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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

#271

Post by shadowgovt »

causality0 wrote: post #264
autoexec wrote: post #187

Earlier 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…

If you don't believe in freedom of speech for people you hate you don't believe in it at all. The refusal to use force to stop opinions the majority doesn't like is the only thing that makes any progress possible. Being able to say things other people want to stop you from saying is the defining characteristic of free speech.

You're right; I don't believe in it as a categorical virtue. I believe in it as an extremely useful feature of a system of government as a check against the failure mode of the leadership becoming so disconnected from the public that they fall to corruption. In short, "It's not okay for the government to turn the public square into an echo chamber."

Private people, groups, companies though? Not only may they curtail speech more or less arbitrarily in places they own, I believe quite firmly that they may respond to the exercise of freedom of speech by exercising their freedom of association and refraining from further commerce with the speaker because of the information the speaker has revealed. And with very few, narrow, specific cut-outs, American law agrees with that premise.

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

#272

Post by mensetmanusman »

TylerE wrote: post #199
autoexec wrote: post #187

Earlier 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…

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…

Depending on who is in power, Ukrainians might be called literal Nazis at the end of a rifle.

If you empower the good guys today with the wrong machinery, you will be crushed in the future by the bad guys.

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

#273

Post by cookiengineer »

As a victim that has been doxxed and attacked in real life, over a rumor that some idiots spread about me on the other side of the planet (that I am trans?!?), I wholeheartedly disagree and I now know what all the feminist movement is talking about when they write or talk about that they don't feel safe, be it online or offline (due to the technological "upper hand" being on the side of the doxxers).

This incident changed my life, and I changed my pacifistic views because I cannot stand by and do nothing anymore.

Why is it that people have the right to decide what their standpoint is over this, especially in regards to legal actions...but victims don't even have the right to change their names in order to feel safe again?

I thought long whether or not I should write about this, because honestly, I'm in Europe and I don't give a damn about your shit-smearing American radicalization tactics in political campaigns. But I realized that it's over here nowadays, too, and it's a lot bigger than anyone not involved might assume.

Team Jorge, AIMS, Killnet/Xaknet/Legion's psyops, troll factories with fake education foundations as a cover story, etc. if you want to know more about it. Aleph from the occrp if you want to do more research on the legal structures and how their money flows.

The right-wing ("alt rights") are the fools of modern warfare, and they don't even know who it is that is playing them because they are blind of hatred and despair. And that's what's wrong with our society.

Autocracies on the planet realized that the weakness of democracy is that it tries to find a compromise. "Divide and conquer" is literally what they're doing, and we are too busy discussing our moral stand points over this while they infect our societies with hatred to make it impossible to govern.

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

#274

Post by bb88 »

richbell wrote: post #213
TylerE wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

What constitutes a "Nazi"? I remember when people were up in arms claiming that Jordan Peterson (who I do not support) a Nazi and trying to get him deplatformed; there are countless other examples of people being branded as Nazis for being unpopular and distasteful.

What constitutes a Nazi? Support for Adolf Hitler or his beliefs.

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

#275

Post by hhhhhhhtopaz »

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]

[flagged]

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

#277

Post by whatwhaaaaat »

paddlepop wrote: post #141
whatwhaaaaat wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The bomb threat is already a crime. Properly prosecute it. Are you trying to say that some opinion posted online that may or may not have been consumed by the offender in this case is somehow directly responsible? My question to those who support big brother any lawful but awful speech is - do you really think it won’t be used to silence any dissent of the ruling powers?

>> My question to those who support big brother any lawful but awful speech is - do you really think it won’t be used to silence any dissent of the ruling powers? My question to those that use this line of reasoning is do you really think a ruling power willing to silence dissent would do so whether or not it is supported?

A salient point no doubt. There is ample evidence that some are silenced by a range of methods. I’m simply not going to support codifying that sort of thing in law.

I would argue if we have people in positions of power who would make decisions like that then it is our duty to our progeny to relieve those in question.

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

#278

Post by X6S1x6Okd1st »

arp242 wrote: post #269
shadowgovt wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

If you want to argue that internet infrastructure providers should be blocking access to areas of the internet due to bad consequences and "being able to sleep at night", then there many more obvious and larger targets. The amount of attention KiwiFarms gets is ridiculously outsized for what it is: a fairly small forum with a bunch of mean-spirited people telling mean-spirited "jokes". It's a very odd target for all…

That's an extremely charitable description of what KiwiFarms is.

What's your list of things to block that are higher up the list?

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

#279

Post by Barrin92 »

toast0 wrote: post #151
Barrin92 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>shouldn't the process be that a court of competent jurisdiction should be able to issue an order the same people who decry this will also decry the government taking charge of internet moderation at the ISP level, probably even louder. This entire discussion is bizarre and academic. The site in question has engaged in doxxing and other activities that has led to real world harm, including suicides, and content on th…

> the same people who decry this will also decry the government taking charge of internet moderation at the ISP level, probably even louder. Probably, yes. Which is why I mentioned the first part of the issue. Otoh, when the government does a takedown with court orders, there's always people yelling about it, but it's not as loud as when the government does a takedown without at least the appearance of due process or…

nobody has any obligation to deliver anything they know will cause someone harm. That is pretty much by definition the violation of an ethical standard. 'Neutrality' in the face of someone's life being threatened by someone else is cowardice. And to make things clear, directly from the EFF article:

"A site that provides a forum for gamifying abuse and doxxing, whose users have celebrated on its pages the IRL deaths of the targets of their harassment campaigns[...]"

If you knowingly facilitate a website which itself takes ownership of deaths they have caused proudly, you are abandoning your civic duty. And we can go farther, not only has any ISP obligation to stop this, any hacker who can should take that site down, and anyone who has some resources left over should aid. Not a single inch should be given to these people, not just by the law but by everyone else.

Do you understand how cynical it is to hide behind neutrality or free speech to let people terrorize others to death and laugh about it?

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