Terminating Service for 8Chan • Hacker News Board

Re: Terminating Service for 8Chan

#231

Post by frabbit » Mon, Aug 05, 2019, 2:58 AM UTC

saagarjha wrote: post #126

King-Aaron wrote: post #56

A lot of not-so-subtle support for 8chan leaking into this thread. Cloudfare aren't a government. They aren't a democracy. I don't know why some people seem to think they should act any differently. If you own a notice board in the real world, and someone put something horrible on it, you would take it down. This is no different.

The problem is that Cloudflare keeps trying to position themselves as not being in the business of deciding what can be on the internet, but they have twice made the decision to do so. Also, since you mentioned it and hence made this disclaimer obligatory: I have zero sympathy for 8chan, and I don't agree with the views espoused there.

That is exactly it. Once they have expressed a private moral judgement about what they consider acceptable they have opened themselves up to being accountable for all the other content they do allow.

Re: Terminating Service for 8Chan

#232

Post by phyzome » Mon, Aug 05, 2019, 2:58 AM UTC

My only concern here is that they're giving less than a day's notice, which is really uncalled for, and shows a certain lack of professionalism.

(Their service terms https://www.cloudflare.com/terms/ allow them to do this, but that doesn't make it a smart idea.)

Re: Terminating Service for 8Chan

#233

Post by jjoonathan » Mon, Aug 05, 2019, 2:59 AM UTC

sk5t wrote: post #153

zzzeek wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

by not reporting on it, the public is not made aware of this very tragic problem which can in fact be improved by several orders of magnitude with the return of some simple political will. Political will requires media publicity, so in that sense, the media is doing the right thing here.

> with the return of some simple political will Gun control is a "third rail" in many political jurisdictions in the USA. Many Americans will vote against any agent who would disarm them; those voters are unlikely to see disarming to diminish the (very roughly) ~0.000001% chance of death by mass shooting as a sensible--or even Constitutional--trade.

Right, and they see their weapons as insurance against being the victims of a socialist famine like the ones that killed 100 million people last century.

If you want to viscerally understand their viewpoint, call to mind the reaction that you have when someone in the conservative camp goes "Look, it's snowing, so much for global warming!" -- and then substitute "snowing" for "school shooting" and "global warming" for "politically-induced mass starvation."

I don't buy this argument, but only because I don't think armed resistance would be effective, and there's a lot that I know I don't know on that front. What I don't believe is that this tradeoff has an obvious undebatable answer.

Re: Terminating Service for 8Chan

#234

Post by mort96 » Mon, Aug 05, 2019, 3:00 AM UTC

sytelus wrote: post #205

This is the same argument cake shops make against taking order from gay people. I do believe that so-called manifesto is mind-numbingly dumb, fact-free and it is dangerous in the sense it will inspire more violence against innocent people. But that precisely what makes it a good test case for asking some fundamental questions. Can commercial businesses with deep reach, pricing power and critical function deny service…

Taking orders from gay people and hosting services for sites which support far-right terrorism aren't exactly the same though. We can be against suppressing gay people and for suppressing far-right terrorism even if the means by which the suppression happens is similar.

Re: Terminating Service for 8Chan

#235

Post by fortran77 » Mon, Aug 05, 2019, 3:00 AM UTC

word-reader wrote: post #199

This post repeatedly refers to 8chan as "lawless" and "unmoderated" but it is neither. As a whole, it is a public website subject to US law, complete with DMCA and search warrant contact forms. The sitewide rule is that all content must comply with US law. The media also keeps saying 8chan, 8chan, 8chan over and over, when it is really just the one most popular board ("pol") that is being discussed. But there are hun…

A man, spreading a false rumor about a restaurant called "Meat", told people on Twitter to burn down that restaurant. He thought his restaurant was responsible for removing a graffiti mural on a building across the street.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/02/nyregion/crown-heights-ri...

> “If that mural goes down, the restaurant gonna go down next,” read one comment on Ms. Price’s post [ on twitter ] , accompanied by flame emojis.

> turns out that about 10 days before the meeting, Apolinar Severino, the owner of the building housing the mural, had told Mr. Caldwell that he claimed full responsibility for attempting to paint over the image of Mr. Price. Mr. Severino had been advised by a real estate agent to whitewash the entire wall while trying to refinance his mortgage on the property, he said.

It turns out the owner of the building was responsible for painting over part of the graffiti and not the restaurant across the street.

I reported the tweet that called for burning the restaurant across the street down to Twitter, and Twitter did remove that tweet, but didn't ban the user.

There's a better article covering the story with links to the false rumors being spread on Twitter -- many with threats -- in the Brooklyn eagle https://brooklyneagle.com/articles/2019/07/25/sean-price-mur...

Maybe I'll go to Twitter's hosting providers and Cloudflare to get all of twitter removed, or at least made a lot slower.

Re: Terminating Service for 8Chan

#236

Post by mikeash » Mon, Aug 05, 2019, 3:00 AM UTC

tedivm wrote: post #131

Lazare wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They've kicked people off their service before for content based reasons (eg, Daily Stormer), so this changes nothing. In any case: > I thought there was some sort of legal distinction if they were totally agnostic to what travels over their wires. Is that not the case? Not as far as I'm aware, no. The closest thing I can think of is if they were discriminating based on people's membership in a protected class, eg, i…

They've also removed sex worker websites (including a forum that was just sex workers talking to each other), but for some reason no one complains about it.

That’s always the way. Censorship/moderation isn’t given a second thought when it’s just sex-related.

Re: Terminating Service for 8Chan

#237

Post by manigandham » Mon, Aug 05, 2019, 3:01 AM UTC

robbrown451 wrote: post #158

saagarjha wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that Cloudflare keeps trying to position themselves as not being in the business of deciding what can be on the internet, but they have twice made the decision to do so. Also, since you mentioned it and hence made this disclaimer obligatory: I have zero sympathy for 8chan, and I don't agree with the views espoused there.

They are making it crystal clear that they "do not take this decision lightly." Not everything has to be so black and white.

Unfortunately the greater population will see it as black and white. Cloudflare has repeatedly worked with gray-area sites and stood by their principles that they were neutral and would only respond to law enforcement. Their previous choice with the Dailystormer can be seen as an exception, especially with supporting material that the site was also blaming Cloudflare.

Making the choice twice now calls into question hundreds of other properties they work with, and may open the floodgates for all that criticism they have shielded against so far.

Re: Terminating Service for 8Chan

#238

Post by tenpies » Mon, Aug 05, 2019, 3:02 AM UTC

Iv wrote: post #79

Tor's onion service will always there to provide hosting to the less popular ideas. The censorship-resistant network is there. Make sure to give it some love. Last time I checked, people were discussing how to murder, exchanging nazi manifestos and conspiracy theories. I was looking for anarchist discussions but I actually ended up having these on reddit. Don't get fooled by the current positioning of IT firms, it on…

> I actually ended up having these on reddit

I am actually quite surprised how complicit the media is in not reporting what goes on Reddit. It's the one place on the "mainstream" internet I run into where you can see calls for political assassinations in default subs, sub-reddits devoted to theft, ethno-nationalism, terrorism, and all sorts of content that makes 4chan seem tame in comparison.

Then there is the huge cross-polination of moderators with radical ideas, who just happen to moderate radical sub-reddits and some prominent default/mainstream sub-reddits.

If advertisers only paid attention. If journalists only cared.

Re: Terminating Service for 8Chan

#239

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Aug 05, 2019, 3:02 AM UTC

colordrops wrote: post #230

BoiledCabbage wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Mass shootings (generally) don't kill that many people. They are scary, yes, but not that deadly (statistically). Keep it local news, don't The problem is there is a simmering domestic nationalistic terrorism threat to the country - and that is news. The killer in TX directly referenced it, as did very many of the prior mass-murders of recent. That is noteworthy, and fundamentally different from people killed in a…

Can you cite evidence for this? My understanding is that deaths due to mass shootings hasn't really changed since the 70s, but rather the media coverage has expanded.

[deleted]

Re: Terminating Service for 8Chan

#240

Post by yongjik » Mon, Aug 05, 2019, 3:02 AM UTC

umvi wrote: post #34

It would be better if cloudflare terminated service for all media outlets. Every time you turn a mass shooting into a national spectacle, it inspires copycats in rapid succession as we've just seen. Mass shootings (generally) don't kill that many people. They are scary, yes, but not that deadly (statistically). Keep it local news, don't publish the name of the killer, basically keep the story away from the front line…

In every other, let's say, G20 country, someone shooting up a shopping mall and killing 20 will absolutely make national news - they will talk about it for months and it will be ranked "top ten worst news for $country in 2019", if not the absolute worst. In some countries (let's say, Korea) reporters will probably dig into the shooter's elementary school transcripts and interview second cousins.

In other words, if anyone is aiming for notoriety, shooting up people in Seoul or Tokyo will give you an eternal place in national zeitgeist, while in America you will be famous until the next shooting: A few months? Weeks?

Yet nobody's (thankfully) taking up the opportunity in these other countries. Certainly not every week, or even every year.

It's not the media. It's not attention-seeking. It's not games (duh). Maybe it's a bit about mental health, but other countries also have problems with crazies and they don't just shoot up schools and nightclubs.

Can we stop beating around the bush?