Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

eff.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

831–840 of 1001 posts

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

#831

Post by l3mure »

gorwell wrote: post #109
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…

That's right. Authoritarian censors found an exploit. They couldn't use the government to clamp down on civil liberties because of the pesky constitution, so they invaded the administrative layer of big tech. It's not the engineers who built the web and these companies with Silicon Valley ideals. They were never intended to be used this way and are secretly horrified. > play moral police at the moment Moral fashion p…

> It's not the engineers who built the web and these companies with Silicon Valley ideals. They were never intended to be used this way and are secretly horrified.

Such a laughable statement given that Silicon Valley was from the beginning a military project, with social control as an explicit aim. Milquetoast lamentations about a lost libertarian dream are no different than old cries about the closing of the Western frontier or Jeffersonian myths about a pastoralist capitalism corrupted by industry.

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

#832

Post by rhelz »

didntcheck wrote: post #559
ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> " Forcing private companies to do what you want them to do, even when they would prefer not to? " That's exactly the argument that bigots who owned businesses used to refuse service to PoC and oppressed people before the civil rights legislations of the '50s and '60s were passed. Funny to hear old discredited arguments used by far-right conservatives decades ago coming out of the mouths of the left these days. It's…

Unfortunately progressives have been acting like ancaps on these issues for a while. I've long since stopped being surprised to see someone with "socialist" in their bio saying it's a good thing that unelected corporations have de facto control over online political expression, or that employers should be able to threaten people's livelihoods for supporting the wrong party, and acting like it's anathema to suggest re…

// progressives have been acting like ancaps //

chuckle I certainly have been lost in wonder that now I'm the one defending corporate power :-)

But, what would a solution to the problem look like, on your view? Would we really be better off having, say, Elon must having to get his decision to remove blocking approved by some media czar in the Ministry of Truth? Would that really stop people from thinking that their views are not being systematically suppressed?

Progressives (like Americans generally) are skeptical of all power, pubic and private, and (like Americans generally) don't want government interference in society unless it might have some hope of actually solving the problem.

But I haven't seen any concrete proposals at all, let alone anything which I would have any confidence that would actually solve the problem. Quite the contrary; no matter what regulations are imposed, surely there will always be those who feel they are being systematically suppressed--and come to think of it, they would be correct in thinking that way.

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

#833

Post by pseg134 »

chonkerz wrote: post #813
dmitri_ignat wrote: post #783

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious what the function of publishing a targets home address, personal phone number, place of employment, and so on is supposed to be if they don't condone harassment. One might suspect that the rule against harrassment is just paper-thin ass-covering. Officially they'll also tell you they just collate and archive freely available information, while for example publishing and micro-analyzing the hacked bank sta…

[flagged]

Reasonable people disagreeing is not evidence of astroturfing or disinformation. It is possible for people to just disagree with you. There is no organized conspiracy against your viewpoint.

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

#834

Post by superchroma »

yanderekko wrote: post #243
superchroma wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kiwifarms isn't some kind of free voice of resistance or gazette, it's just a loose collection of volatile assholes who were banned from 4chan and reddit.

The "good tribe" will always characterize the dissenters of the "bad tribe" in this way.

Doesn't change the facts. I hope they come for kiwifarms. I hope it's snuffed out quietly one day and never returns and all its miserable denizens will be forced to know a fraction of the discomfort they inflicted on others.

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

#835

Post by TeeMassive »

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #821
concordDance wrote: post #636

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> It officially discourages actual harassment of the people it insults. I imagine the moderators giving the same "No, please, don't do this" with the exact same level of authority as Willy Wonka telling people "no don't": https://youtu.be/W9ZD3_ppcPE It's a bullshit, paper-thin "policy" that exists only for KF to cover their own asses. Let's make one thing clear, the only purpose for publishing someone's home address…

> It's a bullshit, paper-thin "policy" that exists only for KF to cover their own asses.

That's only your opinion. What OP says about KF is still correct.

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

#837

Post by chonkerz »

sequoia wrote: post #829
chonkerz wrote: post #809

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If this were the case, I wonder how 4chan, stormfront, etc. stay online. Surely 4chan's providers get floods of complaints about doxxing etc. Or pastebin for that matter. The fact that the EFF is writing about this case and that they're forced to use KF as their one example (clearly they find this distasteful & would prefer to use any other example if they could) indicates that something is unique or at least peculia…

Compared to 4chan, kiwifarms admins take a more active role in directing and encouraging harassment towards specific targets. it's a lot easier to tie the illegal activity to the site's owner. and the cops don't do shit because internet harassment is a seriously under-prosecuted crime. even the EFF admits that. the only route for victims is to follow the chain of upstreams till they get one that isn't in league with kiwifarms. (kiwifarms' hosting provider is even posting in this thread spreading the same untruths the kiwifarms admin says)

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

#838

Post by ToucanLoucan »

phpisthebest wrote: post #807
ToucanLoucan wrote: post #734

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I 100% disagree with this, the engineering level of silicon valley left the old "libertarian" hacker ethos behind a long time ago And thank fuck for that. > at the engineering layer there is idea about using technology to build a "better society" where "better society" is ensuring people with "wrong opinions" isolated so they can not "harm" others with their "violence" and violence is now words on the internet. Peo…

[flagged]

[flagged]

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

#839

Post by kiitos »

mortenjorck wrote: post #8

It's heartening to see the EFF come out sticking to principles on this in a time when other organizations of their stature have not. I hate to say it, but I could easily imagine something like the ACLU opposing the EFF on this.

I also oppose this position. It's uninformed, even naive.

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

#840

Post by gnopgnip »

metalspot wrote: post #652
_lvbh wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meanwhile in the rest of the world, we don’t even have free speech. If only America could export their constitution like they do their weapons

Many countries have recognized free speech as a right through the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which is much broader than the 1st amendment. "Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_…

Freedom of opinion and expression won't protect hate speech that is protected in the US
Post reply on HN