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…
Do you agree with everyone's idea of what a bad actor is? Because Mississippi and New York have very different ideas about who are bad actors.
ISPs should not police online speech no matter how awful it is
221–230 of 1001 posts
Re: ISPs should not police online speech no matter how awful it is
#222Earlier quoted context omitted.
So censorship is okay as long as it's politically aligned with the powers that be? I'm not a nazi, but that seems dangerous...
Neo-nazis are domestic terrorists and should be treated as such.
There are people that believe the BLM movement are also domestic terrorist, see how dangerous is to try to classify every one you don’t like as such?
Re: ISPs should not police online speech no matter how awful it is
#223Re: ISPs should not police online speech no matter how awful it is
#224Earlier quoted context omitted.
And that's where problems arise. Most of us are comfortable oppressing people we disagree with. The reality is that you can't silence voices you don't like without making yourself vulnerable to the same treatment. We either value the freedom to express ourselves within the limits of the law or we don't. As soon as there are more people who think like you do, none of us are safe and it just becomes a system that silen…
I strongly disagree with people who seek to suppress freedom of speech. This is not the hypocrisy that you’re painting it as. I question the motives of anyone sympathizing with Nazis as “just a different opinion” Suppressing nazism is not “suppressing freedom of speech”. It is suppressing people who seek to suppress.
Re: ISPs should not police online speech no matter how awful it is
#225Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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?
It is not that the forum going down in and of itself is the harm. Instead it is that this precedent can be used by much more authoritarian groups to target groups that you support. Now its KF, and after that other countries are telling these tech services to take down gay and lesbian support groups, or even a state in the US could force abortion services offline. Its a loophole that could be used as an end run around…
Those things have and are happening, and kiwifarms is not the reason any of that occur.
Re: ISPs should not police online speech no matter how awful it is
#226Earlier quoted context omitted.
And that's where problems arise. Most of us are comfortable oppressing people we disagree with. The reality is that you can't silence voices you don't like without making yourself vulnerable to the same treatment. We either value the freedom to express ourselves within the limits of the law or we don't. As soon as there are more people who think like you do, none of us are safe and it just becomes a system that silen…
This isn't "people I disagree with". Stromfront, and the groups it enables, are literal nazis. "Stormfront began in 1990 as an online bulletin board supporting white nationalist David Duke's campaign for United States senator for Louisiana. The name "Stormfront" was chosen for its connotations of a political or military front (such as the German Nazi Sturmabteilung (also known as storm troopers or SA)) and an analogy…
They are people.
And you disagree with them.
Free Speech doesn't exist for people to be agreeable. It's only purpose is specifically to protect controversial statements.
Re: ISPs should not police online speech no matter how awful it is
#227Earlier quoted context omitted.
The contrary belief was once mocked on "Yes, Prime Minister" as: "1. We must do something. 2. This is something. 3. Therefore, we must do this."
And to cover the opposite case: 1. Nothing is going to happen 2. Something maybe is going to happen, but we should do nothing about it 3. Maybe we should do something about it, but there's nothing we can do 4. Maybe there's something we could have done, but it's too late now
Re: ISPs should not police online speech no matter how awful it is
#228Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're not free to not associate with people in the U.S. Businesses are not allowed to discriminate against protected classes. This is because businesses are foundational to modern life, so being excluded from them greatly hurts a person. I don't think it's unreasonable to think that we should look to expand such protections to all people for certain services, especially those which are more like infrastructure for m…
>You're not free to not associate with people in the U.S. Yes I am. If Jehovah's Witnesses come to my door I am perfectly within my rights to tell them to go away. I don't have to go to church if I don't want to. I'm perfectly allowed not to associate with racists and homophobes. Businesses are not allowed to discriminate against protected classes, true, but being an asshole is not a protected class, and every bar an…
> Businesses are not allowed to discriminate against protected classes, true, but being an asshole is not a protected class, and every bar and restaurant still has a sign saying they can refuse service to anyone.
Clearly I'm not talking about interpersonal association. We're talking about your freedom when conducting business, which is normal to regulate in the U.S in this way.
> I'd be willing to agree if I didn't remember the last few months of vociferous support for repealing Section 230, having the government take over social media platforms and make TOS's and most forms of moderation illegal. Even make "algorithms" illegal.
Do you think I support repealing section 230 when I said "Not saying sites can't have a TOS"?
> On the one hand, I get the free speech argument
Nothing I said has anything to do with free speech. As stated above, I think it's fine for sites to moderate themselves in a partisan manner.
> but on the other hand, there is a right-wing accelerationist agenda using that argument to push the Overton window of acceptable regulations far enough that it becomes illegal, de facto or de jure, for any site to engage in any form of moderation. I don't believe for a second that people are going to be satisfied with simply regulating ISPs, even if I'm far more sympathetic to the argument that they should be considered infrastructure than websites themselves.
There are other threats besides right wing extremism, like the centralization of power. Even if the power is wielded by some collective consciousness, I have interests that are not shared by the collective, so I don't want them having the ability to dictate my life. I think many people would also share this concern, so the government is a good way to solve that.
> For the time being, the market seems to be working. Conservative and right-wing alternatives are rising to take advantage of sites being pushed out of the mainstream, and I think that's acceptable.
That seems to be the exact opposite of what you want, doesn't it?Extremism is very popular and profitable.
Re: ISPs should not police online speech no matter how awful it is
#229What 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?
I recall reading the other day about Germany making deadnaming a crime..
Re: ISPs should not police online speech no matter how awful it is
#230Earlier quoted context omitted.
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And that's where problems arise. Most of us are comfortable oppressing people we disagree with. The reality is that you can't silence voices you don't like without making yourself vulnerable to the same treatment. We either value the freedom to express ourselves within the limits of the law or we don't. As soon as there are more people who think like you do, none of us are safe and it just becomes a system that silen…
I’m deeply ambivalent about a site like Cloudflare censoring anything but the logic here… absolutely not.
You can classify speech. It’s not terribly difficult to classify when something is an outright call for racial warfare. If I were a person calling for a ban to such speech my own speech wouldn’t automatically be subject to the same criteria.