341–350 of 398 posts
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I agree with that. By the same token they would need to remove all the content that promotes communism in multiple countries. In my country it's illegal as is the case with nazism. I don't hold much hope Google, Spotify etc. would actually walk that road.
In what country is communism illegal?
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Where I grew up, websites used to be blocked by my government because of blasphemy and morality reasons. Criticism of Islam, pro secularism, and yes also porn. I used kazaa to get "God delusion" and "satanic verses", books that would have gotten me into serious trouble. Please don't let that happen in America. Making up hate or blasphemy reasons is very easy.
Nobody is trying to give the government power to censor. Everyone is saying that private companies have no moral obligation to materially support neo-Nazis. Yes, there are concerns about concentrated, oligopolistic markets, but those are solved by breaking up the major players -- not by legislating some requirement of fair service for literal swastika-waving, Roman-saluting Nazis . People are not entitled to claim fr…
Communist Control Act, 50 U.S. Code § 841
>The Congress finds and declares that the Communist Party of the United States, although purportedly a political party, is in fact an instrumentality of a conspiracy to overthrow the Government of the United States. It constitutes an authoritarian dictatorship within a republic, demanding for itself the rights and privileges accorded to political parties, but denying to all others the liberties guaranteed by the Constitution.
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Counter-examples: Nazism (I guess you might argue that after being suppressed it's making a comeback, but that's tenuous at best), dozens of Christian heretic faiths you've never heard about, the genocide of the Native Americans (where's their culture now?), the pre-colombian civilizations of South and Central America, the Roman Empire, Egyptian monotheism under Akhnaten... Keep in mind that listing the ideas and way…
> Nazism Nazism has only been suppressed in Germany as far as I know(how effective has it been?). Was it ever suppressed in the US? One of the crowning moments of the ACLU's support for civil rights was to stand up for a Nazi march - it's hard to call that suppressed. Can you compare Germany to the US and see whether suppressing and not suppressing Nazism has had a significant effect? Or perhaps there is a roiling Na…
Yes, I thought it was obvious from the context. The original version of Nazism was suppressed by invading their country, killing 7 million people in the process, hunting their leaders, etc.
> the Roman Empire
Hm... They were conquered by foreigners, and the empire desintegrated, but it's debatable whether the real change in culture was internal or not. You're right and it doesn't fit here.
> Is just suppression of speech actually effective?
This is a different question then... You're asking if suppression of speech with tactics you deem acceptable is actually effective. I don't know.
I do know that killing people who hold certain ideas is often effective, and that was the point I was trying to make. Merely putting people in jail for violating the free speech laws might not be enough (I don't think just imprisoning dissidents without the threat of capital punishement or outright genocide has ever been tried at scale).
So maybe we don't disagree as much and we were actually arguing for different views, right?
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Here's my comment from the Cloudflare thread, sitting at -4. > But what's the end game? Do service providers have to morally support those who they provide service to? Because that's how things are looking. And what do you know. That's exactly what's happening.
Someone in that thread, unironically, said that Google etc. had to allow Nazi's to use their services. And then immediately said "Whatever happened to "Don't be evil"?". Apparently the concept that providing your services to Nazi's could be thought of as evil totally escaped their thoughts. It seems like quite a lot of people have deeply internalized the opinion that "Free Speech" is an unalloyed good, and are confus…
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So we become like them to stop them?
Yes. The chance you has to deal with this has longt since past. Besides - You think the other side is having a conversation in the first place? No they are not. They're busy making in roads and winning audiences. People thinking this is a discussion are under a mistaken impression. It's a popularity contest. Has been for decades.
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> While I definitely don't support the people they're booting off... A bit off topic but how many bytes are spent on prefaces like this on responses to this topic? I assume that the vast majority of people on the planet don't support Nazis or anything related. I find it interesting that any discussion of them has to include that line lest the speaker/writer be labeled as one (which happens quite a bit anyway but that…
So true. I had to create a separate Reddit account to have these discussions about internet freedom and refusing service because people assume I'm a white supremacist / Nazi. I'm not, I just think it opens up some interesting discussion as to what we can or can't discriminate against.
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Private individual getting paid is not so private anymore. Especially once "protected classes" are brought in. Either go all in and allow anybody to refuse service to anybody or make everybody serve everybody. I don't see middle ground in there. It'd always result in he-said, she-said. Point in case - people bringing up the gay cake in mentioning of google memogate. Is a bus company right to refuse service to protest…
There’s ways to convolute any of those scenarios, but let me just explain why I think there are notable differences: 1. Protected classes are defined by a history of prejudicial treatment and blocked access to essential services, and they exist as a class of people defined by biological markers. So you can control being black or being gay, and you can’t access any bus service or use the same water fountain anywhere.…
No, that's totally wrong. Religion is a protected class in many cases.
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The problem is really that a very few private companies have become core infrastructure providers on the Internet, effectively acting as the government of the net, however they face little to no regulation or accountability - Google, for example, is too firmly entrenched for consumers to realistically move to an alternative. So the question is, at what threshold (of size, competitors, etc) should free speech move fro…
But you are not being prevented from using the Internet, the shop is not preventing me from buying, just from coming in whilst wearing the t-shirt, take it off and I can shop freely. The Nazis can use the internet, they are not being barred from it, they are just not allowed to use Google or Facebook to display their message. I think that something like ifps.io may partially solve this issue as the Nazis could host t…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem is really that a very few private companies have become core infrastructure providers on the Internet, effectively acting as the government of the net, however they face little to no regulation or accountability - Google, for example, is too firmly entrenched for consumers to realistically move to an alternative. So the question is, at what threshold (of size, competitors, etc) should free speech move fro…
But you are not being prevented from using the Internet, the shop is not preventing me from buying, just from coming in whilst wearing the t-shirt, take it off and I can shop freely. The Nazis can use the internet, they are not being barred from it, they are just not allowed to use Google or Facebook to display their message. I think that something like ifps.io may partially solve this issue as the Nazis could host t…
I think the concern is, what if Google and Facebook can be thought of as essentially being the internet. It's certainly true that the internet has gotten far less decentralized in the past decade. Google essentially has a monopoly on how people find information.
Why don't people get upset like this when companies refuse to carry pornography? That's been really common for a long time, even if not universal, and I don't recall ever hearing a peep about it from the likes of the EFF. Maybe I missed it?
Maybe it hasn't raised to EFF's radar before, but it does flare up every now and then. The PMRC drama culminating in Explicit Content Advisory as sales restriction was probably the biggest one in recent memory. The MPAA moving rating system got some heat around the release of This Film Is Not Yet Rated (2006). The EFF did get involved in the SCOTUS case Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association, but I hate to even mention that for the tangential connection because I don't want start another gov't vs private censorship wankfest where everyone misses the fucking point.
But in general, the people who do care find themselves spending time on other priorities, or locked in a flamewars with people who show no morals beyond bland acquiescence to the status quo; and nothing ever changes.