ISPs should not police online speech no matter how awful it is • Hacker News Board

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

#721

Post by moomin » Wed, Aug 30, 2023, 1:07 PM UTC

gorwell wrote: post #109

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…

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…

You need to decide if these are private companies or public utilities. If they’re public utilities, the government should provide them. Restricting company’s freedom to choose a business model is not the answer.

You might not like it, but that’s kind of the point, either let the market decide or take the market out of it.

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

#722

Post by cf141q5325 » Wed, Aug 30, 2023, 1:08 PM UTC

shadowgovt wrote: post #706

cf141q5325 wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you sleep tight in a censored echo chamber you might be in for a rude awakening once you realize what atrocities that enables. But luckily you will only find out once you are at the receiving end of it?

The fact cyberbullies exist doesn't obligate anybody to support the site the cyberbullies organize on.

Nobody is expecting you to pay for server costs and your opinion on the righteousness of your action doesnt absolve you of the responsibility for the delete function that was just created. Or gets you out of the predictable consequences. Old fashioned stuff like checks and balances werent around for fun and censoring stuff doesnt make it go away. Neither is a mob level targeting mechanism a good or safe idea.

Creating means to create holes in the public discourse is utterly reckless as you have no means to tell how big they have become. And no means to address them. You just punched your eyes out because you didnt like the sight of something. The potential to create human misery with this is hard to overstate when people blatantly ignore the consequences. This is a nobody is going to hear you scream type of threat. Its also not a novel risk, we know how horrible attempts to dictate public discourse went in the totalitarian systems of the past. Not because of some evilness, but systemic inertia and no longer functioning breaks. Without the ability to communicate, we are screwed.

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

#723

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Aug 30, 2023, 1:08 PM UTC

chonkerz wrote: post #482

habinero wrote: post #457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[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

[deleted]

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

#724

Post by bobsmooth » Wed, Aug 30, 2023, 1:09 PM UTC

metalspot wrote: post #694

woofcat wrote: post #686

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is a hot take. So if you post asking about abortion access as a 16 year old that should have your name plastered next to it. The internet has saved many people by opening up questions you wouldn't ask your doctor.

its a free market so people are always welcome to run services that allow pseudonymity (nothing is actually anonymous on the internet, everything is logged and tracked and traceable) and people are free to use them. the most popular services (facebook/instagram, twitter) are the ones that have the most real people posting stuff under their real names. those companies continue to allow fake users for a variety of fina…

Facebook, Instagram and Twitter are proof that having your real name next to your posts does not mean people will behave better.

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

#725

Post by greyface- » Wed, Aug 30, 2023, 1:09 PM UTC

dcow wrote: post #705

I see ye ol’ “but HE is a private company they can do what they want” argument surfacing again. Something that is easily missed: internet providers benefit from government protected monopolies because you can’t just dig up cities and lay cable wherever you want. They’re seen as privately run public infrastructure. Therefore there’s an expectation that they indiscriminately carry traffic, because their position as an…

Do you really think HE owns most of the fiber they use? It's mostly leased from much larger behemoths that own the physical cables, who treat it as a private conduit for photons, and lack the ability to even know what's being transmitted over it, so can't censor.

Source: https://he.net/about_network.html - you see them talk about "negotiating with the top fiber carriers" and even "long haul wavelengths", which means they don't always lease a whole fiber, sometimes just a small slice of the EM spectrum on one.

IP transit is a value-add on top of an underlying physical asset which already has the properties that you want.

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

#726

Post by cookiengineer » Wed, Aug 30, 2023, 1:11 PM UTC

hotdogscout wrote: post #674

cookiengineer wrote: post #615

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 did not fully understand your post (men are irrational when being accused of enabling child abuse, I still don't know what kind of feminists you mean). I think you also didn't spend enough time among incels, KF or /pol/ to understand them. KF is a moralist forum, they have more jn common with progressive twitter with the incessant policing of behaviour than incels or /pol/. Incels resent women because they don't ha…

I don't want to spam here, my sibling comment is indirectly also an answer/explanation to your comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37321331

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

#727

Post by bobsmooth » Wed, Aug 30, 2023, 1:11 PM UTC

sneak wrote: post #675

sebzim4500 wrote: post #656

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think your phone company should be able to deny you service if they don't like the things you say on the phone?

Any company should be free to deny you service for any (or no) reason. Consent should be able to be withdrawn by anyone at any time.

And what happens when there's only one ISP in your area and they don't like that you post to hackernews and choose not to do business with you?

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

#728

Post by joenot443 » Wed, Aug 30, 2023, 1:13 PM UTC

wmf wrote: post #15

Are there any lawsuits pending against KiwiFarms? If not, why not?

My understanding is that neither Null nor KF never hosted any content which wasn’t protected by the first amendment.

One has to remember Americans have a unique perspective on speech which isn’t shared around the world. “Sue them so they shut up” works here in Canada, it doesn’t necessarily work in the States.

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

#729

Post by shadowgovt » Wed, Aug 30, 2023, 1:17 PM UTC

cf141q5325 wrote: post #722

shadowgovt wrote: post #706

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact cyberbullies exist doesn't obligate anybody to support the site the cyberbullies organize on.

Nobody is expecting you to pay for server costs and your opinion on the righteousness of your action doesnt absolve you of the responsibility for the delete function that was just created. Or gets you out of the predictable consequences. Old fashioned stuff like checks and balances werent around for fun and censoring stuff doesnt make it go away. Neither is a mob level targeting mechanism a good or safe idea. Creatin…

> Neither is a mob level targeting mechanism a good or safe idea.

I think we agree on this. Which is why I'm in favor of giving no online quarter to KiwiFarms, a notorious site for organizing mobs.

KF supporters and users are free to say whatever they want in their own forums. The freedom of speech has never implied an obligation for people to listen. And freedom of the press does imply a freedom to refrain from serving as a conduit for someone else's message, as does freedom of association.

Nothing of what KF is doing or saying obligates anyone to provide them the tools to do or say it. They're as free as everyone else; they can print their own leaflets and stand on their own soapboxes. They don't have the right to obligate HE to facilitate them, directly or by proxy.

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

#730

Post by bobsmooth » Wed, Aug 30, 2023, 1:17 PM UTC

Devasta wrote: post #622

richbell wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The site is literally about stalking people and documenting their personal lives for the sake of mockery. You're half right, though I'd disagree with literally stalking — at the very least, there's variety and nuance. There's such a large variety of people discussed on the forum that I don't think you can make a blanket statement like that. Is watching every video or stream from a content creator and posting in a f…

Wading through each and every single thing a person has done in their lives to mock them is stalking, yes. Even if we pretend it isn't for a second it means that the person who is being followed is now forces to look at every interaction, no matter how innocuous, under the lens of "How will Kiwifarms react to this?" Can you meet a friend without them trying to dig up information on that friend? Can you apply for a jo…

>Can you meet a friend without them trying to dig up information on that friend? Can you apply for a job without HR finding a thread of thousands of posts talking about you?

How would anyone on the internet know about this if you don't post about it?