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Microsoft threatens to stop hosting Gab unless posts are removed

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Re: Microsoft threatens to stop hosting Gab unless posts are removed

#281

Post by wmf »

moduspol wrote: post #140
millzlane wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are people still able to download a web server and host their own content? What does anyone need a host for? If a bunch of angry racists want to start their own social network, they could build it, if they really wanted a place to spew their hate. Is anyone really stopping them from connecting to the internet?

Is that the point? There are a lot of people here completely in support of this, and it's not hard to trace an IP address to an ISP. When brigades start calling for ISPs to stop serving these sites, do you really think that's when they'll stand up for free speech? Keep in mind in the span of just a few days, we've seen the jump from application platforms (Facebook, Google) to now infrastructure providers. The leap to…

Historically if you have your own AS number it's very very hard to get kicked off the Internet. But maybe Nazis are revolting enough to make it happen.

Re: Microsoft threatens to stop hosting Gab unless posts are removed

#282

Post by anigbrowl »

autoexec wrote: post #154
lylecubed wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A common argument in philosophy is that bad ideas should occur in the open - where everyone may ridicule them. Not to get too far off topic, but is this actually true in practice in the real world? Scientific studies have shown that the idea that gets repeated the most often is the idea that "wins". A bad idea gets repeated and spread every time it gets criticized. If the idea proves more "credible" than the critic…

You can never stop bad ideas from spreading, but you can decide if you'll ever hear about them or have the opportunity to fight them. If the most repeated idea wins but bad ideas are forced to spread in hidden places without refute then bad ideas are the only ones getting any voice and they win by default.

then bad ideas are the only ones getting any voice

That's irrational, resting on the assumption that good ideas which encounter opposition in public discourse thereby cease to exist.

Re: Microsoft threatens to stop hosting Gab unless posts are removed

#283

Post by danjoc »

Nadya wrote: post #31

A common argument in philosophy is that bad ideas should occur in the open - where everyone may ridicule them. When they are cast to the shadows they can grow, under everyone's noses, in private where only there are they allowed to exist. In private, these bad ideas cannot be challenged by others and people will be convinced to believe in them, with nobody challenging the idea as a genuinely terrible idea. It gives b…

>Actions like this serve to placate the public.

I'm not placated. According to Microsoft,

>After an initial review, we have concluded that this content incites violence, is not protected by the First Amendment, and violates Microsoft Azure’s acceptable use policy

If the posts were illegal, why isn't the poster being arrested? Where are the real police in this matter? Why are California cops deferring action to the Redmond internet police?

Re: Microsoft threatens to stop hosting Gab unless posts are removed

#284

Post by wmf »

PurpleBoxDragon wrote: post #18
makomk wrote: post #5

The posts in question are frankly pretty awful, but this does kind of put the lie to the idea that if you don't like FaceGoogleBook's censorship you can just set up your own website.

Well you can host your own website on your own server. Of course, I do wonder how far this goes. What happens if the DNS server refuses to host the IP lookup? Host your own DNS server? What if the browsers refuse to allow access to the site? Build your own browser? What if ISPs refuse to transfer the data over the wire? Make your own internet? People have defended that this vs. Net Neutrality (at least the extent of…

What happens if the DNS server refuses to host the IP lookup?

That already happened; the Daily Stormer (yep, Nazis) was kicked off GoDaddy, Google, Tucows, Namecheap, DreamHost, etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Daily_Stormer#Site_hosting...

Re: Microsoft threatens to stop hosting Gab unless posts are removed

#285

Post by Nadya »

rainonmoon wrote: post #199
anigbrowl wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a poor point of comparison, since baking the cake doesn't put anyone at risk, whereas an exhortation to commit violence against specific people does.

It's disappointing this even needs to be pointed out, that simply existing while gay is not the same thing as proliferating hate speech.

I'm LGBT and this is exactly why I make such a fuss about selective censorship every time it comes up. Everyone always assumes it will only be done for things "they agree" with and never flips the coin over. They see it as justified, but only when it agrees with their morals because anything that doesn't agree with their morals is "obviously wrong" and "doesn't need to be pointed out what the difference is".

That difference simply doesn't exist in many places - because "that difference" is whatever popular opinion deems it to be at the current time and place.

In many countries simply existing as I am is worse than hate speech. Because someone decided, usually due to some religious bullshit or another, that being LGBT is bad and punishable by death. Speaking publicly about it is simply not allowed. If you do not wish to be ostracized, or worse, you keep your mouth shut. Being "pro-lgbt" is not a popular public opinion in every country. It's seen as immoral, corrupting the youth, etc.. Even within countries with majority positive opinion - there are large groups of people or even areas that are still against LGBT people.

Eventually someone needs to be the one who decides what is "good" and what is "not good" and what the public gets to see and hear. To whom would you give the job to decide what you can read? How about what you can say? To save you the responsibility of thinking for yourself? What if you don't get to choose who?

Whenever you give the power of censorship to a group or person - imagine if someone you disagree with on every subject had the power to censor what you read and say. If you are not completely okay with even your worst enemy being your censor, then do not give the power of censorship away. Society has a "not in my country" attitude that recent history has shown can oh-so-quickly fall apart.

Making a cake for a gay couple, in some countries, could put your life at risk. Be thankful you live in a country that recognizes the rights and freedoms of LGBT people.

Re: Microsoft threatens to stop hosting Gab unless posts are removed

#286

Post by autoexec »

jackvalentine wrote: post #228
autoexec wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can never stop bad ideas from spreading, but you can decide if you'll ever hear about them or have the opportunity to fight them. If the most repeated idea wins but bad ideas are forced to spread in hidden places without refute then bad ideas are the only ones getting any voice and they win by default.

> but bad ideas are forced to spread in hidden places without refute then bad ideas are the only ones getting any voice and they win by default. They win by default in those dark places. Important distinction.

The people in those dark places the ones you have to worry about. Most people don't hold dangerously wrong ideologies like neo-nazis do. What amount of rhetoric or marches or speeches would convince you to be a nazi? If you are like most people no amount ever would. The most vulnerable out there are the ones who find themselves isolated. Those who end up in the dark places or are simply raised in them from childhood. They can be reached, but not if they never hear a dissenting voice or have an opportunity to have the views they were taught challenged.

Re: Microsoft threatens to stop hosting Gab unless posts are removed

#287

Post by eridius »

tinalumfoil wrote: post #126
braythwayt wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That argument works well in relatively small social groups where people generally can be relied upon to act in good faith, and where there are social disincentives to clinging to bad ideas after they have been refuted. When you have a small group with social bonds, you don't have to worry about a bad actor constantly repeating their already-refuted arguments to people who haven't heard the refutation. But when you ha…

People are better off hearing a bad idea and hearing it refuted then never hearing a bad idea. You could say, "well then detractors of the idea will have to keep refuting it" and you'd be right. That's how public forums work, and I hope you don't take everything your parent's believed for granted just because their detractors have already been "refuted".

I don't have a source for you but I'm pretty sure I've read studies in the past that actually directly contradict what you're saying, studies where people were exposed to refutations of incorrect ideas, and later actually remembered the bad ideas but forgot that they were refuted.

Which is to say, if you already know about the bad idea, having it refuted is presumably a good thing, but if you don't know about the bad idea in the first place, learning about it in order to have it refuted may actually backfire.

Re: Microsoft threatens to stop hosting Gab unless posts are removed

#288

Post by chc »

api wrote: post #200
Nadya wrote: post #31

A common argument in philosophy is that bad ideas should occur in the open - where everyone may ridicule them. When they are cast to the shadows they can grow, under everyone's noses, in private where only there are they allowed to exist. In private, these bad ideas cannot be challenged by others and people will be convinced to believe in them, with nobody challenging the idea as a genuinely terrible idea. It gives b…

I'm shocked by how many liberals who really ought to know better are cheering for the deployment of corporate oligopolistic censorship at this scale. We're not talking about just kicking someone off Twitter... now we're talking about kicking them off supposedly neutral public cloud platforms. This is a major escalation and honestly it's changing my mind a bit about the whole issue. I was a fence sitter before but now…

> Censors always start with the least popular ideas and speakers. They do that for a reason: they want to gauge what they can get away with and they want to shift the Overton window toward increasing support for censorship.

Every time a neo-Nazi gets shut down, people trot out the "First they came for the communists…" — and yet the next time, it's a neo-Nazi again, every time. It would be bad if people who aren't promoting harm start getting shut down, but I don't see any evidence that current events will lead to that.

> (1) What happens if/when the political winds shift and someone like Donald Trump or maybe someone even to the right of him ends up in control of these powers? Who gets silenced then? A power once created becomes a political entity that can easily be handed off.

We're not talking about the creation of a new power here. This is a power that already exists, and bad actors' ability to use it isn't based on whether or not it's used for good.

> What happens if/when some liberal cause -- like a reboot of unionization and a new labor movement for example -- really threatens corporate and Wall St. profits at a large scale? Will Neo-unionists get this deplatformed and shadow banned now that it's been legitimized? Will anyone even notice?

Again, there is no causal line between "Neo-Nazis get deplatformed" and "Corporations deplatform their critics." You can have either one without the other.

In general, your fears seem to be based on an assumption that looks something like "Bad people won't do anything to good people that good people don't do to them." But history has repeatedly shown that this is not the case. Our refusal to take the threat of Nazism seriously the first time didn't in any way constrain the things they did to people.

Re: Microsoft threatens to stop hosting Gab unless posts are removed

#289

Post by acdha »

fvdessen wrote: post #175
acdha wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Note that most of these existed well before the internet and were just as widespread. Do you have a citation for that? It seems unlikely that the Internet didn’t increase the reach for fringe views by making them available to everyone rather than just the few who requested conspiracy materials by mail.

> just the few who requested conspiracy materials by mail. I remember conspiracy theory / UFO magazines being more widely distributed than regular newspapers. There's even a joke on that in the first Men in Black movie.

Was that ever more than a joke, though? The National Enquirer sold plenty of issues but almost everyone knew it was entertainment rather than a reliable source. Similarly, while bookstores had books & magazines they tended not to shelve them with more legitimate materials.

The other big difference was the barrier to entry: printing things cost real money and anything at all mass-market required a physical presence which could be sued for libel. In contrast, it’s much easier for anyone in the world to slap together a decent enough website or upload a video to YouTube and Google will feature it right next to official NASA content. Sure, anyone who wants to can learn that the source isn’t credible but the last decade really underscores that most people won’t check.

Re: Microsoft threatens to stop hosting Gab unless posts are removed

#290

Post by patrickg_zill »

tptacek wrote: post #261
patrickg_zill wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The original story, is apparently not available at this link, but the footer, also written by Andrew Torba, owner of Gab.ai , is available: https://medium.com/@Torbahax/this-is-a-joke-and-it-is-fake-n... partial quote: " Gab is absolutely not a “white nationalist social media platform.” We are a free speech social media platform. We welcome everyone and have since the day we launched. My co-founder Ekrem is a Muslim…

That's an interesting thing for him to say, because Gab is absolutely and obviously a white nationalist social media platform. Want another example? Arguing with Ken White (Popehat) on Twitter, the official Gab account RT'd a white nationalist mocking Ken for having adopted Asian children. https://twitter.com/Popehat/status/1026849669425520640

I just created a Gab account to try to find hashtags or accounts that are not WN.

There are some, but of course, Gab just passed 500K accounts (no idea how many are active: they are privately held and don't publish a breakdown unlike publicly-traded TWTR, which has 335 million monthly active users) so it's tough to find exactly which non-WN communities there might be...

I am not sure if you are saying that Gab is "majority WN" or that it is "exclusively WN". There are certainly other users (of non-white ethnicities), groups and hashtags represented:

Kenyans group https://gab.ai/jojiwanyoike

Search for "Iyer" a typical Indian (Tamil) Brahmin last name: https://gab.ai/search/iyer

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