Microsoft threatens to stop hosting Gab unless posts are removed • Hacker News Board

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

#251

Post by devtul » Fri, Aug 10, 2018, 12:15 AM UTC

moomin wrote: post #139

tinalumfoil wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are better off hearing a bad idea and hearing it refuted then never hearing a bad idea. You could say, "well then detractors of the idea will have to keep refuting it" and you'd be right. That's how public forums work, and I hope you don't take everything your parent's believed for granted just because their detractors have already been "refuted".

There are an infinite number of bad ideas in the world. No-one’s life would be improved by hearing them all.

In Saudi Arabia letting women drive was/is deemed a bad idea. Some cultures think it is a bad idea to not cut off the clit of girls. There are Islamic scholars that will go at length on how you should discipline physically your wife, for her own good. In those places/societies opinions against all of it would be considered wrong ideas. If you stiffen speech, you don't just stop the society from regressing, you also rob it from progress.

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

#252

Post by patrickg_zill » Fri, Aug 10, 2018, 12:15 AM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #146

Having read the article but not knowing anything about the posts themselves, I think most of this thread misses the point. Clearly Microsoft knew it was hosting Gab and what Gab was. There's a troll argument that suggests Gab is just "free speech twitter", but of course that's not the case: I've been screenshotting the front page for months, from a random anonymous account, and every time I've done it the front page…

The original story, is apparently not available at this link, but the footer, also written by Andrew Torba, owner of Gab.ai , is available: https://medium.com/@Torbahax/this-is-a-joke-and-it-is-fake-n...

partial quote:

" Gab is absolutely not a “white nationalist social media platform.” We are a free speech social media platform. We welcome everyone and have since the day we launched. My co-founder Ekrem is a Muslim Kurd in Turkey. Our Chief Communications Officer Utsav is an Indian and a practicing Hindu. Our “frog logo” that the media wants so desperately to tie to “pepe,” was inspired by Exodus 8:2–7 and was designed by our Creative Director Brandon, who is Jewish."

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

#253

Post by api » Fri, Aug 10, 2018, 12:17 AM UTC

s73v3r_ wrote: post #224

will_dev_4_food wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you say it’s like this one way but not the other, you have conceded to relativism. You have basically said there is a time and place for stealing someone’s wallet, and that acting as a moral agent in society can be suspended under the right conditions.

Or, it could be that the two things being compared have entirely different contexts to them, and thus do have different rules.

This is the road to rule by men and not laws, since at that point any politician can make up whatever "context" they like to interpret the law any way they see fit.

Be careful about the precedent your setting and think about who may wield these powers in the future. I'm sure President Alex Jones will think it quite necessary to make exceptions to ordinary laws and rules when taking down the global pedophile cabal is at stake.

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

#254

Post by Covzire » Fri, Aug 10, 2018, 12:17 AM UTC

s73v3r_ wrote: post #237

zkms wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Well you can host your own website on your own server. Sure, then the people who drove you off Facebook/Amazon/Apple iTunes/Youtube/Azure/EC2/Digitalocean/Cloudflare will go after your DNS registrar and the ISP/CDN/colocation-facility you're using. They won't give up and they'll ruthlessly go after every single commercial entity you do business with. After all, if it's not the government punishing you for speech, i…

Yeah, I don't buy that. If Stormfront and Daily Stormer can still be up, then there can't really be any credibility to that argument.

Did you read any headlines in the last couple days?

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

#255

Post by cdubzzz » Fri, Aug 10, 2018, 12:19 AM UTC

NTDF9 wrote: post #143

komali2 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would like to know this as well. Case in point, when I was a kindergarten teacher, kids wouldn't have a concept of race. I'd have white girls asking me if I could put their hair in braids like "the tan girls." But by 4th grade I'd be teaching about slavery, racism, etc, and the kids would be then learning about a concept that was utterly nonsensical to the non-racism-indoctrinated kids. So I'm wondering what would…

Man, I grew up in a third world country where race was a complete non-issue (unless your color made you stick out like a sore thumb, in which case, you'd be a celebrity, not get picked on). Coming to the US is what made me encounter racism. American society really is broken from within when third world countries can get around this but America can't.

I think this is a bit of apples and oranges. There are vast differences between pretty much any two cultures.

I spent three years living and working in a third world county where I “stuck out like a sore thumb”. Most people I met assumed I was rich, despite living and working on the equivalent of a local secondary school teacher’s salary. And this was still a hell of a lot more than most people in the country were making, but my local counterparts did not have to constantly deny requests for money and things from strangers.

Perhaps a more apt comparison to racism in the US would be sexism in the country I worked in. Men would cat call women constantly to ask for (or demand) sex and marriage. This was just an accepted and normal part of the culture there. It was crazy.

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

#256

Post by kevinmchugh » Fri, Aug 10, 2018, 12:19 AM UTC

jewelthief91 wrote: post #201

kevinmchugh wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What's the connection to the first amendment? Did the government dictate bans? I saw very little concern from the "free speech" crowd about the government's ability to censor US publishers from publishing content by foreign authors.

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

#257

Post by Alex3917 » Fri, Aug 10, 2018, 12:20 AM UTC

mxfh wrote: post #174

tinalumfoil wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are better off hearing a bad idea and hearing it refuted then never hearing a bad idea. You could say, "well then detractors of the idea will have to keep refuting it" and you'd be right. That's how public forums work, and I hope you don't take everything your parent's believed for granted just because their detractors have already been "refuted".

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…

> It's too easy to come up with, spam and spread bad ideas, but actual work to refute them.

That makes sense for shared forums. But not in the case of someone like Alex Jones, where he has his own media platform on his own site and various channels, and not in the case of Gab where they're hosting their own forum.

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

#258

Post by Whitestrake » Fri, Aug 10, 2018, 12:21 AM UTC

reader5000 wrote: post #187

mirimir wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Also, you can refute all you want, but if the bad ideas are better clickbait than your refutations, they will spread faster.

Maybe there's a reason a "bad idea" is clickbait.

Can't think of a better explanation than this video by CGP Grey, titled "This Video Will Make You Angry", [7:26].

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc

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

#259

Post by api » Fri, Aug 10, 2018, 12:21 AM UTC

untog wrote: post #51

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…

I feel as though the "sunlight is the best disinfectant" argument has taken a beating in recent times, and it's not difficult to see why. Take the example of QAnon. It's a movement based around utter nonsense conspiracy theory. It is debunked on a daily basis. It still has a lot of followers. Compare to Milo Yiannopoulos. I remember around the time his social media accounts were banned that people said doing so was p…

I feel like there's an elephant in the living room nobody is seeing, and that's general loss of trust in our institutions. These kinds of ideas have more traction today than they did 20, 50, or 100 years ago because people trust their government and their public institutions less today than they did back then.

IMHO a certain amount of this calling for censorship is people from those self-same institutions refusing to look at their own role in undermining the trust basis of our society. How many mainstream journalists bothered to check on those Iraq WMD claims or investigate the realities behind the 2008 financial collapse? How many politicians?

Trust is hard to earn and easy to squander. When it is lost it leaves a vacuum. If nobody is trusted the vacuum gets filled by whatever random nonsense sounds superficially good to someone.

To me the popularity of crazy populist demagogues is entirely explainable as a response to several large scale and very notable cases where our institutions have burned their credibility. If something isn't done to correct this and start re-earning trust I predict that this situation will only worsen and we'll be facing full-blown fascism shortly.

Censorship does not re-earn trust. In fact it does the opposite. Right now hordes of people out there are saying "see! Alex Jones must be onto something or why would they go to the trouble of banning him?!?" Microsoft's threat to ban Gab is the kind of PR money can't buy. I bet their traffic numbers will skyrocket.

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

#260

Post by Covzire » Fri, Aug 10, 2018, 12:21 AM UTC

gamblor956 wrote: post #222

DanAndersen wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main difference we are seeing in this new world of large tech companies is that the role of the "judge" is diminished. Groups figure out the fine lines on which to make judgment, but only as a matter of internal company policy, behind closed doors, which none of us get to have a say in or even read the guidelines. When a judge sentences you to prison, you know pretty well exactly what sentence of which law was th…

A website ban isn't even remotely the same thing as a legal sanction. If you want to control the platform, create your own. You'll need the hardware and the software, and it could get expensive. But if you want to spread hate speech or libel, suck up the cost. If you want to be on someone else's platform you accept the restrictions of using that platform. Hate speech is on the list of almost every major platform (exc…

As someone else pointed out, what if they go after your DNS registrar? Your SSL certificate provider? Where will it end? De platforming people who spew vile (but legal) speech isn't good for society and it's contrary to the spirit of the first amendment.