8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service • Hacker News Board

Re: 8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service

#881

Post by watwut » Tue, Aug 06, 2019, 6:30 AM UTC

username3 wrote: post #759

slg wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The concept of freedom of speech falls apart if universally reprehensible speech is allowed to be publicaly espoused without being firmly challenged. Forums like 8chan and 4chan effectively incubate hate speech by providing a safe space for anonymized, like-minded individuals to congregate, espouse their basest thoughts and feelings and receive gratification for it -all without challenge. Moderate people are repulse…

8chan incubated hate speech because no one challenged hate speech on 8chan. 8chan welcomed everyone, but everyone ignored 8chan. >The concept of freedom of speech falls apart if universally reprehensible speech is allowed to be publicaly espoused without being firmly challenged. Forums like 8chan and 4chan effectively incubate hate speech by providing a safe space for anonymized, like-minded individuals to congregate…

People did challenged hate speech on 8chan. What happened is that those who challenged hate speech on 8chan lost in following fights. One factor is that chan structure favors bad-faith actors and arguments, favoring inflammatory emotional ones. But the other fact is that bad-faith actors and arguments of the other side lost too.

Re: 8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service

#882

Post by Pimpus » Tue, Aug 06, 2019, 6:56 AM UTC

tepidandroid wrote: post #139

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…

I highly doubt there is more "hate-speech" on right wing 8chan than on left wing Twitter.

Also, users are driven to these sites from other social media where even moderate views are often considered "fascist" and can get you banned.

Re: 8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service

#883

Post by dominostars » Tue, Aug 06, 2019, 6:57 AM UTC

disease wrote: post #241

I realize this may not be the best place to talk about it, but is there some good explanation for what seems to be a totally insatiable thirst for white supremacy in America these days? It seems to me like this is the real story here and, for the most part, it is not being covered in any real sense by either liberal, conservative or independent media.

White Christians are losing their supermajority status in an increasingly ethnically diverse America. Even though white christians will continue to be the largest racial group for a long time, the shifting demographics feel very visceral by increased minority representation in media and politics. This has spurred a lot of racial anxiety.

There was a study done where people were primed by reading news articles about America becoming a "majority minority" country (e.g. white people as a group will no longer represent > 50% of the full population). Reading these articles causes white people to hold more favorable opinions of conservative policies across the board. However, if the articles included statements along the lines of, "But white people will remain as powerful", those conservative shifts go away. Further studies show this same effect across ethnic groups (e.g. Black people reading about growing Hispanic populations). The central takeaway is: when people feel like the status of their identity group is under threat, they become more conservative.

While racial anxiety can be assuaged, popular conservative media in America, like Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, et al, do all that's in their power to inflame these anxieties. And while these anxieties all existed before Trump, Trump was the first major presidential candidate in recent memory to stoke these fires so directly (John McCain and Mitt Romney both famously refused to do so, John McCain by shutting down the "Barack is a Muslim" rhetoric at a town hall, and Mitt Romney refusing to campaign using racial anxiety even though he was showed polling that it would be effective). Trump getting elected has subsequently emboldened a lot of racially anxious people who finally have someone they can rally behind. You know, "someone who isn't afraid" to make the claim that people immigrating from Mexico are rapists and murderers.

And so here we are.

There's a whole other dimension about how damaging spending all day in internet communities can be for emotional health, how lonely a lot of young people are, and how groups like ISIS and white supremacists take advantage of these people by offering them community and subsequently radicalizing them. I'd expand but I'm lazy and I'm just another dumbass on the internet anyway.

Re: 8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service

#884

Post by Pimpus » Tue, Aug 06, 2019, 6:57 AM UTC

nilkn wrote: post #4

I've generally been on the free speech side of this debate, as some of my previous comments on HN will show. With 8chan, I legitimately don't know what my opinion is. I've read it before, and I spent a few hours reading it this weekend, and it's beyond clear to me that it absolutely had the potential to radicalize shooters and terrorists. I'm not referring to the simple use of racial or ethnic slurs -- of course this…

Again, as I said in my other comment, this just sounds like a right wing version of Twitter.

Re: 8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service

#885

Post by TheGrumpyBrit » Tue, Aug 06, 2019, 7:02 AM UTC

busymom0 wrote: post #782

wpietri wrote: post #539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> But rights are inherently social No, the founding fathers specifically said that freedom of speech is a God given right and not something which the government gives to a person, instead the government simply recognizes that right. They specifically said freedom of speech is a "Natural" right. Right to clean water is not a right, right to education is not a natural right in their terms. Right to speech, right to sel…

Speech is a God given right. Nobody can stop you from saying anything you like, but that doesn't extend to inviting you to share that belief with the student body of your local school. The school are absolutely free to refuse to allow you to use their podium if they don't like what you have to say.

Equally, you have every right to set up a website to say whatever you want. That doesn't mean the people who provide the infrastructure behind that website have to continue to host your platform, it doesn't mean other peoples internet providers have to allow access to your website, and it doesn't mean search providers have to list your website in their results.

Freedom of speech worked really well when the largest audience you could get was the people in your local tavern, but it doesn't scale to a global internet without some adjustment. Just like your other example of the right to self defence - the idea of taking arms against a tyrannical government made perfect sense when everybody had muskets, but it doesn't really scale when the tyrannical government has drones and nukes.

Re: 8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service

#886

Post by Pimpus » Tue, Aug 06, 2019, 7:03 AM UTC

DonHopkins wrote: post #261

nilkn wrote: post #4

I've generally been on the free speech side of this debate, as some of my previous comments on HN will show. With 8chan, I legitimately don't know what my opinion is. I've read it before, and I spent a few hours reading it this weekend, and it's beyond clear to me that it absolutely had the potential to radicalize shooters and terrorists. I'm not referring to the simple use of racial or ethnic slurs -- of course this…

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…

That's the problem with leftists in censorship discussions - they fundamentally don't believe in free will. It's not the website that shot people. It wasn't Trump. It was the individual. Believing otherwise is highly problematic as it leads to authoritarianism.

Re: 8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service

#887

Post by jacquesm » Tue, Aug 06, 2019, 7:03 AM UTC

busymom0 wrote: post #782

wpietri wrote: post #539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> But rights are inherently social No, the founding fathers specifically said that freedom of speech is a God given right and not something which the government gives to a person, instead the government simply recognizes that right. They specifically said freedom of speech is a "Natural" right. Right to clean water is not a right, right to education is not a natural right in their terms. Right to speech, right to sel…

- founding fathers are not gods

- they can be wrong

- there most likely is no god

The absolutist nature of these discussions and the near deification of a bunch of well-meaning but ultimately fallible humans has me puzzled. There is no way that the people that wrote up the constitutions of the various still functioning (to greater or lesser extent) democracies had the foresight to deal with 100's of years of technological progress.

Re: 8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service

#888

Post by azernik » Tue, Aug 06, 2019, 7:22 AM UTC

busymom0 wrote: post #782

wpietri wrote: post #539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> But rights are inherently social No, the founding fathers specifically said that freedom of speech is a God given right and not something which the government gives to a person, instead the government simply recognizes that right. They specifically said freedom of speech is a "Natural" right. Right to clean water is not a right, right to education is not a natural right in their terms. Right to speech, right to sel…

That's a very US-centric view. Most democratic countries with constitutions less than 230 years old have broad exceptions for certain kinds of impermissible speech. (Germany takes it to an extreme, but even that seems to be compatible with a liberal democratic basic order.)

Re: 8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service

#889

Post by JohnBooty » Tue, Aug 06, 2019, 7:24 AM UTC

busymom0 wrote: post #782

wpietri wrote: post #539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> But rights are inherently social No, the founding fathers specifically said that freedom of speech is a God given right and not something which the government gives to a person, instead the government simply recognizes that right. They specifically said freedom of speech is a "Natural" right. Right to clean water is not a right, right to education is not a natural right in their terms. Right to speech, right to sel…

The founding fathers enumerated rights like "free speech" because those were novel (not entirely new, but fairly novel) notions at the time.

What many folks (often, seemingly willingly) fail to understand is that those rights were never intended to be parsed in a naive, simplistic way that supersedes the rights of others.

The most obvious example would be speech that causes others to be killed: you have a right to free speech, but other people also have a right not to be killed.

That's why you can't yell "FIRE!" in a crowded movie theater and cause a stampede that kills people, etc.

There are many other examples of free speech that infringe on others' rights.

Call free speech a "natural" right if you wish, whatever that means to you, but only a fool would think that either the Founding Fathers or basic human decency and sense dictate that free speech is meant to exist in some sort of vacuum independent from any and all other rights.

Re: 8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service

#890

Post by dominostars » Tue, Aug 06, 2019, 7:25 AM UTC

sarcasmOrTears wrote: post #765

disease wrote: post #241

I realize this may not be the best place to talk about it, but is there some good explanation for what seems to be a totally insatiable thirst for white supremacy in America these days? It seems to me like this is the real story here and, for the most part, it is not being covered in any real sense by either liberal, conservative or independent media.

I live in Italy. Today the biggest leftists mainstream newspaper (repubblica) opened up with a title "slaughters by the white man". They would never dare to write "black man" and most importantly, the expression "white man" was never used before in Italy, in such a context. There is an international anti-white culture and I'm tired to pretend there isn't a problem. 99% of "alt-righters" who got interested in politics…

In America we elected a president who made the claim that immigrants coming from Mexico were rapists and murders. He built an entire campaign around fear of Mexican immigration. Meanwhile, there's been a string of mass shootings where white people targeted, shot, and killed people of color.

What does it mean to be color blind in this scenario? That Mexican people ignore that the most powerful person in the country is labeling them as a threat? That we ignore that there has been a string of racially motivated killings in the country?

The "alt-right" didn't suddenly appear at gamer gate, these philosophies have existed for a long time and have been popular in your country and elsewhere.