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Microsoft threatens to stop hosting Gab unless posts are removed

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Re: Microsoft threatens to stop hosting Gab unless posts are removed

#201

Post by jewelthief91 »

kevinmchugh wrote: post #145
MoveConstructor wrote: post #72

It's disconcerting to see how many tech and free speech people are clamoring for the censorship of dissenting opinion and are jubilant when it happens. Free speech has always been a very counter-intuitive process. Opinions that directly oppose yours or even your very person will rub you the wrong way, and to be intent on defending the right of your opponent to voice his opinion seems paradoxical, but we nevertheless…

The free speech absolutists would have been more convincing had they been as up-in-arms about the banning of ISIS or ISIS-affiliated accounts over the last several years. This happened by the hundreds-of-thousands.

For better or worse foreign and domestic terrorist speech is treated separately. If ISIS was a domestic terrorist organization afaik they would have 1A rights.

Re: Microsoft threatens to stop hosting Gab unless posts are removed

#202

Post by [deleted] »

braythwayt wrote: post #82
Nadya wrote: post #31

A common argument in philosophy is that bad ideas should occur in the open - where everyone may ridicule them. When they are cast to the shadows they can grow, under everyone's noses, in private where only there are they allowed to exist. In private, these bad ideas cannot be challenged by others and people will be convinced to believe in them, with nobody challenging the idea as a genuinely terrible idea. It gives b…

That argument works well in relatively small social groups where people generally can be relied upon to act in good faith, and where there are social disincentives to clinging to bad ideas after they have been refuted. When you have a small group with social bonds, you don't have to worry about a bad actor constantly repeating their already-refuted arguments to people who haven't heard the refutation. But when you ha…

[deleted]

Re: Microsoft threatens to stop hosting Gab unless posts are removed

#203

Post by DerekL »

CM30 wrote: post #86

This sort of thing illustrates the biggest issue with web hosting, domain registrars and the internet's infrastructure in general; everything is privately owned by companies who get unlimited rights to decide who and what they want to host. The solution is to require all hosting and domain companies to act as utilities, and require neutrality in regards to any content that's legal. They're not private forums or homes…

> Why do/did ISPs have to deal with net neutrality while large hosting companies and registrars get free reign?

*free rein

Re: Microsoft threatens to stop hosting Gab unless posts are removed

#204

Post by BryantD »

lylecubed wrote: post #55
mrguyorama wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A number of other silly ideas that still hold traction and do actual damage despite being out in the open and actively refuted: Moon landing conspiracy Anti-vaccers/Vaccines cause autism Fad diets and "detox"s Anti-intellectualism Alex Jones (to the tune of millions of subscribers on his recently killed youtube) Global Warming etc

And who decides what is and isn't a silly idea? For 40 years, Americans were told by the government to believe that low fat high carb diets were the key to a healthy life. Not only is that not true, but it's never been true. There was never any evidence to support that stance. And yet, that was the official government policy and subsequently the commonly held belief for 40 years. "It ain’t what you don’t know that ge…

I think that's the core question right there. For a while, various governmental bodies got to be the authority figure deciding which ideas were widely propagated. It's interesting to consider the outsized influence of Texas school boards here; the people who decided which textbooks would be used in Texas were elected officials. Texas has a huge textbook market. Accordingly, textbook vendors were incentivized to publish textbooks which fit Texas standards, and other states who didn't have the same influence wound up with those textbooks.

So: "who decides what is and isn't a silly idea?" Texas elected officials.

That's suboptimal in my view. It is also not great that four or five major companies have the same decision-making power. Fixing the problem is difficult, but I take some comfort in knowing that it's not actually a new problem.

Re: Microsoft threatens to stop hosting Gab unless posts are removed

#205

Post by Endy »

DanAndersen wrote: post #188
Endy wrote: post #183

I have an alternate solution especially for Gab and Voat. Rather than allowing them to become known cesspits, advertise them to people and say, "see how others' opinions exist" - people will sign up for curiosity, they'll sign up to argue, etc. But most importantly, they'll be there on that platform and perhaps some people will actually learn to communicate openly with people they disagree with or whose views they de…

That would honestly be a pretty good pivot. The trouble with Gab and Voat is that if you only bill yourself as a "free speech alternative," you get almost-exclusively populated with the sorts of people who have to worry about that (i.e. fringe characters). The community becomes strongly influenced by the "founder effect" of the digital refugees that made up its founding stock. It would be interesting to have a sort o…

Basically yes - then again what I'd like to see (and which I do see somewhat on Voat) is that you have fringe people on all sides - and yes, I mean all, not "both" - there's more than two sides to most human issues.

Re: Microsoft threatens to stop hosting Gab unless posts are removed

#207

Post by fvdessen »

rainonmoon wrote: post #197
kodablah wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There was no government involvement in this I know that, I am clearly saying I don't want it for any consumer-led efforts. > That's not censorship Did you mean to say it's not government censorship or do we just have different definitions of the word? Whether they can host their own site or whatever has absolutely nothing to do with what is and isn't censorship.

If I own a nightclub and it becomes a hotspot for the alt-right, who don't align with my values, and I close down that nightclub for that reason, am I censoring them? No, I'm excluding them from my privately-owned space and refusing to associate with them. Nobody's right is being infringed upon here; they're free to go to any other bar. "Whether they can host their own site" is absolutely relevant to what is and isn'…

Maybe the state should provide hosting services so that the public can express itself freely without fear of being excluded.

Re: Microsoft threatens to stop hosting Gab unless posts are removed

#208

Post by dahdum »

mrguyorama wrote: post #67
ddingus wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So? Laugh at them, and then contribute facts. Next. At any given time, these things are all part of the conversation. Suppressing them only adds to the allure. Attempting to manage it, "for their own good" will not end well, and it won't end well because way too many people will fail to trust, share that and undermine it all. As they should. That problem is why there is a First Amendment in the first place. I know th…

And people like my mother? Who didn't do so well in statistics and science and math and therefore do not have the tools to rationally judge one claim versus another? How do we help them not get pulled into, often alluring and attractive, circles of hate?

I know you're sincere, but do you see the danger in what you just said? Restricting ideas your mother can hear, based on your assessment of her competency to understand them "properly"?

That's a very dark path that does not lead to utopia.

Re: Microsoft threatens to stop hosting Gab unless posts are removed

#209

Post by jewelthief91 »

bitwize wrote: post #185
inevitable2 wrote: post #44

"The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." -John Gilmore Lately this is getting absurd. I believe this quote is still true, but the amount of 'I don't like what is being said so therefore you should be silenced' is going too far. I don't agree with what this guy said (or even know who he is aside from what was said in the article), but I'm alarmed that Microsoft would go after Gab for a user on G…

Lately we're sort of learning that absolute freedom to express any opinion you like is kind of a bad idea, especially at web scale. The example of Germany, which is freer and more democratic than the USA despite having strict laws forbidding expressing any sort of Nazi-like opinion, supports this.

How is Germany more free and Democratic? Aren't they purposefully less free because of anti-Nazi laws?

Re: Microsoft threatens to stop hosting Gab unless posts are removed

#210

Post by mxfh »

fvdessen wrote: post #182
mxfh wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's too easy to come up with, spam and spread bad ideas, but actual work to refute them. As long as people are not paid to refute bad actors with an agenda, bad views will eventually stand unchallenged and make life worse for everyone for the profit an amusement of a view. As said refuting partially worked in small communities, but not on a global audience scale where the is no effective way of social sanctions, tha…

I remember national TV talking about UFOs, proofs of WMD in Irak, Homosexuality being a disease, conspiracy magazines in every gas station shop, and no easy way to verify anything. I have the impression that the general quality of available information has only gone up.

Promoting those things back than had significant opportunity costs for getting things published and reaching an audience. And bad actors even got denied free or even paid communication channels after a number of bad faith offenses, so gatekeepers to mass communication were a good thing in that respect. Of course they also work the other way around, if a bad idea manages to creep in, but it took a significant amount of coordinated resources in analog times.

I think it's no accident, that the rise of fascism and totalitarian Stalinism is coincident with the rise of radio and the maturing fields of advertising and mass psychology. This is the first wave it got a magnitude cheaper, to reach big audiences. We're witnessing the second one. (Third one if you count the printing press, but the adoption happened over generations, so societies had time to adopt)

Nowadays intentionally bad ideas work like spam, they have only an very small individual chance to get hold of a person, but with an near infinite number of permutations for free, it's way more likely to hit each individuals psychological weak spot eventually.

So it was never easier to spread ideas for individuals, but so it for all sorts of corporate and even nation actors posing as individuals.

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