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

Attacking and maligning people is kind of Kiwifarms' whole deal. Plus maybe a bit of stalking thrown in for good measure.

Yes. You're not understanding that

Banning someone from your private establishment is within your rights. If they want to run their own business they can elsewhere.

Banning someone via an ISP is different because ISPs have so much infrastructure they can in some sense be considered a "public utility". Nothing would stop someone from advertising ritualistic kitten killing in a public park (except maybe indecency laws but those vary). Likening an ISP to a public park is more accurate. If someone posted a sign saying "no one convicted of smoking weed can walk through this area" you'd rightfully be accused of some civil rights violation in your park. Similarly, ISPs are a conduit no different than a park path.

Everyone chooses KF or whatever as an example of "bad people that should be stopped". That's great. No one disagrees. Anyone with more than a room temperature IQ sees where it goes though. Suddenly you won't be able to access things that don't conform to the government issued public opinion. Don't believe me? The Great Firewall is exactly the same technology.

It is legitimately not my problem, nor the ISPs, who is doing what on the big internet. We have existing laws. Use those to prosecute people posting kitten killing videos or whatever. We do not need to have ISPs using AI and shit as precognitiion to censor what they deem to be "unsafe speech" or whatever.

I read an interesting article the other day. It was about the Freedom of Information Act. We now take this for granted, but getting it passed was a huge ordeal. It dramatically strengthened the accountability of government and gave citizens one of their strongest tools available. It was, unsurprisingly, vehemently opposed by both major parties and nearly every form of the US political establishment. It would eventually go on to be passed in 1966 after an extensive campaign in support of it.

Anyhow, the point. Check out this [1] snippet, which was published as part of said campaign. More important than the snippet is who it's written by. A young exceptionally popular congressman from Illinois by the name of Donald Rumsfeld, who was also critical about the senseless US involvement in Vietnam. His is a name, which if happens to be before your time, would later come to be synonymous with the Iraq War, US ABC agencies torturing people, and of course the complete fabrication of evidence to justify the invasion Iraq.

And he's not especially unique. I think it all comes down to a simple problem. Imagine you happen to be pro-choice. If I paid you $10,000,000 would you become an advocate for pro-life? For the overwhelming majority of people, the answer there is going to be yes. But of course you and I are relatively irrelevant, so nobody's ever going to really try to change our values. But if you or I gained power, such hypotheticals suddenly become entirely real. For a man to be surrounded by such possibilities, yet remain true to his own values - he's going to need to be rich enough that people can't afford to bribe him, or some once in a millennium Aurelius like man of true character.

[1] - https://acsc.lib.udel.edu/files/original/edbab7cd2d0e82f8e19...

do people here consider comment moderation to be online speech policing? Seems pretty clear that there are certain things hosts don't want on their platform

there's an economic bottom line where advertisers drive a lot of the need as well. users themselves aren't paying for the service.

Isn't a decent amount of spam blocked without our knowing? Telecom companies work to prevent spam phone calls, YT/Twitter/FB try to block bots or spam accounts - all that happens without users consensually blocking each account. Most people don't even realize how much "speech" has been blocked that they don't even see?