8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service • Hacker News Board

Re: 8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service

#521

Post by dcolkitt » Mon, Aug 05, 2019, 7:45 PM UTC

hacknat wrote: post #251

What does free speech have to do with this? Cloudflare and other companies have 1st amendment rights as well. One of them is that they can serve customers as they like, as long as they are not violating the rights of a protected class. Political ideology or party affiliation is not a protected class, nor should it be. Twitter could ban every Republican on its platform tomorrow and it if the government tried to stop t…

Imagine an alternate scenario.

Say the major tech companies get fed up with Elizabeth Warren's calls to regulate them.

Facebook removes all her groups. Cloudflare shuts down her websites. Youtube removes her videos. Google only leaves anti-Elizabeth Warren search results up, etc. Basically a major presidential candidate is completely locked out of having any presence on the Internet whatsoever.

Would your reaction be the same? "This has nothing to do with free speech. These are merely private companies deciding they don't want to associate with Elizabeth Warren."

Re: 8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service

#522

Post by _id » Mon, Aug 05, 2019, 7:45 PM UTC

malvosenior wrote: post #428

tepidandroid wrote: post #139

My 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…

There are other ways to deal with this than censorship. Why are there not FBI agents in /pol/ on 8chan actively chasing up leads on people who are threatening violence? It seems actually useful that these people are willing to make these kind of plans in the public eye. Force them underground and behind encryption and it will be harder to monitor. Does anyone know how law enforcement engages with places like 8chan? I…

> Why are there not FBI agents in /pol/ on 8chan actively chasing up leads on people who are threatening violence? There are. And not only on 8chan.

Re: 8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service

#523

Post by ColanR » Mon, Aug 05, 2019, 7:45 PM UTC

ddebernardy wrote: post #502

irrational wrote: post #468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Popper's tolerance criteria, by contrast, seems clearcut What is that criteria? Because I can easily see people disagreeing on what is and is not intolerant. Would you agree that saying that a baker in Colorado must make a cake for a gay wedding is intolerant of the baker's belief? Because I'm certain a sizeable proportion of the US population would agree that it is intolerant.

Frankly, I don't know what a specific legal criteria might even look like. In fact, I'm not even sure I'd like someone smarter than me with legal street credentials to come up with one. What I do know is that SCOTUS famously refused to define what porn is [0], and went instead with something to the effect of: I know it when I see it, and this is not it. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_I_see_it Methi…

> Methinks we as a society can arrive to similar types of rulings for intolerance.

Freedom of speech is too important to be of secondary value to something that can't even be defined clearly.

Re: 8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service

#524

Post by mechamicro » Mon, Aug 05, 2019, 7:45 PM UTC

malvosenior wrote: post #428

tepidandroid wrote: post #139

My 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…

There are other ways to deal with this than censorship. Why are there not FBI agents in /pol/ on 8chan actively chasing up leads on people who are threatening violence? It seems actually useful that these people are willing to make these kind of plans in the public eye. Force them underground and behind encryption and it will be harder to monitor. Does anyone know how law enforcement engages with places like 8chan? I…

Maybe there will be less monitoring. But with a lack of easily available places to congregate, the assholes will find it much more difficult to recruit, organize, and build their organization. This stagnates or reduces their membership numbers.

Also, it sends a great signal to anyone who might think of joining: that this ideology is so terrible that it's being chased off of the internet. That even the hands-off companies like Reddit and Cloudflare are rejecting it.

Sure, there will be a few who are attracted to it because it is so reviled, but many more will be repulsed. There's a reason why the hate groups did everything they could to be more appealing to the mainstream. Being forced back into the underground essentially means defeat.

As far as monitoring goes, I don't think it will make much of an impact. These are not difficult groups to infiltrate. Generally speaking, they're not the best and the brightest. Their opsec is poor. Activist groups have infiltrated many of them and have posted the discord transcripts. I'm sure the FBI, and other organizations, have gone even further than that.

Re: 8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service

#525

Post by greyfox » Mon, Aug 05, 2019, 7:45 PM UTC

tepidandroid wrote: post #139

My 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…

based and redpilled.

Re: 8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service

#526

Post by Arrezz » Mon, Aug 05, 2019, 7:45 PM UTC

DrDimension wrote: post #266

boramalper wrote: post #182

What people (seemingly) fail to realise is that neither Cloudflare is the Internet nor Voxility is a public infrastructure. They are private enterprises which are free to act in however they want with regards to the service they provide as laid out in their contract. That is the danger of centralisation; when they remove their service, it feels as if your rights has been violated because (a) you have been so used to…

A private company must act as public infrastructure once it becomes a de facto monopoly.

I've always been intrigued by this, do you think that platforms such as YouTube should be considered public infrastructure? And if so for what reasons?

Re: 8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service

#527

Post by JansjoFromIkea » Mon, Aug 05, 2019, 7:45 PM UTC

jolmg wrote: post #175

nilkn wrote: post #4

I'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'm not really that well informed of 8chan, but bringing it down, while practical, doesn't seem like the ideal solution. Isn't it just like covering your eyes and pretending the problem isn't there? The problem doesn't sound like it's 8chan, but rather these people and their ideologies. If 8chan was brought down, they'll just find another hub to congregate, but now we don't know where to reach them to talk. I thought…

To me its more like closing the bar they hang out in, almost all of them will find other bars to go to instead almost immediately but it'll cause at least a temporary fracture and even when they all do find themselves back to the same place (asides from the ones who just got on with their lives), it'll take a while to build up the same kind of feedback loop. Honestly, as a teen (over a decade ago now...), there were forums I was on that totally died due to a week or two of downtime, sometimes just breaking someone away from their familiar habits is enough to get them out of a bad routine.

The notion that we could reach them on 8chan is a bit idealistic, the only thing we're able to reach is the manifestos within seconds of the news breaking as far as I can see. If your goal is to _reach_ them, then do it in reality.

Re: 8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service

#528

Post by adbge » Mon, Aug 05, 2019, 7:46 PM UTC

api wrote: post #386

DonHopkins wrote: post #261

Earlier 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…

The 'chans seem almost like a leaderless cult. I've also seen people get completely sucked into them in this really honestly creepy way. I suppose it's like a subculture but minus virtually everything positive like socializing with real human beings and having real experiences.

You can say the same thing about video games. We had a moral panic over those, too.

Re: 8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service

#529

Post by jolmg » Mon, Aug 05, 2019, 7:46 PM UTC

spookthesunset wrote: post #472

jolmg wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not really that well informed of 8chan, but bringing it down, while practical, doesn't seem like the ideal solution. Isn't it just like covering your eyes and pretending the problem isn't there? The problem doesn't sound like it's 8chan, but rather these people and their ideologies. If 8chan was brought down, they'll just find another hub to congregate, but now we don't know where to reach them to talk. I thought…

8chan never got brought down. They just got dumped by their ISP and CDN. They are free to start their own CDN and ISP to host their content. And if they cannot find a private business willing to peer with them, they are free to offer alternative access methods (dialup?). They can even go set up a booth downtown and hand out flyers with access numbers. No free speech rights were trampled on, and no censorship took pla…

I think no free speech right was trampled because it wasn't the government that acted, not because the reasons you stated. I mean, going by your logic, it's impossible to trample the free speech of someone unless you make it physically impossible for them to express anything ever again.

Re: 8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service

#530

Post by saltminer » Mon, Aug 05, 2019, 7:46 PM UTC

malvosenior wrote: post #428

tepidandroid wrote: post #139

My 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…

There are other ways to deal with this than censorship. Why are there not FBI agents in /pol/ on 8chan actively chasing up leads on people who are threatening violence? It seems actually useful that these people are willing to make these kind of plans in the public eye. Force them underground and behind encryption and it will be harder to monitor. Does anyone know how law enforcement engages with places like 8chan? I…

>Why are there not FBI agents in /pol/ on 8chan actively chasing up leads on people who are threatening violence?

They might be, or they might not be. They tend to keep their mouths shut during active investigations, if people found out the FBI was actively subpoenaing the site they might be inclined to stop giving them more evidence. (That is, the FBI could have developed a public-private honeypot partnership for all we know.)

And many times people aren't espousing direct, actionable threats. Talking about "international bankers" and "globalists" is protected speech, saying they control the world is protected speech, and saying something needs to be done about this is also protected speech - as long as they don't get specific (i.e. "we should fight back, let's meet up at on "), they can't do much about it. So you have people constantly agreeing about how "Zionists" are a threat to "the west" and that "something" needs to happen, egging on each others hate with various hoaxes, reactionary takes and praising Hitler, and finally someone snaps. Despite these people clearly being partially responsible for encouraging one of their members to violence, none of them will get in trouble because they never gave direct threats or incitements.