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4chan, 8chan blocked by Australian and NZ ISPs for hosting shooting video

arstechnica.com

61–70 of 184 posts

Re: 4chan, 8chan blocked by Australian and NZ ISPs for hosting shooting video

#61

Just a thought experiment: so it's after 9/11. Nobody will show a video of the planes flying into the towers. The only place you can watch the video is ISISchan.org, and there are news articles about how many countries banning ISISchan.org & how problematic ISISchan.org is (don't go to ISISchan.org, kids!). Now instead of watching a clip on CNN you've got people absorbing all the extremist propaganda on ISISchan.

The New Zealand video is orders of magnitude more viscerally graphic than the famous videos of the planes flying into the towers. This is not to say one is more tragic than the other, just that the video for the NZ shooting may be one of the worst videos on the Internet. It would never be on CNN, so this comparison doesn't hold very strongly.

Re: 4chan, 8chan blocked by Australian and NZ ISPs for hosting shooting video

#62
post #58
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can be for free speech while also unwilling to host certain speech on a platform you own & operate. I can support your right to protest, while also not permitting you to do it in my living room.

This is about government censorship, not forcing private web sites to host the video.

4chan is not the government.

I think 4chan has gone too far on this one. They should ban neonazi propaganda. -- the grandparent

Re: 4chan, 8chan blocked by Australian and NZ ISPs for hosting shooting video

#63
I hate 4chan so much, its a diseased cesspool of morons. However, I hate the idea blocking them. Its such a slippery slope from censorship of bad websites to moving to censorship of good websites that the government does not like.

Edit: Also, facebook pro-actively took down the video as soon as they became aware.

Re: 4chan, 8chan blocked by Australian and NZ ISPs for hosting shooting video

#64
post #29

I watched this "illegal" video. And not only do I think it should not be illegal, I think watching it should be almost mandatory ! Package it with a safety curriculum, and people should watch it to know what to do. In particular: For the most part, those people in the video who ran, lived, those who tried to drop low, or froze up, died. (There were a couple of exceptions.) Additionally, one guy tried to attack the sh…

Ah yes how enlightened. Mandatory first person murder video screenings. This must be a joke I'm not getting.

Re: 4chan, 8chan blocked by Australian and NZ ISPs for hosting shooting video

#65

They're arresting people for sharing the video This is fucked

They're arresting people for sharing the video along with encouraging comments. They aren't arresting journalists for showing clips.

Shouting "FIRE" in a crowded theatre has always been illegal.

Re: 4chan, 8chan blocked by Australian and NZ ISPs for hosting shooting video

#66
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're either for free speech or you're not, and as much as I would like to have some absolute reference of good and bad, it's all culturally defined. I mean, I think it's horrible, but I can envision lots of functional and useful societies that are horrible based on my principles (how would you like to to be part of a hize mind?), but that doesn't make them bad in an absolute sense. Scaled down, freedom of speech is…

Morality is relative but it isn't subjective. Slaughtering innocents for political purposes is a universally evil act.

This brings up the hypocrisy of those that want to shut down speech based on their personal views.

More people died in 9/11, but those videos are all over the place, even on youtube. Those planes hitting those specific builder _were_ the message of the terrorists.

Re: 4chan, 8chan blocked by Australian and NZ ISPs for hosting shooting video

#67
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Working as designed, I'd imagine? It would be naive to think that wasn't a foreseen use case. Edit: I'm a so-called decentralization advocate and I'd add on to this to say that the big problem we have right now is that people don't think we need decentralization at all. Something like this might change some minds.

> Working as designed, I'd imagine? It would be naive to think that wasn't a foreseen use case. Sure, from a technical point of view. But governments and the general public won’t necessarily see a lack of control over the content as something good or even legal. I expect to see some clash and fight over those questions if a significant number of 4chan/8chan users start to migrate to decentralized platforms.

We already had that fight in the 1990's over Napster and even the WWW in general, and it ended up with massive centralization of the web.

Disclaimer: Take the below images with a grain of salt, I wasn't able to verify how they were generated.

Internet Connectivity in 2003 vs 2010 via The Opte Project:

2003: https://www.moma.org/collection/works/110263#

2010: https://equipping4eministry.com/2015/03/05/a-visual-look-at-...

Unfortunately opte.org appears to be down at the moment (the irony) so I had to dig these ones up. To me, this is a visualization of what the current status quo is as far as those in power "addressing" the issue of content.

If you can get 99% of the people using the same websites that are compliant with what the governments think are okay, then the 1% doesn't matter too much. So we saw things quietly shifting toward this paradigm. The way I see it is that the But actions like these taken by Australia and NZ (using iron instead of velvet) will only accelerate the number of people interested in alternatives, and would therefore undermine the status quo strategy I outlined above.

Re: 4chan, 8chan blocked by Australian and NZ ISPs for hosting shooting video

#68
post #54
post #39

It makes me sad how 4chan has largely been reduced to a place where racists and bigots and sexists hang out. When I was a teenager, it felt like the racists in /b/ were doing it ironically (maybe I was wrong?), but now it seems like a place to spout off white-nationalist nonsense, and whenever its called out the people fall back on "it's just a joke bro!"

How can you be ironically racist, and why is that better than racism?

In hindsight you are right, but I'll give you the mentality that 14-year-old-me had:

Basically, the idea of being racist is so absurd, that by being ironically racist I'm poking fun at the racists, not the races.

It's not a completely ridiculous notion (though it's abused heavily); satire is a common tactic for comedy. Clearly people go too far, and I don't think it's a good excuse to say "it's just satire".

Re: 4chan, 8chan blocked by Australian and NZ ISPs for hosting shooting video

#70
post #54
post #39

It makes me sad how 4chan has largely been reduced to a place where racists and bigots and sexists hang out. When I was a teenager, it felt like the racists in /b/ were doing it ironically (maybe I was wrong?), but now it seems like a place to spout off white-nationalist nonsense, and whenever its called out the people fall back on "it's just a joke bro!"

How can you be ironically racist, and why is that better than racism?

The same way you can be ironically anything. It's not immune to modifiers just because it's offensive.
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