Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

eff.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 1001 posts

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

#191

Post by autoexec »

puglr wrote: post #154
boppo1 wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The three-letter agencies just placed dozens and dozens of people (who decided to quit the CIA, NSA, and FBI in their 30s for some reason and change careers) in the executive suites of every social network. Where can I find more about this?

Found the source[1]. It includes names and LinkedIn profiles, so ought to be verifiable. [1] https://www.mintpressnews.com/twitter-hiring-alarming-number...

That covers twitter, now what about every other social media network. The claim was that this was happening for all of them.

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

#192

Post by tjpnz »

arp242 wrote: post #68
wmf wrote: post #15

Are there any lawsuits pending against KiwiFarms? If not, why not?

Not as far as I know. I think any criminal action will be extremely hard, at least under US law, as they haven't really done anything outright illegal. There are all sorts of claims about "KiwiFarms has done this or that" (same with 4chan), but often there's no direct connection to KiwiFarms or 4chan, and some claims seem to just made up of whole cloth. A civil might have a higher chance of succeeding, but I suspect…

There have been numerous civil suits against KF, not one of them has succeeded.

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

#194

Post by shadowgovt »

lmm wrote: post #135
pfisch wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And an FCC that could yank your broadcast license for transmitting obscenity.

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

#195

Post by sergiotapia »

TylerE wrote: post #170
zeroCalories wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

[flagged]

This is literally what we're discussing.

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

#196

Post by kelseyfrog »

gorwell wrote: post #109
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…

That's right. Authoritarian censors found an exploit. They couldn't use the government to clamp down on civil liberties because of the pesky constitution, so they invaded the administrative layer of big tech. It's not the engineers who built the web and these companies with Silicon Valley ideals. They were never intended to be used this way and are secretly horrified. > play moral police at the moment Moral fashion p…

In an interesting way it is also an exploitable facet of small government. If the private sector is susceptible to moral policing then then government downsizing implies a larger attack surface.

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

#197

Post by random97531 »

TylerE wrote: post #170
zeroCalories wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

[flagged]

i'm not scared of nazis in america. i am scared of people like you.

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

#198

Post by judge2020 »

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.

It’s clear that it’s only an action they take if there is enough immense pressure from everyone who’s not that site.

So while Cloudflare isn’t a diamond in the rough, you could say they’re a.. topaz in the rough.

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

#199

Post by TylerE »

autoexec wrote: post #187
TylerE wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

And that's where problems arise. Most of us are comfortable oppressing people we disagree with. The reality is that you can't silence voices you don't like without making yourself vulnerable to the same treatment. We either value the freedom to express ourselves within the limits of the law or we don't. As soon as there are more people who think like you do, none of us are safe and it just becomes a system that silen…

This isn't "people I disagree with". Stromfront, and the groups it enables, are literal nazis.

"Stormfront began in 1990 as an online bulletin board supporting white nationalist David Duke's campaign for United States senator for Louisiana. The name "Stormfront" was chosen for its connotations of a political or military front (such as the German Nazi Sturmabteilung (also known as storm troopers or SA)) and an analogy with weather fronts that invokes the idea of a tumultuous storm ending in cleansing.[11] The Stormfront website has been registered at Network Solutions since 1995 and was founded in 1996 by Don Black, a former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1970s and a member of the National Socialist White People's Party."

National Socialist White People = The American Nazi Party. That is literal. They changed from the NSWPP to the American Nazi Party in 1983. Their logo has a swastika on it. LITERAL NAZIS.

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

#200

Post by unethical_ban »

torstenvl wrote: post #66
gravitate wrote: post #12

I hit CTRL+F to find the word 'neutral' in this article, but no such word appeared. But it did appear in another EFF article titled 'We Need to Talk About Infrastructure'[0], which is the crux of the issue here. My only question is; what is regarded 'internet infrastructure' these days? Is Cloudflare really just an ISP? Is VPN infra considered an ISP? Are mixer nets like Tor/Hyphanet an ISP? 'Essential internet infra…

Essential internet infrastructure should not be content-neutral. Content neutrality is a higher bar than you think it is. Content-neutral means the rules cannot take content into account at all . If the content is millions of ssh login requests on thousands of servers with ec2-user and the top 10000 most used passwords, the infrastructure should be able to block that. Content-neutrality would probably make it illegal…

I suspect carveouts for overtly, technically malicious behavior can be applied while still saying "content neutral".
Post reply on HN