded speech.

That said, it's plausible it could have a chilling effect on their independent research, which is of concern.

What? The government has been quite openly going around pulling unrelated funding and launching investigations into educational institutions for similar reasons.

> proposals for government-funded speech

No, these are public proposals for public money to do public research. There shouldn't be restrictions on want can be funded based on the President's own personal morality. This isn't the "government's" money or Republican money or the Trump administration's money; it's our money, allocated for research that American public decided that scientists and academic institutions, who by dedicating their life to these pursuits and demonstrating excellence in the process, earned the right to conduct. Although the executive branch has the power, they do not have the mandate to impose its own morality on the entire country, that's what Congress is for.

I'm not saying every proposal deserves to be funded, but I'm saying proposals should not be denied funding on the basis of capricious, political, partisan, myopic moral crusades.

> That said, it's plausible it could have a chilling effect on their independent research, which is of concern.

This is more than plausible, it's actually happening at my workplace at least. Very anti free-speech for a party that said they were pro free-speech.

Surely you are not so stupid to misunderstand and ignore the chilling effects of this?