Reminder that closing 8chan won't stop mass shoting.
it just stops them from announcing it.
8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service
441–450 of 1001 posts
Re: 8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service
#442I'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…
> 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. What was it you read there that convinced you that websites are capable of turning people into murderers any more than video games are?
An implicit acceptance and endorsement for the messages of hate and violence?
I personally doubt violent video games turn people into murderers; I suspect they do desensitize people to violence, and normalize violence. That's the problem with 8chan: violence, hated, bigotry, etc are normalized
Re: 8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service
#443This 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 platf…
Makes me wonder how many people like GPL and free software. One of the core tenants of free software is the ability to do anything with it (freedom 0). This includes being able to do evil. https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html The original JSON license is even deemed not free because it limits the ability to use it for Evil. https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#JSON There is a reason for this decis…
> This includes being able to do evil.
This also includes booting someone off your platform.
Re: 8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service
#444Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've lost good friends to 4chan/8chan. They were obsessed. At first it was cat pictures and memes, but it went way downhill from there. I've watched those sites cause the transition from normal, interesting, reasonable, open minded, intelligent, happy human beings, to horrible inexcusable pieces of shit who I never want to have anything to do with ever again. It's not just that they inspire a few shooters and mass mu…
I would not lump 4chan into this discussion. I'll concede that some boards on the site are more polemical than others and promote alt-right ideologies without a doubt, but there are many other interesting boards and people on 4chan that are not captured by the broad strokes you're outlining. I know people that browse /fit/, /lit/, /mu/ and /out/ just to name some boards that are perfectly reasonable individuals that…
I'm most familiar with /a/ and can tell you there's a broad distaste for /pol/ on /a/.
Re: 8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service
#445Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not that speech doesn't have consequences. If speech had no consequences, it wouldn't be worth defending. Rather, it's that no man is fit to play the censor - not the Government which would censor political criticism of itself, not a king who would censor his opponents, nor even a billionaire who would censor the media when it spurns him. At the same time, if someone points a finger at you and shouts "I'm going…
> At the same time, if someone points a finger at you and shouts "I'm going to kill you", then we're getting outside of speech and into actions, and certainly actions can be prohibited. At least in my state, this is not actionable as described. For it to be actionable, the person saying "I'm going to kill you" needs to reasonably be in a position to do so - i.e. brandishing a weapon, etc. Idle threats and banter do n…
It's not actionable when it's a rando in an online multiplayer game upset at you. It's absolutely actionable when it's your jilted lover in your face, or even if they're texting you.
The details make the case. Coaxing in detail throngs online to attack immigrants, in my non-legal non-expert opinion, seems to be more in the actionable case.
Re: 8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service
#446I guess you could say that free speech has limits that are acceptable. You know you can't yell fire in a crowded room and not get litigation and charges brought against you. So, maybe 8chan just ran past the fine line of hate speech vs encouraging acts of hate. I.e you can be racist but you cannot encourage acts of extremism. If 8Chan was a breeding ground for Islamic Extremists would people be okay with still existi…
The "fire in a crowded theater" metaphor is always mentioned in a discussion of free speech. It's like Godwin's Law. I'm tired of it.
You can say anything. But if the thing you say carries consequences beyond the utterance, the freedom of speech does not immunize that sayer from assuming responsibility for those consequences.
It's not about what happens afterward. It's about not removing someone's voice, for fear of what they might say with it.
8chan is not required to support freedom of speech; it's not the government. It is itself free to pick and choose who is allowed to use its platform. My opinion is that it should not engage in content-based censorship, because no one should. Once you start doing that, there's no ethically clear place where the line between acceptable and unacceptable should lie. If you can make a case for banning neo-Nazis and Boko Haram and Sinaloa Cartel and such, you can also make a case for banning people who put pineapple on pizza or ketchup on hot dogs, with the argument variables set to different values.
Information is not the dangerous thing, nor misinformation. When someone is recruited and turned into a soldier via online image boards, using the exact same psychology as state-based militaries around the world--dehumanizing the xeno, and propagandizing them as an existential threat to the in-group identity tribe--that isn't the fault of the medium. It is the responsibility of the recruiter, the propagandist.
The rightful answer to speech with undesired consequences is not censorship, but counter-propaganda, and to some extent psychological hardening of the whole populace, by encouraging skepticism, critical thought, and formation of individual identity and self-image over group identities.
The former is a more active measure that unfortunately requires a bloody-minded relentlessness combined with unending tolerance for nonsense. Imagine a Bill Nye vs. Ken Ham debate that lasts literally forever, and the toll that would surely take on Nye. Now sub in a pants-on-head flat-earther time-cube woo-woo troll for Ham. No one person could take it. And that's why when these fools show up, the thought-terminating cliches have to be countered with thought-provoking dissent. If you see bullshit, call bullshit.
And the latter is something that probably has to happen in young people, coming with a side effect of making them less governable, and harder to convince of anything. Resistance to radicalization over the Internet would directly translate to more difficult military recruiting, drops in the strength of religious affiliations, and harder political campaigns. Not exactly popular among those loving god and country.
It's probably easier to just censor the things the state doesn't want people to say, and just trust that they will stop with the threshold line in the correct place.
Re: 8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service
#447My opinion is that freedom of speech is a fine ideal to strive for, but it relies on having a stable society with some minimum level of education (moral and philosophical too, not just the technical kind). It requires people who are able to fully parse the implications of what they are hearing to make sound and rational judgements on the rejection of an idea or the embrace of it. It creates a moral duty for the peopl…
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Re: 8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service
#448Earlier quoted context omitted.
Lol These aren't exactly organized bands of people funneling in millions of dollars for carrying out actual training and misson planning/execution. They're watering holes where disaffected elements of society hyperbolically play up various happenings. Just take a step back for a moment. We have an increasing population and increasing saturation of that population with streams of data. When something happens, we know…
The "hyperirony" excuse is complete bullshit. It's not redeeming when the defense is that they only support, encourage, and enable terrorism because it's a joke. That would make it more despicable, even. Instead we have incredibly racist and hateful people who don't see themselves that way making excuses. They're still shit humans. You don't murder people and say it was irony as your defense.
Shit humans have always existed. But claiming they support "terrorism" in the same sense that we think of organizational terrorism is ridiculous.
4chan and 8chan didn't create hyperirony (although they certainly cultivate massive gardens of it) or densensitization. Our media cycle has created it in tandem with a feedback loop that synergizes with the principle of "more people + same time amount = more hyperslices of emotion eliciting news that distort mental maps of larger-than-self situations"
You're safer at a wal-mart than prior 4chan and 8chan. But if you combine higher population density and information density, you'll get more raw events of violence even if the chance of experiencing violence has gone down.
Imo, there's a more insidious risk in allotting more powers of censorship to entities who are far less subject to reciprocal investigation. Think of 9/11. If we had done nothing, we would be safer and more prosperous today. We let the fleas provoke us into gouging untold amounts of flesh to stop itches.
Edit: A more simple way to phrase it is that hyperirony and the lack of "proper affect", which is really what people seem to be most horrified about, is a defense against the 24/7 atrocity exhibition which turns emotion into banality.
Re: 8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service
#449Earlier quoted context omitted.
Personally I'm in agreement with Popper's view that societies should tolerate everything except intolerance. It draws a fine line between what's acceptable speech and what is not. And going by it, things like 8chan should get shut down. The line of thought you put forward, by contrast, rubs me in a very wrong way. It was used to justify, depending on the period and country, not allowing people to vote on the basis th…
You make some great points. Let me also ask you a devil's advocate question. "Let's go to oarabbus_'s house at and kill him" is not protected speech, correct? I am sure everyone agrees upon this. But "Let's attack folks who are as they are a scourge upon our nation" is protected? Why?
That is not protected speech. The 'attack' is the keyword. Therefore, supremacist groups typically say " is destroying " which is legal. They're just connecting the dots the only way they know how.
Re: 8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service
#450I am genuinely upset over this. And that is after CEO pinky swears he will not do it in the future. It will be that much easier to do it now that there is a precedent. I doubt he does not know it. I think.. I think I will be starting free speech focused entity. Like NRA. Laser focus. No restrictions on free speech of any kind. Ever. This may be the only thing to prevent US from losing its list of temporary priviledge…
We're so glad you consider that more important than the continued shootings that only the US seems to suffer from on a frequent and permanent basis. That free speech is sure making a lot of people free right.
Freedom of speech IS more important than few dead people. This entire country was founded on this particular issue. People went to war for it.
So there is no need to be glib here.