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8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service

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Re: 8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service

#211

We wouldn't tolerate the existence of an Islamist site that glorified and helped perpetrate mass incidents of terror against our society. What 8chan is doing is exactly the same, minus the Islamist part, yet there's hypocrisy in how they're treated vs e.g. the social media wing of ISIS. These people are trying to kill as many of us as possible. In no way should society accept it. It's simple societal self-defense. Ro…

> We wouldn't tolerate the existence of an Islamist site that glorified and helped perpetrate mass incidents of terror against our society.

I certainly would tolerate those sites. Free speech arguments aside, you can't kill the hydra, but you can severely degrade intelligence operations watching that hydra. Best case the bad guys all end up on sites already being surveilled, worst case they slip under the radar.

We had this problem years ago, hacktivists targeting ISIS channels. They scatter to the winds, intelligence ends up doing more work for less rewards.

Feel good outrage made things worse.

Re: 8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service

#212
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you know that the "fire in a crowded room" metaphor comes from Schenck v. United States in which Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr used the metaphor to defend the criminality of protesting the military draft? I'm not sure if that's the kind of history you want to align yourself with. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schenck_v._United_States

The justice's analogy in that case was bad, but otherwise it would have been a good argument. If speech is meant to directly lead to harm, it should be constrained.

I mean, I wouldn't use analogies that were originally created to target people who disagreed with the draft.

Whether or not the analogy applies now, is irrelevant. It's history makes it a bad analogy.

It'd be like saying stuff like "it's Ok to be white". It may be a true statement, but it was used by people who were trying to make racial attacks.

Re: 8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service

#213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It reminds me a lot of Charlottesville, where people showed up to try to shout over the white nationalists and it just ended up with a bunch of people getting run over by a car. As if something like that happening wasn't entirely predictable. Wait, what are you trying to say here? That these people deserved to get run over because they dared to shout at white nationalists??

I'm saying that I think allowing people to DDOS 8chan will result in more violence.

>> I'm saying that I think allowing people to DDOS 8chan will result in more violence.

Violence happens because these people follow a hateful, violent ideology whose specific articulated intent is to deprive others of liberty, life, and land. People looking for excuses to be violent will find them.

Also, refusing to provide commercial DDOS mitigation technologies to hostile entities is not the same as "allowing people to DDOS" them.

Re: 8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service

#215
This once again goes to show that you can do nothing illegal and still be virtually locked out of the internet. The viewpoint that "it's okay to kick 8chan off the internet" is not consistent with the viewpoint that "the internet should be neutral infrastructure". Take from that what you will.

People are doing the "yada yada not entitled to a platform" thing, but the distinction between free speech and having a platform is meaningless in reality. It's like saying "you can say anything you want, but we won't let you use the atmosphere to propagate the sound waves".

We now live in a society where it is acceptable for private companies to essentially completely ban individuals from exercising their free speech on the internet. The canary in the coalmine was The Daily Stormer; all the content there would be considered very objectionable and completely without merit by any remotely sensible person, so few people complained about it being shut down. Then came Gab and such. Now it's 8chan, which last time I checked still had more posts about video games and anime than about politics.

Make no mistake, sites you use will be next. /r/the_donald is already quarantined. Youtube and Twitter have gotten much more aggressive with their moderation too.

We need to allow people on the edges of the spectrum to say what they want even if it is without merit. Extreme speech is what prevents normal speech from being censored.

More than anything we can not allow random internet companies to be de-facto lawmakers and speech police by controlling who is allowed to say things on the internet.

Re: 8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service

#216
post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, all those people who were having fun on 8chan will now see the error of their ways, take up sensitivity training, and post only non-controversial things where ever they land next.

No, but if they don't have an easily accessible platform their message can't spread.

If only the internet wasn't an international phenomenon that anyone anywhere can build upon.

Re: 8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service

#217
post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please don't use capitalization to emphisize your points in the future.

That’s the main and only thing you wanted to respond to from what I wrote?

If you had written less, we would have read more!

Re: 8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service

#218
post #79
post #4

I've generally been on the free speech side of this debate, as some of my previous comments on HN will show. With 8chan, I legitimately don't know what my opinion is. I've read it before, and I spent a few hours reading it this weekend, and it's beyond clear to me that it absolutely had the potential to radicalize shooters and terrorists. I'm not referring to the simple use of racial or ethnic slurs -- of course this…

> it's beyond clear to me that it absolutely had the potential to radicalize shooters and terrorists I mean, it literally radicalized white supremacist terrorists . There's no "had the potential" anymore, it's a fact. It also sounds like it held plenty of child porn, so I don't understand why it took until now for anyone to do anything about the site.

> I mean, it literally radicalized white supremacist terrorists. There's no "had the potential" anymore, it's a fact.

Other than the fact that 8chan had things on it that you didn’t like, where is the evidence to support this claim? How do we know that it was a website that was responsible for the views of its userbase, as opposed to any other media they accessed? How do we know that 8chan specifically was the factor that caused the outcome?

Re: 8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service

#219

We wouldn't tolerate the existence of an Islamist site that glorified and helped perpetrate mass incidents of terror against our society. What 8chan is doing is exactly the same, minus the Islamist part, yet there's hypocrisy in how they're treated vs e.g. the social media wing of ISIS. These people are trying to kill as many of us as possible. In no way should society accept it. It's simple societal self-defense. Ro…

> We wouldn't tolerate the existence of an Islamist site Why? Think about what you're saying. Imagine equivalents: 1. We wouldn't allow cell phones that let terrorists communicate 2. We wouldn't allow roads that allow anyone to carry whatever contra-ban they want down them. 3. We wouldn't allow trains that allow just anyone to carry books on whatever topic they want. 4. We can't allow for air that allows two willing…

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