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

481–490 of 1001 posts

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

#481

Post by habinero »

CogitoCogito wrote: post #445
IncogNET wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was later in July. To be clear, filing a complaint is simply an online form. This does not involve or require lawyers or any expense. The TLDR version is: We filed it as a violation of HB2282, Washignton State's Net Neutrality / Open Internet laws, the AG thought it was an appropriate complaint and forwarded it to HE. This gives them 21 days to respond. They (HE) responded relatively quickly, basically saying, "Na…

If HE is lying in response to a complaint forwarded to them by the AG, that seems like something the AG really should investigate. Edit: It's odd to see this downvoted. I don't care about Kiwifarms or all the other random crazy crap being discussed in this comment thread. But I do feel that companies should be honest in their communications. I'm surprised people here disagree.

This seems like an incredibly trivial thing to investigate.

The AG is about consumer protections. This is absolutely not that.

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

#482

Post by chonkerz »

habinero wrote: post #457
richbell wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

[flagged]

kiwifarms admin admitted to this too. he says that he seeks out mentally vulnerable people to harass because they make funny reactions when tormented. he calls them "lolcows". the first victim of the site was a severely autistic person. kiwifarms was originally called "CWCki Forums" after the first victim's initials

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

#483

Post by spondylosaurus »

throwaway56101 wrote: post #461
chonkerz wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You host death threats and leaked PII, and the forum owner explicitly encourages his followers to harass specific people he has a personal grudge against. He names entire sections of his forums after his victims and encourages people to post about his victims. You're lying. He's not running a neutral operation and neither are you. The forum doxes employees of their hosting providers. Even Russian hosters terminated k…

[flagged]

Harassment campaigns by Kiwi Farms users are known to have contributed to the suicides of at least three individuals.[15] The Kiwi Farms community considers it a goal to drive its targets to suicide, and has celebrated such deaths with a counter on the website.[22]: 55, 61 They have used social media reporting systems to mass-report posts by harassment targets in which they have expressed suicidal thoughts or intentions, with the goal of reducing the possibility their targets receive help.[22]: 91

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiwi_Farms

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

#484

Post by Cthulhu_ »

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.

Kiwifarms is not just a site about "opinions", they organize destroying people's lives and celebrating when someone kills themselves.

There's a clear moral distinction between "I believe trans women do not belong in women's bathrooms" and "Here's their address, do your thing until they are gone!".

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

#485

Post by chonkerz »

yashap wrote: post #353

I agree, and I’m extremely far from a free speech absolutist - to a level that I’m sure most at HN would disagree with. I completely believe in limits to free speech on a case by case basis, online and otherwise. For example, I think HN would be a worse place without moderation, same with Reddit, I think my home country Canada would be a worse place without hate speech laws, etc. Not against limits to free speech onl…

Kiwifarms makes shell companies so the hosting provider is a confederate and the only way to terminate service is to go over their head and complain to the upstream. You can even see "their hosting provider" posting weird political astroturfing in this thread.

Spammers do this trick all the time to buy some plausible deniability.

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

#487

Post by chonkerz »

hellgas00 wrote: post #405
SamoyedFurFluff wrote: post #302

Is this situation like, say I own some commercial property like a mall, someone rents from me, I realize the person who is renting from me is allowing one of the storefronts to advertise the ritualistic sacrifice of kittens. Shouldn’t I be allowed to 1) tell the guy renting from me to boot out the kitten killers; 2) boot out the guy renting from me for letting one of the storefronts of my commercial space be kitten k…

Your analogy is poor, what you described contravene US laws. Your misunderstanding was seemingly addressed in the article. Tier 1 providers, in some regions, operate as quazi-monopolies. A more apt analogy; you dislike renters that openly promote their religious affiliation, but you also own all of the rental properties in the western United States. This leaves them with nowhere to setup shop for running foul of your…

[flagged]

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

#488

Post by seanhunter »

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 is an argument that seems reasonable but lacks important nuance and addressing it forms the center of "The Open Society and its Enemies" by Karl Popper, which I would recommend reading.

Popper's argument is essentially that tolerance is essential to open society and therefore to maintain openness, society must ironically be intolerant of those who are intolerant themselves or would spread intolerance. Nazis were specifically on his mind, WW2 having just occurred, and Popper uses them as an example of people who use tolerance by others to spread intolerance and therefore reduce freedom overall. For society to defend freedom, it has to not permit that.

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

#489

Post by chonkerz »

wrp wrote: post #347

Serious legal question...What is the difference between an online venue and telephones? Is it simply that implementation of censoring is practicable? Could the telephone companies start "moderating" all phone communications to prevent unsavory communication?

Phone companies already ban spam customers that make thousands of phone calls

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

#490

Post by habinero »

throwaway56101 wrote: post #461
chonkerz wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You host death threats and leaked PII, and the forum owner explicitly encourages his followers to harass specific people he has a personal grudge against. He names entire sections of his forums after his victims and encourages people to post about his victims. You're lying. He's not running a neutral operation and neither are you. The forum doxes employees of their hosting providers. Even Russian hosters terminated k…

[flagged]

[flagged]
Post reply on HN