I'm confused because the issue seems to be about Crunchbits but most of the article seems to cover Kiwi Farms and only mentions Crunchbits once.
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
#232Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I strongly disagree with people who seek to suppress freedom of speech. This is not the hypocrisy that you’re painting it as. I question the motives of anyone sympathizing with Nazis as “just a different opinion” Suppressing nazism is not “suppressing freedom of speech”. It is suppressing people who seek to suppress.
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Re: ISPs should not police online speech no matter how awful it is
#233I think it's fine for the ISP to police online speech over their network as long as it's clearly stated in their service agreement that they can cancel/interfere with your service if they think you're too mean and as long as they also lose all safe harbor and assume liability for everything transmitted over their network.
I think perhaps your comment was misunderstood (hence the downvotes), but I think it was a fair take. If a company wants to engage in arbitrary (and especially partisan) censorship then they should not be afforded safe harbor. Why should safe harbor be granted to a company which allows hate speech from one group, but actively censors identical speech from another group? By doing so they create an actively hostile atmosphere toward one group or another, and they are no longer "simple carriers", but active participants.
Re: ISPs should not police online speech no matter how awful it is
#234Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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?
It is not that the forum going down in and of itself is the harm. Instead it is that this precedent can be used by much more authoritarian groups to target groups that you support. Now its KF, and after that other countries are telling these tech services to take down gay and lesbian support groups, or even a state in the US could force abortion services offline. Its a loophole that could be used as an end run around…
I am 100% okay with deplatforming fascist genocidal maniacs spreading hate
Re: ISPs should not police online speech no matter how awful it is
#235[deleted]
Re: ISPs should not police online speech no matter how awful it is
#236The 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,…
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Re: ISPs should not police online speech no matter how awful it is
#237Earlier 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.
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The line isn't drawn at "literal Nazis", because for all the criticisms one can lob at KF it is clearly not dedicated to Naziism. It platforms Nazis, for sure, but if the argument is either that a large blast radius that hits a lot of non-Nazi content is acceptable or the old "well if you platform literal Nazis you are a literal Nazi, sorry" fallacy, it's not good.
Re: ISPs should not police online speech no matter how awful it is
#238Are there any lawsuits pending against KiwiFarms? If not, why not?
Side note, but Wikipedia editors decided to censor KiwiFarms url, which I think is very interesting.
Re: ISPs should not police online speech no matter how awful it is
#239EFF is on the wrong side of this, just as they were on the wrong side of the debates about what to do about spam email back in the day. They're committed to the view that the only acceptable place to block any flow of information (which they define very broadly) is at the receiving user's end and that the end user must personally opt-in. This is completely at odds with the last 30 years of experience on the internet…
> how bad actors will abuse systems I’ve seen both ends of the spectrum - I remember Usenet, that had no moderation at all, and having to wade through a sea of spam, wishing somebody would get rid of it. But then I saw what reddit moderation turned into… I’ll take the spam, thanks. The spammers are bad actors, but moderators actually become evil actors.
> But then I saw what reddit moderation turned into
People like the harp on how bad reddit moderation is but I personally haven't seen it. Maybe I'm just in smaller communities or I choose the subreddits I follow more carefully, but I haven't seen cases of moderator abuse and if I ever do (usually as an outside observer to some drama in a different community) then I take a mental note to not follow that subreddit in the future.
Re: ISPs should not police online speech no matter how awful it is
#240Glad 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…
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