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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

#631

Post by gwd »

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.

Agreed: "It's not the crime, it's the cover-up" [1].

[1] https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/obstruction-of-justice-it-...

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

#633

Post by matheusmoreira »

chonkerz wrote: post #455
nonethewiser wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I agree, we've got far too many entities that should just be 'dumb pipes' trying to play moral police at the moment This is one of the positives of capitalism. The only color that matters is green. More competition please.

It's because the police have really failed to enforce existing laws that people have to resort to leaning on ISPs and payment processors to do it.

Which is why society needs to turn ISPs into non-discriminating common carriers of information. Now nobody will be able to "resort" to leaning on them anymore.

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

#634

Post by foven »

michaelt wrote: post #587
chonkerz wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the article, the EFF explicitly calls out the government for failing to enforce existing laws which would have shut down Kiwifarms >That’s what must happen here. The cops and the courts should be working to protect the victims of KF and go after the perpetrators with every legal tool at their disposal. We should be giving them the resources and societal mandate to do so. Solid enforcement of existing laws is som…

> the EFF explicitly calls out the government for failing to enforce existing laws which would have shut down Kiwifarms Eh, maybe, but don't most of these laws mostly fail to work across international borders anyway? I mean, I haven't seen many cryptolocker authors appearing before US courts. And wikileaks remains online despite the best efforts of US authorities. Surely anything that could shut down or block kiwifar…

The operator of the kiwifarms is himself a US citizen with a US business. It is an advertised fact that if a police force comes after or shuts him down with a legal reason, it will cease to exist and he himself has stated he wouldn't operate it out of any other country than the US.

Pirate bay and sci-hub get affected by copyright law more than anything else and, to the best of my knowledge, kiwifarms is protected by section 230 in that respect and has always complied with legitimate takedown requests.

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

#635

Post by RecycledEle »

What if we allowed all speech online, no matter how vile?

The problem would be that people want to avoid seeing some things, and they really want to avoid their kids seeing things.

So what if we define a group of flags that can be set to say "This content does contain X" or "This content does not contain X." If the flag is not set, we don't know. Then web filters can just block content that lacks a flag saying "This content does not contain X."

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

#636

Post by concordDance »

chonkerz wrote: post #448
gorwell wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's right. Authoritarian censors found an exploit. They couldn't use the government to clamp down on civil liberties because of the pesky constitution, so they invaded the administrative layer of big tech. It's not the engineers who built the web and these companies with Silicon Valley ideals. They were never intended to be used this way and are secretly horrified. > play moral police at the moment Moral fashion p…

From the article, the EFF explicitly calls out the government for failing to enforce existing laws which would have shut down Kiwifarms >That’s what must happen here. The cops and the courts should be working to protect the victims of KF and go after the perpetrators with every legal tool at their disposal. We should be giving them the resources and societal mandate to do so. Solid enforcement of existing laws is som…

The issue there is that as best I can tell, kiwifarms the site doesn't break any laws. It officially discourages actual harassment of the people it insults. Individual users may harass people but as far as I could tell from my previous skim they do not organize this harassment in the open.

And requiring service providers to monitor private communications for organisation of harassment seems Orwellian to me. (Intuition pump: imagine the postal service opening every letter to check to see if someone's organising a letter writing campaign sending abuse to George Washington)

As does prohibiting people saying unpleasant things about semi-public figures in public.

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

#637

Post by _cenw »

cookiengineer wrote: post #615
hotdogscout wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for this post. I'm sorry you went through this. I don't exactly understand what you mean by feminism (GC/radfem or the average suffrage feminism).

> I don't exactly understand what you mean by feminism (GC/radfem or the average suffrage feminism). I think that the dissonance in the feminism movement versus their counterparts is that there's a different level of expectations in the topics that they as a movement want to discuss. When women (or LGBTQA+) are talking about these issues, they're looking for allies, they're looking for compassion and comfort on their…

I hate to tell you, but attributing all feminist campaigning to some kind of misplaced compassion or lack of rationality is pretty misogynist. We got plenty of things that need and have benefitted from advocacy. Feminists and queer people are not a monolith, and they're allowed to care about the things they care about specifically - just like everyone else.

Fascists are responsible for being fascists, not foreigners or queer "degenerates".

Just like that, incels are responsible for being incels, not feminists and (again?) queer people.

I'm happy there are people fighting against the current state of our Self ID reform, where reporting requirements for security agencies might create the next pink list. And I don't give a shit if incels see that as an affront. I wouldn't be able to make them happy anyway - they need to sort that out themselves.

I know a lot of people outside this issue sometimes have problems differentiating the parts that get amplified by the likes of BILD, WELT and NIUS - pink capitalism's most obvious objectionable strands - and other advocacy. There's a lot of classic divide and conquer at play here too, incidentally.

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

#638

Post by chrischattin »

kelseyfrog wrote: post #196
gorwell wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's right. Authoritarian censors found an exploit. They couldn't use the government to clamp down on civil liberties because of the pesky constitution, so they invaded the administrative layer of big tech. It's not the engineers who built the web and these companies with Silicon Valley ideals. They were never intended to be used this way and are secretly horrified. > play moral police at the moment Moral fashion p…

In an interesting way it is also an exploitable facet of small government. If the private sector is susceptible to moral policing then then government downsizing implies a larger attack surface.

I think the implication is government putting pressure (or working with) businesses to censor speech. Smaller government would mean less attack surface in that case.

Market forces and competition should help keep speech free because if a private company doesn't allow x group to use their platform, it is likely a competitor will spring up to capture the orphaned market. We see this play out in reality.

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

#639

Post by concordDance »

plagiarist wrote: post #150

What I'd like to figure out is how there are still so many Nazis despite readily-available facts that Naziism is racist delusions? And how are countries like Germany still doing kinda okay despite making it illegal to do Nazi stuff? Isn't it a slippery slope directly from banning Naziism direct to North Korean-style authoritarianism?

> What I'd like to figure out is how there are still so many Nazis despite readily-available facts that Naziism is racist delusions?

You're equivocating between two different meanings of "Nazi" in this sentence.

> And how are countries like Germany still doing kinda okay despite making it illegal to do Nazi stuff?

They aren't, they moved the Overton window so far via a ratchet effect that they're unable to calmly discuss immigration policy.

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

#640

Post by vintermann »

Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #588
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…

Moderation and censorship are two very different things. Also, trusting the government is silly. It has a lot of opportunities to call any speech harmful to state policies as 'hate speech', 'misinformation', etc. - and before long you could find your country turned into a authoritarian failed state like Russia.

Right. To make it explicit: Moderation is when you take down material because the recipient doesn't want to see it.

Censorship is when you take down content because you don't want the recipient to see it, regardless of how the recipient feels about it.

If people think censorship is sometimes justified, they should argue that, and not muddle the picture with moderation.

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