8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service

So instead of banning pro-guns websites and associations, internet self-righteous companies prefer to ban pro-freedom of speech websites.

How brave !

Edit: to people disagreeing, ask yourself : why is mass shooting only happening with such a high frequency in the US ? Internet is global and billions of people speak and write english. So what is the originality ?

This knee-jerk reaction for censorship needs to stop, we’re heading toward censorship at full speed, and everybody is applauding for being so responsible and mature. If people are calling publicly for mass murdering, and if it’s illegal to do so in their country, then let the police get access to the people identity and arrest them. But don’t kill the messenger or the media !

The part that I concerned with has to do with discoverability. If you push these people underground they will not disappear. That has never happened in the history of humanity.

I would much rather the exist in plain view, free to voice their hatred in plain view. I would much rather the algorithms and people of sound mind monitor these individuals and groups in broad daylight than have them exist behind encrypted radicalization chat rooms.

If the standard is to shutdown services that can lead to radicalization and, therefore, harm or death, then the government should shut down Facebook, Twitter, Google and maybe more.

Why treat this any differently that 737 MAX crashes?

The only reason I can see not to do this is to be able to keep an eye on people who self-radicalize.

Sadly I have an example of this in my own family. We have an older relative (late 70’s) who, up until about two years ago, did not own a computer or use the Internet.

He was given a computer by a family member so he could use FB to keep in touch with family in the US and abroad.

We have been watching, in absolute horror, as he has been going down a path towards ever increasing hatred. No, not what you think. I won’t go into details other than to say that he had his political leanings a couple of years ago and FB turned them into nothing less than hatred, constant unrelenting hatred.

No, he isn’t going to go hurt anyone. He is hurting himself. He is in a solid gradient descent into a sad existence and likely already very much in the grips if depression.

I know it’s FB because that’s all he does with the computer. He is, otherwise, computer illiterate. He doesn’t have much if an education, which makes the constant stream of hateful memes, posts and articles impossible for him to filter. He is, effectively, mostly incapable of critical thinking now that he has been pulled down into this dark cave.

Precisely because this is happening in plain sight, various members of our family, myself included, have been engaging with him to try and pull him out of Plato’s proverbial cave.

This task is incredibly difficult. FB feeds him a constant stream of similar material and the world of reason evaporates behind a cloud of hatred. All he sees are shadows on the wall.

We need this in the open in order to be able to help those we love as well as others.

We also need FB and others to understand how much harm their algorithms seem to be causing.

>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.

This is correct, it's the very essence of the southern strategy. As Lee Atwater once said (censorship mine, dunno HN's policy about this type of language) [0]:

>You start out in 1954 by saying, "N-----, n-----, n-----." By 1968 you can't say "n-----" — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me — because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this," is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "N-----, n-----."

If you join a forum and start saying "N-----, n-----, n-----", you'll probably get banned right away. But if you're talking about crime statistics and totally true stories that totally happened to you which just so happen to feature minorities as the antagonists, your dogwhistling might be allowed, and that can serve as a valuable recruiting tactic as people who don't realize it's a dogwhistle read "sources" you provide and fall down a racist rabbit hole. (Even if someone doesn't buy into these ideas right away, planting that seed can bear fruit someday - maybe they've been unsuccessful getting a job for awhile and are really frustrated, then they remember the links they were sent long ago, and suddenly it doesn't seem so unreasonable...)

[0]: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Southern_strategy#It.27s_about...

The problem with extremists is that they drive people who disagree with them away. I've been a fairly heavy user of 4chan for well over a decade now, and I even spent some time on 8chan. I like the anarchic, less ego-driven nature of anonymous image boards. You avoid most of the empty posturing from other social networks.

I even think that 8chan was a great idea on paper. It's basically 4chan with Reddit's ability to create sub-communities on a whim instead of having to beg the admins to create a new board. I created a few of those myself.

But then of course the fascists took over. Admittedly on 8chan is happened almost immediately but on 4chan it was more gradual. Now 8chan is (rightfully IMO) dead and frankly I wouldn't be too sad to see 4chan, or at least some of its more popular boards, go the same way. The /pol/ cancer spreads everywhere, the big boards are 50% shitposting and 50% hate speech. And not in a fun "let's make ironic memes about Hitler to push people's buttons" way but in a rather depressing "I seriously hate women and minorities" way.

The more moderate people gets driven away. Actually any sane people would be driven away from this terrible and constant negativity and all you have left are the zealots who feed on each other's extremism. It's not free speech, it's a circular feedback-loop of radicalization. I've genuinely read a (supposedly videogame related) thread yesterday on 4chan where somebody was trying somewhat successfully to appear moderate by saying "I support white nationalists but I don't think we should be killing brown people". How nice.

Note that Reddit isn't a whole lot better at handling this, they're just better at hiding it under the rug while posturing in their PR releases.

I respectfully and vehemently disagree. Hate speech has been proven to be able to convince people by virtue of appealing to their emotions rather than their intellect. It does not make sense to have a society based around human rights, with a point of view where stealing, murdering or otherwise deceiving people is wrong, while at the same time allowing speech which can subvert that same democracy. It's simply not smart. Just like your body has antibodies to prevent outside threats from outright destroying you from the inside (or outside), democracy too requires its defenses in order for it to work. The advent of fake news and social media manipulation should be enough to realize this: the US has a president that questions that validity of its own institutions right now, so does Brazil. Two democracies which have proven deceiving or hateful speech can mean trouble even for citizens who do not have anything to do with such rhetoric. Simply no, full-on free speech does not work and never will. The (anecdotal) fact Europe has some restraints on free speech while sporting arguably more freedoms, as in, freedom to live your life with a lot less chance of some random person killing you because they hide behind some crazy above-anything notion of freedom, should be enough to illustrate what I mean. Speech needs restraint or we need to stop pretending we care about human rights, simple as that.