ISPs should not police online speech no matter how awful it is

Post by Sohcahtoa82 » Wed, Aug 30, 2023, 4:48 PM UTC

concordDance wrote: post #636

chonkerz wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the article, the EFF explicitly calls out the government for failing to enforce existing laws which would have shut down Kiwifarms >That’s what must happen here. The cops and the courts should be working to protect the victims of KF and go after the perpetrators with every legal tool at their disposal. We should be giving them the resources and societal mandate to do so. Solid enforcement of existing laws is som…

The issue there is that as best I can tell, kiwifarms the site doesn't break any laws. It officially discourages actual harassment of the people it insults. Individual users may harass people but as far as I could tell from my previous skim they do not organize this harassment in the open. And requiring service providers to monitor private communications for organisation of harassment seems Orwellian to me. (Intuitio…

Post by wredue » Wed, Aug 30, 2023, 4:51 PM UTC

RHSeeger wrote: post #802

moomin wrote: post #721

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You need to decide if these are private companies or public utilities. If they’re public utilities, the government should provide them. Restricting company’s freedom to choose a business model is not the answer. You might not like it, but that’s kind of the point, either let the market decide or take the market out of it.

> Restricting company’s freedom to choose a business model is not the answer. Only, that's not how it works in our (and pretty much any) society. We, as a society, choose what we think is acceptable. And then we make laws to enforce that people behave in a way consistent with that. A company is not free to deny service to someone that is gay, or black, or married; just because that is their chosen business model.

Post by chonkerz » Wed, Aug 30, 2023, 4:56 PM UTC

gameman144 wrote: post #798

jasonlotito wrote: post #737

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Indeed, the ACLU have lost their way. Indeed, they haven't. > The memo listed several factors to consider, including "the extent to which the speech may assist in advancing the goals of white supremacists or others whose views are contrary to our values." i.e. Consider whether we'd be arguing against our own goals. How anyone reasonable could consider this a bad thing, I don't know. https://www.aclu.org/news/civil-…

> The memo listed several factors to consider, including "the extent to which the speech may assist in advancing the goals of white supremacists or others whose views are contrary to our values." This itself is the bad bit, IMO. My expectation of the ACLU is that they will always defend the rights of individuals, regardless of the goals of those exercising those rights. When the ACLU defended Nazis marching in Skokie…

Post by a-priori » Wed, Aug 30, 2023, 5:00 PM UTC

bastardoperator wrote: post #817

CM30 wrote: post #46

I agree, we've got far too many entities that should just be 'dumb pipes' trying to play moral police at the moment, and it's a very worrying situation when it comes to free speech on the internet. Cloudflare is an often brought up example, as are payment processors like Visa and Mastercard and app stores like the iOS and Play Stores, but ISPs trying to block traffic for a site that's not actually illegal feels like…

Corporations are essentially citizens, and citizens have the right to free speech. We can agree or disagree, but this where we've allowed ourselves to get. HE is within their rights to say no, we will not host or route to KF, to stop us would violate our constitutional rights to freedom of speech and expression. They would then point to a litany of issues surrounding KF, how it would impact their business, and then w…

Post by sequoia » Wed, Aug 30, 2023, 5:07 PM UTC

chonkerz wrote: post #809

sequoia wrote: post #808

I heard a podcast interviewing the site owner[0], hearing his perspective was interesting though I don't know how much of what he says is true either. He raised one very salient point, however, which was that ISPs probably didn't start dropping him out of nowhere. He asserts that there is a highly persistent and technically knowledgeable party threatening ISPs & other providers by going after the provider's other cus…

ISPs get threatened all the time and don't take content down just because some rando is mad. Kiwifarms needs to provide proof that ISPs are being threatened, as opposed to the more likely scenario that the harassment victims are filing normal abuse complaints and alerting the ISP to the TOS violations taking place all over the site.