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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

#811
post #540

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 do you mean “do Nazi stuff”? Germany treads very lightly when it comes to limiting speech, even for Nazi things. They have plenty of far-right racist groups that model themselves after the Nazis. As long as you don’t display the swastika gratuitously (there is no blanket ban), you’re quite free to organize a racist political party and takes seats in the government. Hell, there are still SS alumni groups in Germa…

>As long as you don’t display the swastika gratuitously (there is no blanket ban), you’re quite free to organize a racist political party and takes seats in the government.

No.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/08/13/afd-party-ban-ge...

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

#813

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm curious what the function of publishing a targets home address, personal phone number, place of employment, and so on is supposed to be if they don't condone harassment. One might suspect that the rule against harrassment is just paper-thin ass-covering. Officially they'll also tell you they just collate and archive freely available information, while for example publishing and micro-analyzing the hacked bank sta…

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

#814

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Kiwifarms makes shell companies Can you provide examples of shell companies they've used? As far as I'm aware, Kiwi Farms only had a single LLC which is based in the US.

[flagged]

There isn't a single comment I've seen you make in this thread which even vaguely qualifies as being in good faith.

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

#815
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…

> " Forcing private companies to do what you want them to do, even when they would prefer not to? " That's exactly the argument that bigots who owned businesses used to refuse service to PoC and oppressed people before the civil rights legislations of the '50s and '60s were passed. Funny to hear old discredited arguments used by far-right conservatives decades ago coming out of the mouths of the left these days. It's…

There is a very bright-line difference in the case of the civil rights-related curbs on private property privilege: Those actually were effective in solving the problem! Because the solution to the problem was very clear: everybody should be able to ride the bus, eat in a restaurant, etc.

The contrast with regulating the media companies couldn't be greater. What, exactly, should these regulations be? I haven't heard anything but the most vague notions--which are so undercooked that they do not rise to the level of any kind of concrete proposal.

In point of fact, no matter what regulations are adopted, there will be media winners and media losers, and the losers will always feel the system is against them. Our media will become even more hyper-politicized than it is now, because its fate would be determined by politicians who can't even agree that it's probably a good idea to pay our debt.

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

#816

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 g…

> 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

Currently I would suggest that most of the failings in, e.g., US democracy are coming from the Republican party and I'm pretty sure most of them will have passed a test of basic civics, etc., yet are demonstrably bad at governance.

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

#817
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…

Corporations are essentially citizens, and citizens have the right to free speech. We can agree or disagree, but this where we've allowed ourselves to get.

HE is within their rights to say no, we will not host or route to KF, to stop us would violate our constitutional rights to freedom of speech and expression. They would then point to a litany of issues surrounding KF, how it would impact their business, and then win their case with ease.

I'm kind of shocked EFF went to bat for KF If I'm being honest. When your speech is unaliving people, or responsible for wide scale harassment of minors, guess what, I'm not interested in doing business with you, and that's perfectly fine. The fact that they use such a weak argument like utilities, and mail service as a comparison to commercial internet service is wild.

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

#818
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…

> But calling for more government regulation of privately-owned services? Forcing private companies to do what you want them to do, even when they would prefer not to? Yes! That's what it's going to take. If you want checks and balances, this is how you get them. Ultimately capitalism is supposed to benefit society as a whole and when it doesn't it needs a kick in the ass. > The whole point of private property is tha…

What, exactly, do you think these regulations should be? What kind of regulation would solve this problem?

E.g. contrast with, say, regulation of pharmaceuticals by the FDA. Certainly a curb on private property rights, but, its also pretty clear what the regulations should do: allow companies to sell only drugs which have been proven to be both safe and effective.

Is there such a very clear idea of how these proposed regulations should be written? Where do we draw the line? Does anybody really have a very clear idea let all what the solution would look like?

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

#819
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…

You are not understanding. We already have many laws that effect companies. For example, power companies cannot just turn off your electricity because they don't like what you say. These are called common carrier laws and they are completely uncontroversial. We live in a society, and it is perfectly OK for us to put limits on what major monopoly type companies can do.

Private property rights are not absolute, sure. But is regulating media companies going to solve anything? Are there any regulations which both sides could be happy with, or would it just open up a whole new front in the culture wars, of endless, highly-politicized and ham-fisted control over, say, whether or not twitter has a block function or not?

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

#820

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're thinking solely in terms of private individuals. Other entities exist and have to be internet-connected to function; corporations, nonprofits, government bodies, institutions. They can't very well use pseudonyms because their whole reason for being is to be accessible to the public. So that makes them easy to target for abuse, eg https://oaklandside.org/2023/08/29/chabot-elementary-evacuat... An episode like t…

In order to prevent bomb threats, we should run algos on every phone call. If they try to make a bomb threat, we can just break the connection and refer the caller to police. Why even wait for phone calls? We can just make the phones emit a high pitched alarm and send cops whenever the algos hear any sort of hate crime within range of the microphone.

Literally the opposite of what I said. Spare me your performative outrage.
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