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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

#341
post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So censorship is okay as long as it's politically aligned with the powers that be? I'm not a nazi, but that seems dangerous...

Neo-nazis are domestic terrorists and should be treated as such.

And how should you be treated? Arent you just a totalitarian yourself if you are gullible enough to think targeted censorship is a good idea?

Genuinely asking, from where i stand your simplistic view on reality is one of the most dangerous currents out there right now.

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

#342
post #287
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…

// private companies a re de facto writing the laws // We can certainly discuss whether these services should be publicly or privately owned. I'm a pretty liberal guy, and wouldn't mind seeing publically-owned versions of Twitter, ChatGPT, or Google, as a guard against corporations dominating the information age. But calling for more government regulation of privately-owned services? Forcing private companies to do w…

> "Forcing private companies to do what you want them to do, even when they would prefer not to?"

That's exactly the argument that bigots who owned businesses used to refuse service to PoC and oppressed people before the civil rights legislations of the '50s and '60s were passed. Funny to hear old discredited arguments used by far-right conservatives decades ago coming out of the mouths of the left these days. It's almost enough to make one start taking the horseshoe theory seriously.

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

#343

I think the question is not quite so easy as many here (and even the EFF) are making it seem. It's easy to talk about free-speech that needs to be protected at any cost when it comes to political speech, but if we look at e.g. spam nobody argues that spam and spammers should be blocked. Now is spam less speech, because it is not political? On a similar note, if I own a large piece of land should I allow a demonstrati…

>but if we look at e.g. spam nobody argues that spam and spammers should be blocked. Now is spam less speech, because it is not political?

Because the blocking is consensual. You're actively choosing to block out the spam, and if you so choose you can still see the spam. The same can't be said for deplatforming. Even if you want to read kwifarms you can't, because others have presented you from being able to access their site.

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

#344
post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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" The site is probably one of the only sources of actual gang stalking on the planet, and when it isn't stalking and harassing people on an industrial scale, it also moonlights as a suicide factory. The psychopaths that run and participate on the site…

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

#345
post #220

I would encourage those interested to read up on the individual behind the ISP harassment campaign and what might actually be motivating them to do it. That it's being done to protect trans people is highly disingenuous.

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

#346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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" The site is probably one of the only sources of actual gang stalking on the planet, and when it isn't stalking and harassing people on an industrial scale, it also moonlights as a suicide factory. The psychopaths that run and participate on the site…

[flagged]

As someone who agrees ISPs shouldn't get to be judge, jury, and executioner on censorship, I find it really odd when people go out of their ways to defend absolute cesspits every time the censorship issue comes up.

Kiwi Farms is an irredeemable cesspit by every measure I can see, and accepting that makes your argument stronger. Trying to act like it's an innocent place, or this place is ok because you're familiar with 100 even worse places just makes you look unreasonable. All it serves to do is muddy the waters between being anti-censorship and being pro-cesspit, and I'm not the former.

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

#349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, sheesh. KF is a website that gleefully reposts terrorist murder videos treated with the same legal penalties as CSAM in other countries, and during the reign of ISIS and the Taliban I don't recall people sitting around defending the need for that particular free speech. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiwi_Farms#Christchurch_mosque... edit: By the way, for all those people ripping on the ACLU and saying "they los…

> Yeah, sheesh. KF is a website that gleefully reposts terrorist murder videos treated with the same legal penalties as CSAM in other countries, and during the reign of ISIS and the Taliban I don't recall people sitting around defending the need for that particular free speech. Do you genuinely not see a problem with the New Zealand police ordering websites to remove content they dislike and hand over user informatio…

There is not a country in the world that does not believe some forms of speech are worth censoring. In most of the world, CSAM is treated similarly because they don't believe people should spread depraved images of other humans being harmed. US Federal law treats animal abuse imagery in this way: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/48

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

#350
post #220

I would encourage those interested to read up on the individual behind the ISP harassment campaign and what might actually be motivating them to do it. That it's being done to protect trans people is highly disingenuous.

Here the Glenn Greenwald post from the time of the Kiwifarms debacle is worth referencing.

https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1567292900312064000

>But the worst is watching people whose job title in corporate HR Departments is "journalist" take the lead in agitating for censorship. They exploit the platforms of corporate giants to pioneer increasingly dangerous means of banning dissenters. These are the authoritarians.

Its especially despicable if it happens consciously as a means to an end. Signaling towards a common enemy is highly profitable in a tribalism ridden society. Doing this despite an understanding of the risk it entails can hardly be described as anything but malice.

I can only think of imploring people to read Meerloos "Rape of the mind" about the existential risk totalitarian systems pose. And even if someone already went full Stalinist thinking the ends justify the means, its worth mentioning that its a self destructive delusion. It cant work and the revolution eats its children reliably. Be it the SA or the red guard, they always end as the victims of the monster they created. Unfortunately the rest of society is then stuck in the dystopian nightmare these delusional maniacs created.

edit: On this note, Arte recently had a documentary about the Chinese gulag system https://www.arte.tv/en/videos/106702-001-A/china-s-concentra...

edit1: The only one saving you from this fate is yourself. So maybe dont put it off till you are in prison.

>In the same text, Martsinkevich said he’d finally read Alexander Solzhenitsyn's “The Gulag Archipelago” for the first time. “If I’d read ‘Gulag Archipelago’ before I sat down to write ‘Restrukt,’ I wouldn’t have even started it!” he confessed.

https://meduza.io/en/feature/2020/09/17/in-the-end-it-doesn-...

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