According to Andrew Torba of Gab (I cannot speak to the veracity of this myself): "As predicted in our statement to Buzzfeed: 8chan is indeed online. It's on ZeroNet, a decentralized and open source peer-to-peer version of the internet. It literally can not be censored now. By anyone. At all. Not admins. Not governments. No one. This isn't as good as it sounds. It means no illegal content can be permanently removed, including things like child exploitation, human trafficking, etc. Happy now, media elites?" https://gab.com/a/posts/102568802463422885
8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service
891–900 of 1001 posts
Re: 8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service
#892Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 technolo…
There's two (well, at least two) issues at work here.
One, unshakable faith in "The Founding Fathers" -- while naive and simplistic -- is appealing. Weak minds love the idea of having a few simple and absolute ideas to cling to, rather than attempting to reason about rights and laws in a more nuanced way. Pointing to something Thomas Jefferson said (typically out of context, of course) is just easier, you know?
Two, there's a willful oversimplification of what the founding fathers actually meant. They enumerated various rights, sure, but never meant for those rights to be interpreted in some sort of intellectual vacuum that disregards all other rights of others. The founding fathers made some incredibly nuanced arguments and proclamations, and it does them an awful disservice to boil their thinking down to DUR HUUUUUURRRR FREEEEE SPEEECH ANYBODY CAN SAYS WHATEVER THEY WANT.
Re: 8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service
#893Earlier 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…
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.
You're just trading one absolutism for another. It's all societies fault! No, it's all on the individual!!
No nuance, no grey area. The leftists do have a point and reality is somewhere in the middle.
Re: 8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service
#894Earlier 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…
>8chan welcomed everyone, but everyone ignored 8chan.
That's not true, the community actively tries to keep out "normies" by posting pictures of disfigured corpses or other disturbing imagery and sabotaging the posts that challenge their agenda through spam and trolling.
They even have a guide how to do that, the following page is linked from the homepage at 8chan: https://cryptome.org/2012/07/gent-forum-spies.htm
Re: 8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service
#895Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
Freedom of speech worked really well when the largest
audience you could get was the people in your local tavern
- You were never allowed to "say whatever you like" in the name of committing fraud
- You were never allowed to "say whatever you like" in terms of threats; I don't know any society that would tolerate a person standing outside his neighbor's home and screaming death threats
- etc.
I make this somewhat pedantic point because the idea of "free speech with limits" is not some kind of modern idea that represents a watering-down of the lofty ideals upon which modern nations were founded, which is why many people seem to object to it. There were always necessary limits to free speech; the right to free speech has never trumped other peoples' rights not to be threatened, killed, defrauded, etc.
Re: 8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service
#896My 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…
That's a nice theory. How does the fact that the FBIs own screenshots of the threads, submitted as evidence, show they posted the comments egging people on?
Re: 8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service
#897Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.)
The US has always had those limitations as well.
It's just that many of my fellow Americans choose to interpret our constitution in a simplistic, childish, and frankly incorrect way.
Our constitutional rights (including free speech) were never meant to be interpreted in a vacuum, irrespective of all other rights.
Our courts have certainly never interpreted things that way. Our courts have always weighed each individual, constitutionally-mandated right against other rights.
Re: 8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service
#898Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
The freedom of speech actually means that you can say what you want and not be persecuted for it.
Except for enticing violence, fraud or etc.
In Europe, you can get in jail if you say hateful or discriminatory things. We want to keep our society more decent (although cracks are forming).
The freedom of speech indeed doesn't mean that others must facilitate you or listen to you.
Re: 8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service
#899Earlier 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…
I would also argue that asking for some minimum level of education/sophistication like the parent poster might qualify as the type of Platonic elitism which Popper was very much opposed to (The Open Society and its Enemies). But then again defining what qualifies as tolerance also has the potential problem Platonic elitism (i.e. who sets the criteria). It's a pretty tough job to balance freedom of speech and prevent…
Very true. He also said that suppression of intolerant ideology is unwise as long as public opinion counters it. 8chan isn't really the center of public opinion.
There were third parties that pointed their fingers to those losers on these boards and now some people lashed out. I don't want to blame anyone besides the murder, but that is the game that is being played.
Being opposed to nazisim wasn't exactly rocket science some years ago, so I don't really can get behind comments pointing to the need for education and that the lack of the latter is reason enough to curb speech.
Re: 8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service
#900My 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…
> some minimum level of education What a bunch of horse crap. Being told what to think, what to buy, who to vote for, how to feel. If you claim to believe in a liberal democracy but want "education" or limited-speech then you don't have must faith in the system. Democracy has been broken since the rise of technology and mass media. If you control the narrative, you control the people, and the power. The outrage over…
What a bunch of horse crap. Being told what to think,
what to buy, who to vote for, how to feel.
When an airplane has a problem in midair, we don't let the passengers each have one equal vote on what ought to be done, regardless of how much they know about flying.
A doctor doesn't crowdsource ideas in the middle of surgery. She certainly could, and it might work, but only if the crowd consisted of qualified doctors.
I'm not advocating to anything other than "one person, one vote" democracy, but surely the success of such a government depends almost exclusively on the quality of minds found in the electorate -- and I'm sorry, but "quality of mind" correlates pretty strongly with education.
You may fancy yourself some sort of exceptional autodidact who needs no education. Perhaps you are right! This is not the case for the vast majority of humans. The vast majority of humans are (by definition) not of exceptional intelligence and drive.