I agree, we've got far too many entities that should just be 'dumb pipes' trying to play moral police at the moment, and it's a very worrying situation when it comes to free speech on the internet. Cloudflare is an often brought up example, as are payment processors like Visa and Mastercard and app stores like the iOS and Play Stores, but ISPs trying to block traffic for a site that's not actually illegal feels like a step even further than that.
It feels like private companies are de facto writing the laws about what's allowed online and in society right now, and that it's almost become a loophole for censoring free speech on a whim.
And while the site in question here is ethically bankrupt in basically every way, it doesn't seem too far fetched to assume the same thing could (and potentially will) happen for sites many more people agree with because someone/some group at an ISP doesn't like them or think they should be accessible.
That's right. Authoritarian censors found an exploit. They couldn't use the government to clamp down on civil liberties because of the pesky constitution, so they invaded the administrative layer of big tech. It's not the engineers who built the web and these companies with Silicon Valley ideals. They were never intended to be used this way and are secretly horrified.
From the article, the EFF explicitly calls out the government for failing to enforce existing laws which would have shut down Kiwifarms
>That’s what must happen here. The cops and the courts should be working to protect the victims of KF and go after the perpetrators with every legal tool at their disposal. We should be giving them the resources and societal mandate to do so. Solid enforcement of existing laws is something that has been sorely lacking for harassment and abuse online, and it’s one of the reasons people turn to censorship strategies. Finally, we should enact strong data privacy laws that target, among others, the data brokers whose services help enable doxxing.
The issue there is that as best I can tell, kiwifarms the site doesn't break any laws. It officially discourages actual harassment of the people it insults. Individual users may harass people but as far as I could tell from my previous skim they do not organize this harassment in the open.
And requiring service providers to monitor private communications for organisation of harassment seems Orwellian to me. (Intuition pump: imagine the postal service opening every letter to check to see if someone's organising a letter writing campaign sending abuse to George Washington)
As does prohibiting people saying unpleasant things about semi-public figures in public.
I'm curious what the function of publishing a targets home address, personal phone number, place of employment, and so on is supposed to be if they don't condone harassment. One might suspect that the rule against harrassment is just paper-thin ass-covering. Officially they'll also tell you they just collate and archive freely available information, while for example publishing and micro-analyzing the hacked bank statements of a streamer they don't like, with enthusiastic support from the moderators.
It's annoying that they're trying to remove your comment via downvoting.
It's amazing to me that some people are so determined to defend KF when it appears that the best defense they have is: "no suicides have been definitively linked to KF." I know their public reason is all about censorship etc, but I'd like to know what their private reason really is.
I'm downvoting the comment due to the same principle that makes me downvote EVERY comment about astroturfing hackernews. Because it's literally against the guidelines of this website, as any real hackernews denizen would know.
They linked this thread on the kiwifarms website so people are coming here from the site. One of them even called out my posting as particularly objectionable to their point of view. I would link it so you can see, but I think that would break HN rules because of the doxing materials on the site.
It's not that we want to defend KF, it's that we want to have a discussion on the merits of the issue not the reputation of the participants.
KF is ultimately an archive site. It "keeps receipts" in their words. If storing someone's posts is bad, is archive.org bad for performing the same function?
If KF supports harassment campaigns then make that case, but they seem not to. I've seen more harassment and threats on Twitter (literally!) than on KF threads.
If suicide is your metric, are you also against storing the words of people you find objectionable in case they commit suicide when discovered? What if a neo-nazi was recorded being a nazi and killed himself, is that bad?
I personally support storing the speech (because it's censorship not to allow it) and I support legal charges for people who go beyond - let the courts sort out the fine lines.
I doubt this. Hackernews still has a disproportionately large number of principled libertarians like me. I've personally gone on kiwifarms twice, both times triggered by a big hackernews story.
You know what would counter disinformation? Links to analysis of kiwifarms with methodology and citations. E.g. what proportion of threads (from, say, a random sample of 20) contain doxxing on the first page?
Edit: I've now done this. Looks like about 25%. Damn, that's high.
No one is going to link to victim dox in a public HN thread. It would get our accounts banned and also further victimizes these people who were harassed by the site. Thank you for looking at the site for yourself.
Reasonable people disagreeing is not evidence of astroturfing or disinformation. It is possible for people to just disagree with you. There is no organized conspiracy against your viewpoint.
They linked this thread on the kiwifarms website so people are coming here from the site. One of them even called out my posting as particularly objectionable to their point of view. I would link it so you can see, but I think that would break HN rules because of the doxing materials on the site.
It's a bullshit, paper-thin "policy" that exists only for KF to cover their own asses.
Let's make one thing clear, the only purpose for publishing someone's home address, place of employment, phone number, etc. (aka, "doxxing") is to condone harassment of that individual. Any claims otherwise are completely bad faith and bullshit. Nobody believes you. Stop claiming "Oh, but this information is publicly available!"
If KF truly discouraged harassment, they'd do what every other sane site does and immediately delete the post and ban the user that posted it.
> the only purpose for publishing someone's home address, place of employment, phone number, etc.
I do not recall seeing those in the threads I looked at (which all have an opening post collecting information about the individual).
Can you confirm what proportion, if any, of main posts had that info? Can you also confirm that KF does not have a policy of removing that info?
I can't access kiwifarms at the moment to check, but I strongly suspect that information is in obscure posts by individuals and their "community" as a whole does not condone it and it is removed where obvious.
Edit: I have now accessed the site and confirm a culture of doxxing, with 3 of the 10 opening posts proudly having "doxx" sections.
Give me some numbers and methodology. You apparently have access to the site, pick the ten top threads about people and tell us how many many post addresses, phone numbers or emails on the first page.
Edit: I went through the hassle of figuring out how to get on that website. I can confirm 2 or the five pages I checked had doxx info on them and agree that kiwifarms does not seem to have a policy against doxxing and in fact has a culture that promotes it. This is bad.
So, you learned what you could have learned from reading the Wikipedia article or any number of other secondary sources (which you were earlier insinuating could not be trusted on these points). I'm glad that you've proved to your own satisfaction that Kiwi Farms is exactly as awful as almost everyone consistently says that it is, but there might be a lesson here about not being irrationally skeptical of 'mainstream' sources.
Thank you for putting the effort in. I can't in good faith link to these people's dox in a comment here just to prove this to you. I would also get banned off this site for doing so.
For what it's worth, there are many sites that are just about posting people's PII. Sites like doxbin, which seem to be up with impunity. I'm surprised KF got got, while DB sticks around - DB seems overall worse to me considering that it _is_ a site that is expressly created for harassment
> Let's make one thing clear, the only purpose for [doxxing] is to condone harassment of that individual. Any claims otherwise are completely bad faith and bullshit. Nobody believes you. Stop claiming "Oh, but this information is publicly available!"
Yes, I acknowledge it's all public, but that doesn't explain why you would want to aggregate that information and post it in a public forum and make it easier to acquire. What purpose does it achieve?
> Edit: I went through the hassle of figuring out how to get on that website. I can confirm 2 or the five pages I checked had doxx info on them and agree that kiwifarms does not seem to have a policy against doxxing and in fact has a culture that promotes it. This is bad.
Anyone who claims that KiwiFarms is not a site for harassing and doxxing people has done zero research and is trusting some lying "news" source that tells them something else. I really wish I could understand the mentality of thinking otherwise. Are you really so hung up on "thinking for yourself" that you automatically assume anything said by the mainstream media is a lie? Skepticism is great and I highly encourage it, but automatic knee-jerk rejection is not skepticism, it's basically setting you up for falling for reverse psychology. Just because the mainstream media says one thing while fringe reporters say something else does not automatically mean the mainstream is lying.
> Anyone who claims that KiwiFarms is not a site for harassing and doxxing people has done zero research and is trusting some lying "news" source that tells them something else.
Two notes:
1. Kiwifarms, by volume, based on the sampling of posts I've read today, is first and foremost a site for talking about, insulting and mocking people. The harassing and doxxing do not seem to have focus and it would require a relatively minor change (banning and removing doxxing) in order for it to claim innocence of harassment and doxxing.
2. "Does more than zero research" is a very high bar that few meet. The number of people I've found on the internet who cite primary sources, government stats/papers and scientific papers is less than 0% to the nearest tenth of a percent. While its true that sometimes research can take half an hour or more, so often it takes five minutes (like checking out stats on the uk gov website regarding criminal convictions of British Pakistanis for having sex with under 16 year olds to settle the myth of Pakistani child rape).
Ideally everyone would do research and cite real sources, in practice less than one in a thousand do.
>1. Kiwifarms, by volume, based on the sampling of posts I've read today, is first and foremost a site for talking about, insulting and mocking people. The harassing and doxxing do not seem to have focus and it would require a relatively minor change (banning and removing doxxing) in order for it to claim innocence of harassment and doxxing.
(I only mention his real name because he's public about his identity, and he's sometimes referred to in the news by either name).
Here is another ocassion, the admin of the site, outright said he was ok with users posting stolen financial information, such as Social Security Numbers and Credit cards. Source: https://archive.is/0fOcS .
There are many examples of private financial information being posted on the site.
go on kf and click a few, there's a ton on there. or just look at their _entire forum_ about a trans-woman named christine chandler, in which they document not only her address, but even have photos of her at walmart, game stores, etc
> go on kf and click a few, there's a ton on there. or just look at their _entire forum_ about a trans-woman named christine chandler, in which they document not only her address, but even have photos of her at walmart, game stores, etc
Chris Chan has been a notorious and divisive figure online long before the existence of the Kiwi Farms. They are arguably one of the most well-known Internet personalities.
Merely referring to them as "a trans woman" throws away a massive amount of context why Kiwi Farms (and many other sites) seems so obsessed.
that is such a circular argument. they are a microcelebrity who has spent the majority of their life being intensely tracked and harassed by a small but dedicated community, the majority of which is on kf.
The original name of kiwifarms was "CWCki", and CWC are the initials of their first victim. The entire premise of the site was harassment of a severely autistic person to trigger "funny" reactions. It's beyond gross.
To understand why the poster is asserting irrelevant materials. Is it their confusion or are they being purposefully obtuse. May I ask why you asked me?
> Intuition pump: imagine the postal service opening every letter to check to see if someone's organising a letter writing campaign sending abuse to George Washington
Just on this specific point: this is not a particularly weird scenario at all. There are very strong rules about what you can and cannot send in the mail, and these rules are enforced. The most obvious example is the Comstock laws, which regulate "obscene and immoral materials" sent through the mail (including things like information about birth control). They're from the 1800s, but several are still on the books. It's not a strange concept at all in American law to regulate what can and cannot be sent through the mail.
If you read up on the Kiwifarms Wikipedia page [0] it sounds like someone needs to go to jail. Until this moment I'd never believed that sending someone a pizza would qualify as an act of violence - but now I can see it. If the site doesn't break laws then there is no reason to ban it. But there are criminals using that site and they should be caught. Banning the site is just dodging the real problem.
Specifically, wikipedia is not an unbiased source on any issue that is of particular concern to the terminally online. Anything to do with US politics or culture war is going to be heavily distorted due to the nature of the beast (its something people care a lot about, there were strong founder effects and there was a purity spiral).
The sources that are allowed/disallowed and their respective biases (e.g. what they publish or don't say) are a big factor.
I have in the past[1], several times It gets old having the same false things posted over and over. often my posts[1] with the linked are also "flagged" because people here do not want to truth, they want the narrative.
> I would have to disagree with the characterization of two opinion blog posts from relatively unknown authors as “unbiased sources.”
The first link is from Destiny, a well-known (albeit controversial) online figure. It seems to be a factual timeline of events with citations for every claim made, which is far from an opinion piece.
Presence of citations has near zero meaning in terms of goals of the writing or bias. These are so clearly opinion pieces. One is bordering on an attack piece.
> Presence of citations has near zero meaning in terms of goals of the writing or bias. These are so clearly opinion pieces.
Completely dismissing the content because you believe it must be biased is somewhat ironic.
Would you at least then concede that the Wikipedia article is also unreliable and biased?
> One is bordering on an attack piece.
Which one? If you're referring to the piece published by Destiny, what constitutes an "attack piece" if all the claims made are rigorously cited? Would being an attack piece invalidate the claims even if they're demonstrably true?
Not the person you responded to, but this[1] is a very thorough and well-sourced criticism of the person behind the campaign to get Kiwifarms removed from Cloudflare. Sections two and three specifically go into the lies, misrepresentation and bad journalism surrounding Kiwifarms itself if you'd prefer not to read the whole thing.
Probably because due to the nature of the issue even actual unbiased source will likely be perceived as biased. The issue is contentious enough for strong tribes to form on both sides - linking to any source in that situation means taking a risk of making either of them, or often both, hostile to you.
Moreover, if it's about the situation mentioned earlier this year on HN, it's problematic because of its complexity and gravity. Even with just facts and only facts, the change of the narrative (ie. the order you present the facts in) is enough for the same reasonable person to come to opposite conclusions. And that's before accounting for rhetorical devices that aim to manipulate the reader while still not crossing the line and sticking to facts - happily employed by both sides of the discussion in staggering quantities. (Then, of course, there's the other 90% of sources full of lies and fabrications, but let's leave those alone on HN at least...)
In short - it's not worth the hassle unless you're invested in the matter enough to care a lot, and once you are, odds are you won't post an unbiased source anyway. You'll need to do your own research, wade through a metric crapton of some of the worst humanity has to offer, and form your own opinion based on that. I don't think there's a shortcut here.
Go on the kiwifarms website itself and ask yourself if it's okay/legal to be posting this manner of personal information on harassment victims. Make your own determination from the original source. Ask yourself if an infrastructure company should be forced against its will to support this.
> Ask yourself if an infrastructure company should be forced against its will to support this.
Come on, that is the literal fucking purpose of infrastructure. Water/sewage doesn't get to refuse to flush my toilet because the content of my stool doesn't meet their nutritional expectations.
That Wikipedia article is full of unverifiable bullshit, and I think you know it.
> I'd never believed that sending someone a pizza would qualify as an act of violence
It doesn't unless you interpret every instance of adversity as an attempt on your life.
Nobody trying to kill anybody sends a pizza, unless the intent is to induce poisoning or choking.
> [Wikipedia] Users also leaked sexually explicit photos of her
"Leaked" sounds so much worse than the truth of the photos being found on a 2257-compliant commercial porn site, which Keffals willingly worked as a onetime model for under a 4-letter pseudonym. To say they were "leaked" is being intentionally dishonest. They were available for sale, by the studio that took them. Users shared the preview images that were publicly posted, because nobody involved felt they were worth paying for.
Don't take my word for it; anyone can see for themselves-- they're helpfully posted in her KF thread, if the site is even up anymore.
> Just because there’s a serious problem doesn’t mean that every response is a good one
Problem: a forum full of misanthropes dedicated to saying the worst things allowed under the first amendment.
Bad solution: erode 1A at the case law level
Bad solution: censor the internet at the backbone level
Freedom isn't free. We're lucky to live in country with robust speech protections. The tradeoff is that there will always be some people who get a kick out of going right to edge of what they can get away. My view is that our civil liberties are worth it.
The operator of the kiwifarms is himself a US citizen with a US business. It is an advertised fact that if a police force comes after or shuts him down with a legal reason, it will cease to exist and he himself has stated he wouldn't operate it out of any other country than the US.
Pirate bay and sci-hub get affected by copyright law more than anything else and, to the best of my knowledge, kiwifarms is protected by section 230 in that respect and has always complied with legitimate takedown requests.
I think Kiwifarms is (borderline) criminal. Null, the admin of the site, outright said he was ok with users posting stolen financial information, such as Social Security Numbers and Credit cards. Source: https://archive.is/0fOcS . There are many examples of private financial information being posted on the site.
I would describe them as operating with a paper thin layer of "plausible" deniability. Officially you aren't allowed to harass or interact with the targets. But posting their home address, stolen passwords, phone numbers, and information about relatives is all allowed. Obviously, if they didn't want their targets harassed, they wouldn't post that. Kiwifarms, now banned, official twitter page said their goal was “exploitation of the mentally handicapped for amusement purposes”. ( Source: https://archive.is/jYp5p ).
But even the rule against interacting with "lolcows" (called "cowtipping") is haphazardly enforced. For example, one user had sex with a "lolcow" and posted photos. The admin explicitly said they would allow the content to remain up: https://archive.is/zYnpK#35%
I could probably post many other examples. Null is entirely willing to host revenge porn on his website. He's also willing to host nudes that he knows were stolen by hackers.
People probably aren't going to want to send takedown requests, when that requires revealing their identity to a site that is known for doxing and harassing people.
Transparency I assume. I understand the admin likes free speech and maintains some transparency, to explain why content has been removed, and giving away your information is always a risk in legal issues.
From what I understand re twitter and others, it's the government that found a loophole. They used big tech to censor according to their agenda. The administrative class, while I agree probably has been invaded in some sense, is really just risk aversion run amok, like it always it, and will self organize to do what it can to minimize controversy.
This is not speculation much less crazy theorizing. Read the Missouri v Biden injunction. It’s crystal clear that FedGov infiltrated and basically zombified social media platforms to perform constitutionally prohibited censorship.
They should have taken the regulation. At least that forces it into the public eye and allows for accountability via voting. This way only generates a shadow government.
You need to decide if these are private companies or public utilities. If they’re public utilities, the government should provide them. Restricting company’s freedom to choose a business model is not the answer.
You might not like it, but that’s kind of the point, either let the market decide or take the market out of it.
My own opinion is that the role of government should be mostly limited to common defense, ensuring essential infrastructure and enforcing/resolving legal disputes. Essential infrastructure should include banking and internet access at this point as it's nearly impossible to function in society without them.
Infrastructure providers should not be able to refuse customers engaging in lawful activity. Your phone company can't shut you off because you say, "I wish $POLITICIAN were dead." You don't have to like or agree with everything everyone says, but it's a very dangerous slippery slope.
Personal liberty should be maximalized so as not to infringe on the rights of others. You do not have the right to live a life without risk of being offended.
> Restricting company’s freedom to choose a business model is not the answer.
Only, that's not how it works in our (and pretty much any) society. We, as a society, choose what we think is acceptable. And then we make laws to enforce that people behave in a way consistent with that. A company is not free to deny service to someone that is gay, or black, or married; just because that is their chosen business model.
They are, however, free to stop you from pushing Nazi propaganda on their resources.
I’m quite discouraged by this thread not being taken down despite the very obvious brigade of alt-right Nazi sympathizers pretending that being gay is the same as yelling for the genocide of gay people.
Yes. But we saw how quickly censorship went from Alex Jones being banned from having a Twitter,Reddit, Twitch, Mailchimp, Shopify, YouTube/Google, Facebook/Instagram account, and being banned from all those platforms simultaneously. To having Donald Trump the Republican Nominee and at the time sitting duck President having his Twitter, Reddit, Twitch, Mailchimp, Shopify, YouTube/Google, Facebook/Instagram account being banned simultaneously. Starting off with "we want to stop Nazi propaganda" turning into banning Republicans is like saying "We want to stop Communist Propaganda" and Blacklisting Liberals
Trump represents Republicans. Literally. It's representative democracy. The point is not Alex Jones is a republican, just that it's a not many months between Alex Jones being deplatformed who was by all definitions fringe to the representative in our representative democracy being deplatformed and alienating half the country. Trump has over 90% approval rating among Republicans.
I mean, if you think that 90% of Republicans are traitors to US democracy, you've just made a great case for deplatforming them, irrespective of how many there are, but I think you were arguing against that?
If you treat 90% of Republicans like traitors, don't be surprised when they treat 90% of Democrats like traitors. Shoe's going to be on the other foot eventually.
Trump wasn’t banned for being a republican. He was banned, ultimately, for Jan 6.
In reality, Trump broke all those platforms rules on several occasions and was given a free pass till he tried to steal an election. He’s actually the poster boy for the fact that republicans get MORE leeway on social platforms, not less.
In an interesting way it is also an exploitable facet of small government. If the private sector is susceptible to moral policing then then government downsizing implies a larger attack surface.
I think the implication is government putting pressure (or working with) businesses to censor speech. Smaller government would mean less attack surface in that case.
Market forces and competition should help keep speech free because if a private company doesn't allow x group to use their platform, it is likely a competitor will spring up to capture the orphaned market. We see this play out in reality.
>Market forces and competition should help keep speech free because if a private company doesn't allow x group to use their platform, it is likely a competitor will spring up to capture the orphaned market.
This doesn't really apply in the same way in social media. Social media platforms organically turn into monopolies.
X and Facebook and Reddit and Hackernews and Whatsapp are all social media, sure, but they are not in direct competition. One does not start or stop using Instagram because they use Reddit. Same with Hackernews and X, etc etc. The product is different.
When you ban an ideology or a group from a piece of social media, they do run to competitors, but "competitors" which can never penetrate the market because they don't have the userbase, which is the main incentive of social media.
So far-right people get banned from Twitter and they run to Gab, but Gab and Twitter aren't really competitors because Twitter can't ever penetrate into Gab's market (they banned that market to begin with) and Gab can't penetrate Twitter's market (because Twitter is the more attractive platform to begin with, having more users)
The better product is better because of its userbase. There is no real competition, and as such, no upholding of freedom of speech due to it.
Are you suggesting that government (big or small) is immune to moral policing and that it's confined to the private sector? Any centralized system is subject to attack, the bigger the better.
I'm suggesting something different than that. I couched it with an if and I should have phrased it a bit differently in retrospect:
If the private sector is more susceptible to moral policing than the public sector, then (all things being equal) if public services are transferred to the public sector(ie: smaller government) then the attack area increases.
There are two conditions, and one conclusion. If you don't agree that the premises apply, then the argument doesn't really matter and also doesn't apply.
>>It's not the engineers who built the web and these companies
I 100% disagree with this, the engineering level of silicon valley left the old "libertarian" hacker ethos behind a long time ago, at the engineering layer there is idea about using technology to build a "better society" where "better society" is ensuring people with "wrong opinions" isolated so they can not "harm" others with their "violence" and violence is now words on the internet.
In fact recent activism coming from the engineer levels at Big Tech (google, Amazon, FB, etc) has me believe that that administrative layer is not really in control, and the policy changes are a reflection coming from the activism in the engineering layer
We also see this through out Open Source with the raise of the CoC to implement systemic changes with in open source to ensure only those with "correct opinions" are allowed to contribute moving from just caring about code, to then caring about code and conduct with in a project and project related events, to now even more expansive monitoring of developers entire lives, and activities completely removed and unrelated to any development activities.
Exactly right. Most of the new engineers have nothing of the libertarian spirit of the 2600 era. It was engineers who implemented censorship at online platforms, most incredulous of which was PayPal charging customers $2,500 in damages for spreading "misinformation." I cancelled my PayPal account the moment I read the news.
For shame. But, things go in cycles. What was once great becomes a ruin, and then rises again. We are now in the heading steadily towards the ruin phase.
Preference falsification from engineers, which was normalized after James Damore had his character publicly assassinated. Throwing rotten tomatoes at him and screaming "shame shame" before chopping off his head was a warning to everyone else to keep quiet or echo the correct opinions.
There's a lot of tribal signaling and "don't hurt me I'm one of you".
Then there's a new brand of engineer, and some old gen converts, who are true believers in the new religion and programming is just a lucrative way to participate in late stage capitalism as a wage slave. Many among them are aggressive bullies and codify their beliefs into CoCs and concern themselves with purity testing.
> I 100% disagree with this, the engineering level of silicon valley left the old "libertarian" hacker ethos behind a long time ago
And thank fuck for that.
> at the engineering layer there is idea about using technology to build a "better society" where "better society" is ensuring people with "wrong opinions" isolated so they can not "harm" others with their "violence" and violence is now words on the internet.
People are so glib about this and it's such a catastrophic failure to engage in empathy and respect for other human beings that it simply blows my mind that people can say things like this and think they're in the moral correct. "Being bullied to death by the Internet" isn't even that uncommon anymore. Especially for people who will have a hard time finding community in the real spaces in which they live, Internet communities of like-people become a literal lifeline. Entire relationships both communal and intimate are carried out through the lens of online communication. "Words on the internet" indeed.
And if said words can be a lifeline of communication and community to like-minded people and alleviate suffering, you can be damn well assured that works the other way too. Having personally known and helped people through being the subject of online alt-right hate mobs, I assure you, "words on the internet" can absolutely kill people. I have watched in happen in real time and pulled people back from the precipice.
> We also see this through out Open Source with the raise of the CoC to implement systemic changes with in open source to ensure only those with "correct opinions" are allowed to contribute moving from just caring about code, to then caring about code and conduct with in a project and project related events, to now even more expansive monitoring of developers entire lives, and activities completely removed and unrelated to any development activities.
Yeah I don't particularly want to use software, especially pay to use software, made by people who want to exterminate people I call friends and family. If a developer comes out on their social media and broadcasts about how my friends are some combination of insane/dangerous for being who they are, no, I'm not using their product ever again and I will spread word about it to people I know who feel similarly. This is just how social networks (in the sociology sense, not the technological sense) work and always have.
I guess what I'm saying is if you want maximum capture on your product, tell your team to park their opinions on which groups of people deserve to die on personal, anonymous accounts. I don't think this is a massive ask, personally, but I also don't want anyone dead so I can't really comment on it.
This is the oddly standard wording used in defense of these newly-fashionable 'everything you've ever done ever can be used against you' contributor codes of conduct and I have to find it very disingenuous.
By and large nobody wants to exterminate anybody. People have legitimate differences of opinion and when they attempt to express them they're being told that even _thinking_ that opinion is tantamount to violence.
If you can't see it as anything other than a transparent attempt to restrict discourse I don't know what to tell you. It isn't like this is the first time this strategy has been used.
> This is the oddly standard wording used in defense of these newly-fashionable 'everything you've ever done ever can be used against you' contributor codes of conduct and I have to find it very disingenuous.
Please provide me an example of a code of conduct you find objectionable on these grounds. I have yet to see one that fits the language used both in this and the parent comment I originally replied to of being "orwellian."
Clearly you have not followed this topic closely, how about you look into the DruPal issues or "Dongle Gate" or the Firing the Firefox CEO, James Damore, or 100's of other examples of people being removed from projects for differences of opinions far far far far less than wanting to "exterminate" people
It's projection. The people making that accusation are themselves all-but-literally exterminating individuals from society. They are engaging in dangerous levels of othering using a cloak of false kindness.
I believe it is result of a raise in Authoritarian ideology in both technology and in wider society, This streak of Authoritarianism is coming from both "political sides"
The concepts of pluralism, tolerance, and peaceful coexistence with people whom we disagree is replaced with forced acceptance, mono-culturalism, speech controls and a rank intolerance of opposing views often supplanted with a rather obtuse perversion of the "paradox of tolerance" where by intolerant people of both political sides justify their actions actions as morally and ethically correct, as being on the "correct side of history" or other such platitudes
The "paradox of tolerance" is much better stated as the "contract of tolerance." Anyone who agrees to be tolerant, is entitled in turn to tolerance themselves. This ensures that intolerable views, such as the view that certain lifestyles are inherently immoral based on one's beliefs, are not respected. Because they shouldn't be. If your personal moral compass has decided that women deserve fewer rights, that's perfectly fine for any woman who also subscribes to that belief system to accept their reduced stature in society. Why they would do that, I have no idea, but if they want to, good for them. However you are not entitled to inflict that intolerance on other people who don't share that belief.
Ergo: if you treat everyone around you with the respect and recognition of their personhood, you in turn are 100% entitled to that same respect and recognition. If however you make statements or act in such a way as to diminish the personhood of others, you are no longer entitled to that respect.
I think it's a nice little system and resolves the paradox quite nicely. To promote a tolerant society means being intolerant of intolerance.
Easy, both are trying to enforce their view of culture on the other via law and other government regulation.
The right is most seen on this in the modern era Womens Rights, Schools, Gay Marriage, etc
The left is most seen on this with Speech Codes around "Hate Speech" and Pronouns, in Employment Regulations, in Equity Regulation (enforced by law not market) ,etc
No that is 2 very different mono-culture attempting to eliminate the other
You seem to believe that because 2 cultures exist it is "multicultural" but that is not the reality, "multicultural" would be accepting the other culture as equally as valid as your own, tolerating their existence in a legal and market framework (i.e willing to do business with them, and not use government power to make their culture illegal)
What we have today is 2 cultures attempt each attempting to banish the other both using markets, and using governments.
I think that's a vast overdramatization based upon reading the most fringe elements into everything else. The reality is the vast majority of people exist well within the edges and aren't anywhere near as fatalistic as you describe
That's all projection and appeal to emotion to justify censoring and bullying people into submission. How many people have had their characters assassinated, ostracized and fired, sometimes commiting suicide as a result, just because they said the wrong thing now or in the past according to the current moral fashion police. How many are self censoring and falsifying preferences to appease the authoritarians. They say it's about kindness and respect, inbetween destroying the next individual's life. Authoritarian bullies cloaking themselves in a veneer of kindness and moral fashion is not new.
> That's all projection and appeal to emotion to justify censoring and bullying people into submission.
It isn't an "appeal to emotion," it is emotion. Emotion is not this ephemeral second-class citizen in your mind. It's you. It's the part of you that cares about things. A response being largely emotional does not make it inherently less valid, and not everyone is required to discard half of the human experience in order to be taken seriously.
> How many people have had their characters assassinated, ostracized and fired, sometimes commiting suicide as a result, just because they said the wrong thing now or in the past according to the current moral fashion police.
I would say far too many, but also I would caveat that by pointing to the other pile of corpses from people who did the same thing for just being themselves in the wrong place. Or worse still, had the violence inflicted upon them by another's hand.
So clearly, at the very least, we can agree that it's not just "words on the internet?" They clearly have dire consequences for all parties involved.
> How many are self censoring and falsifying preferences to appease the authoritarians.
"Everyone agrees with me but they're too afraid to say it" is a convenient excuse to hold reprehensible beliefs that you don't want to take responsibility for. If everyone is afraid to say something, maybe that's because it's disgusting? And given what people are happily not only saying, but being paid to say, (usually while whining about how censored they are but I digress) I'm frankly incredibly skeptical of this position.
> They say it's about kindness and respect, inbetween destroying the next individual's life. Authoritarian bullies cloaking themselves in a veneer of kindness is not new.
Again though, while there I am certain are some examples of people being bullied to that point, I have a hard time seeing it. I personally have carried friends through that mess and to that, I can testify first party. However on the opposite side, all I really see is people complaining about how censored they are, on public platforms, to a wide audience, and usually in some way monetizing it: book sales, shows, public speaking engagements, all the while moaning about how they can't speak their minds... while speaking their minds. Repeatedly. For profit.
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I'm rewriting this because the comment above changed substantially since it was originally posted. Below is the original thing I wrote which I'm leaving up because I'm proud of it:
This notion that "well what's objectionable is subjective and therefore having any standard is having an agenda" is frankly, bullhockety. Yes, it does vary from person to person. Different people will have different tolerances to different things, and part of community building is all of those people coming together and, through trial and error, through difficult conversations, through awkward moments, etc. slowly constructing a line in the sand where upon one side is beyond tolerance, and the other side is not, and that line in itself being subject to change based upon new cultural events, new people joining the community, other people being removed from the community for infraction, etc. etc.
We have been doing this since roughly the taming of fire. The only thing that's changed is the mode of enforcement. Now instead of chucking people out of our tribes and telling them to piss off, we block them on social media and revoke their access rights. Same exact thing. If you want to participate in a community, that participation has always, always been conditional upon agreeing to a mutually agreed upon set of rules, that yes, change over time and that can mean you by virtue of being an imperfect human can stumble over them without meaning harm. The differentiator from that point is how you handle that situation and if your reflex is to post on your own social media about how everyone involved in the community you have transgressed against is censoring you and you have a right to say XYZ, then that community in all likelihood is going to reject you in a more permanent fashion. If your individual liberty to say XYZ is more important to you than membership in that community, then that's the choice you make. I don't judge you inherently for that. I have joined and left many communities over the years as my and those communities' values shifted around. This is just how social organizations work and have always worked.
And you in turn are free to demand access to whatever space but that entitlement needs to be articulated, and I am inherently suspicious of this almost reflexive "well I guess I just had the WRONG OPINIONS" response, which almost universally is presented without the opinions attached. (Including in this comment.) What were the opinions? Why were they "wrong?"
And I will grant: in the digital age, the enforcement of being rejected is much easier with a much lower emotional energy gate than it was previously. Now you don't need to confront people, to have conversations, if you don't want to and that makes a certain kind of person perhaps itchier on the trigger finger than is ideal. And that's unfortunate. But on the flip side of that, sometimes the transgression involved is too extreme. Sometimes the transgression makes the people who would confront an individual feel unsafe to do so. Sometimes there is no path to resolution and there's nothing to do but block and move on.
> It isn't an "appeal to emotion," it is emotion. Emotion is not this ephemeral second-class citizen in your mind. It's you. It's the part of you that cares about things
Regardless, it's not an argument. Your emotion has no direct weight on the correctness of an outcome you're arguing for, and trying to appeal to other's emotions in an attempt to sway them is attempting to bypass their critical analysis.
Argue the facts and let emotions happen. They "are you" but should not drive you.
> "Everyone agrees with me but they're too afraid to say it" is a convenient excuse to hold reprehensible beliefs that you don't want to take responsibility for. If everyone is afraid to say something, maybe that's because it's disgusting?
No, likely outcomes and consequences for discussing something are rarely aligned. You're discussing hounding people out of work/home/politics because of your emotional take on what they're saying, without any actual analysis of it or how actionable it is.
In my mind, that's incredibly dangerous (and thus, if I chose to use emotional language - disgusting) but I'm not advocating taking away your right to say it.
> Again though, while there I am certain are some examples of people being bullied to that point, I have a hard time seeing it.
James Damore is a great example. He didn't broadcast his views - he responded privately to questions in a hiring review panel at Google, discussing how the company could improve its hiring of women by understanding the roles it was offering in the light of modern psychological analysis using the "Big Five" traits model.
Specifically, he did not say that women were worse engineers in any way, either holistically or in individual skills, OR less suited to engineering than males. He argued that Google's roles were less suitable for "traditionally female" interests. Again, this was privately, in the context of a panel trying to evaluate why Google wasn't great at hiring women engineers.
His communications were leaked, with the context stripped, in an edited form without any references to gawker-style media who were prompted with the lead 'white guy says - "Don't hire women"' to prompt them into the "right" emotional headspace to write an attack piece.
To tie this back to emotion, obviously someone read his words and let their emotion at those words (I myself don't like psychobabble) override their analysis of what was said. Their emotions are "valid lived experience" but the attacks they called for, and lies used to do so, are not helpful or justified.
Yes there’s a strange double standard with the “its just words on the internet” perspective. On the one hand, it’s an Orwellian nightmare that Twitter would ban accounts for “having the wrong opinions”, but on the other hand who cares it’s just talking on the internet.
Which one is it? Does your speech have a real world impact? If yes, then you have to acknowledge that it can cause real damage and that private companies have no obligation to accommodate that. If its just meaningless words, then why does it matter that companies ban anyone for any speech?
> That is a failure of mental health and the direction of psychology in general where by they are teaching people that everyone, everywhere must affirm you, must support you, and everything you do is perfect.
Your ideas on needing an internal framework for emotional stability is on the spot, but this idea that "they" are teaching people whatever is in itself a partisan cop-out. The onus of failure for not providing adequate mental health tools is on parents who had no idea how to handle the sudden rise of technology & a general failure of leadership figures to step in. There isn't some big leftist boogeyman teaching people that others "must" do anything.
> do you believe someone refusing to use neo-pronouns is "bullying"
There are a lot of qualifying questions that need answered before this one could be considered. Like what constitutes bullying - your definition is different than everyone else's. Do we frame this under your perception of bullying, or mine? If something is a large part of your internally perceived identity & someone else actively denies that part of your identity, is that okay? Do you have an experiential framework with which to tackle that identity scenario in the first place, to understand in any fashion how they feel about that? Are you willing to employ empathy?
I'm trying to find a moral justification for not simply calling someone what they ask to be called, or walking away from the situation - if you're dredging up old dated phrases, whatever happened to "if you have nothing nice to say, say nothing at all?" If someone wants to be called Xir or whatever, my question is "how the fuck do I say that" not "why should I."
> in return anyone that refuses to use neo-pronouns should be bullied themselves
No, but they should be made aware that they're being assholes. Outside of this hypothetical vacuum scenario, we know statistically that it's more likely for the person refusing to use pronouns to engage in actual violence than someone requesting to be referred using those pronouns, so things become much muddier after the point of "you're being an asshole" - but in this scenario, that's where it should end.
It shouldn't be surprising or incomprehensible to anyone that folks on one side of this field are suddenly stepping up to the same field that the other side is. It doesn't justify it, but it should be well-understood that attacks from the left are not predicated on nothing.
> or banned from society
No. Rather I'd like to see our mental health systems improve enough that we don't have millions of people that erroneously believe that other humans don't have just as much right to exist as they do. That's why people get "banned from society" or whatever inane scenario you're trying to claim happens.
> If they don't agree with your political dogma then bullying is perfectly fine right, they deserve it...
The hilarious part of this statement, at least in this specific context, is that it goes both ways. Our monkeys are flinging shit at their monkeys, and for some reason their monkeys are throwing shit back! How dare they.
I agree that 'cancelling' people - in the view that you've provided - is wrong. That said...
> Now lets say an Employee at Walmart happens to go the Republican National Convention and wears a MAGA hat, you see a photo of this online, then proceed to find their friends, employers, family, and attempt to get them evicted from their apartment, fired from walmart, and when they get a new job at Target attempt to get them fired from that as well, attempt get their mother fired, and attempt get their roommate fired as well just for good measure. (true story form left wing cancellation BTW)
You wanna know a true story from right-wing cancellation? Being bound by chains and dragged behind a truck. Gunning down an entire building full of gay people. Being burned alive in their own home. These events, steeped in alt-right online cultures of stoking fear and hatred towards leftists. Is this not the ultimate form of cancellation, the end-of-the-line of this whole scenario? As you put it, this is a common tactic for those on the authoritarian right. This is the extermination the other person is referring to. Murdering people based on shit they heard online, without actually bothering to interact with those people or build any kind of basis of empathy, to understand the challenges they face in a world where they feel the need to lash out like you've seen.
This is not justification of leftist actions, but you should also keep in mind the cauldron that they've been stewing in for decades upon decades - and the atrocities that the group you're defending have also committed. They are not innocent of wrongdoing, but you seem to casually miss that part.
> I used to work with this very devote christian, she would pray for me everyday [...] Today some people would report her to HR, get her fired, etc...
If they asked her to stop, and she didn't stop, she's in the wrong. Yes, absolutely report her to HR. What was the point of this story?
I will also save you the time by stating I don't intend on discussing this topic with you. I believe, based on the ideas you've expressed here, that you lack the empathy necessary to engage with a very emotional & "human" topic. Have a good one.
>>You wanna know a true story from right-wing cancellation? Being bound by chains and dragged behind a truck. Gunning down an entire building full of gay people.
You believe there is no violence on the left? Shall I pull video of people being beaten and pulled from their cars during BLM "peaceful" protests? Or of the police captian that was burned alive in a store? Or of the Nashville mass school shotting for which the FBI is still withholding the manifesto that has it been a right wing person would have been on ever news outlet the next day?
>This is not justification of leftist actions,
if not outright justification it is attempt to "but but but look over there they are worse"
>>group you're defending
Not defending anyone, I am pointing it out is not left / Right. it is Authoritarian vs Libertarians.
Authoritarians are violent, that is how they weld authority. Right, left does not matter, In this community (technologists) people tend to want to believe only Right Authoritarians exist, and only Right are violent. That there is a nazi on every corner, and that nazi is a republican...
>>I will also save you the time by stating I don't intend on discussing this topic with you.
then I welcome your non-reply... If you did not intend on discussing this then you should have refrained from reply at all.
ironically I am a very empathetic person. I empathize with people suffering real hardship, like the people that are going to lose everything in the hurricane, not because someone on twitter did not use Xe or Xir correctly....
Thank you, and I definitely agree to all points. From my own observations, I feel that the right is often wrong on many things, but the far left has gone off the rails, and most of the left is either, willing, blind, useful idiots or outright evil. There's definitely a few racist, violent right wing assholes in the world, but they don't even compare to the numbers the far left weild.
It also irks me to no end, when people refer to leftists as "liberal" when they are no such thing at this point. I can deal with liberals, and as a libertarian share most of the values. More like Progressive past the point of usefulness to society.
> From my own observations, I feel that the right is often wrong on many things, but the far left has gone off the rails
The difference, I feel, is that I know many people whose identity is "leftist" or "progressive" and I don't personally know anyone who identifies as a "rightist". The right is a centuries-old boogeyman of the left, and it encompasses everyone who disagrees with the critical-analysis class-based views of the left.
The worst term the left has is "far-right" which just means very-heretical. The worst thing you can do is let your opinions diverge from the groupthink.
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>so they invaded the administrative layer of big tech.
Not exactly. While there are certainly people who espouse anti-free-speech views in the big tech, I'm pretty sure the companies themselves are pressured/threatened with increased regulatory scrutiny, anti-thrust action and anything else that is at congress/government's disposal. These congress/senate hearings about misinformation are exactly that.
> It's not the engineers who built the web and these companies with Silicon Valley ideals. They were never intended to be used this way and are secretly horrified.
Such a laughable statement given that Silicon Valley was from the beginning a military project, with social control as an explicit aim. Milquetoast lamentations about a lost libertarian dream are no different than old cries about the closing of the Western frontier or Jeffersonian myths about a pastoralist capitalism corrupted by industry.
> It feels like private companies are de facto writing the laws about what's allowed online and in society right now, and that it's almost become a loophole for censoring free speech on a whim.
This is why monopoly power is dangerous as without it you could just move to a more tolerant competitor and be on with your business. The courts almost never consider the "secondary markets" that exist around these behemoths, and how all of our interests and independence are significantly damaged by allowing these monopolies to merge into existence.
Of course, even this feels like the conversation they would _like_ you to have, because the other side I never see considered is what does it take to buy an "indulgence" from these companies? Is it easy? Is it often done? How often are these "scions of social justice" actually just "turning a blind eye?"
Monopoly power seems secondary here, with the real problem being that there are sufficiently many people now with a totalitarian impulse to forbid others from engaging in speech they dislike that overrides almost any other principle, and no equally obstinate opposition. I am not engaged in and have no interest in any KF-like activity, but merely wanting to choose an ISP, domain registrar, Mastodon instance or email provider that would not filter them as a matter of principle would expose me to the risk of becoming collateral damage, as the armchair censors pressure the closest amenable nodes to participate in what they see as "cutting out the rot" - excise DNS records, range-ban, defederate from your node and recursively any node that would not participate in defederating you, thus forcing the whole world to pick a side.
> Promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all and build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels
Comcast has an all-women Open Source Program Office, which sounds like a way to include females in engineering. But they define women as "females and males who want to be seen as female" which doesn't help women actually get jobs.
The Scottish National Party has sex-quotas to achieve more-equal representation by men and women, but they let men who claim to be women take these seats.
Are either actually inclusive? Are they inclusive of women? If you have a daughter, do either of those measures better her life.
And yet both actions meet the 'Social' criteria of ESG scores, and serve to boost a company's rankings and thus lower its interest rate on sustainability linked loans.
Nothing about 'affirmative action' is inclusive. People just see it as positive 'because minority.' It can not lead to a positive outcome longer term (even now, where all-female teams are now seen as a positive but all-male teams are a negative, regardless of context).
What should happen is across the board equality of opportunity. While making sure the opportunity is truly fair, focus on stamping out prejudice and 'isms. You can't force immediate changes, but you can remove the barriers to equality to let the changes happen.
At least payment providers can plausibly point to financial risks and legal concerns as why they engage in what comes off as moral policing. It's pretty clear that any similar claim on HE's part would be pretextual.
>It feels like private companies are de facto writing the laws about what's allowed online and in society right now, and that it's almost become a loophole for censoring free speech on a whim.
"Feels like"? This is clearly embraced as a necessary step to preserve democracy by a small-but-powerful segment of population.
IMO, practically speaking, payment processors are a much bigger headache than anything else. It's hard to end-run around them and run any kind of successful business. It's really weird how much power they have to play moral police, even deciding what kind of porn is "ok" and what isn't.
Yep. It's especially concerning when clients are cut off for political reasons. Being able to effectively financially sanction people for having the wrong views is truly dangerous to democracy. Like with a lot of things, I suspect the reason they haven't faced more regulation is just that governments largely support these actions, and enjoy having a backdoor that they can ask to hamper undesirables without going through pesky courts
My biggest pet peeve and oft-cited example of US puritanism being imposed upon the entire world is the closed captioning system on YouTube that censors out words like s**t, f**k..
I have nothing whatsoever to do with the US, my Google account is based in a jurisdiction where I'm well past the legal age for adults and where hearing such words (and "worse") is quite normal at 14.
And yet I can't get this multinational behemoth to stop nannying me.
// private companies a re de facto writing the laws //
We can certainly discuss whether these services should be publicly or privately owned. I'm a pretty liberal guy, and wouldn't mind seeing publically-owned versions of Twitter, ChatGPT, or Google, as a guard against corporations dominating the information age.
But calling for more government regulation of privately-owned services? Forcing private companies to do what you want them to do, even when they would prefer not to? The whole point of private property is that it carves out a space of freedom for you, the owner of the private property, to use it as you wish!!!
I really wonder how I became the radical conservative here......
> * The whole point of private property is that it carves out a space of freedom for you, the owner of the private property, to use it as you wish!!!*
Be careful here not to conflate personal property and lucrative property. The first (like a home) is what you say. The second (like a factory) is a way to tell others what to do on your turf, for your benefit rather than theirs.
Private companies are of the second kind: more freedom for shareholders, fewer freedoms for employees… and if they’re big and inevitable enough (like YouTube), that’s fewer freedoms for users as well.
Even if we didn’t distinguish the two kinds of property, I could easily twist your sentence into meaning that the whole point of property is to make sure rich owners have more freedom than the poor. Which is probably not the point you were trying to make.
Freedom is certainly a tricky thing to balance, and private property rights are not absolute. But neither are freedom of speech rights.
Here's a way to cut the Gordian knot: publicly-owned services and utilities. E.g. NPR as a way to check distortions which privately-owned news organizations would otherwise be subject to. We could have a national public twitter, a national public chatGTP, etc.
So those of you who are now thinking of all the drawbacks typically associated with publicly-owned companies (real or imagined), well, the more you let the government regulate the private companies, the more the private companies will behave like public companies anyways.
Instead of getting the best of both worlds, you'll get the worst of both worlds: heavily-regulated, inefficient companies which still control the public discourse, which deliver profits not to the public but to private interests.
> "Forcing private companies to do what you want them to do, even when they would prefer not to?"
That's exactly the argument that bigots who owned businesses used to refuse service to PoC and oppressed people before the civil rights legislations of the '50s and '60s were passed. Funny to hear old discredited arguments used by far-right conservatives decades ago coming out of the mouths of the left these days. It's almost enough to make one start taking the horseshoe theory seriously.
There is a very bright-line difference in the case of the civil rights-related curbs on private property privilege: Those actually were effective in solving the problem! Because the solution to the problem was very clear: everybody should be able to ride the bus, eat in a restaurant, etc.
The contrast with regulating the media companies couldn't be greater. What, exactly, should these regulations be? I haven't heard anything but the most vague notions--which are so undercooked that they do not rise to the level of any kind of concrete proposal.
In point of fact, no matter what regulations are adopted, there will be media winners and media losers, and the losers will always feel the system is against them. Our media will become even more hyper-politicized than it is now, because its fate would be determined by politicians who can't even agree that it's probably a good idea to pay our debt.
You start off with a very clear solution, but don't explain why that very clear solution doesn't apply
Everyone should be able to use the bus, eat in a restaurant, use a water fountain or a post office bathroom
Everyone should be able to use Twitter, Facebook, Google, Uber, Shopify, Reddit.
It's the same problem in both cases. Why is it different now so we should apply an exclusionary standard?
Great question, which made me think about how they are more similar than I had originally thought. In both cases we're talking about carriers, quasi-utilities, network effects and (alas) real potential for abuse. But wouldn't this very similarity tend to strengthen our intuitions about the need for community standards?
E.g. You are sitting on a bus, and a venerable person comes aboard and launches into paean to Bolshevism, urging the present company to rise up and seize the means of production. Certainly protected speech. You might find it entertaining. You might even feel a pang of nostalgia for a lost world and its simpler problems.
But after a few hours of this, would you really feel like a free speech abuse had happened if the bus driver asks our comrade to give it a rest; or, if he feels honor-bound to continue, would he please go do it on somebody else's bus?
But you asked how I thought they were different, and I do think they are very different, because human attention is limited in a different way than the number of busses, or ISPs are. If you can't fit one more person on a bus without kicking another one off, you can just buy more busses.
Human attention is not like that. No matter how many clones of twitter there are, I can't doom scroll for more than 24 hours a day. If some content is promoted on my feed, that means other content is inevitably excluded from my feed. And isn't this really what people are unhappy about? Not just that their views are not stored in some database somewhere. No, they want people to pay attention to what they are saying.
Can that problem be solved by additional regulations? I really don't think so. No matter what regulations we put on carriers, there will be media winners and media losers. And the losers will always feel like the system is systematically excluding them. And no wonder they feel that way--they are right. They can even go beyond vague complaints of corporate collusion and point to specific line items community standards, or--if we do adopt regulations--to specific regulations which are having the effect of suppressing their speech, perhaps even unconstitutionally suppressing their speech. But the conundrum is that this would be true for any set of regulations. The regulations can change who gets attention and who gets ignored. And they can make a bus ride or a social network more pleasant or less pleasant. But I have a hard time seeing how it can actually solve the problem of people being ignored.
Sure, pretty much everyone except extreme libertarians agrees that there are limits to private property rights that can be overriden in certain circumstances. However, if we (rightly) force businesses not to discriminate on the grounds of race, then it seems logically consistent to also allow businesses to refuse to associate with racists. I am not sure how someone could be ok with government intervention to prevent "whites only" restaurants and yet not ok with the government merely refraining from interfering with businesses that voluntarily choose not to associate with racists.
I'm not saying it's a great policy, but it makes sense to me.
Running a whites-only business overlaps but is different from being racist.
In this scenario, it would be weird to force your business to associate with whites-only businesses. But those are illegal, so you're not forced to do that. You're only forced to work with racists that don't run whites-only businesses.
Yes, I suppose there is a logically consistent space there, but not one that seems either appealing or consistent with the way the legal lines have been drawn in the US. For example, as it is not illegal in the US to express hatred for people of a particular ethnicity, should bakeries therefore be required to bake 'Ethnicity X sucks' cakes? That seems both absurd and inconsistent with the eventual outcome of the Masterpiece Cakeshop case.
My overall point here is that it does not make much sense to object to the freedom of association arguments being made in this thread on the grounds that similar arguments were used to support discrimination against Black Americans prior to the Civil Rights Act. The Civil Rights Act recognized racism as a unique evil that required special legal remedy; it did not recognize racists as requiring special legal protection. So, yes, freedom of association permits you to avoid associating with racists but does not (in all cases) permit you to avoid associating with people of a particular ethnicity.
Unfortunately progressives have been acting like ancaps on these issues for a while. I've long since stopped being surprised to see someone with "socialist" in their bio saying it's a good thing that unelected corporations have de facto control over online political expression, or that employers should be able to threaten people's livelihoods for supporting the wrong party, and acting like it's anathema to suggest regulating a private company in any way. Very short sighted, both forwards and backwards
chuckle I certainly have been lost in wonder that now I'm the one defending corporate power :-)
But, what would a solution to the problem look like, on your view? Would we really be better off having, say, Elon must having to get his decision to remove blocking approved by some media czar in the Ministry of Truth? Would that really stop people from thinking that their views are not being systematically suppressed?
Progressives (like Americans generally) are skeptical of all power, pubic and private, and (like Americans generally) don't want government interference in society unless it might have some hope of actually solving the problem.
But I haven't seen any concrete proposals at all, let alone anything which I would have any confidence that would actually solve the problem. Quite the contrary; no matter what regulations are imposed, surely there will always be those who feel they are being systematically suppressed--and come to think of it, they would be correct in thinking that way.
Private property rights are not absolute, sure. But is regulating media companies going to solve anything? Are there any regulations which both sides could be happy with, or would it just open up a whole new front in the culture wars, of endless, highly-politicized and ham-fisted control over, say, whether or not twitter has a block function or not?
> Private property rights are not absolute, sure. But is regulating media companies going to solve anything?
I am not sure if you were aware, but this article is about ISPs and we currently have laws that already regulate them and make the behavior described in the article as illegal.
So yes we do regulate them. And these laws are called common carrier laws. And those have have existed for decades and uncontroversial, and yes they work.
> Are there any regulations which both sides could be happy with
Both sides are indeed already happy with our existing common carrier laws that apply to ISPs, yes. Common carrier laws are not controversial.
Your point about common-carrier regulations already existing is very well taken.
What's not so clear to me is whether (A) the allegations against the ISP have any merit (the article itself states it has no confirmation), or (B) even if they were true that they would run afoul of the common carrier laws. As far as I understand, these regulations do not prohibit the carriers from selectively promoting (and, ipso facto, selectively suppressing) the content they carry.
Indeed, how could it be otherwise? The capacity of the carrier is always going to be finite, therefore, tough choices are always going to have to be made as to who gets priority access.
Common carrier legislation can happily co-exist with a "no shirt, no shoes, no service" sign on the shop door.
How about, "no company shall refuse access to essential infrastructure to anyone because they engage in lawful activity." That's what I think the bar should be on this issue and should include banking and internet services.
Sounds good to me, but (as another perceptive commentator wrote) we do already have common carrier laws on the books; don't they pretty much cover what is intended here?
Yes, but I was mostly responding to the "no shirt, no shoes.." portion of the comment, and don't think that common carrier status goes quite far enough in terms of ensuring access. I also think that the status should include banking, and possibly internet hosting providers and services, not just client access.
I think the Telephone company model is fine.
Have you ever had the phone company disconnect your call or cancel your services because they didn't like something you said?
> But calling for more government regulation of privately-owned services? Forcing private companies to do what you want them to do, even when they would prefer not to?
Yes! That's what it's going to take. If you want checks and balances, this is how you get them. Ultimately capitalism is supposed to benefit society as a whole and when it doesn't it needs a kick in the ass.
> The whole point of private property is that it carves out a space of freedom for you, the owner of the private property, to use it as you wish!!!
That's correct but as soon as you're "open to the public" the rules, necessarily, change.
What, exactly, do you think these regulations should be? What kind of regulation would solve this problem?
E.g. contrast with, say, regulation of pharmaceuticals by the FDA. Certainly a curb on private property rights, but, its also pretty clear what the regulations should do: allow companies to sell only drugs which have been proven to be both safe and effective.
Is there such a very clear idea of how these proposed regulations should be written? Where do we draw the line? Does anybody really have a very clear idea let all what the solution would look like?
I don't really think this is as complicated as you're making it in this case. The regulation should be that ISPs are to simply pass along data that comes their way. If they fail to do that by impeding certain traffic, they should be fined or in egregious cases jailed. No different from how you'd fine or jail something like a restaurant owner for violating health codes. You would expect a restaurant to serve you clean, un-tampered food; likewise, you should be able to expect your ISP to serve you data and to not tamper with it.
This sort of questioning just supports maintaining the status quo even if that benefits nobody.
I don't know what the regulations should be but that doesn't mean regulations shouldn't exist. Businesses are under perhaps thousands of regulations and I can only name a few. How many can you name? What problems do those regulations solve? Do you think they shouldn't exist as well?
// This sort of questioning //
chuckle Surely you are not trying to suppress my right to ask questions? :-) We are all frustrated here and know things have got to change somehow. It's just not exactly obvious how, not to me anyways.
But suppose we actually did have a concrete proposal, something we could legislate. No matter what the legislation was, there would still be media winners and media losers. And the media losers would still feel they are being systematically excluded.
Here's the kicker--they would be absolutely right!! Moreover, they wouldn't have to appeal to vague dissatisfactions about "corporate abuses"--they could point to specific line items of regulations which had the effect of suppressing their speech. There would be endless, highly politicized fights about what the regulations should be, but no matter what they were, the regulations would inevitably have the effect of promoting some points of view and suppressing others.
I.E. I really don't how regulations could provide any sort of solution to this problem.
Winners and losers exist now -- it's just that whatever is the status quo is the assumed baseline. It's just how humans view things but it's not logical.
We didn't used to let private companies control the public discourse. The mail is government-run and there are mail privacy protections as deep as the constitution. In the age of radio and TV we at least had the equal time rule and some level of public oversight.
Following all my opinion, but easier to write without constant hedging:
IMO public discourse is less controlled by private corporations/organizations now than at basically any other point in our history, with the possible exception of like, 10 years ago.
There was never previously any realistic method for a private citizen to gain a platform to meaningfully influence discourse. Traditional media _literally_ defined the narratives in play. I’d argue that a whole lot of the ideological carnage and polarization going on is directly a result of the “democratization” of public discourse.
While there was some oversight, the reality is that news media still had basically total control over whatever narrative they were interested in pushing.
In fact, I’d argue that a lot of the ideological chaos and subsequent censorship we have seen recently is precisely a result of private corporations losing control of public discourse.
The truth is that before the internet, there wasn't really any genuine public discourse. If you wanted any reach at all, you had to go through a gatekeeper of some sort.
In the US, related to this specific situation, the laws are called "Net Neutrality" and "Common Carrier" laws.
Such laws are well established and uncontroversial. Pretty much everyone agrees that it is a good thing that the power company can't shut off your electricity just because you said something that it didn't like.
If you want an example of something that is almost quite literally the public square, you could look at the court case robin vs pruneyard.
In this case, the government forced privately owned malls to allow political protests. So yes the government has forced public squares to be open to the public and prevents private companies from censoring political speech in those public squares.
> or a mass communication system though
Common carriers quite literally are mass communication systems. What do you think common carriers "carry"? The answer is that many of them carry communication.
Things like the phone system are for mass communication.
So yes, we have laws that effect both the public square and mass communication systems.
ISPs are also communication systems and laws called "net neutrality" laws force them to do certain things.
In fact, this article itself is about how the ISP is acting illegally and is breaking existing laws about what the ISPs can censor.
In fact, the reason the First Amendment limits the government, exclusively, is that the ability to abridge free speech (to choose which forms of speech you support, spread, or disassociate from) is implicitly a part of individual liberty, held by the people. Free speech has never guaranteed anyone a platform.
That's not a bug, it's a feature. Yes, it can be messy. Yes, it can be abused. Yes, it means social media companies are allowed to ban you for any reason they like, just as restaurants are allowed to refuse you service. Yes it means ISPs don't have to do business with nazis and assholes.
The alternative is that the government - that controls the monopoly on violence - controls all speech, at all levels, and any business that engages in any form of speech. That it forces you to publish speech against your will, against your interests, even against your safety.
The great thing about ISPs being private is that you can always find another ISP. Kiwifarms did. Being banned from social media isn't the end of the world. But I can't as easily find another government if mine reads my social media posts and decides I'm too "woke" to live.
You're not free to not associate with people in the U.S. Businesses are not allowed to discriminate against protected classes. This is because businesses are foundational to modern life, so being excluded from them greatly hurts a person. I don't think it's unreasonable to think that we should look to expand such protections to all people for certain services, especially those which are more like infrastructure for modern life. Not saying sites can't have a TOS, but an ISP should have a really good business reason for blocking you(illegal activity, spam).
> You're not free to not associate with people in the U.S.
I'm not? There are certain exceptions, such as certain police interactions, or a court order, or protected classes when I'm doing business stuff, but I don't think that's correct in general.
>You're not free to not associate with people in the U.S.
Yes I am. If Jehovah's Witnesses come to my door I am perfectly within my rights to tell them to go away. I don't have to go to church if I don't want to. I'm perfectly allowed not to associate with racists and homophobes.
Businesses are not allowed to discriminate against protected classes, true, but being an asshole is not a protected class, and every bar and restaurant still has a sign saying they can refuse service to anyone.
>Not saying sites can't have a TOS, but an ISP should have a really good business reason for blocking you(illegal activity, spam).
I'd be willing to agree if I didn't remember the last few months of vociferous support for repealing Section 230, having the government take over social media platforms and make TOS's and most forms of moderation illegal. Even make "algorithms" illegal.
On the one hand, I get the free speech argument, but on the other hand, there is a right-wing accelerationist agenda using that argument to push the Overton window of acceptable regulations far enough that it becomes illegal, de facto or de jure, for any site to engage in any form of moderation. I don't believe for a second that people are going to be satisfied with simply regulating ISPs, even if I'm far more sympathetic to the argument that they should be considered infrastructure than websites themselves.
For the time being, the market seems to be working. Conservative and right-wing alternatives are rising to take advantage of sites being pushed out of the mainstream, and I think that's acceptable.
> Yes I am. If Jehovah's Witnesses come to my door I am perfectly within my rights to tell them to go away. I don't have to go to church if I don't want to. I'm perfectly allowed not to associate with racists and homophobes.
> Businesses are not allowed to discriminate against protected classes, true, but being an asshole is not a protected class, and every bar and restaurant still has a sign saying they can refuse service to anyone.
Clearly I'm not talking about interpersonal association. We're talking about your freedom when conducting business, which is normal to regulate in the U.S in this way.
> I'd be willing to agree if I didn't remember the last few months of vociferous support for repealing Section 230, having the government take over social media platforms and make TOS's and most forms of moderation illegal. Even make "algorithms" illegal.
Do you think I support repealing section 230 when I said "Not saying sites can't have a TOS"?
> On the one hand, I get the free speech argument
Nothing I said has anything to do with free speech. As stated above, I think it's fine for sites to moderate themselves in a partisan manner.
> but on the other hand, there is a right-wing accelerationist agenda using that argument to push the Overton window of acceptable regulations far enough that it becomes illegal, de facto or de jure, for any site to engage in any form of moderation. I don't believe for a second that people are going to be satisfied with simply regulating ISPs, even if I'm far more sympathetic to the argument that they should be considered infrastructure than websites themselves.
There are other threats besides right wing extremism, like the centralization of power. Even if the power is wielded by some collective consciousness, I have interests that are not shared by the collective, so I don't want them having the ability to dictate my life. I think many people would also share this concern, so the government is a good way to solve that.
> For the time being, the market seems to be working. Conservative and right-wing alternatives are rising to take advantage of sites being pushed out of the mainstream, and I think that's acceptable.
That seems to be the exact opposite of what you want, doesn't it?Extremism is very popular and profitable.
Focus on speech though. Can the Phone company cut you off because of the content of your communication? Assuming you aren't breaking any other law like harassment?
The deciding factor is if your business revolves around facilitating speech. The law has some way to go to catch up with the current state of affairs, but right now the government is enjoying the power of censoring that speech so it may not be an easy path.
Good, then it should be easy for the police to shutdown the website if that's the case. Tell the authorities and let the justice system to deal with it.
> That’s what must happen here. The cops and the courts should be working to protect the victims of KF and go after the perpetrators with every legal tool at their disposal. We should be giving them the resources and societal mandate to do so. Solid enforcement of existing laws is something that has been sorely lacking for harassment and abuse online, and it’s one of the reasons people turn to censorship strategies. Finally, we should enact strong data privacy laws that target, among others, the data brokers whose services help enable doxxing.
But the authorities and the justice system seem unwilling to do so, and - in the face of their refusal to act - you can't expect people to just give up and not defend themselves, not when they can exert other forms of pressure.
>But the authorities and the justice system seem unwilling to do so
To me sounds like a conspiracy theory. If their crimes are so unquestionable and clear, it should be pretty easy and straightforward to prove it in a court of law. The other alternative being, of course, that there is no crime happening here, at least under the US law, and their actions, as tasteless and despicable as they might be, are covered under the american law and KF opponents are using corporations to censor legally protected speech.
I would like you to pay attention to the word "seem", which describe how their action - or lack thereof - appear to a third party, especially one which has been subject - and continues to be subject - to said "tasteless and despicable" actions, and to avoid jumping to conclusions.
> The other alternative being, of course, that there is no crime happening here [...]
That hardly sounds like the only other alternative. Even without assuming the malice of some hypothetical "conspiracy", it might be the case that
(1) the crime isn't happening here, on US soil, and thus the relevant authorities lack the power to pursue it (see also: spam call centers located in foreign countries);
(2) whoever is tasked with pursuing said crime has other, higher-priority crimes to deal with, and decided that the potential pay-off was not worth the cost of prosecution (see also: the whole US justice system);
(3) the prosecution is waiting to build a stronger case;
(4) it is not clear who should prosecute who (see also: diffusion of responsibility);
(5) the file was lost;
(6) the file got eaten by a grue;
(7) any other reason for why a large and complex machine might turn out to not be effective in dealing, in a timely manner, with a loose group of people who gather on servers hosted on foreign soil, which are not "KF opponents [...] using corporations to censor legally protected [sic] speech";
There is a reason why KiwiFarms is not hosted in my country. We have hate speech and data privacy laws that would prevent it from being hosted here. All that dox crap alone violates the GDPR.
There even was a thread on that forum where the admin asked for advice about alternate hosting locations and could not find any.
The USA is the only country with speech laws permissive enough and data privacy laws weak enough for that site to be legal there.
I don't know if you've noticed, but in the short time since we have basically removed all gatekeepers things have not gone well.
Our democracy is on the verge of collapsing because liars and frauds have grabbed their newly available megaphone and convinced a very significant portion of the population that any election they lose is rigged.
If our democracy even survives this, which is questionable right now, we really need to rein in social media if we don't want to live under a despot.
Typically dumb pipe companies get involved in this side of things due to legal requirements. Less often, though often justified as such, it is due to sincere concerns by the provider.
For example, banks don't typically want to service car dealerships simply because they are a prime target for money laundering. Same for legal cannabis firms due to being unbanked previously or because the whole industry isn't traceable.
Frankly, while I understand the historical reasons for having a "big brother" watch financial transactions, it's way to convoluted to satisfy and represents a big cost in the economy.
> private companies are de facto writing the laws about what's allowed online
It's hard when it's your line people are using to put their brand of ugliness "online".
Cloudflare comes up so regularly because so many legally problematic websites use their free service to evade even judicial blocks that ISPs are ordered to implement at national level. CF are used as a free proxy that's very hard to block unless Cloudflare takes a stand.
When they don't take a stand, when they try to stay impartial, they're attacked for enabling terrorism, child abuse, human trafficking, etc, etc, etc. So they do something, and they're attacked for being moral arbiters.
They're here to do business, not please everyone. Perhaps letting them pick isn't so bad. You can decide whether or not you want to do business with them then based on their actions and everybody can not use them if they're that much of a moral problem for them. I think many people would benefit from knowing they don't always get their way.
"Oh but I have no choice of ISPs" is absolutely a problem, but it's not this problem. Your ISP having a monopoly can be fixed separately.
>When they don't take a stand, when they try to stay impartial, they're attacked for enabling terrorism, child abuse, human trafficking, etc, etc, etc.
Imo the problem lies here. On the idea that servicing someone implies support for their actions or ideology. For all the talk about acceptance and tolerance it would seem a good deal of society is ok with the idea that those doing reprehensible stuff ought to be completely ostracized from society, laws be damned.
Yeah, this is where things are so immature. Where language has been twisted into “silence is violence”. People that think this way either have an intense moral agenda and they’re intolerant of real diversity, or they can’t actually mentally separate the concept of basic human respect (as in servicing someone you disagree with because they’re human) and political support a la providing internet to Kiwi farms perpetuates violence you’re part of the problem.
If you let authoritarians kafka trap you or you peers into thought terminating cliches left and right, and you don’t call the BS, this is the society you end up in.
Corporations are essentially citizens, and citizens have the right to free speech. We can agree or disagree, but this where we've allowed ourselves to get.
HE is within their rights to say no, we will not host or route to KF, to stop us would violate our constitutional rights to freedom of speech and expression. They would then point to a litany of issues surrounding KF, how it would impact their business, and then win their case with ease.
I'm kind of shocked EFF went to bat for KF If I'm being honest. When your speech is unaliving people, or responsible for wide scale harassment of minors, guess what, I'm not interested in doing business with you, and that's perfectly fine. The fact that they use such a weak argument like utilities, and mail service as a comparison to commercial internet service is wild.
The idea of corporations being legal people is questionable in the first place, but now you’re going to argue that they’re not only people but citizens?!
I don't disagree. If a corporation has civil rights, they're akin to being a person/entity in which those rights are guaranteed aka citizenship. Some might argue that America is a "corporatocracy" for this very reason.
No, you’ve got weird ideas about citizenship and civil rights if you think that’s the case.
Plenty of rights are conferred by merely being within the borders of a country, regardless of citizenship status. You can be a tourist or even an illegal immigrant in the US and have the right to habeas corpus or the right of non-self-incrimination, for example.
Talking about elevating corporations to be on par with citizens is a fascist idea, which is absolutely adjacent to corporatism.
You can think these ideas are weird, they're not mine, I think a corporation having civil rights is weird too. The infamous line "corporations are people" comes from American politicians, so as weird as it may be, the government itself is inferring it and a court is justifying it as the law of the land.
A key tenet of fascism is protecting corporate interest and power... but okay.
Is that some sort of subtle trolling? I mean, with that Newspeak verb randomly thrown in, it must be, but then again it wouldn't surprise me if there exist communities on the internet who'd develop slang that ends up being basically Newspeak.
It's basically just making a very poor case for corporate personhood.
The more elegant argument is that the organization has no right, but every human being that is a member of that organization has rights
You have an individual right to practice religion, and you have a group right to practice religion. Your ability to practice religion is not limited by joining a Parish or church organization. The Citizens United of Citizens United v. FEC wanted to Produce, Advertise and Air a documentary. They have an individual right to make a movie, and the court affirmed they have a right to make speech as a group. Citizens have a right to address political Grievances. So do Citizens United
It's also worthwhile to note that the FEC's argument included that there was no limiting principle to their power. They could ban a book if a single sentence advocated for a person or ban a union from hiring someone to write a book. It is completely unsurprising that SCOTUS ruled against unlimited cosmic power.
The lack of government regulations will make businesses "regulate" themselves
What you're seeing is how government is born. Corporatoctacy is just another form of authoritarianism and the more government pulls up stakes, they get replaced.
The global strain of far right ethno isolationist politics is creating the public void these corporations are filling.
Please. We can see how much regulation matters when they're not enforced.
If you went to San Fransisco you would be surprised to know it's against the rules to break into people's cars or shoplift hundreds of dollars of stuff, considering how many people guilty of doing those things are tried convicted and serve time
Which is why society needs to turn ISPs into non-discriminating common carriers of information. Now nobody will be able to "resort" to leaning on them anymore.
We filed a complaint with the Washington state AG over their actions. HE's response was more or less technically obtuse garbage and, "You're not our direct customer" (paraphrasing, of course).
So what they did, was take it upon themselves to prevent access to an entire /36 subnet of IPv6 that our customer had announced downstream of us. Not once did an abuse report get sent to us, or our upstream from HE. Nor did we receive any credible abuse reports sent to us directly from those upset that the site exists. Meanwhile, this actually has no direct impact on the website in question's existence as their opposition has learned by now, it's never been truly offline. Just temporarily blocked from certain ISPs.
From an ISP point of view, it's worrying that a transit provider like HE can arbitrarily cancel a customer of yours, or a customer of a customer (, etc) over legal, protected speech. So, from a business standpoint, what does HE have to gain? The people complaining about the site aren't their target market, they're mostly Twitch streamers, Twitter personalities and folks who have a following on popular platforms that already exist. They're not the types to be self-hosting a streaming service who'll need rackspace and transit. So, what is there to gain by bending the knee to them? The safest business decision would be to remain neutral, respond to law enforcement requests if presented with one, and otherwise do the job you're paid to do. The worst business decision is moderating the content of downstream customers, which is what we're seeing now.
It was later in July. To be clear, filing a complaint is simply an online form. This does not involve or require lawyers or any expense.
The TLDR version is: We filed it as a violation of HB2282, Washignton State's Net Neutrality / Open Internet laws, the AG thought it was an appropriate complaint and forwarded it to HE. This gives them 21 days to respond. They (HE) responded relatively quickly, basically saying, "Nah, no we didn't and no we don't block access to it". At this point it'd be up to us to fight it further. We're not their direct customer, nor will we ever be (now). With that said, they very much WERE blocking access to the subnet as seen here ( https://images2.imgbox.com/b2/ed/Nc8NLQl2_o.png ) and here ( https://images2.imgbox.com/58/e1/1ZIn3YbZ_o.png ).
If HE is lying in response to a complaint forwarded to them by the AG, that seems like something the AG really should investigate.
Edit: It's odd to see this downvoted. I don't care about Kiwifarms or all the other random crazy crap being discussed in this comment thread. But I do feel that companies should be honest in their communications. I'm surprised people here disagree.
A lot of the "people here" are from Kiwifarms because this thread got linked to from their site. So a lot of untrue claims are being made about the facts of the situation.
> A lot of the "people here" are from Kiwifarms because this thread got linked to from their site. So a lot of untrue claims are being made about the facts of the situation.
I went looking for this out of curiosity. It seems to be a thread from 2022 with only 10 pages, and only about 10 total replies this year. Is this really your basis for claiming that "a lot" of people are coming from Kiwi Farms?
Attacking another user like this will get you banned here, regardless of how wrong they are or you feel they are. You've been breaking the site guidelines so frequently that you're already over the line at which we'd normally ban an account, but I'd prefer to ask you to follow them first.
So not knowing either company, is IncogNet and CrunchBits related companies in some way? I ask because the article just talks about Crunchbits, which I didn't know about. I tried to look looking up CrunchBits, but that's not really possible on Bing based search engines.
There are a few links to reviews, but the Crunchbits website seems to have scrubbed from Bing.
While it's certainly a comical thought to imagine a business opening their doors and waiting years to onboard a single customer, that an upstream swiftly cancels on their behalf, it's nothing more than a far-fetched story that you're telling. Do you genuinely believe that both of these businesses exist to support a single customer?
Abuse complaints have to be valid. Submitting opinion pieces to our inbox is good reading, but beyond that, relatively pointless without links to actual unlawful content. I can't speak on behalf of Crunchbits since we simply lease hardware from them, but they likely subscribe to the same policy that most service providers do.
It would be better to call a lawyer or the police. There's no AUP or TOS for the entire internet (aside from stuff that endangers the network itself), and I'm strongly opposed to any efforts to create one.
To be clear: death threats are not protected free speech.
But yes, it's inevitable due to the global and gargantuan nature of the internet that enforcing consequences against hate speech and harassment for any single govy. is extremely hard, even for countries that unequivocally outlaw it.
> The safest business decision would be to remain neutral, respond to law enforcement requests if presented with one, and otherwise do the job you're paid to do.
Have you considered that it might not be about money? What if the decision-makers and operators of Hurricane Electric just have certain people they just want to censor, and use their position to do it at the expense of money. Money is just a means to the end, and if they're getting to that end by foregoing money in business rather than spending it, that seems logical enough to me.
And if the government is ideologically aligned with the operators of the company, you won't find any protection from them. And in many cases it's just the government and large companies working hand-in-glove to get to their ends. Some political outsiders threatening your political monopoly? Pull some strings and have their social media accounts removed and banking taken away; but there's no recourse since "muh private company" even though they're getting direct orders from government officials.
So a good reason to be on the side of "free political speech" is that we don't want the people with the most money controlling what we can and can't say, and we don't want the government to have free reign to shut down criticism or challenges.
I want to propose a way it can be both money and ideology.
Let’s say you were the governor of a very large state. You have a ton of influence if not sold discredtion on how your state’s $500 billion pension fund is invested. You are an ideologue puppet put in place by people desperately trying to reset the world in their image.
Now… let’s the banks and companies don’t care about your cause - but you have disproportionate sway over them. It can be about money if that is your leverage.
If they choose not to host a platform that they don't like, isn't that free speech? Ironically, appealing to authority to enforce an internet service provider to provide speech they don't want to transmit seems like an imposition on a private entity operating freely.
> Ironically, appealing to authority to enforce an internet service provider to provide speech they don't want to transmit seems like an imposition on a private entity operating freely.
They get to make that choice when I get more than 0-1 alternative choices on which ISP I can use the access the internet in my area.
Until then, saying their actions are "free speech" isn't too different from the days before water and electricity were owned by private corporations. I strongly believe primary ISP tubes should be a public service instead of owned by private corporate interests.
This isn't a consumer ISP like Comcast where there's an effective monopoly over the underlying physical infrastructure. Hurricane Electric is a wholesale IP transit provider. Any datacenter worth its salt is going to have several independent IP transit providers on-site, competing for your business.
Absolutely false. We are in no way a 'bulletproof' hoster. You're free to review our IP subnets in use and compare them to actual bulletproof hosting providers. We actively and swiftly remove users engaging in ILLEGAL activity, such as malware, warez, etc.
We're an American based business, registered in Wyoming, and abide by American law. No 'bulletproof hoster' is going to setup shop in America.
Archiving what other people do and say online on and making fun of them on a forum may be mean, but it's not illegal.
With that said, we host many types of clients, including LGBTQ organizations. Privacy and speech is for everyone, that has always been the stance. Our policy is and will remain to be neutral on content, so long as it abides by law.
You host death threats and leaked PII, and the forum owner explicitly encourages his followers to harass specific people he has a personal grudge against. He names entire sections of his forums after his victims and encourages people to post about his victims. You're lying. He's not running a neutral operation and neither are you.
The forum doxes employees of their hosting providers. Even Russian hosters terminated kiwifarms. Russians don't even terminate malware. You are dishonest to argue that this is about free speech.
Even the EFF acknowledges the activity on your forum is illegal and called on the cops to prosecute. it means the EFF won't protect kiwifarms when the cops come for you and Josh.
Except, we don't host them? Didn't you hear, Hurricane Electric didn't allow us to host Kiwifarms.
I haven't followed up with our customer to see who their new hosting provider is.
If you believe we're hosting something illegal, I do encourage you to message our abuse department so we can review it and take appropriate action if deemed necessary. I understand you feel strongly about the issue but we run an honest business and have no hesitation to boot people from our network doing things that are unlawful.
How come no one ever posts any links to any of this (or at least archives of said links), whenever this site is discussed? Instead we get DailyDot and Vice articles, or a wikipedia entry quoting those articles, and little else. If the site is such a clear and present danger to public safety, why is the proof to that effect never provided?
Kiwifarms, now banned, official twitter page said their goal was “exploitation of the mentally handicapped for amusement purposes”. ( Source: https://archive.is/jYp5p ).
I think Kiwifarms is (borderline) criminal. Null, the admin of the site, outright said he was ok with users posting stolen financial information, such as Social Security Numbers and Credit cards. Source: https://archive.is/0fOcS . There are many examples of private financial information being posted on the site.
I would describe them as operating with a paper thin layer of "plausible" deniability. Officially you aren't allowed to harass or interact with the targets. But posting their home address, stolen passwords, phone numbers, and information about relatives is all allowed.
But even the rule against interacting with "lolcows" (called "cowtipping") is haphazardly enforced. For example, one user had sex with a "lolcow" and posted photos. The admin explicitly said they would allow the content to remain up: https://archive.is/zYnpK#35%
> Kiwifarms, now banned, official twitter page said their goal was “exploitation of the mentally handicapped for amusement purposes”. ( Source: https://archive.is/jYp5p ).
I made the mistake of visiting the (archived) page linked to by the second Tweet from that (archived) feed announcing the conviction of someone of interest to them on several criminal counts, and what I read there was nightmare fuel potent enough that if these are the kind of people the site "stalks," I can't say I'm sympathetic. (Seriously, don't read it.)
They just bring up the unsympathetic ones as a defense for what they are doing.
A lot of their targets are more sympathetic. For instance, the moderators have said they are ok with doxxing children: https://ghostarchive.org/archive/DSt5K
Because it's linking to victims dox which would get your account banned on any reasonable website. The homepage is kiwifarms.st currently, and if you're on the fence I would encourage you to check it out for yourself and ask yourself if this is OK, and if a provider should be forced against their will to support this.
and you're not going to address the fact that you're making false accusations against someone for hosting content that they claim to not host? You're not making the best case for yourself here.
These death threats are not true threats and hosting PII is not illegal. Nor is encouraging "harassment" because what's encouraged is not actual criminal harassment. Every victim of a social media mob claims harassment, including Joshua Moon. When the good guys do it, of course, they just call it "consequences culture".
>Even the EFF acknowledges the activity on your forum is illegal and called on the cops to prosecute.
Which is a cowardly attempt at playing both sides. By juxtaposing "KiwiFarms users do bad things" with "criminals should be punished", the implication is that those bad things are criminal but the EFF maintains plausible deniability, which is wise since to do otherwise would constitute defamation. The important thing is that criminal activity should be determined through judicial proceedings, not armchair lawyering from midwits who likely think that there are laws against hate speech.
Kiwifarms, now banned, official twitter page said their goal was “exploitation of the mentally handicapped for amusement purposes”. ( Source: https://archive.is/jYp5p ).
I think Kiwifarms is (borderline) criminal. Null, the admin of the site, outright said he was ok with users posting stolen financial information, such as Social Security Numbers and Credit cards. Source: https://archive.is/0fOcS . There are many examples of private financial information being posted on the site.
I would describe them as operating with a paper thin layer of "plausible" deniability. Officially you aren't allowed to harass or interact with the targets. But even the rule against interacting with "lolcows" (called "cowtipping") is haphazardly enforced. For example, one user tracked down, and had sex with a "lolcow" and even posted photos of this. The admin explicitly said they would allow the content to remain up: https://archive.is/zYnpK#35%
>exploitation of the mentally handicapped for amusement purposes
Edgy, not criminal.
In the posts you link, you can see Null obviously wants to allow basically anything but is still responsive to legal considerations. Maybe he's right and maybe he's wrong about the law. He responds to legal notices that he considers valid, and this has kept him out of real trouble so far.
I think "borderline criminal" is a fair characterization, but I'd point out that lots of sites are "borderline criminal" in the sense that there are often public statements of "we would like to allow this but legally we cannot." It's not that scandalous.
Harassment campaigns by Kiwi Farms users are known to have contributed to the suicides of at least three individuals.[15] The Kiwi Farms community considers it a goal to drive its targets to suicide, and has celebrated such deaths with a counter on the website.[22]: 55, 61 They have used social media reporting systems to mass-report posts by harassment targets in which they have expressed suicidal thoughts or intentions, with the goal of reducing the possibility their targets receive help.[22]: 91
I went down this rabbit hole before, and that wiki page is such a mess of self-referencing articles and recycling outrage in various forms and using one to build on the other. Whatever the original thing is that Kiwifarms did is long lost in this sea of recycled articles, as they're now forever "the site that helped bully and 'contributed' to some people's suicides".
It's sloppy at best, and a coordinated and vindictive smear campaign at worst. And like seriously people, I'm not defending bad things, but we have to have an honest discussion. This is like the website/org equivalent of a "rape accusation", that's never been formally "proven" in a court, yet will follow them forever.
If you went down a rabbit hole and done research, you should have been able to find evidence of such things. And there is a lot of bad stuff they've done that hasn't gotten mentioned by their Wikipedia article.
Kiwifarms, now banned, official twitter page said their goal was “exploitation of the mentally handicapped for amusement purposes”. ( Source: https://archive.is/jYp5p ).
I think Kiwifarms is (borderline) criminal. Null, the admin of the site, outright said he was ok with users posting stolen financial information, such as Social Security Numbers and Credit cards. Source: https://archive.is/0fOcS . There are many examples of private financial information being posted on the site.
I would describe them as operating with a paper thin layer of "plausible" deniability. Officially you aren't allowed to harass or interact with the targets. But posting their home address, stolen passwords, phone numbers, and private information about relatives is all allowed. (Which would have no use if they were simply a gossip forum).
But even the rule against interacting with "lolcows" (called "cowtipping") is rarely, if ever, enforced. For example, one user had sex with a "lolcow" and posted photos. The admin explicitly said they would allow the content to remain up: https://archive.is/zYnpK#35%
None of the KF "victims" have been confirmed, and even so, it would be hard to legitimately claim that KF caused their deaths. People just hate that site because it's a gossip forum that exposes a lot of scummy behavior
Meanwhile, people have doxed others on Twitter, blown their heads off on Facebook livestreams, and posted manifestos on 4chan before slaughtering bystanders, yet nobody calls for any of those sites to be taken offline
Wikipedia is essentially useless for anything politically related due to how badly biased it became, one its own founders nowadays says this. Their "authoritative sources" policy pretty much assures whatever CNN and New York Times say is the unquestionable truth.
I found it useful context. I would’ve previously perhaps been curious but if these guys are related to those suicide promotion sites, then I’m happy to set the bozo bit and walk away. Those people operate on the edge of legality and I’m not really that interested in examining the sorites paradox in this context.
We are currently considering HE vs some other providers for interregion cloud to cloud and I was concerned for a second. Not so much now.
fallacy of assossiation? It's not even a valid misalignment. "Oh they host servers and are in the same seller's circle as other server sellers". Yeah, we were all on Twitter at one point, guess we are all culpable for the terrorism there?
If you're going to make accusations, at least make them sound, let alone factually correct.
>But, what is clear is right around the time Sprint data center kicked Kiwi Farms off their network (according to Joshua Moon, founder of Kiwi Farms), Lolek Hosted was seized by the FBI
>Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.
If you want to argue that internet infrastructure providers should be blocking access to areas of the internet due to bad consequences and "being able to sleep at night", then there many more obvious and larger targets.
The amount of attention KiwiFarms gets is ridiculously outsized for what it is: a fairly small forum with a bunch of mean-spirited people telling mean-spirited "jokes". It's a very odd target for all these free speech issues.
- Corporations that obtain your data and then sell it or abuse it even if said abuse is permitted in some fine print.
- Countries that commit crimes against humanity but those should be fully physically blockaded rather than just blocking their internet.
- ISP's and ISP resellers that aid and abet watering holes, phishing sites, scams, etc... and probably also entire countries that refuse to lift a finger to stop scam call centers should be globally BGP filtered .
Blocking a country due to scam call centers is kind of horrifying collective punishment.
The argument in the article is suggesting that blocking something so bad they will not defend it nor do they even want to look like they are defending it should not be done because of the slippery slope, meanwhile you've leapt straight to partitioning the internet cutting off billions of people.
Blocking a country due to scam call centers is kind of horrifying collective punishment.
That it is and that is the point / goal. It would be in place about a day if even that long. Their government would go round up all the scam center scammers as they already know who and where they all are and the block would be lifted assuming it even managed to escalate to that point.
FWIW I was just answering the question of who who deserves some attention prior to doing anything with the unhealthy trolls at KF. This is assuming anyone even had the ability to do anything I suggested. I would honestly prefer sites like KF stick around so they can be infiltrated by law enforcement to watch for the planning of bad things and I am making a massive assumption that glowies won't instigate the bad things to justify budgets but that's also a big topic in and of itself.
1) They clearly are able to tolerate being locked out of the internet at least in limited fashion, this is regularly being used to control domestic protests.: https://internetshutdowns.in/
2) If an external party imposes a constraint on a nationalistic government the govt can use this external attack to help bind their country together.
I am not aware of the US enslaving and mass executing people of particular ethnic backgrounds. There are certainly some awful people that do awful things but they are not the majority and not backed by the majority of the leadership. The internet will catch up to them. If there is evidence of mass enslavement and executions then absolutely all of those leaders must be brought before the Hague.
Good, let's further isolate the population from independent sources of information and leave them completely in the dark about what's happening both in the outside world, and in their own countries. I often wonder who and for what purpose posts comments such as this one because they play so well towards what these dictators want. Or is it just ignorance coming from those who has never lived in a dictatorship.
I will also let you know that many neutral countries receive our internet through some of those you imply by your statement. You would cut significant chunks of mostly poor population off the internet. We have some connectivity through other countries, but it will be back to the dial-up days for at least 5-10 years until more fiber is laid out.
Good, let's further isolate the population from independent sources of information
I used to think this as well and even offered suggestions on HN for countries that were being blocked. In hindsight I feel that may have been a sub-optimal decision on my part. They need to first communicate with one another in their nation and find a way to rise up above the tyranny. The outside world will do little help with this. Physical blockades will make them desperate and force hard decisions and sacrifice. Every nation has to go through these awful growing pains. But ripping off that bandage is a big topic for another thread I think.
> They need to first communicate with one another in their nation
This is misguided, naive, and even arrogant. Instead of playing the group identity game and anthropomorphizing lawnmowers, imagining what someone must do, you need to understand how totalitarian systems work, there's no "government" and "people" as separate entities to clash, and no "dictators" either. There is simply no "they" to communicate to one another, and there's no communication/organization possible, as the system removes any means for doing that. Paradoxically, any totalitarian system is decentralized and stuck in the local optimum.
Totalitarian systems are perfectly in balance while being isolated, and in fact always move towards self-isolation - take imperial Japan, USSR, or any other similar society. When your goals are the same as those systems', you should take a long look at what you're doing. It's often said that "Jeans brought USSR down", meaning the cultural influence of outside world. Discarding that is just stupid, it's the most fundamental leverage you have at your disposal.
Not exactly. It's fundamental to specific flavor of western democracy that has become common in the world, at least on paper.
But you can have democracy without it. In fact you can have democracy with lot of other characteristics that seem weird today, like randomly chosen representatives, slavery, exile etc. It's largely orthogonal.
Dude, stop repeating this same thing. Everyone disagreeing with anti-kiwi farm stuff is immediately a "common Kiwifarmer tactic" according to you.
I count at least 9 similar comments made by you in this thread alone. I don't even know how someone can spam a thread with 9 comments without being throttled.
@dang - please have a look at this spam? This is an important discussion to be had and having this kind of inflammatory stuff is not productive.
>a fairly small forum with a bunch of mean-spirited people telling mean-spirited "jokes".
That is true, but that is only part of the story. If that was all, the website would not be so notorious.
Kiwifarms, now banned, official twitter page said their goal was “exploitation of the mentally handicapped for amusement purposes”. ( Source: https://archive.is/jYp5p ).
I think Kiwifarms is (borderline) criminal. Null, the admin of the site, outright said he was ok with users posting stolen financial information, such as Social Security Numbers and Credit cards. Source: https://archive.is/0fOcS . There are many examples of private financial information being posted on the site.
I would describe them as operating with a paper thin layer of "plausible" deniability. Officially you aren't allowed to harass or interact with the targets. But posting their home address, stolen passwords, phone numbers, and information about relatives is all allowed. Obviously, if they didn't want their targets harassed, they wouldn't post that.
But even the rule against interacting with "lolcows" (called "cowtipping") is haphazardly enforced. For example, one user had sex with a "lolcow" and posted photos. The admin explicitly said they would allow the content to remain up: https://archive.is/zYnpK#35%
> The amount of attention KiwiFarms gets is ridiculously outsized for what it is: a fairly small forum with a bunch of mean-spirited people telling mean-spirited "jokes"
The site is probably one of the only sources of actual gang stalking on the planet, and when it isn't stalking and harassing people on an industrial scale, it also moonlights as a suicide factory. The psychopaths that run and participate on the site are proud of their body count.
> There are dozens of sites like the Kiwi Farms, many even have "farm" in their name.
I'm aware. The OP is talking about KF.
> There are also completely unaffiliated sites such as Doxbin, which were responsible for a large amount of the harassment and doxing against Keffals. There's a tweet (xeet?) somewhere where she acknowledged that she knew Kiwi Farms wasn't actually responsible, but didn't care.
I have no idea who Keffals is or why you'd think I'd care.
> I have no idea who Keffals is or why you'd think I'd care.
Keffals is one of the people responsible for the chain of events leading to what is happening. If you aren't familiar with the context and don't care to learn about it, what is the purpose of commenting?
You do realize there are other people the site has harassed and killed, right? And afterwards, things just like this took place?
You seem obsessed with this Keffals person, it looks a bit unhealthy to me. Look beyond your obsession at the other people who were affected by these psychopaths.
> You seem obsessed with this Keffals person, it looks a bit unhealthy to me. Look beyond your obsession at the other people who were affected by these psychopaths.
I'm not sure how mentioning a person directly relevant to the linked article in a single comment counts as being "obsessed".
> You do realize there are other people the site has harassed and killed, right? And afterwards, things just like this took place?
Allegedly. I have yet to find a claim that stands up to scrutiny as sites either link to news stories repeating unsubstantiated claims made by someone (alongside factual errors like that the owner of Kiwi Farms lives with his mother, or that he is wanted by law enforcement) or provide no sources whatsoever.
As someone who agrees ISPs shouldn't get to be judge, jury, and executioner on censorship, I find it really odd when people go out of their ways to defend absolute cesspits every time the censorship issue comes up.
Kiwi Farms is an irredeemable cesspit by every measure I can see, and accepting that makes your argument stronger. Trying to act like it's an innocent place, or this place is ok because you're familiar with 100 even worse places just makes you look unreasonable. All it serves to do is muddy the waters between being anti-censorship and being pro-cesspit, and I'm not the former.
It's far from innocent. But they also talk about some things that others aggressively try scrubbing from the internet, which shouldn't be scrubbed from the internet. Cesspits suck, but if a cesspit is the last place you can talk about, say, the criminal indictments of a powerful influencer or moderator, then we have bigger problem than that the place stinks.
But this is a very dangerous argument you're making: "who cares if people are making up complete nonsense about them, they're bad anyway?!" I'm not trying to be uncharitable, but that is more or less the core of your argument.
I don't want to "defend" anyone; I just want to have an accurate understanding of the truth, insofar that's possible. It bothers me so much misinformation is being spread about this and I think this is also harmful overall for many reasons.
This was, IMHO, also the problem with Stallman: yes, Stallman was/is not good and should have stepped down a million years ago (in my opinion, anyway), but no, he's not a transphobic sexist nonce and most of those claims are complete bollocks. But hey, who's going to defend an asshole like Stallman? Especially when a significant section of his more fanatical fanbase is so ... unpleasant (in my experience, anyway)?
It's infinitely more dangerous to reduce the world to the kind of logic that underlies implying "if you feel a way about one case of X you must feel the same way about all cases of X ever in every context".
If someone bad mouths a cesspit by mixing up which stalking cases they're involved with, when said place was literally founded and named around stalking someone... I reserve the right to say that's an acceptable mistake of absolutely no consequence to a conversation about censorship.
I also reserve the right to do say so without unilaterally declaring that it's ok to make up facts about anyone in existence the moment said they're deemed to have done something wrong. That's the kind of nuance in thinking we aim to instill in children from a very young age.
> reduce the world to the kind of logic that underlies implying "if you feel a way about one case of X you must feel the same way about all cases of X ever in every context".
I never said any such thing or made any such argument.
The disagreement is about which events have occurred at all, and it's not about "mixing up" minor details.
I don't care if they got things wrong on which exact people got stalked. You twisted that into:
> But this is a very dangerous argument you're making: "who cares if people are making up complete nonsense about them, they're bad anyway?!"
So either that's the argument that you're making... or you genuinely believe that it's dangerous to say a place is a cesspit "just" because they stalked a lot of people (and drove a brilliant person to suicide, then celebrated)
Also, for posterity:
- If you're not a stalker and someone says you stalked someone: that's making things up.
- If you're named after the first guy you stalked, and you've stalked so often there are academic papers written on it, if people mis-attribute a stalking to you: that's a mix-up.
In their speak, "Is this the hill you want to die on". In other words, if there's something redeemable going on on KF, do you really want to even know? Because then your options are to stick your head out for unsympathetic people, or feeling bad about what's going on.
KF is an irredeemable cesspit but so is Twitter and so is Tumblr, if you know where to look.
There's no difference between what progressives do freely on Twitter/Tumblr and what Farmers do. KF worst actions are only possible because they amplify their harassment of targets by using "woke" optics on twitter to draw corporate backing and media attention against their victims.
The conversation is anti-censorship, and your hill to die on is the place named after the person they were trying to bully is just like the place where if you dig across the 450 million monthly users you'll find bad actors.
At the end of the day you're just elevating a sideshow above the actual anti-censorship argument at the cost of the former, but honestly it's not much sweat of my back. At the end of the day censorship is just the next net neutrality: sideshows based on the most useless cases of its risks burn all the oxygen in the room, no action against it taken, and the world moves on.
“The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one’s time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.”
— Commonly attributed to H. L. Mencken (1880-1956)
Also the person the quote is attributed had some abhorrent views most people who share them have the good sense to only vaguely alude to through veiled references to Ayn Rand and questionable race science articles. He was not exactly a defender of democracy and equal rights.
"Unlike other sites dedicated to harassing Internet users until they commit suicide, KF is public and has a rule against harassing Internet users until they commit suicide" isn't the defense you think it is.
It's perfectly reasonable to push against censorship, but KF being censored isn't a reason to portray them in any sort of favorable light.
> KF is public and has a rule against harassing Internet users until they commit suicide
You're putting words into my mouth. Kiwi Farms has rules against harassment and bans anyone who does.
There is a long history of communities organized specifically to troll people in real life (Something Awful, Sons of Kojima, The Idea Guys, etc.) Kiwi Farms is explicitly not that. Do people say mean and hateful things on it? Sure. But I've yet to see any actual examples of these alleged harassment campaigns, which should be easy to find considering that the site is open.
You will have a very hard time convincing folks that KF should not be censored because they aren't as bad as other sites. As someone who doesn't frequent these places, I will concede that you may be right, but the point has sailed over your head and into outer space.
> As someone who doesn't frequent these places, I will concede that you may be right, but the point has sailed over your head and into outer space.
I disagree.
The entire impetus behind getting Kiwi Farms removed from Cloudflare, having their domains revoked, having their phone numbers and registered agents cancel service, attempting to blackhole them from the Internet, etc. is that they are literally the worst website, so there is no need to feel bad or give them a fair "trial".
If such outrage can be wielded to completely deplatform Kiwi Farms extrajudicially, it sets a terrifying precedent for the future.
And also, you're not allowed to see for yourself. You must take on faith that KF is pure evil, if you want to look and see if they do anything that should possibly be protected speech, then you're one of them and must be banned too.
Sure. And the Democratic People's Republic of Korea is democratic because it says so in the name.
I've personally seen the doxxing threads before and throughout the entire Keffals drama that got KF banned from so many platforms and services. There are videos out there of people going through those threads. The threads were pages upon pages long and KF regulars actively participated in them and cheered on the doxxing attempts.
Trying to whitewash Kiwi Farms as just a site people go to have fun is pathetic. Especially to do so in a place like HN where people likely are aware enough of online drama to be able to call you out on this.
> Sure. And the Democratic People's Republic of Korea is democratic because it says so in the name.
> I've personally seen the doxxing threads before and throughout the entire Keffals drama that got KF banned from so many platforms and services.
The thing is, that isn't what this is about. Doxing is completely legal[0]. That's why people are making up grandiose claims such as "Kiwi Farms exists solely to bully trans people into suicide".
[0] not defending the act in any way or saying that I like it. It's just how things are.
Sure, and telling a provider, even as a group, that continuing to do business with someone you deem undesirable is detrimental to their reputation is also legal. That's not what the EFF takes offense with. The EFF takes offense with a tier 1 ISP cutting off traffic from a provider because some of that traffic goes to KF.
I haven't seen the claim you speak of but I have seen the claim that Kiwi Farms has a history of doxing trans people for no stated purpose other than to implicitly condone harassing and bullying them into suicide. The doxing against Keffals led to multiple instances of targeted harassment offline and KF members positively responded to this while continuing to support the doxing.
If a book club mostly meets to discuss recent NYT bestsellers but occasionally serves to organize bank heists, it's entirely fair to describe it as seemingly solely existing to do bank heists because there are plenty of other book clubs that don't do this and this is its distinguishing trait.
Yeah, sheesh. KF is a website that gleefully reposts terrorist murder videos treated with the same legal penalties as CSAM in other countries, and during the reign of ISIS and the Taliban I don't recall people sitting around defending the need for that particular free speech.
edit: By the way, for all those people ripping on the ACLU and saying "they lost their way" below, they're actively defending 230 against claims of online-terrorism-by-proxy.
> Yeah, sheesh. KF is a website that gleefully reposts terrorist murder videos treated with the same legal penalties as CSAM in other countries, and during the reign of ISIS and the Taliban I don't recall people sitting around defending the need for that particular free speech.
Do you genuinely not see a problem with the New Zealand police ordering websites to remove content they dislike and hand over user information about anyone who so much as discussed it? Christchurch was a horrific act of terrorism; that doesn't make attempting punish people for hosting or discussing content related to it justified.
There is not a country in the world that does not believe some forms of speech are worth censoring. In most of the world, CSAM is treated similarly because they don't believe people should spread depraved images of other humans being harmed. US Federal law treats animal abuse imagery in this way: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/48
It is irrelevant whether what other countries believe. Attempting to equate this with child porn (yes, call it what it is rather than the euphemism-du-jour CSAM) does not make your argument stronger, and indeed will just lead most people to distance themselves from you. They aren't providing material aid to terrorists, nor did they engage in those acts themselves. They're reporting on it (and in some cases reveling in it)....... but that is not illegal, nor should it be.
People really should stop trying to be the mutaween of the internet. It's getting tiresome.
> Attempting to equate this with child porn (yes, call it what it is rather than the euphemism-du-jour CSAM)
The reason the world has moved on from calling it "child porn" is
- because the world has generally moved on from thinking consensual pornography is always morally indefensible
- because consensual pornography is generally legal
- and so because "porn" doesn't truly describe what is happening
It's not a euphemism. It's a clarification. A minority of pornography with adults involves abuse. But _all_ of the material you think should not be "euphemistically" called CSAM intrinsically involves abuse.
"The world", being random individuals, still overwhelmingly calls it child porn. Organizations in the field call it CSAM
It's just like "ISIS". Every organization had an opinion on whether to call it "ISIL" or "the so-called Islamic State" or "Daesh", but the fact is everyone not making a press release just called it "ISIS". Nobody thought that that name was endorsing their self-claimed statehood, and nobody thinks "child porn" somehow justifies it. But using constantly-changing ("CSAI", "CSEM") jargon just confuses anyone not in the know and makes the topic harder to search
_All_ revenge porn involves abuse, but that's still the common term. It's still porn, in the same way that rape is still sex
I don't like the term CSAM because I've seen it lead to such tortured and misleading terms as "CG-CSAM" (computer-generated child sexual abuse material), suggesting that an AI model generating images of naked children is committing sexual abuse. The already-existing concept of "simulated child pornography" actually describes it better.
Do you have sources to back up the fact that "it encourages and is often found coincident with real CSAM"? You can't just claim that it's common sense that an AI-generated image of a child is encouraging real child abuse. Generative AI hasn't even been around for long enough to be part of common knowledge.
Again: it's you that has put the specific "AI" projection onto "CG".
As I say, this term appears to be used in the past broadly to include the kind of 3D animations that appear in conventional porn adverts, and also to face-swap and other Photoshop-type edits.
All I can say is that prosecutions in the UK for example have often mentioned such material alongside conventionally shared material.
I don't think I've read about any prosecutions where fake material was the only material justifying prosecution. But I could have missed that.
I have absolutely no interest in getting into the rest of the argument, which is tedious and IMO kind of obvious on many grounds.
Calling it Child Sexual Abuse Material is doing exactly that.
That is what is depicted, that is what has taken place to produce the material. It puts front and centre that this is abuse, categorically and by definition, not 'porn'.
Why would that not be "porn"? I would define that as "material intended to sexually arouse the particular audience". Merriam-Webster appears to largely agree
The material being harmful and produced via abuse doesn't remove it from that definition, in the same way that rape isn't removed from the definition of "sex"
‘Porn’ these days generally implies legal and consensual. Reflect as you will on what that means about society and the pervasiveness of porn as compared to a few decades back.
Regardless, calling it CSAM puts the abuse aspect front and centre, and puts it in a separate category to that, it avoids euphemism rather than adding to it.
To say “child sexual abuse material” is a euphemism for “child porn” is to misunderstand the meaning of the word “euphemism”.
Which is more mild? “Sexual abuse material”, or “pornography”?
Anyway, the point of bringing up CSAM or child pornography is to point out that you don’t think it’s bad idea to allow “the New Zealand police ordering websites to remove content they dislike and hand over user information about anyone who so much as discussed it” in every context. In some cases you (or if not you, then at least the vast majority of society) thinks it’s appropriate.
So, now we know that there is line, and it’s a matter of discussing as a society where that line should be. I happen to agree that we should keep the government very far away from regulating speech, as much as possible, but I don’t view your argument as the best way of getting there.
> In some cases you (or if not you, then at least the vast majority of society) thinks it’s appropriate.
Children cannot defend themselves. Adults can. No one is particularly interested if this fine line escapes you. The line exists, no one is interested in changing it (other than pedophiles, of course), and the proletariat would quite like it if the bourgeoisie could leave us the hell alone, thank you very much.
Also, allow me to clarify one point: I don't have an argument. I have a class interest. I am not interested in convincing you one way or another. If arguments actually worked to protect our rights then we wouldn't have to go through this merry-go-round of nonsense every few years. I am stating quite simply that the proletariat has certain rights and attempting to infringe upon the same as the bourgeoisie has done for the last decade is a sure-fire way to result in the same being subject to boycott and ruin... and if you don't think that is the case then ask Budweiser how they're doing at their next quarterly earnings report.
My only message is for bourgeoisie who may be reading: If you value your profits then maybe you should consider leaving your customers the hell alone, because the incident with Budweiser shows that customers incensed with your manipulations can and will stop doing business with you. No one is exempt from this fact, including ISPs, NSPs, payment processors, or other intermediaries who perhaps justifiably think that they are untouchable.
Lest there be any room for doubt: KiwiFarms has been under assault for the better part of a year and change... and now we're talking about it on Hacker News. This story is being talked about here and now because some people have had enough of this nonsense. Maybe everyone should take a break... pause, reflect... and ask whether trying to manipulate their customers to their own financial ruin is really something they want to pursue to the bitter end.
Given your framing of this in terms of class warfare, I'd remind you that Marx described capitalism as a major positive force because it "by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilisation". He went on to describe specifically xenophobia ("The cheap prices of commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate") but he went on to argue its transformation is deeper ("It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.")
This is part of him exalting capitalism for laying the groundwork that he believed would make socialism possible. E.g. later:
> The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of Nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalisation of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground — what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour?
So this notion of making an argument that it is about class couched in left wing terms does not change that by that same left wing thinking, this process is progressive. Not by intent, but firstly because bigotry and hate is bad for business, as your yourself point out when you talk of Budweiser boycott (ironically mostly benefiting a more progressive company), and so while some short term losses will be had by people pushing to hard too fast, the regressive parts of the working classes will not just be left to its own, but will be battered over and over by both the bourgeoisie and the progressive parts of the working classes, because bigotry and hate is bad not just for business but also for people.
> Given your framing of this in terms of class warfare, I'd remind you that Marx
Class warfare predates Marx by roughly two thousand years (if not longer). I am not interested in what he has to say on the matter. It was sufficiently described by greeks, along with where it ultimately leads, as the Kyklos or Anacyclosis.
> So this notion of making an argument that it is about class couched in left wing terms does not change that by that same left wing thinking,
Class warfare is not a left wing concept. The left and right wing are a result of class warfare, which predates Marx and the rest of his gang of thieves masquerading as revolutionaries.
TL;DR I don't care about your bourgeoisie rhetoric of who said what. The proletariat has an absolute right to freely speak its mind without your interference. Deal with it.
It's interesting that you're reacting this way to Marx being brought up when the language you're using is straight out of the Marxist school of thought.
It's also fascinating that you favour the idea of cycles, as in that case trying to fight the bourgeoisie is an inherently lost cause and you'd be better off trying to become part of it.
But in any case, the major point was that while you may be free to speak your mind, so are others, and they are also free to choose to not want to associate with people who want to spread hate and bigotry, and you're facing a losing battle. Doubly so if you believe in social cycles (an utterly idiotic concept to buy into today given the amount of change since it was conceived), in which case you're doomed to keeping losing this battle forever.
It's called the kyklos because it is a cycle of human civilization: we go forward, we go back. Over and over without end. The struggle between the proletariat and bourgeoisie is an inevitable part of that cycle. There is no 'losing' this battle. There is nothing idiotic in pointing out that we're still facing the same struggles because human nature hasn't changed and no one learns from history.
In any case: Marx is irrelevant, these people are on the wrong side of history, as is anyone who sides with them. Have fun screaming at a wall.
So your argument is that private individuals, dissatisfied with the behavior of an organization, may choose to take their business elsewhere?
Because business is a two-way transaction. This sounds like an argument in favor of HE's position. If their owner finds KiwiFarms' behavior reprehensible, They're not obligated to do business with it.
> So your argument is that private individuals, dissatisfied with the behavior of an organization, may choose to take their business elsewhere?
Yes.
> Because business is a two-way transaction. This sounds like an argument in favor of HE's position.
Only because you are deliberately mischaracterizing it. No man has the right to void a contract without just cause, nor interfere in the contractual relations of others. When Hurricane Electric unilaterally decides that someone downstream of them has violated their terms of service that is precisely what they have done. Furthermore, someone holding themselves out as a business does not have the right to arbitrarily refuse service to anyone... that much has been made abundantly clear over as many decades of the struggle for civil rights.
Put simply: customers can freely choose not to do business with you. You, however, generally do not get to choose who your customers are. Green is green. This is the system you and yours have designed, and you are free to choke on it.
> someone holding themselves out as a business does not have the right to arbitrarily refuse service to anyone
Sorry, but with respect: you misunderstand the Civil Rights Act and its peer legislature.
CRA and its peers carved out specific categories in which service, if provided at all, must be provided, more or less centered on intrinsic properties that do not impact or reflect the content of one's character. That carve-out is as exceptions to the default common law sense that any company may choose to refrain from doing business at any time. That's the bedrock and we make exceptions.
A cop was recently refused service at a bakery because they have a no open weapons policy (https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/4174109-san-francis...). "No shirts, no shoes, no service" is pretty bog-standard recognized restaurant boilerplate. In most states, bartenders can kick out someone who's dressed like a Nazi. And in HE's case, their terms of service refuse use of their services for illegal activity. In their opinion (and this could, perhaps, be tested in a court of law), this includes providing service to a company that is allowing illegal activity through its network and looking the other way ("data laundring," if you will).
You're right that green is green, and that generally serves as a practical counterweight for abuse of this privilege. But the privilege stands, and if a company decides the money isn't worth the loss to reputation or anything else they value, they may, with few carefully-carved exceptions, leave it on the table.
It's a high hill to climb to justify why we should stud these ground rules with an additional civil rights exception for the likes of KF. What societal benefit? Because it's pretty easy to see the content of their character, and their state of being isn't intrinsic to them and inextricable from their character ("just stop being cyberbullies").
It should be mentioned that some intelligence agencies have an involvement in extremist groups. Like the Soviet Union supported urban guerillas in the west or Russia dumping its Neonazis (who happened to kill Kremlin-critical journalists) into the Ukraine. With them then purposefully spreading stuff like Christchurch manifest translations through people involved with Azov to pump their "international far right" image.
Trying to solve that problem through attempts to quell public discourse and dictate limits of conversation are misguided and self destructive. Its a race to the bottom as a byproduct of short term power politics. Its not like western actors arent also doing it, strategy of tension in Italy for example. Having a bogey man can be quite beneficial.
There being a communication channel with reduced moderation is hardly the root cause. I would argue its quite the contrary, the heavier you get involved in controlling discourse, the easier it becomes to saw tension.
edit: As an example
>Russia dumping its Neonazis (who happened to kill Kremlin-critical journalists) into the Ukraine
>In an interview published by Azov’s online podcast in May 2015, Korotkih fawned over the Islamic State, and compared the Azov Regiment to the group.
>“I can’t accept ISIS ideology but they’re awesome in what they do. I enjoy their movies very much. I drool over what’s going on in the territories they control”, Korotkih proclaimed during the interview (00:32:45 into the interview), in which he also characterized ISIS as “heroes of that time.”
Ross Kemp (introduction in the gym to the NSO in the first few minutes. In case you watch it, the badly faked videos they made were a cover for the police to not investigate attacks on migrant workers. Tesak grew a concision in prison and got tortured and executed through "suicide".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dv1q3pCfed0
Before Tesak was famously used as a bogeyman for Russia's liberal opposition when he came to a book club where Navalny held a discussion.
If you sleep tight in a censored echo chamber you might be in for a rude awakening once you realize what atrocities that enables. But luckily you will only find out once you are at the receiving end of it?
Nobody is expecting you to pay for server costs and your opinion on the righteousness of your action doesnt absolve you of the responsibility for the delete function that was just created. Or gets you out of the predictable consequences. Old fashioned stuff like checks and balances werent around for fun and censoring stuff doesnt make it go away. Neither is a mob level targeting mechanism a good or safe idea.
Creating means to create holes in the public discourse is utterly reckless as you have no means to tell how big they have become. And no means to address them. You just punched your eyes out because you didnt like the sight of something. The potential to create human misery with this is hard to overstate when people blatantly ignore the consequences. This is a nobody is going to hear you scream type of threat. Its also not a novel risk, we know how horrible attempts to dictate public discourse went in the totalitarian systems of the past. Not because of some evilness, but systemic inertia and no longer functioning breaks. Without the ability to communicate, we are screwed.
> Neither is a mob level targeting mechanism a good or safe idea.
I think we agree on this. Which is why I'm in favor of giving no online quarter to KiwiFarms, a notorious site for organizing mobs.
KF supporters and users are free to say whatever they want in their own forums. The freedom of speech has never implied an obligation for people to listen. And freedom of the press does imply a freedom to refrain from serving as a conduit for someone else's message, as does freedom of association.
Nothing of what KF is doing or saying obligates anyone to provide them the tools to do or say it. They're as free as everyone else; they can print their own leaflets and stand on their own soapboxes. They don't have the right to obligate HE to facilitate them, directly or by proxy.
>KF supporters and users are free to say whatever they want in their own forums.
Thats exactly what is no longer the case. We just created the method to even prevent self hosting.
edit: Its also why this is such a big deal. They were a canary and with how they were dealt with its extremely likely that that was a domino. Because there is nothing stopping people from exploiting this now that its here. How ever justified or well intentioned this was, it wont matter for the cases to come.
Oh, they can self-host. They just have to go the long way around to get their message to anybody because the internet is a network. They can send paper letters and provide dialup BBS.
Networks always imply at least two parties. What they don't have the privilege of is access to a carrier willing to devote their privately-owned bandwidth to transceiving the message.
The fact you're publishing a paper doesn't imply that paperboys will carry it for free. Or that they'll even take your money to carry it.
Now, the notion they can self-publish (via mail) and self-host (via BBS) does rely on common-carrier protections (and mail anonymity). One can make the case (as EFF does) that by extrapolation we should give the same general-use protections to the Internet.
I'm not inclined to agree-by-extrapolation. The Internet is far more powerful and far harder to regulate. I think the burden is on those who think it should be a common-carrier system to justify why that's societally beneficial (over the status quo of "it's a federated network of peers, with service provision balanced between people's freedom to carry or not carry traffic and the incentives to get paid to carry").
1. Run your own server, because you've been pressured out existing sites.
2. Run your own data center, because you've been pressured out of existing data centers.
3. Run your own ISP, because that's the only way you can get connectivity.
4. Run your own payment processor, because you can't get a bank to serve you.
5. Run your own government, because you can't just start up your own bank.
6. ???
7. Profit? Wait, I think that started when you took control of the government.
If you run infrastructure, not a destination, then you should be a common carrier. Because freedom of speech is more than just the First Amendment. It's not just the government can't tell you what not to say (that's just the 1A). It's not just the ability to speak, but also the ability to be heard. Because for infrastructure, only loons would believe that you actually are responsible for the speech that you care across your lines.
We arent discussing technicalities here but actual consequences.
>I think the burden is on those who think it should be a common-carrier system to justify why that's societally beneficial
Thats a really easy way out of having to address how this isnt going to end in a totalitarian echo chamber. Unfortunately just ignoring it and feeling right isnt a promising strategy.
Because an organization can always keep seeking someone who will host them.
And if nobody will host them, it's not a totalitarian echo chamber, it's just "the people's will."
There is some risk of cleaving along ideological lines (so you end up with, like, "corporate Internet" and "KF-friendly internet").
I expect that process is currently in progress and I'm not convinced it's a bad thing. Maybe putting everyone on the planet on a flat communications plane was never an experiment that was going to succeed. Maybe we have countries and individual and collective ideologies for a reason.
>And if nobody will host them, it's not a totalitarian echo chamber, it's just "the people's will."
Thats framing that doesnt change the end result. There wont be any cleaving but anything differing from dominant doctrine no longer available. With no regard for who determines that other then the currently loudest screaming mob. That describes a totalitarian society in which truth has lost all meaning because people favor signaling despite knowing better.
I find it highly irresponsible to push for defacto censorship with a complete disregard for very clear threat, namely the power to censor not only getting abused but being by its very nature uncontrollable. Especially in this form. Nobody being able to even describe how this could function without ending in tragedy means its likely impossible. Which should surprise nobody.
edit: China described it as the peoples will as well if i am not mistaken. Which meant having a set ratio of the population that had to confess their reactionary thoughts in front of a screaming mob before being thrown into Gulags.
By definition totalitarian and will of the people are disjoint. Totalitarian systems are centralized. The people deciding, each of their own, to shun that which their consciences tell them is harmful to their society is the opposite of totalitarian. If KF can't find a home with any provider, and if providers they do find a home with are themselves shunned... That's just two tribes circling the wagons. Totalitarianism would look a lot more like some force external to those operators stepping in and forcing them to interact, regardless of their will.
And that's the rub. If we don't trust the owners of the machinery to decide how it is used, what's the proposed alternative?
If we pass laws to tie the hands of corporations on who's data they must carry, then we've taken the cudgel away from the Hurricane Electics of the world and given it to the Richard Blumenthals.
I trust corporations about as far as I can throw them, but I trust them more to decide what bits are on the wire than I trust governments.
Making sure that we have robust system in place that makes silencing dissenting voices impossible. Because it does not work, you have nobody (and no institution) competent enough to decide this. And we will have to rely on this system if history is any measure.
Just wanting this to work is not a valid strategy. You can and should know better.
So your alternative to distributed corp-by-corp decisionmaking is... A centralized set of rules, from a central authority, that corps must abide.
That looks a lot closer to totalitarianism than "KF has to keep changing who it works with because individual companies think they're not a good client."
The only way you can equate censorship with banning censorship is if the death penalty and the bill of rights are also both just laws.
The difference here is that its impossible to push society into a censored echo chamber through banning censorship. You cant create the dangerous blind spots this way that are at the core of totalitarian risks.
You really should read up on totalitarianism. Your definition is quite distorted and you hit a lot of the marks when ignoring consequences in favor of frames. I can recommend Meerloos Rape of the Mind.
You're treating freedom of speech as something beyond what it's protected as.
I fundamentally don't see it that way. It's a useful tool to promote good governance. It's a constraint upon the government's right to build an echo chamber around the leadership, which is comfortable for leadership but eventually leads a government to topple for failure to address the needs of the people.
The natural right that exists in the absence of a Bill of Rights is freedom of association - you can say what you want, and someone can tell you to piss off and go away for your trouble. They can also ignore you. And they are definitely not obligated to echo you, nor to do business with those who listen to you. That's the natural order you're alluding to by suggesting I'm saying the Bill of Rights is "just laws."
> The difference here is that its impossible to push society into a censored echo chamber through banning censorship
a) government bans censorship
b) people can say whatever they want
c) people use that liberty to conspire to commit crimes
d) the commission of those crimes, at scale, overwhelms the state's ability to enforce
e) totalitarians exploit this arrangement to depose the previous emasculated government and install their own... Which includes establishing rules to disrupt conspiracy to commit crimes so they are not themselves deposed.
f) society is now a censored echo chamber
The US does not currently protect freedom of speech to the level you're describing. No large functional government does.
There is no evidence such blanket, wide-open protection is actually a virtue for a functional government or society.
I dont care what it is protected as, i am telling you what automatically happens once you try to poke holes into it. It shouldnt be a surprise to anyone with a functioning relationship to reality. Picture it as a shared communication bus everyone uses for navigation where somebody added a hidden packet drop you cant compensate for or detect. If you try to use that thing you are going to crash. Because you have no ability to determine how much gets dropped. And how much bullshit cant be challenged anymore. Thats the line in the sand for cascading failure.
It cant work. Those blind spots cant be detected, managed or compensated for. They are like a metastasizing cancer.
That blind spot is at the core of totalitarian regimes. Group think sets in and suddenly your farmers are told to plant the crops closer together to utilize the proletarian solidarity between the plants. Anyone who doesnt gets gulaged and the rest starves.
Its worth mentioning that my local constitution has a clause that simplified means anyone trying to get the society to e) can be shot by anyone. How ever much of a paper tiger this is, having had two murderous totalitarian regimes in the last 100 years its generally considered a good idea and the way back out.
That you have to rely on a extremely thin argument like it probably being necessary to uphold the rule of law should have you reflect. You are arguing with an abstract model of what ought to happen according to your favorite ought-to-be model while i am telling you what will happen if you dont prevent it. We have seen it times and times again, if you dont try something different the results will replicate. Acting in denial of reality is totalitarian. Thats how we got all those mass graves. They werent created by evil caricatures but stupid people caught up in a drunk fever and Zugzwang with disabled breaks.
If I understand you correctly, you appear to be making the argument that if we kick certain groups off the public communications fora, they will meet in secret and become an unseen force that overthrows society.
Even if that's true, I don't think you've made the case that allowing them room in the newspapers to coordinate doesn't just give them the opportunity to amass like-minded supporters and overthrow society faster. Forcing the opinions of fringe groups into privately owned newspapers, for example, gives them an air of legitimacy that they don't have if the same information is printed on self-published pamphlets that they're handing out on a street corner.
You are also claiming that you are arguing concrete scenarios and I'm arguing abstractions. I'm unaware of any government overthrows that occurred because some people were unable to use the internet due to their past use of it being so heinous that nobody wants to do business with them, and I'm pretty sure it hasn't happened; internet is too young.
>You are also claiming that you are arguing concrete scenarios and I'm arguing abstractions. I'm unaware of any government overthrows that occurred because some people were unable to use the internet due to their past use of it being so heinous that nobody wants to do business with them, and I'm pretty sure it hasn't happened; internet is too young.
I gave you are very direct example for a totalitarian echo chamber becoming murderous. The Soviet and Chinese famines. The officially dictated story became beyond critic and millions died as a result.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism
I also mentioned Dallaires pleas to the UN for access to radio equipment to be allowed to air a counter narrative to the genocidal government aligned ones. Something he addressed special weight to in his "Shaking hands with the devil". Which should say a lot about its importance.
>If I understand you correctly, you appear to be making the argument that if we kick certain groups off the public communications fora, they will meet in secret and become an unseen force that overthrows society.
No, quite the opposite. Trying to ban people you dont like from communicating will result in a totalitarian echo chamber. Thats a slope and you willfully ignore the need for breaks. That quickly turns murderous. Because determining what should and shouldnt be censored and its second and third order effects is an infinitely complex problem that you cant address with intention alone. And will quickly be exploited for monetary/ personal / political / tribal profit. Trying to control discourse is a slope and by making self hosting impossible you are destroying the possibility to erect warning lights. You are willfully heading for a cliff.
Your error stems from being focused on the who of the story and at the same time ignoring practical limits. I am telling you if you are at the point in which communication is restricted enough, there will soon bee armed men and horror if your only safeguards are good intentions. There is a causal relationship, power becomes uncontrollable and slip from your hands as the official story and reality collide more and more and you become incapacitated by it. You trying to solve this with feeling competent enough and more armed men / state control is how that always works. Those are usually the same people who drag you off into camps. After all, you ignored safe use in favor of feeling good about the story and somebody like Stalin or Hitler doesnt mind taking over. The German justice system is a great example, many judges just continued to do their job with their career spanning Weimar, the third Reich and West/East Germany.
Even if you are delusional enough to think that your totalitarian echochamber will be the first one able to overrule reality, people will reliably react and that reaction being unguided as well can easily turn fascist. It was already visible with the various stay behind organizations throughout Europe that were intended as a safeguard against a totalitarian power grab. Or with the KPD as a major topic for NSDAP election run up. Caricatures and bogeymen pose the threat of becoming the lesser evil if the situation deteriorates enough. This isnt a matter of tribalism but one of guaranteed conflict and atrocities. There is no acceptable or safe version of totalitarianism, its by its very nature corrupt, self destructive and brings out the worst in people. Even if "your side" ends up on top, it will be a distorted, corrupt and dysfunctional monster. Or do you think there are many fans of Göring even among Nazis? Large parts of the admiralty of the soviet pacific fleet dying in an overloaded smuggler plane is another good example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1981_Pushkin_Tu-104_crash
I think we disagree on the totalitarian aspect of the echo chamber. I agree with you that letting companies have freedom to peer encourages echo chambers. For them to become totalitarian, it'd have to be power flowing from the government. The status quo is that individual companies may choose their digital neighbors. That creates echo chambers but not ones that can hook the levers of power. It enhances tribalism, not totalitarianism.
Coupled with a healthy democracy, it if anything makes it harder for a zeitgeist opinion to become entrenched permanently in leadership when the nation's thought is composed of separate tribal opinions.
The EFF is advocating government saying who must and may not peer. Currently, corporations may say. The status quo is diffusion of power, not concentration.
>I think we disagree on the totalitarian aspect of the echo chamber.
That distinction you hope for does not exist. We arent talking about your frame of digital neighbors but an end to self hosting. How ever nice your story sounds isnt more important then its predictable consequences.
Authoritarian means with righteous sounding justifications safeguarded by only good intentions and an assumption of competence arent safeguards against totalitarianism, its its description. You cant create an authoritarian entity where you just keep the mean people away from the wheel. Thats how almost all totalitarians describe their perspective, including when some of my older relatives can be believed my great grand parents with NSDAP membership cards. You are making the exact same argument. By insisting on how competent, well intentioned and justified you are, you verifying this assumption. You acknowledge that you are unable to recognize that that isnt enough. Which means less and less people are going to tell you this. Because its really dangerous, on an individual and a societal level.https://sproutsschools.com/bonhoeffers-theory-of-stupidity/
When the acoustic breaks are gone the kinetic ones will need to be engaged. Thats not a bug, they have to, there is genocide and existential risk waiting at the bottom of the slope and you dont have the ability, let alone intention, to break yourself. Which is really bad as its a very safe indicator that stuff is soon to become horrific. With anyone who tried the acoustic breaks unable to engage the kinetic ones. Which means fewer and fewer will even try communicating this. We cant allow that to happen. There is no way totalitarianism isnt going to end horribly. If we loose the ability to communicate we are collectively done for.
The only thing your intention influences here is your feelings about yourself. Which when coupled with an echo chamber gets you the typical righteous totalitarian fever that allows ignoring the costs and risks in favor of the nicely painted frame. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ToKcmnrE5oY
Please listen to the panicky sounding German, what ever you think you are trying to do here, do it without destroying the acoustic breaks. You not liking the sound they make doesnt mean we can do without them.
The law in the state they operate _literally defines_ it as a common carrier system.
That's the basis of the case being argued here (that the ISPs blocking is literally unlawful due to the common carrier legislation which prevails in the state in which they're operating.)
I'm not generally inclined to assume laws are passed on sound philosophical backing (I've seen too many laws passed that aren't only poorly-grounded, but actually grounded in counterfactual to believe one follows from the other).
But from a mechanical standpoint that is an interesting fact and I'll be intrigued to see how HE defends itself here, should the regulators choose to step in.
(They may not. The text of the law says HE may not drop lawful traffic. To a cursory read, it's unclear if that means they can't drop lawful traffic bundled with unlawful traffic, i.e. if criminals start slipping criminal activity into lawful activity, is the whole channel drop-worthy?)
I think it's good to get a case like this on the books and a precedent established because I think the enthusiasm with which some entities are embracing 'deplatforming' is a bit disturbing and some pushback is well overdue.
I don't even mentally file the ACLU as "the good guys" anymore. Rationally, I know they continue to do a lot of good work today, but that bit has been flipped, and it's hard to go back. When you're an organization like that, you kind of have to be absolute in your stance, and write things like "history requires us to look at the bigger picture, and sound the alarm about the risks even when the facts are horrific".
> the organization finds itself riven with internal tensions over whether it has stepped away from a founding principle — unwavering devotion to the First Amendment.
> Beginning in 2017, some individuals claimed the ACLU was reducing its support of unpopular free speech (specifically by declining to defend speech made by conservatives) in favor of identity politics, political correctness, and progressivism.
Many countries have recognized free speech as a right through the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which is much broader than the 1st amendment.
"Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers."
But just because governments have recognized the right does not mean that they are complying with this recognition.
This is par for the course though. The 1st amendment was ratified in 1791 and the Alien and Sedition Acts which violated the constitution in the most blatant way were passed 8 years later.
> in the rest of the world, we don’t even have free speech.
It exists to varying degrees in various places. It's not absolute in the US, as much as people like to pretend it is - incitement to violence, the old "yelling fire in a crowded theatre" canard, criminal conspiracy, defamation etc etc. There is a line drawn, it's a fuzzy one that people pretend does not exist, but it's there just as it is in other nations.
The "shouting fire in a crowded theater" metaphor was coined by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr in the Supreme Court case Schenck v. United States, in which Holmes and the majority of justices sent a man to prison for distributing flyers protesting the draft in World War I. Anyone today who references the metaphor without sarcasm reveals themselves to be ignorant of the history of the First Amendment.
It's been a popular metaphor for decades. And your link says (amongst other things) -
"Ultimately, whether it is legal in the United States to falsely shout fire in a theater depends on the circumstances in which it is done and the consequences of doing it. The act of shouting fire when there are no reasonable grounds for believing one exists is not in itself a crime, and nor would it be rendered a crime merely by having been carried out inside a theatre, crowded or otherwise. However, if it causes a stampede and someone is killed as a result, then the act could amount to a crime, such as involuntary manslaughter..."
I was not trying to make the point that it is always illegal to shout "fire" in a crowded theatre, that such an act is by itself subject to prohibition, but that it is one of several circumstances in which an act of speech may not be 100% protected by the first amendment in the USA.
I even called it a "canard" because it's something of a cliche and not 100% true as commonly understood.
The point, if anything, is reinforced by this - there is a fuzzy edge to freedom of speech in the USA, even where it is portrayed as absolute.
Another example of illegal speech would be perjury.
What? I don't recall ever having heard the US spread democracy in Latin America. The US destabilized democratically elected governments and propped up violent regimes in Latin America to benefit private industry and "combat Communism". The US Army School of the Americas was a finishing school for Latin American dictators and strongmen, as well as other murderers.
https://irp.fas.org/crs/soa.htm
> The memo listed several factors to consider, including "the extent to which the speech may assist in advancing the goals of white supremacists or others whose views are contrary to our values."
i.e. Consider whether we'd be arguing against our own goals.
How anyone reasonable could consider this a bad thing, I don't know.
> How anyone reasonable could consider this a bad thing, I don't know.
Because it's completely unproven. Their theory is that 'free speech advances the goals of [others whose views are contrary to our values]' but that's not proven, that's just their theory.
It's held for ages that free speech works as it allows for the 'disinfectant of sunlight' i.e. that ideas stand and fall on their merits with all relevant parties allowed to discuss freely.
They _posit_ that this theory no longer holds true but they never seem to actually explain how they came to that conclusion. You, similarly, just say that is 'is right' but... how did you get there? What's your proof of concept? Do you have examples?
It seems very much to me like they've just turned around and said 'yeah actually free speech is bad because it helps the bad guys more than the good guys, trust us, it's no good' and left it at that.
> reasoning has always been sound
They've done a complete 180 on this position. By definition either their reasoning before was unsound or their reasoning today is unsound. Pick one.
You realize that the origin of their changing stance is because they got someone killed, right? It's great to posit that free speech is the best disinfectant, until your principles result in people getting injured and killed. They were warned that the Rally was likely to break out into violence by the city itself but went ahead with their lawsuit anyways.
As a result, going to bat for the Unite the Right rally in 2017 was a massive misstep and resulted in them losing a large amount of donors and professionals working for them. Naturally they would've needed to change or else they collapse and don't function at all.
> your principles result in people getting injured and killed
Good principles remain good regardless of exceptional circumstances.
> needed to change or else they collapse and don't function at all
Yeah, they changed _and_ they don't function at all. Now they just protect the causes their donors agree with while retaining the prestige of the name.
Personally I think a total collapse would have been preferable.
> You realize that the origin of their changing stance is because they got someone killed, right?
The ACLU didn't get anyone killed, violent right-wing individuals did. The right to have a political protest rally is enshrined in the Constitution.
Consider the looting and rioting that took place following the George Floyd protests. It would be absurd to suggest that because violence and crime was happening at some of these events, the political speech they represented might not be worth protecting.
> It's held for ages that free speech works as it allows for the 'disinfectant of sunlight' i.e. that ideas stand and fall on their merits with all relevant parties allowed to discuss freely.
>> Consider whether we'd be arguing against our own goals.
>> How anyone reasonable could consider this a bad thing, I don't know.
> Because it's completely unproven.
So, just to be clear, you are saying it's unreasonable for the ACLU to consider whether a case would directly harm their mission.
Your words say that rather than consider the harm their case will do to their mission, instead, they must blindly defend the case. The result of which could hurt their free speech advocacy.
You might not agree with this interpretation, but that's what you are arguing against here based on your quotes and what I said. If you disagree with my interpretation, you need to rethink what you read because you are clearly misguided.
> It seems very much to me like they've just turned around and said 'yeah actually free speech is bad because it helps the bad guys more than the good guys, trust us, it's no good' and left it at that.
No. You are wrong.
"Free speech is good even when it helps bad people (as proven my our track record), but we will not defend those who attack free speech."
That's what they are saying.
tl;dr: You are wrong and arguing against free speech.
> The memo listed several factors to consider, including "the extent to which the speech may assist in advancing the goals of white supremacists or others whose views are contrary to our values."
This itself is the bad bit, IMO. My expectation of the ACLU is that they will always defend the rights of individuals, regardless of the goals of those exercising those rights.
When the ACLU defended Nazis marching in Skokie, they weren't defending the goals of Nazis to strip ethnic minorities of rights; they were solely defending first amendment rights.
The logic here seems so fragile that I don't see how one could see it as anything other than a bad thing if they value the ACLU as a bastion for defending rights.
For instance, if a criminal is actively going around and killing people from one political bent or ethnic background, they are clearly not respecting the rights of others.
Should we decide that it's okay to not grant them a speedy trial, since giving a jury the right to free them would definitely get in the way of theother rights we care about?
The EFF article explicitly admits there are a lot of actual crimes on the Kiwifarms site. This trainwreck of an article is defending that it acknowledges as "illegal speech" and saying companies shouldn't do anything about illegal speech.
They've gone so far down the rabbithole, they've come up the other end saying the government needs to take a more active role policing speech.
The article doesn't say there are crimes on KF, only that KF "provides a forum for gamifying abuse and doxxing". Magically, that abuse just happens without any planning of it appearing on KF, and then KF's users gossip about the results openly. The article says it supports prosecuting those missing-link people for crimes: "we fully support criminal and civil liability for those who abuse and harass others"
It does think companies should act on illegal speech; those "companies" are the people/orgs who run websites, like KF. "We should enact strong data privacy laws that target, among others, the data brokers whose services help enable doxxing". The EFF doesn't think other companies (network carriers, etc.) should act on illegal speech.
The government ought to take a more active role! Would you prefer the courts to affirm your legal rights, or for an oligopoly of private companies to brazenly deny you them, with no recourse?
The ACLU does debate and reflect, but they _have_ visibly changed in the wake of Charlottesville. The ACLU writing a rebuttal article listing their defenses of right-wing speech since 2017 doesn't really fix that image.
There are multiple causes: even though it is not the ACLU's fault for the murder at the Charlottesville rally, its public image took a beating. Combine that with the massive influx of new supporters and new money in 2017, in support of the ACLU directly challenging Trump, it now has a lot more partisan supporters than it used to. Donations have tripled. Even if all previous supporters were right-partisan (which would be unlikely), the sudden addition of a bloc of left-partisan supporters, double the size of your previous supporter base, could sway your organisation.
From the NY Times article:
> But in interviews, several younger lawyers suggested a toll taken. Their generational cohort, they said, placed less value on free speech, making it uncomfortable for them to express views internally that diverged from progressive orthodoxy.
> “A dogmatism descends sometimes” inside the A.C.L.U., noted Alejandro Agustin Ortiz, a lawyer with the racial justice project. “You hesitate before you question a belief that is ascendant among your peer group.”
> Some argued for carefully vetting hires. “I never do a job interview without raising Skokie/Charlottesville and asking if they are comfortable with that history,” said a lawyer who asked not to be named because of the fear of inflaming colleagues. “Not many colleagues agree. It’s about the cause.”
It seems there is both an "old guard" and "new guard" within the ACLU, only time will tell if they retain full commitment to defending free speech.
I think you misunderstand the EFF's position here if you think this is some kind of enlightened centrist "I may not agree with what you say but I will fight to death for your right to say it": the EFF is opposed to ISPs filtering content because that is not the job of an ISP and not a level of analysis an ISP should be allowed (much less required) to do.
The EFF very much promotes progressive values, more consistently so than the ACLU which has supported "free speech" cases by undesirable folks before and which seems to have led to this supposed "betrayal" when it turned out not to go out of its way to do so in every case.
The problem with "free speech" absolutist organizations is the same as with "free speech" absolutist social media platforms: if your distinguishing feature is to allow everyone to say almost anything, you'll primarily attract those people who want to say things they can't say elsewhere. And this inevitably means you get an overrepresentation of open white supremacists, CSAM enjoyers, teenage edgelords and trolls. And most people don't want to be associated with these kinds of people, so having enough of them around drives out everyone else.
It's the Nazi Bar problem: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Nazi_bar Either you put in effort to make your organization unattractive to nazis, or you become a nazi organization.
the "nazi bar" concept does accurately describe the problem with sites like parlor today, but I'd argue it's only true now because heavy moderation has become the default.
most of the internet was not like this 10-15 years ago. forums and even large social media platforms were moderated lightly, if at all. you would commonly see edgelords dropping slurs, but it did not dominate the discussion. I don't think the entire internet would turn into kiwifarms if everyone just decided to relax a bit.
You're right - there's an extra step. Most of the worst, most toxic shitholes on the Internet are not just unmoderated Nazi Bars, but actively moderated to silence the people telling the Nazis off. Nazi Bar explains the decay of USENET and 4chan, but not, say, Parler. Parler editorializes the shit out of their algorithm and website and actively bans left-wingers that might interrupt the perfect far-right echo chamber they want.
Major social networks don't do this, but they do actively boost things that create engagement, which is something right-wingers are very good at manufacturing. They use sockpuppet accounts to do that. This means that the underlying amount of toxicity on the Internet is not fixed - i.e. these forums not toxic purely because everyone else kicked them out and concentrated the toxicity, and we can't just disperse the toxicity. Dispersing the toxicity creates more toxicity.
Also, the forums you remember from decades ago were likely way more moderated than you remember, and probably run by people powertripping as hard as Elon Musk or Spez. The difference was that you could just leave without consequence and never come back. You don't have that luxury with Facebook or Twitter.
I think you're mostly being downvoted for tone but I agree with you to some extent.
To be clear, sites like Twitter actively went out of their way NOT to ban people for espousing far right talking points. Infamously there's the story about how auto-moderation would have resulted in the ban of a number of major profiles including GOP politicians and they had to give special treatment to Donald Trump while he was in office because he blatantly violated the terms of service all the time. Arguably more leftist accounts were banned than right-wing (if you exclude bans for active harassment like calling people slurs) but this is because leftists are generally outside the political spectrum so far right accounts tend to not be compared to leftists but to liberals, who of course tend to be more within the bounds of the terms of service.
The Nazi Bar is easily observable in real time with Elon Musk's Xitter. Elon Musk unbanned a number of far right accounts while actively engaging with a number of far right influencers. Additionally bans for slurs and targeted harassment have gone down. In Germany the only way to report an account is via a special flow that tries to implement the requirements of the NetzDG law (with malicious compliance in my opinion) and it's an open secret that ever since the layoffs any NetzDG reports sent via this system now get rejected by default whereas any sent by physical mail get approved by default. A German research project has also demonstrated that German-speaking left-leaning and far left "bubbles" have dwindled since the takeover whereas far right bubbles have gone into overdrive.
All German-speaking tweets (xeets?) I've seen from leftist or moderately popular left-leaning accounts are now flooded with replies from right-wing trolls (or worse) with blue checkmarks, often posting things that are clearly illegal speech under German law (e.g. glorifying criminal violence or directly insulting people to a criminal degree) but are not taken down even when reported. To be clear: this is illegal behavior on the part of X and will eventually result in them being fined. Musk just doesn't seem to care as presumably the fine won't be any more ruinous than what the company already owes.
You can however leave Twitter without consequence. Major influences, brands and others have already done so any many "normies" have stopped going because they experience the same toxicity and look elsewhere. Twitter hasn't been that large to begin with, certainly not on par with Facebook. Twitter's success came from it being the place where celebrities and journalists and influencers can be interacted with directly and you'd get a glimpse into the mind of your favorite famous person or be able to see witness reports of major tragedies first-hand (which of course became increasingly attractive for people trying to spread misinformation for fun or profit).
> most of the internet was not like this 10-15 years ago. forums and even large social media platforms were moderated lightly, if at all. you would commonly see edgelords dropping slurs, but it did not dominate the discussion.
Either you're thinking of a time much further back than 10-15 years (that is, 2008-2013), or you're wrong. Or - could be you were just in the Nazi bars at the time, also. My experience in a variety of online places at that time was that "edgelords" got told off or kicked out in most. A few places didn't, and they were already or became the Nazi bars. Alternately, the Nazis would be herded into a smaller subset of the platform, which became the Nazi bar.
> And this inevitably means you get an overrepresentation of
Why do you assume this very consistent pattern of 'new forum overrun by [the material you've mentioned]' is anything other than a transparent attack on free discourse?
I mean, it's very consistent, isn't it? Everyone knows it happens, and it's a good way to scare people off even thinking about visiting those forums if they think that any day they could go there and have their browser history full of ick.
The Nazi Bar "problem" is just a way to justify imposing censorship universally:
1. We ban people we don't like. They aren't actually Nazis, but we don't like them so we pretend they are.
2. They go to some other place where we don't yet dominate.
3. Now we assert that everyone in that other place is also a Nazi, because they aren't doing the same thing we're doing.
If the Nazi Bar was really a real concept then every left wing political party in the world would be a Bar and therefore everyone voting for them would be a Nazi. Because, recall, they were the National Socialists, and every left wing party has a whole lot of committed socialists.
Luckily for political harmony, other people don't use this type of reasoning to eliminate their enemies so left and right parties can compete fairly for votes. Which is why it needs to be stamped out amongst those who do use it.
Yeah this is a fear mongering tactic, and an intentional overreach.
The Nazi bar problem is not even hard in concept. If someone is not a Nazi, let them in. If someone is edgy, let them in. If someone is a Nazi, kick them out. Not rocket science. Nazis will not accumulate if done this way.
But people get looser and looser about their definition of Nazis, which ends up being “people I don’t like or who have different politics agendas than me” and pre emptively kick out tons of people in the name of keeping themselves safe
Here's a quick quiz. For the entire set considered together, which government is being referred to, the USSR or the Third Reich?
1. They set up a network of forced labor camps.
2. They discriminated against Jews, justifying this by claiming that as rich capitalists they were enemies of socialism.
3. They claimed to represent the working class.
4. They invaded and captured other countries.
5. They were a dictatorship.
6. They were famous for their high levels of propaganda.
7. In their printed materials they stated explicitly "We are socialists", demanded a program of nationalization and stated that all citizens were equal.
8. They imprisoned, exiled or killed their political opponents.
9. Most importantly for this thread, they aggressively censored their opponents and directly controlled the media.
You can't tell what the answer is, because every point is correct for both of them. The differences were much smaller than their similarities.
This matters because it leads to people using NSDAP/USSR ideological tactics like censorship of their political opponents, whilst claiming to be fighting the very same.
This obvious comparison has been suppressed by systematic and vicious attacks on anyone who points it out for a very long time, so I doubt this post will get good reactions and unfortunately HN isn't a good forum for pointing this out because it tends to blame people for the reactions of others regardless of how polite or intellectually curious they may actually be, giving a kind of hecklers veto to discussions. But the confusion here leads to people repeating the mistakes of the past and trying to fight fire with fire, so it's really important to point out. That's why Germany is now punishing an American author for using a swastika in his criticism of politicians: the whole point of studying history is to be able to say "wait, that behaviour looks like something we've seen before" and yet the people doing that are now being attacked as Nazis themselves. This upside-down sort of behaviour is inevitable for as long as people keep insisting on upside-down interpretations of history. You can't claim to be fighting Nazi-ism whilst simultaneously using their tactics!
While I know you think "both" is the right answer to all of them: 1, 2, 3, 7 and 9 are the USSR, 6 and 8 apply to both, the rest describes the Nazis.
1. Equating the Holocaust and the gulag system is not just idiotic but outright malicious. The Holocaust was not "a network of forced labor camps". The Nazis had extermination camps. Many also died on the trains to the death camps. They also massacred people directly. The goal of WW2 was to depopulate Eastern Europe and establish "living space" much like the Westward expansion of the early US.
2. The Nazis believed that Jews were migratory parasites lacking any allegiance to a state, draining the host country for resources before moving on to the next country. It equated this with "international bankers" who likewise had no loyalties. The anti-capitalism was rooted in antisemitism, not the other way around. The talk about bankers was what we would now call a dogwhistle.
3. The DAP (later NSDAP) was the only nationalist party that tried to appeal to the working class because it represented the largest voting block. Their politics were however always defined by ethno-nationalism ("völkisch" nationalism to be precise) and antisemitism. The other nationalist parties generally favored a return to the monarchy.
4. That describes most military conflicts in history. However Germany did not want to capture Eastern Europe, it wanted to depopulate it. While the Western Front was largely about revanchism, the Eastern Front was entirely about creating "living space". The Soviet Union did engage in imperalism (although Lenin would disagree based on semantics he invented) but it was more interested in creating distinct Soviet republics and most of its territorial expansion happened in WW2.
5. While the USSR was not what I would call a functioning democracy (and even less so than the USA), even Stalin did not have the same level of power as Hitler. The Bolsheviks embraced bureaucracy and strongly believed in the rule by committees. Given the internal power plays within the party, it's fair to describe Stalin as dictatorial in practice though. However the cult of personality around him was mostly built up after the fact and against his wishes and didn't transfer to his successors like in the DPRK.
6. So was the US? We think of these two as examples of massive propaganda because they were created when mass media became available and we have an outside perspective on their propaganda. The Nazis were however way ahead of the Soviets during their time and the US didn't go to quite the same lengths even before the end of the Cold War.
7. The DAP was explicitly anti-Marxist and embraced what Marxists call "class collaborationism" (as opposed to Marxist class struggle): the idea that despite the divisions, all Germans belong to one people ("Volk", defined by "blood and soil") and differences must be set aside to protect this. When the DAP was renamed, the "socialist" was deliberately chosen to appeal to the working class but the party strongly considered alternative labels to distance itself from Marxism. Any actual anti-capitalist tendencies that survived the Great Depression were eliminated during the Night of the Long Knives when a few holdouts like Strasser were killed to align the party closer with Hitler's vision. The Nazi government also generally did not "nationalise" businesses (not more than other capitalist countries at least), it disowned Jewish people and those deemed enemies of the state. Often these businesses were then sold for very low prices to existing companies. During the war, some companies were also offered cheap access to slave labor in order to aid the war effort. The famous Autobahn and other "accomplishments" of the Nazis were built by companies. I've actually heard people jokingly credit the Nazis for making the idea of "public-private partnerships" popular.
8. If you have to put it so vaguely, you might as well apply that to many other countries including the modern US. I don't think this is a useful framing even if I think that some of the things you're lumping into this both countries did worse than others.
9. Again, you're describing authoritarianism and trying to turn this into a gotcha. Arguably the Nazis had controlled their media less than the Soviets because they would just literally kill or imprison people whereas the Soviets had to create mock trials and torture them until they provided plausible confessions.
I won't even address the rest of your post because it's completely unrelated to your claim. Remember: your claim is that the NSDAP was a left-wing socialist organization and that by implication the Nazi government was socialist and therefore left-wing. You have provided no evidence of that. At best you've demonstrated that the USSR was similarly authoritarian and in many ways did not adhere to its supposedly socialist ideology in practice. That is the opposite of what you claimed to intend to demonstrate.
Serious kudos for taking the time to write out such a measured and thoughtful reply! I honestly wasn't expecting that. Your post has been killed now which I disagree with, but I have showdead turned on so was able to see what you wrote.
That's a lot of words so I probably can't reply to them all, but I'd start by observing that the fact it's so complex to dispute these points indicates it can't possibly be so clear cut, can it?
For example in point 1, I didn't mention the Holocaust. These points were worded carefully. The Nazis did run extermination camps, and they also ran a network of forced labor camps. You yourself mention the use of slave labour later in your reply. This point is not specific to the USSR.
In point 3, you seem to be agreeing. The NSDAP advertised itself as being on the side of the working class, as socialists (at that time) always did. They even selected their name for that reason. Their politics were defined that way to the public.
In point 7, again, you're not arguing with the point as written. They did indeed both do these things. But if you want to widen the context, think about how tiny these differences are you're highlighting! They said they'd nationalize industries, but then they only did it to their enemies. The ones who became subservient to the state voluntarily were allowed to notionally remain "private". This is a wafer thin distinction.
I've seen attempts to debunk or fact check this idea before, and they all look the same. They boil down to "The Nazis said they were socialist, but then they didn't do the things they promised so they weren't really!" which is a ridiculously weak rebuttal. Of course they didn't do the things they said they'd do, of course they didn't live up to their espoused principles. Socialists never do! That's why there was a whole cold war to try and stop them spreading.
The fact that they didn't really care about the workers or any of the other pretty ideas they marketed, does therefore not mean they were on the right.
The difficulty I have with that idea is that logically "far right" means the opposite of the far left. The USSR was far left, I'm sure we both agree. The opposite of the USSR would have been the USA (strong free speech protections, no forced labor camps, etc). Which was the Reich closer to - USSR or the USA? It seems obvious it was the USSR. It therefore cannot be the opposite of that.
As you can see in my reply (which is veering dangerously close to the size limit on HN, which is why I'm replying to it instead of adding this to it directly), responding to a false claim and debunking it takes a lot more writing and effort than simply stating it and moving on to the next one.
The NSDAP was far right. The vast majority of political and historical scholars agree on this. It was also decidedly not socialist. By the 1930s it also was no longer anti-capitalist in any meaningful way (again: working class populism isn't socialism, otherwise Tucker Carlson would be a socialist).
By focusing solely on the USSR and the NSDAP you're also ignoring countries like Mussolini's Italy or Franco's Spain and the Second Portuguese Republic. These states were as much alike as they were different but if you pay enough attention you might find a better pattern than "socialism is when authoritarianism".
The USSR was authoritarian. When the Bolsheviks came to power, they disbanded the workers councils (which btw is what "soviet" means, ironically) and trade unions because the Bolsheviks thought that Russia was too agricultural to be capable of having a true communist revolution and needed the party intelligentsia to figure out how to apply communism for the people. Lenin actually disagreed with Marx on many things, which is why the school of thought based on his writing is known as Marxism-Leninism, not simply Marxism. Specifically Lenin's followers generally think that Marx only described the end goal and Lenin described how to get there. Demonstrably, he did not get there, however. It's worth pointing out that even the USSR and its like agreed on this, which is why they referred to their states as "real existing socialism" (to contrast their systems with "utopian socialism", i.e. what they initially stated would be the end goal but eventually argued was impossible to achieve).
I understand that the American right and its many copycat right-wing movements across the Global North often think "actually the NSDAP was the national SOCIALIST party and it was left-wing" is a nice and easy way to smear anyone left of Reagan but what I want you to understand is that this is not only untrue but also severely misunderstands the extent of the suffering the Nazis inflicted and wanted to inflict. "What if the Nazis had won" makes for entertaining television but in reality it would have meant the systematic death of thousands of millions of people.
The Nazis did not win an election. They did not overthrow the government. They were lifted into power by the Christliche Mitte, a center-right Christian conservative party, because the right saw them as the best weapon against the rise of socialism and the (at that point) imagined threat of a communist revolution[0]. When leftists today talk about "enabling Nazis", this is what they're concerned about. All of Germany did not need to be Nazis for Germany to become Nazi Germany. It didn't even take a majority of voters, let alone a majority of the population[2]. It only took a large enough group and an even larger group of right-wing "moderates" that felt comfortable enough with them to hand them the wheel.
The USSR on the other hand was the result of a revolution. Unlike what the USSR said, this wasn't a revolution of the Bolsheviks although the Bolsheviks had the same enemy: the czar. But the Bolsheviks were the strongest and best organize left when the dust settled and they took the opportunity, first by integrating leftist movements, then by abolishing them, eventually by destroying them. Instead of giving power to the people they said they themselves were the people and they gave all the power to themselves. Instead of ruling bottom-up by delegation they built a bureaucracy and an intricate tapestry of elections and representation.
If you want to understand socialism, you're better off reading Bakunin than Lenin, Bookchin than Stalin, Graeber than Mao. I've commented elsewhere previously in another discussion about real world socialist projects that actually deserve the label rather than using it as statements of aspiration at best or for blunt populism at worst. But they all have in common that they don't start from authoritarianism because authoritarianism always poisons everything. It's difficult to find this information if you don't look for it because we exist in a culture shaped by anti-communist hysteria and Bolshevist propaganda both agreeing on using the labels of communism and socialism exclusively for flavors of authoritarianism. But learning always takes a little effort if you want to do it right.
[0] I'm saying "at that point" because there were genuine attempts to establish forms of communism in the chaos after World War 1, including a number of groups that were aligned with the Bolshevists. There was actually a lot of infighting in the German left over whether to support the Bolshevists or not that largely boiled down to "but they're doing communism wrong" versus "but they're the only ones successfully doing a revolution right now". Most of them died[1] either in battles with the monarchist Freikorps (which were also the breeding ground for the (NS)DAP btw), during violent clashes with other left-wing groups, or at the hands of the Nazis, either prior to their rise of power or thereafter.
[1] It's worth pointing out that despite the Weimar Republic having a central government, many judges would deem defendents not guilty of murder or assault when the act was done "out of love for the country", which specifically meant the monarchy. This largely gave the Freikorps and nationalist groups free reign whereas socialists would be sentenced if they did the same.
[2] The Nazis weren't very popular in Germany when Hitler came to power. The popularity came from the power and even then it was largely artificial. The reason you see cheering crowds in historical documentaries is because those were the scenes the Nazis wanted you to see. You only saw a fraction of the people but it was implied (or outright said) that "the silent majority" was on your side if you agreed with the Nazis. Once they were sufficiently entrenched in power, joining the Party was just an easier way to do networking for your business or your career. You'd do the salute somewhat ironically and both of you would be in on the joke of it, but eventually it stopped being funny but you still did it. Then you had to do it.
I'd normally agree, but a large public organization is a bit different from a small local bar. the Nazi bar problem usually "works" because of an "apple poisons the barrel" deal. But when we're talking about a lake, it just dissipates.
It's the physical analouge to how Twitter can still be the most used social media website despite also having years of accusations about every kind of bad content under the sun. So if a group is large enough, I wouldn't be worried about that kind of inflitration.
The EFF is arguing here that companies should not take anything down and instead rely on the government to dictate what shouldn't be allowed. This is absolutely ridiculous. Imagine being such a free speech advocate that you say something like this.
The corporation is either responsible for its content or it's not.
If they can pick and choose whatever message they like with absolute discretion, then that's effectively the corporation's speech and should be treated as such, with full responsibility over it.
If they don't want to bear the responsibility for what they publish, then it's easy, don't pretend to have the legitimacy to choose.
That the same social media platform can have as big of a change in views as Twitter/X did is insane to me. That's not "the public changing opinion". That's a corporation exercising speech. Full stop.
It's a consequence of freedom. If companies aren't allowed to make the decision, then you're saying the government should make the decision instead. It's one or the other.
There is no functional world where no one is allowed to moderate abuse, because in that world the Internet ceases to function. You don't have to like the results, but someone has to do it.
This is actually completely legal in the USA. It might be illegal if you are doing it with the stated intention of facilitating targeted harassment, but just posting personal information isn't a crime. If it were, the media would be in a lot of trouble.
That's not the ridiculous bit, the ridiculous bit is the advocating that the government crack down on people saying mean things about third parties to each other on the Internet.
And make no mistake, that's 99% of what KiwiFarms does, the last time this came up on hackernews I browsed through hundreds of posts in a bunch of threads to see if there was anything other than that going on, so if its there it's in the DMs (and policing person-to-person communication is utterly insane) or very rare.
What they're really saying is the the bar for ISP intervention in speech should be higher than the bar for prosecution. Which is not particularly ridiculous.
They want to be common carriers, but also be able to discriminate users.
Start by banning racists and bigoted users, then slowly start discriminating against other groups while offering new "private connection" for only $9.99/mo extra.
I find it baffling that so much of the public is content with ostracizing despicable people when it's precisely "racists and bigoted users".
The only reason that those are despicable nowadays is precisely because minorities and their supporters, which were considered despicable at the time, exercised their freedom of speech.
Instead on censoring speech why not provide tools that lead to better speech? This is perfectly possible from a tech stand point but companies would rather have the power that comes from censorship.
1. Get rid of anonymity/pseudonymity. Free speech is a right. Anonymity is not. If people had to post everything in their real name you would get rid of all of the fake b.s. and people would be much more civilized in their speech.
2. Provide content filtering tools based on user voting with a public record of user votes and the option for people to turn off the filters so that they can see what is filtered.
With these 2 mechanisms you can create a public square with absolute free speech where hate speech is filtered and suppressed, if people choose that, but the records are clear and people who want to audit the filtering can do so as they please.
its a free market so people are always welcome to run services that allow pseudonymity (nothing is actually anonymous on the internet, everything is logged and tracked and traceable) and people are free to use them.
the most popular services (facebook/instagram, twitter) are the ones that have the most real people posting stuff under their real names.
those companies continue to allow fake users for a variety of financial reasons but the fake users are actively degrading the experience.
twitter is working on KYC now, but it is a cheap AI version that is easily exploitable, so it won't make much of a difference (as i understand it so far).
People talk about this a lot nowadays, but what's your definition of a "fake user" or a fake account? A real human using a name other than a legal name? Hasn't that been the norm online since the late '80s?
and if you have any hope for humanity at all you have to believe that the majority will continue to reject that evil. pretending evil people dont exist doesnt make them go away.
The majority of people have no opinion on most issues. Politics is a fight between minority groups that try to sway or force the majority into supporting them. If you are in favour of mandatory deanonymisation for all public speech, what you're doing is giving sufficiently powerful groups a license to harass, unperson or arrest members of less powerful ones.
Are you actually fine with this? I can't help but notice you're not posting under your real name...
Yeah the EFF has gotten ridiculously radical into pro-corporate and pro-free speech positions. Generally anything that protects a company's ability to willfully harm society for money is worth protecting for the EFF.
The EFF is so detached from humanity it doesn't mind innocent people dying for it's radical free speech cause. And that's really pretty sad.
Having the ~~clergy~~ ~~nobility~~ bourgeoisie decide what is "harmful to society" and unilaterally censor it is far more harmful. The fact that "pro free-speech" is considered something to sneer at makes me want to facepalm. People will say unpleasant things, but it's far less unpleasant then being told what we're "allowed" to hear "for our safety". The idea that they're "detached from humanity" and killing people by this is ridiculous
You're disagreeing with the comment you replied to. That comment said the EFF is bad because it actually wants the government to intervene, not ISPs. Your comment says the EFF is bad because it wants companies to be allowed to do what they want. Did you misread the comment or did I misread yours?
Once again the EFF is proving that they'll stand behind their principles and defend freedom even for those they disagree with. They are one of the few remaining organizations that I feel I can support without reservation. Taking this difficult position isn't easy, but it is the right thing to do and I'm so glad to see that the EFF has the strength to do it in the face of growing opposition to free speech ideals.
Lol. EFF are now a bunch of virtue signalling hacks pretending to care about Internet free speech. They outed themselves as total hypocrites when they joined the "RMS is an <X>ist" bandwagon and removed Gilmore from their board.
> They outed themselves as total hypocrites when they joined the "RMS is an <X>ist" bandwagon
Are you suggesting that, because of his work writing and promoting open source software, that EFF should never be allowed to criticize RMS? Is that what makes them "total hypocrites"?
No, the EFF is allowed to criticize RMS as much as they want. Criticizing RMS doesn't make them hypocritical. However, linking [1] and spreading slanderous lies (I'm talking about Selam G.'s hitpieces [2] from 2019) isn't very fitting for an organization that claims to defend Internet free speech.
RMS never defended Epstein -- not even once. His only crime was being a pedantic aspie. If the EFF considers that to be good enough reason to cancel him, then yes, I think that EFF are total hypocrites. FWIW, EFF's official blog post only linked Selam G.'s hitpiece that has been thoroughly debunked elsewhere [3].
If you actually read the article by Selam G., you'll immediately see that this is false.
"When I was a teen freshman, I went to a buffet lunch at an Indian restaurant in Central Square with a graduate student friend and others from the AI lab. I don’t know if he and I were the last two left, but at a table with only the two of us, Richard Stallman told me of his misery and that he’d kill himself if I didn’t go out with him."
This is clearly a case of sexual coercion. If, due to autism, RMS was totally unable to avoid sexually harassing women he had power over, then clearly he should never have had a position of power in FSF or anywhere else.
"Many, many years ago, women in the AI and CS labs met to deal with the problematic atmosphere for women in the labs. We met as a group, discussed the issues, complied examples, presented them to the labs, then wrote a report. In the early 80’s, it was a pretty big deal but it would seem it did not have lasting effects."
RMS clearly harmed many women over many years. It's telling that people like you never acknowledge the accounts of women who have specific, individual complaints against him. Even the Stallman Support page you link to has a bunch of pedantic corrections over whether RMS "really" defended Epstein, in addition to generic articles about cancel culture that say nothing about RMS harassing women grad students at MIT.
EFF was correct in criticizing RMS. He shouldn't have been on the board of FSF or any other organization.
Selam G. was paraphrasing an anecdotal #metoo comment by an anonymous source that was backed up by zero evidence. If that's good enough evidence for EFF to call for someone's head, then they're worse than hypocrites. And the law schools that gave degrees to their lawyers should consider rescinding them, since they clearly don't seem to know a thing about law.
"Alumni from as far back as the 1980’s reached out to me and told horrifying stories" -- so the firsthand accounts of sexual harassment by RMS are not anonymous, as they are known to the person writing the article.
Yes, of course, we (particularly the EFF) must take Selam G.'s claims seriously, even when there isn't an ounce of evidence to back them up.
See, it's fine to dislike RMS (for whatever reason). But the question was whether the EFF -- an organization that claims to support free speech on the Internet -- should've joined the dogpile on RMS based on ludicrous claims written by an outrage addict.
> Once again the EFF is proving that they'll stand behind their principles and defend freedom even for those they disagree with. They are one of the few remaining organizations that I feel I can support without reservation.
I find this attitude very odd. Surely some disagreements indicate a violation of their principles. What would the principles be worth otherwise? Surely this is the paradox of tolerance in a different package. Why not instead model communication as a bilateral contract?
> What would the principles be worth otherwise? Surely this is the paradox of tolerance in a different package. Why not instead model communication as a bilateral contract?
If it was justifiable for speech infrastructure to ban the speech of any ideology based on if its implementation societally would probabilistically/historically lead to mass speech suppression and/or other atrocities, then a massive array of political and religious speech would technically qualify for a ban. Including Marxist-Leninist writing, or religious proselytizing to name a few.
The EFF is arguing that companies should lose their right to withdraw service due to TOS violation, unless the government says it's ok. This is as anti-freedom as it gets. What is wrong with them
This is a very funny response. Elon Musk has shown that he's extremely quick to censor speech on Twitter / X that he personally disagrees with. He also declines to fight government requests to censor speech, as opposed to Twitter prior to his ownership.
Starlink is the last place you would be safe from being silenced.
This is a weird one though. They're defending the freedom of criminals to commit crimes while simultaneously calling for the criminals to be prosecuted.
Yawn. Non-telco(*1) Tier 1 provider declines to carry routes for an entity they don't like. Happens all the time. This is why you buy from a Tier 2 instead and bypass DFZ(*2) politics.
Drop routes from spammers: Spamhaus DROP list.
Drop routes from DDoS sources? All the time.
Even Google wasn't reachable from Cogent over IPv6 for years because of a business dispute.
For all we know someone working at HE was targeted by KF and this is a security response (also generally allowed even if you are a regulated provider).
*1: Cogent & HE thread the needle around being a common carrier (they don't sell voice or TDM service) or a broadband provider, which is why KF's WA state complaint will fail (WA's law only applies to mass-market retail providers, which HE is not).
*2: Tier 1 does not mean "best carrier" it means "carrier that doesn't pay another carrier for routes." DFZ literally means default-free zone as in they don't have a default route to another provider.
Spamhaus is huge. A listed IP will see email bounce rates exceeding 50%, easily. Most large North American ISPs use at least one Spamhaus list. Tier-1s don’t generally advertise which blocklists they use, but the 2010-ish “Stophaus” DDoS attacks went after a number of Tier-1 operators.
Didn't someone actually get the configs that showed it was a bgp prefix filter denying accepting the bgp announcement from a customer? Isn't that a far cry from null routing? They're just choosing not to learn it from a customer. And if you buy the "HE is a tier 1" then whatever other peers were announcing the prefix would have been accepted by HE.
I hate how Kiwi Farms has become the benchmark for so many important concepts relating to internet freedom. As much as I think the world would be a better place with them being forever banished to the onion realm, I can't really defend HE and other service providers drafting their own visions of internet code of ethics, then enforcing them on other people's traffic. A smaller ISP would probably start losing business over such concerns, but HE is so large, almost all of internet traffic touches them at some point, so their ability to moderate is not even impacted by their business decisions.
Defending a company's AUP/ToS is reasonable when the company is reasonably sized, but HE is clearly over that limit. When a company gets too big to fail (banking also comes to mind) due to providing crucial societal function, there should be very strict restrictions on what they're allowed to moderate. This also applies to big industry conglomerates (oil, pharmaceuticals).
Another part of the problem seem to be various lazy officials not prosecuting these sites on the basis of obvious crimes involved in their operation.
I really appreciate EFF defending the obviously neutral approach here.
It's an interesting edge case. It's pretty clearly completely legal in the USA, though the content is grossly offensive. Some of the individual posts are almost certainly defamatory, but §230 shields the site itself from that liability (though not the posters).
This brings us back to the real question: should extreme unpopularity alone be enough for deplatforming in a free society? Or should actual laws need to be broken?
I think it's much simpler: make sure the content isn't legal to begin with. doxxing seems to broach on 4th amendment rights and we're no longer in a day and age where we will freely give out our address in newspapers. I don't know the fine legal details, but make a DMCA equivalent of private information. If you request a takedown of your identity and they don't comply, throw the book at them.
Likewise, death threats and that kind of harassment isn't protected by 1st amendment rights. I don't think sites should be sued by consumers over user submitted posts, but they should be held accountable for at the bare minimum removing that harassment in a timely matter when asked. If it doesn't happen often enough, fine them.
I heard a podcast interviewing the site owner[0], hearing his perspective was interesting though I don't know how much of what he says is true either. He raised one very salient point, however, which was that ISPs probably didn't start dropping him out of nowhere. He asserts that there is a highly persistent and technically knowledgeable party threatening ISPs & other providers by going after the provider's other customers to pressure the provider to drop kiwifarms. I don't know what the truth is but it is odd that kiwifarms keeps getting knocked offline as neonazi forums etc. stay online.
I don't know much about kiwifarms, never visited it, but given the claims in this post (that it's "uniquely awful," that the site itself is victimizing people) I think it would be helpful if the authors would link to some context/evidence. Maybe it's all true in this case, but I've been on the internet long enough to know that believing grave accusations without evidence is a very bad rookie mistake.
ISPs get threatened all the time and don't take content down just because some rando is mad. Kiwifarms needs to provide proof that ISPs are being threatened, as opposed to the more likely scenario that the harassment victims are filing normal abuse complaints and alerting the ISP to the TOS violations taking place all over the site.
If this were the case, I wonder how 4chan, stormfront, etc. stay online. Surely 4chan's providers get floods of complaints about doxxing etc. Or pastebin for that matter.
The fact that the EFF is writing about this case and that they're forced to use KF as their one example (clearly they find this distasteful & would prefer to use any other example if they could) indicates that something is unique or at least peculiar about this case.
Compared to 4chan, kiwifarms admins take a more active role in directing and encouraging harassment towards specific targets. it's a lot easier to tie the illegal activity to the site's owner. and the cops don't do shit because internet harassment is a seriously under-prosecuted crime. even the EFF admits that. the only route for victims is to follow the chain of upstreams till they get one that isn't in league with kiwifarms. (kiwifarms' hosting provider is even posting in this thread spreading the same untruths the kiwifarms admin says)
4chan, pastebin go beyond the bare minimum legally required. 4chan includes "You will not post or request personal information ("dox") " and pastebin's prohibits content that is "libelous, defamatory, or fraudulent" and "discriminatory or abusive toward any individual or group"
The other difference is the site owner actively encourages harassment and bans any discussion to the contrary
I've been doxxed & threatened on 4chan[0] (most of the doxxing was actually on pastebin), I contacted 4chan admins and received no response. 4chan does little or nothing to combat doxxing & harassment, I think you're incorrect that these sites "go beyond the bare minimum legally required" at least not 4chan.
4chan does remove posts and IP bans users for posting doxx. The thing is that IP bans are easy for some to work around. And that all 4chan threads expire after some time.
If you filed abuse tickets with the companies hosting 4chan, you should be able to get some response. The kiwifarms victims are demonstrating this is possible. There is hope for you. I wish you luck.
I agree, and I’m extremely far from a free speech absolutist - to a level that I’m sure most at HN would disagree with. I completely believe in limits to free speech on a case by case basis, online and otherwise. For example, I think HN would be a worse place without moderation, same with Reddit, I think my home country Canada would be a worse place without hate speech laws, etc.
Not against limits to free speech online, but I think ISPs are the wrong layer for them. Governments can go after specific sites carrying out illegal activities, online communities can moderate themselves to avoid devolving into 4chan, but ISPs shouldn’t make censorship decisions, it’s just too broad a reach/impact for a private company.
HN is moderated, but I cannot imagine many opinions that really would be outright banned or suppressed. It has strong requirements to the form, but not necessarily the content of the message itself. That is in essence not the topic people complain about, otherwise they probably wouldn't post.
I am a free speech absolutist though, I tend to like the term too because I believe its intended derisiveness is mostly impotent. Overall I believe trying to enforce hate speech laws is fundamentally flawed. I think people should be free to express acceptance as they should be able to express rejections.
Quite a lot of opinions get suppressed over here, and rightly so. You can see a lot of flagged comments in hot threads.
I grew up with unrestricted access to internet as a child, browsed a lot of forums, and most of them were always heavily moderated as well. The thing is, the majority of audience (read-only people) don’t want to see extremely stupid content (subjective). Thus the mods, host and etc. have to play the balancing game. HN is one of those places, and they’re doing a terrific job, in my opinion.
I’m not sure how to put it into words, but Internet is not the same as public free speech. Anonymity, physical distance, not seeing others’ faces contribute to the way people talk. I completely support the former kind, but not the latter. It just becomes a breeding ground for a lot of naive people who start thinking that’s tolerable to act that way in real world too (can’t cite any sources, just observations from my nephews and others kids I know). We like to tout how everyone forms their own opinions, but I’m a heavy believer of the “nurture” side of the debate. If you get sucked into one corner of the Internet, you will start hating the other corner, and that’s basically your nurturing. I guess, the major question is, should we keep fostering this behaviour or not? And I don’t know the answer, as there isn’t “one right corner” most of the time. The best I can do is to support the crackdown on extremely obvious shitty behaviour knowing that’s against the free speech ethos.
I've not done a thorough analysis but it seems like most flagging of posters/comments here seems to be done on the basis of conduct rather than opinion. And that's a different matter.
The thought experiment is always; if this person behaved the same way but had a different viewpoint - would they still be banned/flagged/arrested? Mostly I think it's a yes here, which is a good thing.
The problem with a lot of internet posters is they refuse to accept a distinction between conduct and opinion. If you're abusive to everyone and then get banned, it's not because they couldn't handle your radical opinions, it's because you were being a dick.
> It has strong requirements to the form, but not necessarily the content of the message itself.
This is provably false.
If I write a very formal and polite message asking for some horrible thing to be done to group X, the message will be removed as soon as HN mods see it.
Kiwifarms makes shell companies so the hosting provider is a confederate and the only way to terminate service is to go over their head and complain to the upstream. You can even see "their hosting provider" posting weird political astroturfing in this thread.
Spammers do this trick all the time to buy some plausible deniability.
You posted 89 comments in this thread—that is over the top. We're not here for speedrage flamewars. We're here for thoughtful, curious, respectful conversation. If you can't do that or don't want to, please don't post until you do. The idea on HN is to value quality over quantity—regardless of how wrong others are or you feel they are. I realize several other commenters are also on the wrong side of this tradeoff, but your account has been standing out in this respect.
You have also been repeatedly crossing into flamewar and in some cases egregiously breaking the site guidelines, as you did here.
We ban accounts that post like this, regardless of how right they are or feel they are. If you would please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and not use HN primarily for flamewar and/or ideological battle, we'd appreciate it. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
> You know full well the series of companies Kiwifarms has gone through, because you are an obvious Kiwifarms user astroturfing this thread. I won't waste time on your bad faith questions.
I am not, nor have I ever been, a member of the Kiwi Farms. I simply do not believe it is just that public pressure basic on dubious or false claims can completely kick a website off the Internet.
Regardless, it's clear by your response that you are operating in bad faith.
Edit: it looks like you've been posting a lot of flamewar comments too, and not just in this thread. Can you please not? As I explained to the other user above, it's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
Here's a thread where your admin openly speculates about how to bypass financial restrictions via shell companies because banks won't do business with him and it's harming his business model of taking donations to support harassment campaigns for entertainment.
I'm on the same page, and I think the title could have been better because it overlooks the following sentence, which is in my opinion the most effective argument against HE:
> Tier 1 ISPs don’t have the ability or the incentive to build content evaluation teams that are even as effective as those of the giant platforms who know far more about their end users and yet still engage in harmful censorship.
HE should not do the "moderation" not because those sites are okay, but because HE can't do the effective moderation. The current title doesn't suggest that the subject ("ISPs") is very important.
Moderation and censorship are two very different things.
Also, trusting the government is silly. It has a lot of opportunities to call any speech harmful to state policies as 'hate speech', 'misinformation', etc. - and before long you could find your country turned into a authoritarian failed state like Russia.
> That’s why EFF has long argued that we must “protect the stack” by saying no to infrastructure providers policing internet content.
I agree with this, but you need to understand what you agree to. It's not just the content you want to see - it's also the content you don't want to see. It's the freedom of the most extreme content imaginable - CP, snuff, murder, doxxing, drugs, etc, etc.
People will experience severe issues as a result, but there are other things that can be done:
1. Individuals can do more to protect themselves. We have AI now that can quite accurately detect what is in an image or video, it's entirely feasible to do live content filtering.
2. We need to protect the most vulnerable in our societies. We don't give whiskey to a 5 year old, and we shouldn't give unfiltered internet to a 5 year old. This also extends to vulnerable adults. If you receive government assistance (money/drugs) for a mental disability, a filtered version of the internet should be available to you.
3. The punishment for filtering without permission should be severe enough that it's not just a tax. People really need to be held accountable, otherwise they will just pay the toll and be done with it.
"If you receive government assistance (money/drugs) for a mental disability, a filtered version of the internet should be available to you."
Not every mental disability makes people stupid enough to make them need a filtered internet.
As someone in that category, but still able to think, if people like you nerf my internet, the amount of rage and anger that I will unleash upon society is going to be endless.
> Not every mental disability makes people stupid enough to make them need a filtered internet.
It's not about being stupid, it's about being vulnerable. Also it may not be appropriate in every case. I am also weary of removing the ability to access the internet from otherwise functioning adults. I've not quite happy to have a solid stance on it just yet.
As I said: "[..] a filtered version of the internet should be available to you." - That's to say that they can choose to use it. It's not ideal, but it would be opt-in at least for example on a doctor's recommendation.
> [..] people like you [..]
I'm making the case for an unfiltered internet, and I want as many people as reasonable to be able to access it. My suggestion was a compromise.
> As someone in that category, but still able to think, if people like you nerf my internet, the amount of rage and anger that I will unleash upon society is going to be endless.
I don't know your your specific scenario, but despite your fundamental rights, it may for example be prudent not to give you access to a gun, despite your want for one, or claims of rage and anger unleashed upon society.
Also we haven't really discussed (for good reason) what such filtering would look like, or who would control it. That's a difficult situation in itself. There's not really a person or group I would trust with such power.
> If you think it’s in societies best interest to filter the internet for people like me, don’t worry about my access to firearms.
I can't talk about "people like you", I don't know you. Your immediate jump towards the destruction of society upon discussion on an opt-in filtering of your internet is concerning.
> I’m not an idiot and I don’t need guns to dedicate all my time to ruining society and destroying infrastructure.
I'm not calling you an idiot. The guns were just an example of a right that can removed if a person is mentally unwell. Again, I am still completely undecided how it would be offered in such a way that cannot be politically weaponized. I would default to the null position, which is not to offer it unless such issues could first be addressed.
As for your disillusions of grandeur regarding the 'ruining society and destroying infrastructure' - I think your years of smoking weed to treat your depression are catching up with you. I won't reply further as I don't want to fuel whatever it is you're going through, but please reach out to those around you for help.
It’s not grandeur to understand that the infrastructure that makes society function is not incredibly fragile. It’s a realistic observation of people that understand technology. Turn the power off and everything will fail.
My extreme reaction to the idea of your totalitarian control isn’t going to be rare, I just don’t have anything to lose by publicly expressing it.
I come from the era of an open internet where it’s viewed as a human right.
More nativity from the EFF, I dont think they live in the real world. It’s never worked that at and never will. Why? Because the systems become unusable for everyone.
A simple and very very old example is email. Even back in the 1990s days of the Internet, we had spam on email and if your reputable isp caught you spamming you’d be in trouble. Same with shitposting on usenet.
Sure there are nuances to consider as to what providers should do and what they should not, but like a lot of things this is a hard problem. The ‘simple’ solutions presented here and in other places will not solve it.
Alleging nativity when at the same time championing just simply banning stuff you dont like, the consequences be dammed, might be funny, but this discussion has too high stakes for undisclosed satire. Still made me chuckle though.
edit: Apparently not satire. Quite sorry to hear, that was me giving the benefit of the doubt. That leaves either stupidity (not realizing the consequences), malice (not caring) or me overlooking something.
So, how do checks and balances for mob justice look like? Other then just meaning well and being the good guys? Pretty sure somebody could elaborate if it was really just me overlooking something.
>Because the systems become unusable for everyone.
In this case there is no spam or resource exhaustion going on in this case. People are visiting a forum, posting things, and viewing text / images / video files posted by other users.
What makes things unusable is when you want to follow links on the web you need to use VPNs in order to route your traffic through the correct ISPs that will properly route your traffic. There could be a future where different T1 ISPs block different sites so there is no way to browse the entire internet using a single ISP, but instead you have to cleverly pick a different ISP for each destination IP to get it properly routed.
Too bad they didn't touch on the net neutrality issues at play here. Washington passed a state level net neutrality law, and KF might end up being the test case. They have filed a complaint with the AG and are waiting for a response.
I would encourage those interested to read up on the individual behind the ISP harassment campaign and what might actually be motivating them to do it. That it's being done to protect trans people is highly disingenuous.
>But the worst is watching people whose job title in corporate HR Departments is "journalist" take the lead in agitating for censorship. They exploit the platforms of corporate giants to pioneer increasingly dangerous means of banning dissenters. These are the authoritarians.
Its especially despicable if it happens consciously as a means to an end. Signaling towards a common enemy is highly profitable in a tribalism ridden society. Doing this despite an understanding of the risk it entails can hardly be described as anything but malice.
I can only think of imploring people to read Meerloos "Rape of the mind" about the existential risk totalitarian systems pose. And even if someone already went full Stalinist thinking the ends justify the means, its worth mentioning that its a self destructive delusion. It cant work and the revolution eats its children reliably. Be it the SA or the red guard, they always end as the victims of the monster they created. Unfortunately the rest of society is then stuck in the dystopian nightmare these delusional maniacs created.
edit1: The only one saving you from this fate is yourself. So maybe dont put it off till you are in prison.
>In the same text, Martsinkevich said he’d finally read Alexander Solzhenitsyn's “The Gulag Archipelago” for the first time. “If I’d read ‘Gulag Archipelago’ before I sat down to write ‘Restrukt,’ I wouldn’t have even started it!” he confessed.
I put it as a quote in the post.
Would be great if you could recommend a better alternative though, especially as even watching a tweet was disabled for a time.
kiwifarms admin admitted to this too. he says that he seeks out mentally vulnerable people to harass because they make funny reactions when tormented. he calls them "lolcows". the first victim of the site was a severely autistic person. kiwifarms was originally called "CWCki Forums" after the first victim's initials
> The claim that Kiwi Farms is dedicated to driving transpeople to suicide was started by [specific people]
Nice strawman. There are a huge number of different people who have independently arrived at the conclusion that KF exists to bully queer and autistic people, often to suicide, because it's a consistent pattern; the idea that this concept can be attributed to just one or a handful of people is wilfully misleading. Anyone who's been online long enough in the right circles will eventually know of multiple people who have been targets of the site, and it's obvious what those targets have in common.
> There are a huge number of different people who have independently arrived at the conclusion that KF exists to bully queer and autistic people, often to suicide, because it's a consistent pattern
It's a convenient thing to accuse them of considering that it's already "widely accepted". The same person involved in this was also behind #DropKiwiFarms. They've been trying to blame Kiwi Farms for numerous suicides since 2016, and the "victim count" changes every time the story is told.
> Anyone who's been online long enough in the right circles will eventually know of multiple people who have been targets of the site, and it's obvious what those targets have in common.
Most of the site's largest threads are about right-wing figures (e.g. Nick Fuentes, Ethan Ralph, Milo Yiannopolis) or well-known online personalities (e.g., DarkSydePhil, WingsOfRedemption, Mr. Metokur, Nick Rikeida, H3H3). I'm not sure what you're implying.
> To put it even more simply: When a person uses a room in a house to engage in illegal or just terrible activity, we don’t call on the electric company to cut off the light and heat to the entire house, or the post office to stop delivering mail. We know that this will backfire in the long run. Instead, we go after the bad guys themselves and hold them accountable.
I like this analogy it hits it home.
It really should take a court order to block sites based on a legal reason, and you probably don’t need to get the backbone to do it, it could be done by the ISP then escalate up if needed.
This analogy doesn't hold up, if you were using a room in a house for illegal activity and you didn't come out, they would absolutely cut your power to come after you.
With a warrant, maybe. But would the power company unilaterally cut you because you, say had a neon sign that said ${something you might find on 4chan} on the front lawn?
Being able to choose which private entities your business materially supports is a natural consequence of freedom. As long as ISPs are private businesses, their operators will and should have basic freedoms. The fact that _people_ are dropping KF left and right is just normal and healthy socialization at work. Lack of competition with American ISPs and whether they should be public utilities are real concerns, but fundamentally has nothing to do with KF being widely regarded as a flaming turd.
There is an old joke about the difference between a service provider and a "service preventer". Often the difference is the type of power we allow them to have over the users.
There are many domains of modern society that serve specific service roles, that should never have been given over-reaching power to also monitor and judge outside of a court order, but they do.
Finance used to have secrecy but no anymore, tax is now open book. Transportation and mobility is checked and prechecked. Free speech is being eroded both by snowflakes and copyright trolls. The slippery slope has no boundary and rolls into an avalanche.
EFF is on the wrong side of this, just as they were on the wrong side of the debates about what to do about spam email back in the day. They're committed to the view that the only acceptable place to block any flow of information (which they define very broadly) is at the receiving user's end and that the end user must personally opt-in. This is completely at odds with the last 30 years of experience on the internet and shows that they've learned very little about how bad actors will abuse systems of that sort and degrade the experience for everyone else.
We don't let phone companies police the content of phone calls, and we don't let delivery services police the content of letters/packages, so why would we let ISPs police the content of network packets?
Exceptions exist: you can't send most live animals by mail, packages are subject to inspection at customs borders, etc. But any sort of monitoring of content would need either clear evidence of danger, signs of abusing the network, or court involvement.
If this content is so terrible that it deserves to be removed from the internet by any means necessary, shouldn't the process be that a court of competent jurisdiction should be able to issue an order requiring the site to be taken down. If the proprietors of the site bring it up through another ISP, not a party to the original order, a new order could be issued as well as holding the proprietors in contempt, presumably.
Jurisdiction issues on content are hairy, but jurisdiction issues on ISP connections are easy, the connections happen in specific locations, and you can order the connection severed at either end of the connection (as well as in between the ends).
>shouldn't the process be that a court of competent jurisdiction should be able to issue an order
the same people who decry this will also decry the government taking charge of internet moderation at the ISP level, probably even louder.
This entire discussion is bizarre and academic. The site in question has engaged in doxxing and other activities that has led to real world harm, including suicides, and content on there is already probably illegal. If I run a business, and I know a customer is doing something like that, I have an ethical obligation to not facilitate it. I don't start some ideological discussion about whether some hypothetical court can prevent it given that nobody apparently can be bothered to actually make that a reality.
Imagine I have an axe shop and a known axe murderer walks through the door, and instead of not selling him an axe I propose we have a year long debate about the proper formal process of axe murder prevention supported by the Axe Rights Foundation. Granted this is how America actually (does not) deal with gun violence so I'm not surprised we are now in the pro-doxxer rights debate
> the same people who decry this will also decry the government taking charge of internet moderation at the ISP level, probably even louder.
Probably, yes. Which is why I mentioned the first part of the issue. Otoh, when the government does a takedown with court orders, there's always people yelling about it, but it's not as loud as when the government does a takedown without at least the appearance of due process or when a business does it without any due process.
> content on there is already probably illegal.
If the issue is illegal content, there should be indictments and court orders. Or at least, search warrants and seized equipment.
> If I run a business, and I know a customer is doing something like that, I have an ethical obligation to not facilitate it.
Depends on the circumstances of the business. IMHO, common carriers and businesses that are an awful lot like common carriers have an ethical standard to deliver all messages and parcels that are not unduly burdensome to the delivery of other messages and parcels.
This standard allows for blocking network abuse, probably spam, ddos, explosive packages, packages that emit noxious fumes or odors, etc. But not delivering letters because of their content isn't ethical for a letter delivery service, in my mind.
nobody has any obligation to deliver anything they know will cause someone harm. That is pretty much by definition the violation of an ethical standard.
'Neutrality' in the face of someone's life being threatened by someone else is cowardice. And to make things clear, directly from the EFF article:
"A site that provides a forum for gamifying abuse and doxxing, whose users have celebrated on its pages the IRL deaths of the targets of their harassment campaigns[...]"
If you knowingly facilitate a website which itself takes ownership of deaths they have caused proudly, you are abandoning your civic duty. And we can go farther, not only has any ISP obligation to stop this, any hacker who can should take that site down, and anyone who has some resources left over should aid. Not a single inch should be given to these people, not just by the law but by everyone else.
Do you understand how cynical it is to hide behind neutrality or free speech to let people terrorize others to death and laugh about it?
> nobody has any obligation to deliver anything they know will cause someone harm. That is pretty much by definition the violation of an ethical standard
1. I think the postal service does. Can you find me guidelines to the contrary?
2. Most connections to the IP block are not doing harm. This is more like refusing to deliver any mail to a mafia boss, and maybe also the entire neighborhood.
>1. I think the postal service does. Can you find me guidelines to the contrary?
How about instead, you show us a postal service guideline that says they have to deliver mail that they know to be harmful. There is no such guideline. That's insane.
> 18 U.S. Code § 1703 - Delay or destruction of mail or newspapers (a) Whoever, being a Postal Service officer or employee, unlawfully secretes, destroys, detains, delays, or opens any letter, postal card, package, bag, or mail entrusted to him or which shall come into his possession, and which was intended to be conveyed by mail, or carried or delivered by any carrier or other employee of the Postal Service, or forwarded through or delivered from any post office or station thereof established by authority of the Postmaster General or the Postal Service, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than five years, or both.
This sets the basic expectation that mail will be delivered, and intentionally not delivering mail is a crime, although it allows for lawful exceptions, and therefore, if you wish to assert that the postal service has discretion to purposefully not deliver mail, you have the burden to cite the law or regulation allowing them to do so.
I've looked at several laws recognizing particular items as unmailable, but I don't see anything that fits your assertion that they have to deliver mail they know is harmful to the recipient or someone else who isn't the sender or the recipient.
18 U.S. Code § 1716 - Injurious articles as nonmailable [1] has a list of items that are injurious and so can't be mailed, but these are things like poisonous animals, long bladed knifes and such, not harassment or suggestions to harass others with contact details.
18 U.S. Code § 1717 - Letters and writings as nonmailable [2] has a list of things you can't mail letters in relation to, which are mostly about forging government papers, defense secrecy stuff, but also 18 U.S. Code § 956 - Conspiracy to kill, kidnap, maim, or injure persons or damage property in a foreign country [3]. But it seems that letters regarding a conspiracy to injure persons within the united states are mailable.
There's also some very limited restrictions on mailing sexually oriented advertisements.
Censors made the same argument with the Printing Press and since time immemorial. Censorship has always been on the wrong side of history and it still is.
Speaking of abusing systems, censors end up being the worst bad guys who imagine themselves as the good guys protecting you from the bad guys.
Renditions of extreme violence are legal, and common in cinema. I find them repulsive, but I support people's right to free speech; they should be allowed to produce renditions of extreme violence and distribute them. The movie Texas Chainsaw Massacre is legal, and I support that.
Doing a real life Texas Chainsaw Massacre is not legal. Recording a real life Texas Chainsaw Massacre and distributing the recordings should not be legal. I do not support that.
I do not believe the speech part of Texas Chainsaw Massacre should be illegal, no matter how repulsive I find that genre of entertainment to be. I do believe the non-speech parts of those acts should absolutely be illegal - for obvious reasons.
I personally do not believe I have to yield my absolutionist stance on free speech to say that content downstream of those actions can't be distributed and possessed. There is no way for that content to have been legally produced, therefor there is no way for that content to be legally possessed and distributed.
You aren't OP but that's my poin. OP made the absolutist statement that:
"Censorship has always been on the wrong side of history and it still is."
which is obviously absurd because there are very obvious situations where censorship is clearly a good idea, like in banning not just the creation of child pornography but the possession.
When the feds strengthen laws against child porn in the 70s and 80s, that same free speech argument played out. Free speech advocates argued that having recorded evidence of a crime shouldn't be a crime in of itself. You can have pictures of murder victims after all, and there are plenty of recordings of illegal activity on the internet that are totally legal.
Obviously the right side won and the feds passed laws censoring child pornography because the ends, punishing child porn consumers and creators, outweighed the cost, which was a small reduction in freedom of speech.
Every society needs some limits on speech and free speech absolutism is just ideological weakness in thinking about how a society should actually work because in the real world, unlimited speech leads to a lot of people getting hurt.
I actually hope that AI can allow people to have "child" pornography without children being exploited. If anything, that should be encouraged and made legal.
As the kiddie porn crusaders like to say, "think of the children."
I’ve seen both ends of the spectrum - I remember Usenet, that had no moderation at all, and having to wade through a sea of spam, wishing somebody would get rid of it. But then I saw what reddit moderation turned into… I’ll take the spam, thanks. The spammers are bad actors, but moderators actually become evil actors.
> But then I saw what reddit moderation turned into
People like the harp on how bad reddit moderation is but I personally haven't seen it. Maybe I'm just in smaller communities or I choose the subreddits I follow more carefully, but I haven't seen cases of moderator abuse and if I ever do (usually as an outside observer to some drama in a different community) then I take a mental note to not follow that subreddit in the future.
In the last year or so I've received two strikes from Reddit Admins (employees) for report abuse when I reported two separate instances of explicit calls to violence in left-wing comments. One more "report abuse strike" and my since-Digg-era account is banned, so I've stopped caring. I've also seen first-hand and second-hand how the big default subreddit powermods (volunteers) over the last 10 years have silently banned users for non-inflammatory articulate dissenting posts and comments (while leaving up ones that are poorly written and easy targets). Combine that user shedding with botted upvotes on Rising (partisan-angle posts getting 10-20x the upvote average of other higher-quality posts from the same subreddit), the net effect is clear.
Ultimately, the best way to use Reddit is the way you do - keep it to small subs specifically devoted to a genuine interest, unsub from the defaults, and only browse it from the Home (your subs) page.
>To put it even more simply: When a person uses a room in a house to engage in illegal or just terrible activity, we don’t call on the electric company to cut off the light and heat to the entire house, or the post office to stop delivering mail.
LA actually did this during covid to shut off water for homes being accused of holding parties during covid.
I read an interesting article the other day. It was about the Freedom of Information Act. We now take this for granted, but getting it passed was a huge ordeal. It dramatically strengthened the accountability of government and gave citizens one of their strongest tools available. It was, unsurprisingly, vehemently opposed by both major parties and nearly every form of the US political establishment. It would eventually go on to be passed in 1966 after an extensive campaign in support of it.
Anyhow, the point. Check out this [1] snippet, which was published as part of said campaign. More important than the snippet is who it's written by. A young exceptionally popular congressman from Illinois by the name of Donald Rumsfeld, who was also critical about the senseless US involvement in Vietnam. His is a name, which if happens to be before your time, would later come to be synonymous with the Iraq War, US ABC agencies torturing people, and of course the complete fabrication of evidence to justify the invasion Iraq.
And he's not especially unique. I think it all comes down to a simple problem. Imagine you happen to be pro-choice. If I paid you $10,000,000 would you become an advocate for pro-life? For the overwhelming majority of people, the answer there is going to be yes. But of course you and I are relatively irrelevant, so nobody's ever going to really try to change our values. But if you or I gained power, such hypotheticals suddenly become entirely real. For a man to be surrounded by such possibilities, yet remain true to his own values - he's going to need to be rich enough that people can't afford to bribe him, or some once in a millennium Aurelius like man of true character.
> For a man to be surrounded by such possibilities, yet remain true to his own values - he's going to need to be rich enough that people can't afford to bribe him, or some once in a millennium Aurelius like man of true character.
Not really. The easiest way to be rich enough that you don't need to take bribes to betray your core values is to take a bunch of bribes over issues you don't really care about.
Forget the IRS, imagine if the President himself were to withhold American resources promised to foreign governments in exchange for dirt on his political opponents.
and then force the country to fire the top prosecutor who was investigating his son's illegal activities, truly imagine if such person would do something like that and then have the audacity to publicly brag about it knowing full well the media would cover for him due to his political party.
> Among other issues, he was slow-walking the investigation into Zlochevsky and Burisma and, according to Zlochevsky's allies, using the threat of prosecution to try to solicit bribes from Mr. Zlochevsky and his team
Weird choice to fire the guy slow-walking the investigation if you want to cover up illegal activities.
> [Archer] has also said, including under oath, that he was told Burisma’s allies in Washington didn’t want Shokin fired. “No, we were told that it was bad, and we don’t want a new prosecutor, and Shokin was taken care of,” Archer recently told former Fox News host Tucker Carlson.
Anyway, I guess the EU, IMF, World Bank, Germany, France, and the Ukrainian Parliament were all also colluding to save this guy's son from scrutiny back in 2015.
Cool narrative, unfortunately it isn't true. "Biden did want Shokin fired, but western leaders had widely criticized the prosecutor general as corrupt and ineffective. Biden was leading a widespread consensus in asking for removal. Secondly, a former Ukrainian official said the investigation into Burisma was dormant under Shokin."
I think history shows it pays to be friends with the party in power. As for the IRS it is complicated by the fact that the branches of government can be split along party lines. This should be considered a feature as the branches are intended to check the power of each other.
What do you mean by "the third world" in this case? It's a geographic descriptor (non-Nato / Warsaw Pact countries), not one about how a country treats its people or its developmental state.
Interesting, didn't even know about it's roots on the cold war and its politics. I think by the time I studied history it had already lost it's original meaning.
The more modern view I was referring to, is that third world countries are lesser, developing countries where things that are given elsewhere, like water, food, electricity, education, healthcare or internet access are a luxury.
I guess a more accurate term is "a developing country"
> some people have decided the ends justify the means essentially
...and it's long past time they were told in no uncertain terms that the proletariat has had enough of this bourgeoisie nonsense. Laws exists for a reason. No one should be subject to the whims of bourgeoisie overlords. Just because some imbecile believes they have a great idea and thinks it should be forced upon others does not make it so. This is such an important point that there are entire religions built around it.
I didn't think I'd live to see it, but I'm proud, delighted, and amused to see that people are finally starting to wake up to the notion that maybe the rule of law is a good idea and should apply to everybody.
Hurricane Electric operates tunnelbroker.net, a free SIT tunnel to provide IPv6 connectivity. All those clients (like me) will be using a HE-owned IPv6 address.
I am not sure what you're trying to tell me with an RFC pertaining only to CGNAT. We're talking about transit providers running core and backbone routers here. Such routers aren't running NAT of any kind, and they aren't customer-facing appliances.
The transit provider needs to own some IP space to assign addresses to router interfaces. This is how internetwork routing works. It goes from one network to another, and the router must be a member of the source and destination network in order to participate in each hop.
A transit provider doesn't need many IP addresses in total; if all they're running is core routers then they need sparse allocations: a point-to-point link only needs a /30 or /31 to function correctly. They'll still need to own a variety of netblocks, though, because if they offer transit and backbone services then these will be geographically disparate, and they will necessarily transit a large amount of logical address space.
Parent was saying that those addresses don't need to be globally routable, so you can pick from private IP addresses ranges for your point-to-point addresses.
They might have put the wrong RFC number there. Maybe they meant RFC 6890?
Oh wow, I didn't realize which "hurricane" we were talking about until you said that. Years ago I wrote a script that automatically updated firewall rules to block apparently malicious IP blocks (based upon observable behavior as well as IP reputation), and Hurricane was consistently near the top of the offender list. I recall finding it interesting at the time how the various Hurricane servers showing up in our logs reminded of an actual hurricane.
Serious legal question...What is the difference between an online venue and telephones? Is it simply that implementation of censoring is practicable? Could the telephone companies start "moderating" all phone communications to prevent unsavory communication?
Banning based on complaints by recipients of the calls is also different from banning based on some sort of automated monitoring without any complaints.
censorship is all about power so the focus is on controlling any mechanism of broadcast communication that could result in political organization. traditional voice communication over phones is very inefficient compared to internet based text communication so it would probably be a low priority by comparison.
Is this situation like, say I own some commercial property like a mall, someone rents from me, I realize the person who is renting from me is allowing one of the storefronts to advertise the ritualistic sacrifice of kittens. Shouldn’t I be allowed to 1) tell the guy renting from me to boot out the kitten killers; 2) boot out the guy renting from me for letting one of the storefronts of my commercial space be kitten killing?
Banning someone from your private establishment is within your rights. If they want to run their own business they can elsewhere.
Banning someone via an ISP is different because ISPs have so much infrastructure they can in some sense be considered a "public utility". Nothing would stop someone from advertising ritualistic kitten killing in a public park (except maybe indecency laws but those vary). Likening an ISP to a public park is more accurate. If someone posted a sign saying "no one convicted of smoking weed can walk through this area" you'd rightfully be accused of some civil rights violation in your park. Similarly, ISPs are a conduit no different than a park path.
Everyone chooses KF or whatever as an example of "bad people that should be stopped". That's great. No one disagrees. Anyone with more than a room temperature IQ sees where it goes though. Suddenly you won't be able to access things that don't conform to the government issued public opinion. Don't believe me? The Great Firewall is exactly the same technology.
It is legitimately not my problem, nor the ISPs, who is doing what on the big internet. We have existing laws. Use those to prosecute people posting kitten killing videos or whatever. We do not need to have ISPs using AI and shit as precognitiion to censor what they deem to be "unsafe speech" or whatever.
Okay so like, what if I own the only mall in a large area. Like a rural suburb where there is often only one shopping space/public commercial space. Is there an upper limit where your private property is considered public utility?
> (And when it comes to "only commercial storefront space in a large area", I expect that to be very rare.)
This is actually very common in rural parts of the us fwiw. There places where the only grocery store is Walmart, and the only other place to shop is dollar general.
In which case it's likely such an establishment, lacking any meaningful competition, would be considered a "utility". Whether the law defines it as such or not, it's really bad optics to prevent people from eating.
In this case there is likely a limit to what a private business can grow into before it wades into the territory of public utility. A tenuous but related situation can be seen in trademarks where Kleenex has actually run entire ad campaigns to make people call generic tissue "tissues".
There's a larger philosophical argument here. Theoretically speaking there should be no limits to private corporations. However, when your corporation becomes a stable of modern life and the conduit of major utilities of society all of the sudden things start to turn into shades of grey.
What do you mean by “this”, like malls ban people? Yeah I know malls refuse to rent to people sometimes. I’m asking if this is that scenario, where someone’s private ownership and business operation is not allowed to not serve a customer because they’re doing bad stuff like kitten killing.
Your analogy is poor, what you described contravene US laws. Your misunderstanding was seemingly addressed in the article. Tier 1 providers, in some regions, operate as quazi-monopolies. A more apt analogy; you dislike renters that openly promote their religious affiliation, but you also own all of the rental properties in the western United States. This leaves them with nowhere to setup shop for running foul of your delicate sensibilities as they relate to religious matters.
Right, does this mean that at some point your private property is a public utility? What line is that? What if my mall is the only commercial space available in a small town?
It is not just ISPs. It is crowdfunding and payment processing companies. See for example this apparent seizure of funding to independent journalists happening right now: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37314499
If you care about there being genuinely independent news media then funding these guys is something you can do right now.
There is a new internet payments technology that is 100% effective against abuses like this, even when the state decides it shouldn't be possible.
Censorship-resistant payments are an essential prerequisite to a free society, something I have been asserting in public for a dozen+ years.
Unfortunately as of late they have been vilified. If I were a paranoid man, I might point out that this happened right around the time they became known to the mainstream.
It turns out that censorship-resistant payments also attract the worst type of people along with scammers first. If you had paid attention then you would have realized that is exactly what was going to happen long before it did. There is no need for paranoia here, people tend to dislike and go after hives of scum and villainy (unless they are wrapped in pretty corporate words).
To be fair you are vilifying crypto here. You’re just saying it’s justified. Which proves its vilified. Im not even into crypto but it’s value proposition starts to look better in this context.
That affected party looks like more than just an "independent journalist". They look like a kook that probably did something to deserve it. Can we please have some actual "free speech" that isn't another boring fig leaf for crime?
By that standard, how is say Bellingcat not a pro-NATO propaganda outlet, when the founder was even invited to be a senior fellow of Atlantic Council, a think tank whose members have included luminaries such as David Petraeus, Colin Powell and Henry Kissinger?
The Gray Zone is not a quality outlet, IMO. They're certainly too light on Russia, and worse, bad at distinguishing genuinely damning stuff and spun fluff.
But they should still be able to take the public's funding, if the public wants to fund them.
I think we just need more reciprocity laws in international relations. Russian and Chinese journalists should be equally as constrained as American journalists in their countries.
The crux being what EFF is saying now. ISPs and DNS and CAs are too fundamental to free speech for blockage at that layer to occur without legal cause.
"You don't agree with me so I'll throw my toys out of the pram"
Come off it, debate is debate, you're trying to come to a conclusion, but for that to happen your mind needs to be open to the possibility that you are wrong, can you do that? If not, then yes, debating is not worth the effort.
In the state that KF operates in, it actually isn't legal. ISPs like Hurricane are obligated to serve all legal traffic the same. KF's owner has already served complaints to the state authorities.
> I'm all for freedom of speech, but forums dedicated to driving people to commit suicide go far beyond that.
The claim that Kiwi Farms is a forum "dedicated to driving people to suicide" is patently false. It is rhetoric created by people campaigning to get it removed without due process by painting its owner and users as cartoonish villains.
Kiwi Farms has thousands of threads discussing people from all ends of the spectrum, including apolitical figures. You can go there yourself and see how diverse the users and their interests are.
The site is literally about stalking people and documenting their personal lives for the sake of mockery. The users are cartoonish villains, and I'm not sure how you'd get any other impression after spending a few minutes there.
> The site is literally about stalking people and documenting their personal lives for the sake of mockery.
You're half right, though I'd disagree with literally stalking — at the very least, there's variety and nuance. There's such a large variety of people discussed on the forum that I don't think you can make a blanket statement like that.
Is watching every video or stream from a content creator and posting in a forum mocking them "stalking"? Is digging through someone's old Twitter posts stalking? Is noticing that a person used the same username on multiple websites (some potentially embarrassing) stalking? Kiwi Farms defense is that it's all publicly available information, often published by the people they're mocking.
That's not to say that I agree with or cosign their behaviour. All I'm saying is that there's a large chasm between what people think Kiwi Farms is and what it actually is.
Wading through each and every single thing a person has done in their lives to mock them is stalking, yes. Even if we pretend it isn't for a second it means that the person who is being followed is now forces to look at every interaction, no matter how innocuous, under the lens of "How will Kiwifarms react to this?" Can you meet a friend without them trying to dig up information on that friend? Can you apply for a job without HR finding a thread of thousands of posts talking about you? Probably not, and that has life and mental health ruining consequences.
Its patently obvious you agree with their behavior but lack the fortitude to admit it.
>Can you meet a friend without them trying to dig up information on that friend? Can you apply for a job without HR finding a thread of thousands of posts talking about you?
How would anyone on the internet know about this if you don't post about it?
So if you go to, say, a friends birthday party you should first go round to each and every person there and ask them not to post any pictures with you on FB?
People should be able to live their lives without a morass of deranged lunatics tracking them everywhere.
> Is watching every video or stream from a content creator and posting in a forum mocking them "stalking"? Is digging through someone's old Twitter posts stalking? Is noticing that a person used the same username on multiple websites (some potentially embarrassing) stalking?
> broadly : a crime of engaging in a course of conduct directed at a person that serves no legitimate purpose and seriously alarms, annoys, or intimidates that person
> Stalking is unwanted and/or repeated surveillance by an individual or group toward another person.[1] Stalking behaviors are interrelated to harassment and intimidation and may include following the victim in person or monitoring them.
> Cyberstalking is the use of the Internet or other electronic means to stalk or harass an individual, group, or organization.[1][2] It may include false accusations, defamation, slander and libel. It may also include monitoring, identity theft, threats, vandalism, solicitation for sex, doxing, or blackmail.
> there's a large chasm between what people think Kiwi Farms is and what it actually is.
There's a large chasm between what you think the word stalking means and what it actually means.
I am. The fact you refused to answer any of the questions and threw generic definitions at me kinda proves my point.
Is any unwanted attention stalking? Is a journalist stalking someone if they go through their trash? What about when the paparazzi do it? Did that kid stalk Elon Musk?
> Is a journalist stalking someone if they go through their trash? What about when the paparazzi do it?
Uh, yes. If someone is going through my bins to find information about me, that is most definitely stalking. What some paparazzi do is definitively stalking.
> Did that kid stalk Elon Musk?
I don't know enough about that to comment, but quite possibly yes.
You are making false statements about kiwifarms and denying the existence of illegal conduct that happened on the forum. Linking to it from HN will get my account banned though.
I hit CTRL+F to find the word 'neutral' in this article, but no such word appeared. But it did appear in another EFF article titled 'We Need to Talk About Infrastructure'[0], which is the crux of the issue here. My only question is; what is regarded 'internet infrastructure' these days? Is Cloudflare really just an ISP? Is VPN infra considered an ISP? Are mixer nets like Tor/Hyphanet an ISP?
'Essential internet infrastructure should be content-neutral':
Essential internet infrastructure should not be content-neutral.
Content neutrality is a higher bar than you think it is. Content-neutral means the rules cannot take content into account at all.
If the content is millions of ssh login requests on thousands of servers with ec2-user and the top 10000 most used passwords, the infrastructure should be able to block that.
Content-neutrality would probably make it illegal to prevent DDoS attacks. At some levels of infrastructure, sure, but broadly speaking, content-neutrality seems like a bad requirement.
DDoS generally has little to do about the content of the traffic. It's more about volume and traffic pattern.
Anyway, I think the details are in intent and the nature of the communication. Service providers shouldn't actively block communications where the only intent of the communication is consensual exchange of information between two or more parties (such as visiting a website) regardless of the content of the exchanged information.
SPAM would qualify as non-consensual from one party, so it would be exempt.
The intent of DDoS isn't to exchange information, so it would also be exempt.
I'm sure that it would need pages legalese to make this work, like ironing out the circumstances when ISPs can assume intent or consent. SPAM block lists should be reasonable.
Your examples are people forcing packets to a network node, content neutrality is about receiving what you wish from a server whose operator has chosen to serve that content.
Stopping people who are actively committing crimes is not preventing free movement on a right of way. Or rather, it is in layman's terms, but free movement does not include the commission of crimes. In the same way stopping brute force attempts is not the same as inhibiting net neutrality.
Viewpoint neutrality is debatable though, in this situation, HE could argue that they aren't banning based on viewpoint but rather the nature of the content, and point to other websites sharing similar viewpoints that they carry. It just seems like a half-step that pleases no one and does nothing. Let private companies be private companies, we don't need the unelected bureaucrats to tell us how to run DDOS protection or route traffic.
No company, ever, is going to accept being forced to sell their services to a customer who will use it for obnoxiously illegal purposes. No government is ever going to mandate the use of resources for illegal purposes.
Net neutrality stopped being a concern when activists decided that it was to their overall advantage to ally with powerful, censorious corporations in order to combat right-wing speech .
Not as far as I know. I think any criminal action will be extremely hard, at least under US law, as they haven't really done anything outright illegal. There are all sorts of claims about "KiwiFarms has done this or that" (same with 4chan), but often there's no direct connection to KiwiFarms or 4chan, and some claims seem to just made up of whole cloth.
A civil might have a higher chance of succeeding, but I suspect this will also be very hard. "People say mean things" is neither illegal nor harassment, and outright organisation of harassment doesn't really happen on KiwiFarms, at least not in public. Trying to get damages from doxing (in a civil suit, because in most jurisdictions it's not illegal AFAIK) might be the best shot, especially for people who are otherwise non-public figures, but I'm not sure what chance that will have.
> Mostly because they tend to pick on people who can only file pro se, not because of any inherent merit.
This is demonstrably false. Kiwi Farms has thousands of threads on people ranging from Elon Musk to random Internet streamers. At least one of the most popular threads seems to be about a lawyer (Nick Rekeita).
Police and prosecutors don't seem to take much interest in online harassment cases (they're probably expensive to investigate, and it's difficult to even convince them to care at all), so criminal cases are unlikely. Meanwhile the site tends to pick victims that don't have money to hire lawyers for a civil suit (their victims are average people, not rich).
There's also the problem that their mode of operation may make it difficult to hold any single person liable. They basically engage in crowdsourced stalking, so there's many small contributions of different people whose connections would be hard to prove. As a collective, they obviously know what they're doing, but many individuals have plausible deniability. You can't try them with conspiracy. And that's if you can even track down who your pseudonymous stalkers are.
I first heard of kiwi-farms when it was blocked at the DNS level by New Zealand ISPs for hosting the censored video of the face book live stream of the 51 people being killed in the Mosque Terrorist attack. They also had a whole section called lol-cow where they crowd sourced doxing and ridiculing female youtubers if i recall correctly.
Multiple people have brought lawsuits against KiwiFarms. I believe Russell Greer's lawsuit is still ongoing, to answer your question. None have succeeded thus far.
My understanding is that neither Null nor KF never hosted any content which wasn’t protected by the first amendment.
One has to remember Americans have a unique perspective on speech which isn’t shared around the world. “Sue them so they shut up” works here in Canada, it doesn’t necessarily work in the States.
I feel like in the USA at least free speech(as in the constraint placed on the government; aka 1st amendment free speech) is as strong as it's ever been. The government was way up in everyone's business and bedroom just 50 years ago.
Absolutely. Causing a stampede or crush being the obvious example.
I do get baffled by the absolutionist statements about the freedom of speech. Speech is a side-channel into violence.
My country has a censor's office, for example. Some 'speech' is literally illegal to possess. Government ministers aren't free to speak state secrets in public. It's not legal to disclose the names of persons with judicial name suppression. Even parliament representatives can't speak just anything into the parliamentary record.
I live in New Zealand. It's not that bad to have limits and structures that enable the majority of real freedoms for people.
It's part of the American creation myth that's drilled into our heads as children.
The Alien and Sedition Act was passed in 1798 which made it illegal to critique the government. Eugene Debs went to prison for advocating for draft dodging in World War 1.
Part of is a lot of folks either can't or wont see the difference between "free speech" and "consequences for your actions".
As Americans, we've never had more free speech than we have today. Most of our history is filled with censorship from media to actual human beings being arrested for wearing the wrong clothes. Of course, a lot of those free speech absolutist cheer censorship laws when they are targeted at LGBTQ individuals.
>My country has a censor's office, for example. Some 'speech' is literally illegal to possess.
And it's embarrassing. The KiwiFarms exchange with New Zealand after the Brenton Tarrant shooting (are you even allowed to mention his name? Hope I'm not getting you in trouble here) was one of its prouder moments.
I'm not sure that every country is run by morons who can't understand the concept of per capita, NZ seems pretty special in that regard. I certainly wouldn't want such people having a finger on the censorship button, and for that reason it was very heartening to hear of Ardern's resignation.
> "After all, how do you successfully end a war if people are led to believe the reason for its existence is not only legal but noble? How do you tackle climate change if people do not believe it exists? How do you ensure the human rights of others are upheld, when they are subjected to hateful and dangerous rhetoric and ideology?"
While antipodean advocates of censorship like to reference violence, it's clear that's not actually where they draw the line. Even if they did, their hatred of violence seems to be very selective: Davidson's comments were meant as a distraction from violence against someone she sees as a valid target [1].
> It feels like it's pretty much gameover for free speech in any context.
And it's going to go the opposite way that people are expecting. For some reason, the Democratic base has been trained to think that it will be possible for them to impose an authoritarian meritocracy of kind middle-class people using a police force and army largely made up of working-class reactionary quasi-theocrats. When the shit goes down, the neocons will forget that they spent a year or two pretending to care about misgendering while liberals helped them build the Stasi's dream. Instead we'll end up with dictatorship run by a mashup of Reagan, Trump, and Thiel.
I think the question is not quite so easy as many here (and even the EFF) are making it seem.
It's easy to talk about free-speech that needs to be protected at any cost when it comes to political speech, but if we look at e.g. spam nobody argues that spam and spammers should be blocked. Now is spam less speech, because it is not political?
On a similar note, if I own a large piece of land should I allow a demonstration that I disagree with cross the land because of free-speech? If no, why does a company who carries data, need to provide their "pipes" to the same people?
I understand the argument that restricting speech is a slippery slope, on the other hand I agree with Popper, not restricting all speech and enabling the "intolerant" is also a slippery slope (I say that as a German, we have quite a bit of experience with this).
I'm not sure how to draw easy boundaries, but making this into an argument of "easy it's free-speech that needs to be defended at all costs" seems much too simplistic.
>but if we look at e.g. spam nobody argues that spam and spammers should be blocked. Now is spam less speech, because it is not political?
Because the blocking is consensual. You're actively choosing to block out the spam, and if you so choose you can still see the spam. The same can't be said for deplatforming. Even if you want to read kwifarms you can't, because others have presented you from being able to access their site.
Isn't a decent amount of spam blocked without our knowing? Telecom companies work to prevent spam phone calls, YT/Twitter/FB try to block bots or spam accounts - all that happens without users consensually blocking each account. Most people don't even realize how much "speech" has been blocked that they don't even see?
Spam is speech that the recipient does not want to receive; deplatforming spammers is aligned with the recipient's desires. Deplatforming speech that the recipient does want to receive is not aligned with the recipient's desires and infringes on their ability to communicate freely. Therefore, the spam analogy is not valid.
That's not a very good argument. Clearly there are some people who do want to see spam otherwise spam would be uneconomical because nobody would buy. On the same note there are plenty of people who don't want to see KF material. I don't think arguing by some sort of majority works. And yes lots of spam, phishing and other material gets filtered out by ISPs (somebody further up was talking about that some ISPs were blocking the full spam house list). A
Counterpoint: the Internet is a network of peers, and if KF can't become a peer and can't find a private company to serve their needs, then forget them.
the majority of the overhead of civilization for the last few thousand years or so is scalable mechanisms to arrive at shared definitions for words like "evil", "wrong", "abuse"
it's a really hard problem, and every time someone comes in and treats it as a simple issue they do dangerous and naive stuff.
I don't disagree. But I'll point out that "ISPs should just be dumb pipes" and "In the meantime, Tier 1 ISPs like Hurricane should resist the temptation to step in where law enforcement and legislators have failed" are treating it as a simple issue, only in the other direction.
surely, the attacks from KF against public persons serves to restrict those persons’ freedom of speech.
> The so-called “dark web” has plenty of deserved ill repute, however, so although it is resistant to censorship by Tier 1 ISPs, it is not a meaningful option for many, much less an accessible one.
that’s a way too casual dismissal. consider the type of person who posts on KF for just a minute (go there yourself if you haven’t), and think if they might be way more likely than your average person to know how to use tor, a VPN, or something to obfuscate their traffic before posting to a forum where they themselves might be harassed.
It's called the paradox of tolerance. ISPs aren't the right layer to police this, but every other layer has failed or isn't designed to deal with a death threat generation machine that keeps a proud count of how many people they drove to suicide on their website.
Agreed. ISPs are the part of the network that we need to demand be free to any speech, other than the explicitly illegal, and even then we need to ask if it should be handled in a different manner.
The irony of course is a large segment of the people who are against net neutrality are exactly the people[1] who would have their online speech censored then complain about it.
It's easy to have a principled stance against both net neutrality and private online censorship. Note that the EFF statement is not calling for legislation to stop HE's behavior.
"Being on the border of the precipice, they decided to act and step ahead."
"We must do something; this is something; therefore we must do this."
I've seen that thing rephrased so many ways, it's not even funny anymore. People always fall for that bias. I'm sure if you make some loud proclamations that "Global Warming will destroy everything, we must go and kill the wales", you will get followers.
1] doing something, even if it proves to be wrong, is better than doing nothing.
2] asking forgiveness is better than asking permission.
these [1,2] support each other in a circular discourse.
if you do nothing, you hesitate in want for confirmation of the right thing, you are ineffective.
asking permission, you hesitate in lieu of risking the wrong thing, you are ineffective rather than acting, and later apologizing for doing the wrong thing.
The EFF's response is not a good one, either. The previous sentence is:
"We fully support criminal and civil liability for those who abuse and harass others."
That's not sufficient. These are extremely slow mechanisms, when they work at all. The harassed individual can suffer for years, and the EFF isn't rushing out to aid them. As their post says, "law enforcement and legislators have failed".
The Internet is different from the physical world. It's much easier for people to cross legal jurisdictions and hide from law enforcement. Law enforcement and legislators haven't merely failed. They will continue to fail for a long time, during which there are real consequences to human beings.
The Internet is going to have to develop its own ways of dealing with people who use it to harm others. The EFF could help lead that. But they haven't yet, and so others are going to take action when they feel it's appropriate. They'll take the EFF's injunction to "resist the temptation to step in" as being worth the paper it's written on.
The EFF can defend its mission in multiple ways. One, as you point out, is offering an alternative solution all agree is better. This is fantastic if you can find a feasible solution everyone actually agrees is better but there is no guarantee such a solution is going to be found until after you've managed to find it. Another way for the EFF to defend its mission, as this article aims for, is to make an argument the loss of what the mission is trying to protect is not worth the gains made by tossing it to the side. You can be unpersuaded and disagree with the balance but the lack of alternative solution alone isn't proof of a bad response.
> develop its own ways of dealing with people who use it to harm others
So far, every "way" that's been developed of dealing with people who harm others has itself been used to harm others in more extreme ways than the harm they were supposed to mitigate.
>So far, every "way" that's been developed of dealing with people who harm others has itself been used to harm others in more extreme ways than the harm they were supposed to mitigate.
Has it?
Some of the people Kiwifarms harassed were driven to suicide. Your argument is that having a forum taken offline is a more extreme form of harm than literal death?
It is not that the forum going down in and of itself is the harm.
Instead it is that this precedent can be used by much more authoritarian groups to target groups that you support.
Now its KF, and after that other countries are telling these tech services to take down gay and lesbian support groups, or even a state in the US could force abortion services offline.
Its a loophole that could be used as an end run around the 1st amendment, to take out groups that you support just as much as it can be used against things that you want taken down.
Are you OK with sacrificing those groups for your cause? What would you tell them? That they are just worthwhile collateral damage?
Authoritarian groups are already targeting groups "you support", states and countries are telling tech services to take down lesbian and gay support groups, and states in the US have effectively forced abortion services offline.
Those things have and are happening, and kiwifarms is not the reason any of that occur.
Kiwifarms isn't the first website ever to be taken down. Taking it down won't cause one bit of harm to legitimate websites. It's not that important. Don't worry.
Are you ok with gay and lesbian support groups, and abortion services being taken down because other websites being taken down made these service providers more vulnerable?
One thing does not logically lead to another. What an unreasonable argument. I could say the same thing about the thousands of malware and phish websites that are taken down every day.
The faster you make a mechanism, the more likely it is to be abused. We've already seen several times where bad actors have coopted movements like metoo and taken advantage of the speed of the response to ruin an innocent person and then get off relatively unscathed because almost no one cares once the initial outrage has passed.
Even if you are not a believer in liberalism as a philosophy, you should at least understand that the instant we agree let infrastructure businesses start pruning speech they don't like without any accountability is also the instant that the wealthy and powerful start thinking about how to gain influence over or outright control those businesses. One would have to be absolutely bonkers to think that's going to have a good outcome in the long run.
The system is broken, we need the EFF to do more than just clutch their pearls about somebody trying to do something.
If they want to be the Electronic Frontier Foundation, they can take inspiration from the self-organization that occurs on other frontiers. When there are no rules, you get vigilantes. Well managed, the vigilantes establish the rules, by popular consent. Poorly managed, the most violent ones impose their own rules.
The EFF is well positioned to help establish rules. So merely saying "There shouldn't be any rules", they'll simply be brushed aside one way or the other.
do people here consider comment moderation to be online speech policing? Seems pretty clear that there are certain things hosts don't want on their platform
there's an economic bottom line where advertisers drive a lot of the need as well. users themselves aren't paying for the service.
This has been a clear danger for a while now. Beyond just mere danger at this point in fact. You guys are late to the party but it is nice to see you guys catching.
This is the literal death of the internet if nothing is done to stop it.
I would extend this to include everyone that isn't actual law enforcement agencies.
While it's perfectly reasonable for websites to decide what content is shown, it should also be possible to decide to show ALL content, except very obviously illegal content like CSAM and actual threats (which can be notified by LE and even automated).
I am aware that this line gets blurry very quickly, but we're leaning way too much on the side of censorship.
We are just sweeping the ugly under the rug and hoping it goes away, while instead it festers, until it goes viral.
Surprised by the huge outpouring of support here, yet when X puts forward the exact same values of "freedom of speech but not freedom of speech," it's met entirely with criticism.
Have you checked if it was the same people? I usually read about "Here last week someone said this, but now someone said that" as HN or communities in general are one single organism, what your post wants to say? Have the people in this thread forgotten to go through education camps?
Do you hope that Musk is going to throw some peanuts at you for defending him like a good boy?
They don't have to police it, but they don't have to facilitate it either. ISPs should be just as free as any other company to decide who they want to do business with.
For that to be a reasonable stand people should have reasonable ways to avoid doing business with various ISPs and that's not thr case for many. Their options are one company, maybe two and then they're out of luck. At least if ISP were a real utility in the US they're be able to apply pressure with their votes.
True but that's a different problem. As long as companies are allowed to consolidate just this short of obtaining a monopoly that kind of problem will remain. You'd have to address that separately for it to be effective. That's why you always see a lot of competition in a new field which eventually crystalizes out to two, sometimes three main competitors that all have double digit marketshare. It's why we still have Apple and Mozilla. But from the point of view of the would-be monopolists those are optional.
I far preferred it when we had a more diversified eco-system and long run I think we will come to regret this monoculture. But it is hard to spell out exactly what could be done to resolve all this without having the various negative side effects as well as a method of dealing with the now entrenched and very powerful players.
We need 500 search engines, not three, and 500 browser manufacturers, not four. And open, well published and not-dominated-by-a-single-entity standards.
Further the intent of a system based on law, at least since the Magna Carta, is that the people (definitions vary) have to be consulted democratically.
The EFF is absolutely in the wrong on this. ISPs are private businesses, and they have every right (and responsibility!) to enforce their own Acceptable Use Policies/Terms of Service. Anyone who cries "Freedom of Speech" either hasn't thought this through, or else has no idea what they're talking about... Hurricane Electric is not a government entity.
We are living in Popper's "Paradox of Tolerance". Nazis need to be punched, but de-platforming them is pretty good, too.
Doesn't Hurricane still buy v4 transit from Telia? It's strange that everyone is uncritically calling them a Tier 1 here; I'm used to endless bickering over whether they're a Tier 1 or a Tier 2.
As a victim that has been doxxed and attacked in real life, over a rumor that some idiots spread about me on the other side of the planet (that I am trans?!?), I wholeheartedly disagree and I now know what all the feminist movement is talking about when they write or talk about that they don't feel safe, be it online or offline (due to the technological "upper hand" being on the side of the doxxers).
This incident changed my life, and I changed my pacifistic views because I cannot stand by and do nothing anymore.
Why is it that people have the right to decide what their standpoint is over this, especially in regards to legal actions...but victims don't even have the right to change their names in order to feel safe again?
I thought long whether or not I should write about this, because honestly, I'm in Europe and I don't give a damn about your shit-smearing American radicalization tactics in political campaigns. But I realized that it's over here nowadays, too, and it's a lot bigger than anyone not involved might assume.
Team Jorge, AIMS, Killnet/Xaknet/Legion's psyops, troll factories with fake education foundations as a cover story, etc. if you want to know more about it. Aleph from the occrp if you want to do more research on the legal structures and how their money flows.
The right-wing ("alt rights") are the fools of modern warfare, and they don't even know who it is that is playing them because they are blind of hatred and despair. And that's what's wrong with our society.
Autocracies on the planet realized that the weakness of democracy is that it tries to find a compromise. "Divide and conquer" is literally what they're doing, and we are too busy discussing our moral stand points over this while they infect our societies with hatred to make it impossible to govern.
> I don't exactly understand what you mean by feminism (GC/radfem or the average suffrage feminism).
I think that the dissonance in the feminism movement versus their counterparts is that there's a different level of expectations in the topics that they as a movement want to discuss.
When women (or LGBTQA+) are talking about these issues, they're looking for allies, they're looking for compassion and comfort on their journey; and are not interested in the rational solution in the first place.
The obvious topics that nobody talks about in similar topics like child abuse is ridiculous from their perspective. They see the world as "all men are talking about protecting children, but none of them talk about that they need to protect children from men" and that's something that hits the ego on the other side. Men usually have problems putting their egos aside from the topic, and that's what causes the "defending arguments" game; because they project those accusations on themselves directly.
Hence, incels exist, and why kiwifarms, /pol/ and others have huge overlaps in their communities because of it. They simply cannot differ between personal accusations, and comfort themselves with generalizations out of anger and hate.
And everything that was said in a state of anger wasn't true anyways, because it was either an excessive statement to make a point or some over-stylized hearsay. But that's the blame game that worked in school until the more rational side gave up, and hence why nobody is able to put their egos aside later in life to actually try to find a compromise.
I hate to tell you, but attributing all feminist campaigning to some kind of misplaced compassion or lack of rationality is pretty misogynist. We got plenty of things that need and have benefitted from advocacy. Feminists and queer people are not a monolith, and they're allowed to care about the things they care about specifically - just like everyone else.
Fascists are responsible for being fascists, not foreigners or queer "degenerates".
Just like that, incels are responsible for being incels, not feminists and (again?) queer people.
I'm happy there are people fighting against the current state of our Self ID reform, where reporting requirements for security agencies might create the next pink list. And I don't give a shit if incels see that as an affront. I wouldn't be able to make them happy anyway - they need to sort that out themselves.
I know a lot of people outside this issue sometimes have problems differentiating the parts that get amplified by the likes of BILD, WELT and NIUS - pink capitalism's most obvious objectionable strands - and other advocacy. There's a lot of classic divide and conquer at play here too, incidentally.
> I hate to tell you, but attributing all feminist campaigning to some kind of misplaced compassion or lack of rationality is pretty misogynist.
That's exactly what I am talking about. Attributing all feminist campaigning to anything specific is impossible (and therefore an excessive statement to make a point). It's far beyond human knowability by any means anyways. And implying misogynist behavior to the statements that I wrote pretty much is the start of an irrational - but also not an empathic - discussion.
Maybe the whole problem is because our language in physical form relies on intonation, stressing and nuances that the text form cannot represent, I don't know, I'm no linguist.
Most of the shitstorms I've observed in my social bubbles could have been solved easily if there were some form of empathic notations to the text that was written. Even just being able to express the emotional state while writing it (mad/sad/angry/frustrated/calm/etc) could have helped a lot to resolve those issues.
I think emojis tried to fill this gap initially, but it seemingly failed at it due to the differences of our generations online and their associations with them. Let's say boomer, gen-y and gen-z discussing a topic for argument's sake.
Gen-Z kind of evolved on the web, and they've learned to communicate their feelings differently. Other generations basically think that they're spamming emojis all the time, but gen-z kind of realized that it's their way of communicating empathic needs and expressions, which would be otherwise missing.
All I'm trying to say is that there seems to be an empathic/emotional gap in our language which leads to a lot of misinterpretation on the web; which in physical form never exceeds into the same absurdities because people seem to be able to express their empathic needs much easier then. And that's me saying this as an autist with huge problems reading (in both senses of the word) people's implied intonations, which is kind of absurd to begin with.
The issue with the populist journalism that you mentioned is that there's not laws in place to force them to recorrect their statements in the same populistic way they made advertisements for the previous incorrect statements. Usually you find the corrections in font size 8 on the last page - if there is even any correction. They should be forced to publish it in the same way, on the same media channels, as the initial incorrect article about that topic - by default, as an implemented law. This alone would kill a lot of shares of how misinformation, which appeals to angry emotions, works.
But then political campaigns wouldn't work either, so sadly there's no incentive for legislatives to do this.
Let me just full-quote you, because this seems pretty clear, regardless of tone.
> When women (or LGBTQA+) are talking about these issues, they're looking for allies, they're looking for compassion and comfort on their journey; and are not interested in the rational solution in the first place.
Criticizing that you are baselessly asserting that women and queer people are irrational, not interested in solutions and instead "looking for compassion and comfort on their journey" and that this assessment might be a product of your prejudice against women is irrational?
> Criticizing that you are baselessly asserting that women and queer people are irrational, not interested in solutions and instead "looking for compassion and comfort on their journey" and that this assessment might be a product of your prejudice against women is irrational?
> Irrefutable logic. Circular even.
Empathy and Rationality are not mutually exclusive.
I did not fully understand your post (men are irrational when being accused of enabling child abuse, I still don't know what kind of feminists you mean).
I think you also didn't spend enough time among incels, KF or /pol/ to understand them.
KF is a moralist forum, they have more jn common with progressive twitter with the incessant policing of behaviour than incels or /pol/.
Incels resent women because they don't have them, it's a sour grapes situation.
/pol/ is a containment board for politics on 4chan. These people exist before feminism took the internet stage of most important topic, even in the atheist vs religious era. I don't think they're a response to feminists generalizing men (which is irrational, if you disagree please state your reasoning).
I didn't publish my writeup(s) yet because it would put me at a strategical disadvantage for the time being. I'm not ready, and still need some time for preparing my tech stack. If you're curious, it's gonna be released on the Tholian Network website.
There have been a couple of investigations that I helped with in the German media though, in case you're interested. They mostly focus on bigger topics though, like the fact that AIMS was used for vote manipulations, or about the troll factories in middle/west Africa etc.
They didn't talk about the hacker groups in detail because I think there's some missing expertise in that sector (also in regards of being able to defend themselves), but everything around those groups on telegram can be dug up pretty quickly. It's not like they care about their secrecy.
And that doesn't go far enough. On the modern Internet access to an ISP connection and nothing else is fairly useless.
Without access to a large email provider you won't be able to send to anyone. And, no, you can't just set up an SMTP server. Not if you expect anyone to get your emails.
If you don't have access to messenger apps you basically can't communicate with people outside of the US which is the only country which still uses SMS.
If you don't have access to hosting services and something like cloudflare, you basically can't build a website.
If you don't have access to payment processors, you can't run any form of online business.
I think it’s kind of incredible that Kiwifarms has become the poster-boy for abhorrent content, when Stormfront has been right there for decades and seems to still be going strong. Somehow they are perceived as worse than literal Nazis.
Those of us purchasing bandwidth should boycott HE. I know I will be and I'm a potentially significant customer of theirs. They're completely off the list of providers unless they completely change their tune.
What if we allowed all speech online, no matter how vile?
The problem would be that people want to avoid seeing some things, and they really want to avoid their kids seeing things.
So what if we define a group of flags that can be set to say "This content does contain X" or "This content does not contain X." If the flag is not set, we don't know. Then web filters can just block content that lacks a flag saying "This content does not contain X."
You're making the mistake many people make in assuming all communication on the web is strictly two way, and that the only possible outcome of speech online is hurt feelings.
If I post your real name, address and bank account credentials online, or photos of you in the bathroom, or start a forum to plan acts of genocide against your race or religion, or maybe spread plausible slander about you on every social media platform I can, that's perfectly acceptable under your terms. But it doesn't help you if all you're allowed to do is set a filter flag on it. It's still there, having an effect.
The web isn't just teenage edgelords shitposting at each other for lulz anymore, there are actual real world consequences at play.
I will accept the slander because (1) anonymous slander lacks credibility and (2) being slandered is a small price to pay for my free speech rights and (3) when all limits are removed on speech my big mouth will get me in far more trouble than any slander.
Unfortunately, the media demands censorship and incites people to demand it as well.
The ultimate solution if something bothers you online is to locate the power button on the device, press it, then proceed outdoors to hang out with your friends.
This thread was linked to on the Kiwifarms website and people are coming in here astroturfing for Kiwifarms. That's why this thread is such a garbage pile.
> A lot of the "people here" are from Kiwifarms because this thread got linked to from their site. So a lot of untrue claims are being made about the facts of the situation.
I went looking for this out of curiosity. It seems to be a thread from 2022 with only 10 pages, and only about 10 total replies this year. Is this really your basis for claiming that "a lot" of people are coming from Kiwi Farms?
I see ye ol’ “but HE is a private company they can do what they want” argument surfacing again. Something that is easily missed: internet providers benefit from government protected monopolies because you can’t just dig up cities and lay cable wherever you want. They’re seen as privately run public infrastructure. Therefore there’s an expectation that they indiscriminately carry traffic, because their position as an ISP is too powerful to allow them to be short circuiting the courts and making value judgements. This isn’t just a hypothetical concern, it’s real.
I don’t know HE’s specific situation with regards to being a common carrier, but I’m surprised there isn’t a conversation about the expectations we have of utility providers who receive privileged operational power over necessary public services.
Do you really think HE owns most of the fiber they use? It's mostly leased from much larger behemoths that own the physical cables, who treat it as a private conduit for photons, and lack the ability to even know what's being transmitted over it, so can't censor.
Source: https://he.net/about_network.html - you see them talk about "negotiating with the top fiber carriers" and even "long haul wavelengths", which means they don't always lease a whole fiber, sometimes just a small slice of the EM spectrum on one.
IP transit is a value-add on top of an underlying physical asset which already has the properties that you want.
In other words, if I have been granted conditional protected exclusive ownership of physical fiber lines and that requires me to be a common carrier, I can launder the common carrier responsibility by leasing guaranteed bandwidth downstream? That does not check out…
I'm not sure if this transitive common carrier approach makes sense.
Wouldn't that mean that every company that used telephony, railroads, airlines, or shipping would have to be behave like a common carrier?
I'm not sure what the correct balance is but I don't think it makes sense to force common carrier status to propagate in the way you seem to be suggesting.
Using a common carrier for business is different from purchasing reserved quotas from them and then reselling the access. I can see how it isn’t clear when taken to the extreme, but there’s got to be some balance otherwise a carrier could just resell 100% of the bandwidth to some subsidiary to launder it. I don’t know the answer but this at least seems like a pretty big loophole if it were allowed.
I think you can pretty clearly mentally separate a derivative service originating from a leased common line and Hallmark accepting internet orders.
That's actually what Kiwifarms is doing. If you looked at their hosting structure, their providers 1-2 layers up are friends of the admin (one is even posting in this thread), so sending abuse complaints to the hosting provider is dangerous to personal safety. That's why the victims have to go farther upstream to complain to the first reseller who operates in good faith, rather than these fake corporate entities only operated to host kiwifarms.
New accounts are subject to additional restrictions because of past abuse by spammers and trolls. Obviously that comment was legit, but as we don't have software smart enough to distinguish legit comments from bad one, some human intervention is often required to rescue the legit ones. You did this yourself by vouching for the comment, which unkilled it.
The ACLU will absolutely oppose this. If not for the reason they stand to make a lot of money suing ISPs for "not doing enough" to stop the big-ole-meanies online.
I see ISPs blocking "mean speech" to "protect people" as another symptom of the enshittification of the internet. I legitimately cannot understand problems in this arena because you can just...walk away from your computer. Or turn off the website. Or hey, maybe don't TIE YOUR ENTIRE LIFE AND REAL IDENTITY TO THE INTERNET. I suspect the prominent use of pseudonyms 30 years ago prevented most forms of ongoing harassment. Narcissists need the validation and so now big brother needs to step in to protect them.
I think society is getting a little too comfortable with the idea of big brother and it's making me really, really uncomfortable. As an old man yelling at a cloud the internet really was better 20 or 30 years ago.
You're thinking solely in terms of private individuals. Other entities exist and have to be internet-connected to function; corporations, nonprofits, government bodies, institutions. They can't very well use pseudonyms because their whole reason for being is to be accessible to the public.
An episode like that costs tens of thousands of dollars in lost productive time, police response and investigation etc. And it's increasingly common.
I don't think ISPs can or should proactively try to prevent this (or they'd have to preemptively scan and evaluate every packet request), but I also don't think your dunk on the ACLU has any substance. If an ISP knows that a customer is bad actor because it's brought to their attention in a credible and rigorous way, then it seems quite legitimate to me to cut them off.
The bomb threat is already a crime. Properly prosecute it.
Are you trying to say that some opinion posted online that may or may not have been consumed by the offender in this case is somehow directly responsible?
My question to those who support big brother any lawful but awful speech is - do you really think it won’t be used to silence any dissent of the ruling powers?
>> My question to those who support big brother any lawful but awful speech is - do you really think it won’t be used to silence any dissent of the ruling powers?
My question to those that use this line of reasoning is do you really think a ruling power willing to silence dissent would do so whether or not it is supported?
A salient point no doubt. There is ample evidence that some are silenced by a range of methods. I’m simply not going to support codifying that sort of thing in law.
I would argue if we have people in positions of power who would make decisions like that then it is our duty to our progeny to relieve those in question.
In order to prevent bomb threats, we should run algos on every phone call. If they try to make a bomb threat, we can just break the connection and refer the caller to police. Why even wait for phone calls? We can just make the phones emit a high pitched alarm and send cops whenever the algos hear any sort of hate crime within range of the microphone.
Don't forget, we have to open and read everybody's mail and read it too, otherwise somebody might deliver a bomb threat through the USPS.
The Stasi would be insanely jealous of the new tools for totalitarianism the tech industry is building. We're constructing a digital panopticon around ourselves. If this is allowed to go much further, escape will become incredibly difficult.
> If an ISP knows that a customer is bad actor because it's brought to their attention in a credible and rigorous way, then it seems quite legitimate to me to cut them off.
This would invite false-flag attacks to get others kicked off the internet, especially if you run a public-facing service. If you can find any way to attribute something to someone, it doesn't even have to rise to the level of preponderance of evidence.
This changes the venue for addressing allegedly-criminal behavior of owners/operators from courtrooms with established procedures to arbitrary decisions by nameless individuals accountable to nobody. This certainly works to someone's advantage, especially in cases where the allegations have been fabricated or exaggerated. Let's move things to a kangaroo court where a doctored screenshot is sufficient evidence for us to ban someone/something and there is no formal procedure or record for anyone to review. The accused isn't even entitled to an appeal; the accusation is the conviction.
ISPs were really rigorous in their diligence when the RIAA started suing their customers. DMCA takedowns have never been abused either. ISPs have notably not been quick to do anything about the DDoS attacks Kiwi Farms' detractors have brought to bear against them.
For some reason, of all those people "victimized" by Kiwi Farms, not one can muster a defamation suit? Apparently they organize raids or something on a public forum inclusive to all, but no screenshots or archived copies of these pages exist? For all the claims against KF, apparently none can survive scrutiny from either civil or criminal litigation. The one untrained guy that runs it can only be tried in secret tribunals, in absentia, and must not be allowed to have a platform on which to defend himself. This is the cliquish behavior of spoiled children crying to their gullible grandparents as an end-run around their parents-- not a means of justice.
People claim a lot of things about the Kiwis but the one thing nobody ever calls them is liars.
It's unfortunate that a school that went out of its way to host events only for children of color received a bomb threat. That terrorist should go to jail, and by the rules of this New Woke Order someone should send a letter to the school's upstream hosting providers to get that racist school kicked off the internet.
The people pushing for ISP-level policing aren't going to like living under the rules they're creating. It's going to make it completely fucking unusable for everyone. Like the HOA board members who want to run speed traps and install speed bumps to stop all the speeders, they always end up being among the first ones caught speeding. They'll create all these bypasses to make things intolerable, and then start up with "this place sucks now" and try to rally everyone into leaving.
I take it that (a) your income doesn't depend on your internet presence, and (b) you're reasonably well off. KiwiFarms has done massive damage to people in "the real world", and some people concerned for their safety cannot afford to ignore it. It is a genuine danger.
and people who engage in that sort of activity have in some cases been prosecuted, which is just, but those people didn't do it because the internet exists, they did it because they're monsters.
> The backlash has already spurred other ACLU chapters to declare that they don’t believe free-speech protections apply to events like the one in Charlottesville, and led the ACLU’s national director, Anthony Romero, to declare the group will no longer defend the right to protest when the protesters want to carry guns.
> “Until now,” lawyer and blogger Scott Greenfield wrote, the ACLU has “never quite come out and announced that they will refuse to defend a constitutional right. This announcement says that when someone seeks to exercise two rights at the same time, the ACLU is outta there.”
And their internal policy document listing out things that might stay their hand in an otherwise vigourous defense of free speech:
> * Whether the speaker seeks to engage in or promote violence
> * Whether the speakers seek to carry weapons
> * The impact of the proposed speech and the impact of its suppression
> * The extent to which we are able to make clear that even as we defend a speaker’s right to say what they want, we reserve our right to condemn the views themselves
> * The extent to which we are able to mitigate any harm to our mission, values, priorities, and/or relationships
The first two I disagree with but could arguably see, but the last three are really the death of the ACLU as we knew it.
I think that the ACLU had a bigger impact with 60m in funding as a nonpartisan organization with a respected reputation than as a soldier in the culture war.
That was before the ACLU got hollowed out and skinsuited by activist groups. I'd trust the ACLU of 10 years ago to fight this, but not the one of today.
I mean, to be fair this doesn't really pertain to the sort of Constitutional legal questions that the ACLU famously takes a hardline stance on. I don't think the ACLU endorsing private censorship is clearly at odds with their overall mission. (As opposed to say their going soft on hate speech laws, which clearly has 1A implications.)
I'd rather have laws that prohibit free speech than have the government be able to stifle speech by pressuring large monopolistic organizations behinds closed doors.
That resulted in lots of funding from the anti-Trump crowd. "Trump derangement syndrome" meant previously unimaginable funding.
They needed to do something with the money, so they staffed up, using the new staff to double down on the Trump-fighting.
Before 2016, there were a few claims that the ACLU was biased toward liberals. Afterward, you'll find many articles even from outlets like the Atlantic and the New York Times lambasting the ACLU as openly partisan. Just do a search for them!
So if this is censorship is intended to keep things safe and liberal, people suppose that the ACLU would support the censorship.
This is exactly what happened. They were flooded with money at the same time they were being flooded with new graduates that had strange ideas about what people shouldn't be allowed to do.
you were on the Internet before it merged with reality and the two became one (in the minds of the people). you still perceive the Internet as being this discrete thing, separate from normal meatspace reality, because that's how it was, for a time, in the now-distant past.
smartphones and modern social media bulldozed over our glorious cyber-libertarian future and brought millions of people, all completely unacclimated to the Web and its social customs, online, together, in the name of social progress or something (but, not-so-secretly, it was just to target advertisements and content to people more efficiently), and this is the sad end result—corporate censorship everywhere, with normal people even going out of their way to espouse gratitude for said censorship, complete with all manner of stock memery to disparage anyone who disagrees ("freeze peach", "only the government can censor—if it's not the government, it's not censorship", etc.).
pour one out for the Internet of Yore if you must, but those days are long since over—there really isn't any way to put the genie back in the bottle anymore.
it's hard to remember now, but believe it or not, it used to be such that when you were done using the Internet for a session, you had to get up from your Ethernet or RJ45-connected personal computer and go live in the real world for a time.
twenty-five minutes ago, I posted the above comment, then got into my car to drive home from work. on the way home, at an intersection, I checked my phone to see if anyone had responded to my comment, and indeed, you had. I thought about it a bit, then, while waiting in line at drugstore to pick up a prescription, I typed and submitted this reply. this is most certainly not how Things Used To Be. you used to have to jack into the Matrix at a designated jacking-in terminal—you couldn't just wirelessly jack in anywhere, about the town, at any point in your daily life.
only a decade ago, the idea that a politician would use the public-facing Internet to directly attack or insult a political opponent was unthinkable—now, it's completely commonplace, as common as anyone arguing over the Internet, with anyone else about anything else. now, it's been successfully integrated into everyday life, completely. in the past, though, there most certainly was a time in which it was a completely separate thing, with completely different social norms than meatspace. I don't know why some are so eager to erase this in-the-greater-scheme-of-things extremely-recent history, and pretend like the Internet was always some sort of sanitized "safe space." there were "safe spaces", to be sure—but you had to make them yourself(!), or seek them out. communities were ideologically-driven, not advertiser/moral guardian-driven.
I understand that you're being sarcastic, but don't understand exactly what you're implying. Are you saying that Nancy Reagan became a drug addict? Or else are you saying that experimenting with one or more drugs is beneficial?
I am saying that "Just Say No" is not an effective intervention for addiction. A lot of internet content is addictive, and the more addictive it is, the less likely it is to be bound to reality. So relying on individual self-control -- "just walk away from your computer" -- to counter the deleterious effects of misinformation on the internet is no more likely to succeed than it did for drug addiction.
I disagree. I think the issue is that we don't demand enough individual self-control from people. Individual self-control is supposed to be table stakes for being a mature adult and being treated as such. And teaching that skill (and it is a skill) to kids should be a necessary part of raising them. If "Just Say No" was not effective, I think it's because it didn't get enough traction in society--it didn't become standard operating procedure, to the point where it's just obvious to every adult that yes, you teach your kids to Just Say No to drugs, until it becomes muscle memory.
We're off on a tangent, but... I think you're thinking about people who don't really have an addiction (to the internet, or to drugs), but merely indulge more than they ought to and a little bit of moral rectitude they're alright again. If you had met hopelessly, chronically addicted people, the people for whom their addiction has utterly destroyed their life and they're pleading with you for help and they just keep getting worse and worse, I don't think you'd be so quick to say that all you need is individual self-control.
It is not merely the case that, faced with something potentially addictive, you just recall "Just Say No" and bada-bing, no addiction happens. Humans aren't robots. Humans get addicted to drugs and other activities, not just in social situations but also as a coping mechanism for life failures they can't fix, or see no way to fix. It can take years of psychological work to break the cycle of dependence, and in some cases it might not even be possible.
If you have time for a moving speech, listen to Craig Ferguson's monologue on his own alcohol addiction, his path to sobriety, and the constant vigilance needed to maintain it, which he gave rather than joke about Britney Spears' public freakout in 2007: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K46P7loICXY
> If you had met hopelessly, chronically addicted people, the people for whom their addiction has utterly destroyed their life and they're pleading with you for help and they just keep getting worse and worse, I don't think you'd be so quick to say that all you need is individual self-control.
I know there are such people, but they are a small minority. If "addiction" is only talking about them, then the response to the GP is simple: sure, "Just Say No" doesn't work for that small minority, but it can still work for everyone else, and shouldn't be discarded on that account.
My read of the GP is that they were not using "addiction" in this narrow sense, and my response was based on that interpretation. But they're welcome to correct me if I'm wrong about that interpretation.
My question would be: can we afford a better solution than "Just Say No" in a free society? Would a better solution be an overoptimization of outcomes, one that minimizes slack in the system, leaving the system brittle in times where that slack would have kept it from snapping? I.e., some neo-Weimar Republic phase looming ahead of us?
One recent example of this was the lack of free hospital beds at the height of COVID. In a pandemic, the overoptimization of nixing bed/supply reserves left no slack, leaving hospitals unfit to address the emergency.
I think it might be impossible to avoid having to make moral judgements.
You might wish to believe that you free society can exist without any morality but I don't think it can really.
So what is "ok" and what is "not ok" - would you censor the NAZI party in the 1930s or do you think that letting theim air their views fully would convince Germans not to accept them? 10s of millions of lives depend on your choice.
Any moral judgement that ignores the direct practical implications of that judgement is deeply immoral. You cant have meant well when you could have known better but didnt want to.
>So what is "ok" and what is "not ok" - would you censor the NAZI party in the 1930s or do you think that letting theim air their views fully would convince Germans not to accept them? 10s of millions of lives depend on your choice.
The rise to power of the NSDAP was aided by being able to frame themselves as the lesser evil in comparison to the KPD representing the totalitarian soviet system. Censoring stuff and combating people creates reactions, once you go down the path of opinion control you end up with the choice between totalitarian systems that are dysfunctional by nature and represent the worst and most extreme versions of a tribalistic conflict. Having a common enemy becomes an end in itself and at that point anyone will do.
This is not an abstract risk, its visible across many western democracies right now. The naive assumption that intention alone will be enough and allows you ignore the consequences, might become the death of the current form of democracies. Its arguably how we got to the point where there are far right parties across Europe in and about to become governments. With at the same time a historic high in population and opinion control measures.
In the end, during the most horrific phases of humanity that were intentionally created there is always a desperate demand for two things. The ability to challenge genocidal narratives (See Romeo Dalaires pleas to just be allowed to broadcast) and having as many rifles as you can get once that fails (See the incredible risk people (including children) took when smuggling weapons into Jewish ghettos. I dont see how attempts to make the first harder, let alone impossible, are anything but evil. Especially with a blatant disregard for the risks this entails. Humanity payed the price for this insight already multiple times over.
There is a real chance the next German election might result in an AFD government. Which after years of tribalistic conflict left them in a state where the most extreme positions are in control.
Just thinking that you ought to have those kinds of laws doesnt mean applying them wont result in a tragedy.
Edit: Might have misunderstood your reference. The KPD NSDAP dynamic is often referenced as the "verängstigte Bürgertum". It was quite the popular reference during Pegida, but it has been a common explanation since it happened and isnt just a modern take. The coups during Weimar, and the political reactions to them has to be seen in that light as well. Can recommend Heinrich Hannovers "Politische Justiz 1918–1933" on the atmosphere of the time.
Edit1: His "Die Republik vor Gericht 1954-1995" is also something i would recommend reading for a more realistic view of Western Germany. And Ingo Müllers Furchtbare Juristen. Might be worth reminding people that actual nazis got quite the nice treatment till very recently. The current wave of prosecutions against KZ guards is a historical abnormality, unless the allies actually hung you you got away with a slap on the wrist and in good social standing. Because you were needed against the Soviets. A AFD/CDU might get really bad, there were already CDU politicians during the burning refugee housings in the 90s that argued for more compassion for the drunk piss stained mob.
There was this great picture of a piss stained drunk doing a nazi salute during one of the Pogroms that i cant find on google and bing anymore. But luckily i dont have to worry about such things anymore because everyone means well.
They should indeed support democracy and freedom of expression. That many do not can only be an indictment of the education system. The quite recent turn to listen to your fears and trying to curb wrong opinions very likely made things worse than they could have been.
Vanity and fear set the current strategy and it really does not help.
And Cloudflare are nearly as well behaved as they could possibly be. The simple fact of them being everywhere makes them a major target of government pressure to censor. This is purely an end run around the constitution, not the desire of companies to control speech.
> It feels like private companies are de facto writing the laws about what's allowed online and in society right now, and that it's almost become a loophole for censoring free speech on a whim.
And I don't think that the companies have any particular desire to censor. Zuckerberg would only censor speech about Facebook and himself personally. Dorsey seemed entirely blindsided by the pressures from the administration, three-letter agencies, and individual Congressmen based on the Twitter Files, and pushed back plenty. The three-letter agencies just placed dozens and dozens of people (who decided to quit the CIA, NSA, and FBI in their 30s for some reason and change careers) in the executive suites of every social network.
It's being done in the open, and they're simply daring us to see corruption there. Hell, they've become conspiracy and foreign propaganda scientists, and they can detect the influence of the evil Russian and Chinese enemies of the state even in people who have no connections to Russians or Chinese people. It's their Russian and Chinese ideas that need to be eradicated, and all good communications channels and payments processors should be happy to help unless they are also secretly Russian.
Wow did they go from coordinating banning Alex Jones to banning the last President in record time. Let's see how long it takes them to get from Kiwi Farms to The Grayzone or Rumble, or any newspaper that contradicts a government press release.
> And Cloudflare are nearly as well behaved as they could possibly be.
This is not true. There has been at least two high profile cases where Cloudflare dropped their commitment to free speech when under no real legal pressure(kiwifarms and stormfromt). Maybe you think they did the right thing, but it's clear that they are not a neutral party.
The more social pressure there is, the more meaningful the commitment is. Cloudflare doesn't get points for hosting sites that no cares about. They failed to uphold their promise when it mattered twice, so it's pretty much meaningless. Just use AWS for your DDoS protection at that point.
And yet they're the ISP of choice for the culture war propagandists. The Daily Wire and their german impersonator offspring NIUS both run on AWS. Turning Point USA runs on it, despite inviting a speaker to talk about the dangers of woke AWS censorship.
Kiwifarms is not just a site about "opinions", they organize destroying people's lives and celebrating when someone kills themselves.
There's a clear moral distinction between "I believe trans women do not belong in women's bathrooms" and "Here's their address, do your thing until they are gone!".
And that's where problems arise. Most of us are comfortable oppressing people we disagree with. The reality is that you can't silence voices you don't like without making yourself vulnerable to the same treatment. We either value the freedom to express ourselves within the limits of the law or we don't. As soon as there are more people who think like you do, none of us are safe and it just becomes a system that silences whatever and whoever is unpopular enough.
> Most of us are comfortable oppressing people we disagree with. The reality is that you can't silence voices you don't like without making yourself vulnerable to the same treatment.
I’m deeply ambivalent about a site like Cloudflare censoring anything but the logic here… absolutely not.
You can classify speech. It’s not terribly difficult to classify when something is an outright call for racial warfare. If I were a person calling for a ban to such speech my own speech wouldn’t automatically be subject to the same criteria.
> You can classify speech. It’s not terribly difficult to classify when something is an outright call for racial warfare.
We already have laws against speech that incites violence and you might be surprised how contested the lines themselves are. There are a lot of people these days who outright state that speech itself == violence and should carry the same consequences.
I'm not a free speech absolutist. When pressed, I don't think very many people are. I just think we need to be extremely careful when it comes to expanding those boundaries and that we're better off to err on the side of freedom because of the importance of what we stand to lose.
I don’t deny that there are difficult areas, blurred lines and so on when it comes to free speech. But that doesn’t mean all speech is one and the same.
The OP’s assertion was that if I oppose censoring Stormfront then I shouldn’t be surprised when I find myself censored. But of course I would: the speech I (and the vast majority of the population) engage in is nowhere near as inflammatory.
> the speech I (and the vast majority of the population) engage in is nowhere near as inflammatory.
According to who? History shows us that what people generally find acceptable or inflammatory has changed wildly over time. I think people should be able to love and marry any consenting adult they can convince to agree to it. That kind of talk would have had me crucified under McCarthyism.
You can't know what the prevailing opinion on the views you hold today will be even 5-10 years from now. People in recent times have been surprised to find themselves in very difficult situations because of that reality. In the US, our culture and values are less stable now than they've been in a long time. If you weaken free speech, as a right or an ideal, just to make yourself more comfortable today you might very well be surprised to find yourself censored or worse tomorrow.
Well for example the definition often used in the UK is from Elizabeth Stanko[1] and is ‘any form of behaviour by an individual that intentionally threatens to or does cause physical, sexual or psychological harm to others or themselves’. Which comes from "Counting the costs"[2]. Under that definition, threats of harm are explicitly defined as a form of violence.
The definition of a crime of violence[2] in the US also explicitly includes threats as a form of violence. "The term 'crime of violence' means—... (a) an offense that has as an element the use, attempted use, or threatened use of physical force against the person or property of another, or
(b) any other offense that is a felony and that, by its nature, involves a substantial risk that physical force against the person or property of another may be used in the course of committing the offense." (18 USC § 16 my emphasis)
What's the argument against? Folks have been driven to suicide by targeted harassment and doxxing labeled "speech." The whole reason we have laws about public accommodation is because in a society you can drive someone to ruin by everyone collectively refusing to do business with them which was (and still is for the gays) backed by 1A. The threat of violence is violence, speech that is an implicit threat of violence is violence. Speech that makes people feel unsafe due that implicit threat is violence (say a neighborhood where every house had a flag with a black man hung by a noose). Verbal abuse is still abuse. Everyone who's ever been to school knows that bullying doesn't actually require anyone lay a hand on you to make you live in constant fear and that dynamic doesn't just go away when you become an adult.
Sure, we could coin a term like "diet violence" to mean actions that cause in people the behave as if they were under the threat of violence but which doesn't cause bodily harm but what would be the point? Legally it makes sense to do that to discourage escalation but to the victim the only difference is usually but not always the severity.
I'm sympathetic to folks when their messaging or iconography becomes recognized as an implicit threat of violence due to it being co-opted by others when they didn't mean it that way but if a bunch of people started flying communist flags and lynching people I would take mine down even if I was just really pro-workers rights. To me speech is about the content, the ideas, not any particular expression. In opposite world where "we're here we're queer" was a line that caused people to hide in their homes in fear I would be like yeah that's violence if I used that phrase in a speech. I can't separate cause and effect. I can still express my totally fine idea that queer folks do and will always exist, just using different words.
No, muddying up terms and words is not okay. The threat of violence is not violence. It's a threat. And I say that as someone who thinks that threats should carry a far (FAR) higher penalty than they currently do. This constant redefinition of words is done as an attempt to define a new morality but you know very well that there are many holes in it. And yet proponents of this new morality don't care to think about those holes. Being offended or scared can be subjective, therefore you cannot define threats and insults as violence. Otherwise the person which is most easily scared and offended wins. And what a surprise: That's how people already evolved under this new morality, how often do you now see people talk about how "terrified" they are of X or Y or Z or something their political opponent said. Obviously they are not actually terrified per dictionary definition but they use that word because they know that it gives them power under the new morality. Likewise being offended now equals power. You create a very dangerous system through these word redefinitions. Also by admitting that in a world where your views are the minority, you would define violence differently just proves what a problem this is: Whoever wins the social battle, gets to define what violence is. That is dangerous. Things must be based on objective reality.
I'm ambivalent towards this issue and I can't say I have a definite answer (and I'm also someone who thinks threats of violence should carry far far harsher penalties, just think of DV for example), however: that logic doesn't hold. You can certainly define when threats or other speech constitute violence. Just as brandishing a gun and threatening to shoot is not violence in the strictest sense of the word but it is violence for all intents and purposes. Just as burning crosses in front of the house of a black family. Of course these are the clear cut examples and leave no margin for error, the majority of situations are much more ambiguous, and there I agree we should tend to err on the side of caution.
If speech is violence then we have no means other than acts of violence to explore, discuss, and debate ideas. We need to be able to disagree with each other without it being assault and battery.
We need the right to offend, make uncomfortable, and challenge.
Exposure to an idea shouldn't be treated the same as being beaten with a fist because acts of violence are criminalized. Criminalizing unpopular speech is exactly what free speech is supposed to protect us against. Our freedom and ability to demand change depends on the ability to speak out against oppression without fear of being sentenced to prison just because of our words. If we need to speak out against those in power, we need the ability to use words they don't want to hear.
Blurring the lines between words that offend us and actual violence is dangerous and can only lead to actual violence. If there's something we disagree on, let's keep talking about it to reach a solution or at least an understanding of one another. If there is no difference between speech and violence we may as well just pull out guns instead and let might make right.
> The threat of violence is violence, speech that is an implicit threat of violence is violence.
Some speech really does rise to the level of threat and incitement to violence and we already have first amendment exceptions carved out in law to deal with that. We have laws against harassment. We don't need to expand that to include anything that someone doesn't want to hear. Even on the more extreme end, courts have tended to agree https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech_in_the_United_Stat...
The content on the kiwifarms site includes private people's home addresses and highly personal intimidating details that have no reason to be posted except for intimidation. The content violates existing criminal and civil laws and has nothing to do with "reasonable disagreements". It's an utter failure that the police don't do anything about online harassment. Even the EFF article admits this stuff is illegal.
The actions of individuals on that site have at times certainly been offline acts of harassment and abuse. I'd agree that police should take action against those people and I'd agree that it's a failure of the police and our legal system if that doesn't happen. I don't think that necessitates violating free speech ideals or that it justifies the actions of Hurricane Electric however.
> What's the argument against? Folks have been driven to suicide by targeted harassment and doxxing labeled "speech."
No they haven't, not on Kiwi Farms anyhow. This is a deliberate smear intended to justify any extrajudical action taken against the forum. The reality is that it's just a bunch of assholes gossiping about other assholes, and one asshole in particular is doing everything he can to eradicate the site because it has documented, amongst other horrible things, his confession of rape.
> The reality is that it's just a bunch of assholes gossiping about other assholes
Kiwi Farms has been more than just gossip. It's been used by people to harass people in the real world. People there have taken things way too far in the past, and that behavior has been encouraged and supported by the culture of the site. I don't think the forum should be silenced, but it's simply not accurate to say that it's nothing more than online gossip. It has at times been the source of outright harassment and abuse. I think we'd agree that it's an issue that needs to be handled with moderation and the law, but it's also a real problem.
> It's been used by people to harass people in the real world.
And libraries have been used by people to learn effective methods to harass or harm others in the real world. Quick! Let's shut down all the libraries!
> I think we'd agree that it's an issue that needs to be handled with moderation and the law, but it's also a real problem.
We already have such a law. It's called Section 230. Forum operators should not be subject to tortious interference, criminal harassment, or other manner of extrajudicial punishment because they choose to exercise speech that you find repugnant.
The operator of the forum has made harassing statements himself, and he has already lost his section 230 protections. The first lawsuit or prosecution that comes his way will take this into account.
Reporting what the "victims" themselves have said is not harassment. Reporting on the extralegal actions of these "victims" is also not harassment. If you have evidence of him engaging in actual harassment as legally defined then please share it as I'm sure those inclined to see him prosecuted would love to have that information. Don't worry... I'll wait.
There is a lot of dox on Kiwifarms and I am not linking directly to it and getting my HN account banned. You have to look for it yourself. Don't wait around.
You can put that straw man away. I made it clear that I didn't think the site should be shut down. I was only saying that its content and impact shouldn't be misrepresented as mere gossip.
You're probably being auto-flagged. Seems to be a feature intended to stop perpetually misbehaving users. Such as, ones who keep posting the same comment again and again and again for whatever weird obsessive reason. Or maybe it's just someone with very fast flagging fingers sweeping the new comments list.
> How about this then, I suggest, in order to both demonstrate freedom of speech and to entertain fans of KiwiFarms like content we create a KiwiFarms like site based on studying and publishing public facts on popular KiwiFarms members.
Sure, why not. Are there any potentially entertaining or ridiculous ones you have in mind, such that you feel it would be worth your efforts?
If you don't believe in freedom of speech for people you hate you don't believe in it at all. The refusal to use force to stop opinions the majority doesn't like is the only thing that makes any progress possible. Being able to say things other people want to stop you from saying is the defining characteristic of free speech.
You're right; I don't believe in it as a categorical virtue. I believe in it as an extremely useful feature of a system of government as a check against the failure mode of the leadership becoming so disconnected from the public that they fall to corruption. In short, "It's not okay for the government to turn the public square into an echo chamber."
Private people, groups, companies though? Not only may they curtail speech more or less arbitrarily in places they own, I believe quite firmly that they may respond to the exercise of freedom of speech by exercising their freedom of association and refraining from further commerce with the speaker because of the information the speaker has revealed. And with very few, narrow, specific cut-outs, American law agrees with that premise.
> I believe quite firmly that they may respond to the exercise of freedom of speech by exercising their freedom of association and refraining from further commerce with the speaker because of the information the speaker has revealed.
"freedom of association" is what a lot of people who owned diners felt enabled them to deny services to black people. Maybe you still feel that they should have been able to refuse service to anyone for any reason including skin color. We collectively decided that society works a lot better when we infringed on the rights of diner owners in order to protect the rights of everyone who wanted a seat at the lunch counter.
There's an argument to be made that in exchange for the privilege of corporate personhood, any company offering services to the general public should be required to serve any member of that public no matter what their beliefs. I'm not yet convinced that's an ideal situation personally, but situations like this make me more sympathetic to the idea.
I'd rather see our government take steps to make sure that no company is allowed to be in a position to oppress the American people leaving them without recourse. I'd sooner see companies with monopoly power broken up or pathways cleared to bring in meaningful competition. That should help protect the American people from oppression by non-governmental agencies while preserving the rights of companies to discriminate according to ideology (if that's a value we think is worth protecting).
> We collectively decided that society works a lot better when we infringed on the rights of diner owners in order to protect the rights of everyone who wanted a seat at the lunch counter.
We notably did not and that is a key distinction. We carved out very narrow obligation upon business owners to refrain from refusing service in a very specific set of intrinsic categories that have no bearing on the content of one's character. At the federal level, we notably stopped short of things like political affiliation.
In most states you can be refuse service for being a Nazi. Hell, a police officer was recently refused service because the obligation he has to open carry a firearm on duty ran afoul of the establishment's "no firearms on premises" policy (https://www.insider.com/san-francisco-bakery-reems-refuses-p...). The key difference is intrinsic versus malleable properties; a cop can go off duty and put the gun down, a Nazi can stop advocating for the genocide of people, and a KFer can cease to associate with a site tied directly to organizing abuse.
You can make a case that promoting the common welfare is served by maximizing the corporate obligation to serve citizens, but if you're trying to make it the burden's on you to explain why it promotes the common welfare for a person to serve those they know wish for their genocide or actively organize hate mobs against them.
... Anyway, I'd love to continue this thread, but as this site owner exercises their right to filter the content on their own site, I'm limited to the number of responses I may give per period of time. And that is reasonable, it is their site. ;)
Remember the Red Scare, when communists, socialists, and leftists were widely hated and persecuted? Do you think such a societal shift can't happen again? Freedom of association for businesses is all fun and games until society's values shift and all of a sudden it's you that's unpopular and businesses start refusing to serve you.
The extreme right is growing because the left is failing miserably in making a case for the public to vote for them. Attempting to squash the speech of their opponents when they're not succeeding legitimately just makes the left look even worse and gives the far right the opportunity to play the oppressed martyr.
Sure can happen again, if it happens again it can be dealt with the same way it was dealt with last time: vote the bastards out and maneuver around Hollywood to make the movies.
We have a very narrow carve out of service obligation that constrains businesses from refusing service for intrinsic properties. Apart from that, at the federal level: no, we don't and shouldn't obligate businesses to serve Communists. We don't obligate them to serve Nazis. We don't obligate them to serve the KKK. We don't obligate them to serve Democrats. A business that's too picky about the color of people's money is a business that leaves money on the table, and that is almost always counterweight enough.
No, you're drawing a false equivalence. Advocating for genocide of entire ethnic groups is not "an opinion I disagree with", in fact: the crucial point is that it is an opinion that if taken up would mean the end of freedom for other people. It's the old paradox of tolerance/freedom/etc. If you would like to preserve e.g. free speech and rule of law then you must resist, by force if necessary, people who would abolish that very same free speech under whose cover they propagate the idea of dismantling it.
The paradox of tolerance is about "unlimited tolerance" which already isn't a thing. We have exemptions to the first amendment for words that rise to the level of incitement of violence.
The author of that paradox also states:
"I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise." He only recommends such an extreme action when all else has failed and we're up against "fists and pistols".
I have yet to hear an argument for genocide that can't be countered by rational argument. When hate groups commit acts of violence (not just acts of speech), the US is certainly not sitting around tolerating that. We don't need to fear words. In fact, I much prefer it when racists make themselves known by their words rather than their actions.
This is an argument that seems reasonable but lacks important nuance and addressing it forms the center of "The Open Society and its Enemies" by Karl Popper, which I would recommend reading.
Popper's argument is essentially that tolerance is essential to open society and therefore to maintain openness, society must ironically be intolerant of those who are intolerant themselves or would spread intolerance. Nazis were specifically on his mind, WW2 having just occurred, and Popper uses them as an example of people who use tolerance by others to spread intolerance and therefore reduce freedom overall. For society to defend freedom, it has to not permit that.
Karl Popper discusses "unlimited tolerance" which literally no one is demanding. With very very few exceptions, we all accept limitations on speech. We have specific exemptions to free speech like incitements to violence for this reason.
Popper also states: "I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise." He only recommends such an extreme action when all else has failed and we're up against "fists and pistols". When hate groups are committing acts of violence (not just acts of speech), the US is certainly not sitting around tolerating that behavior.
It's not the opinion I disagree with, it's the actions and policy changes that result from it, which turn into genocide. If a website has people talking politics, that's fine; if a website has doxxing and organizing lynchings, that's not fine. The problem is that one thing (opinions) can lead to the other (genocide) if not kept in check.
Thankfully we already have laws against lynchings and genocide so there is no reason to violate the ideals of freedom of speech. If anyone is doing either of those things we can (and absolutely should) throw the book at them.
This isn't "people I disagree with". Stromfront, and the groups it enables, are literal nazis.
"Stormfront began in 1990 as an online bulletin board supporting white nationalist David Duke's campaign for United States senator for Louisiana. The name "Stormfront" was chosen for its connotations of a political or military front (such as the German Nazi Sturmabteilung (also known as storm troopers or SA)) and an analogy with weather fronts that invokes the idea of a tumultuous storm ending in cleansing.[11] The Stormfront website has been registered at Network Solutions since 1995 and was founded in 1996 by Don Black, a former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1970s and a member of the National Socialist White People's Party."
National Socialist White People = The American Nazi Party. That is literal. They changed from the NSWPP to the American Nazi Party in 1983. Their logo has a swastika on it. LITERAL NAZIS.
Nobody argues with this. But LITERAL NAZIS have free speech rights in the USA same as anyone else. Once upon a time the ACLU defended a similar group’s right to march loudly through Skokie, Illinois:
If Cloudflare or anyone else wants to have a different standard, that’s their right, too. But the First Amendment line is neon bright, which is a nice feature.
Cloudflare isn’t the government and has no specific requirement to enable the use of their platform to further a political agenda. Being a racist nazi advocating for violence isn’t a protected class, and private companies are not required to host content or otherwise provide a platform for any particular speech that’s not otherwise protected by law.
They can host their content on other platforms, or self host.
Cloudflare has issued statements in the past that they desire to provide their service to everyone, but have been put under immense external pressure not to.
Sometimes they cave, sometimes they don’t. But they’ve begged the public, and presumably the customers/investors pressuring them, to treat them as dumb pipes, not editors.
Perhaps, but my point is that the constitutional right doesn’t extend beyond the government. Just like HN can moderate without fear, so can cloudflare. They choose to take a more hands off approach - good for them. But it’s a choice, and there are apparently limits to their forbearance.
I don't think anybody in this thread has disputed that neo-Nazis have free speech rights under the First Amendment. What's disputed is whether this entitles them to any number of private services.
To make it intuitive: the First Amendment is just as much a guarantee of a right to not speak as it is a right to speak. In other words: it is just as much a guarantee that the state is not empowered to make you do or say things. Expecting the state to require private businesses to carry speech that they otherwise would never associate with is a remarkable incursion on 1A rights.
> What's disputed is whether this entitles them to any number of private services...Expecting the state to require private businesses to carry speech that they otherwise would never associate with is a remarkable incursion on 1A rights.
Freedom of speech is a right guaranteed by the First Amendment. It (in theory) protects us from oppression by our government. Freedom of speech is also an ideal that we should strive for in a free society. One would protect us from oppression by forces other than our government.
Private businesses don't have an obligation to uphold people's rights the way the government does, but that doesn't mean we can't or shouldn't expect them to respect the ideals of freedom of speech. Because our country doesn't do enough to protect the people from what are basically monopolies we should apply extra pressure to companies who are uniquely positioned to oppress us.
I personally don't think the government should step in and force companies to carry speech they disagree with. I think they should make certain that no company has the power to oppress people leaving them without reasonably equivalent options.
Once a single company, or small group of companies, can decide who has a voice that company has become a liability to our security and freedoms. Those companies should either be broken up or others must be allowed and enabled to step into that space to create alternatives. That might mean that certain barriers to entry will need to be dismantled. It might mean changing laws to accommodate newcomers into the market. As long as truly competitive options exist and/or can be created, freedom can exist.
Sadly, right now we don't really have truly competitive alternatives for things like cloudflare or payment processors and there are many places where single entities hold dangerous amounts of power when it comes to the internet. Imagine if ICANN decided to refuse to provide IPs or domains to anyone whose political views they disagreed with. When non-governmental agencies hold too much power, as Hurricane Electric does, we have to hold them to a higher standard, take actions against them, or put alternate systems in place to protect ourselves from them.
I don't think we materially disagree about the civic importance of free expression.
> I personally don't think the government should step in and force companies to carry speech they disagree with. I think they should make certain that no company has the power to oppress people leaving them without reasonably equivalent options.
This maxim has not been violated in this case! HE is one of many ISPs; no evidence has been presented that it colludes with other ISPs[1] to stifle public expression.
And note: the logic of "reasonably equivalent options" doesn't entitle anybody to Internet access, for the same reason that the freedom of movement doesn't entitle me to a driver's license (or a horse). The government may not prohibit my expression; it is also under no particular obligation to supply me any particular venue for expression.
It's one of a very small number of ISPs that form the backbone of the internet (Tier 1-ish) and that puts it in a rare position to censor. The website they are censoring has no direct relationship with HE, yet they are still being silenced by them. That's the problem.
Indeed there is a long history of companies providing services (at inflated rates, of course) to people engaging in activity most are not comfortable with. Think payment processors for porn sites.
If Cloudflare or anyone else wants to have a different standard, that’s their right, too. But the First Amendment line is neon bright, which is a nice feature.
No one cares. This is class warfare. The proletariat needs the right to engage in debate free of interference from the bourgeoisie and bourgeoisie-adjacent. You're not going to win anyone over by saying that the law doesn't provide for that. Hang your laws. The natural rights of the proletariat should not be up for negotiation.
And they ARE free to engage in debate, and they DO - nazis are NOT oppressed in the US. But services like Cloudflare are ALSO free to not platform it. This is the freedom of choosing who to do business with. The "proletariat" can - and do - engage in debate in millions of ways. Else the insurgents couldn't have organized the Jan 6th coup attempt.
Calling people you don't like "nazis" doesn't change what you are doing. They are being deprived of their civil rights and no one is fooled. That's why we're having this discussion at all: you've managed to piss off the right people such that the problem isn't being ignored anymore.
Commerce is not the right to arbitrarily deny people services you have freely offered either, but here we are.
You people built an edifice at law, called it 'public accommodations', went to great lengths to stretch it as far as possible into a concept of commercial neutrality, and now here it is being applied against you. No one will care whether or not your idiosyncratic definition of 'public accommodations' applies here either. The proletariat's sense of justice has been offended. You did this to yourselves. Choke on it.
> Commerce is not the right to arbitrarily deny people services you have freely offered either
Yes, it generally is in the US. Legally, there are a small number of narrow exceptions in public accommodations based in historically widespread societal persecution, but those exceptions would not be necessary if the general liberty you deny were not the rule, and even those exceptions which have been established in statute have not-infrequently been narrowed or limited by the courts for infringing on speech, press, and association rights when applied beyond certain limits.
I am not interested in your arguments predicated on what bourgeoisie law courts have said. They have natural rights the same as anyone else, and they are being trampled upon. No one is fooled, and no one is going to get dragged into useless arguments to authority with you.
> I am not interested in your arguments predicated on what bourgeoisie law courts have said.
A nitpick, but "bourgeoisie" is the noun, "bourgeois" is the adjective; it is either "bourgeois law courts" or "law courts of the bourgeoisie".
> They have natural rights the same as anyone else
“Natural rights” are a thought-terminating cliché to avoid justifying one’s view of what concrete legal rights people should have while simultaneously pretending that the moral conclusion on that question one is offering is a material fact.
Outside of use within a community within which there is a non-controversial moral consensus as a shorthand for positions not in debate within that community, it is never productive to invoke it.
And, certainly, the right to compel others in society to involuntarily relay your views is not a consensus position on rights in our society, even if you leave the law courts, of the bourgeoisie or otherwise, out of it. Otherwise we wouldn’t be having this debate.
What if the government reaches out to social media company and asks them to police speech that they don’t like, as was the case during Covid/Hunter Biden Laptop?
And yet it still happened, to the point where thousands died a preventable death.
"hunter biden laptop" was always a distraction tactic, just like "but hillary's emails". It was an attempt to muddy the waters and obscure the republican's long list of shit they got up to. Thankfully, we've gone from "fuck around" to the "find out" age now.
If Biden did a thing then the legal system will take care of it. That is all.
No, most of you seem to be comfortable ignoring when things turn into safety hazards for people who are not you. That includes Nazis for a sliding scale of people who are not part of majority culture (trying really hard to not say white men adjacent for your sensibilities).
The luxury of liberal principles - facing the threat of the rise of fascism - really can only be exercised by those least affected by such a rise.
I'd be really interested to hear how you think Hitler should've been handled in the 1920s and early 1930s. Could a debate parler have saved Germany's democracy?
A number of kiwifarms victims are guilty engaging in speech that the Kiwifarms users disagreed with. So Kiwifarms users launched criminal harassment campaigns and used the forum to coordinate sharing the personal information of these victims. Personal information that has no relevance except to intimidate. And then the owner of the forum comments in these threads actively encouraging the activity.
You characterize this as a difference of opinion. Despicable.
if you claim to support unrestricted free speech then of course this is hypocrisy. how could you possibly argue otherwise? "seeking to suppress" is still a form of speech. you cannot have your cake and eat it too.
if you don't support unrestricted free speech that's fine, but don't pretend you do. i personally don't either.
That logic can be used to suppress most other political/religious ideologies and speech. If all it takes to justify censorship is a slippery slope argument that "when XYZ ideology gains enough real following the resulting implementation attempts probabilistically/historically lead to a suppressed society with hateful class division and mass death" -- then everything from Marxist writing to religious proselytizing qualifies for banning too.
Freedom is speech protects people from retaliation by the government. It is not and was never meant to protect the infringing upon other people’s right to a good life.
Do you have any more alt-right copy pasta bullshit to spread?
I think people who consider Freedom of Speech, the principle, to be exclusively a government thing, are stupider than people who think the right to Free Speech applies to everything. Wonder why this misaligned perspective seems so popular with pseudo-intellectuals these days.
The grandparent comment explicitly draws a distinction between the social contract and the Constitution, and explicitly points to the Constitution as the mechanism that apparently protects Nazis, specifically pointing out that they aren’t talking about the social contract.
The freedom of speech is a guarantee to the people that they may exercise free thought and expression and not be subject to the use of force or fraud against them by any party, whether a state or private actor. The use of force or fraud against someone for speech you dislike does not magically cease to be a civil rights violation by virtue of being applied to someone you personally dislike. Anyone with even a cursory knowledge of history is well aware of intrusions by actors public and private to suppress speech that threatened their interests.
Put another way: All men have a natural right to the freedom of thought and expression, and no one cares what dead old men thought when they drafted their particular laws. This is about what matters to us here and now. The proletariat has a need for public debate free of interference from the bourgeoisie and bourgeoisie-adjacent. Period. Full stop.
Did you read beyond the first sentence of my comment? I feel like I provided enough context for what I was getting at.
I just meant that Nazi Germany, in comparison to any other authortarian regime, weren't anything special when it came to censorship, other than the racial focus making them easy to hate.
If we are trying to justify censorship as an effort to "protect" Freedom of Speech, then logically we would need to censor the more popular anti free speech political ideologies as well, and with higher priority even! But that wouldn't be free speech anymore would it?
The reality of it is that Nazis only get censored because they are unpopular, a dead political ideology. There is no nation that supports it, and none that can defend it, it's an easy target. People who want to censor Nazis aren't doing it to protect Free Speech, they are doing it because they don't like them, the argument is fundumentally dishonest.
If you just want to censor people you don't like, then you don't support Freedom of Speech. Just like every other autoritarian regime that banned whatever they disliked. The line is very clear here.
The Paradox of tolerance doesn't mean what you think it does. It talks about "unlimited tolerance" which already doesn't exist under law or the first amendment. We have many restrictions on freedom of speech, such as incitements to violence.
The author also states explicitly that his words shouldn't be used to "suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument" and that such extreme action should be reserved for situations where all else has failed and we're up against "fists or pistols"
Violence, not words, is the problem. Thankfully we're not tolerating their violence.
The operator of the Daily Stormer, Andrew Anglin, is currently a fugitive. He lost a lawsuit regarding harassment he organized on the site and went into hiding instead of paying what the government ordered him to.
>The operator of the Daily Stormer, Andrew Anglin, is currently a fugitive
Is there a warrant out for his arrest? "Owing money but not paying it and/or avoiding the debt collectors" isn't exactly being a fugitive, otherwise many of americans defaulting on their debt would also be "fugitives".
People who believe they should be treated equally and people who literally believe in a master race and genocide are not equivalent, and anyone trying to make an equivalence is either intellectually dishonest, or agrees with the Nazis.
"Some people think" is not an argument. Much of life is gray, this is not one of those times.
They dont need to be equivalent, they just need to be treated the same. What do you think will happen once "your side"/"the correct side" gets removed from power and replaced by the unguided reaction it created?
Thanks to all this stupid nazi fearmongering and virtue signaling i am currently faced with a far right party possibly wining my next election as a reaction. With the government having gained unprecedented powers to quell and control dissenting opinions.
This is literally what's happening here. No one is cutting off the admin's personal Internet connection to get on the Internet. They're taking his website down because it's full of abuse.
They're cutting off the company's internet connection, which isn't significantly better than a personal connection. The entity doing this is not the web host, it's the ISP. I would be fine with a web host refusing service, but that is not what is happening.
The Germans who died in the 30s and 40s would be alive if the Nazis had been denied access to oxygen. As some of their heirs openly talk about murdering us I don't think in the long run we'll still be mutually protecting each others rights.
It in fact might be kinder to deny them rights now than life later.
People who openly advocate for mass violence even if vague and theoretical belong in prison.
>As some of their heirs openly talk about murdering us
> People who openly advocate for mass violence even if vague and theoretical belong in prison.
Wait.......didn't you just openly advocate for mass violence (denying them oxygen) against the philosophical heirs of Nazis, even if only in a vague and theoretical fashion?
I did not. I said specifically that Germans in hindsight ought to have bled the Nazis rather than descend into the hellscape that followed and we with the gift of their terrible example should shut down the monsters now when this can be done non-violently. Please attend more carefully to my words.
> It in fact might be kinder to deny them rights now than life later.
Lock up the bad guys now so we aren't in a position where our only options are fascism or murder.
>People who openly advocate for mass violence even if vague and theoretical belong in prison
I very much agree but this is so one-sided. Would you support arresting Muslims who support Shariah?
Would you support arresting Stalinists?
There are sadly so many groups that advocate for mass violence I think it's pointless how people only seem to care about the single one that's most vilified and defeated.
I don't think this is complicated at all. If the are merely organizing and trying to use proper legal procedures to implement their designs they should be defeated at the ballot box if they plot to implement by force they belong in prison.
The constitution doesn't say you have a right to water, electricity, internet service, sewer service, etc.
Meanwhile the conservatives in the US are saying that corporations have a right to choose who they serve based upon their religious beliefs. See the SCOTUS Masterpiece Cakeshop ruling on whether they must serve a gay couple.
I'm pretty sure I could argue that Nazism is against someone's religious beliefs....
The constitution doesn't say a lot of things. The constitution is not the whole of the law, any more than the bible is the whole of religion. At the end of the day I think we've reached a point where the majority of the proletariat believe that they have a natural right to the freedom of thought and expression, meaning that they should not be subject to acts of force or fraud by private parties to interfere with that right. Further, the same believe that anyone engaged in commerce with the public should function as a public accommodation and offer their services to all and sundry. This just happens to be a very inconvenient opinion for bourgeoisie imperialists intent on silencing the proletariat to maintain their death grip on society.
To put it simply: Maybe if you'd just let people gripe away in peace on their little gossip forums you wouldn't have so many problems in the world.
Do you have evidence that Null knew about people organizing these on KiwiFarms and openly endorsed them or at least tolerated them? Do you have anything to confer upon him some kind of liability for the actions of his users other than "I don't like him so fuck him"?
> illegal in many countries
No one cares whether it's illegal in any random country. Other countries ban lots of things for utterly cretinous reasons.
Attempting to characterize a gossip column as a "harassment" site isn't working. The EFF is openly commenting now because people like you who are pushing that narrative have failed, and have managed to piss off all the wrong people. You might want to consider rethinking your position.
Some people have posted home addresses... just like some people have posted child pornography on Twitter. Does that mean Twitter is responsible for their actions? That is the key point that none of you seem willing to touch because you're desperate to latch onto any pretext to see KiwiFarms removed from the Internet. What is it you're so desperate to hide? What is it on there that you don't want people to read?
>Meanwhile the conservatives in the US are saying that corporations have a right to choose who they serve based upon their religious beliefs. See the SCOTUS Masterpiece Cakeshop ruling on whether they must serve a gay couple.
Unfortunately you are misinformed. The baker was quite willing to serve a gay couple. The Supreme Court never said the baker can not serve gays if he doesn't want to.
What the Supreme Court said is a baker cannot be forced to engage in an activity (gay wedding) that he disagrees with even if it is as remote as a baking the cake. The baker made it clear if they wanted a plain cake he would have sold it to them.
>Meanwhile the conservatives in the US are saying that corporations have a right to choose who they serve based upon their religious beliefs.
This gotcha only works when your opponent is pro business and you want them oppressed by businesses. However republicans are starting to turn anti-business. Take for instance the kerfuffle Ron DeSantis had with Disney.
Sure, conservatives have been pushing rights for conservative businesses.
But once those religious rights have been granted, it's possible for that pendulum to swing the other way.
Must a power company, say, give power to the NY State NAMBLA headquarters? That's the easy one.
The more complex one is arguing that the insurrection was against your religious beliefs (because your religion espouses non-violence), and then the power company could say cut off power to offices held by congress people that supported the J6 criminals?
The problem for me is that banning them makes them think that they’re correct. For many people who take hideous ideas to heart, they do so because they believe themselves to be under attack and fighting for “their people.” In this way, they attempt to justify themselves. By banning them, the attack is made more real. Don’t get me wrong, I dislike Nazis. They believe me to be inhuman. I just believe this to be the wrong strategic move.
The line isn't drawn at "literal Nazis", because for all the criticisms one can lob at KF it is clearly not dedicated to Naziism. It platforms Nazis, for sure, but if the argument is either that a large blast radius that hits a lot of non-Nazi content is acceptable or the old "well if you platform literal Nazis you are a literal Nazi, sorry" fallacy, it's not good.
I'd say KiwiFarms is about as "dedicated to torture" as say the tabloid industry (producers and consumers) is. Seems like a real stretch of language, really.
What constitutes a "Nazi"? I remember when people were up in arms claiming that Jordan Peterson (who I do not support) a Nazi and trying to get him deplatformed; there are countless other examples of people being branded as Nazis for being unpopular and distasteful.
So, I love reminding people of this -- when they dropped the "literal Nazis," they kept supporting ... ISIS Murder Sites. Videos where people were executed with detcord around the neck, toddler terrorists in training shooting people, people put in cages and set on fire. Cloudflare kept those sites up but hey "Nazis."
Now, if you're a reasonable human being, you would think that dumping political snuff video sites would take priority over Stormfront. It's just virtue signalling.
> The three-letter agencies just placed dozens and dozens of people (who decided to quit the CIA, NSA, and FBI in their 30s for some reason and change careers) in the executive suites of every social network.
Oh sorry, you're right. Here's an article[1] about Facebook, from the same outlet. With some cursory searching I couldn't find anything about other social networks hiring former three letter agency employees.
There was some good reporting on this issue in the Twitter Files. For example, Jim Baker, the general counsel at Twitter, used to work for the FBI. Musk fired Baker for his role in suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop story.
Kiwifarms isn't some kind of free voice of resistance or gazette, it's just a loose collection of volatile assholes who were banned from 4chan and reddit.
Doesn't change the facts. I hope they come for kiwifarms. I hope it's snuffed out quietly one day and never returns and all its miserable denizens will be forced to know a fraction of the discomfort they inflicted on others.
"Feeling attacked, users of Kiwifarms became even more aggressive. Over the last two weeks, we have proactively reached out to law enforcement in multiple jurisdictions highlighting what we believe are potential criminal acts and imminent threats to human life that were posted to the site."
Seems weird that you can't just google this, I mean it took me 30 seconds to do this.
> So you do realize that cyberstalking is a crime in US code: 47 U.S.C. § 223, right?
It seems pretty clear they're doing that, no?
You claimed people "might" be using the forums to commit crimes, now you're saying "it's pretty clear". Again, what actual evidence do you have to back these claims?
> Seems weird that you can't just google this, I mean it took me 30 seconds to do this.
I aware of this blog post by CloudFlare. However, I am not aware of any actual evidence or examples that substantiate the claims made in it. The operator of Kiwi Farms has publicly stated that he received no notice from either CloudFlare or law enforcement about the alleged threats. CloudFlare has also never provided any specifics publicly. In my opinion, the CEO was overruled and forced to remove KF, and that blog post is a transparent attempt to save face after beating his chest about never backing down.
) However, the rhetoric on the Kiwifarms site and specific, targeted threats have escalated over the last 48 hours to the point that we believe there is an unprecedented emergency and immediate threat to human life unlike we have previously seen from Kiwifarms or any other customer before.
> Fortunately US Code doesn't require violence for cyberbullying to be a crime.
This is conflating two parts of my message. You cited CloudFlare's blog post as an example how it's "pretty clear" that Kiwi Farms breaks the laws. My point is that the blog post is completely vacuous and no evidence or examples have ever been shared with the public or the operator of Kiwi Farms.
Matthew Prince received a massive backlash for this decision and he hasn't once been able to elaborate on what evidence they had. As mentioned, I believe it was merely a convenient excuse to justify backtracking on his definitive promise less than 48 hours later.
If he had evidence of something that constituted a threat to life, why didn't they share it with the operator of the Kiwi Farms so that it could be removed? If it was as damning and credible as he claimed, why did none of the authorities follow-up on it?
> and he hasn't once been able to elaborate on what evidence they had.
Would it be possible there's an ongoing investigation, and he was asked by authorities to not detail those posts for fear of letting them vanish in the wind?
My understanding is this is a common tactic used by law enforcement to prevent "spooking" the targets of an investigation.
Of course it's possible, though without evidence it's baseless speculation. I'm pretty sure the Kiwi Farms is protected by section 230, so unless the owner was personally involved in these threats to life (which I doubt) what reason would there be to keep them in the dark?
Only Matthew Prince can shed light on the truth, but if he hasn't by now I doubt he ever will.
The owner shed his Section 230 protections when he made posts directly involved in harassment of his victims that he has a personal beef with. Even the EFF's article says the site is full of crime and called on the cops to prosecute. This also means they won't defend your beloved website in court.
> The owner shed his Section 230 protections when he made posts directly involved in harassment of his victims that he has a personal beef with.
That's an interesting legal theory.
> Even the EFF's article says the site is full of crime and called on the cops to prosecute. This also means they won't defend your beloved website in court.
An organization making a claim is not evidence of the claim being true.
If I recall correctly those posts were all from new accounts, and were largely removed by moderators.
I mean, anyone can create a new account on HN and post "I am literally going to kill Joe Biden tonight", and perhaps they actually plan to do that too, and maybe they'll even pull it off, but that doesn't mean HN orchestrated a conspiracy to kill Joe Biden.
The general policy is "look, but don't touch", and while I don't really trust the userbase in general to adhere to that, the people running the site (mostly this Null guy, as near as I can tell) seem fairly dedicated to this.
Personally I think the internet wold be better without the site, but I also think there's a sore lack of nuance here, and people accept certainly dubious claims a little bit too readily (turns out not everything on the internet is the whole story, or even true in the first place).
Notably, the infamous picture taken outside of Keffals' alleged residence in Ireland was posted *on 4chan* by someone claiming to be a member of Kiwi Farms.
If they were actually a member of Kiwi Farms, why didn't they post it on the forums? The obvious answer, to me at least, is that they weren't, and they couldn't because KF had closed new user sign ups prior to that.
Now imagine if HN admins created a section explicitly purposed for posting Joe Biden's personal family information and stalking his family. That's what Kiwifarms actually is towards its victims.
Go look at the front page of the site. There is a section named "lolcow cults" and 4 major forum sections created by the admins naming specific victims by name. I don't think I can even link to it without getting my HN account banned.
Do you really want the answer, or was that a question hoping to shame me?
So if the biker bars are distributing child porn, or illegal drugs or guns, or using it as a place for conspiracy terrorism, then yeah, I say yes those corporations serving said bar should have a say. Particularly if the biker bar, e.g., violated the company's Christian morals.
More importantly, this is supported by case law, today.
The decisions of who a business chooses as it's customer is actively being challenged by conservatives in this country. See the Masterpiece Cakeshop ruling. In this case the decision was overturned on religious grounds.
I would bet a significant amount that if an electric company didn't want to serve a biker bar on religious grounds (particularly if there was active criminal activity), they probably would get away with it.
The last time I checked the constitution there wasn't a right to internet or electric or phone service. There was a right for religious beliefs, though.
> So if the biker bars are distributing child porn, or illegal drugs or guns, or using it as a place for conspiracy terrorism, then yeah, I say yes those corporations serving said bar should have a say.
For the sake of argument let’s change it from biker bar to a LGBT bar. Say some customers may be doing illegal drugs, and the CEO of the electric company (Known for his stance against illegal drugs) got wind of it. Like the biker bar, they were never afforded due process, and were never ordered to shut down in a court of law. Instead, the CEO orders his company to shut off the power; the reason being, he knows it must be true because a local reporter told him so. Not only that, a friend of his went to the bar and saw people doing drugs.
The bar gets no jury, no trial. A structure without electricity is considered uninhabitable, and the bar is forced to close down. Do you still think this is legal?
The Masterpiece ruling was a 7-2 decision. We can get into if/buts etc.... but the way I see it, common carrier status is a congressional law, not a constitutional one.
> More importantly, this is supported by case law, today.
The Supreme Court ruling was not on using religion as an excuse not to serve. Supreme Court ruling was an about the commission violating a rule on religious neutrality. It set no precedent for the substance of the original suit.
> I would bet a significant amount that if an electric company didn't want to serve a biker bar on religious grounds (particularly if there was active criminal activity), they probably would get away with it.
You would be wrong. Electricity is not “creating expression”, which is what the lower courts were ruling on.
> Zuckerberg would only censor speech about Facebook and himself personally.
Facebook is the mother of all censorship. Nudity, speech, political views just to name the top most. They only want people to post fluffy stuff on their website.
>This is purely an end run around the constitution, not the desire of companies to control speech.
Want an example of this type of end run being used in practice? Nearly a decade ago? Obama used banking access to do a similar end run around businesses deemed political enemies. Some to the good, weapons/ammunition sellers with uncertain scruples, payday lenders...[0] but for some reason I'm not super confident about its consistent use for the better..
Crap, sorry guys. Luckily the other commenter was right, he found the correct link. The third party hackernews app I'm using has weird behavior when I edit a comment causing my spacing to mess up (why no line break between quote and my comment) and it also caused the ... to no longer be considered part of the link. If anyone has a good rec for an iphone app for hn, i'd appreciate it.
What I'd like to figure out is how there are still so many Nazis despite readily-available facts that Naziism is racist delusions?
And how are countries like Germany still doing kinda okay despite making it illegal to do Nazi stuff? Isn't it a slippery slope directly from banning Naziism direct to North Korean-style authoritarianism?
"nazi" is a name people call those they don't like: mother in laws, their bosses, the school principal, political opponents...
it is used so often, it lost a real meaning.
It retains that meaning in 99.98% of political discourse: "[topic] is something I dislike and/or reminds me of something/someone I dislike, and it's the only way for me to express that my enemy is subhuman without sounding like a psycho fascist myself"
Well, right now there's a odd vogue to think that a healthy democracy does things like ban political parties (currently an active debate regarding the AfD in Germany), or embrace indigenous apartheid movements (NZ, Australia), or to cede sovereignty to unaccountable transnational elites that promise to protect you from the ravages of political misinformation (the EU as a whole.) I don't think these notions will stand the test of time, but we'll see.
For those of people who are wondering about the "indigenous apartheid", the poster is talking about co-governance, i.e. giving certain "typically local", economic and political powers to indigenous organizations. This has become recently become on-vogue to call "apartheid" in right circles.
I guess the people opposing co-governance are not very fond of following contracts, because at least in NZ the founding document/contract the treaty of Waitangi guaranteed a co-governance (and arguably the commonwealth for a long time ignored those obligations).
If many people believe that co-governance is undemocratic, what does "following contracts" have to do with anything? Frankly, why should New Zealand be forever bound by the treaty? Parliament is supreme, if they didn't want to follow the treaty they don't have to.
How many steps between that and the Māori having a casus belli to engage in open warfare?
Stuff like this may have a certain level of "might makes right" (similar question for Hawaii, although there it's obvious who would win in a fight) but not always (Irish independence at close to the peak of the British Empire, the Cod Wars, that the US didn't keep all of Mexico after the war, just Texas, Arizona, California, etc.)
> If they don't want to follow a treaty they should rescind it. Until then it is the law of the land and it should be followed.
Or not, as parliament is free to decide. I think my previous statement on parliamentary supremacy stands for itself. If you have something specific to talk about from that Wikipedia page, it's best that you spell it out for us.
> Its privileging a demographic with greater power under the law based on skin color. Thats apartheid
It literally speaking isn’t based on skin colour. In Australia (I think the situation in NZ is similar?) indigenous status is based on descent, identification, and acceptance by the community. Unlike the “blood quantum laws” which apply for Native Americans in the US, there is no minimum percentage of indigenous ancestry required. So you have people, the majority of whose ancestors are European, and who look physically indistinguishable from other European-descended Australians, but who have some indigenous ancestry, who choose to identify with that ancestry, and whose identification is accepted by a recognised indigenous community - they are legally indigenous. An indigenous person can have any skin colour, and due to trends in intermarriage and indigenous identification (which is optional), the distribution of skin colours is changing over time.
That's even worse though, isn't it? A racist policy favoring indigenous by blood could at least be justified by saying it's correcting for past racism in the opposite direction - however weak that justification is. But what you're describing sounds like granting privileged status to a club, membership in which is dictated by whether you identify with it, and existing members identify with you. Similar to privileging a religious group, but sans religion itself.
> That's even worse though, isn't it? A racist policy favoring indigenous by blood could at least be justified by saying it's correcting for past racism in the opposite direction - however weak that justification is. But what you're describing sounds like granting privileged status to a club, membership in which is dictated by whether you identify with it, and existing members identify with you. Similar to privileging a religious group, but sans religion itself.
I'm not necessarily defending these policies–just attempting to describe them accurately–if one is going to criticise something, it is important to accurately describe the thing to be criticised. This is an issue on which I have mixed feelings and can see both sides of the argument.
But to clarify, at least officially speaking, it is based on blood–it is not enough to simplify identify as indigenous and be accepted by a recognised indigenous community as indigenous, you also have to actually be of indigenous descent – a person with zero indigenous descent is officially speaking not indigenous, even if they identify as such, and even if a recognised indigenous community accepts them as such. The difference from American "blood quantum" laws, is there is no requirement for any minimum degree of indigenous descent – officially it doesn't matter if a person's ancestry is 100% indigenous or 1-in-256 indigenous – but officially a person with zero known indigenous ancestry can't be indigenous. In practice, people with extremely remote indigenous ancestry are unlikely to be able to find a recognised indigenous community willing to endorse their indigenous identification, but standards vary from community to community, and also change over time – sometimes it becomes a very political issue, with certain factions within a community advocating for much tougher membership standards than others, and so it can depend on the outcome of the political battle between those different factions.
In practice, Australia doesn't have any central list of "who is indigenous". Every agency makes that decision for itself. For statistical purposes, the government just uses self-identification, and doesn't require any evidence of descent or acceptance by a recognised community. When it comes to "affirmative action" (reserved jobs, admission to educational institutions, scholarships, etc) and voting rights in representative bodies (such as the "land councils" through which indigenous communities own land), agencies usually require more than just self-identification: generally a letter or certificate issued by a recognised indigenous community body (often a land council), although sometimes other forms of evidence can be accepted instead.
> No way this could possibly go wrong.
There is a lot of controversy in the Australian indigenous community over so-called "box-tickers", who identify as indigenous, despite having only very remote indigenous ancestry, or even no such ancestry at all. The requirement for a letter/certificate issued by recognised community can be a big hurdle for such people, although given the political controversies over the standards for issuing such letters/certificates (and even occasional allegations of corruption), we can't rule out the possibility that some people with zero actual indigenous descent have successfully obtained such letters/certificates. Officially speaking, such people aren't actually indigenous, but the system will treat them as if they were. However, there was a case (in NSW) a few years ago where a woman claimed to be of indigenous descent, and had her claim endorsed by her local land council, which then accepted her as one of its members – a competing faction on the land council insisted her indigenous ancestry was bogus, gathered evidence of her genealogy, filed a formal complaint with the state government agency which manages land councils, and successfully convinced that agency to revoke her land council membership.
Which makes it a little odd to separate out 'indigenous' as needing a separate legal or advisory entity doesn't it? What is the position of the 1% indigenous? It is referring to a culture contextualised by skin colour.
It's all signalling. In Australia there are support and administrative bodies at all level of government interacting with aboriginal communities (often failing for different reasons, mostly budget). A 'Voice' (which is still vaguely defined as having influence but no power) does not magically create harmony between the past and future, it only continues the divide.
We are stuck in a world of trying to simultaneously give back the 'old past' while carrying on as-is otherwise. That is impossible. We must work towards a common, prosperous and respectful future for all inhabitants that recognises and admits the things we can't undo or change. We are trying to have it both ways, and it will leave the divides strongly in place.
>Which makes it a little odd to separate out 'indigenous' as needing a separate legal or advisory entity doesn't it? What is the position of the 1% indigenous? It is referring to a culture contextualised by skin colour.
Weird how you seem to recognize what culture is, yet in the same sentence it means nothing more than sharing a skin tone
That's not what I said. I said the culture (for the sake of the referendum) is contextualised by skin tone, because if they showed lots of 'white' people as those they're bringing a voice to people would be confused and it gets messy. Which is my follow-on point about how they're trying to pretend it will somehow bring back a past that can't be brought back.
I'm not sure if skin tone really plays as big a role in the referendum as you suggest. If you look at who the biggest Indigenous spokespeople on each side are, some of them have darker skin and others paler skin, but most of them look like they have varying degrees of mixed Indigenous-European descent.
The idea that pale-skinned people can't be Indigenous is mainly one that exists on the political right. In 2011, conservative Murdoch newspaper columnist Andrew Bolt was found (in a civil, not criminal, proceeding) to have violated the Racial Discrimination Act by authoring a newspaper column arguing that pale-skinned people couldn't "really" be indigenous. [0]
By contrast, my local federal member of parliament is Dr Gordon Reid MP [1]. He identifies as Indigenous, but his skin tone is pretty similar to my own, and (as far as I know) my own ancestry is purely European (mostly Irish, with some English and Scottish too). But, Dr Reid belongs to our main centre-left party (Labor), and the Australian Labor Party has zero objection to pale-skinned people identifying as Indigenous
I don't think you are getting the point, which is how it is analyzed whether someone "is or isn't" 'indigenous' and a necessary element of that was the requirement that they have indigenous blood. So I don't get where you are coming from when you say you can't "identify" as indigenous - in the law, you needed to do both.
Ok I get what you're saying now. Still though, you can't exactly identify as such without the blood...
But this is the whole ludicrous thing; what are they actually identifying as?. Traditional landowners? Cultural martyrs? 'Aussie?' 'Neglected outsiders? It gets really tricky if they start to actually really dig into the problem.
It's like the argument is saying they're disadvantaged because they're not living their 'full modern Western life' while also supposing somehow 'we' will give back the old ways and apologise. Which is it? Hence I've been saying we need to work out what future 'Australian' is and all head towards that, as best we can. I don't even know what Australian culture is now, it's a mess of trying to be all cultures to everyone.
I don't think anything you asked follows logically. They seem like your personal political grievances, and I don't see why they are necessary questions to ask at all
I do see a potential problem: being accepted as Indigenous requires no minimum amount of ancestry; identifying as Indigenous is increasingly seen as a social benefit rather than detriment, and hence people with that ancestry (or even without it) will seek that identity out; some Indigenous community groups will try to limit access to an officially recognised Indigenous identity, but those who seek it will gravitate towards those community groups which are most generous in recognising it, and those groups will grow in power and influence as a result, producing a feedback loop which encourages lowering those barriers over time; intermarriage rates between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people are high (over 50%) – isn't the likely result of this that, in the long-term, more and more of the population will be Indigenous? It is one thing to argue for "affirmative action" for a minority which is only 2-3% of the population - what happens as it grows to 5%, 10%, 15%, 20%, etc?
It also potentially results in two groups of Indigenous people – one group with majority Indigenous ancestry, found mostly in remote/regional/rural areas, who experience a great deal of social deprivation; another group with minority (in some cases even only slight) Indigenous ancestry, found mostly in urban/suburban areas, who experience far less social deprivation. With all this talk of "closing the gap", counting both groups as "Indigenous" makes "the gap" seem smaller than it actually is, and if the second group is growing, that growth can create a false sense of progress of the gap being closed, even as little or nothing improves for the first group.
Meanwhile it creates stigma around Indigenous = disadvantaged which a) is a terrible way to label a group and b) ignores all the other disadvantaged people for the sake of signalling empathy the 'right' way.
When I said "no minimum amount of ancestry", I meant "minimum" as excluding "zero". So, a person with literally zero Indigenous ancestry, cannot be Indigenous by the official definition. However, if a person has non-zero Indigenous ancestry, the official definition doesn't care how slight that ancestry is.
Furthermore, the official definition is not phrased in terms of DNA, only descent. Many Indigenous communities object to the use of DNA testing in determining Indigenous status, and as a result it is mostly not considered in deciding these questions.
The official definition is ambiguous in using the word "descent" – while most commonly that is interpreted as "biological descent", it isn't clear that merely legal descent (as in legal adoption) is actually excluded. If an Indigenous person legally adopts a biologically non-Indigenous child (or has such a child through IVF, surrogacy, sperm/egg/embryo donation, etc), and the child is raised to identify as Indigenous, and their Indigenous community accepts that child as Indigenous – there is an argument they officially are Indigenous, and given the unresolved ambiguity in the official definition, I don't know how one can say that argument is incorrect. In practice, if the elders of their Indigenous community write a letter declaring them to be Indigenous, the government will very likely accept them (and their descendants) as such.
It has little to do with politics except how political parties (yeah both) will manipulate it. It's a societal issue. It's a pity everything is politics and polarisations these days.
If you mean ethnicity, why not just say "ethnicity"? Why call ethnicity "skin colour" if by that you actually mean ethnicity?
And if by "race" you mean something which is neither ethnicity nor skin colour, then that is a concept with very unclear applicability to contemporary Australia.
Finally, your needlessly hostile attitude is obnoxious.
were having a convo on a internet board, not having an academic debate. People say “skin color” colloquially when they mean the general concept of race/ethnicity. Is it not used like this in Australia?
The hostile attitude is because you decided to focus on a hyper-specific nuance that nobody cares about. And then write an entire essay about a non-point.
Its like if I were to focus in solely on you purposely misspelling “color” using non-American and then steer the convo into an endless quagmire about semantics. Can you see how obnoxious that would be?
> were having a convo on a internet board, not having an academic debate
I come to this website because it provides an opportunity for a level of discussion which is closer to an "academic debate" than a "convo on an internet board". If you find that obnoxious, maybe there is some other "internet board" out there which is more suitable for you.
> People say “skin color” colloquially when they mean the general concept of race/ethnicity. Is it not used like this in Australia?
You speak as if the "general concept of race/ethnicity" was identical in every country – it isn't. There are significant differences between how "race/ethnicity" is understood in Australia, and how it is understood in the US-to speak of just two countries. Do you understand those differences?
> The hostile attitude is because you decided to focus on a hyper-specific nuance that nobody cares about
Just because you don't care about a nuance doesn't mean nobody else does. Indeed, the comment you are complaining about was upvoted. And, I've posted many other comments just like the one you are complaining about in the 8+ years I've been here, and many of them have been upvoted as well.
> Its like if I were to focus in solely on you purposely misspelling “color” using non-American
There is a big difference between spelling differences between different Anglophone countries – which are trivial – and differences in how "race/ethnicity" is conceptualised in different countries – which are far from trivial.
> You speak as if the "general concept of race/ethnicity" was identical in every country – it isn't. There are significant differences between how "race/ethnicity" is understood in Australia, and how it is understood in the US-to speak of just two countries. Do you understand those differences?
Are you or are you not the one who misunderstood that distinction when you responded to my post using an American understanding of the phrase "skin color" (note the American spelling)?
> I come to this website because it provides an opportunity for a level of discussion which is closer to an "academic debate" than a "convo on an internet board". If you find that obnoxious, maybe there is some other "internet board" out there which is more suitable for you.
lol mate. An obsessive focus on a netcode assembly doesn't make people experts on political matters.
The political conversations on HN aren't deep. Actually, they're very superficial.
What's the phrase? "Performative erudition". You aren't having anything closer to academic debate than anywhere else. Let's call it "performative academia".
> Are you or are you not the one who misunderstood that distinction when you responded to my post using an American understanding of the phrase "skin color" (note the American spelling)?
Your comment was talking about Australia. There are significant differences in how Australians and Americans understand issues such as ethnicity, race and skin colour, and trying to apply American understandings of those topics to Australia doesn't make much sense – which is part of what my comment was trying to convey. But, rather than using this as an opportunity to learn about those differences – about which you don't appear to know anything – you just dismissed it as "irrelevant". If you aren't interested in understanding race/ethnicity/etc issues in another country, why are you commenting about them?
Well, to clarify, your comment did not explicitly mention any country. However, in the context of the conversation, it seemed to be primarily talking about institutions such as the proposed Indigenous Voice in Australia, and the Maori electoral roll in New Zealand; I don't think it was primarily talking about the US since "co-governance" is much less on the agenda there (and the existing institution of tribal governments would seem to cover much of the demand for it anyway). As such, you were talking about race/ethnicity issues in other countries, without appearing to have any understanding of the differences between how those issues are understood in those countries as compared to your own.
When they were actively blocked from governance for a long time and effectively blocked for most the rest, is it really apartheid to have Māori represent their views?
It’s also what was guaranteed in our founding document - depending on how you read it. That dubious piece of legal work managed to botch the key term ‘governance’ such that interpretation is required and it may, or may not guarantee Māori governance of the country.
Comparing NZ to apartheid South Africa is darkly funny. The oppression I face is underwhelming.
The word "harem" is derived from Arabic/Persian for "forbidden"; it was a place where men were not allowed, and thus a considered a safe space for the women within.
Little Boy turned actual little boys into carbon ash imprints on the concrete where they sat and ate lunch; it probably saved many more children from burning up in a sustained campaign of carpet-bombings.
To create a new power group to balance rights? It's unstable, but it also leads to things like "women, as well as men, get to vote" and "workers can organise their labour via trade unions, just as owners can organise their capital via shareholdings and loans".
That's quite a strong statement to just present as an axiom without even any evidence or premises leading to it. Can you justify this statement, or do we have to just accept it as an axiom?
It's one of the most common divide in philosophy and morals, and I think nobody is capable of changing their opinion, because this one question is fundamental in how a person sees the world.
Should you punish the children for what the fathers did wrong? Because whoever wronged the people are dead since long. The people who were wronged are dead since long. Do the children inherit the sins or the victimhood of their ancestors? Some say yes. They say to the youth: "Look how bad these people were treated long before you were born! Now it's your responsibility to settle the score and pay back."
Others say no. They say that nobody can be held responsible for the wrongs that other people have done, even if those people were their ancestors, or are considered their ancestors by modern measurements. The question is if somebody is to be seen as an individual and judged as an individual, or seen as a member of some tribe and judged as a member of that tribe.
It's worth to mention that things are usually seen in another way. What we're seeing right now is the end of christian morality, where a victim is held in high regard. This is not common through history or through the world. Once these kind of victim-revering morals don't exist anymore, the attitude will instead be: "Your ancestors were slaves, therefore you deserve to be a slave" or "My ancestors conquered your ancestors, therefore we have the right to treat you as we wish" and such awful things.
Comparisons with apartheid South Africa are not to be made lightly. Anyone who makes the comparison in this case is either extremely ignorant or simply trying to stir up pointless controversy. Any serious argument against the policy described in the linked article can only be weakened by such an absurd comparison.
Not really, because I wasn't arguing against the poster's opinion (as I don't know much about, or have strong opinions on affirmative action in New Zealand), but only the absurd comparison being used to support their argument. It's the sort of wild comparison that gets thrown around on hotheaded internet message boards but that would get you laughed (or heckled) out of the room in any serious discussion of the issue.
It's like a schoolboy calling their teacher a Nazi for putting them on detention. There's an abstract point of comparison (authoritarian behavior), but the differences in scale, severity and underling motivation are so vast that the comparison is absurd. If someone seriously wants to argue against this particular form of affirmative action – and knows what South African Apartheid actually was – then they don't make this comparison.
(Similarly, if you think a teacher is being too authoritarian with their students, you won't make your case any more convincing by making comparisons with crazed dictators.)
Unsurprisingly, we did try this for a decade or two. It was an extensive and expensive failure and is widely researched and written about [1].
A minor boost to Māori in a waiting list point scoring system for list prioritisation has caused a knee jerk dismissal of the scheme as we see here. Absent from the shouting has been a solution to Māori living shorter lives with worse health [2]. The new scheme also reduces the impact of race on list priorities, as noted at the end of this article [3]. Race is a couple of points out of 100, most being clinical.
The point scoring system is a small part of the large changes underway in the system at the moment. The moves are primarily towards more autonomy for Māori within the healthcare system [4]. The background to this is a recognised failure in the system after a successful court action claiming Treaty of Waitangi obligations were not being met. They weren’t and aren’t [5].
With knowledge of the situation and what’s going on, ‘apartheid’ is a pretty radical take. To my knowledge even the dog whistle politicians in an election year haven’t called new the scheme apartheid.
Update: yes, our dog whistle politics have gone there.
You need stronger arguments than misusing the term "racism".
Consider two hungry kids at lunch. Consider the difference between stealing the fruit from one kid's plate, and giving extra fruit to the other kid. Both are special treatment. Think about what you can see that's different in these two situations that you would call the same thing.
Actually, no. Treating people differently based on race, is by definition racism - discriminating against people on the basis of their race.
And your analogy is a poor one for what is happening in NZ with regards to healthcare. Healthcare is a limited resource, and what NZ is doing is letting race be a factor when triaged patients in an environment of limited healthcare resources. You could literally be sicker than someone else, but if you're the wrong race, the other person get treatment first.
So for your analogy, it's more like there are two kids. One hasn't eaten in 3 days, the other 2 days, but the one that hasn't eaten in 3 days is a member of an "oppressive race" (without having committed any oppression themselves mind you, just their ancestors), so the other one gets to eat first.
Patients are triaged for medical care, it's always been that way - it's based on medical need, with the sickest treated first, and those who are less sick wait.
The new system now prioritized people based on race. You could be sicker than someone else, but if you're the wrong race, you wait.
This doesn't "even up" anything. It penalizes people for being the wrong race.
You don't solve racism, by being racist. It's an absurd idea.
Your link echos exactly what I'm talking about. This is a statement from one of the hospitals.
“Capital & Coast and Hutt Valley DHBs are prioritising Māori and Pacific in our surgical scheduling processes. The patients’ ethnicity is taken into account along with their level of clinical urgency and the number of days they have been on the waiting list within a given clinical priority band. It is unlikely that any other patients will be significantly affected as a result of this work.” - media statement, May 2020
The last statement "it is unlikely any other patient will be significantly affected" is laughable.
The goal is to affect patients - prioritize a specific ethnic group, so either the change does nothing (then why do it at all?), or it prioritizes certain patients (and if it does it must deprioritize others).
You appear to have missed the bit about clinical need again. It’s in your quote.
It’s a points system, with something like 2 out of the 100 points relating to ethnicity, per the links.
No one is penalised for their race. Groups are promoted due to their race. This isn’t the same thing, though from the perspective of your ‘score 70’ patient, I do agree that it’s splitting hairs.
What’s important to the scenario though, is that at present, Māori and Pacific Islanders get seen less by specialists, less clinical tests, less treatment and then worse outcomes. They die several years earlier than their Pakeha peers. It’s incredible that this is acceptable, but here we are.
Māori and Pacific Islanders are being discriminated against by the system, it’s just that their race demerit points are not nicely documented.
So getting promoted on lists by a couple of points is an attempt to even it up via forced functionality.
I don’t think you and I are ever going to agree that positive description should be used.
Other things are being tried. Part of the massive and overdue restructuring that’s underway to our healthcare system is going to be interesting to watch. “In each local community, partnerships between Iwi-Māori Partnership Boards, Health New Zealand’s regional and district teams, and the wider community will ensure Māori voices are heard, embedded in plans and services, and that health equity for Māori is non-negotiable.” [1].
We will see how it goes. The structural changes so far have been rather painful and seem clumsy when viewed from my adjacent seat.
No one is penalised for their race. Groups are promoted due to their race
Promoting one group by very definition penalized other groups. You can't have one without the other.
What’s important to the scenario though, is that at present, Māori and Pacific Islanders get seen less by specialists, less clinical tests, less treatment and then worse outcomes. They die several years earlier than their Pakeha peers. It’s incredible that this is acceptable, but here we are.
That's fine, then fix those issues. It's bizarre that a lack of medical care in one group is solved by reducing access to medical care in other groups.
We aren't going to agree on this.
As I said, that's been attempted for decades, and zero progress has been made over decades with billion spent. If you have an idea that hasn't been tried or isn't being tried, Im sure they'd love to hear it.
I'd not come across this term before. Odd (for me) to see a special term used to describe something that I see in almost any story reported across a range of publications on any one day.
> right now there's a odd vogue to think that a healthy democracy does things like ban political parties (currently an active debate regarding the AfD in Germany)
this is based on the idea of streitbare demokratie[0]. Which basically states that the foundation of the state (bundestag, bundesregerung and courts) has the right AND duty to defend itself against parties/elements who wish to abolish the "freiheitlich-demokratische Grundordnung" (freedom/democratic foundation/order).
This concept actually is worked out in various different laws in the Grundgesetz.
It solves the problem of the paradox of intolerance quiet well in my opinion, and considering germany's history it is a very, very good system to have.
A parliament that cannot initiate legislation and not even completely refuse legislation introduced to the session. Very weird.
In UK analogies it's more like the house of lords except it has less revision power on the legislation before it.
First: this is still direct influence by the people.
Second: UK parliament theoretically has this power, but in practice private members bills are either trivial, filibustered, or both ("nurses should have free parking at the hospitals they work in"). In practice this is up to the government, and given how much of the uk government is "convention" rather than constitution, it's almost impossible to untangle it without at least a politics degree.
Third: can you name literally even one other trade agreement that tries? If there is one, and there may be, I've not heard of it.
It's a trade agreement; the democratic part is unusual, one of the rare (IIRC unique) examples where one has a mechanism for self-updating by the people of the counties in that agreement rather than by the government of whichever country happens to be biggest and most able to throw its weight around.
You're welcome to not like the details of the democratic mechanism within the EU; ironically this is in part because some of the member state governments thought that making the EU more democratic would usurp the sovereignty of the member states.
• The Vatican (a "country" on paper; but seriously?)
• The Sovereign Military Hospitaller Order of Saint John of Jerusalem, of Rhodes and of Malta (not to be confused with the country of Malta; this lot have no territory)
• The Organisation of African, Caribbean and Pacific States
• The African Development Bank
• The Andean Community (another free trade area)
• Both the Commonwealth of Independent States (former soviet bloc) and the Commonwealth of Nations (former British Empire)
• The International Olympic Committee
…
The list of organisations sending delegations is pretty big, even just limiting to the ones important enough to get into Wikipedia; you can probably find a whole bunch more of small ones.
The EU itself stopped pushing the "just a trading zone" lie a long time ago, back when they renamed from the EEC to the EC and then the EU. It literally advertises itself as a project to unify Europe into a single country ("ever closer union"), which unfortunately would be the death of democracy in Europe because the EU is a totalitarian system in which the civil service controls Parliament rather than the other way around.
It is also a FTA. And unlike most (all?) other FTAs, it has democratic elections. All the funky stuff it can do is tied into that democratic process, because that is what the member states wanted.
> into a single country ("ever closer union")
The former is not the latter.
> which unfortunately would be the death of democracy in Europe
Bothering with elections and MPs is a bizarro mirror-world way of doing that.
That aside: Turning the EU into a country would require a massive treaty change; there's no way at all to forecast what this might look like given it's not even on the horizon yet.
They weren't even able to give UK citizens in the EU a way to claim EU citizenship despite several politicians wanting to make it available, because "EU citizen" is really just a shorthand for "citizen of an EU member state" rather than a coherent thing in its own right.
> because the EU is a totalitarian system
I work near to Checkpoint Charlie, I've been to the DDR and Stasi museums; if you think the EU is "totalitarian" you don't know what those words mean.
The way you're using the word, I think 100% of all treaties would fail, given they are not (generally? Ever?) negotiated directly by parliaments.
The EU has elections and MPs, but doesn't have democracy. Same as a lot of non-democratic societies throughout history.
MEPs are pretty much powerless, which is why the EP fills up with joke candidates who think the EU should be abolished or who don't even bother turning up at all.
Turning the EU into a country would require a massive treaty change
Why? Since Lisbon was rejected the EU treaties have been "self amending" (i.e. worthless). The EU routinely goes beyond its treaty-granted powers without pushback. It just gave itself powers to censor things globally, a power that appears in no treaty.
Also the EU already has: borders, taxes, a civil service, an army, a spy agency, a diplomatic corps, law making powers that override all others, a flag, a national anthem, a president, a cabinet, a central bank, a currency and dozens of other country-like things I'm forgetting. It's already more than half way there.
if you think the EU is "totalitarian" you don't know what those words mean.
The EU is a totalitarian system; the freedoms you have today that didn't exist in the DDR are because the EU has not yet been able to completely subsume the post-war countries and institutions put in place by the allies.
Nonetheless the fact remains that the EU is not a real democracy. In a real democracy, elections mean things. Elections to the EU Parliament don't because the MEPs aren't empowered to change anything. This reality was made brutally apparent when the self-proclaimed Parliament was entirely cut out of the process of choosing the leader of the government. Instead you got vDL, someone with no history as an MEP and who didn't campaign. Why did she get the job? Nobody knows! The tiny number of people who theoretically made that decision point-blank refuse to tell anyone how it was made. That's way closer to DDR style leadership than democracy.
Who gets to decide who is a Nazi or a Communist? Maybe one day you'll be declared a Nazi for disagreeing with something the government in power decrees or even because some social group disapproves of your lifestyle. Definitions are powerful and recently, quite flexible to achieve desired goals of those who make themselves the arbiters of definition.
It's actually not very difficult to distinguish who nazis are.
I see all these arguments waxing poetic about how dangerous it is to... I don't know, give anyone power? As if we haven't had these debates before. We have concrete examples of policies and behaviors that are harmful on fascist/Communist (big C is important) levels. We can compare someone's rhetoric and actions to those of people who have done the kinds of harm we want to prevent. We can use reasoning to parse their arguments instead of reacting emotionally. People do this every single day.
If it's really your concern that we can't define what dangerous ideologies are, then educate yourself, because we can.
>It's actually not very difficult to distinguish who nazis are.
It's very difficult because calling someone "Nazi" means you get to attack the "Nazi". So people who want to attack others just call them Nazis to justify it.
It's happened a lot in US politics, but for an example everyone here can agree on, "Ukraine is infested by Nazis" was one of the excuses for Russia invading Ukraine.
> It's very difficult because calling someone "Nazi" means you get to attack the "Nazi". So people who want to attack others just call them Nazis to justify it.
Yeah, that's not true. That isn't something that happens.
I'd be surprised if you can find even one news article about a non-fascist being called a Nazi and then attacked and everyone being ok with it. Nazis don't get punched as often as they should.
Russia invading Ukraine is not a good example. Much of the rest of the world said "No, you're full of shit and we're sending Ukraine missiles." I don't think anybody has actually supported Russia's "anti-Nazi" justification, even those countries economically bound to Russia and unwilling to resist them. It's just something Russia said, that doesn't mean it worked.
Further, international invasions are extremely different from internal politics are extremely different from personal/public interactions. You're painting broad strokes as if the entire planet of 8 billion people has the same mindset that "you can call anyone a Nazi and attack them." That doesn't even make sense. We are talking about US culture.
Finally, I shouldn't even be replying since it doesn't seem you read the majority of my previous comment. I've already said this: we know what Nazis are. You can call anybody anything, but whether or not they're a Nazi depends on if they hold Nazi beliefs.
In some countries (Germany and Austria, for example), Nazi propaganda is illegal. And in those countries much stronger evidence is necessary to convict someone of it. Baseless accusations on twitter are unlikely to work.
The Communists invaded and occupied my country for 45 years. The Nazis invaded and slaughtered almost all of our Jews. We know very well who is a Nazi or a Communist.
We don't want another Holocaust or Gulag camps here ever again. I'm fine with restricting some speech. It's a small price to pay.
What if the billionaires behind those parties, who funded those "nazi" or "communist" parties, funded a party and gave it a different name. Would it be ok then?
Because of criminalizing "deadnaming" or in spite of it?
For those that don't know, so-called "deadnaming" "is the act of referring to a transgender or non-binary person by a name they used prior to transitioning, such as their birth name."
At this point, there's lots of books and CDs out there with 'deadnames' on the cover, and movies and games with them in the credits.
"Who directed 'The Matrix'?" probably shouldn't be a controversial question, let alone one with potential answers that are considered offensive or even illegal.
I guess the idea is to provide some shields to people making a transition, as they could suffer ostrisation or threats from people who have animosity against transgender.
Not everyone is a world famous artist that certainly can hire a whole team of body guard h24 all year around if they feel like it's appropriate.
I'm not aware of the the law in question. It seems strange to me to target specifically naming the person with this or that name, rather than cover the case in a more generic way like creating threats on someone's life or social integrity through public release of intimate information.
Intentionally insulting someone already is a crime under German law, so the only real question is why deadnaming is not already covered?
And these kinds of laws also exist in more extreme "free-speech" countries like the United States (where the guarantee of free speech doesn't cover, for example, libel).
Not to say that the US is a country of unrestricted free speech, but the standard of libel/slander is extremely strict in the US relative to most other countries.
You must make intentionally untrue statements with the intent to harm that causes harm.
The truth is a perfect defense. Even if you thought you were lying, you are protected. If you believe what you are saying, you are protected. If you did not know for certain that you said a lie, you are protected. If you did not mean to cause harm, you are protected. If no harm occurred, even if you tried to cause harm, you are protected.
The standard is extremely hard to reach, possibly even too hard, and it is clearly qualitatively different than most other countries.
I agree that the US is different from most countries in terms of how difficult it is to prove slander and libel. But I don't think your description is quite accurate. Then again, I'm not a lawyer.
> The truth is a perfect defense. Even if you thought you were lying, you are protected. If you believe what you are saying, you are protected.
IIUC the truth is a perfect defense in most states, but in some states maliciously stated truths (insults, more or less) can be defamatory. For example, see Johnson v Johnson in Rhode Island, where one Clifford Johnson was required to pay compensatory damages for (more or less accurately) calling his ex-wife a "[redacted] whore" in public. (He was also initially ordered to pay punitive damages, but that was reversed on appeal.)
> If you did not know for certain that you said a lie, you are protected.
I don't think this is the case in most states. If you say something with reckless disregard for the truth, it can be defamatory.
> If you did not mean to cause harm, you are protected.
I think this is typically only true of defaming public figures.
libel and "insulting someone" in the sense of using slurs of defamatory remarks aren't obviously the same thing as referring to them by a previous name.
I'd be very surprised if the German law (if actually policed) expands to anything an individual might be insulted by, especially if the offense is one of self image.
Fixed that: "That should not [need to] be a criminal offence."
Much like many other things. But, alas, we do not yet live in a world where people treat each other with even the simplest basic respect and we have to force the issue via laws.
Should it be a criminal offense to call someone a useless layabout who will never amount to anything and should have been aborted?
I worry that we've started to use the ponderous blunt government legal system more and more widely for things that used to be resolved via society and community censure. The law should be restricted to the most serious and large scale community disrupting acts, not for policing every bit of cheating, insults and lying. It's very unsuited for the latter.
Worth noting that kiwifarms only negatively harms people who don't read it via the statoshistic terrorism mechanism.
Which would also apply to places like pre-Musk Twitter, reddit, tumblr and Facebook (and indeed every social media site), all of which have lead to targeted and sustained harassment of people, often for things they didn't actually do.
What is the 'community' in this case? The entire globe, all Internet users?
On a local scale, 'community censure' may work well. But not so much on a global scale, where a few determined activists anywhere in the world have the power to get a person fired, take away various online accounts or services, or maybe even have their banking services removed, all over issues of 'speech', with no due process.
The community of network operators exchanging routes over BGP. Get yourself an ASN and some IP space and join us! At the end of the day, the Internet is a collection of independent networks, interconnected voluntarily when there is mutual benefit to doing so.
And I think I agree that is the right level for this sort of thing to take place, even if I might disagree with both the specific decision and whether this sort of entity (monopoly level ISPs) should be able to make that decision.
Community standards cannot exist in a diverse multicultural society because there no longer is a broad agreement on what those standards should be. Even things as basic as prohibitions on murder have various different "well, in this particular situation" exclusions that differ by culture. So anything that used to be community enforced now has to be elevated to legal enforcement, with some cultures disadvantaged and others favored by the choice of what the government will enforce on all regardless of individual cultural standards.
Or we can let different communities and cultures keep their different social norms and accept a bit of friction/"injustice" when people from one culture interact with another.
I think it depends on where (or even if) you draw the line on free speech when it comes to verbal harassment.
Here's a quick test. Let's say Bob goes for a walk, but Bob's neighbor, John, is a complete dick and whenever Bob leaves his house to go for a walk, John follows him and just hurls non-stop insults at Bob.
Should John's behavior be illegal? You could argue that as long as he's not trespassing anywhere, and he has the right to free speech, then John should be legally allowed to do this. In that case, it makes no sense to make deadnaming a criminal offense. There's no discussion to be had, as we've decided that asshole-ish speech is not illegal.
If you say no, it's verbal harassment, and should be illegal, then you're saying free speech does have limits, and we just gotta decide if deadnaming is bad enough to be illegal.
John's behavior already is illegal in most Western jurisdictions. Your example does not demonstrate why deadnaming in particular needs to be a criminal offense.
Political harmony is a problem if forced, but a common vision shared by much of society is a strength if arrived at through healthy, intellectually honest debate.
Political debate is fine and healthy, but it should not be possible to end a debate by being louder, more obnoxious and more ready to do violence than the other debaters.
Of course, but having lived in a lot of “politically harmonious countries” I’ve noticed it’s not harmonious due to some universal belief in the political system, but a combination of political apathy, learned helplessness, political oppression (often subtle) or some cultural belief that you don’t question leaders or that they possess some special attributes that no one else does.
It sure seems strange to want to fight for your right to be deliberately rude to someone. If someone says they want to be Stephen instead of Stephanie, choosing to continue calling them Stephanie is just being a dick for no reason. It's one thing if you've known them for years and so breaking the habit of calling them Stephanie is hard, but when that happens, you apologize and call them Stephen.
While I agree that making it a crime is a bit over the top, it's just not a good look to complain about it.
Do you have a handy link, btw? I did some searching and all I can find is their new "self-determination" law reported by AP[1], and their report doesn't mention deadnaming. The only places I can find saying that deadnaming will be fined are your standard right-wing transphobic nutjobs.
[2] (with an NSFW header image) explains that it only covers "[deadnaming] with the aim of harming the person" which is completely different from "deadnaming [is] a crime", right?
Germany treads very lightly when it comes to limiting speech, even for Nazi things.
They have plenty of far-right racist groups that model themselves after the Nazis.
As long as you don’t display the swastika gratuitously (there is no blanket ban), you’re quite free to organize a racist political party and takes seats in the government.
Hell, there are still SS alumni groups in Germany. They arent banned.
>As long as you don’t display the swastika gratuitously (there is no blanket ban), you’re quite free to organize a racist political party and takes seats in the government.
"Considers" can mean someone had an idle thought about it. It can also mean that the full apparatus of the government is able to do something, and is allowed by its own rules to do so, and just hasn't yet. This "considers" is the second kind.
But it still proves the point - association with Nazism is not outright banned in Germany. The law is actually quite delicately applied after much consideration.
American playwright and humorist C.J. Hopkins, profiled in this space on numerous occasions, has been sent a “punishment order” by a German judge, offering him a Sophie’s Choice of 60 days in jail or 3,600 euros.
His crime? Essentially, insulting the German health minister in a tweet, and using a scarcely-visible image of a Swastika on a mask in a book critical of the global pandemic response, The Rise of the New Normal Reich.
They're literally punishing a guy for calling someone else a Nazi due to their political policies, under anti-Nazi laws. It's the wrong way around but they don't seem to care, the victim in this case was protesting against their COVID laws so down with those sorts.
Also remember the EU just handed itself the power to force tech firms to globally censor anything the EU decides is misinformation, which in practice appears to be anything that disagrees with their policies or ideology.
> despite readily-available facts that Naziism is racist delusions?
A lot of people on the right are talking about the US having a mental health crises when it comes to mass shootings. If that's really true, then yeah, that's how we get natsies.
> Isn't it a slippery slope directly from banning Naziism direct to North Korean-style authoritarianism?
Well I mean if there's a mental health crisis then yeah, people are going to say that. I personally don't think the founding fathers of the US understood the future gullibility of their citizens.
> I personally don't think the founding fathers of the US understood the future gullibility of their citizens.
They absolutely did. When only white, male, decently educated property owners could vote, they had decent reassurance that a constitutional republic with state-specific voter management could work.
I think they'd be horrified to see that today we don't even demand a basic proof of civics education. And I hate that Ramaswamy made that suggestion in such an embarrassing, conversation-poisoning way.
I'm not saying you're wrong, I just think the founding fathers could not anticipate the world we have today.
The problem of course being that intelligence tests were used in the 60's to deny voting rights. But the founding fathers were okay with slavery, so would they have been okay with that for that purpose?
Originalism has a purpose I think, but, we've changed so much since then...
Then why didn't they write the founding documents so that black people would be free and women and black people could vote? Would have saved us a lot of conflict over the years.
Because it would have tore up the social and economic fabric of significant parts of the US. The Founders were ahead of their time, but they still recognized that the vast majority of their countrymen were not.
Because, at the time, those beliefs were not universal, and a compromise was made as formation of the Republic would likely not have happened otherwise.
All the writings of the Founding Fathers are free and publicly available. You can learn all about it.
That might explain the document, but that doesn’t explain some of them keeping slaves themselves. Jefferson even went on to be president and while he did things to restrict the trade, he kept slaves and opposed some measure to restrict slavery (for reasons much as you describe).
Like any subject, I’d you want a respectable understanding it’s going to take some commitment to studying key documents, not just reading. A few quotes.
You don’t get smarter reading a few 140 characters tweets.
I have been convinced for a long time that a test of basic civics and current events is a necessary (and possibly a sufficient) condition to fix most of the failings we see in representative democracy, but the Overton window is nowhere near it, and Ramaswamy is hardly the candidate I'd want proposing it.
The whole question and answer bank could even be given out online or in print cosr free - my bar is pretty low.
> a test of basic civics and current events is a necessary (and possibly a sufficient) condition to fix most of the failings we see in representative democracy
Currently I would suggest that most of the failings in, e.g., US democracy are coming from the Republican party and I'm pretty sure most of them will have passed a test of basic civics, etc., yet are demonstrably bad at governance.
Are you saying white male educated property owners can’t be gullible? Have you been to Marin county?
The founding fathers certainly did assume there were gullible voters even among the select few who could vote.
Protections such as the Constitution itself (that old archaic document!), the Senate, supermajorities, an independent legislative, executive and judicial, etc, etc.
I laugh when people say “Congress is deadlocked! It needs to be fixed!”. No, it’s working exactly as intended.
We need score voting. Being able to express a preference for a third candidate without danger of flipping the election would fix quite a bit. Unfortunately doing so currently is more useless than using the ballot as toilet paper.
Actually, implementing score voting (or approval or STAR or Majority Judgement) should incentivize all the candidates to move toward the majority opinion. The problem isn't the candidates, it is what platforms the current system pushes them to adopt. If we changed to any of these MaxVoting methods today, you would see majority opinion platforms emerge as the lead platforms within a year.
> What I'd like to figure out is how there are still so many Nazis
There are always going to be people who are fearful and ignorant and looking for a convenient external something to blame their problems on. There are also the people who are raised with those views and others who feel excluded and find a place to belong with a group of "outsiders". I don't think we can ever get rid of racist ideologies. We've evolved to be tribal and distrustful of outsiders and some will struggle with those feelings more than others. We're always going to struggle with racism and that's going to include Nazis. That doesn't mean we're powerless against them, but censorship and oppression certainly isn't the solution.
> And how are countries like Germany still doing kinda okay
Germany is not okay. Personally, I think Germany takes things way too far and that state censorship really is dangerous, but I also recognize that they've been in a very difficult position since the end of the war. I can't really fault them for over-correcting, but I do feel for the German people who have to live under unjust laws.
To their credit they've also relaxed a bit over the years. For example, they lifted the ban on Mein Kampf and it flew off the shelves (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-38495456) not because the country was full of secret Nazis this whole time just waiting for it, but because the German people strongly desire freedom.
It's worth noting that even in Germany and other EU counties that gave up basic freedoms in an effort to oppose racism there are still racists. Innocent people get hurt by oppressive laws and racists gain a talking point for recruiting that resonates with a lot of people. It's a lot easier to feed into a person's victim complex when they're actually being oppressed.
> To their credit they've also relaxed a bit over the years. For example, they
> lifted the ban on Mein Kampf and it flew off the shelves (https://www.bbc.com
> /news/world-europe-38495456) not because the country was full of secret Nazis
> this whole time just waiting for it, but because the German people strongly
> desire freedom.
Factually wrong take. Mein Kampf was never "banned", in fact, there is no such thing as book bans under German law, as there is no censorship - article 5 of the Basic Law explicitly says so. The state can make it illegal to sell and advertise media to minors if it is considered dangerous, and Mein Kampf is and always was on that list.
The reason Mein Kampf could not be distributed until a few years ago is because after Hitler's death, the copyright on Mein Kampf fell to the state of Bavaria (for convoluted reasons), and Bavaria just never reprinted it, nor gave license to reprint it. Therefore, any copying of the book was piracy and was prosecuted under piracy laws. Because German copyright ends 70 years after the death of the author, this no longer applies, and the book can be printed and distributed again.
Note that public distribution of the book for nazi propaganda purposes is still banned under German hate speech laws ("Volksverhetzung") - not because it is this particular book, but because all nazi propaganda in public is blanket banned. This is why the now-released official Bavarian-government-approved copy of Mein Kampf contains additional commentary by historians to situate Hitler's remarks in historic context.
Just when you may have thought things couldn’t get any crazier: American playwright and humorist C.J. Hopkins, profiled in this space on numerous occasions, has been sent a “punishment order” by a German judge, offering him a Sophie’s Choice of 60 days in jail or 3,600 euros.
His crime? Essentially, insulting the German health minister in a tweet, and using a scarcely-visible image of a Swastika on a mask in a book critical of the global pandemic response, The Rise of the New Normal Reich. He was first accused of this “crime” in June, shortly after Roger Waters was placed under investigation for wearing his clearly satirical “Pink” costume in a stage performance in Berlin. As I wrote when C.J. was charged weeks later, authorities claim that through the use of the mask image, C.J. was “disseminating propaganda, the contents of which are intended to further the aims of a former National Socialist organization.”
> The reason Mein Kampf could not be distributed until a few years ago is because after Hitler's death, the copyright on Mein Kampf fell to the state of Bavaria (
Bavaria used copyright to enforce an "unofficial" ban on the book. It's ridiculous to try to paint the situation as one where Bavaria just never got around to reprinting it.
This was of course intentional, but you incorrectly claimed that
> To their credit they've also relaxed a bit over the years. For example,
> they lifted the ban on Mein Kampf
This just never happened. No ban was ever lifted. This does not show some change in the German mindset towards being more tolerant of Nazi speech, as you insinuate. The copyright expired - that is all.
If you'd like another example where German citizens are being subjected to less censorship, the restrictions on Nazi images in video games have been somewhat lightened. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-45142651
As mentioned above, the USK cannot "censor" games, it is responsible for deciding which games (or other pieces of media) are considered "harmful for the youth" (and by the way, it is a public-private partnership, not a government body). Games considered "harmful for the youth" (i.e. games that are, colloquially, "auf dem Index") may by law not be distributed or advertised to minors. They may still be imported, sold, and otherwise distributed, as long as care is taken that they are only distributed to people of age.
Because it's essentially impossible to ensure that any particular advertisement will only be seen by adults, this however means that games not approved by the USK may practically not be publicly advertised at all. Because game publishing companies have a strong incentive to be allowed to advertise their games, they will often self-censor to ensure USK approval. This is done for commercial, not legal reasons; if the companies didn't want to advertise their games, they wouldn't have to abide by USK guidelines.
It is also illegal to advertise tobacco in Germany, and it is also illegal to sell tobacco to minors. Unless you believe that this constitutes a "tobacco ban" in Germany, it is hard to argue that video games are "banned" under this law.
That said, the 2018 change in USK policy that allows video games showing anti-constitutional symbolism to still be approved as long as the message is clearly anti-nazi is still perfectly reasonable, and probably a good development, as it aligns USK policy in this regard with policy that it previously took on other media.
> This is done for commercial, not legal reasons; if the companies didn't want to advertise their games, they wouldn't have to abide by USK guidelines.
That's a ban by any reasonable standard. That's like saying that a requirement that churches be built on the moon wasn't banning churches, or a requirement that Jews who own businesses pay a 95% tax isn't a ban on Jews owning businesses. In some technical sense it's not a complete ban, but if the government says that if you do X, you face so many restrictions that you'd go broke, that's defacto a ban. It's an excuse made by people who like to pretend that they're not getting their hands dirty by literally banning something, while banning it in practice.
There's a huge difference between regulating drugs or the ad industry and censoring artistic works and Germany has a long history of censoring artistic works including video games intended for adult audiences. They can call it whatever else they want but when the people of Germany are unable to access art in its original form, if they are even able to access it at all, strictly because of what that art depicts that's censorship.
In the US we have our own problems with censorship. I've had to track down copies of video games released overseas to get uncensored versions myself. Censorship in art is a huge problem, but it's a lot more dangerous when people can't even recognize when it's happening.
Pretty much sums it up. Also of note is that Germany already had and still has laws against numerous forms of speech, most notably anything that could threaten the public order, which you could mold into a justification to basically stop any speech. The only thing preventing that isn't a law, it is the overall political culture. But with polarization rising, it can quickly become more serious.
Most of these laws stems from a time where monarchy wanted to suppress unsanctioned speech.
The Nazis made a lot of political capital because people wanted them banned and censored. Of course that was just political play and they set new standards for suppression of information and propaganda, but that came after they got into power.
> Also of note is that Germany already had and still has laws against numerous forms
> of speech, most notably anything that could threaten the public order, which you
> could mold into a justification to basically stop any speech.
Germany has no laws against "anything that could threaten the public order". This is just unsubstantiated nonsense.
There are laws against hate speech: "Volksverhetzung", a more direct translation: "incitement of the people", i.e. hate speech with the intent of causing mob violence or the persecution of minorities. There are also laws against disrupting the public order: "Erregung öffentlichen Ärgernisses", so "causing public offence", but those don't really target speech, they're more about taking your pants off in public and peeing on the sidewalk.
Also, neither of those laws are from the time of the monarchy.
> The Nazis made a lot of political capital because people wanted them banned and
> censored. Of course that was just political play and they set new standards for
> suppression of information and propaganda, but that came after they got into
> power.
The Nazis also made a lot of political capital because people didn't ban them for democratic and free-speech reasons. As Goebbels, the Nazi's chief propagandist, himself said:
> Wir gehen in den Reichstag hinein, um uns im Waffenarsenal der Demokratie mit
> deren eigenen Waffen zu versorgen. Wir werden Reichstagsabgeordnete, um die
> Weimarer Gesinnung mit ihrer eigenen Unterstützung lahmzulegen. Wenn die
> Demokratie so dumm ist, uns für diesen Bärendienst Freifahrkarten und Diäten zu
> geben, so ist das ihre eigene Sache.
Translation:
> We enter the Reichstag [Weimar Republic parliament] to stock ourselves with
> weapons from democracy's own arsenal. We become assemblymen of the Reichstag to
> take down the spirit of Weimar with its own support. If democracy is so stupid
> to supply us with hall passes and diets for this disservice we do to it, then
> that is its own problem.
Your entire comment is a great example of the bullshit asymmetry principle.
There are also laws against "gross mischief". While the legal definition is more precise than the term might imply, you can be certain that such laws exist.
I picked the example because it can collide with freedom of speech as you can imagine. If you demonstrating something and your placard is seen as insulting, the police can force you to take it down.
Laws against speech like "Volksverhetzung" were already in place in the late 19th century. The monarchy was ended in 1918. There is a constant with laws restricting speech and it is mostly those in power just wanting to do so. That was mostly the case in Germany.
> As Goebbels, the Nazi's chief propagandist, himself said
Perhaps he said that so people start to destroy democracy themselves. He had a knack for propaganda and fooling people.
For one thing the "Nazis" in the US aren't actual Nazis no matter how much they desire to be. German has banned things that deal with the ACTUAL, real Nazis which were a part of Germany. Germany hasn't banned racism and the reality is that Germany is quite racist. If judging by US standards Germany would be off the charts racist. Even Berlin, Germany's most diverse city is still > 80% white.
> When a person uses a room in a house to engage in illegal or just terrible activity, we don’t call on the electric company to cut off the light and heat to the entire house, or the post office to stop delivering mail. We know that this will backfire in the long run. Instead, we go after the bad guys themselves and hold them accountable.
Although your points are valid in some sense, I don’t see how they respond to any claims of the article.
That's fine when you have the jurisdiction for doing that. In your example, there is a house with people in it doing something illegal. That's within the realm of law enforcements and courts.
A better example is robocall spam. Most of it comes from overseas. That is incredibly difficult to do about directly. The only effective way to go after it is with the exchanges that transmit and essentially "launder" the spam traffic, cutting them off if necessary.
KiwiFarms openly engages in and faciclitates harassment and doxxing. It's absolutely the right thing to do to limit its reach and availability.
Actually robocalls are a good example too where we don’t need to remove our privacy for less scam calls. Admittedly, allowing others to listen in to all calls is a solution, but what a trade off it is to allow that.
I learned recently about SnorCall [1] which is IMO a pretty ingenious solution to the problem. The idea is to have a bunch a phone numbers allocated to listening on incoming calls. They record what they listen to and an algorithm will do some speech to text translation then another categorises the call as spam or not. These calls have a huge amount of variation and anyway the incoming number can be spoofed so that number is not interesting. The ingenious part is that often scams will have a call to action and then will give a number to call back. And that number is not spoofed since a real person must answer. And the tests show that a lot of scams actually use the same call back number, making it it easier on law enforcements to act upon those registering that phone number.
Anyway, my point is just that we should try to think outside the box before accepting to decrease our privacy. We usually have a very hard time to get it back.
“Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them…”
“… In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols.”
Karl Popper was a free speech absolutist. His point was that every form of speech should be countered with speech, not "deplatforming" or laws criminalizing it. I wish he was alive to see people mangle his thoughts into “He actually was against tolerance and said to jail your political enemies.”
> In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument
The problem is that we can't. The "marketplace of ideas" that many people imagine exists, can only exist when people are interested in honest debate and evaluation of their own ideas in the face of honest counterpoints and robust exchange.
If we should learn anything from the last several years of widespread internet noise, it's that honest, open-minded debate is a minority sport. The disingenuous propagation of bullshit in furtherance of either a dollar or an agenda, is far more popular.
He most definitely was not a free speech absolutist. The very quote you include makes that clear:
> But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force
The quote says rational argument and discourse is the preferred option but there will be times when all rational argument will be rejected and that may require suppression.
He’s talking about violent groups who aren’t attempting to have discourse at all, and are attempting to use force to muscle their views on society.
Again you’ve selectively quoted and ignored that the people he says need to be suppressed are those who “begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols.” I.E. "intolerance" here should not be read in a vague sense but specifically means "people who won't tolerate hearing a contrary argument".
Popper's definition of "intolerance" is literally the thing that you’re doing: prima facie denunciation of all argument, and instinctively responding to undesired speech by trying to shut it down. He's literally saying "the only people we should silence by force are the people who refuse to argue and insist on silencing us by force" and somehow you’ve decided he's saying: "we should silence anyone who argues with us by force".
He goes into further detail over several hundred pages in a book nobody who parrots “the paradox of tolerance” has ever read.
Few things are more inhumane, abhorrent, vile, digusting, and sickening as war. Yet every ISP permits news businesses to spread content about, and even promote, wars. Clearly they do not actually object to "offensive" content, but are cherry-picking to suit their own ideology.
Why is trust the default here? If governments, ISPs, and other tech entities behave this way in a single instance, why assume that it's the only instance? Why not just migrate the infrastructure to a country like Belarus and strip away the leverage of whatever shitty jurisdiction you're living under?
I'd argue that there are legitimate safety concerns that trump speech in this particular case.
But I think EFF would have a stronger case if we had common carriers following net neutrality laws. Content decisions are in the hands of upstream ISPs because we don't have the right regulations in place.
EFF has clearly tried here. The case is strong. But it's the edge cases where we need the net neutrality regulations most.
>I'd argue that there are legitimate safety concerns that trump speech in this particular case.
What makes HE well-positioned to be able to determine what constitutes a "legitimate safety concern"? What happens when a pro-life organization or a corrupt politician starts leaning on ISPs to enforce their own views of what constitutes a "legitimate safety concern"?
Cloudflare denied service to KF on an imminent threat to people's lives, which could have been justified on a short term basis. Their refusal to reinstate service months later strains the credulity of this rationale, and shows that it was never really the goal.
I'm going to guess that if we ever get a post-mortem on what really is happening inside HE, what we'll find is not "a well-reasoned, dispassionate debate occurred and a consensus was reached in favor of censorship". Instead it will be like "someone powerful in the company made a unilateral decision and dissent was absent because everyone understood that it would have negative career consequences."
I don’t think HE should be making that decision, especially in an upstream role—and the fact that they’re in that position points at a need for regulation.
However, I would argue that KF is a long-term threat whose imminent dangers were honestly a very narrow lens that barely appeased a company that shouldn’t have been making the call in the first place. Their position in last year’s debate created a very volatile atmosphere for a solid month—a situation which would be volatile once again if brought back.
The Constitution would not provide a carveout for the long-term censorship of a forum like KF based on some rationale like "creating a volatile atmosphere", so I don't know what you expect regulation to accomplish here. And of course activists would scream if such regulation were applied in a viewpoint-neutral fashion (eg. platforms being mandated to delete content that advocates for crime / violence - imagine how Trump would've used this power during the BLM riots!) - the non-neutrality is considered a feature of private censorship, not a bug.
Yes, well, that's the beautiful thing about common law - we still have a pretty clear understanding of what constitutes free speech, and it's largely invariant to whether the means of communication is through the internet or a medium that was more-familiar to the founders.
I think it's fine for the ISP to police online speech over their network as long as it's clearly stated in their service agreement that they can cancel/interfere with your service if they think you're too mean and as long as they also lose all safe harbor and assume liability for everything transmitted over their network.
> When a person uses a room in a house to engage in illegal or just terrible activity, we don’t call on the electric company to cut off the light and heat to the entire house, or the post office to stop delivering mail. We know that this will backfire in the long run. Instead, we go after the bad guys themselves and hold them accountable.
Although I see your point, the quote above made me switch to thinking it’s not okay.
And we also can't sue the electric company whenever someone uses the electricity they provide to post a scam on Craigslist, which is the sort of liability I'm saying the ISP should assume before they're allowed to start mucking about with their customers' traffic.
If you lived next door to a house that had become a drug spot, would you find it acceptable to call the landlord, tell them what's happening, and then ask them to investigate and evict? I sure would.
Why would you call the landlord instead of the police? I'll tell you why you needed to do it for this metaphor - because Kiwi Farms doesn't break any laws and "drug spots" do.
Now, we're deputizing landlords. If that isn't the perfect public-private partnership, I don't know what is.
Who is 'deputizing' a landlord? The police are going to be much slower and ineffective in dealing with the problem than the landlord is, and why shouldn't a landlord take into consideration the effect their renters have on the neighbors in deciding who to rent to.
I think perhaps your comment was misunderstood (hence the downvotes), but I think it was a fair take. If a company wants to engage in arbitrary (and especially partisan) censorship then they should not be afforded safe harbor. Why should safe harbor be granted to a company which allows hate speech from one group, but actively censors identical speech from another group? By doing so they create an actively hostile atmosphere toward one group or another, and they are no longer "simple carriers", but active participants.
If I can't have full, unfettered free speech, then it's the end of the world.
Let's put aside the slippery-slope arguments. The real world is messy, with ridiculously obscure corner cases that make blanket statements and policies practically impossible to operationalize without significant collateral damage.
Shouldn't a more realistic approach be something like "give me speech as free as is possible", with considerations that are negotiable, such as, "does this speech promote destroying the institutions on which the speech itself is based on", etc...
As an extension of the Spolky-ism that all non-trivial abstractions are leaky, all production systems have edge and corner cases that can't (or shouldn't) be contained within a blanket uniform policy.
Yeah, it's messy. But, as with many regulations written in blood, there are legitimate use cases where exceptions to blanket policies and statements are better to include than not include.
> considerations that are negotiable, such as, "does this speech promote destroying the institutions on which the speech itself is based on"
That's not a considerable negotiation. Give people power and they will use literally every single bit of it and then some. ISPs should have absolutely no say, in any way, of what people do. They shouldn't even be able to know anything about what I'm doing past what is needed for the ISP to function.
> Give people power and they will use literally every single bit of it and then some
This is going back to slippery slope argument issue.
What makes you think there isn't pushback to create an equilibrium of policies?
Why does it necessarily need to be one-sided, where giving in to one iota entails giving in to the whole enchilada?
Complex systems entail dialogue and pushback across competing incentives and motivations. Yes, each side works on the basis of self-interest, but what is to say that giving one inch necessarily entials giving up entirely, unless the original premise is that one cannot give up anything (i.e., uncompromising by definition). That doesn't seem to scale in any real-world system, only ideal systems.
> Why does it necessarily need to be one-sided, where giving in to one iota entails giving in to the whole enchilada?
Because every single time this is what happens. Your argument basically comes down to creating some speedbumps to slow down how long it will take, not whether it will or not create the same predictable outcome.
I'd rather not live in a place like the UK where SWAT teams do over-night raids of peoples houses because they tweeted something mean. The sort of situation I'm sure people said would never happen when the ball got rolling decades ago.
That's the government, not the ISP taking a look at the "traffic" though. If some random british ISP decided to censor twitter, who'd care to stay?
As long as there's a split between powers and a choice, there's just as little need to restrict that as there is to restrict how for example spam filtering works.
> ISPs should have absolutely no say, in any way, of what people do. They shouldn't even be able to know anything about what I'm doing past what is needed for the ISP to function.
Up until the point you become disruptive to the service, other customers or third parties for ex. DDoS attacks.
Absolute statements like these are silly. Making comparisons with houses is quite silly if you can figuratively "take your house somewhere else", people don't have to just turn the other cheek.
Though it would indeed be better if law(makers) would target malicious activity, but providing a billboard for it should not be mandatory.
The US supreme court has narrowed down the few necessary exceptions to freedom of speech over 230 years. It's not perfect, but it's better then having ISPs make these decisions.
I don't think you deserve to be downvoted, but you're missing the point: we need guiding principles to help us work through tough cases so that we can best avoid setting bad precedent. The EFF made a good move today.
It feels like private companies are de facto writing the laws about what's allowed online and in society right now, and that it's almost become a loophole for censoring free speech on a whim.
And while the site in question here is ethically bankrupt in basically every way, it doesn't seem too far fetched to assume the same thing could (and potentially will) happen for sites many more people agree with because someone/some group at an ISP doesn't like them or think they should be accessible.