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

#941

Post by pauldenton » Thu, Aug 31, 2023, 12:42 AM UTC

username332211 wrote: post #830

bastardoperator wrote: post #817

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

Is that some sort of subtle trolling? I mean, with that Newspeak verb randomly thrown in, it must be, but then again it wouldn't surprise me if there exist communities on the internet who'd develop slang that ends up being basically Newspeak.

It's basically just making a very poor case for corporate personhood. The more elegant argument is that the organization has no right, but every human being that is a member of that organization has rights You have an individual right to practice religion, and you have a group right to practice religion. Your ability to practice religion is not limited by joining a Parish or church organization. The Citizens United of Citizens United v. FEC wanted to Produce, Advertise and Air a documentary. They have an individual right to make a movie, and the court affirmed they have a right to make speech as a group. Citizens have a right to address political Grievances. So do Citizens United

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

#942

Post by zer8k » Thu, Aug 31, 2023, 12:42 AM UTC

SamoyedFurFluff wrote: post #893

Dylan16807 wrote: post #629

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is there an upper limit where your private property is considered public utility? Maybe. I don't think it's a problem if companies with extreme amounts of power have to give up some freedom of banning. On a sliding scale though, you don't literally become a utility one day. (And when it comes to "only commercial storefront space in a large area", I expect that to be very rare.)

> (And when it comes to "only commercial storefront space in a large area", I expect that to be very rare.) This is actually very common in rural parts of the us fwiw. There places where the only grocery store is Walmart, and the only other place to shop is dollar general.

In which case it's likely such an establishment, lacking any meaningful competition, would be considered a "utility". Whether the law defines it as such or not, it's really bad optics to prevent people from eating.

In this case there is likely a limit to what a private business can grow into before it wades into the territory of public utility. A tenuous but related situation can be seen in trademarks where Kleenex has actually run entire ad campaigns to make people call generic tissue "tissues".

There's a larger philosophical argument here. Theoretically speaking there should be no limits to private corporations. However, when your corporation becomes a stable of modern life and the conduit of major utilities of society all of the sudden things start to turn into shades of grey.

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

#943

Post by thrwaway1234567 » Thu, Aug 31, 2023, 12:52 AM UTC

foven wrote: post #634

michaelt wrote: post #587

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I think Kiwifarms is (borderline) criminal. Null, the admin of the site, outright said he was ok with users posting stolen financial information, such as Social Security Numbers and Credit cards. Source: https://archive.is/0fOcS . There are many examples of private financial information being posted on the site.

I would describe them as operating with a paper thin layer of "plausible" deniability. Officially you aren't allowed to harass or interact with the targets. But posting their home address, stolen passwords, phone numbers, and information about relatives is all allowed. Obviously, if they didn't want their targets harassed, they wouldn't post that. Kiwifarms, now banned, official twitter page said their goal was “exploitation of the mentally handicapped for amusement purposes”. ( Source: https://archive.is/jYp5p ).

But even the rule against interacting with "lolcows" (called "cowtipping") is haphazardly enforced. For example, one user had sex with a "lolcow" and posted photos. The admin explicitly said they would allow the content to remain up: https://archive.is/zYnpK#35%

I could probably post many other examples. Null is entirely willing to host revenge porn on his website. He's also willing to host nudes that he knows were stolen by hackers.

People probably aren't going to want to send takedown requests, when that requires revealing their identity to a site that is known for doxing and harassing people.

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

#944

Post by aaomidi » Thu, Aug 31, 2023, 1:05 AM UTC

didntcheck wrote: post #566

aaomidi wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I was at let’s encrypt, there were so many people outside that expected us to be the morality police of the internet. Like, no. Certificate Authorities exist because the web fucking sucks. Not because they want to be gate keepers.

I'd be interested to hear more about that. What sort of groups did you get making these requests, and what sort of reasons did they usually give?

It was mostly twitter folk.

Let's Encrypt has a post about phishing websites: https://letsencrypt.org/2015/10/29/phishing-and-malware.html

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

#945

Post by ddingus » Thu, Aug 31, 2023, 1:30 AM UTC

hellojesus wrote: post #759

ddingus wrote: post #699

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Big Tech was told they can either see regulation they don't like, or get with the program and ignore corruption like old media has done for decades.

They should have taken the regulation. At least that forces it into the public eye and allows for accountability via voting. This way only generates a shadow government. Apart from the obvious 1a violation.

Yup.

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

#946

Post by jstarfish » Thu, Aug 31, 2023, 1:34 AM UTC

roenxi wrote: post #661

concordDance wrote: post #636

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…

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.…

That Wikipedia article is full of unverifiable bullshit, and I think you know it.

> I'd never believed that sending someone a pizza would qualify as an act of violence

It doesn't unless you interpret every instance of adversity as an attempt on your life.

Nobody trying to kill anybody sends a pizza, unless the intent is to induce poisoning or choking.

> [Wikipedia] Users also leaked sexually explicit photos of her

"Leaked" sounds so much worse than the truth of the photos being found on a 2257-compliant commercial porn site, which Keffals willingly worked as a onetime model for under a 4-letter pseudonym. To say they were "leaked" is being intentionally dishonest. They were available for sale, by the studio that took them. Users shared the preview images that were publicly posted, because nobody involved felt they were worth paying for.

Don't take my word for it; anyone can see for themselves-- they're helpfully posted in her KF thread, if the site is even up anymore.

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

#947

Post by check89 » Thu, Aug 31, 2023, 1:47 AM UTC

krapp wrote: post #91

commandlinefan wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> develop its own ways of dealing with people who use it to harm others So far, every "way" that's been developed of dealing with people who harm others has itself been used to harm others in more extreme ways than the harm they were supposed to mitigate.

>So far, every "way" that's been developed of dealing with people who harm others has itself been used to harm others in more extreme ways than the harm they were supposed to mitigate. Has it? Some of the people Kiwifarms harassed were driven to suicide. Your argument is that having a forum taken offline is a more extreme form of harm than literal death?

> Some of the people Kiwifarms harassed were driven to suicide.

Who?

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

#948

Post by dmatech » Thu, Aug 31, 2023, 2:02 AM UTC

chonkerz wrote: post #858

mrweasel wrote: post #592

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So not knowing either company, is IncogNet and CrunchBits related companies in some way? I ask because the article just talks about Crunchbits, which I didn't know about. I tried to look looking up CrunchBits, but that's not really possible on Bing based search engines. There are a few links to reviews, but the Crunchbits website seems to have scrubbed from Bing.

[flagged]

It would be better to call a lawyer or the police. There's no AUP or TOS for the entire internet (aside from stuff that endangers the network itself), and I'm strongly opposed to any efforts to create one.

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

#949

Post by refurb » Thu, Aug 31, 2023, 2:10 AM UTC

Jiro wrote: post #811

refurb wrote: post #540

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

"Considers". It's not banned.

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

#950

Post by dmatech » Thu, Aug 31, 2023, 2:18 AM UTC

kristjank wrote: post #571

I hate how Kiwi Farms has become the benchmark for so many important concepts relating to internet freedom. As much as I think the world would be a better place with them being forever banished to the onion realm, I can't really defend HE and other service providers drafting their own visions of internet code of ethics, then enforcing them on other people's traffic. A smaller ISP would probably start losing business…

It's an interesting edge case. It's pretty clearly completely legal in the USA, though the content is grossly offensive. Some of the individual posts are almost certainly defamatory, but §230 shields the site itself from that liability (though not the posters).

This brings us back to the real question: should extreme unpopularity alone be enough for deplatforming in a free society? Or should actual laws need to be broken?