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Microsoft threatens to stop hosting Gab unless posts are removed

thehill.com

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

#531

Post by partiallypro »

Mikhail_Edoshin wrote: post #396
partiallypro wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly, Ruby Ridge and Waco for that matter were completely bungled operations, and imo were largely unjustified hamfisted responses. However they weren't inherently nefarious, just sheer incompetence and cowboy minded policing. Yet their mere existence fueled a far right movement that believes they were. In an unfortunate turn, the OKC bombing was a direct result of that. It fell right into the preaching of Koresh…

Well, that sheer incompetence indeed disappeared when it was time to cover all this up. Was that nefarious? Because this is what eventually motivated McVeigh, not some strange conspiracy theories. Let me quote: "I waited two years from "Waco" for non-violent "checks and balances" built into our system to correct the abuse of power we were seeing in federal actions against citizens. The Executive; Legislative; and Jud…

The initial intent was not nefarious, the execution was incompetent, the cover up of the incompetence was nefarious. That's not the same as saying the ATF torched the place to the ground, which isn't backed up by anything...and that's what McVeigh believed.

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

#532

Post by lmm »

anigbrowl wrote: post #512
lmm wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is. The only point where "rights" matter is when two groups of people are in conflict, and each side will always be able to express what they want as a "right" (e.g. making it illegal for other people to describe you in their own terms is your "right to exist").

That doesn't follow. If group A enjoys a right and group B does not, and that right is extended to group B, Group A no longer enjoys the same advantage over Group B but hasn't suffered any limitation of rights. To use the supplied example, if you're a male driver in Saudi Arabia your driving privileges are unimpaired by the novel legality of female drivers.

Group A will always find some way to define the change as them losing a "right". E.g. in the US if you propose to extend the right to life that born people currently enjoy to the unborn, many born people will claim this is a violation of their rights.

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

#533

Post by jewelthief91 »

jazzyjackson wrote: post #530
jewelthief91 wrote: post #506

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't really "make your own platform" though. Ultimately the ISPs could shut down access to any website they don't think their customers should have access to. The only recourse would be for the censored to somehow construct their own physical internet infrastructure, which was so difficult and costly the first time that it was highly subsidized by the government. And do you honestly think you should have the rig…

I'll keep your points in mind. I would only insist on making a distinction between "a public form" and "the public forum" As an owner of a machine, I see no reason I should be forced to host some conversation I consider harmful. OTOH I would encourage ISPs to maintain a common carrier status just out of pragmatism. Once you memory-hole connections to some IP address, I think you become responsible for the content you…

I agree with that. We need some way of differentiating between private sites and sites that be considered part of the public forum.

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

#534

Post by inevitable2 »

api wrote: post #200
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'm shocked by how many liberals who really ought to know better are cheering for the deployment of corporate oligopolistic censorship at this scale. We're not talking about just kicking someone off Twitter... now we're talking about kicking them off supposedly neutral public cloud platforms. This is a major escalation and honestly it's changing my mind a bit about the whole issue. I was a fence sitter before but now…

Good post and agree with you.

>libertarian crowd on this one, and I say this as someone who is nowhere near the alt-right politically.

This is one thing that concerns me is people who stand up for this or lean libertarian being seen as alt-right simply because they disagree with this corporate censorship. To me this censorship or suppression goes against the founding principles of the internet. I don't understand why it is acceptable to label everyone as such.

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

#535

Post by inevitable2 »

"The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." -John Gilmore

Lately this is getting absurd. I believe this quote is still true, but the amount of 'I don't like what is being said so therefore you should be silenced' is going too far. I don't agree with what this guy said (or even know who he is aside from what was said in the article), but I'm alarmed that Microsoft would go after Gab for a user on Gab's platform.

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

#536

Post by dang »

s9w wrote: post #385
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…

[flagged]

You've been using HN primarily for political and ideological battle. That's an abuse of the site and we ban accounts that do it, regardless of their politics. Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and use HN as intended from now on.

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

#537

Post by dang »

jewelthief91 wrote: post #349
jewelthief91 wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Looks like the ADL didn't like my comment. /s

We've banned this account for using HN primarily for political battle. That's not what this site is for, and we ban accounts that do it, regardless of their politics.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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

#538

Post by tpush »

t3soro wrote: post #504
tpush wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You missed this parts of the article: > "Rosenberg does occasionally raise the issue of Jews. On March 28, 1941, he referred to the opening conference of his brainchild, the Institute for Research into the Jewish Question. I regard the conference as a success,” Rosenberg wrote. “It is, after all, for the first time in European history, that ten European nations [were] represented at an anti-Jewish conference with a c…

Removal, as in expulsion. I didn't miss a thing. The gas chamber mythology is entirety based on emotional propaganda. The facts point to the German camps as a network designed for prisoner labor and transportation and show no support for homicidal poison gas chambers. Search for the International Report of the Red Cross, who audited the camps, 1944. Class-act whoever decided to flag my post for posting my opinion.

Holy hell, an actual Holocaust denier.

You know, there are survivors of these extermination camps still around; some even speaking of their experiences. All liars in your warped world view?

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

#539

Post by zkms »

s73v3r_ wrote: post #525
zkms wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. That those two loathsome websites are still up doesn't mean that the technique I described is invalid; it just means it doesn't have a 100% kill rate, and it certainly works on less resourced and less indefatigable targets. I'm not worried about those specific websites -- I'm worried…

"Is it fine for me to pressure and suborn an electric company into cutting off service to someone I don't like (after all, without electricity, they can't make those bad internet posts!). If I can rile up enough of an internet mob, can I get them evicted from their residence, simply by annoying their landlord until the trouble's not worth the monthly rent cheque?" The really funny, and by funny I mean sad, thing abou…

> The really funny, and by funny I mean sad, thing about your argument, is that you're all upset about this happening to racists and bigots, but you completely ignore that this was a fact of life for many of the marginalized communities that they terrorize.

No. This is frankly wrong. In my comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17730702) that you replied to, I described the websites in question as "loathsome" and "generally disgusting". If that wasn't enough, I will say it explicitly: I do not endorse/support racists or bigots or white supremacists or white nationalists or Nazis or Neo-Nazis or the alt-right or other flavours of fascism.

I find this incident mildly troubling not because of the targets in question (I don't give a solitary fuck about Gab or the Daily Stormer or their users/admins/owners), but because of the precedent it sets -- and specifically that this precedent will be exploited by these racists, against marginalised communities.

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

#540

Post by X6S1x6Okd1st »

s73v3r_ wrote: post #235
X6S1x6Okd1st wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd love to see an analysis of if this theory is true. There's another argument for allowing hateful speech which is that it is a containment strategy. It appears that there isn't much to that theory. An analysis of reddit's 2015 banning on r/fatpeoplehate and r/coontown did not see the hateful speech increase where 'migrants' went. http://comp.social.gatech.edu/papers/cscw18-chand-hate.pdf

I think it's because such banning made it abundantly clear that such behavior was not welcome. So that's more to do with social norms, I guess.

Why do you think that?
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