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8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service

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Re: 8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service

#531
post #348

I've been waiting for answers to these question: What do we think happens to hate when when we ban it in discussions? Evaporates into thin air? Also, is there ANY proof at all that banning hate speech is effective in stopping hateful actions in the short and long term? Answering these questions should be the BASIS for any decisions we make right?

No, banning speech critical of the government and racial groups that reveive priviledged treatment from the government is the basis for every decision the media tells people to make.

Re: 8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service

#532
post #319
post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Put differently: this is why we can't have nice things

Pretty much. It's a problem anyone doing privacy conscious software is going to run into, if it works it will be used by people generally agreed to be morally detestable (eg: child abusers or human traffickers). In a similar vein I think people will need to in general get comfortable with the fact that some technology will be used by bad groups and it will make it harder for law enforcement to catch and stop people b…

Agreed. Though, I would also argue that fighting the communication tools and to an extent the hateful speech is a bit fighting the symptom of a larger problem.

I think we're bogged down debating the specific problem of hate speech, without discussing why it exists. Mental health, education, and poverty have a material impact on crime; do they also have material impacts on racism? I'd wager yes, but I don't know.

Purely fighting 8chan might be akin to fighting one symptom of a larger disease. I fear we're ignoring the causes.

Re: 8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service

#533
post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've lost good friends to 4chan/8chan. They were obsessed. At first it was cat pictures and memes, but it went way downhill from there. I've watched those sites cause the transition from normal, interesting, reasonable, open minded, intelligent, happy human beings, to horrible inexcusable pieces of shit who I never want to have anything to do with ever again. It's not just that they inspire a few shooters and mass mu…

I would not lump 4chan into this discussion. I'll concede that some boards on the site are more polemical than others and promote alt-right ideologies without a doubt, but there are many other interesting boards and people on 4chan that are not captured by the broad strokes you're outlining. I know people that browse /fit/, /lit/, /mu/ and /out/ just to name some boards that are perfectly reasonable individuals that…

Just to add on my own experiences, Since starting to collect toys and also make my own, I've been entirely unable to find a better community for both of these than /toy/. Every other community is brimming with an endless barrage of superhero stuff and zero interest in niche/art toy lines. /pol/-esque posting is always mocked, reported, and subsequently purged by janitors there.

Re: 8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service

#534

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get that you're trying to address a larger philosophical question, but what action are you actually suggesting in this particular instance? Should Cloudflare be forced to host 8chan? Even more than YouTube/Twitter, this seems like a clear case of business owners deciding that 8chan is too much of a liability to do business with.

This is a good point that I do not have a solution to. I do see that "I think the internet should be a neutral platform", "I think that the internet should be run by private companies" and "I think that private companies should be free to decide who to do business with" is also a set of incompatible beliefs (that I personally hold). Thankfully, I do not need to have all the answers to point out the issue :)

The problem here is that you don't see the difference between the informal "should" from the first stance and the legal "should" from the third. You can't even say things like "the internet legally should X" because the internet is not a single entity that can be coerced to do X (yep, the legal talk all comes down to the issue of who should be coerced to do what).

Read Hayek BTW.

Re: 8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service

#535
post #476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally I'm in agreement with Popper's view that societies should tolerate everything except intolerance. It draws a fine line between what's acceptable speech and what is not. And going by it, things like 8chan should get shut down. The line of thought you put forward, by contrast, rubs me in a very wrong way. It was used to justify, depending on the period and country, not allowing people to vote on the basis th…

Popper's quote is often quite misconstrued. Here it is, in context: "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 sho…

There's an interesting parallel here by Nassim Taleb, author of several books the most famous of which might be The Black Swan. In this article, a chapter from an in-progress book, he contends that the most intolerant faction will eventually come to dominate. In the article he's talking about extremist Muslims but it could just as easily be extremist Christians or extremist white nationalists.

https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...

Re: 8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service

#536

People keep telling "they are a peivate company, they can serve whoever they". Can they really? Can I open a shop that doesn't serve people with political view X? Or religion? Race?

Yes, no and no, at least in the USA.

Huh, really? that was surprising for me. I would put political views right next to someone's religional beliefs.

Re: 8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service

#538
post #90

We wouldn't tolerate the existence of an Islamist site that glorified and helped perpetrate mass incidents of terror against our society. What 8chan is doing is exactly the same, minus the Islamist part, yet there's hypocrisy in how they're treated vs e.g. the social media wing of ISIS. These people are trying to kill as many of us as possible. In no way should society accept it. It's simple societal self-defense. Ro…

Cloudflare provides services to a number of Islamist terror organizations: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/cloudflare-cybersecurity-terr...

If I were a US intelligence organization I would be incredibly happy that terror organizations were voluntarily letting a US company MITM all of their traffic...

Re: 8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service

#539

My opinion is that freedom of speech is a fine ideal to strive for, but it relies on having a stable society with some minimum level of education (moral and philosophical too, not just the technical kind). It requires people who are able to fully parse the implications of what they are hearing to make sound and rational judgements on the rejection of an idea or the embrace of it. It creates a moral duty for the peopl…

My main issue with discussions on topics like this is a sort of fundamentalism. It's very easy to take a particular right (e.g., speech, property) and defend it absolutely. But rights are inherently social, and must be balanced against other people's rights.

For example, I don't think my freedom of speech should trump Cloudflare's or Voxility's right to freedom of association. They should generally be able to decide who to do business with. However, that freedom also isn't absolute; it was used for decades as part of race and gender discrimination, which impinges upon other people's freedoms. Thus the US theory of protected classes. [1]

Or to pick another example, employers should generally be able to hire who they want. But that has been used for religious discrimination, so we protect those people. However, that also isn't absolute; if for religious reasons I won't handle pig products, I'm not entitled to a job at a pork BBQ restaurant. To get reasonable outcomes, we need to welcome nuance and compromise.

I encourage everybody to be suspicious of anybody who thinks there's a single clear answer in situations like this. Fundamentalist positions are both appealing and dangerous.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_group

Re: 8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service

#540
post #43

I’m old enough to remember when Howard Stern, as quaint as that seems today, was considered one of the greatest threats to civilization and had to be “de-platformed” before he could successfully destroy society - and the reasoning they used against him was _exactly_ the same as this reasoning: “he, himself (8chan, itself) is not going out and doing horrible things, but he’s encouraging people to go out and do horribl…

I'm on the record here defending /r/The_Donald. I'm even on the record saying I didn't think it should be quarantined and that I don't think it should be banned in the future. It takes a lot for me to wonder if something actually should be censored. I certainly wouldn't have been on the side of censoring Howard Stern. Radicalizing terrorists to such an extent that they actually go through with it -- multiple times --…

>I saw many posts subscribing to the general theory that racial violence has been accepted throughout most of human history

My knowledge of human history mostly validates this theory.

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