Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A Heretic's Guide to Deplatforming

easydns.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

411–420 of 473 posts

Re: A Heretic's Guide to Deplatforming

#411

Post by kakarot »

tptacek wrote: post #399
kakarot wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're a payment processor. If you believe in a non-discriminatory economy, where anyone with a legal, useful service or skill should be able to collect payment for it, then you simply can't have this position. Payment processors must follow the law like anyone else and have no obligation to process payments for illegal services, but we can't start mass boycotting them based on the clients they legally do business w…

Lots of people don't accept your premise that white supremacists deserve FRAND terms for access to commercial hosting providers. I'd go so far as to describe it as the mainstream opinion. So: they can quite simply have that position.

This isn't an issue of what should be legal. It's an ethical issue.

Re: A Heretic's Guide to Deplatforming

#412

Post by b1daly »

cousin_it wrote: post #290
b1daly wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m responding to your comment more as a representative of a general sentiment. The implicit psychological construct behind this little “mini-panic” around fringe groups be “de-platformed” is a common one: something bad is happening, and we are losing freedoms/rights/capabilities we (society) has in the past. It’s a variation on the notion that “the world is going to hell a hand basket.” The rhetorical fallacy is cal…

> The problem that these new communication platforms are trying to deal with is unprecedented. The early internet had to deal with the same problems, yet it was much more free than the internet of today. This isn't a false idealization of the past - I was around at the time. To me the only reason the internet matters is to let individual people speak and be heard - without being silenced by advertisers, the governmen…

The rise of ubiquitous networked social platforms is very new. In the earlier days of the internet, it simply did not have the reach it does today. It is the mass effects that are causing problems, especially since you can now purchase direct access to millions for the purpose of spreading propaganda.

Re: A Heretic's Guide to Deplatforming

#413

Post by Torwald »

evrydayhustling wrote: post #338
logifail wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> satisfy the requirements of every platform you build on top of This sounds simple, until you realise the requirements aren't well-defined, or that the definitions can be changed arbitrarily (and retroactively) by the platforms.

No argument, and it wasn't meant to sound simple -- just depends on how deeply you are aligned with the goals of the platform. I agree from painful experience that platforms can be capricious and even disingenuous. But that's also part of how they adapt to a changing world and business. Still boils down to: nobody said it would be easy (to get others' attention).

> …just depends on how deeply you are aligned with the goals of the platform.

Here is the problem though: The platform of platforms, then, is politics, if we want to keep biology out of the picture.

And the thing with politics these days is, that the state, as a system, is compulsive. I cannot leave the state, I am not free to do so.

In other words, the most underlying platform is not of my choice and therefore it is not as simple as you are making it out to be.

I like your thinking framework and agree with it.

Re: A Heretic's Guide to Deplatforming

#414

Post by amanaplanacanal »

TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #356
CM30 wrote: post #315

I've said it before, and I'll say it again; online platforms needed to be treated like their offline equivalents. Why can an ISP not censor traffic but a web host can? Why can the utility company or a credit card processor not 'shut down' customers they disagree with while the likes of Cloudflare or PayPal or Stripe can? There's no logic behind this. No, you can't just say 'offline stuff has a monopoly', because it d…

Unfortunately, credit card processors can and do deny services to people with which they disagree. To give one example: you can't use any mainstream payment processors for anything related to pornography. Also, on Android you can run alternative app stores without having to "jailbreak" the phone. One example of this is f-droid [0]. You just need to change a single configuration option to allow installing APKs from th…

Are there any platforms that are still neutral? It seems like reality has shown those that tried to be, that really, they can't. Spam takes over your email, hostile ads take over your advertising space, trolls take over your forums.

Maybe there is some way around this, but I have no idea what it might be.

Re: A Heretic's Guide to Deplatforming

#415

Post by wpietri »

cousin_it wrote: post #290
b1daly wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m responding to your comment more as a representative of a general sentiment. The implicit psychological construct behind this little “mini-panic” around fringe groups be “de-platformed” is a common one: something bad is happening, and we are losing freedoms/rights/capabilities we (society) has in the past. It’s a variation on the notion that “the world is going to hell a hand basket.” The rhetorical fallacy is cal…

> The problem that these new communication platforms are trying to deal with is unprecedented. The early internet had to deal with the same problems, yet it was much more free than the internet of today. This isn't a false idealization of the past - I was around at the time. To me the only reason the internet matters is to let individual people speak and be heard - without being silenced by advertisers, the governmen…

I was around at the time, too, and you're missing that the early Internet wasn't free at all: the great majority of the users were part of some postsecondary educational organization. Those places strongly select for very specific kinds of people (smart, collaborative, curious, reasonable, not murder-y), and imposed both formal and informal controls on what was said.

Your notion is that 3 corporate-run, lowest-common-denominator TV channels controlling nationwide communication is exactly the same thing as a global network where everybody can participate and they can talk publicly about anything except, say, "Hey, we should kill all the Jews and brown people"? That seems woefully unsubtle to me. I see a useful middle ground. One where people are radically more free to communicate than they were at any point in human history.

Not also that neither advertisers, the government, or "the mob" are silencing anything here. People are exercising their right to freedom of speech and freedom of association. This is the same thing that happened in the real world pre-Internet when people would throw Nazis out and refuse to support businesses who made Nazis welcome. Businesses are free to host Gab or not; everybody else is free to use those businesses or not based on their desire to support companies that support people getting minorities killed.

Re: A Heretic's Guide to Deplatforming

#416

Post by tptacek »

kakarot wrote: post #411
tptacek wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots of people don't accept your premise that white supremacists deserve FRAND terms for access to commercial hosting providers. I'd go so far as to describe it as the mainstream opinion. So: they can quite simply have that position.

This isn't an issue of what should be legal. It's an ethical issue.

If it's ethical, it's even more baffling why this would be a problem; providing services to enable and amplify white nationalism is clearly unethical.

Re: A Heretic's Guide to Deplatforming

#417

Post by tptacek »

cousin_it wrote: post #290
b1daly wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m responding to your comment more as a representative of a general sentiment. The implicit psychological construct behind this little “mini-panic” around fringe groups be “de-platformed” is a common one: something bad is happening, and we are losing freedoms/rights/capabilities we (society) has in the past. It’s a variation on the notion that “the world is going to hell a hand basket.” The rhetorical fallacy is cal…

> The problem that these new communication platforms are trying to deal with is unprecedented. The early internet had to deal with the same problems, yet it was much more free than the internet of today. This isn't a false idealization of the past - I was around at the time. To me the only reason the internet matters is to let individual people speak and be heard - without being silenced by advertisers, the governmen…

Large portions of the Internet were cordoned off from commerce altogether. There was a weekend back in the 90s (probably more than one, but this is the one I remember) where there was an Internet-wide netsplit that cut commercial ISPs like Ripco off from the rest of the Internet.

Most conversations on the Internet took place on Usenet, and even in the alt. hierarchy, there were rules and politics behind what stuff got propagated.

Re: A Heretic's Guide to Deplatforming

#418

Post by colllectorof »

evrydayhustling wrote: post #327
im3w1l wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First people get kicked off their platforms "build your own platforms" Then platforms got kicked off the platform platforms "build your own platform platforms" What reason is there to assume those platform platforms will not get kicked off the platform platform platforms? These people are not arguing in good faith.

You are mistaking "good faith" for satisfying others' entitlement The spirit of your complaint here is "there should be a reasonably easy path for me to widely distribute my message without getting the rug pulled out from under me". There is exactly one way to distribute your message, and whether it is easy or hard is up to you. That is: satisfy the requirements of every platform you build on top of, and fill in the…

>You are mistaking "good faith" for satisfying others' entitlement

The spirit of your complaint here is "there should be a reasonably easy path for me to widely distribute my message without getting the rug pulled out from under me".

There is a reasonably easy path to do exactly that. But it has dependencies, and certain people are manipulating these dependencies in any which way they can to control online discourse. And you're cheering them on, pretending that not publishing someone's article is exactly the same as closing someone's bank account on hearsay.

And yet I am 100% sure that if someone started following you around and pressuring companies to close your accounts and stop any dealings with you, you would immediately decry it as grave injustice and invent some reason why it's "different".

>I believe in common spaces

In hypothetical ones, that don't exist.

>Feel free to start there and build an ecosystem and audience - that is how the world discovers who wants to participate in a particular kind of dialogue.

So, what exactly in your arguments binds them, preventing you from saying the exact same things about this hypothetical zero-layer public space when it gets sabotaged? Nothing, really. You will just say "you're still free to build another one, somehow".

Re: A Heretic's Guide to Deplatforming

#419

Post by zimablue »

atq2119 wrote: post #350
zimablue wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is such a common thing that you're doing. There are four levels of power (kind of) => government, employer, social, individual. Whenever you're in an argument, assume that the other side is advocating for the top level to enforce something so you can call them oppresive, and claim that you're advocating for the bottom level (and that that level should be free to do as it likes). Nothing in this article mentions…

I agree with you, but your four levels really need to be refined by a fifth level, corporate power. That is, power that is wielded over you by corporations even though they're not your employer because you essentially have to do business with them (Visa and MasterCard come to mind - they're essential infrastructure to the point where it really should just be a function of government, but isn't for historical reasons)

Very good point

Re: A Heretic's Guide to Deplatforming

#420

Post by tptacek »

adventured wrote: post #205
tptacek wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stormfront is still up and running. They had a hard time getting access to the same QOS and pricing as do sites that companies actively want to host, but at some point we're complaining that white nationalists don't get FRAND terms, and it's a little hard to get worked up about that. Gab ran Twitter for White Nationalists off Digital Ocean, Azure, and who knows where else. Gab's users have a disconcerting tendency to…

> Gab's users have a disconcerting tendency to blow up synagogues. The Gab user in question was issuing threats on Twitter as well for months. Twitter did nothing about it. Under your exceptionally poorly formed argument, Twitter's users have a tendency to blow up synagogues (it was actually a shooting). Under your premise, Twitter and Facebook should be forced off the Internet, or otherwise maligned, because the peo…

I'm sorry, I'm having a very hard time connecting the dots from Gab finding it can't get FRAND access to hosting to "the entire Internet has to be destroyed". Since the entire Internet is (checks notes) not actually being destroyed, it feels like your argument is self-refuting.
Post reply on HN