Twitter shuts down account of Sci-Hub • Hacker News Board

Re: Twitter shuts down account of Sci-Hub

#211

Post by Terretta » Thu, Jan 14, 2021, 10:23 PM UTC

russell_h wrote: post #38

HarryHirsch wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same. If he is seditious you can get a court to issue an injunction very quickly, and if he isn't a private entity has no issue determining what a politician can say. As a German one thinks different about free speech than do most Americans. We know all too well where too much free speech leads and when in doubt let the courts decide because we love public peace. Putting a muzzle on someone is interfering with po…

To be clear, there is no serious interpretation of the US Constitution required here: Twitter absolutely has the right to determine what shows up on their website. For the government to require Twitter to publish the opinions of the president would be a very clear violation of Twitter’s own first amendment rights. There could be more nuance involved if, for example, there were a credible claim of racial discriminatio…

Agree with how you put this.

Just a reminder to readers that the First Amendment prevents govt (Congress, and the States) from making laws that abridge freedom of speech.

It governs the government, state actors, not Twitter or other private companies or individuals. If you are not a state actor and you want to limit speech, go bananas.

For example, think back to the Google memo, and misconception of free speech at work. This 2017 article calls the misunderstanding “tremendous”:

Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/on-leadership/wp/2017/08...

Outlined: https://outline.com/2udPxF

Archived: https://web.archive.org/web/20200125155407/https://www.washi...

Re: Twitter shuts down account of Sci-Hub

#212

Post by kypro » Thu, Jan 14, 2021, 10:23 PM UTC

beebmam wrote: post #203

HarryHirsch wrote: post #11

Twitter has no business inserting itself into a dispute between Elbakyan and Elsevier et al. Few people would have issues if Twitter shut down the Sci-Hub account after they received a valid court order, but a private monopolist cannot be trusted to be the arbiter of what is permitted speech.

Why should we FORCE twitter to publish the speech of someone they don't want to publish? Doesn't that itself infringe on free speech?

We probably shouldn't (perhaps with the exception of politicians or key public figures), but we should still recognise this is a move that has net-negative effect for humanity – and a move that Twitter didn't have to make.

We can recognise things as being wrong even if they're not illegal.

Re: Twitter shuts down account of Sci-Hub

#213

Post by Fnoord » Thu, Jan 14, 2021, 10:25 PM UTC

skissane wrote: post #174

kristofferR wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's pretty messed up. You as a 14 year old send a nude picture to your 15 year old boyfriend and suddenly you're banned from Facebook from life? Frankly the whole situation in the US is messed up, punishment should be limited to whatever the court decides.

Even more messed up is the fact that some jurisdictions will criminally prosecute 14 year olds for sending nude pictures of themselves. (I do think 14 year olds should be discouraged from taking and sending nude pictures of themselves – it is the sort of thing they could easily come to regret in a few more years – but I don't think criminal prosecution is an ethical way of providing that discouragement.)

I don't know.

Receiver could delete picture ASAP, and discourage behavior. If they keep, spread, or encourage they're complicit. Of course, there's a difference in severity between 1 nude of 1 person, or a myriad, or being an adult with a myriad.

Sender getting prosecuted for spreading their own nude as minor might be weird, but also makes sense. Its not as if they'd be a registered sex offender as a minor.

Put this way: what if it was an illegal firearm? We can't just turn a blind eye to youth breaking law, but we can't treat them like adults either. There's a solid middle ground: hold parents accountable till teenager, then both, and at age 16 the teenager but not with fully implemented adult law. Interestingly, that's approx how countries deal with it, or variants of that at least.

TL;DR if properly nuanced, we can deal with issues like these, though we may disagree on these nuances, I'm quite sure we'll agree on the outliers.

Re: Twitter shuts down account of Sci-Hub

#214

Post by Blikkentrekker » Thu, Jan 14, 2021, 10:28 PM UTC

lliamander wrote: post #190

davrosthedalek wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It all boils down to this: a) Should twitter be allowed to cancel accounts who harm twitter? If yes: b) Who decides which accounts harm twitter? If the answer is "twitter", then they have effectively the right to terminate any account at their will. I don't know what other answer is possible for b) except maybe "the courts", and I'm not sure I like that one. If the answer to a) is no, for which companies does this ap…

> twitter can ban whomever they like, for whatever reason, except for the usual exceptions (religion, race etc). I think we either need to get rid of those exceptions or add more. I'm not sure which.

Why would those even be exceptions or treated differently.

I find it a rather arbitrary standard I so often encounter.

How would banning for religion be different than banning for any other opinion? So long as an opinion asserts the existence of a higher being it is inviolate? All I need to claim to be unbannable for saying that vaccines cause cancer is simply add “This was told to me by the almighty creator Zefron of Zefronism” and that small differences turns an ordinary falsehood into a religion?

Can I deny the holocaust in Germany by simply making it a tenant of a religion?

It seems awfully arbitrary to me.

Re: Twitter shuts down account of Sci-Hub

#215

Post by jolmg » Thu, Jan 14, 2021, 10:32 PM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #201

jolmg wrote: post #17

To see the tweets: https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://twitter.com/Sci_Hub I should donate more to the Internet Archive. I hate how so much history can just disappear at a whim if it weren't for them.

How can you see Tweets there? When I try to open some past snapshots, they just render ajaxy "Something went wrong". (I'm surprised Twitter is archivable in the first place, the whole thing being a pile of JS crap.)

I see tweets here:

https://web.archive.org/web/20201225111818/https://twitter.c...

I use Chromium for this because on Firefox I have the Referer header disabled and that causes the WaybackMachine to return a 498 HTTP status on an internal API call, but otherwise I see no issues.

Images:

https://ibb.co/1mRqyvW

https://ibb.co/F8TbCLv

https://ibb.co/P1xZwZT

> I'm surprised Twitter is archivable in the first place

I'm sure it must have taken some effort by the IA team, but Twitter is a pretty important source to archive, so I'm not as surprised because of that. They simply rock and can be expected of greatness.

The infinite scroll works, but zooming on images doesn't. That's a bit of a shame because Twitter clips them, and they can sometimes contain important content. Loading replies also doesn't work. Still way better than nothing.

Re: Twitter shuts down account of Sci-Hub

#216

Post by beowulfey » Thu, Jan 14, 2021, 10:32 PM UTC

lliamander wrote: post #187

roenxi wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a) Should twitter be allowed to cancel accounts who harm twitter? Although some people agree that is the question, it is not the fundamental one here. Most of the respectable arguments are that Twitter's bans are senselessly harming Twitter. They're building a gaping hole in their offering that a competitor can cover.

The thing is, few other companies will do business with anyone trying to compete with Twitter. Parler was nuked. Gab was almost nuked, but they've managed to survive. There's a huge demand for alternatives to Twitter, but other major tech companies, the corporate press, and many politicians are doing everything in their power to crush those alternatives and prevent them from springing up.

Huge demand is maybe an overstatement. A quick google search shows me that Parler had ~4 million active users a couple weeks ago. Twitter has >300 million. That’s about 1-2%. I don’t think that qualifies as huge.

Re: Twitter shuts down account of Sci-Hub

#217

Post by paul_f » Thu, Jan 14, 2021, 10:37 PM UTC

ardy42 wrote: post #207

kristofferR wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's pretty messed up. You as a 14 year old send a nude picture to your 15 year old boyfriend and suddenly you're banned from Facebook from life? Frankly the whole situation in the US is messed up, punishment should be limited to whatever the court decides.

> That's pretty messed up. You as a 14 year old send a nude picture to your 15 year old boyfriend and suddenly you're banned from Facebook from life? It's worth noting that is far from the typical case of "being a sex offender."

No, more typical is a 22yo taking a pee against an alley wall behind the bar and being arrested for indecent exposure. Calling everyone a sex-offender just makes this a useless morass.

Re: Twitter shuts down account of Sci-Hub

#218

Post by bgilroy26 » Thu, Jan 14, 2021, 10:38 PM UTC

Blikkentrekker wrote: post #214

lliamander wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> twitter can ban whomever they like, for whatever reason, except for the usual exceptions (religion, race etc). I think we either need to get rid of those exceptions or add more. I'm not sure which.

Why would those even be exceptions or treated differently. I find it a rather arbitrary standard I so often encounter. How would banning for religion be different than banning for any other opinion? So long as an opinion asserts the existence of a higher being it is inviolate? All I need to claim to be unbannable for saying that vaccines cause cancer is simply add “This was told to me by the almighty creator Zefron o…

Before the movement of peoples accelerated greatly in the mid 20th century, identity was determined by a few factors and they were practically constitutive of who people were

Think about the adhoc communal living options that are available to people who want to live in intentional community in SF, consider side by side people like conservative Mennonite churchgoers in rural Illinois.

The idea is not that anyone can or should pull an L Ron, the point is that those identity factors are more or less taken to be extraneous of someone's behavior

They are default bad reasons to ban someone, not an exhaustive list, just good rules of thumb

Re: Twitter shuts down account of Sci-Hub

#219

Post by at_a_remove » Thu, Jan 14, 2021, 10:40 PM UTC

guerrilla wrote: post #135

at_a_remove wrote: post #120

Twitter flexed, everyone flinched. Expecting more flexing is where I am. They say the slippery slope is a fallacy, but I am starting to think of that as a reflex saying when someone gets caught shoving the Overton Window.

Slippery slope is a fallacy when no evidence that the slope is actually slipper is presented. If someone were to, for example, highlight unchecked incentives Twitter has to further censor then that'd be a valid argument.

Well, the incentive can be as tiny as "I don't like them." Recall Cloudflare's CEO waking up "in a bad mood."

Re: Twitter shuts down account of Sci-Hub

#220

Post by vimy » Thu, Jan 14, 2021, 10:43 PM UTC

skissane wrote: post #181

davrosthedalek wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It all boils down to this: a) Should twitter be allowed to cancel accounts who harm twitter? If yes: b) Who decides which accounts harm twitter? If the answer is "twitter", then they have effectively the right to terminate any account at their will. I don't know what other answer is possible for b) except maybe "the courts", and I'm not sure I like that one. If the answer to a) is no, for which companies does this ap…

> If the answer to a) is no, for which companies does this apply? Must every company work with every potential customer? Who decides which companies must? Regulated public utilities generally speaking can't just drop customers simply because they feel like it or don't like them or view them as a "threat". Thankfully the electricity company can't just disconnect you because they don't like you. So long as you pay the…

> They are calling for government regulations to control when Twitter can remove content or ban people [0]. Effectively, turning it into a regulated public utility, at least in Australia.

Poland will do the same.