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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

#131

Post by ratsmack »

zeroCalories wrote: post #122
pessimizer wrote: post #81

> Cloudflare is an often brought up example And Cloudflare are nearly as well behaved as they could possibly be. The simple fact of them being everywhere makes them a major target of government pressure to censor. This is purely an end run around the constitution, not the desire of companies to control speech. > It feels like private companies are de facto writing the laws about what's allowed online and in society r…

> And Cloudflare are nearly as well behaved as they could possibly be. This is not true. There has been at least two high profile cases where Cloudflare dropped their commitment to free speech when under no real legal pressure(kiwifarms and stormfromt). Maybe you think they did the right thing, but it's clear that they are not a neutral party.

They also dropped the Daily Stormer from what I remember.

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

#132

Post by philippejara »

ratsmack wrote: post #130
mptest wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>This is purely an end run around the constitution, not the desire of companies to control speech. Want an example of this type of end run being used in practice? Nearly a decade ago? Obama used banking access to do a similar end run around businesses deemed political enemies. Some to the good, weapons/ammunition sellers with uncertain scruples, payday lenders...[0] but for some reason I'm not super confident about i…

Your link goes to a 404, unfortunately.

probably linking to this: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/op-eds/obamas-ope...

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

#134

Post by yanderekko »

JamesBarney wrote: post #113
yanderekko wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, to be fair this doesn't really pertain to the sort of Constitutional legal questions that the ACLU famously takes a hardline stance on. I don't think the ACLU endorsing private censorship is clearly at odds with their overall mission. (As opposed to say their going soft on hate speech laws, which clearly has 1A implications.)

I'd rather have laws that prohibit free speech than have the government be able to stifle speech by pressuring large monopolistic organizations behinds closed doors.

Sure, there are 1A concerns there. But that's not part of the HE issue as far as I'm aware.

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

#135

Post by lmm »

pfisch wrote: post #103
CM30 wrote: post #46

I agree, we've got far too many entities that should just be 'dumb pipes' trying to play moral police at the moment, and it's a very worrying situation when it comes to free speech on the internet. Cloudflare is an often brought up example, as are payment processors like Visa and Mastercard and app stores like the iOS and Play Stores, but ISPs trying to block traffic for a site that's not actually illegal feels like…

When in all of US history were private companies not controlling the public discourse and "censoring free speech"?

We didn't used to let private companies control the public discourse. The mail is government-run and there are mail privacy protections as deep as the constitution. In the age of radio and TV we at least had the equal time rule and some level of public oversight.

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

#136

Post by mcpackieh »

pessimizer wrote: post #93
anigbrowl wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Don't forget, we have to open and read everybody's mail and read it too, otherwise somebody might deliver a bomb threat through the USPS.

The Stasi would be insanely jealous of the new tools for totalitarianism the tech industry is building. We're constructing a digital panopticon around ourselves. If this is allowed to go much further, escape will become incredibly difficult.

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

#137

Post by yanderekko »

shortformblog wrote: post #125
yanderekko wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I'd argue that there are legitimate safety concerns that trump speech in this particular case. What makes HE well-positioned to be able to determine what constitutes a "legitimate safety concern"? What happens when a pro-life organization or a corrupt politician starts leaning on ISPs to enforce their own views of what constitutes a "legitimate safety concern"? Cloudflare denied service to KF on an imminent threat t…

I don’t think HE should be making that decision, especially in an upstream role—and the fact that they’re in that position points at a need for regulation. However, I would argue that KF is a long-term threat whose imminent dangers were honestly a very narrow lens that barely appeased a company that shouldn’t have been making the call in the first place. Their position in last year’s debate created a very volatile at…

The Constitution would not provide a carveout for the long-term censorship of a forum like KF based on some rationale like "creating a volatile atmosphere", so I don't know what you expect regulation to accomplish here. And of course activists would scream if such regulation were applied in a viewpoint-neutral fashion (eg. platforms being mandated to delete content that advocates for crime / violence - imagine how Trump would've used this power during the BLM riots!) - the non-neutrality is considered a feature of private censorship, not a bug.

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

#138

Post by _0ffh »

pessimizer wrote: post #108
psychphysic wrote: post #16

It feels like it's pretty much gameover for free speech in any context. Too much of the population of the world wants rid and it doesn't matter much that they disagree on precisely which opinions are unacceptable.

> It feels like it's pretty much gameover for free speech in any context. And it's going to go the opposite way that people are expecting. For some reason, the Democratic base has been trained to think that it will be possible for them to impose an authoritarian meritocracy of kind middle-class people using a police force and army largely made up of working-class reactionary quasi-theocrats. When the shit goes down,…

One Charles Haywood is apparently applying for that job.

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

#139

Post by stale2002 »

pfisch wrote: post #103
CM30 wrote: post #46

I agree, we've got far too many entities that should just be 'dumb pipes' trying to play moral police at the moment, and it's a very worrying situation when it comes to free speech on the internet. Cloudflare is an often brought up example, as are payment processors like Visa and Mastercard and app stores like the iOS and Play Stores, but ISPs trying to block traffic for a site that's not actually illegal feels like…

When in all of US history were private companies not controlling the public discourse and "censoring free speech"?

When we made laws to prevent them from doing so.

In the US, related to this specific situation, the laws are called "Net Neutrality" and "Common Carrier" laws.

Such laws are well established and uncontroversial. Pretty much everyone agrees that it is a good thing that the power company can't shut off your electricity just because you said something that it didn't like.

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

#140

Post by Rapzid »

psychphysic wrote: post #16

It feels like it's pretty much gameover for free speech in any context. Too much of the population of the world wants rid and it doesn't matter much that they disagree on precisely which opinions are unacceptable.

I feel like in the USA at least free speech(as in the constraint placed on the government; aka 1st amendment free speech) is as strong as it's ever been. The government was way up in everyone's business and bedroom just 50 years ago.
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