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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

#801

Post by gameman144 »

hnbad wrote: post #567
mortenjorck wrote: post #8

It's heartening to see the EFF come out sticking to principles on this in a time when other organizations of their stature have not. I hate to say it, but I could easily imagine something like the ACLU opposing the EFF on this.

I think you misunderstand the EFF's position here if you think this is some kind of enlightened centrist "I may not agree with what you say but I will fight to death for your right to say it": the EFF is opposed to ISPs filtering content because that is not the job of an ISP and not a level of analysis an ISP should be allowed (much less required) to do. The EFF very much promotes progressive values, more consistentl…

> And this inevitably means you get an overrepresentation of open white supremacists, CSAM enjoyers, teenage edgelords and trolls.

This is not a problem for free speech organizations, though, since they have the ability to choose which cases they represent.

They can (and do, I'm sure) often weigh the perception of bias in which cases they take on next.

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

#802

Post by RHSeeger »

moomin wrote: post #721
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…

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.

> Restricting company’s freedom to choose a business model is not the answer.

Only, that's not how it works in our (and pretty much any) society. We, as a society, choose what we think is acceptable. And then we make laws to enforce that people behave in a way consistent with that. A company is not free to deny service to someone that is gay, or black, or married; just because that is their chosen business model.

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

#803

Post by shrimp_emoji »

goodpoint wrote: post #617
bluescrn wrote: post #560

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Freedom of speech was a pretty fundamental value. A couple of generations ago.

Freedom of speech is being distorted by some actors in bad faith that want the freedom to be racist etc.

Freedom of speech is being distorted by some actors in bad faith that want the freedom to be anti-Juche counterrevolutionary etc.

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

#805

Post by rhelz »

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…

Freedom is certainly a tricky thing to balance, and private property rights are not absolute. But neither are freedom of speech rights.

Here's a way to cut the Gordian knot: publicly-owned services and utilities. E.g. NPR as a way to check distortions which privately-owned news organizations would otherwise be subject to. We could have a national public twitter, a national public chatGTP, etc.

So those of you who are now thinking of all the drawbacks typically associated with publicly-owned companies (real or imagined), well, the more you let the government regulate the private companies, the more the private companies will behave like public companies anyways.

Instead of getting the best of both worlds, you'll get the worst of both worlds: heavily-regulated, inefficient companies which still control the public discourse, which deliver profits not to the public but to private interests.

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

#806

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#807

Post by phpisthebest »

ToucanLoucan wrote: post #734
phpisthebest wrote: post #708

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>It's not the engineers who built the web and these companies I 100% disagree with this, the engineering level of silicon valley left the old "libertarian" hacker ethos behind a long time ago, at the engineering layer there is idea about using technology to build a "better society" where "better society" is ensuring people with "wrong opinions" isolated so they can not "harm" others with their "violence" and violenc…

> I 100% disagree with this, the engineering level of silicon valley left the old "libertarian" hacker ethos behind a long time ago And thank fuck for that. > at the engineering layer there is idea about using technology to build a "better society" where "better society" is ensuring people with "wrong opinions" isolated so they can not "harm" others with their "violence" and violence is now words on the internet. Peo…

[flagged]

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

#808

Post by sequoia »

I heard a podcast interviewing the site owner[0], hearing his perspective was interesting though I don't know how much of what he says is true either. He raised one very salient point, however, which was that ISPs probably didn't start dropping him out of nowhere. He asserts that there is a highly persistent and technically knowledgeable party threatening ISPs & other providers by going after the provider's other customers to pressure the provider to drop kiwifarms. I don't know what the truth is but it is odd that kiwifarms keeps getting knocked offline as neonazi forums etc. stay online.

I don't know much about kiwifarms, never visited it, but given the claims in this post (that it's "uniquely awful," that the site itself is victimizing people) I think it would be helpful if the authors would link to some context/evidence. Maybe it's all true in this case, but I've been on the internet long enough to know that believing grave accusations without evidence is a very bad rookie mistake.

0: https://www.heterodorx.com/podcast/episode-107-how-the-inter...

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

#809

Post by chonkerz »

sequoia wrote: post #808

I heard a podcast interviewing the site owner[0], hearing his perspective was interesting though I don't know how much of what he says is true either. He raised one very salient point, however, which was that ISPs probably didn't start dropping him out of nowhere. He asserts that there is a highly persistent and technically knowledgeable party threatening ISPs & other providers by going after the provider's other cus…

ISPs get threatened all the time and don't take content down just because some rando is mad. Kiwifarms needs to provide proof that ISPs are being threatened, as opposed to the more likely scenario that the harassment victims are filing normal abuse complaints and alerting the ISP to the TOS violations taking place all over the site.

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

#810

Post by lr4444lr »

zimpenfish wrote: post #584
lr4444lr wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I personally don't think the founding fathers of the US understood the future gullibility of their citizens. They absolutely did. When only white, male, decently educated property owners could vote, they had decent reassurance that a constitutional republic with state-specific voter management could work. I think they'd be horrified to see that today we don't even demand a basic proof of civics education. And I hat…

> I hate that Ramaswamy made that suggestion in such an embarrassing, conversation-poisoning way Are you talking about his "failed Civics 101" gaffe re: historical ordering of Constitution and Revolution?

https://twitter.com/VivekGRamaswamy/status/16568127781773475...

I have been convinced for a long time that a test of basic civics and current events is a necessary (and possibly a sufficient) condition to fix most of the failings we see in representative democracy, but the Overton window is nowhere near it, and Ramaswamy is hardly the candidate I'd want proposing it.

The whole question and answer bank could even be given out online or in print cosr free - my bar is pretty low.

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