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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

#661

Post by roenxi »

concordDance wrote: post #636
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 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. (Intuitio…

If you read up on the Kiwifarms Wikipedia page [0] it sounds like someone needs to go to jail. Until this moment I'd never believed that sending someone a pizza would qualify as an act of violence - but now I can see it. If the site doesn't break laws then there is no reason to ban it. But there are criminals using that site and they should be caught. Banning the site is just dodging the real problem.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiwi_Farms

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

#662

Post by agentgumshoe »

yrro wrote: post #568
imadierich wrote: post #525

Earlier quoted context omitted.

blame the WEF and 16 UN STG

> Promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all and build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels oh no how _terrible_

It's not that bit you need to check, it's the 'how' behind it.

'Inclusive' is also incredibly easy to abuse.

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

#663

Post by DharmaPolice »

kredd wrote: post #600
raxxorraxor wrote: post #545

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN is moderated, but I cannot imagine many opinions that really would be outright banned or suppressed. It has strong requirements to the form, but not necessarily the content of the message itself. That is in essence not the topic people complain about, otherwise they probably wouldn't post. I am a free speech absolutist though, I tend to like the term too because I believe its intended derisiveness is mostly impote…

Quite a lot of opinions get suppressed over here, and rightly so. You can see a lot of flagged comments in hot threads. I grew up with unrestricted access to internet as a child, browsed a lot of forums, and most of them were always heavily moderated as well. The thing is, the majority of audience (read-only people) don’t want to see extremely stupid content (subjective). Thus the mods, host and etc. have to play the…

I've not done a thorough analysis but it seems like most flagging of posters/comments here seems to be done on the basis of conduct rather than opinion. And that's a different matter.

The thought experiment is always; if this person behaved the same way but had a different viewpoint - would they still be banned/flagged/arrested? Mostly I think it's a yes here, which is a good thing.

The problem with a lot of internet posters is they refuse to accept a distinction between conduct and opinion. If you're abusive to everyone and then get banned, it's not because they couldn't handle your radical opinions, it's because you were being a dick.

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

#664

Post by Levitz »

oliwarner wrote: post #647
CM30 wrote: 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 are de facto writing the laws about what's allowed online It's hard when it's your line people are using to put their brand of ugliness "online". Cloudflare comes up so regularly because so many legally problematic websites use their free service to evade even judicial blocks that ISPs are ordered to implement at national level. CF are used as a free proxy that's very hard to block unless Cloudfla…

>When they don't take a stand, when they try to stay impartial, they're attacked for enabling terrorism, child abuse, human trafficking, etc, etc, etc.

Imo the problem lies here. On the idea that servicing someone implies support for their actions or ideology. For all the talk about acceptance and tolerance it would seem a good deal of society is ok with the idea that those doing reprehensible stuff ought to be completely ostracized from society, laws be damned.

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

#665

Post by jameshart »

loup-vaillant wrote: post #621
rhelz wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

// 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…

> * The whole point of private property is that it carves out a space of freedom for you, the owner of the private property, to use it as you wish!!!* Be careful here not to conflate personal property and lucrative property. The first (like a home) is what you say. The second (like a factory) is a way to tell others what to do on your turf, for your benefit rather than theirs. Private companies are of the second kind…

Owning a factory doesn’t give you the right to tell people what to do.

Having employment contracts with people gives you that right.

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

#666

Post by ben_w »

yanderekko wrote: post #247
peterashford wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From an outsider's perspective (NZ) Germany's democracy looks a lot healthier than the US's.

Well, right now there's a odd vogue to think that a healthy democracy does things like ban political parties (currently an active debate regarding the AfD in Germany), or embrace indigenous apartheid movements (NZ, Australia), or to cede sovereignty to unaccountable transnational elites that promise to protect you from the ravages of political misinformation (the EU as a whole.) I don't think these notions will stand…

The EU isn't unaccountable, unlike most free trade agreements it's also got a parliament that citizens can vote for.

NAFTA or TTIP — unless I've fallen for the exact same propaganda that led to Brexit — would have been better examples.

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

#668

Post by metalspot »

krapp wrote: post #643
RecycledEle wrote: post #635

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…

You're making the mistake many people make in assuming all communication on the web is strictly two way, and that the only possible outcome of speech online is hurt feelings. If I post your real name, address and bank account credentials online, or photos of you in the bathroom, or start a forum to plan acts of genocide against your race or religion, or maybe spread plausible slander about you on every social media p…

if people are doing something illegal than allowing them to freely post about it online makes it much easier to detect and prosecute.

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

#670

Post by Levitz »

chrischattin wrote: post #638
kelseyfrog wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>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.

This doesn't really apply in the same way in social media. Social media platforms organically turn into monopolies.

X and Facebook and Reddit and Hackernews and Whatsapp are all social media, sure, but they are not in direct competition. One does not start or stop using Instagram because they use Reddit. Same with Hackernews and X, etc etc. The product is different.

When you ban an ideology or a group from a piece of social media, they do run to competitors, but "competitors" which can never penetrate the market because they don't have the userbase, which is the main incentive of social media.

So far-right people get banned from Twitter and they run to Gab, but Gab and Twitter aren't really competitors because Twitter can't ever penetrate into Gab's market (they banned that market to begin with) and Gab can't penetrate Twitter's market (because Twitter is the more attractive platform to begin with, having more users)

The better product is better because of its userbase. There is no real competition, and as such, no upholding of freedom of speech due to it.

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