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ISPs should not police online speech no matter how awful it is

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Re: ISPs should not police online speech no matter how awful it is

#91

Post by krapp »

commandlinefan wrote: post #4
jfengel wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The EFF's response is not a good one, either. The previous sentence is: "We fully support criminal and civil liability for those who abuse and harass others." That's not sufficient. These are extremely slow mechanisms, when they work at all. The harassed individual can suffer for years, and the EFF isn't rushing out to aid them. As their post says, "law enforcement and legislators have failed". The Internet is differ…

> develop its own ways of dealing with people who use it to harm others So far, every "way" that's been developed of dealing with people who harm others has itself been used to harm others in more extreme ways than the harm they were supposed to mitigate.

>So far, every "way" that's been developed of dealing with people who harm others has itself been used to harm others in more extreme ways than the harm they were supposed to mitigate.

Has it?

Some of the people Kiwifarms harassed were driven to suicide. Your argument is that having a forum taken offline is a more extreme form of harm than literal death?

Re: ISPs should not police online speech no matter how awful it is

#92

Post by IncogNET »

Glad to see this. Hurricane Electric has behaved in such an incredibly unprofessional manner regarding this entire ordeal. It began here: https://twitter.com/IncogNetLLC/status/1685359845505957888

We filed a complaint with the Washington state AG over their actions. HE's response was more or less technically obtuse garbage and, "You're not our direct customer" (paraphrasing, of course).

So what they did, was take it upon themselves to prevent access to an entire /36 subnet of IPv6 that our customer had announced downstream of us. Not once did an abuse report get sent to us, or our upstream from HE. Nor did we receive any credible abuse reports sent to us directly from those upset that the site exists. Meanwhile, this actually has no direct impact on the website in question's existence as their opposition has learned by now, it's never been truly offline. Just temporarily blocked from certain ISPs.

From an ISP point of view, it's worrying that a transit provider like HE can arbitrarily cancel a customer of yours, or a customer of a customer (, etc) over legal, protected speech. So, from a business standpoint, what does HE have to gain? The people complaining about the site aren't their target market, they're mostly Twitch streamers, Twitter personalities and folks who have a following on popular platforms that already exist. They're not the types to be self-hosting a streaming service who'll need rackspace and transit. So, what is there to gain by bending the knee to them? The safest business decision would be to remain neutral, respond to law enforcement requests if presented with one, and otherwise do the job you're paid to do. The worst business decision is moderating the content of downstream customers, which is what we're seeing now.

Re: ISPs should not police online speech no matter how awful it is

#93

Post by pessimizer »

anigbrowl wrote: post #22
zer8k wrote: post #14

The ACLU will absolutely oppose this. If not for the reason they stand to make a lot of money suing ISPs for "not doing enough" to stop the big-ole-meanies online. I see ISPs blocking "mean speech" to "protect people" as another symptom of the enshittification of the internet. I legitimately cannot understand problems in this arena because you can just...walk away from your computer. Or turn off the website. Or hey,…

You're thinking solely in terms of private individuals. Other entities exist and have to be internet-connected to function; corporations, nonprofits, government bodies, institutions. They can't very well use pseudonyms because their whole reason for being is to be accessible to the public. So that makes them easy to target for abuse, eg https://oaklandside.org/2023/08/29/chabot-elementary-evacuat... An episode like t…

In order to prevent bomb threats, we should run algos on every phone call. If they try to make a bomb threat, we can just break the connection and refer the caller to police. Why even wait for phone calls? We can just make the phones emit a high pitched alarm and send cops whenever the algos hear any sort of hate crime within range of the microphone.

Re: ISPs should not police online speech no matter how awful it is

#94

Post by dmix »

unsui wrote: post #54
alexb_ wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> considerations that are negotiable, such as, "does this speech promote destroying the institutions on which the speech itself is based on" That's not a considerable negotiation. Give people power and they will use literally every single bit of it and then some. ISPs should have absolutely no say, in any way, of what people do. They shouldn't even be able to know anything about what I'm doing past what is needed for…

> Give people power and they will use literally every single bit of it and then some This is going back to slippery slope argument issue. What makes you think there isn't pushback to create an equilibrium of policies? Why does it necessarily need to be one-sided, where giving in to one iota entails giving in to the whole enchilada? Complex systems entail dialogue and pushback across competing incentives and motivatio…

> Why does it necessarily need to be one-sided, where giving in to one iota entails giving in to the whole enchilada?

Because every single time this is what happens. Your argument basically comes down to creating some speedbumps to slow down how long it will take, not whether it will or not create the same predictable outcome.

I'd rather not live in a place like the UK where SWAT teams do over-night raids of peoples houses because they tweeted something mean. The sort of situation I'm sure people said would never happen when the ball got rolling decades ago.

Re: ISPs should not police online speech no matter how awful it is

#95

Post by amiga386 »

another_story wrote: post #24
zer8k wrote: post #14

The ACLU will absolutely oppose this. If not for the reason they stand to make a lot of money suing ISPs for "not doing enough" to stop the big-ole-meanies online. I see ISPs blocking "mean speech" to "protect people" as another symptom of the enshittification of the internet. I legitimately cannot understand problems in this arena because you can just...walk away from your computer. Or turn off the website. Or hey,…

In the past the ACLU has defended hate groups right to freedom of speech. Do you have evidence that they'd do something to the contrary?

Their national director's statement in the immediate aftermath of the Charlottesville riots:

https://www.vox.com/2017/8/20/16167870/aclu-hate-speech-nazi...

> The backlash has already spurred other ACLU chapters to declare that they don’t believe free-speech protections apply to events like the one in Charlottesville, and led the ACLU’s national director, Anthony Romero, to declare the group will no longer defend the right to protest when the protesters want to carry guns.

> “Until now,” lawyer and blogger Scott Greenfield wrote, the ACLU has “never quite come out and announced that they will refuse to defend a constitutional right. This announcement says that when someone seeks to exercise two rights at the same time, the ACLU is outta there.”

And their internal policy document listing out things that might stay their hand in an otherwise vigourous defense of free speech:

https://www.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/20180621ACLU....

> Considerations Specific to Speech Cases

> * Whether the speaker seeks to engage in or promote violence

> * Whether the speakers seek to carry weapons

> * The impact of the proposed speech and the impact of its suppression

> * The extent to which we are able to make clear that even as we defend a speaker’s right to say what they want, we reserve our right to condemn the views themselves

> * The extent to which we are able to mitigate any harm to our mission, values, priorities, and/or relationships

Re: ISPs should not police online speech no matter how awful it is

#96

Post by krapp »

adamrezich wrote: post #85
zer8k wrote: post #14

The ACLU will absolutely oppose this. If not for the reason they stand to make a lot of money suing ISPs for "not doing enough" to stop the big-ole-meanies online. I see ISPs blocking "mean speech" to "protect people" as another symptom of the enshittification of the internet. I legitimately cannot understand problems in this arena because you can just...walk away from your computer. Or turn off the website. Or hey,…

you were on the Internet before it merged with reality and the two became one (in the minds of the people). you still perceive the Internet as being this discrete thing, separate from normal meatspace reality, because that's how it was, for a time, in the now-distant past. smartphones and modern social media bulldozed over our glorious cyber-libertarian future and brought millions of people, all completely unacclimat…

The internet was never separate from meatspace reality - that was always a naive cypherpunk delusion.

Re: ISPs should not police online speech no matter how awful it is

#97

Post by droptablemain »

another_story wrote: post #24
zer8k wrote: post #14

The ACLU will absolutely oppose this. If not for the reason they stand to make a lot of money suing ISPs for "not doing enough" to stop the big-ole-meanies online. I see ISPs blocking "mean speech" to "protect people" as another symptom of the enshittification of the internet. I legitimately cannot understand problems in this arena because you can just...walk away from your computer. Or turn off the website. Or hey,…

In the past the ACLU has defended hate groups right to freedom of speech. Do you have evidence that they'd do something to the contrary?

The ACLU changed quite dramatically around 2016.

Re: ISPs should not police online speech no matter how awful it is

#98

Post by pessimizer »

drewcoo wrote: post #55
another_story wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the past the ACLU has defended hate groups right to freedom of speech. Do you have evidence that they'd do something to the contrary?

The ACLU fought Trump's "Muslim ban." That resulted in lots of funding from the anti-Trump crowd. "Trump derangement syndrome" meant previously unimaginable funding. They needed to do something with the money, so they staffed up, using the new staff to double down on the Trump-fighting. Before 2016, there were a few claims that the ACLU was biased toward liberals. Afterward, you'll find many articles even from outlet…

This is exactly what happened. They were flooded with money at the same time they were being flooded with new graduates that had strange ideas about what people shouldn't be allowed to do.

Re: ISPs should not police online speech no matter how awful it is

#99

Post by pessimizer »

psychphysic wrote: post #18
zer8k wrote: post #14

The ACLU will absolutely oppose this. If not for the reason they stand to make a lot of money suing ISPs for "not doing enough" to stop the big-ole-meanies online. I see ISPs blocking "mean speech" to "protect people" as another symptom of the enshittification of the internet. I legitimately cannot understand problems in this arena because you can just...walk away from your computer. Or turn off the website. Or hey,…

The ACLU are pretty useless these days

Actively harmful.

Re: ISPs should not police online speech no matter how awful it is

#100

Post by jadamson »

vore wrote: post #84
jadamson wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

[flagged]

I'm not sure that every country is run by morons who can't understand the concept of per capita, NZ seems pretty special in that regard. I certainly wouldn't want such people having a finger on the censorship button, and for that reason it was very heartening to hear of Ardern's resignation.

> "After all, how do you successfully end a war if people are led to believe the reason for its existence is not only legal but noble? How do you tackle climate change if people do not believe it exists? How do you ensure the human rights of others are upheld, when they are subjected to hateful and dangerous rhetoric and ideology?"

While antipodean advocates of censorship like to reference violence, it's clear that's not actually where they draw the line. Even if they did, their hatred of violence seems to be very selective: Davidson's comments were meant as a distraction from violence against someone she sees as a valid target [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kellie-Jay_Keen-Minshull#New_Z...

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