This. Having this content out in the open means we can monitor it. I totally get why Cloudflare would not want to do business with 8Chan, but every step towards pushing 8Chan and it's members underground is less visibility into the kind of people who operate on the site.
They didn't post this on Twitter or FB already but every news media person found his manifesto quickly - just like they always do. There will be another 8chan to fill that void soon enough.
So you think people who engaged in fringe ideologies will be slowed down by having likeminded people banned and deplatformed from popular social media and chan forums? And not instead just pushing them further and further into their ideological bubbles (complete with a new self-fulfilled victim complex) on platforms where they are the only ones and they get to police their own wrongthink?
Even ISIS seemed to have an extensive social media identity despite countless attempts to prevent them from having any platform. Which included plenty of DDOS'ing too.
I’m sure some level of banning and administration makes sense on content sites (not so sure about DNS/WAF hosts) but I’m curious at what point it becomes “feel good” slacktivism while these guys just hop onto the next forum.
> So you think people who engaged in fringe ideologies will be slowed down by having likeminded people banned and deplatformed from popular social media and chan forums?
Yep!
And, more importantly, by making it even marginally harder to find this shit online, we can dramatically decrease the number of people who get exposed to, and radicalized by, it.
This is allowing perfection to be the enemy of the good. It's not necessary for an action to completely solve a problem to make it worth doing, it's OK if the action just helps.
Yeah, absolutely. It's a numbers game, just the same as bombing your opponent's barracks or airfields in a conventional war. It doesn't wipe out their capacity but it degrades their infrastructure and communications.
I’m sure some level of banning and administration makes sense on content sites (not so sure about DNS/WAF hosts) but I’m curious at what point it becomes “feel good” slacktivism while these guys just hop onto the next forum.
They do, but it's not a smooth transition and sudden forced migration presents an infiltration opportunity because there's an avalanche of new user IDs with no way to verify them. Of course there are ways around this, like challenge/response phrases, callbacks to famous threads that people would remember, user IDs that can be checked back against contemporary screenshots etc., but it's pretty leaky.
Less visibility for those not already on it looking to join in too though. If it gets forced so far underground that law enforcement can't figure out a way in I don't see how some disaffected youth somewhere could either.
It's not that it would go too underground for law enforcement to find it, it's that it would be limited to terrorist cell networks that mass shooters don't even post in.
Yes, but 8ch users have been expecting this since Christchurch, and in any case chan culture has a long history of people on one site raiding an other and causing it to collapse with DDOS or contraband or whatever. It's not hard for people who regularly monitor it to figure out where people will move to.
Perhaps the authorities will closely monitor people who make obscure & dramatic claims online. There's probably an effective scoring system & NLP in place anyways. We think "social credit" only applies to China...
I don't get it, either. Even New Zealand deep-state spy bureaucrats followed around a pro-democracy protestor just to win some favor with the Fijian government. These systems are already abused like this. The Intercept runs a series called Trial and Terror where they pick up on people like this so we know they are doing it. How is NZ following around a pro-democracy protestor and not the NZ shooter? Let's hope it is incompetence. Source, btw: https://theintercept.com/2016/08/14/nsa-gcsb-prism-surveilla...
They don't tend to advertise the means by which they stop terrorist activities that are still in use, to be honest. If you had the best honey trap in the world, would you go on the television and announce it?
Right, and in order for that to happen they have to be actionable.
If you have a place in which the common discourse includes hundreds of people saying "i'm going to murder someone tomorrow" in a mostly anonymous format, it's not really something you can follow up on without opening up an entire can of first amendment issues (I say this as a
very pro-big government belief structure).
8chan's very nature prevents it from being useful.
Obviously not supporting these sites, but I think an argument can be made for at least being _consistent_ about whether or not you're going to allow only things you find morally reasonable on your service.
> The problem was that other Cloudflare customers started calling and threatening to cancel their service if Cloudflare didn't cut the Daily Stormer off. "The pressure to take it down just kept building and building," [the CEO] told Ars. [...] "I woke up this morning in a bad mood and decided to kick them off the Internet,"
So far he has been a "free speech absolutist" aside from the Daily stormer (economic extremes) and 8chan (public safety extremes). They're just defining what their identity as a cloud provider is. There's nothing morally inconsistent about discovering where your limits and tolerance are.
> Daily stormer (economic extremes) and 8chan (public safety extremes).
Both actually share a large cross section of users. The Daily Stormer was named after storm troopers. It is a cesspool of white supremacists. The same problem that 8chan's userbase has. I expect we'll see a continued deplatforming of sites which allow that ideology to fester.
Hence the quotes. And if you read the arstechnica article, it's understood the CEO himself realizes he had to make an exception from that position.
You and the poster I responded to are picking nits with absolutes. Aside from pedantics, is there a problem with wanting to go as far as you can with an idea until you feel like you can't?
> is there a problem with wanting to go as far as you can with an idea until you feel like you can't?
Lacking integrity is absolutely a problem! This isn't "pedantic", it's a disgrace. I don't recall AWS ever claiming to be pro free speech yet I also don't recall them banning businesses on a Sunday afternoon because Jeff Bezos was in a bad mood.
> I also don't recall them banning businesses on a Sunday afternoon because Jeff Bezos was in a bad mood.
I was trying to be generous by assuming the real reason was economic pressure, but yes the way this is worded makes it sound very unprofessional.
> Lacking integrity is absolutely a problem! This isn't "pedantic", it's a disgrace.
AWS can be the honey badger b/c they can afford to not give a crap. I get the impression Cloudflare doesn't have the same luxury yet. I very much admire Lavabit for folding the company on a moral stance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavabit, but not everyone can afford to send employees packing for their belief. You are correct, he compromised, but let's admit 99% of us have limits.
Except the warnings are anonymous, and don't mention who, when, or where.
What's really going on is similar to what we saw with radicalization in extremist Islam forums. A large group of young, usually lonely and frustrated men, disconnected socially, often with no hope of financial status advancement, find solace and community in online forums with like people, and then act to self-reinforce some of the community's worse inclinations, blaming their predicament on other types of people, dehumanizing them. The irony with these forums are, some people on those forums are not racist or pedophiles, but edge-lording on purpose, but other people can't discern the difference and are swept up and manipulated by other people who get off on manipulating people.
When I was a teen in the 80s, I nerdy and disconnected from school, but back then, if you used a computer, you were fairly involved in hacking, and a lot of community revolved around constructive activities, so whatever loneliness or ostracism geeks felt, it was often distracted by optimism and excitement over technology.
It seems these days, you have the online community in these forums, but it is mostly consumptive, not constructive, or rather, what is constructive is memes and racist, xenophobic, extremist screeds.
I really worry about what's happening as more and more people are made idle and out of the labor force, rather than seek face to face community activity, will eventually retreat to their online bunkers?
> What's really going on is similar to what we saw with radicalization in extremist Islam forums. A large group of young, usually lonely and frustrated men, disconnected socially, often with no hope of financial status advancement, find solace and community in online forums with like people, and then act to self-reinforce some of the community's worse inclinations, blaming their predicament on other types of people, dehumanizing them. The irony with these forums are, some people on those forums are not racist or pedophiles, but edge-lording on purpose, but other people can't discern the difference and are swept up and manipulated by other people who get off on manipulating people.
This is something a large number of people don't seem to realize. The parallels between Islamic extremism and this white supremacists extremism should jump out, and both should be approached the same way. It's sick people offering a sort of belonging to disaffected young men.
There's very interesting psychology research on the topic of radicalization as well as de-radicalization that could come in handy. As well as similar techniques in cult exit counseling.
Yes, it is, and that’s why the demonization of men’s rights groups is not only counterproductive, but completely irresponsible. You may disagree with specific grievances or talking points, but you shouldn’t discourage groups who feel aggrieved from airing their grievances in a nonviolent way and trying to work within the system to achieve their goals.
That's a pretty warped view, 8chan is the support system for radicals which in all likelyhood gives them the motivation to commit mass murder since they have an audience to play to and support for their demented views.
As the article states, it's very likely 8chan is just going to use a competitors service so it's unlikely to cause them much disruption, but at least Cloudflare isn't going to feel terrible for providing Internet services to the cesspit that formed the mind of the next radical that's going to commit mass murder and announce it there.
Motivation is part of it, but there's also an extensive practical support system that provides advice on technique, target selection, troubleshooting and so on.
That will not, of course, go away even if 8chan were to collapse under LOIC fire later tonight, but it will undermine the infrastructure and hinder recruiting.
Political *chan culture drives mass shootings in the first place by radicalizing antisocial people more. You'd likely have fewer mass shootings you'd need early warning about in the first place.
Yes, but Cloudflare needs talented engineers, and talented engineers don’t sign up to serve clients like 8chan. Software doesn’t run on one person’s contrarian politics.
I think you'd find a great many talented engineers don't share the same politics you do, and an even greater number who are far too apolitical for it to factor into their job search.
I think more engineers are realizing that if you've been working for Uber, Facebook, Twitter, and maybe now (or depending on how they act, maybe not) Cloudflare it severely curtails your future opportunities, both as an employee and socially.
There is nothing inherently virtuous about talented engineers, and in fact some of the most talented engineers I’ve come across in the industry have very loose morals.
Cloudflare serves many odious sites, such as https://godhatesfags.com/. They only terminate service when some site gets a lot of heat in the news.
I like to think I'm a pretty talented engineer. I've avoided using Cloudflare and I've avoided applying to them because of their wishy-washy stance on censorship. They are a utility. PG&E doesn't terminate electricity service based on what was said on a property. So too should it be for data services. Otherwise, you get people lying and doing false flags to get their enemies kicked off the internet.
> Late Sunday, following hours of public criticism, Cloudflare announced a major reversal, saying 8chan had gone too far and “repeatedly proven itself to be a cesspool of hate.” Its access to Cloudflare services was scheduled to terminate at midnight Pacific time, making it more vulnerable to a potentially crippling cyberattack.
I don't know if the article was updated or what, but near the end:
"Late Sunday, following hours of public criticism, Cloudflare announced a major reversal, saying 8chan had gone too far and “repeatedly proven itself to be a cesspool of hate.” Its access to Cloudflare services was scheduled to terminate at midnight Pacific time, making it more vulnerable to a potentially crippling cyberattack."
Its important that a company distances themselves from this type of behaviour but even slightly spinning it as action against something is disingenuous at best. So much more needs to happen to really address these problems and Im fairly confident a cdn isnt the make or break for shootings in America.
On the one hand, I like the idea of a free, open, and distributed internet, where no one company or government has the power to control what is distributed or discussed. As the great John Gilmore said, more aspirationally than accurately even then: "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it."
On the other hand, we don't live in that world, and I don't know how well it would work in practice if we did. In this world, corporations and governments have enormous power. Cloudflare has made it clear that it will use that power in a fairly limited and restrained way, but it will use it as it sees fit.
Given that, this seems like a reasonable exercise of that power, and that's about the best we can hope for.
>Given that, this seems like a reasonable exercise of that power, and that's about the best we can hope for.
Maybe, this event may become the precedent for all future hosting providers of unpopular opinions and where denial of service attacks become used against these hosting providers. Losing protection from anti-ddos service(s) becomes a process to eliminate the unpopular opinions being expressed.
I think this is dangerous recourse and even if there are competitor services like cloudfare. There are limits in services available and state actors can understand this problem. Then make it impossible for unpopular opinions to be expressed by either orchestrating what's needed to get the anti-ddos services to resent their customers or by other means.
Me personally, I'm alright with 8chan being deleted from the internet but I don't think that will even solve the problem. People with poor quality of life will continue being radicalized and do these acts of revenge in their eyes against a system that made them live in pain (somehow unjust to their views). I think we just need to improve quality of life for people equally without leaving some people left behind because of whatever circumstances. Otherwise people feel the need to leave with sometimes a couple bangs.
> Maybe, this event may become the precedent for all future hosting providers of unpopular opinions
Maybe it won't!
I feel like every time a controversial site gets shut down message boards are flooded with slippery slope arguments, but by and large I haven't seen it ever transpire.
How many controversial topics can we recall that we lived through and where they became accepted overtime? What medium was used at the time and was it the popular communication method for the time. I'm sure historically there was a similar fight with what mediums were available at the time. Burning books or just killing someone who speaks out.
The internet can be the only method nowadays where people with little finances can make a loud enough voice be heard and there are still unpopular views I'm worried won't ever get accepted if people are not being cautious about throwing away measures. That's why the slippery slope argument is worth me typing. Even if maybe it won't!
I'd argue reddit is a decent example. They banned some very hateful subs, and then later started banning subs because they 'were not good for advertising' see r/waterniggas.
That's not a slippery slope, though. That's Reddit banning subs for two different reasons. I'd they banned subs for hateful content then changed the definition of "hateful content" to include things advertisers object to then it would be. But if they're publicly stating that they're doing it because of advertisers then it's not really related.
Any time reddit says they are removing something due to "hateful content", it's just PR speak for "we got some media/advertiser backlash for this content so we are removing it".
Reddit was notoriously infested with white supremacist subs, jailbait subs, pics of dead people subs, and more, and they were all brought up to the admins many times, and the admins never took any action on this hateful content until CNN et al started writing articles about it.
It's not entirely unlike this situation with Cloudflare, really. These companies talk a big game about their principles and morals, but at the end of the day the only principle they strictly adhere to is the principle of public backlash.
Recently, after Youtube responded to Steven Crowder's harassment of a gay reporter who works for Vox named Carlos Maza, a number of independent youtube personalities who comment on news mentioned they had their videos demonetized. This included people who are on the left. Here's an example and someone I follow[0]. It's not quite what you're talking about, but it's an example of how trying to moderate speech or chill it affects everyone who isn't already an established player (CNN,MSNBC,etc) regardless of their ideology.
You’re right about the demonetization effects, but to clarify the Maza-Crowder tiff - Maza previously spent years mocking Crowder and making inappropriate sexual references involving himself and Crowder. Crowder responded inappropriately, thinking he could pull off a Don Rickles act. Still, nothing either of them have done opens them up to harassment charges.
I think the wider demonetization is part of a cynical attempt to sabotage non-publisher media generally, it’s not an accidental side effect. There’s a scorched earth campaign by certain activists at Vox, Media Matters, and even CNN to contact advertisers en masse and essentially threaten that they are considering naming the advertiser in a hit piece about objectionable content. They aren’t dumb - they know the fallout will affect independent journalists and media of all politics.
I think unpopular opinions from life experiences are what gravitates people to whatever categorization and or label is placed upon them.
Btw, the only reason I feel the needs to share my thoughts is because I have an unpopular opinion myself. Assisted death should become available for people that desire it. There are some sites I view that have resources for people that are ending their life and these sites suffer denial of service attacks. They started using cloudflare recently.
This feels like a misunderstanding of the word freedom. Freedom in speech means that I can say what I want.
It does _not_ mean that a hosting company has to host it or that a CDN has to optimize it or that a search company has to rank it or that an ad-network has to monetize it. Each of those players is free to do what they think is best with their time, resources, etc.; which often includes thinking of what "the public" will think of them doing (or not doing) a thing.
Freedom does not mean that I have the "right" to be heard or the "right" to be amplified—either as much as the next person or at all.
The net, as in a network of computers, is quite close to free. Being a part of a society is not.
Ted Kaczynski was not arrested for writing manifestos beyond the pale of normative capitalism from a self-built cabin in Montana. He was arrested for sending bombs. The moment one person freely decides to harmfully affect others, those others can do something about it.
It seems much of the hand-wringing about freedom—when we talk about the internet and corporations—is that extremist speech does not have access to the same megaphone, the same means of monetization (and therefore survival). And that…well that's what living in a society is all about.
Are there bad parts about tech as we see it today? Absolutely! But it hardly seems like the problem is "not enough shit is allowed on the internet." I don't know, maybe I'm wrong.
Should that mean a power company can cut off your power because they don't like what you've said?
Should that mean the water company can cut your water off for criticizing them?
Should that mean that a bank can refuse to give you a loan, because you said something bad, even if your credit is more than acceptable?
-------------------------------
Remember this: its the extremist that the law is made around. And soon enough, the law will be wrapped around non-extremists and used as let another tool of influence and control. The worst part is that anyone who speaks against this sort of law is seen to be defending the extremists, and is seen as a despicable person - yet the criticizers never stop to think about the average Joe and Jane.
Have we all just completely forgotten the years of fighting for net neutrality? The very same net neutrality where we all have been arguing that sometimes even private companies shouldn't be allowed to arbitrarily filter whatever they want?
If all of the major ISPs launch their own email competitor and then go on to block Google, would you be singing the same tune? "It's okay because AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, and Charter are private institutions and are not obligated to do business with Google"? What if it turns out that the AT&T CEO is a Trump supporter, and he decides that anyone who has AT&T as an ISP will no longer be able to access any news site other than Fox News? "It's okay because AT&T is a private company and has no obligation to do business with the Washington Post"?
The entire argument for net neutrality is based on the premise that sometimes even private companies become so big that they become very similar to 'public utilities' and it is absolutely in the public interest to force those companies to not arbitrarily filter whatever they feel like.
You can argue that Cloudflare, or a bank, or whoever doesn't fit this definition, but you can't both be for something like net neutrality while simultaneously spouting this argument that "private companies can do whatever they want". We have literally centuries of laws that specifically say that no, companies cannot do whatever they want just because they are private.
>but you can't both be for something like net neutrality while simultaneously spouting this argument that "private companies can do whatever they want".
One can definitely pick and choose what you want to support, all those laws did exactly the same. Charities are 'picked and chosen' not to pay taxes, even though they are basically private companies. I don't see a contradiction between supporting net neutrality and supporting Cloudflare's decision.
>We have literally centuries of laws that specifically say that no, companies cannot do whatever they want just because they are private
We have literally centuries of law stating that 'Neo-Nazi White Supremacists' isn't a protected class, hence can be refused service.
If and when this is abused by companies causing real problems which society thinks is unacceptable, new laws will be passed restricting discriminating against neo-Nazis.
Maybe write to your local congressman and senator asking them to pass a law forcing Cloudflare to serve neo-Nazis.
>ISPs use the public's right of way and air wave spectrum licenses, so I don't think they're good examples.
And Cloudflare's business is similarly dependent on these very same rights of way and spectrums. So why shouldn't they be subject to the same restrictions?
Hint: it's because the argument for net neutrality has nothing to do with the ISP's usage of ROW or public spectrum, and everything to do with the effect that it would have on society if ISPs were allowed to arbitrarily filter whatever they want.
What's funny about this is that I actually don't need to make this argument, because Cloudflare's CEO Matthew Prince has already made it for me. The entire blog post that he wrote [1] when Daily Stormer was taken off CF is one big explanation of why companies like Cloudflare having the ability to arbitrarily filter sites is bad. That didn't seem to stop him, I guess.
> Due Process requires that decisions be public and not arbitrary. It's why we've always said that our policy is to follow the guidance of the law in the jurisdictions in which we operate. Law enforcement, legislators, and courts have the political legitimacy and predictability to make decisions on what content should be restricted. Companies should not.
>And Cloudflare's business is similarly dependent on these very same rights of way and spectrums. So why shouldn't they be subject to the same restrictions?
In order for them to win, you'll have to ignore the fact that when they created a CloudFlare account, they agreed that CloudFlare had the right to terminate such services for any or no reason.
You're mixing up net neutrality with freedom of speech issues. Net Neutrality seeks to regulate IP packet filtering and prevent transport providers from selling premium services ("fastlanes") to particular companies only. What content those companies deliver or (re-)transmit is not regulated by net neutrality at all.
I'm saying this not because I disagree with your position, but mainly because this confusion was dominating the debate in the US and was to some extent a deliberate strawman pushed by the opponents of net neutrality.
Incorrect , net neutrality also required that ISPs not block.
A lot of pro net neutrality people didn’t really understand what they were arguing for, I think, since the same people will turn around and argue that ISPs should be able to censor content they don’t like.
“A person engaged in the provision of fixed broadband Internet access service, insofar as such person is so engaged, shall not block lawful content, applications, services, or non-harmful devices, subject to reasonable network management.“
The point remains that the OP mischaracterized net neutrality. What is important is that net neutrality only concerns transport of IP packets. Content providing companies and web site owners can moderate, block, or censor content as they like and as they deem fit. They have done so in the past under net neutrality, do so in countries with net neutrality laws, and are doing it now in the US without net neutrality.
The two issues are frequently mixed up, hence my comment.
On a side note, I've never heard anyone argue that ISPs should block content, that seems like a strawman to me, but I guess if you just search hard enough you can find someone on the Internet who argued for that nonsense.
> lawful content
Good point, that's compatible with restrictions of freedom of speech due to declaring certain kind of content illegal, and clearly illustrates that the two issues are different from each other. Yet people confuse them again and again, and additionally almost always base their arguments on a false dichotomy or on fallacious slippery slope arguments.
8chan is lawful content. Vile, hateful content, but completely lawful. They comply with DMCA and moderate to remove illegal material. If they didn’t, the FBI could already have had them pulled offline just like they do to ISIS websites.
The logical end to deplatforming is arguing that ISPs should be able to block or decline customers based on the content they are hosting. Otherwise a customer can buy business-class internet and host their immoral content themselves on a server farm in their home, which takes away the whole point of deplatforming which is to make the content no longer available on the internet.
> The logical end to deplatforming is arguing that ISPs should be able to block or decline customers based on the content they are hosting.
Not at all. That's an obvious strawman.
You're mischaracterizing what's going on there. If I run a company, it is my right not to make business with radical hate groups and terrorists. They will be someone else's problem then.
That's exactly the reason that Cloudflare has given, not some nebulous talk about "deplatforming".
> which is to make the content no longer available on the internet
LOL. That is decidedly not the purpose of deplatforming, as the word "de-platforming" readily suggests.
> the FBI could already have had them pulled offline just like they do to ISIS websites
It is obvious to me as an outside observer that the FBI applies justice selectively. Domestic terrorism is underrated. Of course, 8chan could be raided and closed for the same reasons as ISIS websites are raided and closed. The laws are there and 8chan could easily be considered aiding and fostering domestic terrorism. The laws are just not applied in this case.
It's also kind of 'reasonable' not to apply them as harshly, since US judges and juries suffer from the same bias. They are unlikely to judge of some deranged gun nut that he was planning or aiding a terrorist attack. They are highly likely to judge of some deranged ISIS sympathizer that he was planning or aiding a terrorist attack. Police authorities make the call on what to pursue and what not to pursue based on the prospects of a successful trial.
>If I run a company, it is my right not to make business with radical hate groups and terrorists. They will be someone else's problem then.
This type of thing is possibly one of the hardest ethical issues to tackle. On the one hand, I don't support racists and fascists at all. But on the other hand, I recognize the potential damage in carving out these exceptions in free speech. As social mores change, the ideas of "acceptable" free speech may change, and we need to be cognizant of the ways that these exceptions could be abused long term. Otherwise, we're just setting up future generations for a collapse of the concept of freedom of speech.
I think the answer to solving hate and bigotry goes much, much deeper than preventing people from speaking their hateful and bigoted views. All that's going to do is sweep the problem under the rug, and eventually that problem will come back out some orders of magnitude worse. Perhaps we could do things like make it illegal to teach kids hate and bigotry? But then you've got the entirety of America mad at you because you're "telling people how to raise their kids". Mere advocacy against bullying and hate doesn't really seem to be working.
I think we'll see better gains in this area when we stop trying to find the first thing we can to "blame" these mass shooting on, and arguing endlessly about what that cause is (guns, video games, unrestricted freedom of speech, etc). We need to dig deep. I think if we understood more on the topic of mental health, we'd have a better chance at understanding these situations.
> On a side note, I've never heard anyone argue that ISPs should block content, that seems like a strawman to me, but I guess if you just search hard enough you can find someone on the Internet who argued for that nonsense.
Well, it's been going on for years in the Netherlands, where the Pirate Bay, almost all of its proxies, and a couple of non-TPB torrent sites are being blocked at the ISP level. It used to be a relatively simple to circumvent DNS block (the ISPs didn't really want to, either), but they've gotten better at it and now if it's blocked, the site is either gone, unless a specific proxy for it exist (or you use a VPN).
To tie it back to the US again, the reason this happened is because of a Dutch lobbying group (Brein) that is funded by and works directly for the gigantic US content industry and rightholders (there are maybe a few Dutch artists attached to them , but they are a mere drop in budget).
Net neutrality is deeply entangled with freedom of speech issues. In fact one of the ISP's main arguments against it is that it violates their 1st amendment rights.
> No. Because they are a public utility and that would be a violation of the first amendment.
> Yes. Because they are a private institution and not obligated to do business with you.
That's some pretty strong dissonance there. Here in Indiana, the utilities AND banks are all private entities. And there's no actual state or federal law that would prevent a utility from cutting utilities for "being and speaking of white nationalism". I chose my examples carefully - all are much more regulated than some Walmart or Target or Amazon.
My larger discussion was that over very corporate autonomy. Who made them arbiters of what language was acceptable? Why should infrastructure companies be decision makers of what is said online? Years ago, we restricted the phone companies from doing that very thing - and they wanted dearly to forbid classes of speech. Yet somehow when it's "on the interwebz" we throw those ideas and rules out, all so that someone can make a bigger pile of dollars.
Don't forget, cloudflare is a US company. There's absolutely 0 reason why they can't be considered an infrastructure company and subject to common carrier rules as well. Or the counter-offer is they can be responsible for speech over their network. I doubt they'd like that either. After all, they're still hosting piles of stressers and ddos merchants.
>That's some pretty strong dissonance there. Here in Indiana, the utilities AND banks are all private entities. And there's no actual state or federal law that would prevent a utility from cutting utilities for "being and speaking of white nationalism". I chose my examples carefully - all are much more regulated than some Walmart or Target or Amazon.
I don't see a dissonance. If and when banks and utilities start cutting off neo-Nazis, the public and politicians may find that unpalatable and pass laws restricting it. Or may not. The fact that isn't happening right now means no unnecessary laws are required.
If and when society and politicians feel that Cloudflare shouldn't be able to not serve 8chan, it will pass a law doing so. Call your congressman and senator.
>Years ago, we restricted the phone companies from doing that very thing - and they wanted dearly to forbid classes of speech
> Here in Indiana, the utilities AND banks are all private entities.
It's likely there's one (or at most, a small handful) of each utility enjoying a state-supported monopoly, even if it's technically run by a private company. The same is not true for banks - I can sign up for one of hundreds of nationwide or online banks even if all the local ones decide I'm an ass.
No, [1] the bakery that paid $135,000 in fines, went bankrupt, and is stll bound by the lower courts decision because SCOTUS only remanded the case back to a lower court.
And yeah, they might ultimately win... if you want to call that winning.
> and is stll bound by the lower courts decision because SCOTUS only remanded the case back to a lower court.
Wrong, they are not bound by the lower court decision, because the Supreme Court vacated the judgement and remanded the case for further consideration in light of the SCOTUS ruling in Masterpiece Cakeshop (as stated in the order linked from the source you linked), because that decision set relevant precedent which the lower court did not consider in its judgement (for timing reasons, as the lower court decision predates Masterpiece Cakeshop, I believe.)
However, this was a problem when Visa and Paypal cut off donations to Wikileaks. It was actually quite hard for them for a while to get donations in, even though there were plenty of people willing to donate.
Certain banks and their services (e.g. wire transfer), as well as payment providers should be treated like public utilities, especially when they have quasi-monopolies. The same for ISPs in areas in which there is only one or two, and other large companies with quasi-monopolies like Google, Apple and Microsoft. I don't think this applies to companies like Reddit or Cloudflare, though, for which there are easy and widely used substitutes.
Are there easy and widely used substitutes for Cloudflare's DDoS protection?
Because a big reason why I think this is bad is because I thought there are in fact no realistic alternatives to Cloudflare's protection.
If there are alternatives, then I am also in the camp of "okay they can decide who to do business with or not".
But I was under the impression that, if you are a controversial website, at a certain size (not even that big, depending on your enemies) you are likely to draw DDoS attacks of a severity that only Cloudflare can realistically protect against. The DDoS attacks being relatively cheap for whoever orders them.
Your hypos fall well short of the level of actions undertaken by the two sites which have been terminated by CloudFlare, which advocated for, championed, and celebrated violent actions against innocent and blameless third parties, including children.
Your argument fails to credibly address the situation at hand.
Cloudflare didn't and can't "cut off” 8chan. They can stop providing CDN distribution and bandwidth services to 8chan. As it happens, 8chan's web host _did_ cut off 8chan, so you should be directing your rants at them.
When you use the tired, old "businesses can refuse to serve anybody they want" argument, understand that you are using the same arguments used in the past to refuse business to various races, creeds, orientations etc. that are now protected classes. That really ought to make you queasy and perhaps you should contemplate why.
By the way, some states are now recognizing that political affiliation needs to be a protected class as well: https://www.legalmatch.com/law-library/article/political-aff.... It may not be in keeping with modern progressive thought but is certainly in the spirit of classical liberalism as well as an important first step in depolarizing the country.
That doesn’t change the fact that the CRA restricted freedom of association. Still, the better argument for legislating platform neutrality is that those platforms enjoy special legal status based on the notion that they can’t be held responsible for user-generated content. If you can spare resources to purge content that offends your political sensibilities, then you are making a choice not to remove content that is, e.g., defamatory, infringes on copyright, etc.
Historically, some of the most discriminated people have been people of a different religion. In principle you can "stop believing in your religion" as easily as you can stop believing that immigrants are destroying your country.
In practice, nobody cares to protect bigots and a lot of people want to protect gays, immigrants, women, etc. It is troubling that we only protect certain classes of people since maybe the next group that comes along after the current group of bigots will actually deserve protection but the arguments we built to allow the lack of protection for bigots will be used to deny protection to that group.
The end goal of bigotry is to distort legal structures to eliminate equality and preferentially harm certain people, often because of attributes they can't change, like their ethnicity or where they were born. If you're worried about protecting people of the future, you should be opposing bigotry.
Bigotry has cloaked itself in the mantle of victim and you've totally fallen for it.
Those same arguments were used against freedom of religion. English Catholics were popish spies who would try to blow up parliament and overthrow the government, etc. Therefore, they needed to be persecuted as heretics to protect the common good.
Roman Christians refused to worship the emperor, destabilizing the social order, and therefore needed to be thrown to the lions to protect society.
Atheists couldn’t be trusted because they didn’t believe in hell, and therefore would act immorally, and so should be banned from positions of power (this is actually in a couple of US state constitutions!)
(And of course, the same arguments were used in reverse later on as different groups got power)
I won’t shed any tears for 8chan who are a bunch of immoral scum, but I know these same arguments will be deployed to censor religious minorities and others in the future. Hopefully they are less appealing targets.
Were they lies? Guy fawkes was real. The pope actually did excommunicate Elizabeth and sponsor several invasions/rebellions by the French and Irish.
The western Roman Empire fell apart a hundred years after Christianity became the state religion. Some historians blame tensions among christian schisms in Egypt/the Middle East for the byzantine empire losing those regions to the Arab invasion.
(All I’m saying with the above is that the justifications seemed plausible and reasonable to the educated people of the time. Read Pliny’s letter to Trajan seeking counsel for what to do about Christians, for example)
It is a failing of the ego to think that one has foreseen all possible abuses of a policy going forward.
I think the answer is more speech, not less. Any exception you carve out will be abused in the future, based on the history of humankind and the behavior of governing entities throughout.
Take these exceptions to freedom of speech, add to them a codified framework for equity (which some are pushing for), and you're laying the groundwork for a society like that seen in Harrison Bergeron.
You're far too quick to paint me with the brush of "enemy" simply because I can understand why sensible people are worried. That I tangentially refer to 8chan as bigots should have been enough to tip you off. Maybe you should allow a little color into your world of black and white.
I suppose you don't find historical things like McCarthyism very worrying, given how easily you are to think your principle of discriminating by choice separates what you judge to be good from what you judge to be bad. But do you really trust every imaginable leader with such a power?
This is what I worry about. As social mores change, we must resist efforts to carve out exceptions to fundamental rights, in order to prevent those exceptions from being wrongly used against people in a harmful way. I think the Founders understood this on some level, even if they couldn't know what the political and social landscape would look like today.
No one has the "right" to have their speech amplified by 3rd parties. However, I don't think Cloudflare is in the business of providing amplification, they are in the business of providing access, which I think is closer to censorship than restricting amplification.
Access means people who WANT this content can get it easily. If you're making it harder for people who voluntarily choose to view 8chan content, you're restricting access.
Amplification means getting content in front of new eyeballs that wouldn't have otherwise seen it. E.g. if Facebook determined that given this user's age, race, zip-code, and favorite TV shows they might be in interested in this racist-meme sharing group that one of their friends joined, and then surfaces that content, that's amplification.
Cloudflare can't block access to a website. They can protect their customers from DDOS attacks, and they happen to do it more cheaply and effectively than one could do alone. If they refuse to service a website and that website gets DDOSed off the internet, that is not cloudflare's fault.
> Amplification means getting content in front of new eyeballs that wouldn't have otherwise seen it.
Which a CDN does as well. If a user visits the site during peak demand and the site without a CDN can't handle it, the user doesn't get the site in front of their eyeballs. With a CDN, they might. Analogy also works during DDoS attacks. Both assume that the user doesn't have infinite memory and patience to keep trying (because that's a realistic assumption).
"Amplification" has be overloaded. You are talking about a viral marketing definition, whereas CDNs are a hardware+software force multiplier for performance.
Cloudflare is committing itself to do as they are told by the governments, in the spirit of upholding the law [0] on govts' behalf (despite under no obligation to do so), if they deem fit.
Whether this makes them reasonable, time will tell. Full marks to Cloudflare for so eloquently addressing this and covering themselves with as much grace as they could muster. If one reads between the lines, censorship is coming. This isn't different from what jgrahamc said a few months back in the news [1].
Signals a new era for Cloudflare, going from protector to arbitrator [2], for better or for worse.
[0] for instance, it was and still is a crime to be a minority in some countries.
The government could fund educational programs to teach people to think critically about the content they see on the internet, then they wouldn't have to censor it.
Do we really need to talk about closing down a site where people encourage each other to kill other people (no matter who does it)? Why is it so important that there are no exceptions to freedom of speech?
Seriously, I just don’t get how the purity of the concept of freedom of speech can be so important that it beats common sense.
Since there are no army related sites which encourage people to kill other people I'm not in favor of that and you are free to convince me otherwise by providing a link. But, if they were doing this I would be in favor of shutting them down, yes.
Army is all about how to kill other people. Not hypothetically, very real. Every day.
And governemnts openly advertise for it. On websites, (even in schools). And private enthusiasts maintain forums where army people discuss about the current wars and how to better kill the current enemy. Etc. Etc.
Not necessarily. The purpose of armies is to win wars. If it was possible to win wars without killing people they wouldn't kill people. In fact they are trying to minimize collateral damage. It's different with white supremacists. They have a direct interest in killing people. There is no collateral damage for them, which is also why they do mass shootings and the army usually doesn't.
Most of the latter are interested in expelling those they don't consider their own, violence to most of them is just a means to an end, otherwise "go back" or "send them back" would not have been their rallying cry.
Some really do want to kill people, but then again would you deny that the army or even the police doesn't get their fair share of these people?
I guess we already made the experiment what would happen if white supremacists would lead a country, so we can already tell that it's likely that "sending them back" isn't going to cut it, if "they" refuse to leave.
I think the vast majority of bigots are low-level blowhards who don't even understand their own viewpoints. Only a small percentage of those actually cause direct harm to others.
I don't know the answer, but I know that indiscriminate restrictions on freedom of speech aren't the answer.
It saddens me that this paraphrased prose I'm about to write even has to exist.
First they came for the Nazis, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Nazi.
Then they came for the racists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a racist.
Then they came for the bigots, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a bigot.
Then they came for the rich, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not rich.
Then they came for the religious, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not religious.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
I don’t consider deleting calls for violence towards minorities censorship. And I do think that history has shown too many times that propaganda is a powerful tool, that needs to be restricted. I mean you are free to doubt common sense, but I think doubting common sense is always the first step of becoming fanatic. What would be the country you are talking about? The way I could imagine for someone to commit atrocities out of common sense would be if he has a gun pointed to his head.
We are not talking propaganda here, these are individual actors. Some just like to provoke a reaction, some have these believes and I have seen people turning their back on these platforms innumerable times.
Regardless of the reason people visit these places, the moment they get external pressure, their believes get vindicated. We see a large surge in issues with these communities since we got on our little censorship trip. It is just plainly the wrong move to make.
There have been Nazis on the internet since shortly after its inception. But random people going out and shooting crowds in this frequency is a new phenomenon.
Historically censorship has always been applied for the right reasons of course.
This historical comparison just isn't fair since at no point in human history the possibilities of communication were anywhere close to what they are now.
Freedom of speech is not without exceptions. You can't yell, "fire" in a crowded theater when there is no fire for example.
Everyone here wants that perfect idealistic and pure world, unfortunately that's now the world we are given. Problem is many here want to just treat the world we have as the idealistic model world as if there is no difference.
It can be checked through lawsuit -- 8chan could conceivably sue Cloudflare under numerous doctrines, starting with breach of promise / breach of contract.
Another service provider could step up, as was the case with Daily Stormer, and is extensively commented upon in Prince's commentary, and provide services.
Regulatory or legal procedures could be established to specifically address this situation or provide redress.
Public outcry, market sanctions, or labour actions might be taken against providers who exercise such power in manners which are seen as morally reprehensible. For similar examples, see Google employees over Dragonfly or Edleman's emplyee backlash over a contract with a border-wall services company.
The question to be asked, the question we all have to ask, is whether or not individuals, groups, companies, or inchoate movements which are themselves dedicated to abolition or denial of civil order and rule of law are themselves deserving of its full protections in pursuing those ends. And a considerable case can be made for "no".
It's not unchecked- they are free to move to a different service. Why should Cloudflare be forced to keep all customers no matter what? That infringes on their rights as a private business to run their business as they see fit. There is no "freedom of platform" where your right to a platform is being infringed. You have no right to a platform.
"The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it."
As if "The Net" is a perfect, neutral, self-supporting entity that behaves with mathematic predictability rather than a projection of the chaotic human society on which its existence depends.
There is a widespread habit among futurists and technologists, perhaps arising from an appreciation for semantic economy and the anonymizing instinct to downplay associations between oneself and one's assertions, to use the passive voice when concocting reductive maxims of this sort.
I believe many of the moral blind spots of technocratic thinking are connected to the peculiar tendency - revealed by this passive voice framing habit - to overlook or outright dismiss the role that human inputs play in the complex systems futurists propose as solutions to human problems.
This is extra funny because in general anyone's internet access is trivially easy to take down with just a bunch of well sent and crafted routing control packets.
Internet was not designed in an adversarial model.
I don't think this statement is ignoring human input. It's extrapolating the result based on what we have observed about the interaction of the technology and the participating humans so far, viewing them as a single system. The passive voice is in recognition that an individual has almost no control over this system as a whole.
We lived in that world until media pushed mentally ill people to the front.
Look at the graphs reporting on racism and the surge of terror.
They basically revived nationalistic movements for clicks. Not wanting to reverse cause and effect but there is ample evide ce that the call for censorship massivle accelerated occurrences like shootings.
> Not wanting to reverse cause and effect but there is ample evide ce that the call for censorship massivle accelerated occurrences like shootings.
That is interesting, but just saying that it is so doesn't lend any credibility to the conclusion. If there is ample evidence, surely you should be able to present it?
But the power that Cloudflare has, is being one of the only services to offer protection against modern DoS attacks. If you're a somewhat controversial site (be it right extremist or LGBTQ or sex worker forum) you are going to be suffering these attacks. And then Cloudflare is your only option, or suffer being DoS-ed off line constantly.
Correct me if I am wrong, but Cloudflare is the only serious option against heavy modern DoS attacks, right?
Cause if you can go somewhere else, then sure Cloudflare do it's thing. But if you can't ... then that is way too much power for a random company to hold the gate over any kind of controversial group, anywhere on the political, cultural or global spectrum. Because we really needed another US corporation with runaway power, that'll balance things.
It's a euphemism for sites that are not censored and still allow free speech. Matthew Prince used to support freedom of speech but he's abandoned that concept a while back.
By throwing up their hands and claiming that it's too hard to implement.
8ch is not running a highly sophisticated software stack. (Quite honestly, their code [1] is pretty terrible -- it's a bunch of frameworkless, hacked-together PHP.) Nothing about their setup is especially elaborate or unusual; at best, "we can't ban content" is an admission of their incompetence.
> Removing 8chan from our network takes heat off of us, it does nothing to address why hateful sites fester online.
It’s not your role to address the “why”. As a platform you’re only obliged to deal with the “what” and the “how”.
They now have one less platform to choose from, and their ability to do whatever it is they do is reduced. That’s a win, because wins don’t need to be absolute to count.
DDoSes are rarely prosecuted as the perpetrators are rarely caught. This is even more true when the DDoS is done by large groups of people (such as the scientology attacks a decade or so ago).
Further, 8chan is run in the Philippines, which would add a lot of complications to any prosecution
Isn’t the DDoS a form of free speech though? At the risk of being uber pedantic, on the internet, speech is reduced to packet delivery from source to destination.
Therefore, one could make an argument that DDoS protection is in itself stifling free speech?
Exactly. To the outside world, for all intents and purposes Cloudflare was their host. Cloudflare's IP addresses served 8chan's content, even held it on their local drives. I don't care (and neither should anyone else) that their primary source of truth was internally hosted elsewhere.
Cloudflare often tries to skirt definitions and would love to be seen as a neutral utility, a simple carrier. They're not though. 8chan was their customer. They hosted their DNS, served their content and potentially took their money (I don't know whether 8chan was on their free plan or not, but again that doesn't matter).
"the speed with which tech cos change after a bad PR cycle seems like solid proof that none of this is abt principles but abt trying to keep from making hard choices as long as possible. earlier today they argued that keeping 8chan within its network is a “moral obligation”"
Cloudflare in the past was a staunch defender of free speech when people tried to get them to take down a website that was an outlet for pro-ISIS propaganda (I think the quote from the CEO was "A website is speech. It is not a bomb").
When they stopped hosting the neo-Nazi website they mentioned in the link, they made a big deal about how it was a one-off decision and they'll never again again stop serving a website because of its content. Clearly they've changed their minds about that.
This always has been and always will be about publicity. 8ch started getting mentioned on national television, and there started to be questions directed at cloudflare. Reddit used to happily host discriminatory, violent communities, and only banned them once people started paying attention and companies became afraid to advertise on reddit because of its perceived connections to hate by the public. The message to hate communities is to lay low and not get noticed by the media.
To the downvoters: speech cannot be violent, by definition. Using your own private definition of a word—in this case, violence—without making an explicit disclaimer is inherently deceitful.
Violence does refer to direct physical harm. There's a subset of people, predominantly in the social sciences, that is trying to redefine violence to include things like "economic violence" and "social violence" (e.g. breaking up with an SO you don't like, or not being friends with someone anymore). This is not the average person's understanding of the word, and personally I feel that it drastically washes down the meaning of violence.
If these things constitute violence then lots of violence is completely legal. In fact, you commit violence probably every day when you decide who to be friends with and who not to be friends with, who gets hired, etc.
Why does Cloudflare feel the need to take action here? Only a minority believe that 8chan is the culprit in creating these gunmen, and fewer people have called for Cloudflare specifically to shutdown 8chan.
By staying idle the conversation would've moved onto gun control, but now they're going to make this round of shootings all about online community policy which IMHO is a futile scapegoat.
Political discussion happens all the time on Hacker News, but you don't see many mass shooters from HN. Culture of the online communities matters a lot (and moderation). I don't think chans create gunmen per se, but they assist to radicalize antisocial young men.
I don't think anything is gained from political discussion on *chans. Free speech is important, and no company should be legally punished for providing these spaces, but that doesn't mean discouraging them from existing is wrong.
There is an article in the Washington Post about how they're not taking action, and quotes from activists about how they need to take action. Their general counsel had to answer questions from a journalist (on a weekend!) about whether they were taking action. That constitutes significant pressure.
Further, as the article helpfully mentions, they took action before. After you take action once, a failure to take action a second time stops being a principled "we never take action", and starts being, at least partially, a defence of the target. If you drop the Daily Stormer but not 8chan, you're saying, implicitly, that 8chan is not as bad as the Daily Stormer.
This may or may not be true, but it's absolutely not a discussion a company wants to have in the national media in the context of the aftermath of a mass shooting.
> By staying idle
Arguably that was never an option. Today, it's absolutely not an option.
> Only a minority believe that 8chan is the culprit in creating these gunmen
I seriously doubt this, even amongst people who were aware of 8chan before today's spate of articles. After them, I'm pretty sure that 99% of people aware of 8chan blame it for this stuff. Which is also why Cloudflare needs to take action, because it becomes endangered itself.
The founder is saying that it should shut down in the NYT; if that's not a demand for a response, I don't know what is.
edit: I agree that it's a scapegoat, I read militia newsletters circulating in the early 90s, and I'm a collector of old John Bircher stuff. Angry white people will find and act out this model no matter what; it's part of the fabric of the US (and the rest of the West.)
And I'm not saying this hypothetically, those newsletters were in the air leading to OKC. It's actually a good sign that these remain loner shootings by the socially rejected; race riots and pogroms are basically when this happens, but other people on the verge decide to join in. When one of these mass shootings happens, and two or three other people who don't know the shooter come and help, that will be the scary transition for me.
It would be better if cloudflare terminated service for all media outlets. Every time you turn a mass shooting into a national spectacle, it inspires copycats in rapid succession as we've just seen.
Mass shootings (generally) don't kill that many people. They are scary, yes, but not that deadly (statistically). Keep it local news, don't publish the name of the killer, basically keep the story away from the front lines.
By turning every mass shooting into a hysterical emotional maelstrom, you signal a green light to all the other potential shooters that this is how you get attention.
All around the world people listen to and see the same news stories. I woke up yesterday thinking that the media was reporting on the same mass shooting, but I figured out it was another new and predictably American assault rifle massacre pretty quickly.
I don't know why you are getting downvoted. It is the same here. Every time I see a US city name in my Twitter sidebar here in Australia, I just know that it is another mass shooting without having to click.
I hate that it has become so common now that I have just stopped clicking to find out more about them. This sort of thing used to horrify me, but nowadays I just feel so numb about it, and that scares me because I feel that I am becoming less empathetic and more cynical.
I also wonder if Americans who think this is a problem with the media inspiring more shootings would take the same tack on reporting terrorist incidents. Wouldn't it make sense to say we shouldn't report on them, given that attitude?
I'm a US/AU dual citizen and I've visited America quite often over the last few years, and it feels like we hear about the shootings only very slightly less in Australia than in the US. Here they're still front page news, and my co-workers are all talking about them.
Had some friends from San Diego and Houston over in the last few weeks and the commented on how safe Sydney feels, even in the grimy parts. They said that they had a need for situational awareness at all times in the US, but here it feels like it wasn't so necessary. At this point I'm certainly not looking at America as the safe haven of liberal democracy or freedom. I feel freer walking around the streets near public housing here than I do in the financial district in SF. But I guess in America you get to own guns with a high clip capacity, bump stocks, and get to post white nationalist manifestos on message boards? Cool.
I feel like if America has a mental illness problem, surely it would be addressed by providing more mental health services perhaps cough universally to the populace somehow. But, it's all rhetoric. If claims there was a mental illness problem were in good faith, we'd see American action on mental health.
"Mental illness" is just a convenient way to dismiss any notion of doing anything about gun violence. It's misdirection. Because, as you point out, we're not going to actually do anything about mental illness. Indeed, half the Congress and all of the Administration is trying to reduce access to health care, which would include mental health care.
> would take the same tack on reporting terrorist incidents. Wouldn't it make sense to say we shouldn't report on them, given that attitude?
I had a muslim coworker recently self-radicalize with online ISIS videos and attempt to carry out a truck attack against national harbor. It didn't make it out of local news because the FBI nabbed him a few hours before the attack was to take place.
I think that's a good thing. If the media blew it up, no doubt it would have inspired others to try the same.
The biggest puzzle to me is how a lot of Americans I talk to that equate 2A with 'freedom'. I have seriously had conversations with some people who believe that we are _less_ free here in Australia that them in the US because we do not have the right to bear arms.
I think that definition of 'freedom' has just become so conflated or twisted of late that it really needs to be decoupled from the overall culture and re-examined.
Today I read tweets from pundits and politicians advocating for armed guards to be at every 'peaceful gathering' in order to ensure safety in the US. I grew up in an authoritarian S/E Asian country where there were policemen or soldiers on literally every street corner with an automatic weapon slung around their front and with one hand close to the trigger. This is the very antithesis of 'freedom' to me.
Under what definition of freedom does having less right to defend yourself make you more free?
I understand how you might see the tradeoff as worth it - some safety purchased at a cost of freedom. But expanding the list of things that you're not allowed to do doesn't seem like it could possibly be interpreted as expanding freedom. Same argument for drug or alcohol prohibition, religious restrictions, etc.
You are correct, you'd definitely lose the freedom to own a gun that fires 10 rounds a second, to defend your home. In Australia you'd just have to make do with the freedom to own a bolt-action.
On the other hand, A whole bunch of civilians in malls would gain the freedom to live.
First, people in America can't own guns that fire '10 rounds a second' without a class 3 firearms license, which is very rare. Such guns are basically never used in mass shootings.
Second, depending on who you need to defend your home from, you may want such a gun. For example, if government or government sanctioned groups are a threat. An example of this is the killings of white farmers in South Africa. Is not just about burglars, it's about gas chambers and political threats. Always has been.
Finally, redefining safety as freedom is a truly absurd abuse of language which wipes out a critical distinction that has been heavily discussed for a long time. If this is what it takes for you to make your point make sense, your point doesn't make sense.
Just admit it. You want more safety. You're willing to give up freedom (or rather, sacrifice the freedom of others) to get it. No need to play ridiculous semantic games to pretend there are no tradeoffs here.
Again, you are very correct. There's always tradeoffs where freedom is concerned. For example, you may be free to bring a gun into your home for defence, but the tradeoff is that you and your family are 3x freer to die from gunshot wounds as a result.
Also very cool and correct of you to support the restriction of high fire rate firearms, like the assault rifles used in all of the mass shootings over the last decade.
You're correct to say safety isn't freedom. However, being alive definitely contributes to freedom. Gun safety and being alive are correlated :) Remember, trigger discipline!
America is definitely an outlier in terms of gun deaths. I don't know much about the situation in South Africa, but it's very interesting you'd consider the death of some white farmers in Africa as pertinent, when the vast majority of political violence in America in the last decade has been perpetrated by white men.
Also interesting that you'd consider government sanctioned groups as a threat. Do you feel like if the brave men and women of the American military were ordered to take your guns, they'd do so? Why do you think so little of our troops?
"you may be free to bring a gun into your home for defence, but the tradeoff is that you and your family are 3x freer to die from gunshot wounds as a result."
Do I need to say this? Correlation does not equal causation.
"restriction of high fire rate firearms, like the assault rifles used in all of the mass shootings over the last decade"
I never stated any such support, and that is not the definition of an assault rifle, it's the definition of an automatic weapon.
"it's very interesting you'd consider the death of some white farmers in Africa as pertinent, when the vast majority of political violence in America in the last decade has been perpetrated by white men."
I wasn't talking about 'gun violence', I was talking about political violence; those African killers are not necessarily using guns. You didn't understand me, clearly, but nice to immediately slip in a racism accusation there.
Of course it's perpetrated by whites; they're almost 80% of the population.
"Do you feel like if the brave men and women of the American military were ordered to take your guns, they'd do so?"
The rest of what you're saying seems to be some kind of rhetorical trick; speak plainly if you have a point to make.
I don't have any guns and I never said I was American, but I appreciate the stereotyping and assumptions. Clearly, imagining me as a truck-driving beer-swilling hillbilly, or whatever racist steretotype you prefer, makes it easier to not think about what I'm saying, because you clearly didn't engage with any of it.
>White men are around 35%, so it's weird that this very vocal and pearl-clutching portion of the population commits so many murders per capita.
Men commit more murders than women (in all places and times).
In America, whites commit less murders than their population percentage. This is true overall, and amongst men only.
You seem to support holding suspicion of entire identity groups on the basis of crime statistics. If so, you must really hate young black men; they're 4% of the population and commit >50% of American murders. Do you? If not, why the obsessive focus on 'white men'?
>Do you feel like if the brave men and women of the American military were ordered to take your guns, they'd do so?
I asked you to make your point and you insist again on rhetorical questions with some kind of implied but unspoken point behind them. But sure, I'll answer: Given that I'm not American and I don't own any guns, it's kind of a bizarre question. If they were ordered to invade my country, I think they would. But that'd be a very different world.
>What have you specifically said that you think I'm not thinking about?
> Men commit more murders than women (in all places and times).
I know, 90-95% in fact! Which makes it interesting that so often people focus on racial issues, like the plight of white south african farmers, when there's a wayyyy larger correlation with violence of all kinds, and gender. An individual gun owner's reason for owning a gun may focus on some abstract interracial political violence, when they're much more likely to be murderer by a young, poor, man.
> Redefining safety as freedom is absurd.
If some level of safety is required in order to live, freedom is contingent on safety. When you're dead you can't own any guns.
We absolutely have the right to defend ourselves here in Australia. With guns even, no less.
I used to own several (bolt action, 5 shot internal magazine capacity) rifles because I used to competition shoot. I sold them off years ago because I stopped competing and just didn't need them lying around the house, rusting. There you go - freedom to own guns or not.
I could probably also get a handgun if I wanted, but I would need to renew my licence and pass strenuous background checks and prove to the police that I store it safely, AND I have to be a continual member of a gun club and shoot regularly with others so they can assess my gun handling skills (and I guess also my mental state) on a regular basis.
What I absolutely CANNOT do is to go and buy a semi automatic gun with a magazine capacity to slaughter an entire school room full of kids without having to reload. What the heck would _any_ civilian in a peaceful country want/need such a weapon? On the flipside, it also means I am free to enjoy the fact that my kids can go to school every day with a less than .001% chance that some maniac will walk into their classroom and mow them down.
To close off this post, and to end that illusion of "I can protect my family with a gun" hero storyline - About 3 years ago we had someone break into our house in the middle of the night. I was woken up by the sound of my son yelling at someone to get the fk out of his room so I jumped out of bed and grabbed a small wooden baton that I keep under our bed.
When I threw open our bedroom door, I saw a shadowy figure run past it in the dark corridor. To this day, I am glad I grabbed the baton instead of an (imagined, non existent) loaded gun, because my first instinct was let fly at the fleeing figure, only to realise a few seconds later that it was my own son, giving chase to the intruder who was fleeing ahead of him. I could have killed my own son if I had a gun in my hand in that split second of rage and confusion.
Later, we found out that the police nabbed the intruder, who turned out to be a 15 year old boy that lived a couple of streets away. Had I shot HIM, I would have had to live with the thought that I had killed someone's child. I cannot do that. I prefer to live with the _freedom_ of not having the guilt of taking someone else's life on my conscience.
You talked a lot about why you think guns are not necessary in a peaceful society. Of course, this isn't why people think that citizens should be allowed to have them. The reason is to resist organized violence, which can arise over time or without warning. It's not just about stopping burglars.
However the more critical problem with what you wrote is that it doesn't actually attempt to disprove anything I said. You simply reiterated a bunch of arguments against gun ownership.
You didn't actually say why adding to the list of things you're not allowed to do here makes you more free. And I think that's because it's definitionally impossible to demonstrate.
Would you say that alcohol prohibition 'expands freedom' because it reduces drunk driving deaths?
The definition of freedom is being allowed to do things. It doesn't mean being allowed to do only good things, or things which are good in some particular person's opinion. It means I can do something that you would rather I did not do. That's freedom. Freedom to do what others want you to do is not freedom.
At what point do you draw the line though? If your intent with the second amendment is to, as it says, stop a potentially tyrannical government, then do you also have the freedom to buy hand grenades? How about shoulder mounted surface to air missiles to stop those pesky government F-16s? Some drones with Hellfire rounds? An M1-Abrahams to drive down to the corner store in case an uprising should start when you are out getting the milk?
Are your neighbours free to mine the road outside your house in case insurgents should drive up some day? How about them buying some uranium and building a small detonator in their garage? Or perhaps brewing some toxic cocktail of poison gas in the local primary school science lab?
Any of the above can be classed as a weapon to deter others, never mind the unintended consequence of accidental (or deliberate) discharging of any of them killing multiple innocent people. If you cannot purchase any of the above at a local dealership, then are you really free, when your government can outgun you at any point in time?
I consider myself 'free' when I take steps to minimise the infinitesimally small probability that something bad might happen, and I know that the steps I take will not result in an even worse 'bad thing' happening.
I got rid of my guns when we had kids. The very very tiny chance that I would need to use a gun against an intruder was outweighed by the even larger chance that one of my kids may have found my rifles and thought of them as play toys. Or the even larger chance that someone could burgle our house when we were not there and take them. I was free to choose what I wanted to do, and I still do not feel any less protected or safe in my own home, or while walking down the street, or when sending my kids to school, or when visiting a bar or attending a concert... or doing pretty much anything that a 'free' American is actually dead scared to do in their own country today.
As a technical point of fact, Americans can buy tanks, missiles, hand grenades, and most any other conventional weapon if they wish, there is no prohibition under Federal law and an existing process for doing so. In practice, it is a hassle and weapons are extremely expensive so only a handful of wealthy collectors ever dabble in it.
Discussion about heavier weapons is interesting and worthwhile; there is a line there. But we're not talking about that, we're talking about guns right now. If the line of policy ever gets past guns we can all have a debate about hand grenades and RPGs.
Howver, again, you are slipping sideways off the topic we're discussing. You're discussing what good policy is towards weapons. That's not what we're debating. This thread is about what it means to be free.
If you could buy an RPG launcher, you would undoubtedly be more free than if you could not. This is by definition. It doens't mean you'd be safer, or better, or that this is good policy. It just means you'd be more free.
"I consider myself 'free' when I take steps to minimise the infinitesimally small probability that something bad might happen, and I know that the steps I take will not result in an even worse 'bad thing' happening."
This definition matches the word 'safe', not the word 'free'. (If you disagree, I wonder what your definition of 'safe' would be that differs from this?)
> I have seriously had conversations with some people who believe that we are _less_ free here in Australia that them in the US because we do not have the right to bear arms.
You seem to be conflating "freedom" with "safety". Often they're correlated, but in this case they conflict.
by not reporting on it, the public is not made aware of this very tragic problem which can in fact be improved by several orders of magnitude with the return of some simple political will. Political will requires media publicity, so in that sense, the media is doing the right thing here.
*so in that sense, the media is juicing its numbers
thats all they're doing
>public is not made aware of this very tragic problem
everyone is quite aware of what the problems are, many view the children murdered during Sandy Hook as the end of the conversation. The decisions were made.
most first world countries have solved these problems, the US meanwhile...
‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens
Think about this event for 1 minute: He drove for -9- hours. NINE HOURS.
Do you think it would take less than 9 hours to pour some diesel fuel on fertilizer and flatten the entire WalMart?
People will just move on to other weapons: knives, bombs, etc.
Norway has very restrictive gun laws. Breivik managed to get enough fertilizer to make a bomb that was mostly a distraction, but still sent 8 people to grave and injured hundreds.
Are you going to cite anything about knife crime not being a problem in the UK?
How do you explain much lower homicide rates in different US states, many on par or better than "every other first wolrd country?
If you drill down deeper, by county level, or even more granular - the picture becomes much clearer still. You should research it, see what variables drive it, instead of arriving at conclusions without any data.
Why do such discrepancies exist, sometimes literally across the street?
The problem is much more complicated than "guns bad".
Which states and developed countries are you talking about? The EU28 homicide rate is ~1 per 100,000. NH sometimes hits that; no other US state does. There are about 6 US states <= to 2. The only EU states over 2 are Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. Japan and South Korea are both under 1.
The UK ‘knife crime’ thing is severely overhyped (in particular, most of the figures you’ll see include mere possession of a knife under certain circumstances). The UK’s intentional homicide rate is middling for Europe and about a fourth that of the US. Homicide rate has risen a little bit over the last few years.
Gun control is a "third rail" in many political jurisdictions in the USA. Many Americans will vote against any agent who would disarm them; those voters are unlikely to see disarming to diminish the (very roughly) ~0.000001% chance of death by mass shooting as a sensible--or even Constitutional--trade.
How about a background check and a mental check? Gun owners always call it a mental health crisis, so let's make sure all new gun owners are vetted and have to pass a psychological exam.
> How about a background check and a mental check?
That would pretty much guarantee that people who need mental health services would deliberately avoid getting it to prevent it from showing up on their records, e.g. a security guard who needs to carry a firearm for their job.
It gets worse. If you’re flagged with a mental illness, most states will yank your professional license (you lose your job and possible primary income). Our society has an economic incentive to underreport mental illness.
Uh, what do you think a psychiatric exam is? There's no crazy-o-meter that they stick into an orifice to objectively determine whether you're mentally ill or not. You simply get asked a series of questions which you can reply to in any way you like.
Replying to the other comments under this reply: in Canada we check for past history of mental illness but don’t flag gun license applicants just because of that. They need to have a history of being treated due to illness that could lead to violence.
In the abstract, yes, virtually everyone agrees with "wouldn't it be great if bad people couldn't get guns". The problem is the moment it becomes specific a lot of the support is lost.
People agree with the specifics too, until the media outlets they watch start pumping out misinformation about whatever the specific proposal says. After a few weeks of watching their favorite pundits bloviate, many people’s “personal preferences” change.
Seems like exactly the opposite is true. Where specific bills have reached the floor, they've passed. The tactics of the opposition are to use procedural control and veto power to prevent these from becoming laws. The assault weapons ban of 1994 was a successful law, and would have removed access to almost all the weapons used in the recent attacks. It had a sunset provision, and expired in 2004. But it passed, and it worked.
It's a common founding myth among gun rights people that "The American People" are pro-gun, but it's just not really true. It's a particular driving issue for a particular subset of the republican base, and beyond that opinions aren't as strong, but are broadly pro-gun-control.
I was under the impression that the 1994 ban targeted specific models of firearm and silly features like pistol grips, flash suppressors, and bayonets (I might be confusing this with a california ban). The whole "Assault weapon" thing is considered something of a joke to a lot of firearm enthusiasts. For example, the ruger mini 14 wasn't legally considered an "Assault weapon" (but would be considered one if it had a collapsible stock? might be a myth idk this is what some people claim) despite it being a well regarded semi-automatic rifle which was also used in an infamous shootout with the fbi to devestating effect.
> might be a myth idk this is what some people claim
It was a flawed list of too-specific rules that were self-contradictory or incomplete in a bunch of places, and indeed that became part of the mythology about it in gun circles.
But it also directly outlawed clones of the Kalashnikov and AR-15 rifles that have been preferentially used (for fairly obvious reasons) in much of the recent violence. It worked, within its domain.
No one likes the ACA either, but you can still buy insurance with a pre-existing condition. Same deal. The gun folks like to conflate "flawed law" with "useless law", but that's not how it works in practice.
That's total nonsense. The AWB accomplished nothing at all, and did not remove access to any weapons for anybody. It banned specific models of weapons and a few specific features that don't correlate to anything in particular. Manufacturers basically instantly made minor modifications and kept selling the exact same thing.
Seconding your assertion that the AWB was ineffective. It barred certain cosmetic features--some malarkey about muzzle brakes and folding stocks or foregrips or whatnot. While doing nothing to diminish the availability of equally potent weapons. 100% toothless, feel-good legislation.
It's worth pointing out that the House passed the "Bipartisan Background Checks Act of 2019" back in February, and that Republican leadership in the Senate refuses to bring it to a vote. I have not heard of any House representatives facing enormous backlash at home over their vote.
As it is, the House is more representative of the population of the US than the Senate, so it's fair to say the biggest barrier to increased gun control right now is the quirky nature of the US political system, not popular sentiment.
That bill would do nothing to combat these mass shooters. I can't think of any offhand that have bought their weapons through private sale. Most don't have a criminal record so they just buy them from random gun shops.
So if it won't solve anything related to these incidents, what's the point?
There are many types of gun crime in the US. Background checks would help with a lot of individual murders, particularly in domestic cases where one partner has already been arrested for domestic abuse.
No, it wouldn't solve everything. But if we wait to pass a law that solves everything, we'll never pass anything.
I guess I would need to see numbers on how many murders use a gun that was bought by a prohibited person through private sale. I highly doubt its anything significant.
So your presumption is that all the people calling for background checks and that have drafted and passed a complete background check law have not considered any of this, or looked at any data? And despite not actually knowing yourself you're comfortable dismissing it as something you "highly doubt"?
I have tried to find numbers on this after I made my comment and couldn't come up with anything.
> have drafted and passed a complete background check law have not considered any of this, or looked at any data
Yes, generally because the people proposing gun laws know nothing about guns.
I have watched national politicians tell townhalls that it's perfectly legal for someone to order a gun online right to their door without a background check, that is a felony.
I have watched them tell people that fully automatic guns are easy to obtain, which they are not.
I have watched them tell people that banning the AR-15 should be our #1 priority, when in reality more people are punched and kicked to death each year than are killed with rifles.
So yes, politicians generally talk out of their @$$ to pander to their bases and get votes. They are not experts on most subject matter so I wouldn't expect them to have any info that isn't widely known.
"Gun people" might be skeptical of the 85% number because there are already background checks, with which "non-gun people" by definition are unfamiliar. Is there something preventing the existing system from becoming better naturally (I honestly don't know the answer here)? I would hazard to guess the 15% of dissenters to be wary of the survey-takers' motives, the particulars of how background checks might be governmentally instrumented to be better, stuff like that. Consider that the prior administration floated the idea of barring folks on the no-fly list from possessing guns, which seems an awfully bureaucratically unconstitutional thing after even slight consideration.
Right, and they see their weapons as insurance against being the victims of a socialist famine like the ones that killed 100 million people last century.
If you want to viscerally understand their viewpoint, call to mind the reaction that you have when someone in the conservative camp goes "Look, it's snowing, so much for global warming!" -- and then substitute "snowing" for "school shooting" and "global warming" for "politically-induced mass starvation."
I don't buy this argument, but only because I don't think armed resistance would be effective, and there's a lot that I know I don't know on that front. What I don't believe is that this tradeoff has an obvious undebatable answer.
I didn't mean to imply any particular motive to the pro-gun / pro-2A camp. Like, I personally tend to think most live in somewhat rural areas, and value firearms as tools for self-defense and deterrence--in areas where there is zilch, zero chance one could scream or even effectively telephone for help from the police or a neighbor--plus hunting, protecting livestock, and the like. Surely there are some Americans who dream of resisting government oppression, but surely even the able-minded among them understand the pure futility, plus the crushing societal and economic collapse that would come with it.
That is very well put, far from the rabid madness that usually seems to be conjured up when gun control is discussed. I spent some time studying it to spot the weak point.
I guess it is the phrase "to disarm them", which is somewhat provocative, since no-one would seriously advocate taking away all guns. Even Japan, with just 5% of the gun violence of the US, allows some citizens to have some guns.
Another issue is with your stated statistic of death via mass shooting. This obviously ignores maimings and other non-deaths, and also deaths from guns in non-mass events, such as burglaries, accidents.
But most of all, it ignores the psychological impact from the threat of gun violence.
What happens to a young child's mind from having to participate in active shooter drills? From having adults explain to them that this is a real threat, and that they better be ready for it? No child should have to carry that burden.
And maybe that leads back to some agreement with your point. If the actual danger from guns is as low as you say, then why have these drills at all?
> no-one would seriously advocate taking away all guns
While I believe this to be true, virtually any sort of "turn in some of your guns" event in the USA would... not be viewed with any nuance at all. Even machine guns were more-or-less exempt from turn-in, provided they were registered by a certain time. Moreover there are already very, very many semi-automatic pistols, revolvers, rifles, and shotguns in circulation--it's not as if a lot of folks have a bolt-action 22 cal rifle and just a few have semi-automatics--the sort of guns that can be fired and reloaded somewhat rapidly, that's what we've got. Setting aside the fact that a rifle is more powerful and aim-able, but harder to conceal, compared to a pistol, I'm not sure what characteristic of a "bad" gun the American government could successfully put forth.
All that said--from whom would you propose to confiscate what guns?
> Another issue is with your stated statistic of death via mass shooting. This obviously ignores maimings and other non-deaths, and also deaths from guns in non-mass events, such as burglaries, accidents.
Well, agreed! Mass shootings and terror attacks inflict many fewer casualties on the American population compared to robberies, gang and drug violence, alcohol and smoking, fatty foods, traffic accidents and DUI, swimming pools, etc. However, it does not seem to me that these other perils are used to buttress the case for banning the instruments of such trouble. I don't mean to be glib, and indeed it is hard to imagine a bad actor using an undoctored swimming pool against innocents, but it does seem to be the case that the electorate lacks the will to stamp out certain risks. And this lack of will is not really related to the measurable impact of the problem.
> What happens to a young child's mind from having to participate in active shooter drills?
We could reflect on the schoolhouse duck-and-cover drills for nuclear war in the 1950s and 1960s--like, isn't contemplating nuclear annihilation and nuclear winter much more terrifying and existentially dreadful than locking the classroom door? Maybe it isn't a good idea to traumatize children with visions of a terrible but statistically very remote fate. On the other hand, local police and school districts must be seen to be doing something, so maybe it is practically unavoidable.
> Mass shootings (generally) don't kill that many people. They are scary, yes, but not that deadly (statistically)
Logic like that is usually applied to forces of nature. Or at least things that provide utility in return for this risk (e.g. cars). Mass shootings don't really fit that mould.
"stop telling people things" strikes me as a strange response. We could have a nationwide epidemic of mass shootings flying under the radar entirely. Sometimes issues need to faced head on.
(and even if the national media didn't say a peep, 8Chan would be all over it, tracking the number of deaths for their high score board. It's a forum for radicalisation that's been ignored for a very long time)
> We could have a nationwide epidemic of mass shootings flying under the radar entirely.
There are published statistics. They suggest that the focus should be on car safety, driving and worrying about bad habits that have health impacts. We'd know if there was a problem and the evidence is that your greatest enemy is you. It'd be interesting to get statistics on how many of these shootings are linked to drug abuse though.
> Logic like that is usually applied to forces of nature.
Good decisions that feel bad will get a better result than bad decisions that feel good. Politics is almost always improved by people taking deep breaths and not focusing too much on what is happening today - ideally using logic although simply sticking to process is good enough for me.
For decades the government has passed laws and regulations that have forced car manufacturers and owners to prioritise safety over all else: seat belts, air bags, crumple-resistant frames... the list goes on and on. The results have been a massive success. It's an example of effective government.
They could do the same for guns, if they had the political will. The only way they get the political will is if voters demand it. The only way voters demand it is if they are aware of the problem.
I am completely against not publishing the name of the shooter.
I want to know who these shitbags are.
I want their entire family shamed.
Who was the shitty ass parents who raised the murderer? Who were his failed doctors or teachers of friens who failed to help prevent.
I want to know every god amn detail about this person..
Look at vegas. Look at the failed police/FBI/CIA/whatever investigation that has provided ZERO detailas about Paddock and how he carried out a killing of 58 people, shot over 500 people and we have ZERO details.
So fuck this idea that we shouldnt be revealing their names. We should be shaming the ENTIRE POPULATION in his orbit if they had any indication.
We also need a full toxicology report FUCKING ONLINE and compared to every single other person who has done this.
Are they all taking Zoloft for example?
Where is big pharma in here.
The aurora shooter looked like a freaking mental patient in court. Why was he allowed to dye his hair AFTER his arrest.
The idea that we need to be some sleepy apologetic society is bullshit.
This is some shady shit going on.
My personal opinion is that the pedo world is distracting from the epstein case with this. PLEASE FUCKING DOWNVOTE ME, because you have NO argument against what I have just said.
Then youre an idiot to think that after being on HN for over a decade and paying attention to stories from the full spectrum that somemone on HN is going to compartmentalize so fucking hard against a major flaw in our society.
Look at your username - and you dont think that someone who has been online since 1993 and on HN for as long as I have isnt going to pay attention to the shit that is going on in our world.
Give me a break. I speak my mind on HN - and have for many years. Sometimes Dang gets mad at me - but I participate in this community daily for more than a decade. and I pay attention.
There is something shady going on. and its all related to epstein and his dead mans switch.
> Mass shootings (generally) don't kill that many people. They are scary, yes, but not that deadly (statistically). Keep it local news, don't
The problem is there is a simmering domestic nationalistic terrorism threat to the country - and that is news.
The killer in TX directly referenced it, as did very many of the prior mass-murders of recent. That is noteworthy, and fundamentally different from people killed in a gas station robbery.
This rising domestic terrorism is fed and incited by nationalistic groups who have explicitly stated this as their plans and goals.
Yes the media could adjust how they report it, but that's not the root problem here. It's an intentionally fostered growing domestic nationalist terrorism.
Can you cite evidence for this? My understanding is that deaths due to mass shootings hasn't really changed since the 70s, but rather the media coverage has expanded.
That seems unlikely. The first graph[1] on this Wiki[2] article shows from 1982 until 2017 -- so not the exact range you mentioned -- but it shows that mass shooting deaths are higher today than decades ago.
Sure, but the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 "killed at least 168 people, [and] injured more than 680 others".[0] And annual traffic deaths were 50K-35K during the 90s through the 01s.[1]
It should go without saying, but the Okahoma City bombing wasn't a mass shooting, which is what is being discussed.
And what's your point about traffic deaths? By that logic, heart disease killed more people over that interval, should we stop caring about traffic deaths?
Well, generically the topic is domestic terrorism.
I know that I'm verging on whataboutism. But there is the tendency to amplify outrage based on public sympathies.
I worry lots more about official government violence. Consider deaths of US troops in Iraq during the mid 00s. About 800-900 per year.[0] Or far worse, deaths of Iraqis, which exceeded 20K per year during that period.[1] The same issues that are driving mass shootings will likely result in another major war. That's the thing to worry about.
This is a strong feeling you have, but I see no evidence for it. The media likes to talk more about ultra nationalist groups now than it did in the past, giving some sense that it's growing into a big problem, but where is the actual evidence. Seems more like a big narrative push, a puff of smoke in everyone's eyes.
By many studies Americans overall are far less racist and more tolerant than they ever were. Things are actually improving on that front rather than deteriorating.
I’d argue that the effort spent hunting Muslim terrorists at borders, museums, transit hubs etc is not justified when compared to the relative death toll from domestic ultranationalists/white supremacists.
>Yes the media could adjust how they report it, but that's not the root problem here. It's an intentionally fostered growing domestic nationalist terrorism.
Like any form of lone-wolf terrorism, these shootings are being perpetrated by individuals, with individual motivations. There's a compelling case that they're at least partially motivated or inspired by media coverage.
It's not really lone wolf terrorism; evidence suggests that most killers actually have a loose but persistent social network. Even though they may select the time, location, and specifics of their actions in private, they typically discuss the possibilities and general goals/tactics with others.
Media coverage can make a difference but I think relatively few people just decide to do it based on news coverage. FBI data suggests a median planning time of 1-2 months and a median preparation time of a week.
In every other, let's say, G20 country, someone shooting up a shopping mall and killing 20 will absolutely make national news - they will talk about it for months and it will be ranked "top ten worst news for $country in 2019", if not the absolute worst. In some countries (let's say, Korea) reporters will probably dig into the shooter's elementary school transcripts and interview second cousins.
In other words, if anyone is aiming for notoriety, shooting up people in Seoul or Tokyo will give you an eternal place in national zeitgeist, while in America you will be famous until the next shooting: A few months? Weeks?
Yet nobody's (thankfully) taking up the opportunity in these other countries. Certainly not every week, or even every year.
It's not the media. It's not attention-seeking. It's not games (duh). Maybe it's a bit about mental health, but other countries also have problems with crazies and they don't just shoot up schools and nightclubs.
>In other words, if anyone is aiming for notoriety, shooting up people in Seoul or Tokyo will give you an eternal place in national zeitgeist, while in America you will be famous until the next shooting: A few months? Weeks?
Good luck buying guns in Korea/Japan (or any country[1] for that matter) as a tourist, or smuggling them in. It's significantly easier to get guns where you normally reside.
[1] Except maybe the US. Is the gunshow exemption still around?
There never was a gunshow exemption. Federally licensed dealers must follow the same process to sell a gun no matter where they do it - at their brick-and-mortar store, at a gunshow, or in a parking lot. Individuals can sell a personally owned firearm to anyone in the same state with no check, and where the sale is made has no relevance.
Your premise is wrong. Mass shootings and killings happen across the globe at rates comparable to America. America is exceptional only in its population, which obviously increases the number of events without increasing their prevalence, and in its proximity to you personally, which increases how much you hear about American events versus other events.
Even Polifact has fact-checked this and found that America is not particularly exceptional [0]. By this study, it's not even in the top 10. [1]
And just off the top of my head, there were two mass killings recently in Japan. A guy burned down an animation studio and killed 35 people. Before that, a guy stabbed a bunch of kids to death near a subway station in Tokyo a few months ago.
You know when you cherry pick countries with 1 attack and a small population, then stack Norway with 1, finland with 2 etc and proclaim "look these small places should be compared per capita with the US, 1 attack surely is enough data points", then don't look at the combined EU and state that gun legislation is fine? Maybe you even misrepresent (frequency, literally noone claims that mass killings cannot physically happen elsewhere, what the actual f) what the person you are 'fact checking' said and change nothing when it's pointed out to you?
It would be good if you actually looked at the study because it talks about dozens and dozens of countries. There is no cherry-picking and it is not a one-to-one comparison with one other country.
I did look at it. And yeah, you need dozens and dozens of small nations to get the population of one superpower.
Now, if they were clustered together like for example in one continent maybe you could actually compare, and you can, but that doesn't look as good for the US.
This is the typical handwaving from the right. None of these incidents are even remotely comparable to what has happened in the US over the last decade in totality. Andres Breivik swings these stats in a way that is useful for this agenda.
>In every other, let's say, G20 country, someone shooting up a shopping mall and killing 20 will absolutely make national news - they will talk about it for months and it will be ranked "top ten worst news for $country in 2019", if not the absolute worst.
I don't think this would apply to China and India. Every other country in the world has a lower national population than the US. Yet I doubt that your statement even applies to countries such as Brazil and Nigeria.
You really do have to take population numbers into account when you look at what the media focuses on. No other western country even comes close to the population the US has, so it gives the impression that the US is somehow much worse.
It looks like there’ve been about four mass shootings in China since 1990; a couple criminal (robbery-related), one terrorist, one random.
Of course, information out of China isn’t that reliable, you could argue. The EU as a whole is considerably bigger than the US, and every year or so there’s a mass shooting or other mass killing. And it’s huge news for a long time. The UK has about a fifth as many people as the US, and this century has had five mass killings (one of which involved guns). The US rate and attitude really is abnormal.
Edit: It’s also worth noting that the vast majority of European mass killing incidents are terroristic; the “someone just shoots a bunch of people for no particularly discernible reason” thing is really, really rare. The Texas shooting (terroristic) would be extremely shocking in any European country and would dominate the news for a long time. But the Ohio one (looks non-terroristic) would probably have an even bigger impact and would likely lead to tightening of gun laws etc (the Dunblane massacre lead to the banning of almost all handguns in the UK, for instance).
Well it turns out gun crime under totalitarian regimes is usually pretty low. So it's not very useful to say things like "Look at North Korea! They have way lower gun deaths and mass shootings rates than America!"
If you trade all of your freedoms for securities, you too can have a totalitarian regime that keeps you safe. It's a "slippery" slope that can take centuries, but you just keep losing a few freedoms here, a few there, and pretty soon your monolithic monstrosity of a government holds all the cards.
Who's talking about North Korea? We're talking about South Korea, Japan, and the entire western Europe.
> If you trade all of your freedoms for securities, you too can have a totalitarian regime that keeps you safe.
Totalitarian regime usually have worse security because nobody can criticize the supreme leader and they can simply make an inconvenient news item (like an unsolved murder) go away. Your slippery slope isn't even in the correct direction.
No society is perfect, but it's quite possible to have a safe and free society. But you should be willing to make reasonable compromises instead of arguing from centuries-old aphorisms.
The person I directly responded to was talking about China, which is YAGFTR (yet another gun-free totalitarian regime).
> No society is perfect, but it's quite possible to have a safe and free society.
That also lasts a long time without lapsing back into being YAGFTR? Japan was YAGFTR less than 75 years ago, same with a lot of currently "safe and free societies".
I am skeptical that a gun-free society can last hundreds of years without it lapsing back to being YAGFTR but I suppose time will tell
The "do it for my 5 minutes of fame" narrative is mostly wrong. It is meant to denigrade the shooters.
If you read tarrant's manifesto, for example, his motivation is entirely racial/political. He thinks white people is being destroyed, and he lashes out against his enemies.
If people's grievances, real or not, are not addressed. They will lash out. Calling them racist, stupid, xenophobes, losers, mentally ill or whatever else will not stop the tide of blood.
News reports what happened. These days people seem to see news organizations as the enemy or at least the news organizations they don't like.
Although one thing I have noticed about news these days is it tends to voice personal opinion openly much more than years ago. Walter Cronkite, Tom Brokaw, Peter Jennings wouldn't spout their own opinion they'd tell you what happened, and that's it.
Show the bodies, name the attackers, send reports to the NRA, government officials don't take no for an answer hound them day and night for a reply. Make it uncomfortable for everyone so much so that everyone wants to prevent another event from occurring.
There is no way to hide what happened or who did it in this age of information. If information lacking people just make up their own story or create conspiracy theories to fill the void.
The case you cited isn't just a civilian killing a cop at a traffic stop or during a random crime. It's a targeted assassination of two police officers for politicial reasons. It's more terrorism than crime. This makes it very newsworthy.
Equally, if a cop went out purely to kill some black men for reasons of political revenge, that would be newsworthy in a way that a random death at a traffic stop is not.
The status quo, however, is that random traffic stop deaths of white guys are not newsworthy, but random traffic stop deaths of black guys are national news. That racist double standard is what's being called out.
> By turning every mass shooting into a hysterical emotional maelstrom, you signal a green light to all the other potential shooters that this is how you get attention.
I can see that point. There is also something odd about what shootings get publicized and which don't. Some shooters, seem to be getting more media attention than others.
Is it the manifestos or maybe the number of victims? I remember the Congressional baseball shooting, but I think there was no manifesto so it wasn't talked about as much, even though it involved members of Congress. The Christchurch one was publicized and was very visible, and there was a manifesto. The youtube shooter was a strange case. Given what media likes to do, I would have expected that one to be front page news for a long time since it had a manifesto in her videos and it involved a major tech company. However, it disappeared from the news cycle relatively quickly.
Now, I would rather they all not be publicized as much. There needs to be legislative action about guns, what resources, especially mental health, are available, etc. But, it is probably better if that is handled after some time and not in the immediate aftermath of the tragedy.
It's the politics. If it helps the narrative of the left, it gets wall-to-wall coverage. If it hurts the narrative of the left, it goes down the memory hole as fast as possible.
Actually not sure. I guess even for 2, why is there more attention received for some vs others? So it's a bit tautological / recursive.
The media is in the middle of the feedback loop, it can both generate attention and react to it. Given that position they push a narrative if it gets more ad views.
At the risk of staying the obvious, the various media outlets in the US have all by this point joined either the red or blue team and now report only on those incidents which could harm the other team in the eyes of the public.
The idea that the problem will go away if we talk as little as possible about it isn't borne out by experience. Why wouldn't you just expect independent media outlets to fill the information vacuum? I hear this argument a lot after every terrorist incident but in ~30 years nobody has ever provided any solid evidence to back it up.
The problem is, mass shootings generate a lot of revenue for media companies in terms of clicks, so when one major online newspapers posts something about it, the rest of them would follow. (Capitalism can really commoditize anything, right?)
"Some" will condemn this ban by appealing to freedom of speech. But freedom of speech is not absolute. Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, as per the Guardian:
"I am an unswerving advocate of freedom of expression, which is guaranteed under Article 19 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), but it is not absolute. Article 20 of the same covenant says: ‘Any advocacy of national, racial or religious hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence shall be prohibited by law."[0]
As so often, different values are in tension with each other. And different societies draw the line at different places, somewhat favouring one or the other value. I hope we can agree that 8-chan, due to the lack of sensible moderation, is way past that line by all standards.
Edit: to clarify, this is not meant to be a strawman. By "some", I don't mean some here or alike, but those in 8-chan , TD, etc., who have brought forward this argument in the past.
That swerve doesn't apply to the US's actual unswerving protection of freedom of expression, it was ratified with the following reservation (the first among others):
> (1) That Article 20 does not authorize or require legislation or other action by the United States that would restrict the right of free speech and association protected by the Constitution and laws of the United States.
Well, they're at least making their position clear here. They are not a government or a public forum. As such, they can decide who and what they will support on the internet. Can't argue with their decision on that point.
Does CF enjoy publisher protections for the content that moves through their servers? Because if they do, and they “curate” opinions they don’t like, that’s an issue.
If you build a system that is technically possible for someone to censor, particularly if you make it easy to do (and in fact where not doing so would cost them potentially billions of dollars in market cap in an upcoming IPO, recruiting, sales, vendors, etc), you shouldn’t be at all surprised when they do censor. It is interesting that Cloudflare has only really censored two sites (dailystormer and 8chan) outside of a fairly clearly articulated terms of service. There are clearly a large number of sites on Cloudflare which are a net liability to them and always will be, so the “free speech” stance is genuine.
Only governments can censor; it is not a concept that applies to private parties. Cloudflare's decision to not continue a business relationship with someone is not censorship in any meaningful sense of the word.
That is like saying a grocery store that prohibits customers without shirts and shoes is the same thing as the forced famines of communist regimes: they are both starving people.
Kicking out and not providing service isn't the same thing as censoring. One is customer-driven, the other is content-driven.
You can kick a customer out because they espouse certain views or whatever, and it's fine to call it discriminatory, but it's not censorship. This isn't usually a relevant distinction, but here it is because Cloudflare hasn't built "a system that is technically possible for someone to censor".
They could, and thank fuck they don't, because that would absolutely be the day I'm getting off Cloudflare.
The article mentioned that they are now and have been monitoring content of web sites they route and have been sharing information with various agencies based upon that content.
They have removed at least two portals, and higher up in the thread it is mentioned that they have also axed various sex related sites - and they are providing monitored info to agencies that use courts and guns to force people to do things... that is starting to sound more and more like a censorship system than a dump pipe which prevents overuse (ddos) - to me..
There will be lots of people who are frustrated by this. They may say that Cloudflare shouldn't remove content unless they are legally required. Or that a CDN like Cloudflare is a platform layer, deep in the stack, and that it shouldn't be making decisions based on content. That they are a essentially a utility, and that they should provide the the same service to everyone.
But at the end of the day, companies are run by people. And those people should consider the positive and negative concequences of the services they provide. It is the moral thing to do. It is the right thing to do. It is the courageous thing to do.
That doesn't mean they must block every potentially bad actor. And they don't need to block based explicitly on content. Here, the line was drawn at "platforms that have demonstrated they directly inspire tragic events and are lawless by design." But when situations arise that cause decision makers at an organization to re-consider providing their services to their customers, they should take that opportunity to re-evaluate. They should ask, "Do we want to be hosting this?"
In this case, they said "No."
Maybe some other customers will leave, afraid of being kicked off next. They should take that into account. If you think your service is sufficiently like 8Chan, you should probably leave Cloudflare. Or if you think Cloudflare's decision was arbitrary and that worries you, you should leave.
But maybe others will be happy that their CDN doesn't need to be associated with hosting 8Chan's content. I know I feel that way.
Maybe the goodwill you receive will lead to more financial success. But you'll probably never know. In all likelihood, so long as your customers aren't leaving in droves after you kick someone off your platform, you'll never know if the decision was the right financial decision.
You'll probably never know if it was a net positive or negative on your balance sheet. But you might sleep better at night. And maybe sites that enable the propagate hate will find it a little bit harder to survive. And I think that's great.
>That doesn't mean they must block every potentially bad actor.
Unfortunately obligatory "I don't support 8chan".
I dislike this idea that people can stomp their feet and demand CloudFlare kick off "bad actors".
Who is to say the bad actor of tomorrow won't be the "good actor" of today. CloudFlare and other internet utilities should remain apolitical tools that leave law enforcement to law enforcement (even that is a slippery slope, but I'd much prefer an open internet that isn't open to individual whims of what is right and wrong)
Create and maintain "the Great American Message Board" the same way the government funds PBS. Sounds like a great idea to me.
Sad fact is, you can't expect any platform to do anything, assuming that it's not illegal for them to do and cost of doing it is less than the cost of not doing it.
If you're a platform, and your people say we'll lose 100 million if we do thing X or we'll lost 20 million if we do thing Y, the correct choice is do thing Y. You're still losing, but you're losing less.
Welcome to capitalism in the internet outrage era. Burning Nikes and demanding that Chik-fil-a not open on your campus are the decisions megacorps PR departments have to deal with. They don't care about you, singular human, and your views. They care about the net effect on their bottom line.
> Or if you think Cloudflare's decision was arbitrary and that worries you, you should leave.
I am not entirely sure whether this statement carries moral judgment of those who see it as arbitrary or not. Would you mind clarifying if you intend to pass judgment or not?
Edit: It seems I communicated my point poorly. My last sentence is not intended as a swipe at the parent poster. It's simply a request for clarification. I desired to understand parent's point rather than mischaracterize it.
" they have proven themselves to be lawless and that lawlessness has caused multiple tragic deaths."
What insane nonsense. Whatever motivates mass murderers caused the deaths, not where they posted. They get rewarded with tons of attention from all forms of media, too. Just kill a minimum number of people to get the popularity in the corporate and social media they otherwise wouldn't ever earn. They revel in it. 8chan disappearing doesn't change that.
I've always favored all the mass media agreeing to not even mention the killers names, achievements, etc in favor of just belittling or dismissing them. Focus on everyone else in the tragedy instead. Make sure the abusers or killers get nothing out of it. Meanwhile, they'll get plenty across the media with Cloudfare getting some good PR not supporting one of the sites a few wrote on. My prediction: more people will do mass killings since this wasn't a causal factor or even help stop them.
Good luck thought policing thousands upon thousands of journalists, each of them has an incentive to defect and get more eye balls that competition, and make more money and name for themselves.
Never going to happen, until we have full blown censorship and you only read double-plus good happy time stories.
"Good luck thought policing thousands upon thousands of journalists"
Except you're ignoring the fact that the corporate media already does that. It seems to work well enough, too. It helps that "journalists" are mostly a thing of the past with today's reporters often just doing the minimum to check things when they're not just repeating whatever the current fad is. That's extremely popular, too. Most stories are whatever people in target demographic are either what people want to say yes to or hate on. We're already there.
They are utility though. Have you thought about that people support neutrality/common carrier style behavior with 8chan existing being the acceptable price to pay and not 8 chan itself?
They are not a utility. At all. They are not comparable to your water or your electricity in any way.
They are comparable to a self-storage place you might keep your boat. Or an office you might rent to house your business. But they are not anything like a utility.
At some point, the price is unacceptable in light of the benefits conferred.
And Cloudflare isn't a utility. I agree with Cloudflare's decision. I hope whichever host 8chan runs to will do the same. Free speech is not a suicide pact.
Generally, utilities have a regional pseudo-monopoly. It’s unlikely more than one entity runs electric or phone lines to your house, say. CDNs aren’t really utilities, and most of them have long been pretty picky (most won’t deal in porn, say).
They host and indirectly disseminate media, just like a news network. Do you expect Fox or CNN to host views they don't find acceptable? If we're going to accept that biased media is legal (news networks) then biased media is legal (Cloudflare), although you'd have a harder time making a case of bias against Cloudflare in comparison to the former.
Fox and CNN are indeed liable for what they display because they are publishers. They control the content.
That's kind of the point.
Cloudflare and social media co's naturally want to be protected as a platform. If they start controlling the content in an ad hoc it's a lot harder for them to claim that.
The problem is that a company named Noticeboardflare has practically monopolized protection of noticeboards, and that if you do not have their approval, your noticeboard is impractical to operate.
This isn't about "supporting" someone's views. This is about simply allowing one to speak. Otherwise Google should be held liable for every single illegal thing that happens on their platform (and there are ton of those).
I don’t think Cloudflare is trying to claim liability (that would be a bad move on their part), but just that they want no part of that kind of behavior. They don’t want to take money from or enable that kind of behavior in any way.
The problem is that Cloudflare keeps trying to position themselves as not being in the business of deciding what can be on the internet, but they have twice made the decision to do so. Also, since you mentioned it and hence made this disclaimer obligatory: I have zero sympathy for 8chan, and I don't agree with the views espoused there.
Unfortunately the greater population will see it as black and white. Cloudflare has repeatedly worked with gray-area sites and stood by their principles that they were neutral and would only respond to law enforcement. Their previous choice with the Dailystormer can be seen as an exception, especially with supporting material that the site was also blaming Cloudflare.
Making the choice twice now calls into question hundreds of other properties they work with, and may open the floodgates for all that criticism they have shielded against so far.
That is exactly it. Once they have expressed a private moral judgement about what they consider acceptable they have opened themselves up to being accountable for all the other content they do allow.
Most providers make hundreds or thousands of decisions like this per year. Cloudflare doing it twice ever in 10 years of existence, both times in response to ideologically-inspired mass murder and platforms that stoked the flames (intentionally in the first case and by negligence/refusal in this case), doesn't really mean much.
Broadly speaking, there's (at least) two forms of net neutrality:
1) Different classes of traffic will be treated identically and not throttled indiscriminately (VOIP vs web content vs bittorrent etc.)
2) Content cannot be arbitrarily restricted by a technical provider.
If there was substantial abuse with their platform based upon technical reasons in case 1, I could see that as cause for termination.
Their arguments against denying service to 8chan are based upon case 2. Given where Cloudflare sits in the internet infrastructure layer, their supporting a pro-net neutrality position enforced upon ISPs while not applying that standard to themselves strikes me as more than a tad hypocritical.
As long as they can be sued for liable the way any other publisher can I have no problem with them pulling 8chan. If they're going to selectively hide behind section 230 to promote their political agenda then I do, they can't have it both ways and I hope congress clamps down on this.
Do you complain when liberal writers don't get hosted on Fox News? Or when liberal guests don't get as much air time as conservatives? Do you want congress to clamp down and make all sides get equal air time and newspaper time? This 'everyone should host my political agenda and his agenda....ad infinitum, all equally in time and space', is not just ridiculous but impossible. They're a private company doing the same as CNN or Fox, deciding not to host what they don't agree with.
It is their prerogative to operate their business in a partisan fashion if that is their desire. If you don't like their business practices then you can protest, boycott, and spread the word.
The better analogy about notice boards matching the current situation is that third parties offended by the content demand the content to be removed.
I get the mourning about senseless death, but this is basically killing the messenger. And I do indeed believe that people trying to get these platforms shut down don't really care about it too much and have different motives. Maybe just trying to prove a point.
> A lot of not-so-subtle support for 8chan leaking into this thread.
I hope I am not supple about when I say that I think the move is idiotic.
"It does nothing to address why portions of the population feel so disenchanted they turn to hate."
To me this seems like the broader context that's necessary to actually decrease hate and hate related attacks. These are real people online posting things that really express their feelings about society. A ton of trolling too, of course. But these people aren't just going to go away or get healthy.
Maybe censorship is a good measure to reduce attacks, as it's harder for these individuals to organize and promote each other to act. But then again maybe this response is just the obvious thing corporate entities have to do to wipe their hands of it while we further decentralize hate and make it harder to monitor.
I don't know. I don't have the data and I'm certainly not advocating anything nor saying somethings bad. To me the conversation just doesn't intuitively lead me to believe that were attacking the right problem.
Who is going to deplatform Facebook and Twitter? After all plenty of shooters have used them too. Before the usual: " But 8chan is a cesspool of bla bla" Probably it is, but, either the users are doing something ilegal in the site and you close it if the owners refuse to comply with a legal request, or they are not doing anything illegal so they have to be left alone.
For the "Free Speech is freedom from government prohibition and this is a private company" brigade. I dont want to live in a world where colored people is being prohibited to enter a night venue, or gay people cannot order a simple cake, or YES, dudes who think their race is more superior being able to blabber their nonsense online as long as it is nothing illegal. After all similar sentiments are expressed (veiled or openly) from many powerful spheres and nobody does nothing.
> For the "Free Speech is freedom from government prohibition and this is a private company" brigade. I dont want to live in a world where color people is being prohibited to enter a night venue, or gay people cannot order a simple cake, or YES, dude who think their race is more superior being able to blabber their nonsense online as long as it is nothing illegal. After all similar sentiments are expressed (veiled or openly) from many powerful spheres and nobody does nothing.
> Nothing illegal
I think at some point it goes up against the "yelling 'fire' in a crowded movie theater" exemption of free speech.
There are more fundamental fish to fry. 1 Violation of terms of service should categorically be NOT a criminal matter. 2 I strongly believe possession (given we meet safe storage provisions) should never be illegal. ...
I also agree with you that people blabber all the time but when multiple unrelated people take the next step seemingly after reading...
I see your point, but violation of TOS has to be a very clearly defined situation and it is rarely is, at the end it can be ambiguously interpreted to kick anyone if you have the right lawyers, so we are back to step 1.
> I think at some point it goes up against the "yelling 'fire' in a crowded movie theater" exemption of free speech.
You know where that phrase came from? It was coined in Schenck v. United States[1], where Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr convicted the defendant for publishing pamphlets opposing the draft in the first world war.
I'll admit. I didn't know the origin. I don't know whether I'd have supported or opposed this verdict but I can't support the administration's supposed vigorous enforcement.
I think laws are not absolute. We frequently allow prohibited acts because common sense and decency. If you're at a light and it turns yellow, you should stop but not if there's a car close behind you and you're more likely to get in a wreck by stopping rather than speeding up.
I oppose the draft as it exists. It is wrong and immoral to have a draft of only "able-bodied" people of one gender. The draft, if one exists, should be for everyone. No body gets an exemption regardless of their personal belief or body condition. They don't all have to fight. There are plenty of opportunities (I'd imagine) to serve without ever being in a hand to hand combat. Either have a draft of all adults regardless of any other exemptions or don't have one at all.
> I think at some point it goes up against the "yelling 'fire' in a crowded movie theater" exemption of free speech.
I would like to point out (not necessarily to parent) that this was an example of speech that was not protected by 1A in a case where a man was prosecuted by the government for trying to tell young Americans that they don't need to join the draft for WW1.
Also important: yelling fire in a crowded theater is entirely protected speech if you don't believe it to be false.
People of color, and LGBT are demographics. White supremacy is an ideology (a reprehensible one at that). People choose their ideology, not their race, or sexuality. They are not the same thing. Third party businesses should not feel any obligation to do business with "dudes who blabber" about the murdering and hate of others.
What about communists, anarchists, marxists, mormons, people who believe there are genetically based cognitive differences based on sex/race. What about people who are against abortion, against weed legalization, what about people who consider cops to be a civilian death squad used by the rich to oppress the poor. What about people who think the US Army is an occupation force in every place but America. Is OK to discriminate some of them? All of them? None? Are you going to manage the API so the apps can be built to see who is worthy or not?
The point is, who’s gonna be the arbiter of what’s absolute good and what’s absolute bad? What happens if people disagree? Where is the line?
If you find something like 8chan and point it out to Cloudflare, should they ban it? If they say no that’s not as bad, well why is their value judgment worth more than that of other people? If they say okay, then anyone can get anything they judge to be as bad as 8chan ‘banned’ from it.
> I think it's okay to discriminate or moderate against a set of beliefs if you can show that the spread beliefs lead to the widespread harm of others.
Does that also work if you can show that it doesn't cause widespread harm in every country with stricter gun regulations?
Seriously if you make statements like that, you ought to acknowledge the elephant in the room.
Do they? A key aspect of religion is believing that your beliefs reflect objective reality, e.g. there really is a God that did all this stuff, there really were prophets that performed these specific miracles and said these specific things etcetera.
Saying that believing in what you think is objective reality is a choice gives off some strong 1984 vibes.
I think it depends on how you categorize the act of "choosing". It could be cognitive and evidence (more traditional idea of "choosing") based or it could be faith and/or feelings-based (it's not clear if this is "choosing").
There are a thousand religions/sects in the world. Most of them are exclusive (as in the 1st Commandment). You have to make a choice to affiliate yourself with one of them (although not everyone chooses to be specific to one denomination).
I don't think it's reminiscent of "1984" to say that people choose their religion. I think people choose who they want to be around and that tends to be among the largest predictors of religious affiliation.
This is a good argument, but it falls apart when you confront the fact that religious beliefs have no basis in objective reality and are thus entirely unbound from it. People convert all the time, religious beliefs are frequently inherently contradictory, et c.
When your beliefs about objective reality include a bunch of made up delusional shit to satisfy oneself emotionally, it’s pretty straightforward to swap one set of fairy tales that didn’t happen for another set of fairy tales that didn’t happen. No harm, no foul.
lgbt fanatics aren't much more sane than any other extremists yet they don't have any issues with being on twitter, facebook or reddit. (emphasis on _fanatics_). Widespread propaganda about kids sexualization/abuse and genitalia mutilation on these platform is A-ok and a cause for celebration.
You literally can't express any opinions going against the current flow of ideas without being labelled as hostile (alt-right, nazi, white privileged, whatever the word of the day is, &c.), no matter how valid the point you're making is (even here on HN you can’t have serious discussions about issues like the gender pay gap or immigration). It really isn't a surprise that these loners end up on sketchy websites once they're ridiculed/banned/shut off everywhere else. If you're a man feeling like a girl you'll find a community telling you you should chop off your genitals and ingest a truck load of hormones, if you’re a POC feeling unaccepted they'll tell you it's because of how racist society is [0], if you’re a girl and aren’t successful it’s due to the patriarchy [0], but oh boy if you’re a white man feeling empty inside no one gives a flying fuck about what you have to say.
Anyone thinking these shootings are due to 8chan is a fool, plain and simple, the issues are rooted much more deeply, especially in the US culture, and they've been running for a while. I’d even argue that the root cause of modern white supremacy is very close to the root cause of religious terrorism. But see, no one wants to even consider it through that lens, it's much easier to dismiss it entirely and talk about non-issues ("they're mentally ill", "just an angry loner", "if only he was dating", &c.). Now we can spend days talking about cloudflare, but that's mostly a waste of time, you don't put a bandaid on a broken leg and expects it to heal.
“These young people find themselves at a time in their life when they are looking to the future with the hope of engaging in meaningful behavior that will be satisfying and get them ahead. Their objective circumstances including opportunities for advancement are virtually nonexistent; they find some direction for their religious collective identity but the desperately disadvantaged state of their community leaves them feeling marginalized and lost without a clearly defined collective identity”
for the individuals who become active terrorists, the initial attraction is often to the group, or community of believers, rather than to an abstract ideology or to violence”
---
[0] Just to be clear I'm not implying these things don't exists or that they're non-issues.
Don't take time to elaborate, you might be able to actually voice your opinion and add something meaningful to the conversation.
That's exactly what I'm talking about when I say "intelligent discussions are impossible" on these subjects. When someone takes time to write something we can just reply "Lol whatever fam" and continue with our day feeling like we accomplished something. This is level 0 of human communication, you can abstain from it as it doesn't add anything, even a simple down vote would add more value.
Every single time I learned something valuable in life was when I talked with people having diametrically opposed opinions but who were able to have a coherent discourse, the problem is that these people are quickly disappearing and are being replaced by people spewing feel good one liners like yours.
No, it literally makes no sense because you start off with premises that have no correspondence to any sane reality.
There are no "lgbt fanatics". That's not even a concept. I have been around LGBT circles my entire life and the most of extreme forms of advocacy of... anything there, are quite literally incomparable to real, actual extremists. So you're not really off to a good start as far as reasonably informed opinions.
You talk about "a man feeling like a girl", in which you're literally ignoring multiple lifetimes of study of the psychology and clinical evidence, by _very_ qualified experts in the topics who have studied thousands of cases. Again, if you're going to ignore expert advice and call the shots on whatever this isn't exactly helpful.
You continue by claiming that "Anyone thinking these shootings are due to 8chan is a fool, plain and simple". See, again, you ignore strong evidence on the history of deplatforming, going way back to right after WWII.
In what world do you expect to have "reasonable debate" if you spout garbage about subjects that you don't even know where the expert consensus is?
Come to Berlin gay pride and enjoy kids walking among naked seniors, progress am I right?
All these are applauded by the lgbt community, publicly, every day. I don't know where you stand morally but these things are definitely way out of my acceptance zone and way past the "let people do what they want". Closing your eyes and saying they don't exists is one step under active support.
> You talk about "a man feeling like a girl", in which you're literally ignoring multiple lifetimes of study of the psychology and clinical evidence, by _very_ qualified experts in the topics who have studied thousands of cases.
I just said these people currently have a huge network of public communities to help them through whatever they go through, same for POCs, they're on the current "good side". Not sure what you're hinting here.
You are quoting garbage websites. This "Life site" page is literally nothing more than hot garbage that is about as good as the Enquirer as far as the validity of its reporting goes.
And the idea that trans and POC have "huge networks of support" has no correspondence with real life. You've ever met real trans people? Clearly not, otherwise you would know how their traumas come from intolerant families that disown them, find no support networks and turn to drugs and prostitution as a means of subsistence. The median life expectancy of a trans person is of 35 years, dying from conditions related to drug abuse, STDs, and psychological issues where abandonment is the primary cause of these.
So before copying a bullshit website that seems unhealthily obsessed with trans people, George Soros, and the signs of the antichrist, I dunno, go do some research and try to distinguish real journalism from garbage. This is not even worth our time debating.
Well, you’re quoting precisely nothing, and if you were to quote anything then who’s to say that’s not also just “hot garbage that is about as good as the Enquirer as far as the validity of its reporting goes”?
I'm well aware of that, but do you happen to know why I have to do that ? Because they're the only ones talking about it (and they're doing a piss poor job at it btw), fortunately there are pics and videos of these events so we can have a glimpse of what's happening. Mainstream medias and "experts" are too busy telling how being fat is healthy and spewing bs stats about the gender pay gap, why would they talk about contrarian ideas ? To get shut off and deplatformed ?
> The median life expectancy of a trans person is of 35 years, dying from conditions related to drug abuse, STDs, and psychological issues where abandonment is the primary cause of these.
Unhealthy behaviors leading to unhealthy behaviors ? Who would have thought.
Do you know what we were telling teenagers looking for a meaning in life in the past ? "Suck it up kiddo it'll get better", and for the vast majority of the time it worked. What do we tell them now ? "Oh my dear, you're simply not in the right body", no wonder they get depressed there is 0 chance of a successful "transition" unless you start before puberty...(and even then you have to go through body mutilation and life long treatments to suppress your natural body processed). When I was 10 I wanted to be a trash trucker driver, at 15 I wanted to be an indiana jones style archaeologist, it was fun for my parents. But somehow if it gets sexual all of a sudden it's DEFCON 1 and you have to comply with their will ?
Feel free to link your experts studies btw, I'm yet to see any of them pointing something out other than "look at all the suicides, you should feel bad".
Who cares, unless the parents are that super controlling "my child is a star" type--which is the only thing that worries me about that situation, who cares if the kid wears a dress and make up.
I know it feels bad when you watch something super cringy and you wish it did not exist, but I don't see anybody shooting up people, which is a feeling that is objectively worse than cringe.
There are videos of dudes having sex on gay pride carts in broad day light in major cities.
Let's not pretend that the gay community isn't the most promiscuous community (stds stats, amount of partners stats, &c.) and that half naked dudes in bdsm outfit are "non-sexual". The whole thing is about "sexual liberation". It's not even about being gay or not, it's about decency, I'd have the same discourse for a "straight pride" with straight people having similar behaviors.
> Widespread propaganda about kids sexualization/abuse and genitalia mutilation on these platform is A-ok and a cause for celebration.
Citation needed.
I see Facebook/Twitter/Reddit in the unenviable role as having to police minimum local standards across the world's largest online community. They also have to do it while running a publicly traded company in the USA, which means they need to optimize for minimum moderation costs.
> You literally can't express any opinions going against the current flow of ideas without being labelled as hostile
s/going against the current flow of ideas //
I straddle the line between US liberal/conservative depending on the issue. I've been labeled lot of things by both the majority opinion holders and minority opinion holders. It doesn't matter. People need to put on their big boy/girl/whatever pants and realize it doesn't matter what you are labeled. People call you far worse behind your back... the internet just allows you to hear it and reduces peoples' social filters.
> Anyone thinking these shootings are due to 8chan is a fool, plain and simple
Citation needed.
I treat {4Chan, 8Chan, 9Gag, etc} as a proxy for "long tail opinion holders" who gather in the same place.
I'm sympathetic to the idea that being a social outlier with no outlet for discourse/self-importance/identity/hope is strongly correlated with those extremism/terrorism, but that doesn't preclude 8Chan from being part of that process of extremification.
I listened to a podcast over the weekend about a Philipino guy who worked as a Facebook moderator. He quit for many reasons, but among them PTSD, nightmares, attraction to sexual images of children, attraction to bestiality, etc. He might well have had those same tendencies before he moderated for Facebook, but the exposure to that content was what accelerated his problems.
The Chans are an exposure channel. They probably help in popularizing fringe ideas, but they also attract window shoppers looking for identity and an ideology that social misfits might be willing to try on. Shutting down the window shopping isn't nothing (although I will admit I don't know that it can be done while preserving the intent of the principle of Free Speech).
You are literally comparing "the chans" to the vile shit Facebook moderators have to endure?? The latter is about an order of magnitude worse, it's literally the worst of Facebook, a constant pressure hose of horrors. People don't need fucking black and white filters to be able to browse 4chan and you don't get PTSD from it. That Facebook moderation feed does.
It's kind of sick, seeing Americans here all ignore the elephant in the room and go "yeah it might be that website" :facepalm:
A whole communications platform just got censored by a private US company (who should NOT have that power), that's pretty big thing. Maybe we should talk about that.
That shooting happened because of America's gun laws and the general way it's been squeezing the life and joy out of its lower and middle class populations. There's some really bleak shit going on there, lives are empty, people are hopeless and fear the future. That's it. The whole world knows it and sees it. Nothing really relevant for HN, either.
> The Chans are an exposure channel. They probably help in popularizing fringe ideas, but they also attract window shoppers looking for identity and an ideology that social misfits might be willing to try on. Shutting down the window shopping isn't nothing (although I will admit I don't know that it can be done while preserving the intent of the principle of Free Speech).
Yeah but no. These "chans" are international places. People outside the US also go ideological window-shopping or hang out around fringes. But somehow the worst we got was, I think years ago .. when a guy (physically) broke into a live news broadcast with a fake gun and then .. nothing much happened and he was taken away. He claimed he was doing it for a hacker collective, or something.
I'm not really sure what site inspired this dude again, but imagine Cloudfare banning it over this.
The difference seems clear as day/night to me, no?
That situation in the live news studio had one glaringly obvious thing missing from it, that saved it from possibly becoming a tragedy and it wasn't a fucking website.
Take away the website, however, and there is a chance this guy would not have gotten inspired by something else, MAYBE--but you still got all those other mass shootings to deal with, USA. I'm totally looking forward reading about the drop in gun violence now that Cloudflare did something about it. I get it, they felt powerless and someone had to do something. But they better hope that the results of their actions were indeed worth the means. It's a pretty brazen act of censorship, that IMHO doesn't weigh up at all to the limited effect it'll have on fringe crazies bouncing hateful ideas off one another.
How do you figure that works? Do we wake up, fully equipped with a developed mind but zero preferences and experiences and then ponder which of the available ideologies we would like to subscribe to?
I think this is shaky ground. Plenty of people think LGBT "choose" their sexuality (though I do not). White supremacists, religious people etc think their beliefs reflect objective reality, which is clearly not something they can choose.
I think making "you chose this" a valid reason to censor/attack/etc. something opens the door to some pretty dangerous things, since it's not difficult to accuse things of being a choice that aren't.
The accusation of "bigotry" is a common and entirely predictable, tiresome move for those without the academic goods. Why not read the actual research? Nope, sorry/not sorry, the prolix pop culture wishful thinking that homosexuality is innate is fiction https://www.thenewatlantis.com/docLib/20160819_TNA50Sexualit...
I didn't say the New Atlantis was a peer-reviewed publication, and I know the difference. But did you read it? The NA is a summary of the peer reviewed publications and journals such as The Annals of Statistics, Biometrics, American Journal of Political Science, New England Journal of Medicine, Journal of the American Statistical Association, and American Journal of Public Health.
So, nope, it simply won't do to sniff "not peer reviewed!" in response to this and think it's some kind of slam dunk that supports your biases regarding human sexuality.
I don't see how white supremacy is any different than what the Black Panthers promote. Or any identity movement, for that matter. I'm sure there are some pretty vile Asian ones. Do you reject all of them?
Before you excoriate 8chan, I will point out that I have found all kinds of interesting information on there that isn't some salacious nature. For example, someone posted "confidential" FBI documents outlining that all conservatives are now considered white nationalists/ fascists/white supremacists and how they are a huge terrorism threat and how to rate them. It's not surprising to see it, but there it was in black and white what our government's real intentions for its own people are.
Folks, if you can't see the bullshit that is going on right now, I can't help you. If you truly fear online speech, then why are you in technology in the first place? If technology isn't going to free us from statist coercion but rather further enslave us, what good is it?
Ah yes, the enlightened centrist who equates white supremacist not welcome at businesses to ethnic minorities not welcome at businesses. You guys sure are the real victims here.
Does this start to open CloudFlare up to legal issues for all the sites they host? I was under the impression they were more of an infrastructure/utility type service, and weren't liable for what took place, the same way gun manufacturers aren't liable for shootings or gas stations for car crashes.
But if now they're manually deciding who goes on their network and who doesn't, it seems like they're more responsible for everything else that's on it that they allow.
They're a private company and I support them choosing to do business with whoever they want, but I thought there was some sort of legal distinction if they were totally agnostic to what travels over their wires. Is that not the case?
They've kicked people off their service before for content based reasons (eg, Daily Stormer), so this changes nothing. In any case:
> I thought there was some sort of legal distinction if they were totally agnostic to what travels over their wires. Is that not the case?
Not as far as I'm aware, no. The closest thing I can think of is if they were discriminating based on people's membership in a protected class, eg, if they announced a strict "no female clients" policy. This is clearly vastly different.
From a PR point of view, yes, every time they kick someone off for being bad, the more their failing to kick someone off will be seen as an implicit endorsement. But again, that ship has sailed.
They've also removed sex worker websites (including a forum that was just sex workers talking to each other), but for some reason no one complains about it.
I believe you'll find that this was driven by SESTA/FOSTA, rather than being a discretionary choice by Cloudflare, and if you hang out in the right circles, it gets complained about a lot. (EFF, ACLU, Wikimedia, and many more opposed it.)
I think it's unconstitutional and the worst thing to happen to the internet in many years, as well as one of the worst things to happen to civil liberties (which is a pretty high bar!). Unfortunately, it passed senate 97 votes to 2, which suggests legislative fixes will not be coming soon.
You may be thinking of the "CDA 230" nonsense that will not die, where people claim that companies can't moderate their customers because they'd be liable for what they post.
The opposite is true. CDA 230 makes it clear that companies can moderate their content without becoming responsible for it.
I've never heard anyone claim that companies can't moderate content without becoming responsible for it. I've heard people say that if publishers show themselves to be capable of censoring, then the legal protections should be rescinded and they should decide if they are a platform or a publisher.
The techdirt article I linked cites examples of people doing exactly this.
> If Facebook were to start creating or editing content on its platform, it would risk losing that immunity
and
> If Facebook is going to behave like a media provider, picking and choosing what viewpoints to represent, then it’s hard to argue that the company should still have immunity from the legal constraints that old-media organizations live with.
This is all nonsense. Old-media organizations are protected by CDA 230 just like everyone else: they can host third party content like user comments without being liable for it.
Publishers being able to "censor" is the whole value proposition for having a publisher. You're paying for the NYT because it picks who to publish. Facebook has no special "platform" protections that anyone else doesn't get.
Many, many people seem to think that CDA 230 itself makes a distinction between "platforms" and "publishers". I even replied to someone here in this comment section:
The first one is fair - Vox got it wrong. That vox got it wrong should surprise no one, vox is lowest common denominator agenda driven garbage. \
The second one is asking "should they" - its asking a question not positing a fact.
Should they get immunity for what posted if its clear they have the capacity to censor at will? Why should they and not anyone else on the internet?
CDA makes a distinction between publisher and platform and the talk about this whole issue is that many people are saying that these companies can clearly police their content, and should be liable for it and not specially protected.
The first one was Wired- not Vox- and the second one was claiming in the prior paragraph that "The platforms are immune from such suits under [CDA 230]. The law treats them as a neutral pass-through" which it doesn't. The law specifically says that platforms can moderate any content it deems objectionable.
Where does the CDA make a platform/publisher distinction? What is the definition of the difference, and where is it in the law?
You would think but apparently that doesn't apply anymore. You can control the content and still get the protections of a common carrier.
I just know I'll remember that cloudflare could pull the pulg on my site if one of my users posts something they don't like. I don't think I can recommend their service to any of clients because of that.
1,465 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 428 ms ] threadThey didn't post this on Twitter or FB already but every news media person found his manifesto quickly - just like they always do. There will be another 8chan to fill that void soon enough.
It's not necessary for an action to completely stop something bad from happening to be worth doing. It's OK if it just makes it harder.
Even ISIS seemed to have an extensive social media identity despite countless attempts to prevent them from having any platform. Which included plenty of DDOS'ing too.
I’m sure some level of banning and administration makes sense on content sites (not so sure about DNS/WAF hosts) but I’m curious at what point it becomes “feel good” slacktivism while these guys just hop onto the next forum.
Yep!
And, more importantly, by making it even marginally harder to find this shit online, we can dramatically decrease the number of people who get exposed to, and radicalized by, it.
I’m sure some level of banning and administration makes sense on content sites (not so sure about DNS/WAF hosts) but I’m curious at what point it becomes “feel good” slacktivism while these guys just hop onto the next forum.
They do, but it's not a smooth transition and sudden forced migration presents an infiltration opportunity because there's an avalanche of new user IDs with no way to verify them. Of course there are ways around this, like challenge/response phrases, callbacks to famous threads that people would remember, user IDs that can be checked back against contemporary screenshots etc., but it's pretty leaky.
8chan totally still exists. All CloudFlare did was essentially erase the link between their IP and "8chan.org".
It took them probably 15 minutes to "go back up", if they hadn't already been abandoning CF anyway.
You massively overestimate law enforcement interest and ability, and massively underestimate the technical abilities of teenagers.
Indeed. The scary proposition is that it's competence.
And you really, _really_, don't want it to be.
If you have a place in which the common discourse includes hundreds of people saying "i'm going to murder someone tomorrow" in a mostly anonymous format, it's not really something you can follow up on without opening up an entire can of first amendment issues (I say this as a very pro-big government belief structure).
8chan's very nature prevents it from being useful.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/12/cloudflares-ceo-...
Obviously not supporting these sites, but I think an argument can be made for at least being _consistent_ about whether or not you're going to allow only things you find morally reasonable on your service.
So far he has been a "free speech absolutist" aside from the Daily stormer (economic extremes) and 8chan (public safety extremes). They're just defining what their identity as a cloud provider is. There's nothing morally inconsistent about discovering where your limits and tolerance are.
Both actually share a large cross section of users. The Daily Stormer was named after storm troopers. It is a cesspool of white supremacists. The same problem that 8chan's userbase has. I expect we'll see a continued deplatforming of sites which allow that ideology to fester.
Actually it's named after this publication.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Der_Stürmer
So not a "free speech absolutist"
You and the poster I responded to are picking nits with absolutes. Aside from pedantics, is there a problem with wanting to go as far as you can with an idea until you feel like you can't?
Lacking integrity is absolutely a problem! This isn't "pedantic", it's a disgrace. I don't recall AWS ever claiming to be pro free speech yet I also don't recall them banning businesses on a Sunday afternoon because Jeff Bezos was in a bad mood.
> I also don't recall them banning businesses on a Sunday afternoon because Jeff Bezos was in a bad mood.
I was trying to be generous by assuming the real reason was economic pressure, but yes the way this is worded makes it sound very unprofessional.
> Lacking integrity is absolutely a problem! This isn't "pedantic", it's a disgrace.
AWS can be the honey badger b/c they can afford to not give a crap. I get the impression Cloudflare doesn't have the same luxury yet. I very much admire Lavabit for folding the company on a moral stance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavabit, but not everyone can afford to send employees packing for their belief. You are correct, he compromised, but let's admit 99% of us have limits.
What's really going on is similar to what we saw with radicalization in extremist Islam forums. A large group of young, usually lonely and frustrated men, disconnected socially, often with no hope of financial status advancement, find solace and community in online forums with like people, and then act to self-reinforce some of the community's worse inclinations, blaming their predicament on other types of people, dehumanizing them. The irony with these forums are, some people on those forums are not racist or pedophiles, but edge-lording on purpose, but other people can't discern the difference and are swept up and manipulated by other people who get off on manipulating people.
When I was a teen in the 80s, I nerdy and disconnected from school, but back then, if you used a computer, you were fairly involved in hacking, and a lot of community revolved around constructive activities, so whatever loneliness or ostracism geeks felt, it was often distracted by optimism and excitement over technology.
It seems these days, you have the online community in these forums, but it is mostly consumptive, not constructive, or rather, what is constructive is memes and racist, xenophobic, extremist screeds.
I really worry about what's happening as more and more people are made idle and out of the labor force, rather than seek face to face community activity, will eventually retreat to their online bunkers?
This is something a large number of people don't seem to realize. The parallels between Islamic extremism and this white supremacists extremism should jump out, and both should be approached the same way. It's sick people offering a sort of belonging to disaffected young men.
As the article states, it's very likely 8chan is just going to use a competitors service so it's unlikely to cause them much disruption, but at least Cloudflare isn't going to feel terrible for providing Internet services to the cesspit that formed the mind of the next radical that's going to commit mass murder and announce it there.
That will not, of course, go away even if 8chan were to collapse under LOIC fire later tonight, but it will undermine the infrastructure and hinder recruiting.
http://comp.social.gatech.edu/papers/cscw18-chand-hate.pdf
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20607945
I like to think I'm a pretty talented engineer. I've avoided using Cloudflare and I've avoided applying to them because of their wishy-washy stance on censorship. They are a utility. PG&E doesn't terminate electricity service based on what was said on a property. So too should it be for data services. Otherwise, you get people lying and doing false flags to get their enemies kicked off the internet.
They are not even close to a utility.
> Late Sunday, following hours of public criticism, Cloudflare announced a major reversal, saying 8chan had gone too far and “repeatedly proven itself to be a cesspool of hate.” Its access to Cloudflare services was scheduled to terminate at midnight Pacific time, making it more vulnerable to a potentially crippling cyberattack.
"Late Sunday, following hours of public criticism, Cloudflare announced a major reversal, saying 8chan had gone too far and “repeatedly proven itself to be a cesspool of hate.” Its access to Cloudflare services was scheduled to terminate at midnight Pacific time, making it more vulnerable to a potentially crippling cyberattack."
On the other hand, we don't live in that world, and I don't know how well it would work in practice if we did. In this world, corporations and governments have enormous power. Cloudflare has made it clear that it will use that power in a fairly limited and restrained way, but it will use it as it sees fit.
Given that, this seems like a reasonable exercise of that power, and that's about the best we can hope for.
Maybe, this event may become the precedent for all future hosting providers of unpopular opinions and where denial of service attacks become used against these hosting providers. Losing protection from anti-ddos service(s) becomes a process to eliminate the unpopular opinions being expressed.
I think this is dangerous recourse and even if there are competitor services like cloudfare. There are limits in services available and state actors can understand this problem. Then make it impossible for unpopular opinions to be expressed by either orchestrating what's needed to get the anti-ddos services to resent their customers or by other means.
Me personally, I'm alright with 8chan being deleted from the internet but I don't think that will even solve the problem. People with poor quality of life will continue being radicalized and do these acts of revenge in their eyes against a system that made them live in pain (somehow unjust to their views). I think we just need to improve quality of life for people equally without leaving some people left behind because of whatever circumstances. Otherwise people feel the need to leave with sometimes a couple bangs.
Maybe it won't!
I feel like every time a controversial site gets shut down message boards are flooded with slippery slope arguments, but by and large I haven't seen it ever transpire.
How many controversial topics can we recall that we lived through and where they became accepted overtime? What medium was used at the time and was it the popular communication method for the time. I'm sure historically there was a similar fight with what mediums were available at the time. Burning books or just killing someone who speaks out.
The internet can be the only method nowadays where people with little finances can make a loud enough voice be heard and there are still unpopular views I'm worried won't ever get accepted if people are not being cautious about throwing away measures. That's why the slippery slope argument is worth me typing. Even if maybe it won't!
Reddit was notoriously infested with white supremacist subs, jailbait subs, pics of dead people subs, and more, and they were all brought up to the admins many times, and the admins never took any action on this hateful content until CNN et al started writing articles about it.
It's not entirely unlike this situation with Cloudflare, really. These companies talk a big game about their principles and morals, but at the end of the day the only principle they strictly adhere to is the principle of public backlash.
Should we ban all pro-abortion subreddits as well because they promote murder of unborn children?
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dX4dDh-EGyI
I think the wider demonetization is part of a cynical attempt to sabotage non-publisher media generally, it’s not an accidental side effect. There’s a scorched earth campaign by certain activists at Vox, Media Matters, and even CNN to contact advertisers en masse and essentially threaten that they are considering naming the advertiser in a hit piece about objectionable content. They aren’t dumb - they know the fallout will affect independent journalists and media of all politics.
Btw, the only reason I feel the needs to share my thoughts is because I have an unpopular opinion myself. Assisted death should become available for people that desire it. There are some sites I view that have resources for people that are ending their life and these sites suffer denial of service attacks. They started using cloudflare recently.
It does _not_ mean that a hosting company has to host it or that a CDN has to optimize it or that a search company has to rank it or that an ad-network has to monetize it. Each of those players is free to do what they think is best with their time, resources, etc.; which often includes thinking of what "the public" will think of them doing (or not doing) a thing.
Freedom does not mean that I have the "right" to be heard or the "right" to be amplified—either as much as the next person or at all.
The net, as in a network of computers, is quite close to free. Being a part of a society is not. Ted Kaczynski was not arrested for writing manifestos beyond the pale of normative capitalism from a self-built cabin in Montana. He was arrested for sending bombs. The moment one person freely decides to harmfully affect others, those others can do something about it.
It seems much of the hand-wringing about freedom—when we talk about the internet and corporations—is that extremist speech does not have access to the same megaphone, the same means of monetization (and therefore survival). And that…well that's what living in a society is all about.
Are there bad parts about tech as we see it today? Absolutely! But it hardly seems like the problem is "not enough shit is allowed on the internet." I don't know, maybe I'm wrong.
Should that mean the water company can cut your water off for criticizing them?
Should that mean that a bank can refuse to give you a loan, because you said something bad, even if your credit is more than acceptable?
-------------------------------
Remember this: its the extremist that the law is made around. And soon enough, the law will be wrapped around non-extremists and used as let another tool of influence and control. The worst part is that anyone who speaks against this sort of law is seen to be defending the extremists, and is seen as a despicable person - yet the criticizers never stop to think about the average Joe and Jane.
Banks can absolutely decide not to do business you, for any reason that's not explicitly forbidden (protected classes, etc.)
No. Because they are a public utility and that would be a violation of the first amendment.
> Should that mean that a bank can refuse to give you a loan, because you said something bad, even if your credit is more than acceptable?
Yes. Because they are a private institution and not obligated to do business with you.
There are very simple rules at play here...
If all of the major ISPs launch their own email competitor and then go on to block Google, would you be singing the same tune? "It's okay because AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, and Charter are private institutions and are not obligated to do business with Google"? What if it turns out that the AT&T CEO is a Trump supporter, and he decides that anyone who has AT&T as an ISP will no longer be able to access any news site other than Fox News? "It's okay because AT&T is a private company and has no obligation to do business with the Washington Post"?
The entire argument for net neutrality is based on the premise that sometimes even private companies become so big that they become very similar to 'public utilities' and it is absolutely in the public interest to force those companies to not arbitrarily filter whatever they feel like.
You can argue that Cloudflare, or a bank, or whoever doesn't fit this definition, but you can't both be for something like net neutrality while simultaneously spouting this argument that "private companies can do whatever they want". We have literally centuries of laws that specifically say that no, companies cannot do whatever they want just because they are private.
An example right of way agreement between a municipality and Cable company: https://www.avondalelibrary.org/Home/ShowDocument?id=7086
Summary of right of law statutes in different states:
https://www.ntia.doc.gov/legacy/ntiahome/staterow/rowtable.p...
>but you can't both be for something like net neutrality while simultaneously spouting this argument that "private companies can do whatever they want".
One can definitely pick and choose what you want to support, all those laws did exactly the same. Charities are 'picked and chosen' not to pay taxes, even though they are basically private companies. I don't see a contradiction between supporting net neutrality and supporting Cloudflare's decision.
>We have literally centuries of laws that specifically say that no, companies cannot do whatever they want just because they are private
We have literally centuries of law stating that 'Neo-Nazi White Supremacists' isn't a protected class, hence can be refused service.
If and when this is abused by companies causing real problems which society thinks is unacceptable, new laws will be passed restricting discriminating against neo-Nazis.
Maybe write to your local congressman and senator asking them to pass a law forcing Cloudflare to serve neo-Nazis.
And Cloudflare's business is similarly dependent on these very same rights of way and spectrums. So why shouldn't they be subject to the same restrictions?
Hint: it's because the argument for net neutrality has nothing to do with the ISP's usage of ROW or public spectrum, and everything to do with the effect that it would have on society if ISPs were allowed to arbitrarily filter whatever they want.
What's funny about this is that I actually don't need to make this argument, because Cloudflare's CEO Matthew Prince has already made it for me. The entire blog post that he wrote [1] when Daily Stormer was taken off CF is one big explanation of why companies like Cloudflare having the ability to arbitrarily filter sites is bad. That didn't seem to stop him, I guess.
> Due Process requires that decisions be public and not arbitrary. It's why we've always said that our policy is to follow the guidance of the law in the jurisdictions in which we operate. Law enforcement, legislators, and courts have the political legitimacy and predictability to make decisions on what content should be restricted. Companies should not.
1: https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-we-terminated-daily-stormer/
Did Cloudflare sign a document like this one?
https://www.avondalelibrary.org/Home/ShowDocument?id=7086
Then 8chan should sue them in court and win.
Why didn't Daily Stormer sue them?
In order for them to win, you'll have to ignore the fact that when they created a CloudFlare account, they agreed that CloudFlare had the right to terminate such services for any or no reason.
I'm saying this not because I disagree with your position, but mainly because this confusion was dominating the debate in the US and was to some extent a deliberate strawman pushed by the opponents of net neutrality.
A lot of pro net neutrality people didn’t really understand what they were arguing for, I think, since the same people will turn around and argue that ISPs should be able to censor content they don’t like.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_Open_Internet_Order_2010
“A person engaged in the provision of fixed broadband Internet access service, insofar as such person is so engaged, shall not block lawful content, applications, services, or non-harmful devices, subject to reasonable network management.“
The point remains that the OP mischaracterized net neutrality. What is important is that net neutrality only concerns transport of IP packets. Content providing companies and web site owners can moderate, block, or censor content as they like and as they deem fit. They have done so in the past under net neutrality, do so in countries with net neutrality laws, and are doing it now in the US without net neutrality.
The two issues are frequently mixed up, hence my comment.
On a side note, I've never heard anyone argue that ISPs should block content, that seems like a strawman to me, but I guess if you just search hard enough you can find someone on the Internet who argued for that nonsense.
> lawful content
Good point, that's compatible with restrictions of freedom of speech due to declaring certain kind of content illegal, and clearly illustrates that the two issues are different from each other. Yet people confuse them again and again, and additionally almost always base their arguments on a false dichotomy or on fallacious slippery slope arguments.
The logical end to deplatforming is arguing that ISPs should be able to block or decline customers based on the content they are hosting. Otherwise a customer can buy business-class internet and host their immoral content themselves on a server farm in their home, which takes away the whole point of deplatforming which is to make the content no longer available on the internet.
Not at all. That's an obvious strawman.
You're mischaracterizing what's going on there. If I run a company, it is my right not to make business with radical hate groups and terrorists. They will be someone else's problem then.
That's exactly the reason that Cloudflare has given, not some nebulous talk about "deplatforming".
> which is to make the content no longer available on the internet
LOL. That is decidedly not the purpose of deplatforming, as the word "de-platforming" readily suggests.
> the FBI could already have had them pulled offline just like they do to ISIS websites
It is obvious to me as an outside observer that the FBI applies justice selectively. Domestic terrorism is underrated. Of course, 8chan could be raided and closed for the same reasons as ISIS websites are raided and closed. The laws are there and 8chan could easily be considered aiding and fostering domestic terrorism. The laws are just not applied in this case.
It's also kind of 'reasonable' not to apply them as harshly, since US judges and juries suffer from the same bias. They are unlikely to judge of some deranged gun nut that he was planning or aiding a terrorist attack. They are highly likely to judge of some deranged ISIS sympathizer that he was planning or aiding a terrorist attack. Police authorities make the call on what to pursue and what not to pursue based on the prospects of a successful trial.
This type of thing is possibly one of the hardest ethical issues to tackle. On the one hand, I don't support racists and fascists at all. But on the other hand, I recognize the potential damage in carving out these exceptions in free speech. As social mores change, the ideas of "acceptable" free speech may change, and we need to be cognizant of the ways that these exceptions could be abused long term. Otherwise, we're just setting up future generations for a collapse of the concept of freedom of speech.
I think the answer to solving hate and bigotry goes much, much deeper than preventing people from speaking their hateful and bigoted views. All that's going to do is sweep the problem under the rug, and eventually that problem will come back out some orders of magnitude worse. Perhaps we could do things like make it illegal to teach kids hate and bigotry? But then you've got the entirety of America mad at you because you're "telling people how to raise their kids". Mere advocacy against bullying and hate doesn't really seem to be working.
I think we'll see better gains in this area when we stop trying to find the first thing we can to "blame" these mass shooting on, and arguing endlessly about what that cause is (guns, video games, unrestricted freedom of speech, etc). We need to dig deep. I think if we understood more on the topic of mental health, we'd have a better chance at understanding these situations.
Well, it's been going on for years in the Netherlands, where the Pirate Bay, almost all of its proxies, and a couple of non-TPB torrent sites are being blocked at the ISP level. It used to be a relatively simple to circumvent DNS block (the ISPs didn't really want to, either), but they've gotten better at it and now if it's blocked, the site is either gone, unless a specific proxy for it exist (or you use a VPN).
To tie it back to the US again, the reason this happened is because of a Dutch lobbying group (Brein) that is funded by and works directly for the gigantic US content industry and rightholders (there are maybe a few Dutch artists attached to them , but they are a mere drop in budget).
Incitement to specific violence and planning thereof, against specific individuals, is not lawful content.
> Yes. Because they are a private institution and not obligated to do business with you.
That's some pretty strong dissonance there. Here in Indiana, the utilities AND banks are all private entities. And there's no actual state or federal law that would prevent a utility from cutting utilities for "being and speaking of white nationalism". I chose my examples carefully - all are much more regulated than some Walmart or Target or Amazon.
My larger discussion was that over very corporate autonomy. Who made them arbiters of what language was acceptable? Why should infrastructure companies be decision makers of what is said online? Years ago, we restricted the phone companies from doing that very thing - and they wanted dearly to forbid classes of speech. Yet somehow when it's "on the interwebz" we throw those ideas and rules out, all so that someone can make a bigger pile of dollars.
Don't forget, cloudflare is a US company. There's absolutely 0 reason why they can't be considered an infrastructure company and subject to common carrier rules as well. Or the counter-offer is they can be responsible for speech over their network. I doubt they'd like that either. After all, they're still hosting piles of stressers and ddos merchants.
I don't see a dissonance. If and when banks and utilities start cutting off neo-Nazis, the public and politicians may find that unpalatable and pass laws restricting it. Or may not. The fact that isn't happening right now means no unnecessary laws are required.
If and when society and politicians feel that Cloudflare shouldn't be able to not serve 8chan, it will pass a law doing so. Call your congressman and senator.
>Years ago, we restricted the phone companies from doing that very thing - and they wanted dearly to forbid classes of speech
Sounds interesting, got any references to read?
It's likely there's one (or at most, a small handful) of each utility enjoying a state-supported monopoly, even if it's technically run by a private company. The same is not true for banks - I can sign up for one of hundreds of nationwide or online banks even if all the local ones decide I'm an ass.
Tell this to the bakery refusing to make a cake for a same sex marriage.
No, [1] the bakery that paid $135,000 in fines, went bankrupt, and is stll bound by the lower courts decision because SCOTUS only remanded the case back to a lower court.
And yeah, they might ultimately win... if you want to call that winning.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/06/17/scotus-lower-court-should-re...
Wrong, they are not bound by the lower court decision, because the Supreme Court vacated the judgement and remanded the case for further consideration in light of the SCOTUS ruling in Masterpiece Cakeshop (as stated in the order linked from the source you linked), because that decision set relevant precedent which the lower court did not consider in its judgement (for timing reasons, as the lower court decision predates Masterpiece Cakeshop, I believe.)
I am NOT wrong...
... this case is yet to be heard. Therefore; they are still presently bound by the original decision.
PS: And they are still Bankrupt.
Certain banks and their services (e.g. wire transfer), as well as payment providers should be treated like public utilities, especially when they have quasi-monopolies. The same for ISPs in areas in which there is only one or two, and other large companies with quasi-monopolies like Google, Apple and Microsoft. I don't think this applies to companies like Reddit or Cloudflare, though, for which there are easy and widely used substitutes.
Because a big reason why I think this is bad is because I thought there are in fact no realistic alternatives to Cloudflare's protection.
If there are alternatives, then I am also in the camp of "okay they can decide who to do business with or not".
But I was under the impression that, if you are a controversial website, at a certain size (not even that big, depending on your enemies) you are likely to draw DDoS attacks of a severity that only Cloudflare can realistically protect against. The DDoS attacks being relatively cheap for whoever orders them.
Your argument fails to credibly address the situation at hand.
By the way, some states are now recognizing that political affiliation needs to be a protected class as well: https://www.legalmatch.com/law-library/article/political-aff.... It may not be in keeping with modern progressive thought but is certainly in the spirit of classical liberalism as well as an important first step in depolarizing the country.
A person who believes black people should be killed or kicked out of the U.S. can always change their mind, and they should.
Advocating bigotry or violence is not a political affiliation nor is it a protected class.
In practice, nobody cares to protect bigots and a lot of people want to protect gays, immigrants, women, etc. It is troubling that we only protect certain classes of people since maybe the next group that comes along after the current group of bigots will actually deserve protection but the arguments we built to allow the lack of protection for bigots will be used to deny protection to that group.
Bigotry has cloaked itself in the mantle of victim and you've totally fallen for it.
Roman Christians refused to worship the emperor, destabilizing the social order, and therefore needed to be thrown to the lions to protect society.
Atheists couldn’t be trusted because they didn’t believe in hell, and therefore would act immorally, and so should be banned from positions of power (this is actually in a couple of US state constitutions!)
(And of course, the same arguments were used in reverse later on as different groups got power)
I won’t shed any tears for 8chan who are a bunch of immoral scum, but I know these same arguments will be deployed to censor religious minorities and others in the future. Hopefully they are less appealing targets.
These people are real, and actually causing harm. Or do you argue that it is not the case?
The western Roman Empire fell apart a hundred years after Christianity became the state religion. Some historians blame tensions among christian schisms in Egypt/the Middle East for the byzantine empire losing those regions to the Arab invasion.
(All I’m saying with the above is that the justifications seemed plausible and reasonable to the educated people of the time. Read Pliny’s letter to Trajan seeking counsel for what to do about Christians, for example)
I think the answer is more speech, not less. Any exception you carve out will be abused in the future, based on the history of humankind and the behavior of governing entities throughout.
Take these exceptions to freedom of speech, add to them a codified framework for equity (which some are pushing for), and you're laying the groundwork for a society like that seen in Harrison Bergeron.
I suppose you don't find historical things like McCarthyism very worrying, given how easily you are to think your principle of discriminating by choice separates what you judge to be good from what you judge to be bad. But do you really trust every imaginable leader with such a power?
Access means people who WANT this content can get it easily. If you're making it harder for people who voluntarily choose to view 8chan content, you're restricting access.
Amplification means getting content in front of new eyeballs that wouldn't have otherwise seen it. E.g. if Facebook determined that given this user's age, race, zip-code, and favorite TV shows they might be in interested in this racist-meme sharing group that one of their friends joined, and then surfaces that content, that's amplification.
Which a CDN does as well. If a user visits the site during peak demand and the site without a CDN can't handle it, the user doesn't get the site in front of their eyeballs. With a CDN, they might. Analogy also works during DDoS attacks. Both assume that the user doesn't have infinite memory and patience to keep trying (because that's a realistic assumption).
"Amplification" has be overloaded. You are talking about a viral marketing definition, whereas CDNs are a hardware+software force multiplier for performance.
Whether this makes them reasonable, time will tell. Full marks to Cloudflare for so eloquently addressing this and covering themselves with as much grace as they could muster. If one reads between the lines, censorship is coming. This isn't different from what jgrahamc said a few months back in the news [1].
Signals a new era for Cloudflare, going from protector to arbitrator [2], for better or for worse.
[0] for instance, it was and still is a crime to be a minority in some countries.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19774347
[2] Not an expert, but it'd be nice if they allowed 30 to 90 day time period before termination, rather than doing it overnight?
Do you have examples in mind?
I have no doubt that this is the case, but I can't think of any examples.
They kicked off The Daily Stormer 2 years ago. I'm not sure anything changed today.
A government funded Reddit?
Which government would fund it? How would it be run?
If not government funded, a non-profit, like c-span.
Critical thinking skills still seem to be a rarity.
Oh, so you are in favor of shutting down all army related sites? Well, many pacifist would probably agree ..
And governemnts openly advertise for it. On websites, (even in schools). And private enthusiasts maintain forums where army people discuss about the current wars and how to better kill the current enemy. Etc. Etc.
Not necessarily. The purpose of armies is to win wars. If it was possible to win wars without killing people they wouldn't kill people. In fact they are trying to minimize collateral damage. It's different with white supremacists. They have a direct interest in killing people. There is no collateral damage for them, which is also why they do mass shootings and the army usually doesn't.
Some really do want to kill people, but then again would you deny that the army or even the police doesn't get their fair share of these people?
I don't know the answer, but I know that indiscriminate restrictions on freedom of speech aren't the answer.
It saddens me that this paraphrased prose I'm about to write even has to exist.
First they came for the Nazis, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Nazi.
Then they came for the racists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a racist.
Then they came for the bigots, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a bigot.
Then they came for the rich, and I did not speak out— Because I was not rich.
Then they came for the religious, and I did not speak out— Because I was not religious.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
I don't, so I value it very much. There were attrocities in my countries in the name of common sense on the other hand.
Even if intuitive, censorship isn't an answer to anything.
Regardless of the reason people visit these places, the moment they get external pressure, their believes get vindicated. We see a large surge in issues with these communities since we got on our little censorship trip. It is just plainly the wrong move to make.
There have been Nazis on the internet since shortly after its inception. But random people going out and shooting crowds in this frequency is a new phenomenon.
Historically censorship has always been applied for the right reasons of course.
Everyone here wants that perfect idealistic and pure world, unfortunately that's now the world we are given. Problem is many here want to just treat the world we have as the idealistic model world as if there is no difference.
That's a fairly simple metric. So you're saying we can finally shut down Twitter?
https://youtu.be/n2Gu7NqsCfg
It can be checked through lawsuit -- 8chan could conceivably sue Cloudflare under numerous doctrines, starting with breach of promise / breach of contract.
Another service provider could step up, as was the case with Daily Stormer, and is extensively commented upon in Prince's commentary, and provide services.
Regulatory or legal procedures could be established to specifically address this situation or provide redress.
Public outcry, market sanctions, or labour actions might be taken against providers who exercise such power in manners which are seen as morally reprehensible. For similar examples, see Google employees over Dragonfly or Edleman's emplyee backlash over a contract with a border-wall services company.
The question to be asked, the question we all have to ask, is whether or not individuals, groups, companies, or inchoate movements which are themselves dedicated to abolition or denial of civil order and rule of law are themselves deserving of its full protections in pursuing those ends. And a considerable case can be made for "no".
You clearly are okay with it because you are posting on a forum with unchecked, active moderation.
As if "The Net" is a perfect, neutral, self-supporting entity that behaves with mathematic predictability rather than a projection of the chaotic human society on which its existence depends.
There is a widespread habit among futurists and technologists, perhaps arising from an appreciation for semantic economy and the anonymizing instinct to downplay associations between oneself and one's assertions, to use the passive voice when concocting reductive maxims of this sort.
I believe many of the moral blind spots of technocratic thinking are connected to the peculiar tendency - revealed by this passive voice framing habit - to overlook or outright dismiss the role that human inputs play in the complex systems futurists propose as solutions to human problems.
Internet was not designed in an adversarial model.
Look at the graphs reporting on racism and the surge of terror.
They basically revived nationalistic movements for clicks. Not wanting to reverse cause and effect but there is ample evide ce that the call for censorship massivle accelerated occurrences like shootings.
That is interesting, but just saying that it is so doesn't lend any credibility to the conclusion. If there is ample evidence, surely you should be able to present it?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydra_effect
http://tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations
Correct me if I am wrong, but Cloudflare is the only serious option against heavy modern DoS attacks, right?
Cause if you can go somewhere else, then sure Cloudflare do it's thing. But if you can't ... then that is way too much power for a random company to hold the gate over any kind of controversial group, anywhere on the political, cultural or global spectrum. Because we really needed another US corporation with runaway power, that'll balance things.
What does "lawless by design" mean?
It's a euphemism for sites that are not censored and still allow free speech. Matthew Prince used to support freedom of speech but he's abandoned that concept a while back.
That is pretty obviously 'lawless by design'.
How is this implemented?
Sure I imagine they could go db diving and ban content manually, but they don't want to.
By throwing up their hands and claiming that it's too hard to implement.
8ch is not running a highly sophisticated software stack. (Quite honestly, their code [1] is pretty terrible -- it's a bunch of frameworkless, hacked-together PHP.) Nothing about their setup is especially elaborate or unusual; at best, "we can't ban content" is an admission of their incompetence.
[1]: https://github.com/OpenIB/OpenIB
It’s not your role to address the “why”. As a platform you’re only obliged to deal with the “what” and the “how”.
They now have one less platform to choose from, and their ability to do whatever it is they do is reduced. That’s a win, because wins don’t need to be absolute to count.
Further, 8chan is run in the Philippines, which would add a lot of complications to any prosecution
Therefore, one could make an argument that DDoS protection is in itself stifling free speech?
In the U.S., at least, one is free to argue any number of ignorant things -- and often does.
Cloudflare often tries to skirt definitions and would love to be seen as a neutral utility, a simple carrier. They're not though. 8chan was their customer. They hosted their DNS, served their content and potentially took their money (I don't know whether 8chan was on their free plan or not, but again that doesn't matter).
https://twitter.com/cwarzel/status/1158193462459506693
When they stopped hosting the neo-Nazi website they mentioned in the link, they made a big deal about how it was a one-off decision and they'll never again again stop serving a website because of its content. Clearly they've changed their minds about that.
What kind of tortured logic do you need to employ where one can only claim to have principles if they hold on to them no matter the cost?
To the downvoters: speech cannot be violent, by definition. Using your own private definition of a word—in this case, violence—without making an explicit disclaimer is inherently deceitful.
If these things constitute violence then lots of violence is completely legal. In fact, you commit violence probably every day when you decide who to be friends with and who not to be friends with, who gets hired, etc.
Would you care to offer a different definition?
Edit: Looks like CEO comment to the Guardian earlier today
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/aug/04/mass-shoo...
By staying idle the conversation would've moved onto gun control, but now they're going to make this round of shootings all about online community policy which IMHO is a futile scapegoat.
The linked article gives their reason.
I don't think anything is gained from political discussion on *chans. Free speech is important, and no company should be legally punished for providing these spaces, but that doesn't mean discouraging them from existing is wrong.
There is an article in the Washington Post about how they're not taking action, and quotes from activists about how they need to take action. Their general counsel had to answer questions from a journalist (on a weekend!) about whether they were taking action. That constitutes significant pressure.
Further, as the article helpfully mentions, they took action before. After you take action once, a failure to take action a second time stops being a principled "we never take action", and starts being, at least partially, a defence of the target. If you drop the Daily Stormer but not 8chan, you're saying, implicitly, that 8chan is not as bad as the Daily Stormer.
This may or may not be true, but it's absolutely not a discussion a company wants to have in the national media in the context of the aftermath of a mass shooting.
> By staying idle
Arguably that was never an option. Today, it's absolutely not an option.
I seriously doubt this, even amongst people who were aware of 8chan before today's spate of articles. After them, I'm pretty sure that 99% of people aware of 8chan blame it for this stuff. Which is also why Cloudflare needs to take action, because it becomes endangered itself.
The founder is saying that it should shut down in the NYT; if that's not a demand for a response, I don't know what is.
edit: I agree that it's a scapegoat, I read militia newsletters circulating in the early 90s, and I'm a collector of old John Bircher stuff. Angry white people will find and act out this model no matter what; it's part of the fabric of the US (and the rest of the West.)
And I'm not saying this hypothetically, those newsletters were in the air leading to OKC. It's actually a good sign that these remain loner shootings by the socially rejected; race riots and pogroms are basically when this happens, but other people on the verge decide to join in. When one of these mass shootings happens, and two or three other people who don't know the shooter come and help, that will be the scary transition for me.
There were a lot of ISIS inspired attacks until ISIS was destroyed. Which effectively shut down the community.
This entire age of frequent mass shootings coincides with the internet and media coverage in general.
I personally believe that this has more to do with the notoriety and following these attacks inspire than gun laws, which have always been very weak.
A lot of these attacks are similar to streaking imo, which basically stopped when the media coverage stopped.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20607635
Mass shootings (generally) don't kill that many people. They are scary, yes, but not that deadly (statistically). Keep it local news, don't publish the name of the killer, basically keep the story away from the front lines.
By turning every mass shooting into a hysterical emotional maelstrom, you signal a green light to all the other potential shooters that this is how you get attention.
The murderers like the idea of their face on TV and their words read to the world. And content that shows chaos.
They don't like stories about the victims portrayed as people with lives, scenes of community comming together, and etc.
NPR did some stories about that research and shortly after you saw more stories about the victims lives.
As pointed out by an ever prescient Charlie Brooker almost ten fucking years ago. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PezlFNTGWv4).
On a similar subject, The Samaritans publish very specific and thorough guidelines as to how to report and publish suicides (https://www.samaritans.org/about-samaritans/media-guidelines...) which are still ignored by many even if unknowingly.
I hate that it has become so common now that I have just stopped clicking to find out more about them. This sort of thing used to horrify me, but nowadays I just feel so numb about it, and that scares me because I feel that I am becoming less empathetic and more cynical.
I'm a US/AU dual citizen and I've visited America quite often over the last few years, and it feels like we hear about the shootings only very slightly less in Australia than in the US. Here they're still front page news, and my co-workers are all talking about them.
Had some friends from San Diego and Houston over in the last few weeks and the commented on how safe Sydney feels, even in the grimy parts. They said that they had a need for situational awareness at all times in the US, but here it feels like it wasn't so necessary. At this point I'm certainly not looking at America as the safe haven of liberal democracy or freedom. I feel freer walking around the streets near public housing here than I do in the financial district in SF. But I guess in America you get to own guns with a high clip capacity, bump stocks, and get to post white nationalist manifestos on message boards? Cool.
I think most people's fears are around unhinged homeless than random shooters.
I had a muslim coworker recently self-radicalize with online ISIS videos and attempt to carry out a truck attack against national harbor. It didn't make it out of local news because the FBI nabbed him a few hours before the attack was to take place.
I think that's a good thing. If the media blew it up, no doubt it would have inspired others to try the same.
I think that definition of 'freedom' has just become so conflated or twisted of late that it really needs to be decoupled from the overall culture and re-examined.
Today I read tweets from pundits and politicians advocating for armed guards to be at every 'peaceful gathering' in order to ensure safety in the US. I grew up in an authoritarian S/E Asian country where there were policemen or soldiers on literally every street corner with an automatic weapon slung around their front and with one hand close to the trigger. This is the very antithesis of 'freedom' to me.
I understand how you might see the tradeoff as worth it - some safety purchased at a cost of freedom. But expanding the list of things that you're not allowed to do doesn't seem like it could possibly be interpreted as expanding freedom. Same argument for drug or alcohol prohibition, religious restrictions, etc.
On the other hand, A whole bunch of civilians in malls would gain the freedom to live.
Freedom would expand.
First, people in America can't own guns that fire '10 rounds a second' without a class 3 firearms license, which is very rare. Such guns are basically never used in mass shootings.
Second, depending on who you need to defend your home from, you may want such a gun. For example, if government or government sanctioned groups are a threat. An example of this is the killings of white farmers in South Africa. Is not just about burglars, it's about gas chambers and political threats. Always has been.
Finally, redefining safety as freedom is a truly absurd abuse of language which wipes out a critical distinction that has been heavily discussed for a long time. If this is what it takes for you to make your point make sense, your point doesn't make sense.
Just admit it. You want more safety. You're willing to give up freedom (or rather, sacrifice the freedom of others) to get it. No need to play ridiculous semantic games to pretend there are no tradeoffs here.
Also very cool and correct of you to support the restriction of high fire rate firearms, like the assault rifles used in all of the mass shootings over the last decade.
You're correct to say safety isn't freedom. However, being alive definitely contributes to freedom. Gun safety and being alive are correlated :) Remember, trigger discipline!
America is definitely an outlier in terms of gun deaths. I don't know much about the situation in South Africa, but it's very interesting you'd consider the death of some white farmers in Africa as pertinent, when the vast majority of political violence in America in the last decade has been perpetrated by white men.
Also interesting that you'd consider government sanctioned groups as a threat. Do you feel like if the brave men and women of the American military were ordered to take your guns, they'd do so? Why do you think so little of our troops?
Do I need to say this? Correlation does not equal causation.
"restriction of high fire rate firearms, like the assault rifles used in all of the mass shootings over the last decade"
I never stated any such support, and that is not the definition of an assault rifle, it's the definition of an automatic weapon.
"it's very interesting you'd consider the death of some white farmers in Africa as pertinent, when the vast majority of political violence in America in the last decade has been perpetrated by white men."
I wasn't talking about 'gun violence', I was talking about political violence; those African killers are not necessarily using guns. You didn't understand me, clearly, but nice to immediately slip in a racism accusation there.
Of course it's perpetrated by whites; they're almost 80% of the population.
"Do you feel like if the brave men and women of the American military were ordered to take your guns, they'd do so?"
The rest of what you're saying seems to be some kind of rhetorical trick; speak plainly if you have a point to make.
I don't have any guns and I never said I was American, but I appreciate the stereotyping and assumptions. Clearly, imagining me as a truck-driving beer-swilling hillbilly, or whatever racist steretotype you prefer, makes it easier to not think about what I'm saying, because you clearly didn't engage with any of it.
It has been backed up by numerous studies which control for that sort of thing.
> I never stated any such support, and that is not the definition of an assault rifle, it's the definition of an automatic weapon.
Awesome, reasonable gun control for all! Don't even need a handgun, really.
You: > I was talking about political violence
Me: > political violence in America
> Of course it's perpetrated by whites; they're almost 80% of the population.
White men are around 35%, so it's weird that this very vocal and pearl-clutching portion of the population commits so many murders per capita.
> speak plainly if you have a point to make
Do you feel like if the brave men and women of the American military were ordered to take your guns, they'd do so?
> makes it easier to not think about what I'm saying
What have you specifically said that you think I'm not thinking about?
Men commit more murders than women (in all places and times).
In America, whites commit less murders than their population percentage. This is true overall, and amongst men only.
You seem to support holding suspicion of entire identity groups on the basis of crime statistics. If so, you must really hate young black men; they're 4% of the population and commit >50% of American murders. Do you? If not, why the obsessive focus on 'white men'?
>Do you feel like if the brave men and women of the American military were ordered to take your guns, they'd do so?
I asked you to make your point and you insist again on rhetorical questions with some kind of implied but unspoken point behind them. But sure, I'll answer: Given that I'm not American and I don't own any guns, it's kind of a bizarre question. If they were ordered to invade my country, I think they would. But that'd be a very different world.
>What have you specifically said that you think I'm not thinking about?
Redefining safety as freedom is absurd.
I know, 90-95% in fact! Which makes it interesting that so often people focus on racial issues, like the plight of white south african farmers, when there's a wayyyy larger correlation with violence of all kinds, and gender. An individual gun owner's reason for owning a gun may focus on some abstract interracial political violence, when they're much more likely to be murderer by a young, poor, man.
> Redefining safety as freedom is absurd.
If some level of safety is required in order to live, freedom is contingent on safety. When you're dead you can't own any guns.
I used to own several (bolt action, 5 shot internal magazine capacity) rifles because I used to competition shoot. I sold them off years ago because I stopped competing and just didn't need them lying around the house, rusting. There you go - freedom to own guns or not.
I could probably also get a handgun if I wanted, but I would need to renew my licence and pass strenuous background checks and prove to the police that I store it safely, AND I have to be a continual member of a gun club and shoot regularly with others so they can assess my gun handling skills (and I guess also my mental state) on a regular basis.
What I absolutely CANNOT do is to go and buy a semi automatic gun with a magazine capacity to slaughter an entire school room full of kids without having to reload. What the heck would _any_ civilian in a peaceful country want/need such a weapon? On the flipside, it also means I am free to enjoy the fact that my kids can go to school every day with a less than .001% chance that some maniac will walk into their classroom and mow them down.
To close off this post, and to end that illusion of "I can protect my family with a gun" hero storyline - About 3 years ago we had someone break into our house in the middle of the night. I was woken up by the sound of my son yelling at someone to get the fk out of his room so I jumped out of bed and grabbed a small wooden baton that I keep under our bed.
When I threw open our bedroom door, I saw a shadowy figure run past it in the dark corridor. To this day, I am glad I grabbed the baton instead of an (imagined, non existent) loaded gun, because my first instinct was let fly at the fleeing figure, only to realise a few seconds later that it was my own son, giving chase to the intruder who was fleeing ahead of him. I could have killed my own son if I had a gun in my hand in that split second of rage and confusion.
Later, we found out that the police nabbed the intruder, who turned out to be a 15 year old boy that lived a couple of streets away. Had I shot HIM, I would have had to live with the thought that I had killed someone's child. I cannot do that. I prefer to live with the _freedom_ of not having the guilt of taking someone else's life on my conscience.
However the more critical problem with what you wrote is that it doesn't actually attempt to disprove anything I said. You simply reiterated a bunch of arguments against gun ownership.
You didn't actually say why adding to the list of things you're not allowed to do here makes you more free. And I think that's because it's definitionally impossible to demonstrate.
Would you say that alcohol prohibition 'expands freedom' because it reduces drunk driving deaths?
The definition of freedom is being allowed to do things. It doesn't mean being allowed to do only good things, or things which are good in some particular person's opinion. It means I can do something that you would rather I did not do. That's freedom. Freedom to do what others want you to do is not freedom.
Are your neighbours free to mine the road outside your house in case insurgents should drive up some day? How about them buying some uranium and building a small detonator in their garage? Or perhaps brewing some toxic cocktail of poison gas in the local primary school science lab?
Any of the above can be classed as a weapon to deter others, never mind the unintended consequence of accidental (or deliberate) discharging of any of them killing multiple innocent people. If you cannot purchase any of the above at a local dealership, then are you really free, when your government can outgun you at any point in time?
I consider myself 'free' when I take steps to minimise the infinitesimally small probability that something bad might happen, and I know that the steps I take will not result in an even worse 'bad thing' happening.
I got rid of my guns when we had kids. The very very tiny chance that I would need to use a gun against an intruder was outweighed by the even larger chance that one of my kids may have found my rifles and thought of them as play toys. Or the even larger chance that someone could burgle our house when we were not there and take them. I was free to choose what I wanted to do, and I still do not feel any less protected or safe in my own home, or while walking down the street, or when sending my kids to school, or when visiting a bar or attending a concert... or doing pretty much anything that a 'free' American is actually dead scared to do in their own country today.
Howver, again, you are slipping sideways off the topic we're discussing. You're discussing what good policy is towards weapons. That's not what we're debating. This thread is about what it means to be free.
If you could buy an RPG launcher, you would undoubtedly be more free than if you could not. This is by definition. It doens't mean you'd be safer, or better, or that this is good policy. It just means you'd be more free.
"I consider myself 'free' when I take steps to minimise the infinitesimally small probability that something bad might happen, and I know that the steps I take will not result in an even worse 'bad thing' happening."
This definition matches the word 'safe', not the word 'free'. (If you disagree, I wonder what your definition of 'safe' would be that differs from this?)
You seem to be conflating "freedom" with "safety". Often they're correlated, but in this case they conflict.
thats all they're doing
>public is not made aware of this very tragic problem
everyone is quite aware of what the problems are, many view the children murdered during Sandy Hook as the end of the conversation. The decisions were made.
most first world countries have solved these problems, the US meanwhile...
‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens
Do you think it would take less than 9 hours to pour some diesel fuel on fertilizer and flatten the entire WalMart?
People will just move on to other weapons: knives, bombs, etc.
Norway has very restrictive gun laws. Breivik managed to get enough fertilizer to make a bomb that was mostly a distraction, but still sent 8 people to grave and injured hundreds.
UK is having a knife problem: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-42749089 https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-48186035
You are at 10x higher chance of death by vehicle.
The -only- reason it is seen as a tragedy because people feel those deaths were somehow avoidable.
Also, knife crime in the UK is not higher than the US.
Yes the deaths were avoidable. We know they were because every other first world country doesn’t have this problem in anywhere the same degree.
How do you explain much lower homicide rates in different US states, many on par or better than "every other first wolrd country?
If you drill down deeper, by county level, or even more granular - the picture becomes much clearer still. You should research it, see what variables drive it, instead of arriving at conclusions without any data.
Why do such discrepancies exist, sometimes literally across the street?
The problem is much more complicated than "guns bad".
Gun control is a "third rail" in many political jurisdictions in the USA. Many Americans will vote against any agent who would disarm them; those voters are unlikely to see disarming to diminish the (very roughly) ~0.000001% chance of death by mass shooting as a sensible--or even Constitutional--trade.
That would pretty much guarantee that people who need mental health services would deliberately avoid getting it to prevent it from showing up on their records, e.g. a security guard who needs to carry a firearm for their job.
Uh, what do you think a psychiatric exam is? There's no crazy-o-meter that they stick into an orifice to objectively determine whether you're mentally ill or not. You simply get asked a series of questions which you can reply to in any way you like.
"socially awkward people aren't allowed to have guns" as a policy would be a flagrant violation of a constitutional right.
The scary thing is that mentally ill people can intentionally mask their illness in order to pass exams.
It's a common founding myth among gun rights people that "The American People" are pro-gun, but it's just not really true. It's a particular driving issue for a particular subset of the republican base, and beyond that opinions aren't as strong, but are broadly pro-gun-control.
It was a flawed list of too-specific rules that were self-contradictory or incomplete in a bunch of places, and indeed that became part of the mythology about it in gun circles.
But it also directly outlawed clones of the Kalashnikov and AR-15 rifles that have been preferentially used (for fairly obvious reasons) in much of the recent violence. It worked, within its domain.
No one likes the ACA either, but you can still buy insurance with a pre-existing condition. Same deal. The gun folks like to conflate "flawed law" with "useless law", but that's not how it works in practice.
As it is, the House is more representative of the population of the US than the Senate, so it's fair to say the biggest barrier to increased gun control right now is the quirky nature of the US political system, not popular sentiment.
That bill would do nothing to combat these mass shooters. I can't think of any offhand that have bought their weapons through private sale. Most don't have a criminal record so they just buy them from random gun shops.
So if it won't solve anything related to these incidents, what's the point?
No, it wouldn't solve everything. But if we wait to pass a law that solves everything, we'll never pass anything.
> have drafted and passed a complete background check law have not considered any of this, or looked at any data
Yes, generally because the people proposing gun laws know nothing about guns.
I have watched national politicians tell townhalls that it's perfectly legal for someone to order a gun online right to their door without a background check, that is a felony.
I have watched them tell people that fully automatic guns are easy to obtain, which they are not.
I have watched them tell people that banning the AR-15 should be our #1 priority, when in reality more people are punched and kicked to death each year than are killed with rifles.
So yes, politicians generally talk out of their @$$ to pander to their bases and get votes. They are not experts on most subject matter so I wouldn't expect them to have any info that isn't widely known.
If you want to viscerally understand their viewpoint, call to mind the reaction that you have when someone in the conservative camp goes "Look, it's snowing, so much for global warming!" -- and then substitute "snowing" for "school shooting" and "global warming" for "politically-induced mass starvation."
I don't buy this argument, but only because I don't think armed resistance would be effective, and there's a lot that I know I don't know on that front. What I don't believe is that this tradeoff has an obvious undebatable answer.
I guess it is the phrase "to disarm them", which is somewhat provocative, since no-one would seriously advocate taking away all guns. Even Japan, with just 5% of the gun violence of the US, allows some citizens to have some guns.
Another issue is with your stated statistic of death via mass shooting. This obviously ignores maimings and other non-deaths, and also deaths from guns in non-mass events, such as burglaries, accidents.
But most of all, it ignores the psychological impact from the threat of gun violence.
What happens to a young child's mind from having to participate in active shooter drills? From having adults explain to them that this is a real threat, and that they better be ready for it? No child should have to carry that burden.
And maybe that leads back to some agreement with your point. If the actual danger from guns is as low as you say, then why have these drills at all?
While I believe this to be true, virtually any sort of "turn in some of your guns" event in the USA would... not be viewed with any nuance at all. Even machine guns were more-or-less exempt from turn-in, provided they were registered by a certain time. Moreover there are already very, very many semi-automatic pistols, revolvers, rifles, and shotguns in circulation--it's not as if a lot of folks have a bolt-action 22 cal rifle and just a few have semi-automatics--the sort of guns that can be fired and reloaded somewhat rapidly, that's what we've got. Setting aside the fact that a rifle is more powerful and aim-able, but harder to conceal, compared to a pistol, I'm not sure what characteristic of a "bad" gun the American government could successfully put forth.
All that said--from whom would you propose to confiscate what guns?
> Another issue is with your stated statistic of death via mass shooting. This obviously ignores maimings and other non-deaths, and also deaths from guns in non-mass events, such as burglaries, accidents.
Well, agreed! Mass shootings and terror attacks inflict many fewer casualties on the American population compared to robberies, gang and drug violence, alcohol and smoking, fatty foods, traffic accidents and DUI, swimming pools, etc. However, it does not seem to me that these other perils are used to buttress the case for banning the instruments of such trouble. I don't mean to be glib, and indeed it is hard to imagine a bad actor using an undoctored swimming pool against innocents, but it does seem to be the case that the electorate lacks the will to stamp out certain risks. And this lack of will is not really related to the measurable impact of the problem.
> What happens to a young child's mind from having to participate in active shooter drills?
We could reflect on the schoolhouse duck-and-cover drills for nuclear war in the 1950s and 1960s--like, isn't contemplating nuclear annihilation and nuclear winter much more terrifying and existentially dreadful than locking the classroom door? Maybe it isn't a good idea to traumatize children with visions of a terrible but statistically very remote fate. On the other hand, local police and school districts must be seen to be doing something, so maybe it is practically unavoidable.
Logic like that is usually applied to forces of nature. Or at least things that provide utility in return for this risk (e.g. cars). Mass shootings don't really fit that mould.
"stop telling people things" strikes me as a strange response. We could have a nationwide epidemic of mass shootings flying under the radar entirely. Sometimes issues need to faced head on.
(and even if the national media didn't say a peep, 8Chan would be all over it, tracking the number of deaths for their high score board. It's a forum for radicalisation that's been ignored for a very long time)
There are published statistics. They suggest that the focus should be on car safety, driving and worrying about bad habits that have health impacts. We'd know if there was a problem and the evidence is that your greatest enemy is you. It'd be interesting to get statistics on how many of these shootings are linked to drug abuse though.
> Logic like that is usually applied to forces of nature.
Good decisions that feel bad will get a better result than bad decisions that feel good. Politics is almost always improved by people taking deep breaths and not focusing too much on what is happening today - ideally using logic although simply sticking to process is good enough for me.
And it has been. Look at the data for car death over time:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...
For decades the government has passed laws and regulations that have forced car manufacturers and owners to prioritise safety over all else: seat belts, air bags, crumple-resistant frames... the list goes on and on. The results have been a massive success. It's an example of effective government.
They could do the same for guns, if they had the political will. The only way they get the political will is if voters demand it. The only way voters demand it is if they are aware of the problem.
But no government data unlike car deaths, because the gun lobby blocks any attempt to actually fund research into gun deaths.
I want to know who these shitbags are.
I want their entire family shamed.
Who was the shitty ass parents who raised the murderer? Who were his failed doctors or teachers of friens who failed to help prevent.
I want to know every god amn detail about this person..
Look at vegas. Look at the failed police/FBI/CIA/whatever investigation that has provided ZERO detailas about Paddock and how he carried out a killing of 58 people, shot over 500 people and we have ZERO details.
So fuck this idea that we shouldnt be revealing their names. We should be shaming the ENTIRE POPULATION in his orbit if they had any indication.
We also need a full toxicology report FUCKING ONLINE and compared to every single other person who has done this.
Are they all taking Zoloft for example?
Where is big pharma in here.
The aurora shooter looked like a freaking mental patient in court. Why was he allowed to dye his hair AFTER his arrest.
The idea that we need to be some sleepy apologetic society is bullshit.
This is some shady shit going on.
My personal opinion is that the pedo world is distracting from the epstein case with this. PLEASE FUCKING DOWNVOTE ME, because you have NO argument against what I have just said.
Look at your username - and you dont think that someone who has been online since 1993 and on HN for as long as I have isnt going to pay attention to the shit that is going on in our world.
Give me a break. I speak my mind on HN - and have for many years. Sometimes Dang gets mad at me - but I participate in this community daily for more than a decade. and I pay attention.
There is something shady going on. and its all related to epstein and his dead mans switch.
I am pissed off.
Perhaps you should calm down a bit before posting.
I know... I have "post" traumatic spontaneity disorder
The problem is there is a simmering domestic nationalistic terrorism threat to the country - and that is news.
The killer in TX directly referenced it, as did very many of the prior mass-murders of recent. That is noteworthy, and fundamentally different from people killed in a gas station robbery.
This rising domestic terrorism is fed and incited by nationalistic groups who have explicitly stated this as their plans and goals.
Yes the media could adjust how they report it, but that's not the root problem here. It's an intentionally fostered growing domestic nationalist terrorism.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_shootings_in_the_United_S...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_shootings_in_the_United_S...
0) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oklahoma_City_bombing
1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_traffic_deaths_per_VMT...
And what's your point about traffic deaths? By that logic, heart disease killed more people over that interval, should we stop caring about traffic deaths?
I know that I'm verging on whataboutism. But there is the tendency to amplify outrage based on public sympathies.
I worry lots more about official government violence. Consider deaths of US troops in Iraq during the mid 00s. About 800-900 per year.[0] Or far worse, deaths of Iraqis, which exceeded 20K per year during that period.[1] The same issues that are driving mass shootings will likely result in another major war. That's the thing to worry about.
0) https://www.statista.com/statistics/263798/american-soldiers...
1) https://www.statista.com/statistics/269729/documented-civili...
By many studies Americans overall are far less racist and more tolerant than they ever were. Things are actually improving on that front rather than deteriorating.
Like any form of lone-wolf terrorism, these shootings are being perpetrated by individuals, with individual motivations. There's a compelling case that they're at least partially motivated or inspired by media coverage.
We often hear that suicide is contagious. Some studies and commentators have suggested that murder-suicide might spread like noncriminal suicide. https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2017/11/americas-...
Columbine shooting reporter Dave Cullen has suggested some low-impact changes to media coverage which could have a positive effect. https://www.buzzfeed.com/davecullen/stop-naming-mass-shooter...
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1057610X.2017.1...
Media coverage can make a difference but I think relatively few people just decide to do it based on news coverage. FBI data suggests a median planning time of 1-2 months and a median preparation time of a week.
https://www.fbi.gov/file-repository/pre-attack-behaviors-of-...
There is a community that actively celebrates, studies, and iterates on mass shootings for a variety of ends from political to psychic reasons.
The USA Government is doing nothing to even attempt to prevent the next one.
Correct me if I’m wrong, would definitely like to change that opinion.
In other words, if anyone is aiming for notoriety, shooting up people in Seoul or Tokyo will give you an eternal place in national zeitgeist, while in America you will be famous until the next shooting: A few months? Weeks?
Yet nobody's (thankfully) taking up the opportunity in these other countries. Certainly not every week, or even every year.
It's not the media. It's not attention-seeking. It's not games (duh). Maybe it's a bit about mental health, but other countries also have problems with crazies and they don't just shoot up schools and nightclubs.
Can we stop beating around the bush?
Good luck buying guns in Korea/Japan (or any country[1] for that matter) as a tourist, or smuggling them in. It's significantly easier to get guns where you normally reside.
[1] Except maybe the US. Is the gunshow exemption still around?
Registered FFL holders selling guns at a show have to do the same background checks they’d do anywhere else.
Even Polifact has fact-checked this and found that America is not particularly exceptional [0]. By this study, it's not even in the top 10. [1]
And just off the top of my head, there were two mass killings recently in Japan. A guy burned down an animation studio and killed 35 people. Before that, a guy stabbed a bunch of kids to death near a subway station in Tokyo a few months ago.
[0] https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/jun...
[1a] https://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/sorry-despite-...
[1b] https://crimeresearch.org/2015/06/comparing-death-rates-from...
Yeah, that is what you just posted.
It may not be these things alone. But they do contribute. The number of copy-cat crimes is a pretty clear indication of that.
I don't think this would apply to China and India. Every other country in the world has a lower national population than the US. Yet I doubt that your statement even applies to countries such as Brazil and Nigeria.
You really do have to take population numbers into account when you look at what the media focuses on. No other western country even comes close to the population the US has, so it gives the impression that the US is somehow much worse.
Of course, information out of China isn’t that reliable, you could argue. The EU as a whole is considerably bigger than the US, and every year or so there’s a mass shooting or other mass killing. And it’s huge news for a long time. The UK has about a fifth as many people as the US, and this century has had five mass killings (one of which involved guns). The US rate and attitude really is abnormal.
Edit: It’s also worth noting that the vast majority of European mass killing incidents are terroristic; the “someone just shoots a bunch of people for no particularly discernible reason” thing is really, really rare. The Texas shooting (terroristic) would be extremely shocking in any European country and would dominate the news for a long time. But the Ohio one (looks non-terroristic) would probably have an even bigger impact and would likely lead to tightening of gun laws etc (the Dunblane massacre lead to the banning of almost all handguns in the UK, for instance).
If you trade all of your freedoms for securities, you too can have a totalitarian regime that keeps you safe. It's a "slippery" slope that can take centuries, but you just keep losing a few freedoms here, a few there, and pretty soon your monolithic monstrosity of a government holds all the cards.
> If you trade all of your freedoms for securities, you too can have a totalitarian regime that keeps you safe.
Totalitarian regime usually have worse security because nobody can criticize the supreme leader and they can simply make an inconvenient news item (like an unsolved murder) go away. Your slippery slope isn't even in the correct direction.
No society is perfect, but it's quite possible to have a safe and free society. But you should be willing to make reasonable compromises instead of arguing from centuries-old aphorisms.
The person I directly responded to was talking about China, which is YAGFTR (yet another gun-free totalitarian regime).
> No society is perfect, but it's quite possible to have a safe and free society.
That also lasts a long time without lapsing back into being YAGFTR? Japan was YAGFTR less than 75 years ago, same with a lot of currently "safe and free societies".
I am skeptical that a gun-free society can last hundreds of years without it lapsing back to being YAGFTR but I suppose time will tell
If you read tarrant's manifesto, for example, his motivation is entirely racial/political. He thinks white people is being destroyed, and he lashes out against his enemies.
If people's grievances, real or not, are not addressed. They will lash out. Calling them racist, stupid, xenophobes, losers, mentally ill or whatever else will not stop the tide of blood.
News reports what happened. These days people seem to see news organizations as the enemy or at least the news organizations they don't like.
Although one thing I have noticed about news these days is it tends to voice personal opinion openly much more than years ago. Walter Cronkite, Tom Brokaw, Peter Jennings wouldn't spout their own opinion they'd tell you what happened, and that's it.
Show the bodies, name the attackers, send reports to the NRA, government officials don't take no for an answer hound them day and night for a reply. Make it uncomfortable for everyone so much so that everyone wants to prevent another event from occurring.
There is no way to hide what happened or who did it in this age of information. If information lacking people just make up their own story or create conspiracy theories to fill the void.
selectively reports what happened, and only if it tells the right narrative and/or generates clicks, yes.
Mass shooting where 3 innocents die = clicks and correct narrative and will therefore be reported.
DUI crash where 5 innocents die = boring, wrong narrative; no report
Civilian kills police officer = boring, wrong narrative; no report
Police officer kills civilian (esp. with different color skin) = clicks and correct narrative and will therefore be reported
You're kidding, right?
Cops getting doused in water got national news coverage.
So'd https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_killings_of_NYPD_officers
Equally, if a cop went out purely to kill some black men for reasons of political revenge, that would be newsworthy in a way that a random death at a traffic stop is not.
The status quo, however, is that random traffic stop deaths of white guys are not newsworthy, but random traffic stop deaths of black guys are national news. That racist double standard is what's being called out.
I wish people would stop blaming the news and blame themselves.
I can see that point. There is also something odd about what shootings get publicized and which don't. Some shooters, seem to be getting more media attention than others.
Is it the manifestos or maybe the number of victims? I remember the Congressional baseball shooting, but I think there was no manifesto so it wasn't talked about as much, even though it involved members of Congress. The Christchurch one was publicized and was very visible, and there was a manifesto. The youtube shooter was a strange case. Given what media likes to do, I would have expected that one to be front page news for a long time since it had a manifesto in her videos and it involved a major tech company. However, it disappeared from the news cycle relatively quickly.
Now, I would rather they all not be publicized as much. There needs to be legislative action about guns, what resources, especially mental health, are available, etc. But, it is probably better if that is handled after some time and not in the immediate aftermath of the tragedy.
1. News media decides how long to keep a story active in the news cycle in order to push a narrative.
2. News media reacts to the attention a story received and keeps popular stories active longer to sell more ads.
The media is in the middle of the feedback loop, it can both generate attention and react to it. Given that position they push a narrative if it gets more ad views.
"I am an unswerving advocate of freedom of expression, which is guaranteed under Article 19 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), but it is not absolute. Article 20 of the same covenant says: ‘Any advocacy of national, racial or religious hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence shall be prohibited by law."[0]
As so often, different values are in tension with each other. And different societies draw the line at different places, somewhat favouring one or the other value. I hope we can agree that 8-chan, due to the lack of sensible moderation, is way past that line by all standards.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2015/apr/24/k...
Edit: to clarify, this is not meant to be a strawman. By "some", I don't mean some here or alike, but those in 8-chan , TD, etc., who have brought forward this argument in the past.
> (1) That Article 20 does not authorize or require legislation or other action by the United States that would restrict the right of free speech and association protected by the Constitution and laws of the United States.
You can kick a customer out because they espouse certain views or whatever, and it's fine to call it discriminatory, but it's not censorship. This isn't usually a relevant distinction, but here it is because Cloudflare hasn't built "a system that is technically possible for someone to censor".
They could, and thank fuck they don't, because that would absolutely be the day I'm getting off Cloudflare.
They have removed at least two portals, and higher up in the thread it is mentioned that they have also axed various sex related sites - and they are providing monitored info to agencies that use courts and guns to force people to do things... that is starting to sound more and more like a censorship system than a dump pipe which prevents overuse (ddos) - to me..
Also it is bad idea to get political. And I feel that a lot of those companies are gonna get punished in the next few years.
And he didn't managed to even make his case. He accused 8 chan of lawlessness while never actually stating which law they broke.
Just say they are too much trouble and be done with it, without sounding fake.
Is this because he posted his manifesto on 8chan or other sources point to 8chan as the source of his extremism?
There will be lots of people who are frustrated by this. They may say that Cloudflare shouldn't remove content unless they are legally required. Or that a CDN like Cloudflare is a platform layer, deep in the stack, and that it shouldn't be making decisions based on content. That they are a essentially a utility, and that they should provide the the same service to everyone.
But at the end of the day, companies are run by people. And those people should consider the positive and negative concequences of the services they provide. It is the moral thing to do. It is the right thing to do. It is the courageous thing to do.
That doesn't mean they must block every potentially bad actor. And they don't need to block based explicitly on content. Here, the line was drawn at "platforms that have demonstrated they directly inspire tragic events and are lawless by design." But when situations arise that cause decision makers at an organization to re-consider providing their services to their customers, they should take that opportunity to re-evaluate. They should ask, "Do we want to be hosting this?"
In this case, they said "No."
Maybe some other customers will leave, afraid of being kicked off next. They should take that into account. If you think your service is sufficiently like 8Chan, you should probably leave Cloudflare. Or if you think Cloudflare's decision was arbitrary and that worries you, you should leave.
But maybe others will be happy that their CDN doesn't need to be associated with hosting 8Chan's content. I know I feel that way.
Maybe the goodwill you receive will lead to more financial success. But you'll probably never know. In all likelihood, so long as your customers aren't leaving in droves after you kick someone off your platform, you'll never know if the decision was the right financial decision.
You'll probably never know if it was a net positive or negative on your balance sheet. But you might sleep better at night. And maybe sites that enable the propagate hate will find it a little bit harder to survive. And I think that's great.
Unfortunately obligatory "I don't support 8chan".
I dislike this idea that people can stomp their feet and demand CloudFlare kick off "bad actors".
Who is to say the bad actor of tomorrow won't be the "good actor" of today. CloudFlare and other internet utilities should remain apolitical tools that leave law enforcement to law enforcement (even that is a slippery slope, but I'd much prefer an open internet that isn't open to individual whims of what is right and wrong)
If you want tools that are open for everyone, create a public utility that must comply with the first amendment.
Fair enough. People are lame and should just admit what they actually are (not apolitical) rather than hyping themselves up as such.
Humans suck, hah.
Sad fact is, you can't expect any platform to do anything, assuming that it's not illegal for them to do and cost of doing it is less than the cost of not doing it.
If you're a platform, and your people say we'll lose 100 million if we do thing X or we'll lost 20 million if we do thing Y, the correct choice is do thing Y. You're still losing, but you're losing less.
Welcome to capitalism in the internet outrage era. Burning Nikes and demanding that Chik-fil-a not open on your campus are the decisions megacorps PR departments have to deal with. They don't care about you, singular human, and your views. They care about the net effect on their bottom line.
I am not entirely sure whether this statement carries moral judgment of those who see it as arbitrary or not. Would you mind clarifying if you intend to pass judgment or not?
Edit: It seems I communicated my point poorly. My last sentence is not intended as a swipe at the parent poster. It's simply a request for clarification. I desired to understand parent's point rather than mischaracterize it.
What insane nonsense. Whatever motivates mass murderers caused the deaths, not where they posted. They get rewarded with tons of attention from all forms of media, too. Just kill a minimum number of people to get the popularity in the corporate and social media they otherwise wouldn't ever earn. They revel in it. 8chan disappearing doesn't change that.
I've always favored all the mass media agreeing to not even mention the killers names, achievements, etc in favor of just belittling or dismissing them. Focus on everyone else in the tragedy instead. Make sure the abusers or killers get nothing out of it. Meanwhile, they'll get plenty across the media with Cloudfare getting some good PR not supporting one of the sites a few wrote on. My prediction: more people will do mass killings since this wasn't a causal factor or even help stop them.
Good luck thought policing thousands upon thousands of journalists, each of them has an incentive to defect and get more eye balls that competition, and make more money and name for themselves.
Never going to happen, until we have full blown censorship and you only read double-plus good happy time stories.
Is that what you really want?
Except you're ignoring the fact that the corporate media already does that. It seems to work well enough, too. It helps that "journalists" are mostly a thing of the past with today's reporters often just doing the minimum to check things when they're not just repeating whatever the current fad is. That's extremely popular, too. Most stories are whatever people in target demographic are either what people want to say yes to or hate on. We're already there.
It's all about eyeballs.
Cloudfare aren't a government. They aren't a democracy. I don't know why some people seem to think they should act any differently.
If you own a notice board in the real world, and someone put something horrible on it, you would take it down. This is no different.
They are comparable to a self-storage place you might keep your boat. Or an office you might rent to house your business. But they are not anything like a utility.
And Cloudflare isn't a utility. I agree with Cloudflare's decision. I hope whichever host 8chan runs to will do the same. Free speech is not a suicide pact.
That's kind of the point.
Cloudflare and social media co's naturally want to be protected as a platform. If they start controlling the content in an ad hoc it's a lot harder for them to claim that.
And if your noticeboard is inciting nearly weekly mass homicides, maybe the noticeboard you're trying to support is a shitty noticeboard.
This isn't about "supporting" someone's views. This is about simply allowing one to speak. Otherwise Google should be held liable for every single illegal thing that happens on their platform (and there are ton of those).
Why shouldn’t they have that choice?
Your opening premise isn't even true. CF has nothing near a monopoly on CDNs.
Not everything has to be so black and white.
Making the choice twice now calls into question hundreds of other properties they work with, and may open the floodgates for all that criticism they have shielded against so far.
Broadly speaking, there's (at least) two forms of net neutrality:
1) Different classes of traffic will be treated identically and not throttled indiscriminately (VOIP vs web content vs bittorrent etc.)
2) Content cannot be arbitrarily restricted by a technical provider.
If there was substantial abuse with their platform based upon technical reasons in case 1, I could see that as cause for termination.
Their arguments against denying service to 8chan are based upon case 2. Given where Cloudflare sits in the internet infrastructure layer, their supporting a pro-net neutrality position enforced upon ISPs while not applying that standard to themselves strikes me as more than a tad hypocritical.
I get the mourning about senseless death, but this is basically killing the messenger. And I do indeed believe that people trying to get these platforms shut down don't really care about it too much and have different motives. Maybe just trying to prove a point.
> A lot of not-so-subtle support for 8chan leaking into this thread.
I hope I am not supple about when I say that I think the move is idiotic.
To me this seems like the broader context that's necessary to actually decrease hate and hate related attacks. These are real people online posting things that really express their feelings about society. A ton of trolling too, of course. But these people aren't just going to go away or get healthy.
Maybe censorship is a good measure to reduce attacks, as it's harder for these individuals to organize and promote each other to act. But then again maybe this response is just the obvious thing corporate entities have to do to wipe their hands of it while we further decentralize hate and make it harder to monitor.
I don't know. I don't have the data and I'm certainly not advocating anything nor saying somethings bad. To me the conversation just doesn't intuitively lead me to believe that were attacking the right problem.
"They are no longer Cloudflare's problem, but they remain the Internet's problem."
These sites are breeding grounds for extremism, more and more I feel this free for all on the internet probably hasn't been a net positive.
For the "Free Speech is freedom from government prohibition and this is a private company" brigade. I dont want to live in a world where colored people is being prohibited to enter a night venue, or gay people cannot order a simple cake, or YES, dudes who think their race is more superior being able to blabber their nonsense online as long as it is nothing illegal. After all similar sentiments are expressed (veiled or openly) from many powerful spheres and nobody does nothing.
> Nothing illegal
I think at some point it goes up against the "yelling 'fire' in a crowded movie theater" exemption of free speech.
There are more fundamental fish to fry. 1 Violation of terms of service should categorically be NOT a criminal matter. 2 I strongly believe possession (given we meet safe storage provisions) should never be illegal. ...
I also agree with you that people blabber all the time but when multiple unrelated people take the next step seemingly after reading...
You know where that phrase came from? It was coined in Schenck v. United States[1], where Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr convicted the defendant for publishing pamphlets opposing the draft in the first world war.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schenck_v._United_States
I think laws are not absolute. We frequently allow prohibited acts because common sense and decency. If you're at a light and it turns yellow, you should stop but not if there's a car close behind you and you're more likely to get in a wreck by stopping rather than speeding up.
I oppose the draft as it exists. It is wrong and immoral to have a draft of only "able-bodied" people of one gender. The draft, if one exists, should be for everyone. No body gets an exemption regardless of their personal belief or body condition. They don't all have to fight. There are plenty of opportunities (I'd imagine) to serve without ever being in a hand to hand combat. Either have a draft of all adults regardless of any other exemptions or don't have one at all.
I'll try to avoid the phrase going forward.
I would like to point out (not necessarily to parent) that this was an example of speech that was not protected by 1A in a case where a man was prosecuted by the government for trying to tell young Americans that they don't need to join the draft for WW1.
Also important: yelling fire in a crowded theater is entirely protected speech if you don't believe it to be false.
If you find something like 8chan and point it out to Cloudflare, should they ban it? If they say no that’s not as bad, well why is their value judgment worth more than that of other people? If they say okay, then anyone can get anything they judge to be as bad as 8chan ‘banned’ from it.
Does that also work if you can show that it doesn't cause widespread harm in every country with stricter gun regulations?
Seriously if you make statements like that, you ought to acknowledge the elephant in the room.
If they promote violence and racism. Yes.
> Will you manage the API?
If I thought it would help, sure.
It's a myth that people can simply "choose their ideology"
There are a thousand religions/sects in the world. Most of them are exclusive (as in the 1st Commandment). You have to make a choice to affiliate yourself with one of them (although not everyone chooses to be specific to one denomination).
I don't think it's reminiscent of "1984" to say that people choose their religion. I think people choose who they want to be around and that tends to be among the largest predictors of religious affiliation.
When your beliefs about objective reality include a bunch of made up delusional shit to satisfy oneself emotionally, it’s pretty straightforward to swap one set of fairy tales that didn’t happen for another set of fairy tales that didn’t happen. No harm, no foul.
You literally can't express any opinions going against the current flow of ideas without being labelled as hostile (alt-right, nazi, white privileged, whatever the word of the day is, &c.), no matter how valid the point you're making is (even here on HN you can’t have serious discussions about issues like the gender pay gap or immigration). It really isn't a surprise that these loners end up on sketchy websites once they're ridiculed/banned/shut off everywhere else. If you're a man feeling like a girl you'll find a community telling you you should chop off your genitals and ingest a truck load of hormones, if you’re a POC feeling unaccepted they'll tell you it's because of how racist society is [0], if you’re a girl and aren’t successful it’s due to the patriarchy [0], but oh boy if you’re a white man feeling empty inside no one gives a flying fuck about what you have to say.
Anyone thinking these shootings are due to 8chan is a fool, plain and simple, the issues are rooted much more deeply, especially in the US culture, and they've been running for a while. I’d even argue that the root cause of modern white supremacy is very close to the root cause of religious terrorism. But see, no one wants to even consider it through that lens, it's much easier to dismiss it entirely and talk about non-issues ("they're mentally ill", "just an angry loner", "if only he was dating", &c.). Now we can spend days talking about cloudflare, but that's mostly a waste of time, you don't put a bandaid on a broken leg and expects it to heal.
https://www.gwern.net/Terrorism-is-not-about-Terror
---
“These young people find themselves at a time in their life when they are looking to the future with the hope of engaging in meaningful behavior that will be satisfying and get them ahead. Their objective circumstances including opportunities for advancement are virtually nonexistent; they find some direction for their religious collective identity but the desperately disadvantaged state of their community leaves them feeling marginalized and lost without a clearly defined collective identity”
for the individuals who become active terrorists, the initial attraction is often to the group, or community of believers, rather than to an abstract ideology or to violence” ---
[0] Just to be clear I'm not implying these things don't exists or that they're non-issues.
That's exactly what I'm talking about when I say "intelligent discussions are impossible" on these subjects. When someone takes time to write something we can just reply "Lol whatever fam" and continue with our day feeling like we accomplished something. This is level 0 of human communication, you can abstain from it as it doesn't add anything, even a simple down vote would add more value.
Every single time I learned something valuable in life was when I talked with people having diametrically opposed opinions but who were able to have a coherent discourse, the problem is that these people are quickly disappearing and are being replaced by people spewing feel good one liners like yours.
There are no "lgbt fanatics". That's not even a concept. I have been around LGBT circles my entire life and the most of extreme forms of advocacy of... anything there, are quite literally incomparable to real, actual extremists. So you're not really off to a good start as far as reasonably informed opinions.
You talk about "a man feeling like a girl", in which you're literally ignoring multiple lifetimes of study of the psychology and clinical evidence, by _very_ qualified experts in the topics who have studied thousands of cases. Again, if you're going to ignore expert advice and call the shots on whatever this isn't exactly helpful.
You continue by claiming that "Anyone thinking these shootings are due to 8chan is a fool, plain and simple". See, again, you ignore strong evidence on the history of deplatforming, going way back to right after WWII.
In what world do you expect to have "reasonable debate" if you spout garbage about subjects that you don't even know where the expert consensus is?
https://mobile.twitter.com/roughly_speakin/status/1083520556...
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.lifesitenews.com/mobile/new...
Literally kids in bikini around men role playing as women on Netflix : https://imgur.com/a/haqn5NY
https://youtu.be/397hRrQWa_c
Come to Berlin gay pride and enjoy kids walking among naked seniors, progress am I right?
All these are applauded by the lgbt community, publicly, every day. I don't know where you stand morally but these things are definitely way out of my acceptance zone and way past the "let people do what they want". Closing your eyes and saying they don't exists is one step under active support.
> You talk about "a man feeling like a girl", in which you're literally ignoring multiple lifetimes of study of the psychology and clinical evidence, by _very_ qualified experts in the topics who have studied thousands of cases.
I just said these people currently have a huge network of public communities to help them through whatever they go through, same for POCs, they're on the current "good side". Not sure what you're hinting here.
And the idea that trans and POC have "huge networks of support" has no correspondence with real life. You've ever met real trans people? Clearly not, otherwise you would know how their traumas come from intolerant families that disown them, find no support networks and turn to drugs and prostitution as a means of subsistence. The median life expectancy of a trans person is of 35 years, dying from conditions related to drug abuse, STDs, and psychological issues where abandonment is the primary cause of these.
So before copying a bullshit website that seems unhealthily obsessed with trans people, George Soros, and the signs of the antichrist, I dunno, go do some research and try to distinguish real journalism from garbage. This is not even worth our time debating.
I'm well aware of that, but do you happen to know why I have to do that ? Because they're the only ones talking about it (and they're doing a piss poor job at it btw), fortunately there are pics and videos of these events so we can have a glimpse of what's happening. Mainstream medias and "experts" are too busy telling how being fat is healthy and spewing bs stats about the gender pay gap, why would they talk about contrarian ideas ? To get shut off and deplatformed ?
> The median life expectancy of a trans person is of 35 years, dying from conditions related to drug abuse, STDs, and psychological issues where abandonment is the primary cause of these.
Unhealthy behaviors leading to unhealthy behaviors ? Who would have thought.
Do you know what we were telling teenagers looking for a meaning in life in the past ? "Suck it up kiddo it'll get better", and for the vast majority of the time it worked. What do we tell them now ? "Oh my dear, you're simply not in the right body", no wonder they get depressed there is 0 chance of a successful "transition" unless you start before puberty...(and even then you have to go through body mutilation and life long treatments to suppress your natural body processed). When I was 10 I wanted to be a trash trucker driver, at 15 I wanted to be an indiana jones style archaeologist, it was fun for my parents. But somehow if it gets sexual all of a sudden it's DEFCON 1 and you have to comply with their will ?
Feel free to link your experts studies btw, I'm yet to see any of them pointing something out other than "look at all the suicides, you should feel bad".
Who cares??
(also, who's gonna be the extremist mass shooter in that picture, the kid or the senior?)
> https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.lifesitenews.com/mobile/new....
This article mentions no "LGBT fanatics" cheering it on, just people from the LGBT community condemning it.
> https://mobile.twitter.com/roughly_speakin/status/1083520556....
Who cares, unless the parents are that super controlling "my child is a star" type--which is the only thing that worries me about that situation, who cares if the kid wears a dress and make up.
> Literally kids in bikini around men role playing as women on Netflix : https://imgur.com/a/haqn5NY
So .... ?
> https://youtu.be/397hRrQWa_c
I know it feels bad when you watch something super cringy and you wish it did not exist, but I don't see anybody shooting up people, which is a feeling that is objectively worse than cringe.
Are you sexualizing the seniors nudity or the kids viewing of non-sexual nudity? Either way I think you should see a shrink.
There are videos of dudes having sex on gay pride carts in broad day light in major cities. Let's not pretend that the gay community isn't the most promiscuous community (stds stats, amount of partners stats, &c.) and that half naked dudes in bdsm outfit are "non-sexual". The whole thing is about "sexual liberation". It's not even about being gay or not, it's about decency, I'd have the same discourse for a "straight pride" with straight people having similar behaviors.
Citation needed.
I see Facebook/Twitter/Reddit in the unenviable role as having to police minimum local standards across the world's largest online community. They also have to do it while running a publicly traded company in the USA, which means they need to optimize for minimum moderation costs.
> You literally can't express any opinions going against the current flow of ideas without being labelled as hostile
s/going against the current flow of ideas //
I straddle the line between US liberal/conservative depending on the issue. I've been labeled lot of things by both the majority opinion holders and minority opinion holders. It doesn't matter. People need to put on their big boy/girl/whatever pants and realize it doesn't matter what you are labeled. People call you far worse behind your back... the internet just allows you to hear it and reduces peoples' social filters.
> Anyone thinking these shootings are due to 8chan is a fool, plain and simple
Citation needed.
I treat {4Chan, 8Chan, 9Gag, etc} as a proxy for "long tail opinion holders" who gather in the same place.
I'm sympathetic to the idea that being a social outlier with no outlet for discourse/self-importance/identity/hope is strongly correlated with those extremism/terrorism, but that doesn't preclude 8Chan from being part of that process of extremification.
I listened to a podcast over the weekend about a Philipino guy who worked as a Facebook moderator. He quit for many reasons, but among them PTSD, nightmares, attraction to sexual images of children, attraction to bestiality, etc. He might well have had those same tendencies before he moderated for Facebook, but the exposure to that content was what accelerated his problems.
The Chans are an exposure channel. They probably help in popularizing fringe ideas, but they also attract window shoppers looking for identity and an ideology that social misfits might be willing to try on. Shutting down the window shopping isn't nothing (although I will admit I don't know that it can be done while preserving the intent of the principle of Free Speech).
It's kind of sick, seeing Americans here all ignore the elephant in the room and go "yeah it might be that website" :facepalm:
A whole communications platform just got censored by a private US company (who should NOT have that power), that's pretty big thing. Maybe we should talk about that.
That shooting happened because of America's gun laws and the general way it's been squeezing the life and joy out of its lower and middle class populations. There's some really bleak shit going on there, lives are empty, people are hopeless and fear the future. That's it. The whole world knows it and sees it. Nothing really relevant for HN, either.
> The Chans are an exposure channel. They probably help in popularizing fringe ideas, but they also attract window shoppers looking for identity and an ideology that social misfits might be willing to try on. Shutting down the window shopping isn't nothing (although I will admit I don't know that it can be done while preserving the intent of the principle of Free Speech).
Yeah but no. These "chans" are international places. People outside the US also go ideological window-shopping or hang out around fringes. But somehow the worst we got was, I think years ago .. when a guy (physically) broke into a live news broadcast with a fake gun and then .. nothing much happened and he was taken away. He claimed he was doing it for a hacker collective, or something.
I'm not really sure what site inspired this dude again, but imagine Cloudfare banning it over this.
The difference seems clear as day/night to me, no?
That situation in the live news studio had one glaringly obvious thing missing from it, that saved it from possibly becoming a tragedy and it wasn't a fucking website.
Take away the website, however, and there is a chance this guy would not have gotten inspired by something else, MAYBE--but you still got all those other mass shootings to deal with, USA. I'm totally looking forward reading about the drop in gun violence now that Cloudflare did something about it. I get it, they felt powerless and someone had to do something. But they better hope that the results of their actions were indeed worth the means. It's a pretty brazen act of censorship, that IMHO doesn't weigh up at all to the limited effect it'll have on fringe crazies bouncing hateful ideas off one another.
How do you figure that works? Do we wake up, fully equipped with a developed mind but zero preferences and experiences and then ponder which of the available ideologies we would like to subscribe to?
Each group will have its own ideologues, its own agenda.
Right. Even this assumption is loaded with ideology both ways. I.e. either they choose or do not choose. Neither is correct.
So, nope, it simply won't do to sniff "not peer reviewed!" in response to this and think it's some kind of slam dunk that supports your biases regarding human sexuality.
Folks, if you can't see the bullshit that is going on right now, I can't help you. If you truly fear online speech, then why are you in technology in the first place? If technology isn't going to free us from statist coercion but rather further enslave us, what good is it?
But if now they're manually deciding who goes on their network and who doesn't, it seems like they're more responsible for everything else that's on it that they allow.
They're a private company and I support them choosing to do business with whoever they want, but I thought there was some sort of legal distinction if they were totally agnostic to what travels over their wires. Is that not the case?
> I thought there was some sort of legal distinction if they were totally agnostic to what travels over their wires. Is that not the case?
Not as far as I'm aware, no. The closest thing I can think of is if they were discriminating based on people's membership in a protected class, eg, if they announced a strict "no female clients" policy. This is clearly vastly different.
From a PR point of view, yes, every time they kick someone off for being bad, the more their failing to kick someone off will be seen as an implicit endorsement. But again, that ship has sailed.
I think it's unconstitutional and the worst thing to happen to the internet in many years, as well as one of the worst things to happen to civil liberties (which is a pretty high bar!). Unfortunately, it passed senate 97 votes to 2, which suggests legislative fixes will not be coming soon.
For the record, gender isn't a protected class in a place of public accommodation and it's why clubs in Las Vegas can charge Men more than Women.
The opposite is true. CDA 230 makes it clear that companies can moderate their content without becoming responsible for it.
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20190507/16484342160/one-t...
Are you sure you heard the argument correctly?
> If Facebook were to start creating or editing content on its platform, it would risk losing that immunity
and
> If Facebook is going to behave like a media provider, picking and choosing what viewpoints to represent, then it’s hard to argue that the company should still have immunity from the legal constraints that old-media organizations live with.
This is all nonsense. Old-media organizations are protected by CDA 230 just like everyone else: they can host third party content like user comments without being liable for it.
Publishers being able to "censor" is the whole value proposition for having a publisher. You're paying for the NYT because it picks who to publish. Facebook has no special "platform" protections that anyone else doesn't get.
Many, many people seem to think that CDA 230 itself makes a distinction between "platforms" and "publishers". I even replied to someone here in this comment section:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20610778
The second one is asking "should they" - its asking a question not positing a fact.
Should they get immunity for what posted if its clear they have the capacity to censor at will? Why should they and not anyone else on the internet?
CDA makes a distinction between publisher and platform and the talk about this whole issue is that many people are saying that these companies can clearly police their content, and should be liable for it and not specially protected.
Where does the CDA make a platform/publisher distinction? What is the definition of the difference, and where is it in the law?
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/230
As Techdirt says, "This "publisher" v. "platform" concept is a totally artificial distinction that has no basis in the law.". Are they wrong?
I just know I'll remember that cloudflare could pull the pulg on my site if one of my users posts something they don't like. I don't think I can recommend their service to any of clients because of that.