Live data from Hacker News

Firefox bans free speech commenting plugin Dissenter from its extensions gallery

reclaimthenet.org

81–83 of 83 posts

Re: Firefox bans free speech commenting plugin Dissenter from its extensions gallery

#81
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the HN Community yes... Far-left / Socialist is the only "acceptable" way of thinking anything Libertarian, (which is labeled "far-right" now) should be shut down, out, and banned

> anything Libertarian, (which is labeled "far-right" now) US Capital-“L” Libertarians tend to be solid-to-far right as well as libertarian, but, no, genuine center- and left-libertarian isn't usually called far-right by anyone. Also, right-libertarians are a pretty big segment of the HN community, possibly more dominant than anything on the left.

Uh, personalities like Joe Rogan and Tim Pool have been called far-right[0], then there are also secular muslims who get called "anti-muslim extremists" by SPLC[1]. So unless you want to claim that these aren't "true scotsmen", there are most certainly people who get called far-right, who are anything but.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-A_aNMe1Wk

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maajid_Nawaz#SPLC_claim

Re: Firefox bans free speech commenting plugin Dissenter from its extensions gallery

#82
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because Dissenter was created by Gab, a far/alt-right online platform. So what? I'm not trolling, I'm trying to understand. It's doesn't look like anybody was forced to use the extension, you don't like it - don't use it. If it's ok to use clear-cut ideological censorship for plugins/extensions, then it's ok to block websites. Personally, I find it hard to accept.

Here's what I posted in another response in this thread just now: >Mozilla themselves has said that they didn't remove it for political reasons [or "ideological censorship" as you put it], rather it was the language and vitriol being used on the platform. As an example, it's one thing to use something like Dissenter to calmly and rationally discuss why you might think a nation should close its borders to all immigran…

Mozilla themselves has said that they didn't remove it for political reasons [or "ideological censorship" as you put it], rather it was the language and vitriol

If it's about politically incorrect speech - it's absolutely ideological.

If it's about obscene language - it's still not Mozilla's business to police someone's lexicon, and Mozilla doesn't do it generally, which means something ideological happens here.

Btw, it's interesting that you yourself agree that the whole thing is political by this stereotyping statement but you and I both know that language like that is commonplace on alt/far-right platforms. And at the same time you disagree.

Try to check your biases: every time Trump tweets, Twitter explodes with left activists using motherfcker, fck, and a lot of derogatory expressions addressed to him, and right-leaning voters which has zero value for any civil discourse. So ask yourself: would you say "we both know it's commonplace on the left to use disparaging, and obscene exoressions"? And would you be fine with Twitter punished for this? (It enables them, gives the platform).

Finally, you are calling dissenter.com alt-right which is not true unless they operate alt-right censorship there. It shows some bias too.

Re: Firefox bans free speech commenting plugin Dissenter from its extensions gallery

#83
post #3

Please, tell me again why Firefox is not evil and respect their users.

Because Mozilla (unlike most other web browser publishers) publishes free software -- software users are allowed to run, inspect, modify, and share at any time for any reason. This is known as respecting a user's software freedom. Programs that don't respect a user's software freedom are called non-free or proprietary.

That's the saving grace of Firefox. That's what makes Firefox better than any of the other currently widely-used browsers. A program's technical problems can be fixed, a program's speed can be improved (Mozilla recently proved this in the most recent versions of Firefox), but software freedom cannot be added to a proprietary program.

Therefore if you don't like how Mozilla treats add-on programmers or Firefox users, you have the software freedom needed to make a free derivative of Firefox which behaves in a better way (where "better" is up to you to define, it's purposefully vague). Perhaps you want your Firefox derivative to let its users easily install whatever add-on they like that will persist across restarts, or get add-on updates without hassles by checking multiple sources for updates, or installing add-ons signed with unfamiliar keys after getting a user's approval. I'm sure there are plenty of other ideas you could come up with to implement.

But with software freedom the limits of what you can implement are limits you impose on yourself.

This doesn't make Mozilla or Firefox evil and distributing free software is respectful of the users. Don't confuse unrewarded labor (complaining that Mozilla doesn't make Firefox do what you want) with respect for the users.

The Dissent add-on, similarly, is really just another single point of censorship forum. We can't evaluate whether it is better at respecting user's free speech until they are challenged in a serious way (such as the implicit threats to big social media firms when they are given vague inactionable requests to 'do better' when their CEOs are brought before Congressional hearings and told to respond favorably to Russiagate lies). Already on this forum we see some posters confusing freedom of speech with reading something that echoes their views. One post, for instance, claimed "[Dissent's] audience is primarily folk on the far/alt-right". As George Orwell said, "Freedom is the right to tell people what they don't want to hear". Or as Noam Chomsky reminds us, "Goebbels was in favor of free speech for views he liked. So was Stalin. If you're really in favor of free speech, then you're in favor of freedom of speech for precisely the views you despise. Otherwise, you're not in favor of free speech.".

So both Firefox's add-on repo and Dissent's forum are singletons that don't liberate users so much as they establish their respective admins as censors. Perhaps you could come up with a way to let users more easily distribute comments from their own comment database so that all comment threads on a website come from multiple servers, and no censor power exists because no single user has admin control over all of the comment servers. Dissent is also free software (licensed under Apache License 2.0) so even if you believe Gab or Dissent aren't to be trusted, you could choose to improve Dissent to make it decentralized.

Post reply on HN