This is why Facebook host their own servers... well not the only reason, but you could easily make the argument that Facebook is an "Internet hate forum" and should be shut down for failing to police their site.
No, not really, no. Facebook is a media company that has half-assed moderation because it's not profitable to them to be any better about it, and is mostly old ladies posting ancient memes and chain letters.
Just imagine how hard it would be for Facebook to exist if they didn't host their own servers. They would have to be under constant threats of being kicked off from whatever ISP they used because of the content users submit. And also quite obviously the press would be yelling at ISPs for hosting them, same they are doing with 8chan
But it's not just half-assed is it, it's misguide, misleading and misdirected. Facebook will actively block a post selling baby items from a "non-smoking home" because their shitty A.I. and $2 an hour moderators can tell that the post isn't selling tobacco or animals. At the same time they can't find an entire group applauding the death of police officers or groups encouraging violent racism.
And those last two, those aren't old ladies, those a shit people who aren't technically literate enough to find 8chan.
Not even hosting your own servers would do much to prevent a site shutdown since the domain can also be censored by the company that owns the TLD.
Facebook takes their hosting to a whole new level by being part of the ICANN as a domain registrar which their domains are registered under themselves, making it close to impossible to be shutdown on the domain level.
I've generally been on the free speech side of this debate, as some of my previous comments on HN will show.
With 8chan, I legitimately don't know what my opinion is. I've read it before, and I spent a few hours reading it this weekend, and it's beyond clear to me that it absolutely had the potential to radicalize shooters and terrorists. I'm not referring to the simple use of racial or ethnic slurs -- of course this was extremely common there, but I don't think this is the part of the site that encouraged actual violence. Rather, among the many ideological threads that were more or less constantly ongoing on 8chan, one of them just straight-up encouraged mass shootings. "The fire rises" is a common phrase I saw there celebrating the frequency of shootings. For instance, here's a quote I saw this weekend (I screenshotted a bunch of stuff like this in anticipation of the site going down):
"holy fucking shit, a third mass shooting toda [referencing an incident near Douglas Park in Chicago], white guy shot 7 people, no one dead yet but the meter is still running!!! shooter still active!!!
its absolutely fucking happening !!! the FIRE RISES!!!"
This was attached to a picture of Trump with the text "it's happening" superimposed.
While 8chan overall was absolutely all over the place, this thread of support for shootings and terrorism was seemingly always present in the background.
There is absolutely no evidence that the 8chan circle-hate happening out in the open has had any mitigating effect. It only made it accessible to even the technically illiterate among the potential audience.
There's no evidence that law enforcement took any action till afterwards, and on multiple occasions. So is the medium to blame or is the clear lack of policing?
So imagine you own a bunch of ponds and let groups of people use them. Some people use them for breeding goldfish. Some use them for canoe races. Some for swim meets.
But one of the biggest ponds you own lies still and stagnant. A perfect place for mosquitos to lay their eggs. In fact you’ve managed to make it especially hospitable to mosquitos that carry malaria. And all your other ponds are next to it, all your other ponds connect to it. Lots of people who come to your ponds for other things end up with malaria.
Should you be allowed to keep operating these ponds?
I don't think equating people to mosquitos is a good analogy, it seems dehumanizing the other to me.
But let's roll with it anyway. What we have here is actually a large-scale land owner who leases out the land to anyone without further conditions to the lessee. It would seem silly to blame the leaser and not the lessee for what happens on those lands.
Of course the government can still come in and request that they do something about the mosquitoes, if laws and regulations require that, but until then they won't become active because it would mean going back on their lease agreements which grant the lessee free use.
Statistically, approximately nobody dies in mass shootings (per [0], 387 deaths in 2018). Getting up in arms about something so small is absolutely a moral panic.
Of course more people die of cancer, diabetes, heart disease, car accidents (and probably any number of other things) than in mass shootings every day.
But the seemingly random and violent nature of it is what's scary.
I can eat healthier, exercise, buy a safer car, drive more carefully, etc etc. But mass shooters aren't really avoidable while leading a normal life. That makes it scary and noteworth.
Statistically, approximately nobody is worse off for 8ch being inaccessible.
Presumably you have some threshold of statistical significance that would cause you to be worried about risk factors, but that threshold is itself subjective. Besides the questionable proposition that the number of deaths below that threshold don't matter, a lack of interest in the problem impairs the ability to make future predictions, since by the time you do take it seriously, you'll have to do a lot of catching up before you can assess the future course of events.
you might like to think about this in similar terms to epidemiology. while a small number of fatalities from a disease outbreak in a remote location isn't that troubling to most people, epidemiologists are in the business o assessing the potential scope, speed, and severity of communicable diseases and seem to prefer nipping things in the bud to waiting to see whether they develop into a pandemic if left alone.
I think I'm on the same boat as you on this one; I tend to have a pretty libertarian view on free speech, but lately the bizarre rise of hyper-radical idiots on places like 8chan (and even YouTube to a lesser extent) has really made me question these things.
It's very easy to shout the mantra of "Free speech!!! OMG!!!" but we gain nothing by acting like there aren't natural consequences to it. By having a liberal free-speech system, you are going to expose glitches in the "marketplace of ideas", and demagogues and radicals are going to be able to exploit it.
It might still be worth it (I haven't made up my mind yet on where we draw the line in censorship).
> I think I'm on the same boat as you on this one; I tend to have a pretty libertarian view on free speech, but lately the bizarre rise of hyper-radical idiots on places like 8chan (and even YouTube to a lesser extent) has really made me question these things.
there have always been hyper-radical idiots. with 8chan and such, you can see them.
you're not getting rid of anything, you're just sticking your head into the sand.
> there have always been hyper-radical idiots. with 8chan and such, you can see them.
Sure, I'm aware that the KKK existed before the internet.
> you're not getting rid of anything, you're just sticking your head into the sand.
I didn't claim I was getting rid of anyone or anything. I didn't really claim much at all in my post, but there's a difference between "getting rid" of stuff and deplatforming it.
For that matter, how does your logic make any sense? If I hire a hitman to kill someone, could my defense in court be "Well he was going to kill somebody anyway! You're just sticking your head in the sand by blaming me for it!"
Is your argument that rhetoric, delivered consistently enough and effectively enough, can't possibly influence people to do reprehensible things?
Just like 8chan isn't getting rid of them either. They're just pushing them to a different platform where its going to be harder to keep tabs on these people.
I just wonder with all the technology we have at our disposal, how is it these people continue to slip through the system undeterred to escalate this type of violence?
There are a huge number of people who claim they support the Confederate flag in honor of those who lost their lives under it.
Okay. It was a racist and oppressive government, but I can understand that logic. People gave their lives, and even sacrifice in favor of an unjust cause is sacrifice.
That said... if that's what it's really about for them, then why didn't those folks say something when the flag was claimed by racists and white supremacists? Why didn't they defend it from those who would appropriate the symbol?
Silence carries its own liability.
And a lot of 8chan-style behavior that isn't guilty of outright instigation is certainly guilty of immoral silence.
They did try to defend it. They were what was meant by the "good people on both sides" remark. They are up against an increasingly consolidated media empire that generally does not like the man who made that comment. It's unfair to put the onus of successful promulgation of a message against a wave of misinformation and misappropriation, and condemn them for failing at that.
That's not its unified mission. I don't hear the BDS movement speaking out that much against suicide bomb attacks on civilians either, but that doesn't automatically delegitimize all of their arguments about the Israeli occupation.
Totally agree. But also one needs to say that this is of course the tip of the ice berg. I don't think people land there right away, but rather start maybe at some "normal" YouTube video's comment section or the comment section of some politics focussed news site.
People voice their trashy opinions there - which is totally fine - but there are so few balancing/calming opinions. Especially if you have some conspiracy affine news site/YT video, these balancing/calming opinions are just not present.
My conclusion at the moment is that more balanced people (no, not bots :)) should visit these sites and write calming/positive comments. Dialogue has become pretty unfashionable in 2019, monologues seem to have become the norm unfortunately although I think there is hope.
Valid concern... Probably one shouldn't approach the situation with a 'improve discussion' hat on, but rather with a 'participating in critical discussion' hat. I mean just people actually reading articles, comments, thinking about them and answering would probably be a high advancement in culture.
I recently got an account at a more or less alt-right news website and the comments there were all just rants that stood for themselves.
It's tough to make the distinction between acceptable and unacceptable speech on a case-by-case basis.
The classic extremist play is to patiently gnaw at the edges of acceptability. Subtle digs at Jews, blacks, Hispanics, muslims or non-muslims (you can insert any group here, really) pave the way for innuendos about their morals, work ethic, intellectual capacity etc.
You can gaslight perfectly normal, upstanding citizens into doubting their strongly held ethical convictions, first enough that they don't argue against e.g. racist loudmouths, then to the point that they don't argue for equal treatment of "out" groups. As this process plays out, it starts to seem dangerous to defend the maligned against violence, and eventually enough citizens will have had their sense of normal behaviour pushed far enough that atrocities become possible.
I don't know how to break that cycle. I do think the root causes need to be addressed, because poverty and social decline provide fertile ground for demagogues pointing fingers.
I'd like to think I never went too far with it, and I certainly was never violent or anything, but I got pretty big into the anti-feminist, #GamerGate, and "fight the SJW snowflakes!" crap from the years of ~2013-2016; basically the TLDR for that ending was when Donald Trump was elected I realized I was wrong to hold a lot of these viewpoints, and now it is not a chapter of my life that I am proud of.
I don't think I'm an idiot, and I would like to think that I'm normally a pretty decent human, and yet I was still able to be persuaded by morons on Youtube like Sargon of Akkad and Thunderf00t, and I spread the stupid memes along with most of my friends; I can easily see the alternate universe where I didn't realize I was wrong, and went further down the rabbit hole watching idiots like Stefan Molyneux or something.
I think people like to pretend that they and everyone they care about are immune to propaganda.
Sadly we are all manipulable. Tho being aware of that fact makes you a lot more resilient to manipulation and more likely to end up with a life you would have chosen. So kudos.
Study political science, propaganda, psychology of advertising, this is something that can make you resilient to propaganda. Just being aware that you may get manipulated can't help you much as you have to be able to spot it effortlessly everywhere.
As a fellow math enthusiast, I would love to grab a coffee or beer with you next time I'm in NYC and hear about this journey. Care to email me? laughinghan@gmail.com
Well, wait, the question is whether or not internet service is considered a utility, and whether or not that utility is allowed to take a "side" as a result.
I think that 8chan is terrible and I would rather it not exist, but at the same time, I would be pretty against denying its owners water or something, since we've decided that utilities don't get to take sides.
Wouldn't that be more like public roads? You couldn't decide that Fords are not allowed on a road, just because of the brand, but Ford is perfectly within their rights to not sell a car to somebody, just as Cloudflare and Voxility have decided to sell their hosting services to 8chan.
I'm not saying I disagree with you, evidently; the line in which we draw "utility" is a discussion that I really don't know that I have a good viewpoint. Are you entitled to having a soapbox to shout off of? I'm genuinely not sure.
Yeah, I agree. Up until the internet, getting information out there required resources and/or a platform to speak from, be it the pulpit, a newspaper, etc. If you had something to say, you had to go through such great effort to say it.
What do we even do, besides sit and watch? I've totally shifted the way I browse the web to reduce my exposure to toxic information, and I think that the whole corporate banning of Alex Jones was a net positive, but what happens when a voice I agree with gets shunned in the same way?
Most 'internet as utility' arguments though don't extend to hosting or other services though, only the physical infrastructure that exists as a near monopoly (and at best is usually a duopoly of one cable and one DSL provider) in most locations. The argument is they shouldn't get to play favorites because the ability for competitors to come in and provide competition to limit bad behavior is extremely limited.
> I continue to be surprised at the level to which people misunderstand this.
It isn't "misunderstanding" it is willfully ignoring to push a narrative. I sincerely doubt most of the people here calling this a violation of free speech are doing so in good faith.
It is a pretty basic set of logical steps to determine that a private business refusing to serve a customer is perfectly okay and should be encouraged. Arguing that a private business should be forced at gunpoint by government goons to do business with nazis or racist assholes doesn't make any sense at all.
All the attempts to derail into minutia like "cloudflare is a utility" is simply done to wear you out.
Most people understand that fine. It's about freedom of speech as a social principle and value, not strictly a matter of law.
It's granted that people are within their rights to throw out speech they dislike and that there's a world of difference between severing a voluntary business relationship and the deployment of state force, but the implications of an anxious, PR-sensitive set of internet infrastructure providers is certainly fair game for discussion.
If we get into the habit of shutting down every site that attracts a spate of negative attention, it still has the aggregate effect of chilling free discourse. If a shooter came onto HN and posted a manifesto here, would it withstand the mainstream media onslaught?
> I continue to be surprised at the level to which people misunderstand this.
That's probably because you are actually the one misunderstanding. The argument it sounds like you're making (I apologize if I'm reading you wrong) is the often made one that "Freedom of speech only protects you from the government". This argument equivocates the idea of freedom of speech with the First Amendment.
Many Americans, and freedom loving folks internationally, believe that freedom of speech is critical for a liberal democracy to exist. Many of the American founders believed in the idea and enshrined it in our Bill of Rights to make sure the Government can not violate it. They did not, however, create he idea of freedom of speech, which existed long before the Bill of Rights, exists outside of America and outside of the context of Government and Citizens.
Think of it like murder. People do not find murder reprehensible because it is illegal. It is illegal because it is reprehensible, and most people would not support it regardless of its legal status (I hope). The idea of murder and the legality of murder are related but separate.
Your argument is therefore taking as narrow a scope of the idea of freedom of speech as possible and then arguing against that, which is a type of straw man argument. I hope that clarifies the logic fallacies involved in your argument and helps you better understand those you disagree with.
I'm afraid that part is largely accurate. While 8ch administrators and global moderators did respond to reports of CP hosted on their site, they handled these reports on a largely reactive basis -- the anonymous-imageboard model used by the site made it impossible to block individual posters in any effective fashion, and I don't believe the site had any way to block specific files from being reposted.
So it ran as a honeypot? I understand that 8chan wasn't hosted anonymously, the owners are known. If they provided a safe haven to child pornography, I assume law enforcement would put an end to that very quickly, especially with obvious and easy ways to apprehend the owners. They've been very active and successful in bringing down hidden services, it's not plausible that they looked the other way for a clearnet site.
I don't think so. What seems more likely to me is that one or more of the following is the case:
1) The "fast-flux" nature of imageboards makes it difficult for law enforcement to effectively respond to illegal content hosted on them.
2) Deleting content upon reports places board administrators technically within the boundaries of the law.
3) The arm's-length separation between the owners of 8ch, the users who operate boards on the site, and the users who post content on the site allows the owners to claim a lack of responsibility for that content.
In that case, we're talking about something different though. Saying "they have CP" to mean "there is CP posted which then gets speedily removed by mods before LE can act on it" implies that AWS, Google, FB, Youtube etc also host child pornography. Certainly it will be uploaded and they will remove it.
Only when the platform embraces it does that statement make sense, which apparently 8chan did not if I understand you correctly.
> they handled these reports on a largely reactive basis
I don't see anything wrong with that considering the limited and volunteer-based resources they have. Youtube-style content ID pre-censoring built into everything shouldn't be a goal we're striving for.
Exactly how are they at fault for responding to the issue in the only way the site design can allow? Do you also blame Twitter for only banning people after they've posted something deemed to be breaking the rules? or that it takes 5 minutes to make a new account?
Unless you aren't attempting to imply anything about them being at fault. Although, as long as they are making that good faith effort to take down CP, they can't be taken down by the US govt at least.
CP gets knocked off the board fast. 4chan and 8chan know the line, though it is in a weird place (it probably should be on the other side of "fomenting white supremacy")
I think "\w+" is regex for "one or more non-specified words," so they're nitpicking that it should be "* supremacy" instead of "white supremacy", in a weirdly obtuse and technical way.
Do posters get banned? If it's not accepted on the board then why does it keep getting posted, and posted sufficiently often that many people are claiming 8chan has CP?
The 8ch.net/delicious/ board routinely had extremely realistic animated images and video of prepubescent girls having sex with older men. The images were reported to mods who left them up.
That's the sort of thing that starts to hit some really grey areas, and also starts to illuminate some of the differences in the justifications for banning CP. If you're against CP because it means the exploitation of children, animated images of children that do not exist should be fine - but if you're against it due to it being disgusting or normalizing the abuse of real children it's not. However, I believe that the Supreme Court has thus far held that drawings fall under the 1st Amendment, as (IMO) they most certainly should.
There is an important shade of grey between "clearly artificial image" and "real image", where "artificial but real-looking image" sits. It has the same normalizing effect as a real image.
Otherwise there's no reason to oppose real images, since the harm is done before the image is ever seen.
> Otherwise there's no reason to oppose real images, since the harm is done before the image is ever seen.
We ban specifically real images for two general reasons - one is that allowing them encourages the production of more such images, necessitating additional abuse, and the second is that for the children involved, knowing that other people are looking at those images is a huge violation.
Neither of those applies for "artificial but real-looking" images.
Fun fact, there are places in the Western world where it is considered illegal to the same degree as photographs of children being abused. And ditto for textual descriptions of this fictionally happening. Scandinavia, for instance. Which is admittedly not famous for its uncompromising approach to freedom of expression.
There's nothing stopping the same thing happening to HN, except the people that do it have no interest in doing so (and images don't auto-display, I guess).
They're all behind variable IP VPNs. Permanently getting rid of them is nearly impossible.
8chan deliberately set itself up such that it's impossible to do anything beyond an IP ban. This was a conscious choice they made, and that doesn't mean they get a pass on failure to enforce rules as a result.
By making a transaction (or series of transactions) that happen to have a binary representation (or destination address, or comment, or...) that decodes to CP - the same way that you'd store any other arbitrary data there.
IP Permaban and allegedly details forwarded to law enforcement. Never ever heard of any actual consequences though, and "everyone" hits 8chan / 4chan through a VPN anyway.
> 4chan and 8chan know the line, though it is in a weird place
"Things we legally cannot host" is exactly where one would expect them to draw the line. Whether or not you agree with that position is another matter.
The mods remove those posts as quickly as they can. It's impossible to prevent it when you're hosting a board that allows anonymous image uploads. No pre-approval process could keep up with the amount of content posted on a popular board, especially when the site is being run on donations.
Are you of the belief that hatred and radicalization doesn’t exist in environments that lack free speech?
Lot’s of places on this planet have hyper radicalized portions of their populations that commit aggregious acts of violence, and they lack free speech.
Yet free speech is being used as the red herring to blame.
Unequivocally, your assessment of these forums causing the radicalization is wrong. Plain wrong. These people exist in any environment, they go into the shadows, they continue to lash out, and removing and restricting rights for every person DOES NOT STOP THIS BEHAVIOR.
They may already exist, but that doesn't mean we should amplify their voices and give them the ability to recruit more to their cause and ideology.
Now, that's not to say disruptions of communication systems (e.g. censorship) is the right answer. But existence doesn't mean we shrug our shoulders and do nothing. At the very least you can stop encouraging and normalizing them.
This isn't a free speech issue. We have free speech in most parts of our country without radicalization. This is an issue of a specific environment that actively celebrates hatred and awful behavior. "Free Speech" is a red herring. Just because it's legal to say this stuff doesn't make it okay to say it, and it's society's job to stamp out this kind of thing.
Something relevant here is that I believe that there is a significant amount of illegal speech on 8chan (or also twitter for that matter). Moving the discourse over to better enforcing current laws looks like an underestimated approach.
There is illegal speech on many platforms. Twitter is used for doxing for example.
I do not like companies being the arbiters of good, but in this case (as far as CF is concerned [1]) I believe they did no wrong.
They clearly state that they should not be in the business of policing legal content they host, but also work hard to make sure they are not hosting illegal content. This way is better than a twitter-like approach where you only pay attention to high profile situations.
(In many senses twitter is doing a good job, but in other senses they (and their employees) have a strong political bias that bubbles up to how they enforce policies)
Nasty people do exist in any environment, but in just the same way that network effects can enormously magnify things like charitable fundraising or the production of cat memes, they can also amplify the production of terrorism or other undesirable activities. Damaging social infrastructure which allows that is an effective way to impede recruitment and organization.
Ban free association then if you are worried about the wrong ideas being propogated to people. Build the police state and massive bureacracy that can enforce this at that the detriment to us all, or start trying to engage with these people and solve the fundamental problem.
> removing and restricting rights for every person DOES NOT STOP THIS BEHAVIOR.
DUI laws don't stop DUI related accidents, but having and enforcing DUI laws decrease DUI related accidents. And while you can't prevent anything 100% of the time, you can actively work toward reducing the chances of something bad happening.
And I'm sure permanently banning everyone who ever gets a DUI from driving would also decrease DUIs, but there's an important line to draw with how we enforce those.
If our ultimate goals are to reduce driver impairment and maximize highway safety, we should be punishing reckless driving. It shouldn't matter if it's caused by alcohol, sleep deprivation, prescription medication, text messaging, or road rage. If lawmakers want to stick it to dangerous drivers who threaten everyone else on the road, they can dial up the civil and criminal liability for reckless driving, especially in cases that result in injury or property damage.
Doing away with the specific charge of drunk driving sounds radical at first blush, but it would put the focus back on impairment, where it belongs. It might repair some of the civil-liberties damage done by the invasive powers the government says it needs to catch and convict drunk drivers. If the offense were reckless driving rather than drunk driving, for example, repeated swerving over the median line would be enough to justify the charge. There would be no need for a cop to jam a needle in your arm alongside a busy highway.
That is the equivalence of saying murder laws prevent or reduce murder, when here we are discussing mass murder events.
There is an underlying issue in our society that creates this lashing out behavior, and hiding it under the precept of preventing radicalization instead of engaging it will not stop the behavior.
We are all adults here. I have children, as many of you do. When your children exhibit a bad behavior, do you ban it or engage it and fix it?
I can tell my children to stop doing something until I’m blue in the face. I can BAN the action from my home, but until I engage with them it’s meaningless and only serves to make me feel good while they continue said things behind my back.
My point is, let’s look at the deeper issues instead of the emotional knee jerk tripe of ban guns, ban speech, blame racism. We have a problem that requires more rational behavior and level heads.
Now apply that logic to the war on drugs. Tell us how the war on drugs has actually helped society and how similarly banning 'hate speech' will result in a net decrease in the damage these ideologies cause.
If you think 8chan and 4chan haven't made it uniquely easy for groups like this to spread their message, you're being deliberately naïve. It's not about eradicating the behavior entirely, because yes, that's not truly possible. It's about making it more difficult for people to be recruited and radicalized. Just because you have the right to not go to jail for being racist doesn't mean you have the right to spread those views anywhere and everywhere, and when it has a proven link to encouraging violent behavior it crosses the line IMO.
If it was an ISIS board we wouldn't even be having this conversation, it would already be offline.
> I mean, it literally radicalized white supremacist terrorists. There's no "had the potential" anymore, it's a fact.
Other than the fact that 8chan had things on it that you didn’t like, where is the evidence to support this claim? How do we know that it was a website that was responsible for the views of its userbase, as opposed to any other media they accessed? How do we know that 8chan specifically was the factor that caused the outcome?
If you block 8chan, the only thing that it will result in is people will move to more censorship-resistant technologies. You will push people to TOR, distributed P2P, blockchain forums, etc. Which will make even harder to identify them.
You can't stop the signal. ThePirateBay proved it many many times.
We need to address the sources of the problem, not the symptoms.
Nobody in the history of the world has been radicalized because it was easy to access. They were radicalized because something they read resonated with something they experienced. People don't just accidentally turn into mass murderers because they read some pamphlet, a lot has to go wrong.
They don't in one step but in this analogy the pamphlet isn't static it constantly changes to show you more of what's engaging to you (or people like you as the algorithm understands you or as you engage more and more with that initial resonance) so that small initial resonance gets cranked up and up and up. It's hard to see how putting up a larger speed bump along that route won't decrease the number of people who get sucked into these radicalization spirals.
The internet has shown just how much making that slide easier means way more people fall into it. Used to be to get sucked into a world of neonazi/etc propaganda you had to know one and consciously choose to associate with it but now it gets lightly slipped into discussions online and is easy to find articles taking you to the next step.
Because the speed bump you are trying to erect only addresses the issue of people finding websites like 8chan, it does nothing to address the issue of why people stay on sites like 8chan as you described. Once they find the new site, they will be able to visit it again with ease. Furthermore, they will feel more victimized by society and point to their old sites being banned as evidence that society hates them; ergo, why they begin to hate society.
From the reporting and studying that's been done so far it seems like most people that wind up in this world get marginally attracted at first and then over time get sucked deeper and deeper into the more virulently hateful and violent edges of the ideology. My thought is that if you can sever the easy link between the on ramp and the end point people will still start over there but the jump from whatever weird subreddit or 8chan-alike to the violent side most people will stay on the clearnet.
I don't want to go into specifics, but I spent time on some of the more unsavory parts of Reddit for a while. It got me into trouble with friends and family - I said some truly mean and hateful things. I was going deeper and deeper into it. But when Reddit banned those communities, I just... moved on.
I'm ashamed I ever let myself fall into the decaying orbit I did, but when the attractor was removed, I didn't seek out a new one. I didn't even have to install tor if I wanted to: they had just moved to Voat. Still, that tiny barrier to entry caught me. And I'm glad it did.
That's already too much work for the vast majority of the population. If you can't just randomly stumble on it somewhere, it has no real discoverability.
I still wouldn't say "most people" can't access Pirate Bay. Install uTorrent, click the magnet link. Easy as that.
The very small subset of the population who live in a area where govt has blocked Piratebay can just use a VPN (which they likely already are for stuff like YouTube and Netflix).
Perhaps, but I do wonder if it actually mattered all that much whether 8chan encouraged this. There's evidence of contagion in mass shootings, that shooters seem to see the headlines about a shooting and become inspired to imitate it. Maybe there'd always be mass shootings tied to 8chan so long as there were news headlines tying the previous mass shootings to the site and leading future shooters towards it. Those certainly have a much broader reach than anything on the site itself.
It seems that the Ohio gunman claimed to be rather left leaning and wanted sen. Warren to be next president. Probably he hasn't read 8chan but still started shooting. He also claimed to be pro-Satan leftist, whatever it can possibly mean. So, I would say, that both he and large majority of public place murderers, serial killers, etc. are simply very sick people and presence of lack of presence of some random internet site does not make much difference.
I'm not really that well informed of 8chan, but bringing it down, while practical, doesn't seem like the ideal solution. Isn't it just like covering your eyes and pretending the problem isn't there? The problem doesn't sound like it's 8chan, but rather these people and their ideologies. If 8chan was brought down, they'll just find another hub to congregate, but now we don't know where to reach them to talk.
I thought the idea expressed by NearlyFreeSpeech.net in the following link was nice:
> Isn't it just like covering your eyes and pretending the problem isn't there?
Not necessarily - more like taking the megaphone away. You're right that some/many will find a hub to congregate in, but if it's discoverable by the current 8chan users, there's no reason to think it won't be discoverable by media outlets/journalists either.
Like most things, obfuscation/suppression isn't going to solve the issue, but by providing spaces that allow for discussions, the views can be legitimised in the eyes of people who otherwise may not believe them. I'm for the most part against suppression of speech or views, but I do believe there is a line, and to me 4/8chan can (and do) regularly cross this line.
The "megaphone" was simply a ranking of the most popular boards on the front page. There was no promotion of a particular community, it fell on the user to see a board description and think "Oh, I might find interesting content there".
So the crime is mostly in allowing individuals to connect with other individuals interested in a particular topic.
In that case, isn't Google a far more reaching megaphone? One can find far more vicious communities through Google. I remember browsing through racist forums as a kid because a friend had found it on Google (presumably because he looked for it). The community in there certainly matched the worst 8chan boards in their belief and conviction in hateful ideals.
The only difference is 8chan is a neutral rank by popularity, while Google also filters by a user-supplied search string. The same type of communities can be found through both sites.
> The "megaphone" was simply a ranking of the most popular boards on the front page.
No, the megaphone was the site facilitating the discussion, not the ranking. In fact, by anonymising the discussion, they make it even more difficult to infer whether something is "groupthink" or just a lone spammer.
>In that case, isn't Google a far more reaching megaphone?
This is textbook whataboutism, but yes it is. That doesn't change the discussion in any way other than to attempt to muddy the discussion.
> . I remember browsing through racist forums as a kid because a friend
The internet has changed hugely in the last few years, and comparing what was on Google 10+ years ago doesn't compare to the discussions that are happening in other places today.
Let me elaborate on why this argument isn't simply "whataboutism":
Nobody would call for Google to be shut down for the "evil" content they mirror and link to. We all have an implicit understanding that Google is simply a tool, a neutral platform to connect people to websites.
In fact, we believe the exact contrary. For us well educated folks, it's preventing access to Google on the basis of its content that is seen as a backward, deeply offensive move (China, Iran).
We look at the purpose and nature of the platform itself when we judge Google.
Well, the purpose of 8chan has never been to promote hate, but instead to provide an open alternative to 4chan, where everyone is welcome to open a board about any topic[1].
The reason why 8chan is ridden by "evil" content has more to do with the heavily controlled state of the giant internet networks, than the nature of 8chan in itself. Nothing about 8chan caters to hateful communities in particular. It's simply one of the few open social networks on the web, which naturally attracts the people rejected from mainstream social networks first.
Were it to be more popular, the ratio of "evil" to "decent" communities would trend towards the ratio found in other social networks.
So why do we call for it to be shut down, when its only real fault is to be too small? If you were the user of an 8chan community about cooking cupcakes (or furries, or BDSM), you certainly wouldn't want 8chan to be shut down just because some people are using the site differently.
___
Now I don't disagree with the reality that intellectually vulnerable people can be influenced by hateful communities in sites like 8chan, and that this is a problem to solve.
But in my opinion, the solution is to go in the total opposite direction of what you propose.
The urge to seek out and enter fringe communities is healthy, and at least a necessary step in one's intellectual development. People will from time to time look to escape out of controlled environments, into the bigger space of possibilities. This won't change for as long as we keep teaching kids that freedom is good.
The problem is that, as conventional social networks get more and more controlled, and havens of diversity suppressed (Tumblr, ...), the only remaining places of freedom are those where all the "evil" has been funneled in. That's how people wanting to escape oppression or simply discover new possibilities, get shoved in places where "evil" looks like the norm.
Therefore, the solution is not to shut down one of the last places of diversity on the internet, Instead, we should try to make diversity and openness of thought as widespread as possible, so that "evil" doesn't seem like the only option to a lost, vulnerable individual.
I don't really know anything about 8chan but my limited experience watching videos on YouTube leads me to believe that there are millions of people being radicalized through technology. Young, angry, possibly under-educated people can easily fall down into a rabbit hole of hate like never before.
It's definitely an issue worldwide regardless of race, religion or gender and unfortunately no one has the answer. I don't know if 8chan going down really helps stop radicalization but I don't think it hurts. I also don't think it's an affront to free speech if a hosting provider stops doing business with them. If the US government started arresting posters on 8chan that's most definitely a concern but losing your Cloudflare service or hosting is not breaking any first amendment rights.
8chan never got brought down. They just got dumped by their ISP and CDN. They are free to start their own CDN and ISP to host their content. And if they cannot find a private business willing to peer with them, they are free to offer alternative access methods (dialup?). They can even go set up a booth downtown and hand out flyers with access numbers.
No free speech rights were trampled on, and no censorship took place.
I think no free speech right was trampled because it wasn't the government that acted, not because the reasons you stated. I mean, going by your logic, it's impossible to trample the free speech of someone unless you make it physically impossible for them to express anything ever again.
I have zero qualms about private businesses or private citizens stopping nazis from shouting their hate to the world. Nazis are free to shout as much as they want, and I'm free to tell them to shut the fuck up.
"Censorship is the suppression of speech, public communication, or other information, on the basis that such material is considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, or "inconvenient". Censorship can be conducted by a government,[5] private institutions, and corporations."
This is the wikipedia definition of censorship, so that makes your definition wrong.
Yes, but GP was specifically stating that no rights afforded by the United States government were trampled on in this case. This is, no doubt, censorship, but some questions are:
- did censoring 8chan significantly limit any sort of harmful behavior?
- is censoring 8chan "right"?
- does this merely hide the problem, preventing an open discussion?
- should CloudFlare, an entity with massive control of Internet infrastructure, really be acting as a moral arbiter? Or do we expect some kind of neutrality from them? Do our expectations matter?
That's clearly against the spirit of free speech.
At that point, what's stopping the government from relying on corporations to perform censorship for them in exchange for say, tax benefits and just going off of this plausible deniability of "oh, but we the government didn't do it! Go blame that corporation!".
I suspect if water and electricity services weren't public utilities, you'd argue that they too can take away service from whoever they want simply because of their unrelated views.
I'm guessing you also think it's okay when banks and transaction processors can interfere in the unrelated business of their clients, relying on their large market share to coerce their clients into dumping certain users. There's absolutely nothing authoritarian about that!
Seriously, this naive approach to things is going to ruin this country. The road to hell is truly paved by good intentions.
To me its more like closing the bar they hang out in, almost all of them will find other bars to go to instead almost immediately but it'll cause at least a temporary fracture and even when they all do find themselves back to the same place (asides from the ones who just got on with their lives), it'll take a while to build up the same kind of feedback loop.
Honestly, as a teen (over a decade ago now...), there were forums I was on that totally died due to a week or two of downtime, sometimes just breaking someone away from their familiar habits is enough to get them out of a bad routine.
The notion that we could reach them on 8chan is a bit idealistic, the only thing we're able to reach is the manifestos within seconds of the news breaking as far as I can see. If your goal is to _reach_ them, then do it in reality.
The whole point of bringing 8chan down is to make it harder for them to congregate and fracture their community. It also makes it harder for new people to be indoctrinated.
Reddit found that banning hate subreddits reduced the overall usage of hate speech on the website. Even though the most dedicated users probably moved to voat, now some clueless kid who just wants to see look at memes is much less likely to just stumble upon that content.
> I've read it before, and I spent a few hours reading it this weekend, and it's beyond clear to me that it absolutely had the potential to radicalize shooters and terrorists.
What was it you read there that convinced you that websites are capable of turning people into murderers any more than video games are?
Do you not think that discussion has the potential to convey ideas and change minds? It hardly seems implausible to say that a group of people eagerly urging each other to murder could possibly result in someone getting murdered.
An implicit acceptance and endorsement for the messages of hate and violence?
I personally doubt violent video games turn people into murderers; I suspect they do desensitize people to violence, and normalize violence. That's the problem with 8chan: violence, hated, bigotry, etc are normalized
free speech is highly overrated, is not even granted in other democracies that are functional
It has also not prevented the US to go into a de-facto oligarchy state if anything the NRA and others have manipulated the "free speech cult" to promote private interest over a public one.
Same as with gun ownership, that sad illusion that owning guns will prevent tyranny is beyond hilarious at this point.
I've lost good friends to 4chan/8chan. They were obsessed. At first it was cat pictures and memes, but it went way downhill from there. I've watched those sites cause the transition from normal, interesting, reasonable, open minded, intelligent, happy human beings, to horrible inexcusable pieces of shit who I never want to have anything to do with ever again.
It's not just that they inspire a few shooters and mass murders. They inspire a hell of a lot of other once-reasonable people to be deeply and irredeemably terrible in many other ways.
The 'chans seem almost like a leaderless cult. I've also seen people get completely sucked into them in this really honestly creepy way. I suppose it's like a subculture but minus virtually everything positive like socializing with real human beings and having real experiences.
What's tragic is that they convince cat lovers to post cat pictures on "Caturday", when they should be posting them every day! That needlessly reduces their positive contribution to society to just 14.28% efficiency.
Maybe those games where you control a Western European country in the middle ages and have to defend your civilization against religious, cultural and ethnic rivals?
>Prior to the start of Rawitsch's history unit, Heinemann and Dillenberger let some students at their school play it to test; the students were enthusiastic about the game, staying late at school to play. The other teachers were not as interested, but did recommend changes to the game, particularly removing negative depictions of Native Americans as they were based more on Western movies and television than history, and could be problematic towards the several students with Native American ancestry at the schools.
But they partially addressed that in the 1974 MECC version:
>He also added in more positive depictions of Native Americans, as his research indicated that many settlers received assistance from them along the trail. He placed The Oregon Trail into the organization's time-sharing network in 1975, where it could be accessed by schools across Minnesota.
Now the developer, Don Rawitsch, would like to create a version of the game from the Native American perspective.
>But developers still field questions about the game’s stereotypical portrayal of Native Americans. During a recent gaming conference, Don Rawitsch, one of three aspiring teachers who developed The Oregon Trail, said he has dreams of reimagining the game with a Native American perspective.
>“If I were to create something like Oregon Trail today, I would create the Native American version,” he said during a panel discussion at the Game Developers Conference in March. “What would it be like on the other side of the wall, so to speak?”
But even the cowboys-and-indians-movie 1971 version of Oregon Trail was a far cry from 8chan.
There are definitely leaders on the chans. The site operators know who log in the most, post the most, and what they post. This sort of info is inherent to running a message board. Moot was upfront about this when he ran 4chan, and he cooperated with law enforcement when they came looking for specific people.
The idea that these movements are leaderless collectives is part of their propaganda and should not be passed on without skepticism.
As someone who unashamedly frequents 4chan it saddens me to see this sort of view. I'm neither for or against 8chan's banning but I think there's a lot of misunderstanding of the *chan cultures.
The problem with most of the internet is that there are so many psychological incentives to repress unpopular opinions and to fit in with the hive mind. Reddit is the pinnacle of that where your opinion is literally shown or hidden based on its popularity. Now this is good for lazy content consumption since most of the time the popular content is what you want to see. But it's also very dangerous. Very very dangerous. Not only because it discourages changes in thinking but also because malicious entities can literally manipulate what you're thinking.
So yes, I may not always like what I read on 4chan. It may act as a platform for mentally ill people. But a lot of greatness also comes from it too. I mean it's no coincidence that a disproportionate amount of internet memes originate there. But a lot of thoughtful discourse also occurs there, often inciting interesting arguments where elsewhere on the internet it'd be buried by downvotes or deleted by moderators.
The antidote to social media ad populum isn't social media anarchy. They're both bad, but they're not equally bad.
It's like asking if you'd rather eat your own poop or a handful of one inch nails. As unpalatable as the former certainly is, the latter is unambiguously worse.
I never claimed it was a solution. I just said it helps you to avoid it. If it were the solution I wouldn't be on Hacker News right now.
Although I strongly disagree regarding 4chan being unambiguously worse. Maybe if you're talking about just /b/ and /pol/ I'd agree but the site is so much more than that.
For instance, the game development community there much more human and helpful than most other communities I've participated in. But there's a hundreds of other micro communities that are really great if you know where to find them.
There are tons of non-gamified and non-surveillance-capitalist forums out there about all kinds of topics. I realize not everything and everyone on the chans is toxic, but there is quite a lot of toxic presence there.
I think the chans were cool and interesting back in the early-mid 2000s but since then they've been taken over by not-actually-ironic trolls, political propagandists and astroturfers, and other nasties. Since the forums are anonymous there's no real way to police it or even tell who you're talking to or whether they're a "real person" or a sock puppet of some kind.
I distinctly remember what to me felt like the chans' shark-jumping moment: Ebola Chan.
When that appeared along with a thread full of seemingly not actually ironic comments like "maybe Ebola will de-populate Africa," I felt that the chans were done.
There's plenty of actual racism around, which of course I don't like, but most of this is limited to /b/ and /pol/ which are not representative of the entire site. They just happen to get in the spotlight more because of how controversial they can be.
A lot of people on 4chan view these boards as a sort of filter to scare away outsiders. The majority of the site isn't nearly that edgy and largely discuss the various relevant topics for each respective board.
I would not lump 4chan into this discussion. I'll concede that some boards on the site are more polemical than others and promote alt-right ideologies without a doubt, but there are many other interesting boards and people on 4chan that are not captured by the broad strokes you're outlining. I know people that browse /fit/, /lit/, /mu/ and /out/ just to name some boards that are perfectly reasonable individuals that don't lionize shooters or hold other alienated views.
That's a concern leveled elsewhere in this thread: that you go to 4chan to discuss music or retro video games, and are one click away from an absolute hive of poisonous extremists.
On the other hand, the extremists are one click away from the people who will call them out on their bs. I'm not sure if that's worse or better than deplatforming them only to have they retreat to even more extremist echo-chambers.
The "bad" boards frequently leak, and you do see highly political or racist posts from time-to-time on the regular boards. A sign that the community is functioning properly is regulars on /out/, /lit/, etc. calling out (read mocking) ethno-nationalist threads, or race-baiting for what they are.
The answer is structuring society, socialization, and culture in a way that doesn't disenfranchise people or leave them feeling helpless enough to turn to extremism, hate, and violence.
But that requires empathy and effort, things often in short supply.
People only go down the dark paths that lead to 8chan et al when the avenues to belonging they were presented with by their parents and by default failed them.
Just to add on my own experiences, Since starting to collect toys and also make my own, I've been entirely unable to find a better community for both of these than /toy/. Every other community is brimming with an endless barrage of superhero stuff and zero interest in niche/art toy lines. /pol/-esque posting is always mocked, reported, and subsequently purged by janitors there.
There is an important difference, in approach if not in ultimate intent: the alt right tries to look suave, intellectual, and hipsterish. (This is also why "debate" is exactly the wrong way to approach them as it plays to their charade. Antifa is entirely correct to respond to them with suppressive violence.)
Literal Nazis are German White Nationalist Socialists. That's not what the alt-right is. The alt-right is a blanket term used to describe anyone right of Bill Clinton who is currently not a media darling.
Fascists or Ethno-Centrists are both better terms, and cover the ideologies that most people attribute to the alt right.
Because that's the radicalized ideology that pops up most often on 4chan. If you know of a board with a contingent of alt-left/identity-politics I would be interested to know. As you said yourself, the case of the second shooter seems to be related to Twitter, not the chans.
No. Come on, are we gonna do it like this? Actually take a look at this guy.
I call him radical because he actually was. He posted overt, politically charged threats on Twitter, for example: "I want socialism, and i’ll not wait for the idiots to finally come round to understanding."
I'm interested in how that can be the case. Do you mind sharing some more details of how normal people can go off the deep end through their experiences on the sites?
I posted this above, but it is a direct response to your question as well: Just look at the absurdity of Qanon. This troll gone long [1] has affected real people and real relationships [2].
There's an extremely long tail of terribly damaged human beings and relationships, once you get past all the mass murderers and white supremacists that 8chan and 4chan have inspired.
I used to go on 4chan as a teenager. It was always "edgy" but only recently (since roughly around gamergate and Elliot Rodger, which is also when 8chan started) has it begun to seriously drift to the far-right. White nationalists saw that as an opportunity to radicalize teenagers to their cause and it's still ongoing.
There is a whole cottage industry of people attempting to radicalize jaded white teens and "skeptics" to turn them from ideological libertarians or politically unaffiliated into hateful, "alt-right" fascists. One of them was Steve Bannon [0].
It would be naive to assume that the only people who want to push America to fascism are from other countries. There are a lot of people in the US that support that too.
I'm wondering since other commenters wrote that even twitter is filled with white nationalists. I don't think you can blame some random internet platform for the world's problems. It's just that they make the problems far more visible because they are echo chambers that focus around one particular ideology.
So what exactly causes white nationalism to be rising everywhere, not just on 8chan?
You could say the exact same thing about Twitter, Facebook, Reddit or any other form of social media. People get absorbed in ideas all the time, and those platforms just multiply the intensity.
Personally, Twitter has been a much bigger source of anger, shock and hate than 4chan ever was. Some of the shit I've seen on Twitter made it unbearable to go on my day and yet on 4chan, on boards like /vg/, /ck/, /g/, /wg/ it was mostly just shitposts and once in a while you would see a good post.
All I can do is shrug.. People with no clue will always just yell.
>You could say the exact same thing about Twitter, Facebook, Reddit or any other form of social media. People get absorbed in ideas all the time, and those platforms just multiply the intensity. Personally, Twitter has been a much bigger source of anger, shock and hate than 4chan ever was.
Do you ever see people openly hoping for shootings, cheering them on, and then posting manifestos there (referencing not only the ideology they learned from the site, but even the in-jokes of the people cheering for it on the site) before doing their own shootings? And then after that, do those sites regularly completely refuse the concept of doing anything to try to prevent repeats?
I'm sure that other sites have been guilty of bits and pieces of that, but the combination makes 8chan on another level than any of those.
I'm in the same boat as DonHopkins. I've seen people who used to be friends get sucked into far alt-right stuff through 8chan specifically. Maybe it happens with Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit, but I haven't seen it and haven't seen many people here bring up any experiences like that.
> Do you ever see people openly hoping for shootings, cheering them on, and then posting manifestos on Twitter?
Yes I have many times. Just this weekend alone, the Ohio shooter tweeted "Kill every fascist", retweeted several violent Antifa posts. His Twitter profile read “he/him / anime fan / metalhead / leftist / i’m going to hell and i’m not coming back.” His top pinned tweet said “Millennials have a message for the Joe Biden generation: hurry up and die.” In May, he tweeted, “You’ll never be rid of me. I’ll haunt your life like a fucking vengeful spirit.” He added, “My Horoscope Just Reads ‘Doom.'” He shared posts about “concentration camps” at the border and wrote, “Cut the fences down. Slice ICE tires. Throw bolt cutters over the fences.” He retweeted a post from another person about stealing from “right wingers” at a Trump rally. One of his tweets referred to white people. “Imagine if we did the thing you liked, but in a way that totally ruins what you liked about it! Wouldn’t that be fun? Ha ha Also, of course they’re all white people, of course they are,” he wrote.
From another comment:
> "Dayton shooter Was The Lead Singer Of A "Pornogrind" Metal Band - The gunman, identified as 24 year-old (wont be named), was a member of Menstrual Munchies, a three-man band that performed regularly on the Midwest death metal scene. All the Dark Metal Bands that were friends with the shooter are distancing themselves extremely fast. All their music supports antifascists (aka antifa) and their genre of music is defined by its explicit subject matter and themes of gore and violence, specifically sexual violence and necrophilia."
> "Betts was also in a “Pornogrind” Band that, according to Vice News, “released songs about raping and killing women.” Vice called it the “extreme metal music scene.” The bands he performed in sometimes were called Menstrual Munchies and Putrid Liquid, and the songs contained vile names like “6 Ways of Female Butchery” and “Preeteen Daughter Pu$$y Slaughter,” Vice reported."
> Betts’ Twitter profile read, “he/him / anime fan / metalhead / leftist / i’m going to hell and i’m not coming back.” One tweet on his page read, “Off to Midnight Mass. At least the songs are good. #athiestsonchristmas.” The page handle? I am the spookster. On one selfie, he included the hashtags, “#selfie4satan #HailSatan @SatanTweeting.” On the date of Republican Sen. John McCain’s death, he wrote, “F*ck John McCain.” He also liked tweets referencing the El Paso mass shooting in the hours before Dayton. The Twitter page contains multiple selfies of Betts.
>All the Dark Metal Bands that were friends with the shooter are distancing themselves extremely fast.
If the groups of these other shooters had instead responded by distributing propaganda that literally canonized the shooters like saints and praised future shooters in order to encourage more, then it might be comparable. (You don't have to look far at all on 8chan for this type of thing.) I'm probably only in the tamest of lefty circles, but I've never seen anything remotely like that. I don't see these shootings celebrated; it seems like a much harder argument to make that they're encouraged in lefty places than the argument that 8chan encourages violence.
Sorry that's not the argument I was trying to make. The argument I was trying to make is that Twitter, FB groups etc all have these type of violent posts but they are not being held liable (most likely because they are way too big and maybe also because they are US based companies). Reddit has subreddits which actively call for assassination of political figures. I have reported them a few times but the posts stay on because maybe the mods aren't getting paid to do their jobs on reddit unlike the other big companies.
I can't find anything in your comment that alludes to what being a terrible horrible utter piece of shit consists of. Do you mind elaborating?
Note that this is a sincere question, since I haven't had exposure to 4chan since before the Internet went mainstream, and even then it was fairly limited. I've heard horrible things about what it's become since, but I don't know much about it.
That's the problem with leftists in censorship discussions - they fundamentally don't believe in free will. It's not the website that shot people. It wasn't Trump. It was the individual. Believing otherwise is highly problematic as it leads to authoritarianism.
The shooter acted of his own free will. Yes, there were factors that contributed to his actions, but the responsibility is squarely on his shoulders. There's room for nuance, but unless he was forced to do something against his will, it's on him.
Culture matters. Environment matters. Yes he chose to commit the crime but if the environment promotes this kind of thinking/behavior then the environment needs change as well.
If he were Muslim or dark skinned we'd be losing our shit but because he's a white Christian male he's a lone wolf and it's solely his responsibility. Excuse me but I find that to be utter horsecrap.
Reality is indeed more complicated than you and I can fathom, which makes it ironic that there is always a knee-jerk reaction to tragedies, usually by politically opportunist leftists who want to take away guns and free speech. The reality is that these were individuals who allowed themselves to be taken over by demons. They willingly forfeited their own sovereignty. To what degree society is culpable is unknown, and large-scale attempts to curtail the devil, performed with an impetuous lack of prudence, serve only to make him stronger.
> once-reasonable people to be deeply and irredeemably terrible in many other ways
Like otaku. Or furries. Can't imagine anything more terribly dangerous than furry otaku spreading GNU Manifesto and forcing you to install Gentoo. Awful place!
I've never figured out a good way to express this without sounding like a raving censor, but here goes: I feel like freedom of speech is a means to an end (the end being general freedom and liberty) more than an end in itself. When speech leads directly to mass fear or violence engendering mass fear, which leads to people willingly sacrificing their own and others' rights just for the promise of safety, then bitter realpolitik says that we may need to limit certain kinds of speech to maintain vital freedoms.
Of course that's dangerous thinking in itself, because there's always potential for abuse when you let someone decide what people aren't allowed to say. But there has to be a balance somewhere. I hope we can find it.
there is no free speech side of this debate. framing the "other side" as not being free speech is false.
the free speech argument is that racist assholes should be allowed to say whatever they want, but cloudflare or voxility or any other service provider should also be allowed to tell 8chan to STFU and go away. that's part of free speech too. 8chan doesn't and shouldn't have any more rights here than cloudflare does.
A person can be sound and rational but people are tribal. It is deep human drive to find a tribe to belong to. What the internet has enabled is forming tribes irrespective of geographic proximity. Sites like 4chan/8chan allow people of radical persuasions to find each other and band together, growing their
That creates a powder keg waiting on a fight/flight trigger. Without a tribe to back someone, such a trigger will cause a flight response, but with that tribe they’ll feel emboldened and choose a fight strategy. Sites that encourage the formation of communities that promote violence will inevitably lead to actual violence once they’re past a certain size. It doesn’t even really matter what the ideology is, it just matters that they preach violence.
There is high chance that most of those in these groups don't even believe in most of the stuff they say. To them its just entertainment. People participate only because its a throwaway identity that is noncommittal. These groups have no leadership or loyalty. I'm sure this is understood a majority of the time by participants. The problem is that one individual who memes way too hard or is absolutely serious about the things they say. Real life friends call you out on your bullshit, they try to reason with you when you are irrational. they stop you from driving when you're drunk. Your internet troll squad does everything opposite.
Because when people are joking they aren't usually willing to get into arguments that span hundreds of posts about race and IQ, the so-called parasitic nature of Jews, race mixing and why every race other than whites (with the ocassional exception of asians) is subhuman.
I would not doubt that a not very small percentage of the conspiracy theories posted are done so by people who don't actually believe it but want to see how many others they can convince.
However, I do also believe that some pretty sick people use 8chan to recruit people to continue their campaign of hate.
I visited 8chan/pol for the first time before it went down. I think reading content there should absolutely make anyone think hard about reasonable constraints on free speech. For example, I saw someone started a thread about population in Nigeria rising. Several anonymous commenters piled on, virtually everyone referring to Africans as “subhumans”. One commenter proposed that western countries should issue tags to hunt Africans in same way as animals and utilize their skills to survive as hunting challenge. Other commenter thanked Trump for shutting down Ebola research and hoped it will soon spread again. It was very clear no one had any rational debate. No one cared to fact check or cross-question anything. You can literally through whatever number and cite whatever source you want and everyone merely would go with it as long as it supports racial superiority. Everyone was busy one upping another in how grotesque and extreme they possibly could be. It is at this point I realized that hate is an addiction. I am certain it gives large dopamine hits for these people to consume all these material. It is probably highlight of their day to justify themselves as savior of humanity, being superior and created favorably by god than others. They probably hang out in here very large portions of their free time not for learning something but for pure entertainment derived dopamine hits. They are neither looking for nor want rational debates or reasoning from the other side. I can see how someone vulnerable will get in to these forums and become terminal addict. These forums should not be considered any less dangerous than drug dealers who handout cocain to young kids.
> I've generally been on the free speech side of this debate, as some of my previous comments on HN will show.
> With 8chan, I legitimately don't know what my opinion is.
You can support free speech and still condemn 8chan, by considering Karl Popper’s Paradox of Tolerance[1]. If a person or group enacts violence on another person or group because of their ideas, the elements of the latter will curb their speech out of fear.
Violent groups use “free speech” as an excuse because it works. They’re only interested in free speech for themselves, not others. In fact, they’re so incapable of tolerating the free speech of others that they resort to killing them.
I'm of the opinion that if we suppress it, it doesn't go away. When it comes back, it's much harder to control.
I also firmly believe that everyone has biases and inclinations that are morally wrong. The sooner we learn how to deal with the "good guys" unfair biases, the sooner we can figure out how to deal with the "bad guys" too.
The already radicalised don't go away, but de-platforming does help.
Sure, there are some alternatives that are harder to restrict and monitor, like if all the radicals move to private Telegram groups or the dark web or something.
However all the vulnerable people at risk of being radicalised are less likely to be radicalised if they're using a similar forum to 8chan but without all the white supremacist and other hateful memes and "jokes", that obviously have radicalised a lot of people. Even if most people just scroll past them.
The way to deal with the "bad guys" is for private businesses to not give them a platform to spew their hate from. And it's up to us to pressure these private businesses to do that.
The "bad guys" just went somewhere else. This doesn't fix the problem it just pushed the problem away from reddit.
> And it's up to us to pressure these private businesses to do that.
No it isn't. I am fed up of something I like being ruined by moral busy bodies such as yourself. My friend and I like the "edgy" jokes because we work in environments where you have to be political correct and I need to let off some steam.
8chan isn't the problem. The problem is that large portions of the population aren't engaged in society at large. The is a huge problem with loneliness, suicide and general lack of meaning to life.
Censorship and harassing companies that run image board won't fix the problem. All you will do it hide it.
> The problem is that large portions of the population aren't engaged in society at large. The is a huge problem with loneliness, suicide and general lack of meaning to life.
Do you think that this is the root cause of violent islamic extremists as well?
With extremists that grew up in the west, possibly. I did work with some Somali guys (they weren't extremists) but a few of them said they didn't feel British and they didn't feel Somalian. So there is a schism there, I've felt the same schism as someone that is essentially a nomad these days I don't belong anywhere.
Extremists that grow up in the Middle-East. No idea I haven't spent a lot of time in the Middle-East (only Israel).
>Liberals like to make off-color jokes too, they're just in denial about it.
Are they? Myself, a liberal, and all my liberal friends and family, make off color jokes all the time and are totally aware of it. Similarly, we don't castigate conservative friends for making off color jokes.
I think you're purposefully misstating the fact that people disagree on the (admittedly fuzzy) line between off color jokes and sincere expressions of hatred.
I'm in favor of extra-legal filtering, according to a company's morals, as long as market alternatives exists.
If speech crosses the line, law enforcement should pursue and prosecute.
Short of that (e.g. the "we were just joking" crowd), the best possible aggregate outcome seems like it would be companies making independent moral judgements and acting on them.
If Cloudflare doesn't want to be associated with 8chan, they refuse them as a customer.
Other customers are then free to judge Cloudflare for that action and use / not use them as they decide.
This seems far preferable to more draconian, government-enforced options.
Companies are inherently political, and a diversity of options is the healthiest ecosystem.
Not, this requires that we have functioning alternatives. For something like 8chan, Cloudflare's services are probably avoidable, but there's a market penetration at with "must serve" should be considered.
I am fed up of everything be political. I know someone is going to make Doom Eternal political somehow when the game is about a man that is too angry to die taking on the legions of the hell dimension (that is literally the plot of the game).
Gilette have tried making how I remove hair from my face political.
I want companies to sell their product and as long are people are using it legally they should probably not take a political stance.
You may not. But others certainly do. Otherwise recycled toilet paper wouldn't be stocked.
Beyond that, to use the same analogy, one brand might be dump their bleaching agents in the ocean.
It's up to the companies if they want to trumpet their behavior loudly or say nothing about it. And it's up to consumers if they care about whatever type of behavior is involved.
Well that is up to other people. It doesn't make the company inherently political.
This logic as previously stated is a horrible mind worm that infests everything and ruins a great many things that are just useful (razor blades) or fun (video games).
Politics is a set of power games done by people we call politicians and promoted by their activists. It has nothing to do with right and wrong.
> The problem is that large portions of the population aren't engaged in society at large. The is a huge problem with loneliness, suicide and general lack of meaning to life.
Well said. The American melting pot makes this loneliness stronger still as there’s no sense of community left for these people. They live amongst us but they’re not connected to anyone around them.
I’m convinced there’s twisted weirdos all over the world, but traditionally communities did a better job of watching their own and making sure they were not endangering others. That simply does not exist any more, so the dark thoughts fester and grow until they’ve taken total control.
I don’t know how to fix any of this, but know it going to require either bringing those people into the light or occasionally joining them in their darkness.
The study explicitly states, that the problem went away for reddit, but this does not proof that the hate went away, it maybe just left reddit for another platform.
Sure but I interpreted the claim being made to be about hate existing anywhere. Reddit can do what they want, but we can argue whether it's good for society or not, even if it's clearly good for reddit.
Then at least they isolate themselves, and have less ability to radicalize anyone besides the true believers. A number of isolated extremist cells are probably also easier to deal with for law enforcement, and these weird beliefs will stand out more to others in a social setting if they become rare.
Also, it seems like the group egging them on motivates these shooters. Tragically seems related to internet likes. So, by deflating the social network surrounding these ideas, there will be less social motivation to carry out such horrible actions.
And, finally, people have a social concept of truth, and if such ideas are considered to only be fringe crazy ideas instead of consistent with mainstream Darwinian theory, then people will be less likely to believe such ideas are true and less likely to act on them. As it is, social Darwinism seems to be one of those unpleasant truths due to the social weight given to the idea. Such social weight needs to be eradicated.
> A number of isolated extremist cells are probably also easier to deal with for law enforcement, //
I'd expect stuff done in the open on 'chan sites to be much easier to monitor than stuff done in private encrypted channels elsewhere.
>Also, it seems like the group egging them on motivates these shooters. //
In private where all the voices coalesce around a single ideology then the effect (Echo Chamber) makes it appear that _everyone_ [who matters] shares that ideal.
Moreover, it's easier to "other" the out group, make them in to a caricature; dehumanise them. (See 2-party political systems!)
Cults don't operate in the open, forcing people underground creates a sort of cultist environment.
Contact with genuine people who are considered part of the out-group appears to be highly effective in breaking down these sorts of barriers .. that can happen on generalist sites but will never happen in closed ideology-bad groups.
It seems to me that shutting down places like 8chan is going to lead to _more_ radicalised groups (that are more extremely radicalised), though they may be smaller groups and a smaller overall population. I think bigger, less cohesive, in-the-open groups are easier to monitor and take action against when necessary.
I wonder if there are any useful models that can give actionable input to this question.
I guess you could say that free speech has limits that are acceptable.
You know you can't yell fire in a crowded room and not get litigation and charges brought against you.
So, maybe 8chan just ran past the fine line of hate speech vs encouraging acts of hate. I.e you can be racist but you cannot encourage acts of extremism.
If 8Chan was a breeding ground for Islamic Extremists would people be okay with still existing?
Not the OP, but I think you're missing the point of the question; the question is about hypocrisy. I think the poster was trying to say "a lot of people who claim that they love free speech would suddenly become really uncomfortable with the idea of a breeding ground for Islamic Extremists".
I don't think there's a contradiction between supporting freedom of expression and suggesting that such a freedom isn't absolute. There are limits, particularly when the use of that freedom treads on the freedoms of others.
Even US law recognizes this. You're not allowed to invite violence or rioting for example. There are also rules about perjury, liable, and other things that directly limit freedom of expression.
The real questions we should be asking here are where the line is between stating an opinion and inciting violence... And what should ISPs and edge providers be asked/allowed to do?
Because not being forced to provide a platform for the speech of someone else may also be a valid freedom. If I come into your property and say things you don't like, are you allowed to ask me to leave? What if I put up a sign in my front yard? Can I take it down?
IMO, we need neutrality regulations to protect ourselves from the corporations who control everything we see... But such neutrality regulations must necessarily include ISPs as well as edge providers. Otherwise they're worthless.
Did you know that the "fire in a crowded room" metaphor comes from Schenck v. United States in which Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr used the metaphor to defend the criminality of protesting the military draft?
I'm not sure if that's the kind of history you want to align yourself with.
My point is that the phrase has a history of being used to criminalize speech that most people would now see as being worthy of protection. For those using it today, the burden is really on the accuser to show that they aren't doing the same.
In that case, wouldn't it be more that it isn't allowed to yell fire in a crowded theater with the express purpose to cause injury during a stampede? Would doing so "just as a prank bro" still be protected under American precedent?
I'm not a Constitutional or 1A scholar, but I believe the test remains whether the speech is substantially likely to result in "imminent lawless action". Whether you wanted people to get trampled, or just thought it was a lulz thing to do, exigently emptying a crowded room on false pretenses is probably going to yield some pretty lawless behavior.
EDIT: Even so, that test was IIRC conceived as a means of measuring whether political speech — specifically, advocating the use of force or criminal behavior — was 1A-protected, so I really wonder whether this line of thought isn't moot.
> I mean, I wouldn't use analogies that were originally created to target people who disagreed with the draft.
> Whether or not the analogy applies now, is irrelevant. It's history makes it a bad analogy.
I appreciate your motivation, but I just can't get behind this line of reasoning. For one thing, most people aren't aware of the history.
For another, almost every good idea has a tainted history. (e.g. the golden rule. "Eh that? That's just something that Jesus guy said, and look how many people his followers killed in the crusades, witch-hunts, etc.")
Lastly, it's just not a form of rational thinking. Obviously the connotations of our words matter, but unless we can separate the connotation from the denotation we have no hope of arriving at the truth.
The other irony is that the holding of Schenk vs. United States was later overturned in Brandenburg vs. Ohio, which set the line for where free speech becomes unprotected at "inciting imminent lawless action":
Brandenburg overturned the specifics of Schenk, not the idea of free speech having limits. "There are valid limits of free speech" remains as true as ever.
I'd had a paragraph after that said "You can, in fact, yell "fire" in a crowded theater without breaking any laws", but edited it out because in certain situations this would also violate the revised test in Brandenburg (you still can't incite a riot legally, for example). But that paragraph made it a bit more clear that yes, the irony I'm talking about is that the specific examples in Schenk are no longer law, not the general principle that free speech has limits. The limits are significantly less restrictive than Schenk held, though.
Little known fact about the phrase "fire in a crowded theater": it was coined in a criminal case against a man who was distributing leaflets criticizing the draft during World War 1. The Supreme Court upheld his conviction by comparing those leaflets to "shouting fire in a crowded theater" -- even though most readers here would agree that those two things are nothing alike.
I think there's a lesson in that: when we tolerate any censorship, it will inevitably be used by the powerful to oppress the powerless. If the powerful need to compare the targeted speech to "fire in a crowded theater" or "Nazism" or whatever, they'll do it whether it makes sense or not.
It's never just used for the original case either.
Now that 8chan is down why not every other site with a subset of (violent?) racist users?
By doing something about one and not doing anything about another, is Cloudflare not basically giving their ideology a greenlight to exist? This is the type of backwards anti-intellectual thinking that will seep into the decision making.
"Slippery slopes" are a cliche for a reason when talking about this stuff because it never stops with one really good example nor within a very narrow scope. Making this debate all about 8chan misses the larger point because it sets a precedent. There's already tons of people who want way more than 8chan banned from the internet.
The problem for 8chan wasn't having bad users, every place has those, it was the specific way which it enabled them. Reddit or Facebook make effort to take down extremist threats, which puts them in a different league altogether. I'm fine with taking down places that enable them in that way and it hasn't seemed to have led to the slippery slope you are worried about so far.
The point is slippery slopes don't stop after the fact.
The next time twitter blows up at Cloudflare [or insert tech company name] over a tragedy what's going to happen?
Does this apply to Islamic Extremism or some radical groups in Ukraine or some hypothetical Flemish separatist group who is openly violent and posts similar un-moderated content? Or is it only for some highly touchy US problems since they're a US company or the topic got the most noise on Twitter/news sites?
Private companies are incentivized to make money, they can host and kick off whoever the hell they want. I don't understand what you're getting at? It's capitalism at work.
If 8chan wants to exist on the internet without worrying about being knocked offline then 8chan needs to either build their infrastructure or find companies that are willing to risk their reputation to support them.
Yeah but on the other hand you shouldn't be able to shout fire in a crowded theater so you need some censorship. As with like 99% of political arguments is about finding the line because the absolutist arguments generally end up kinda silly.
If 8Chan was a breeding ground for Islamic Extremists would people be okay with still existing?
Strangely enough, most people who find censorship ideologically palatable consider Jihadists a more sympathetic group than Incels. Note that ISIS beheadings have been subject to far less censorship than the Christchurch shooter's propaganda, for example.
I make a factual claim you can investigate on your own. Perhaps your findings will surprise you. As an aside, I recommend engaging with people you disagree with politically to understand their motivations and opinions. Much of political discourse is superficially ridiculous, but almost everything can be made sense of and appreciated once you get a view of the whole picture. Good luck.
And a note to the simpleton downvoters, so that they may possibly grow: my profile has contained an Arabic adoration of the Islamic God since before I posted the above comment. I am Roman Catholic and deeply oppose censorship of any kind.
To Catholics, as with all Christians, God is Jesus Christ.[1]
The Islamic view is that Jesus of Nazareth was a prophet.[2][3] (The audio answer is a bit long, but quite good.)
The argument that Allah is the same as the Father in the Christian trinity depends on various heresies[4] (incorrect claims), maybe one of Monarchianism, Sabellianism, Tritheism.
So, no, neither religion accepts that they are one and the same. And this is due to central tenets of each respective faith.
Haha, well, I'm skeptical that obscure exegesis is much of a way to get closer to God, though maybe for this audience it could be.
As it's impossible to quantify the unknown, when we approach a subject we're not familiar with, our bias is to assume it's very simple. So I think it's helpful to dig in a little to give a hint at the vast amount of scholarly work done on these subjects.
> you can't yell fire in a crowded room and not get litigation and charges brought against you.
Of course you can yell 'fire' in a crowded room and not have any charges that stick brought against you. Are you arguing the point it is not allowed to yell to a large audience? Or there is something else here you are not mentioning, like for example whether or not the statement is true is the actual crux of the matter? Of course you can yell 'fire' in a crowded room - if there is a fire!
> I guess you could say that free speech has limits that are acceptable.
There are already limits to free speech that most people don't complain about. The most frequent example is defamation.
I do like how Canada handles hate speed -- like defamation, it is illegal. There's really no benefit to protecting hate speech. If you argue it is a slippery slope, we're already on a slope with defamation so the benefits of adding hate speech out weight the risks of slipping further.
I supposed I should have mentioned how Canada defines illegal hate speech, because that has a clear definition too. The type of hate speech that is illegal there is hate speech that advocates or incites violence or genocide. That's clear and defines how it is damaging, therefore it's not definitively slippery.
Hate speech is illegal in Canada because it infringes on the right to security of the person - a Charter right. Freedom of speech is also protected, but the expression of one right cannot diminish the protection of another.
> I guess you could say that free speech has limits that are acceptable.
widely known and not really legally disputed.
> You know you can't yell fire in a crowded room and not get litigation and charges brought against you.
this seems like empty rhetoric; we already know that there are classes of speech that aren't 1A protected. this isn't controversial.
> If 8Chan was a breeding ground for Islamic Extremists would people be okay with still existing?
whether or not people "are okay" with something isn't relevant when discussing the legality of said thing, which seems to be what the rest of your post is focused on. so this seems like a red herring, or alternatively, the rest of your post was a red herring.
if your line of reasoning about the closure is legally oriented, then i'm sure you can find lots of things people aren't okay with, e.g. campaign finance.
The "fire in a crowded theater" metaphor is always mentioned in a discussion of free speech. It's like Godwin's Law. I'm tired of it.
You can say anything. But if the thing you say carries consequences beyond the utterance, the freedom of speech does not immunize that sayer from assuming responsibility for those consequences.
It's not about what happens afterward. It's about not removing someone's voice, for fear of what they might say with it.
8chan is not required to support freedom of speech; it's not the government. It is itself free to pick and choose who is allowed to use its platform. My opinion is that it should not engage in content-based censorship, because no one should. Once you start doing that, there's no ethically clear place where the line between acceptable and unacceptable should lie. If you can make a case for banning neo-Nazis and Boko Haram and Sinaloa Cartel and such, you can also make a case for banning people who put pineapple on pizza or ketchup on hot dogs, with the argument variables set to different values.
Information is not the dangerous thing, nor misinformation. When someone is recruited and turned into a soldier via online image boards, using the exact same psychology as state-based militaries around the world--dehumanizing the xeno, and propagandizing them as an existential threat to the in-group identity tribe--that isn't the fault of the medium. It is the responsibility of the recruiter, the propagandist.
The rightful answer to speech with undesired consequences is not censorship, but counter-propaganda, and to some extent psychological hardening of the whole populace, by encouraging skepticism, critical thought, and formation of individual identity and self-image over group identities.
The former is a more active measure that unfortunately requires a bloody-minded relentlessness combined with unending tolerance for nonsense. Imagine a Bill Nye vs. Ken Ham debate that lasts literally forever, and the toll that would surely take on Nye. Now sub in a pants-on-head flat-earther time-cube woo-woo troll for Ham. No one person could take it. And that's why when these fools show up, the thought-terminating cliches have to be countered with thought-provoking dissent. If you see bullshit, call bullshit.
And the latter is something that probably has to happen in young people, coming with a side effect of making them less governable, and harder to convince of anything. Resistance to radicalization over the Internet would directly translate to more difficult military recruiting, drops in the strength of religious affiliations, and harder political campaigns. Not exactly popular among those loving god and country.
It's probably easier to just censor the things the state doesn't want people to say, and just trust that they will stop with the threshold line in the correct place.
How would you even come to the conclusion that it would be a german company? They are HQd in Romania and only have a virtual office address in Frankfurt, for their GmbH.
I'm still waiting for a new platform to take the world by storm: The freedom of Gab, with sane content filtering options to make it look as tame as reddit so by default users don't see all the fringe crap, but lets them if they really want, right to the legal edge.
People are not fringe will tend to abandon sites that embrace people who are, even tacitly. Sites that create havens for them will naturally tend to become sites that consist almost solely of them.
That's been the status quo up until now, but it doesn't have to be. We're moving towards orwellian style censorship at a breakneck pace with SV leading the charge.
Any violent thug can go spread their message in the town streets as long as they're not causing a disturbance. It doesn't happen very much, because it requires effort and it's sure to attract opposition. That opposition is necessary, like anti-bodies attacking an invading bacteria. By shutting out the harmful bacteria where anti-bodies can't reach them, they'll do nothing but grow and fester.
> That's been the status quo up until now, but it doesn't have to be. We're moving towards orwellian style censorship at a breakneck pace with SV leading the charge.
Very few people actually want such a site arrangement. Believe it or not, I have no interest in interfacing with people who want to kill me unless they are open to honest and rational debate, which few are. One of the reasons I enjoy Hacker News is because I know won't have to deal with the type of people that will frequent the fringe elements of the style of site you are advocating for.
Also, I'd hardly call a business led moratorium on speech advocating terrorism and genocide "moving towards Orwellian style censorship". Absolutely nothing is stopping these individuals from standing up their own server and hosting this content themselves. They aren't banned by an ISP. Moreover, business owners should be allowed to express their opinions too, including who to do business with.
I think we have pretty good evidence in recent years that this is not how things really work. Those filters and algorithmic steering just provides a way to keep people in their bubble. What you’re describing is basically what YouTube was: allow anything legal but use sophisticated software to show people what they’ll respond to positively. The radicalization this led to is well documented at this point.
I’m not really in favor of what CloudFlare’s done here, but it’s really a fact of basic statistics that exposing the mainstream to well-made propaganda is far more dangerous than exposing radicals to the mainstream.
Imagine 1% of non-radicalized people exposed to radicalism become dangerous and 50% of radicalized people are de-radicalized by exposure to the mainstream (laughably optimistic). If you start with 100 million non-radicals and 500 thousand radicals, you have a 125% increase in radicalization.
This is how we now have so many flat earthers. When you have massive reach, it’s easy to grow your numbers.
Sane defaults. Option to not see filtered content, but see a note saying "these many comments were hidden" (and a way to see them). Both AI-based filtering (e.g. for porn & gore), and user-moderated lists (e.g. a left-moderated list of "hateful neo-Nazis" and a right-moderated list of "crazy leftists").
1. Make users tag their content if it touches on certain topics and use harsh punishment if they fail to. If it's fringe content for example, make them tag it as such so default users will not see it unless they really want to. If someone doesn't know their ramblings are racist, they should be banned on incompetence grounds and not due to censorship.
2. Rethink real time posting. It's nice, but a 1 minute delay would be very beneficial. You could even conscript volunteer users, perhaps give them "free premium" accounts that act as sentinels for all new content so they can see all new content in real time, like a mod of sorts, and can flag inappropriately tagged content as such so it's kicked back to the poster as "You forgot to add a violence tag".
Essentially the only people who should be de-platformed are those who are either banned for legal reasons or because they're simply too incompetent or unwilling to tag their content with appropriate fringe tags.
> with sane content filtering options to make it look as tame as reddit
People are really, really good at circumventing automated filters, while non automated filtering means subjecting people to horrific content for 8 hours a day.
I really want to be on the side of the broadest possible interpretation of free speech, but my experience leads me in a different direction. It's been my experience that corralling the fringe doesn't work because the people in that fringe are intent on spreading their message/content as far and wide as possible. Even against the wishes of the general populace of a given site like Reddit. That behaviour seems to spring from the same attention-seeking place as that of griefers like Goonswarm in EVE, whose stated goal was at one point to ruin as many people's fun in that game as possible.
So there's perhaps two parts to the freedom of speech argument space: One is that there are people who want to create/share/consume content that the general populace doesn't want to see. Then the second is that there are people who aren't acting in good faith, whose goal seems to be to ruin as much as possible.
The first group there will probably keep to themselves, manage their communities and cooperate with governmental authorities to remove illegal content or activities. Of course that doesn't take into account when those groups are acting against those authorities while still having the moral support of most of the population. For instance campaigning for marijuana legalization, which most people would say should be protected speech.
But then there's the second group, who hide within the first often enough, or who falsely act like the first because they want to destroy things because they seem to have no emotional investment in society. (in my opinion)
The second group thrives because no one wants to commit the manpower to track and manage them. I don't know how to fix that problem, I don't even know if it's possible. Heck there will be many who will argue it's not necessary at all.
When will the same rules apply to other big companies. FB has never been taken down, and they have been streamig some questionable things. I know its a bit, but look at them. Im just struggeling with the feeling. I have only visisted 8chan a while a go to get a taste whats going on and its like all the other "free" boards, no moderators and it becomes a mess.
I'm one of the ones that believe that Facebook should be better at policing there content.
But they do pull down manifestos from mass murders and have been doing that for a long time. The first instances of that I'm aware of is the manifesto of the guy behind the 2011 attack on Norway. As soon as FB figured out who he was and what happened. His page and his manifesto went down, never to come back up again.
I'm sure they did similar things earlier than that too, but that one I payed a lot of attention too, and remember like it was yesterday.
"I disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the deaths of others your right to say it."
How many free speech absolutists have "skin in the game", or whatever? Every alternative to censorship suggested always puts the burden on the victimized. Like, "if you debate it in public you will defeat these bad ideas". Few who are free speech absolutists roll up their sleeves and volunteer to take the action they prescribe.
Or, you have the sophists who believe free speech is the most important thing in the world but will deny that speech has any connection to its consequences. For example, separating the white nationalist rhetoric on 8chan from the white nationalist terrorism perpetrated by 8channers.
It's not that speech doesn't have consequences. If speech had no consequences, it wouldn't be worth defending. Rather, it's that no man is fit to play the censor - not the Government which would censor political criticism of itself, not a king who would censor his opponents, nor even a billionaire who would censor the media when it spurns him.
At the same time, if someone points a finger at you and shouts "I'm going to kill you", then we're getting outside of speech and into actions, and certainly actions can be prohibited. The question we have, really, is whether the content of 8chan was just speech (and therefore should be protected unless you buy into censorship) or crosses into actions (convincing someone to massacre immigrants). From what I've seen, 8chan certainly seems to be in the action category.
What you say is reasonable, and is not free speech absolutist. This isn't a No True Scotsman sort of thing. There are people on this very forum who reject out of hand any question that 8chan should be censored.
Another reply to my comment supposed my criticism means that the alternative is a Soviet surveillance state. Really?
I think the point is more that there's nuance in preventing speech (like censorship) and punishing the actions as a result of speech. I get that some would call those the same thing.
In the context of 8chan, I think there's a difference between allowing people to say whatever they want online and punishing the people that use that freedom to incite violence.
The part where it gets blurry to me is the hateful rhetoric that doesn't directly call for violence, but the only logical conclusion of the position is genocidal or otherwise racial violence. Talking about "invaders" or "American cities under foreign occupation" for example.
> At the same time, if someone points a finger at you and shouts "I'm going to kill you", then we're getting outside of speech and into actions, and certainly actions can be prohibited.
At least in my state, this is not actionable as described.
For it to be actionable, the person saying "I'm going to kill you" needs to reasonably be in a position to do so - i.e. brandishing a weapon, etc.
The purpose of (most) speech is to create action. If the phrase "I'm going to kill you" is intended to alter someone's behavior. If property is involved, whether it's through force or threat of force, it's still robbery. If the threat of violence is delayed, it's still extortion.
For libertarian extremists who, just treat the right to be left in peace to live your life as you see fit... as a property right.
It's not actionable when it's a rando in an online multiplayer game upset at you. It's absolutely actionable when it's your jilted lover in your face, or even if they're texting you.
The details make the case. Coaxing in detail throngs online to attack immigrants, in my non-legal non-expert opinion, seems to be more in the actionable case.
> It's not actionable when it's a rando in an online multiplayer game upset at you. It's absolutely actionable when it's your jilted lover in your face, or even if they're texting you.
> The details make the case.
That's pretty much what I was saying, as well, I believe.
In and of itself, saying (even in person) "I'm going to kill you" is an idle threat that the police in my state will not do anything about in a vacuum.
However, saying such a thing while also being in a position to reasonably carry out such an action, the Police will step in on those threats.
In the situation you described, unfortunately, the first time they may just tell the couple to stay at different places that night to cool off. This assumes by the time they arrive there are no visible marks on the victim and no weapons out.
Now if they have to come out for several of these calls, it's no longer "in a vacuum", and they can probably detain the threatening person.
Your state or country's police force may operate under different rules and laws.
> Rather, it's that no man is fit to play the censor
I agree with this, and I'd further say that no man is really fit to rule or have real power over his fellow men. But human society can't function, or defend itself from tyrants, without some sort of power structure. The best we can do is try to make sure that the people in power aren't tyrants.
>From what I've seen, 8chan certainly seems to be in the action category.
Users on 8chan, perhaps, but no the website itself. 8chan has cooperated with law enforcement against individuals making legally-actionable threats effectively since the website's beginning.
The truth is that information does not radicalize people - censorship does. That's why the channers are as radicalized as they are - they've been censored everywhere else. Censor their last remaining outlets and you will increase violence by orders of magnitude.
If ethno-nationalists are not allowed to make their political case with speech, what alternative would they have but violence? You obviously can't change their minds with censorship, only harden them.
The US president supports and advocates for their cause. A national television syndicate (Fox) echos their talking points. I don't think you can call them censored.
Define 'citation', write a long essay about your criteria for accepting citations, maybe supply an appendix outlining your epistemological views so people know exactly what sort of citations you'll consider acceptable.
If the claim is [Donald Trump supports and advocates for ethno-nationalists causes] ...
I'd like to a source for that claim because it seems like Orange Man Bad delusions, but I'm willing to remain open minded if someone can provide a citation!
And I'd like to know what your standards are so I don't waste my time selecting and offering sources only to have them dismissed because you consider them deficient.
Since you already incline to the view that such assertions are delusional and employ a common political trope to characterize such delusions, I feel nagging doubts about your purported open-mindedness. Discussions like this generally devolve into pedantic quibbling which would be a waste of both your time and mine.
What will you do when your plan to censor the alt-right backfires and makes the violence worse? Attempt to start rounding them up? And when that makes it even worse?
You don't have a plan, just a knee jerk impulse to censor.
It's not censorship of the entire alt-right. It's the limited censorship on certain privately-run forums of a small subset that is directly advocating for violence and attempting to tear apart society.
If they want to speak in public, they are free to. They probably won't get a warm reception.
I don't think that is how they come about. It is about recruitment and ideals and how they spread not about being banned on other platforms. If they could discuss saving the white race with violence on reddit or hackernews nothing would change more than they would have more potential recruits.
A lot of people say "censorship radicalizes" but I've never seen any studies or evidence for this claim. Your comment is purely speculative. There is some evidence that banning extremist content reduces its potential to radicalize [1]. Do you have any evidence to suggest it increases radicalization?
> If a man can't speak his truth, what alternative does he have to violence?
No one is stopping anyone from speaking their truth. They're just saying they're not going to help you.
If you want to speak your truth, speak it. Go down to a public square and preach. Write your truth down, print it, and hand it out. If its truth and you believe it so much, you'll do the work necessary in getting it out there.
People are used to treating the Internet as the new public square. Obviously, there are many private entities that make up the Internet, but if want it to continue to serve as the public square (rather than a patchwork of corporate fiefdoms) then I think we have to accept the moral (and possibly legal) obligation of these private entities to maintain the Internet as a public square.
I essentially agree. The internet is not the public square, until you legally make it so.
And that essentially is not going to happen. Companies are "people too". They are allowed to express their free speech by not doing business with you.
Cloud Flare is within their rights to protect their stock value by doing business with whomever they choose. If the government declared the opposite, then it would truly require a massive shakeup of law and precedent.
> The internet is not the public square, until you legally make it so.
Culture and custom generally precede law and government. If the Internet is a public square, it is only so as a result of our various social relations. Passing laws would be merely to preserve it as such.
Shallow statistics are never going to replace empathy* when it comes to sound policy making.
That study does show that banning content within a forum means that you will get less of that content on that forum. A useful but not entirely surprising result. As a Reddit user, I'm glad that the site has less of such content.
It does not prove that censorship reduces "radicalization" (whatever that is). As the study says, many of those users just moved their content to Voat.
*By which I mean cognitive empathy: the capacity to infer the motivational states of other people and anticipate their actions.
Maybe not radicalizes but seems obvious that censorship sort of 'funnels' the extremists onto the same forums which turn into an echo chamber / amplification chamber for their ideas. It seems like if they were tolerated on other forums that there'd be enough mediating comments to prevent the amplification.
I'd also be interested in seeing studies that echo chambers increase radicalization in the first place. That seems to be a given right now.
> If ethno-nationalists are not allowed to make their political case with speech, what alternative would they have but violence?
Plenty of nazi sites on the web where they make all sorts of “political cases”. Don’t confuse inability to make the case with repugnance to that case in general public.
So why don't we continue down the slippery slope and criminalize, like the Chinese do, speech that generally disrupts social harmony? How will you tangibly stop us from sliding down that slope, the absolutists have ever right to ask of you.
Nobody is talking about crminalizing speech. 8chan is a private website and 8chan service providers are private companies who do not wish to do businesses with 8chan because of the 8chan community's endorsement of domestic terrorism. Nobody should be forced to do businesses with 8chan and if nobody will and that means 8chan disappears from the internet, that is a decision society has made within their rights as free individuals.
How many people had to die on 9/11 to protect the free speech rights of Muslims? It is undeniable that those terrorist attacks have a direct connection to the ideas being spread by those Mosques. How many Muslims have "skin in the game"?
I think you are trying to turn the above argument on it's head, but honestly I have no idea what point you are trying to make.
"The free speech of muslims"? It's almost as if you think 9/11 was caused by a domestic terrorist. You do realize the hijackers were mostly from Saudi Arabia right? And there is no free speech there? So... what are you trying to imply? Please use more clear language instead of just trying to meme.
Clearly you understood what I was trying to say, you're just acting dumb to avoid directly engaging with it.
These arguments can be directly used to argue for the suppression of Islamic religious speech. Using the same "guilt by association" reasoning, you can easily argue that 9/11 is proof that Islam itself is a hateful and dangerous ideology which, when spread, has "consequences".
The distinction in this case is that 8chan is simply a “poisoned well” which can be boarded up until the next one takes its place, whereas “Islam” is a whole ideology followed by a billion-odd people.
“Extremist Islamic terrorists” on the other hand, that is a narrowly defined enough population to feel justified in going to war against.
But the point is, no one’s speech in particular is being suppressed. To keep the metaphor, a “mosque got too radical” and was shut down. People who were practicing there will have to find another place to go.
Well, mass shootings tend to be indiscriminate once they get started.
Those motivated by animus towards a minority group do generally target areas frequented by members of that group, like in the Texas shooting where the gunman targeted a Walmart in a largely Hispanic community. As a non-Hispanic white person (who lives in the US), that does put me at less risk of being a victim of that type of shooting. Also, to the extent that terrorism’s impact is emotional rather than purely rational, I’m less impacted simply
because I don’t feel targeted in the same way.
Nevertheless, I wouldn’t say the risk is zero; it’s not impossible that I could be in a place like that when the next shooting happens. So I have at least a bit of skin in the game.
Edit: Also, while perhaps not 8chan specifically, Internet forums have been implicated in shootings that weren’t targeting ethnic groups and thus would put me at more risk. An example would be Elliot Rodger’s shooting, which was driven by a hatred of women, but ended up killing an equal number of men and women (not too surprising, since people don’t self-segregate by gender to the same extent they do by race and religion).
> Those motivated by animus towards a minority group do generally target areas frequented by members of that group, like in the Texas shooting where the gunman targeted a Walmart in a largely Hispanic community. As a non-Hispanic white person (who lives in the US), that does put me at less risk of being a victim of that type of shooting. Also, to the extent that terrorism’s impact is emotional rather than purely rational, I’m less impacted simply because I don’t feel targeted in the same way.
Isn't this usually where hate crimes come into the picture?
I've heard the same said about r/the_donald etc. That argument falls flat when an overarching theme is a reality. Terrible people always try and lump themselves in with the truly innocent who are oppressed to engender sympathy as victims. There are increasingly common intersections where a duck is a duck.
This is not a free speech issue. This is not a censorship issue. This is companies deciding that they will not do business with some parties. Those parties nor the reasons and the actions of the companies today do not fit inside narrow definitions which would make what anyone did today unlawful.
Moreover 8chan posts, though vile, arguably do not fit the narrow free speech exemptions of the US such as true threat or incitement. The law and judicial precedent would require a reasonable reader to take it seriously. All that is moot though as the government has taken no action here.
A lot of these mass shooters (and a number of serial killers) quote social Darwinism nonsense as inspiration. I wonder why that ideological portion is not being dealt with more. I hear social Darwinism ideas fairly frequently in everyday conversations with people, like casual lunch conversations.
It is not individual Darwinism but social Darwinism. They think they are part of a superior race, and so it does not matter as much what happens to them individually.
I’m old enough to remember when Howard Stern, as quaint as that seems today, was considered one of the greatest threats to civilization and had to be “de-platformed” before he could successfully destroy society - and the reasoning they used against him was _exactly_ the same as this reasoning: “he, himself (8chan, itself) is not going out and doing horrible things, but he’s encouraging people to go out and do horrible things, so he (it) must be shut down”.
The call-in segments on Stern's show have been frequently used as a platform for extreme and fringe positions, including calls for violence. Through the mid 90s, these came from Stern himself, although he has matured and tempered with time.
But not much gap between conflating allowing free speech and encouraging mass murder to conflating dick jokes (and having a KKK member as a frequent guest) and encouraging moral decay.
I'm on the record here defending /r/The_Donald. I'm even on the record saying I didn't think it should be quarantined and that I don't think it should be banned in the future. It takes a lot for me to wonder if something actually should be censored. I certainly wouldn't have been on the side of censoring Howard Stern.
Radicalizing terrorists to such an extent that they actually go through with it -- multiple times -- is extreme enough to make me wonder.
The El Paso shooter's manifesto was posted on 8chan for a reason. The manifesto was written specifically for other potential shooters. It contains tips and advice. It explains the shooter's choice of gear and that he needed to use heat-resistant gloves because one of the guns he used was prone to overheating if fired rapidly. It encourages potential shooters to avoid heavily guarded areas and to avoid engaging with security personnel regardless of how confident they are.
Throughout 8chan, I saw many posts subscribing to the general theory that racial violence has been accepted throughout most of human history and the only people who disapprove constitute a tiny little blip on the grand tapestry. The whole point of this ideology was to encourage people to commit acts of violence by indoctrinating them into the belief system that all their ancestors would not only have approved but would have done it themselves.
/r/The_Donald is not very far from the kind of hatred and prejudice used on 8chan. White supremacists use places like /r/The_Donald to "normalize" ideologies and move the overton window far enough from normal that the extremer places like explicit calls to violence on 8chan are now palatable. It's all part of the same pipeline.
Nonsense. The kind of hate and prejudice posted on 8chan /pol/ would be deleted in a heartbeat on T_D. The worst you can say about T_D is that they don't like Islam, and given the violence and regressiveness it promotes, I can't blame them.
This is the slippery slope that people worry about and why they fight against banning things like 8chan. First it's banning 8chan, then it's /r/The_Donald. What's next?
Mass shooters are a problem that must be dealt with. Pretending that everything to the right of mainstream Democrats is a pipeline to mass shooters that must be silenced is the type of thing that radicalizes people. It's unduly oppressive and it dehumanizes people you may not happen to agree with.
Hey the morons in /r/The_Donald can say what they want. That is what we have all determined.
However, one of the largest social media sites out there (reddit) does NOT have to allow them to congregate together. Reddit should have banned them years ago. They are actively responsible for providing a place for hate to thrive.
You can be 100% pro free-speech and still agree that no one (except the government is some form, meaning sure they can hold meetings in public places, etc) HAS to give them a platform. Anything private can and should say NO.
I should clarify that the theory also encompasses the additional inference that the above statement justifies racial violence today. The gist is that you shouldn't worry about how people today might judge you, because you'd be judged positively by the N billion people who came before you; therefore your actions are correct and justifiable.
Playing whack-a-mole with extremist communities is only going to drive them together under a common threat and make them more desperate. The dedicated ones install a tor client and go further underground. The not-so-dedicated ones leave. But the not-so-dedicated parts of the community are the ones helping contribute to the deradicalization of the others.
It should be obvious to state that if you get rid of 8chan, those people aren't suddenly deradicalized and they're still in the country holding the same beliefs. Those people who are today at risk of continuing in this shooter's footsteps have already read the manifesto. People like the shooter often do these things because they want to be heard and they want to contribute to the course of history. Taking away what little voice they have in their own spaces makes them feel less heard. Destroying the little community that they have removes their stake in the world. Suppressing their only place to express their grievances causes them to lose hope. This is the cocktail for more violence, not less.
The *chans are the furthest from centers of indoctrination because the moderation is the weakest of all social media platforms. All ideas are present and little to nothing is suppressed. Dissent is commonplace and general consensus has no power. Sure, it means ugly ideas get spread, but it means that people actually have to refine their moral argumentation. No longer can you assume that the other person has the common ground of "racism is wrong", you have to actually dive into why racism is wrong. You can act outraged all you like, but it won't convince people to change their mind. Changing minds is going to be the only effective course of action to avoid tragedies like these.
The fact that this all seems to be getting worse as more and more people are deplatformed from more mainstream carriers like Facebook and Twitter (where rational voices can chime in from time to time) bolster your suspicion that they're just driven to the more and more extreme places that let them in.
You know, I was going to argue against the above poster, but then I read your post here, and I think this is an excellent point. I think it's extremely reasonable to wonder how many folks would avoid feeling the need to go to a place like 8chan if they felt like more reasonable versions of their viewpoints could be represented in mainstream venues and subjected to healthy debate rather than aggressive and hostile deplatforming.
> It should be obvious to state that if you get rid of 8chan, those people aren't suddenly deradicalized
More importantly, you should ask yourself how they found 8chan. They were using other means of communications that didn't disappear. The invisible force that gathered them together on 8chan is still there and can definitely do that again.
At that point, it doesn't sound like freedom of speech is the problem. Rather, this sounds like conspiracy to promote and further the attempts of mass murder for the intent to cause terror.
That being said, I grew up reading TOTSE, which might by this conversation's context in today's world, also sound like a source of the same.
Just summing up the paradigm of needing to control the masses by preventing people from doing things that people will inevitably do. You can't stop people from talking.
You can stop people from talking publicly.
People will break and do harm to others, but having a vehicle to know what that harm might be in advance is invaluable.
Society would be much easier to control if we simply kept all the people in cages and let them out occasionally to work for the good of the people. On the other hand, it wouldn't be much of a society now, would it?
The supreme court has ruled time and time again that the right to free speech implies the right to be heard.
While CloudFlare obviously isn't legally required to serve 8chan, the only service they are really providing is making it so that 8chan can't be DDOS'd. And DDOS'ing is very clearly a tactic that violates the first amendment. So really by no longer serving 8chan, the only thing they are doing is allowing and/or encouraging others to violate 8chan's constitutional rights.
It reminds me a lot of Charlottesville, where people showed up to try to shout over the white nationalists and it just ended up with a bunch of people getting run over by a car. As if something like that happening wasn't entirely predictable.
If 8chan is inciting violence or doing other things not covered by the first amendment then it should be the government's job to police that.
When Facebook and Twitter started de-platforming right-wing types like Alex Jones and Milo Yannopoulis, the actions-of-a-private-company-are-beyond-criticism types immediately defended them with “it’s not like they’re being thrown off the internet entirely - they can always create their own websites!” Well now, they are being thrown off the internet entirely. And a disturbingly large number of people think this is a positive thing.
But they're not being thrown off the internet entirely! There are other services they can create or use (voat, gab). The internet itself is still open for them to use.
The moral reasoning behind restraining the government from denying speech and other rights is that the government is a monopoly (in this case of force). This reasoning extends to restrictions on the ability of other monopolies, such as local utilities, to deny service.
If every service provider with the capacity to serve the needs of Website X were to deny service, the DE FACTO effect is precisely the same as a single monopoly doing so. In which case, the moral reasoning behind restraint of government and other monopolies comes into play.
The de facto effect is the same. But is a decision independently reached by multiple parties really the same as a decision by a single monopoly?
I can't confidently say one way or another, but it feels more acceptable to me.
Assuming each company did reach that decision independently (and that's a big assumption) and not as a result of bad PR brought on by an angry internet mob.
> the DE FACTO effect is precisely the same as a single monopoly doing so
The effect is the same, but the legal interpretation of the situation isn't, as long as new players are free to join the game.
You can find lots of examples where two cases of real-world events are the same, but are interpreted differently by law, depending on the context that is purely juridical.
> the moral reasoning behind restraint of government and other monopolies comes into play.
Governments hold the monopoly on violence, thus they are fundamentally different from any other entity.
The real reason for restraining the government from restricting speech is the hope that people use the soap box, and the ballot box, instead of the bullet box to make the changes they want to see in the world.
The monopoly on violence does not necessarily have much to do with this.
A tale as old as the Internet (older!) is people arguing about how we represent our morality through legal code.
The First Amendment is a law, but it's an imperfect representation of an idea, and that idea is that everyone has a right to (among other things) express ideas free from organized oppression. A lot of people see "organized oppression" to be exclusively possible by a governing body, but some others see that to mean the platforms themselves.
"The First Amendment" is oftentimes used as a conversational shortcut to talk about the moral right of expression. Is it entirely accurate? No, and accuracy matters. However, the conversation doesn't die when the correction is made. Here, it's true that CloudFlare isn't in violation of the First Amendment of the US Constitution, however the argument being made is that they have a moral obligation to stay a "dumb pipe", to prevent the oppression of a minority voice.
I'm not making that argument, I just wanted to point out the nuance of invoking "The First Amendment" here, that it's often not literally a reference to the legal authority of the private entity in question.
Depends upon their involvement with the government that allows them their market position. In the particular case of CloudFlare I don't actually know what the involvement is, and would default to agreeing with you. But I do know some private companies often mentioned in relation to First Amendment that there is some level of involvement, but I think the courts have largely not taken a critical look at what is going on and is still quite inconsistent on the matter (which should surprise no one who compares the pace of law and the pace of technology).
> And DDOS'ing is very clearly a tactic that violates the first amendment.
I don't follow this, much less find it "very clear." DDOSing is a crime and the prevention of it is a service provided by a third party. It's not a free speech issue.
Furthermore, you're really blaming the victim in your analysis of Charlottesville.
> Furthermore, you're really blaming the victim in your analysis of Charlottesville.
Well they're both the victims and the perpetrators. It's not legal to drive over them, but it's also not legal for them to try to prevent the people from organizing the rally from speaking.
Stuff like this has been happening for hundreds of years, there's actually a reason why the laws are the way they are.
> People _are_ allowed to shout over protesters. It's legal to do that.
Sometimes. If organizing a rally requires a government permit, then having the government give another permit for the same time and place to people whose aim was to disrupt the rally would probably violate the first amendment rights of the rally organizers. And that's basically what happened in Charlottesville, the rally organizers had permits and the protestors did not.
> having the government give another permit for the same time and place to people whose aim was to disrupt the rally would probably violate the first amendment rights of the rally organizers. And
You keep saying that this violates the first amendment rights of the protesters but yet again you're not backing that up in any way. How does this violate their first amendment right? I'm just not seeing it.
> It reminds me a lot of Charlottesville, where people showed up to try to shout over the white nationalists and it just ended up with a bunch of people getting run over by a car. As if something like that happening wasn't entirely predictable.
Wait, what are you trying to say here? That these people deserved to get run over because they dared to shout at white nationalists??
>> I'm saying that I think allowing people to DDOS 8chan will result in more violence.
Violence happens because these people follow a hateful, violent ideology whose specific articulated intent is to deprive others of liberty, life, and land. People looking for excuses to be violent will find them.
Also, refusing to provide commercial DDOS mitigation technologies to hostile entities is not the same as "allowing people to DDOS" them.
CloudFlare is providing a basic service that the government should be providing itself.
If colleges need to guarantee first amendment rights since they are partially government funded, and the Internet itself is partially government funded, then I think there is a decent case for the government being required to provide a public solution for mitigating DDOS attacks if the market can't sort it out.
I've seen this line being trotted out by people supporting 8chan and their ilk a lot lately. "If you censor them they'll get even more violent." Regardless of your opinions on free speech, it sounds to me that cutting off the hub for these groups to network, encourage, indoctrinate and manipulate is much more likely to reduce violence than incite it.
DDoSing doesn't "violate the first amendment" anymore than a loud bar violates my first amendment rights.
The concept of free speech and the first amendment aren't the same thing. The first amendment, in part, attempts to stop the government from violating its citizens' free speech.
Yelling over you does not violate your rights. Not giving you something does not violate your rights.
Another right the first amendment guarantees is the right to assemble. That means I can associate with whomever I want. That means Cloudflare can associate with whomever they want. They choose not to associate with 8chan. That is their choice and their right. We cannot force Cloudfare to associate with 8chan.
Also, what does Charlottesville have to do with anything here? Are you trying to say the guy running over others is guilty of violating the "shouters" first amendment rights? And that they should have predicted that "shouting at white nationalists" means they would get run over? And how does that remind you of Cloudflare not hosting 8chan? Did they run a car through the server?
Everything is covered by the first amendment.
So. It's a real good look for CloudFlare because they're no longer the company that associates with white nationalists.
It's been ruled private companies can discriminate against homosexuals by refusing to provide service to them (ie: a wedding cake). Also been ruled you can discriminate against customers based on religious beliefs (ie: refuse to fill prescriptions for birth control) see “religious refusal” and “conscience protection” laws.
I don't think the main disagreement in this thread is about whether the ban was legal but whether it was moral.
There are the usual side-debates though: the ban being strategically effective and the ban being in-line with how the us constitutions concept of free speech gets interpreted.
Personally I'm not sure to what degree the latter might be relevant for an apparently(?) Filipino company.
I think you are right that the government has showed a lot of restraint in dipping its toes into this problem, and that might be a good thing. However, Cloudflare in shutting off 8chan, has not violated anybody's free speech.
The constitution only applies to the government's relationship with its people. Only the government can violate a citizen's constitutional rights. Other individuals (or companies) cannot violate another person's constitutional rights. Cloudflare, in ceasing its relationship with 8chan, is not impeding on their first amendment rights.
Even so, the first amendment is not a blanket right to say whatever you want or incite violence. The first amendment is much narrower than you may realize, and in the narrowest (most protected) case, only applies to political speech. Hate speech is definitely not protected.
While 8chan, as an operator, is not directly responsible for what happens on their site, they start taking on liability when they are knowingly aware of and take no action against people who are using the site for criminal activity. The same goes for a landlord who knowingly lets his/her house be used for criminal activity, such as crack house.
>Charlottesville, where people showed up to try to shout over the white nationalists and it just ended up with a bunch of people getting run over by a car. As if something like that happening wasn't entirely predictable.
Why disparage the innocent victims a politically-motivated terrorist? Because they "shouted" at the very extremists who celebrated that act of murder?
>> It reminds me a lot of Charlottesville, where people showed up to try to shout over the white nationalists and it just ended up with a bunch of people getting run over by a car. As if something like that happening wasn't entirely predictable.
People showed up to exercise their own first amendment rights, which is how the whole free speech thing works.
Those with opposing points of view also showed up to demonstrate that ordinary people wouldn't be intimidated by white nationalists marching and carrying intimidating symbols from the past.
Are you suggesting that the best response to these regressive viewpoints is for ordinary decent folk to let them alone and do their own thing in peace? Cowardice.
That would only serve to embolden them, and an emboldened hate group is even more likely to engage in violent activity against the targets of their hate.
"where people showed up to try to shout over the white nationalists and it just ended up with a bunch of people getting run over by a car."
Sorry, if I may clarify. It ended up with a bunch of people protesting white nationalism being run over by a white nationalist, who has been sentenced for killing a woman with his car.
In the Charlottesville case, the people inciting violence and the people performing violence are both white nationalists.
The problem with 8chan is, it's not a cohesive whole. Each board is individually ran and the global moderators won't get involved unless it's content that's blatantly illegal. Not all boards there are the same. Not all the people there are the same. The problem is the hateful supremicists all congregate there. /pol/ is the board where most of them hang out. Other boards have nothing to do with politics and have completely different kinds of people that post there. There's even a /leftypol/ devoted to leftist politics that contains no white supremicists.
>There's even a /leftypol/ devoted to leftist politics that contains no white supremicists.
Leftypol is not devoted to "leftist politics", it's a counterpart to /pol which stands for "politically incorrect". /leftypol by extension is politically incorrect that curved to the left. In reality /leftypol and /pol are not that dissimilar. Both attract off-the-rocker crazy conspiracy-theory types the likes of QAnon. If you looked at /leftypol during say attempted coup in Venezuela the content you would have encountered would have been just as offensive as /pol.
I am genuinely upset over this. And that is after CEO pinky swears he will not do it in the future. It will be that much easier to do it now that there is a precedent. I doubt he does not know it.
I think.. I think I will be starting free speech focused entity. Like NRA. Laser focus. No restrictions on free speech of any kind. Ever.
This may be the only thing to prevent US from losing its list of temporary priviledges.
There are societies which are in practice far more free in their expression of speech and which are at the same time substantially safer.
There is quite evidently no move to legally curtail any freedoms. Nor are the restrictions put on by these companies in any substantially onerous or making free speech impossible.
Free speech does not require that we give people a platform. Free speech also means that everyone can decide to turn their backs on people saying these sorts of things, and not let them use the things we have built to spread their message.
>Free speech does not require that we give people a platform.
That's true!
Unfortunately it gets a little more complicated than that.
As providers enjoy PLATFORM protections that align with the ideas of free speech. Meaning they will enjoy legal immunity from content they host so long as they won't decide who gets a voice or why so long as the content is legally allowed. They aren't liable because they didn't have a say in what it was. They are required to remove illegal things of course.
The issue here is the PLATFORMS are now deciding they're going to keep these legal protections they basically require in order to exist - while also acting a PUBLISHERS that curate otherwise legal content to be aligned with their views.
Admit that many of the same people celebrating "they're a private company they can do what they want!" were also yelling "make the cake you bigots!"
This may be a cake-centric issue now that I think about it. Because CF, SV, FAANG are Having Cake + Eating Cake.
I think it is ridiculous to hold the position that you aren't allowed to block ANY content if you don't want to be held liable for things people say on your platform.
We can't hold a platform liable for content because it is technically impossible to perfectly block infringing content, so we realize it is unfair to hold platforms accountable.
However, this doesn't mean a platform can't make ANY effort to control what content is on their system without losing this protection. YouTube doesn't lose safe harbor protection just because they have contentid...
If we are talking about the DMCA safe harbor stuff, which is what I was talking about, it was not modeled after the first amendment at all. What makes you think they were?
I would have agreed not that long ago, but a lot of those platforms became defacto public squares. You do not get to benefit from a public good without burdens that come with it.
We wouldn't tolerate the existence of an Islamist site that glorified and helped perpetrate mass incidents of terror against our society. What 8chan is doing is exactly the same, minus the Islamist part, yet there's hypocrisy in how they're treated vs e.g. the social media wing of ISIS.
These people are trying to kill as many of us as possible. In no way should society accept it. It's simple societal self-defense. Root out the terrorists wherever they may congregate, regardless of whichever flavor of terrorist they happen to be.
> Cloudflare provides services to a number of Islamist terror organizations
yes, and that entire article is about people trying to get them to take them down and the criminal statute they're using to force the issue, which is part of the GP's point. Not a lot of folks in the federal government hand wringing about deplatforming on that one.
And yet, Cloudflare didn't take them down proactively like they did with The Daily Stormer and now 8chan. Under what standards are sites like 8chan worse than the Taliban?
Probably it's closer to home- those sites fuel domestic terrorism, whereas the Taliban do not. Also public pressure and public attention. They're probably incredibly hesitant to take anything down, but if something becomes front page news then they have to deal with it. Also I don't know what's proactive about any of this, if anything it's way too little too late. The sites you mention provide absolutely zero value to anything resembling civilization- they're gathering places for sociopaths and psychotic morons. I'm not even close to being remotely upset that they may have been treated more harshly than actual ISIS or Taliban sites or whatever. There is a level of pathetic beneath which it all just kind of blends together and it doesn't make sense to attempt to rank them. Yeah, ISIS is shittier than the people who like Daily Stormer, but they're both so shitty that it's not really possible to rank their shittiness relative to each other. It's like the difference between jumping off a 50 story building vs. a 100 story building- there is a distinction, but it doesn't really matter.
I don't think 8chan was exactly a good site, but I'd still put it in the category of "internet-neutral". There's some horrible stuff there (which is all you really hear about), a lot of neutral stuff and a little bit of good.
IMO the reason Cloudflare took down TDS and 8chan but not the Taliban or Hamas is simply outgroup vs fargroup. [0] The operators, users and targets of 8chan or TDS are all familiarly western but different enough to hate, while islamic terror organizations are so different it's hard to relate to them - sort of like that joke about how the more similar two religious denominations are, the more likely it is that they hate the other. [1]
I agree with you. Those sites were closer to home and less alien to Americans, and thus might get more scrutiny and judgement. That's got to be a factor. But I've got to think avoiding bad publicity and negative headlines is the #1 factor behind any inconsistencies in their reaction. The news cycle can be a powerful force for companies concerned about how they're perceived by their investors.
> But I've got to think avoiding bad publicity and negative headlines is the #1 factor behind any inconsistencies in their reaction.
I don't see this working out well for them when it comes to total negative news. Would we have seen nearly as many requests to Cloudflare asking for 8chan to be cut off if they had not already done so for The Daily Stormer?
It's hard to say. It's never going to be a win/win for them, and unfairly cutting someone off would be terrible publicity for them. I'd imagine they're totally inconsistent about these things and don't spend hardly any time policing their customers (nor should they). I have a feeling these things tend to be on a case-by-case basis, mostly fueled by investor concerns, but I guess that just doesn't bother me like it does some people. I don't see them as having any responsibility at all to be guardians of free speech or anything, maybe that's the distinction.
On a more practical level, most internet infrastructure firms based in the US or Europe probably don't have that many people on staff who are fluent in Arabic, Pashto and other languages that would allow the quick identification of terrorists, as opposed to normal people who sometimes discuss terrorism as spectators of the news.
True, but these weren't terrorist propaganda sites, they were the official websites of Hamas & Co, and they do have an english version for anyone not familiar with Hamas. Zoho apparently is providing Email to them.
It being their official sites gives those value / legitimacy and makes them even more okay to not kick them off. Kind of like there should be hardly anything the US president can do to get kicked off twitter.
The US president isn't classified as a terrorist (organization) though, while Hamas is. CF's argument was that they weren't providing material support, otherwise they'd be breaking the law.
Looks like the standard is there hasn’t been enough bad press about their material support of those terrorist orgs yet. They clearly wait for the public outrage before acting.
According to some CEO interview they hold on as long as possible until forced otherwise.
This is relevant as the censorship here (whether justified or not, right or wrong it is censorship) is not done by CF, but by a faceless internet mob that is attacking both CF and 8chan.
CF has all the right to terminate its relationships with anyone. social media mobs should not force companies to exercise that right.
> According to some CEO interview they hold on as long as possible until forced otherwise.
I think an appropriate qualifier here might be that they used to hold on as long as possible. I don't think that's universally true anymore.
> This is relevant as the censorship here (whether justified or not, right or wrong it is censorship) is not done by CF, but by a faceless internet mob that is attacking both CF and 8chan.
In the same sense that a mob outside the courthouse ensured a guilty verdict, perhaps. But it's still the jurors who actually acted.
> In the same sense that a mob outside the courthouse ensured a guilty verdict, perhaps. But it's still the jurors who actually acted.
I am not sure what you mean here... but I would find in both cases very problematic that a mob could wield such power. A mob is not a democratic representation.
I meant that the mob may have made demands, but the only power the mob has is that which it is given. Just like the verdict reached by those jurors, Cloudflare chose their own path.
Mob power come mostly from two sources. First, the one you point out, people/companies yielding and affirming the efficacy of their method. Second from other public figure joining in the pressure.
The reason the mob has power is in the end that they do not get criticized by those they respect.
If 8chan or dailystormer never made the news, cloudflare would still be hosting them. It isn’t public opinion that is the big factor, enterprise client won’t use controversial services. Having a few large enterprise customers call up saying they can’t be hosted with a hate site is what made the CEO of cloudflare flip his decision.
I do think cloudflare will be forced to be more palatable to enterprise customers if they go public. One biggest factors why I don’t use them is who they provide access to.
I think you have it spot on, but public opinion is driving those enterprise customers to make that call. They still support the terror group websites, even after being informed of them, so it’s not based on policy but rather a business decision.
If I was choosing for a company like Monsanto that has the possibility of getting majorly shat on by internet opinion, Cloudflare's seeming policy of "if the media hates you, we'll drop you" would be the exact opposite of comforting.
If I were a US intelligence organization I would be incredibly happy that terror organizations were voluntarily letting a US company MITM all of their traffic...
> We wouldn't tolerate the existence of an Islamist site that glorified and helped perpetrate mass incidents of terror against our society.
Speak for yourself, I would. I've downloaded and distributed ISIS propaganda videos before out of sheer intrigue.
Just because someone says something you don't like doesn't mean you should ban it. Of course, this will be downvoted to hell because this is a hot topic at the moment, but we shouldn't let that too-near emotion influence out policies. We've seen that lead to stuff like the PATRIOT act in the past and we surely don't need another one of those.
> No. Must I be to show someone the community's proverbial door?
Speaking for the whole site like that comes off as rather pompous. Not to mention the comment is now "in the black" on points, so it's not even clear that the community even agrees with you.
Are we talking about the comment? The one I'm talking about is flagged/dead.
Yea, I wouldn't pretend to speak for the community - for some reason our OP insinuated I do by asking if I'm a moderator.
What I'm trying to say is that a negative karma post has been shown the door by the community. That statement remains true from my perspective regardless if I upvoted, downvoted, or did not engage with that comment.
I mean this seriously, more Americans should see what those ISIS videos are like.
More Americans should read the writings of Osama bin Laden too.
It's not that this material isn't horrendous, but it's very different from what you'd expect -- the people behind it are not dumb, and like all good propaganda the rationale is selectively built on compelling facts.
> Speak for yourself, I would. I've downloaded and distributed ISIS propaganda videos before out of sheer intrigue.
It will be downvoted because it's INSANE, not because it's a hot topic.
ISIS propaganda isn't banned for the fun of it or because "too near emotions influencing policies", it's banned for the effect that it casuses, the intention it has, and the attorcities it shows.
There's a difference between supporting free speech and you spreading around videos of murders, executions of innocent people who have families, and calls for more murders of innocent people all over the world. Just because those things don't make you want to kill someone, doesn't change the fact that they do help radicalize other people.
When he distributed the content he didn't pick only the rational ones. Many people did exactly that, joining ISIS, traveling to Syria, doing terrorist attacks in their own countries.
They didn't get the ideas to do that out of the blue, without seeing or hearing any of the propaganda content.
Well, let's be clear, I simply downloaded a torrent and let it seed for a while.
You seem strongly opinionated on this one though, I'm curious, what do you think of Tor or BitTorrent? Should such services be banned as they aid in the distribution of this type of thing too? If you're running a Tor middle node you're part of the distribution of not just all sorts of propaganda like this, but far, far worse things.
Do you think banning these services, reigning in control of information to "help prevent radicalization" in a China-esque way would be a good decision? In my view this is just part of living in a free society, freedom sometimes costs security.
I don't think those services should be banned as that's not their only purpose. I do think that anyone knowingly spreading racist, extremist, terrorist material should be punished.
Platforms that can, but do not, enforce rules to remove such content should also be punished and forbidden.
I would not sacrifice the lives of the ones I love in the name of free speech. Promoting terrorist content increases ever so slightly the chances of your loved ones and your family being hurt by those who get radicalized due to such content.
If "China-esque way" is what it takes then so be it.
Interesting, most Tor operators are doing so because they feel that people should have a right to anonymity or an uncensored internet connection. I'd even argue that Tor trades lives in a far more direct way than 8chan ever could given that fentanyl and weapon sales as well as plotting of child abductions or slave sales occur right there.
Tor operators in doing so are making a choice: they feel the freedom of anonymity and speech are more important than human lives, even the lives of children.
I'd argue that running a Tor node is explicitly making that choice and that statement, so then it confuses me why you seem to be okay with Tor but more questioning of 8chan and similar services where the choice is made less directly. Is it a matter of having the ability to discern "good" uses from "evil"? You're surely accepting both uses by operating a Tor node and knowingly doing so, so I don't see how that makes sense.
If you want to look at gun laws on the other hand, that's a freedom for security trade that seems more debatable given that other countries have the same access to information, but not nearly the same gun violence problems.
And they're free to continue their speech elsewhere. Cloudflare and Voxility are within their rights to refuse service to a client on the basis that the client is persistently associated with terrorism and kiddy porn.
Why is that a remotely controversial statement? Nobody is suggesting that chan-tards should be rounded up for unamerican activities, and I'd be the first to speak against that, but CF don't need to tarnish their brand with 8chans bullshit.
They're free to withhold their support and so express an opinion.
Because Cloudflare used to say that they would never take anyone down, and now they have. I think it's valid to wonder if they'll be more willing to take down other content, and perhaps become a target by groups looking to restrict the spread of certain information now that they've shown that this is something they're willing to do. This also brings up the point of why Cloudflare thought this specific website was worth taking down, and not the other horrible things that they do support.
Well, say you're cruising around the fringes of the web one day and you stumble on a forum where people are plotting to kill you. You, personally. What do you do?
> We wouldn't tolerate the existence of an Islamist site that glorified and helped perpetrate mass incidents of terror against our society.
I certainly would tolerate those sites. Free speech arguments aside, you can't kill the hydra, but you can severely degrade intelligence operations watching that hydra. Best case the bad guys all end up on sites already being surveilled, worst case they slip under the radar.
We had this problem years ago, hacktivists targeting ISIS channels. They scatter to the winds, intelligence ends up doing more work for less rewards.
And a few months later ISIS died because the lack of easily-spread propaganda destroyed its ability to recruit susceptible idiots to its cause to replace all the soldiers that were being killed.
Exactly this. These sort of folk started congregating on 8chan when they got pushed out of 4chan. I certainly don't condone mass shootings, white supremacists, etc., but if you think denying 8chan hosting is going to solve this problem, you are sorely mistaken. All it does is force these people into more concentrated forums where there is less push back and opposing views to their radical ideas. Ultimately, it forces them into corners of the internet that are harder for outside groups to locate and monitor for potential threats.
I'll be quite honest, I don't know what a "good" solution here is, but I really don't think this is it.
On the other hand making them harder to access also makes the ideas spread slower because if you get all of say white supremacist sites off Google you massively cut down on the number of random 'normies' that will fall in and get swept up in the group. Same thing applies but is probably even more effective for getting groups off the regular internet all together because then you have to convince someone to install TOR (or whatever the new flavor of the month is) to get them into the funnel.
Disagree. Of course people recongregate in less well-known haunts, but there's a cost to them in doing so, it massively inhibits recruitment, and when there's an influx of new users after the sinking of a platform security standards tend be much lower, making it that much easier to infiltrate.
In war, degrading your enemy's communications and lines of supply is often more effective than engaging in battle.
Lone wolf attacker has no supply line to degrade. The El Paso shooter used 8chan to distribute his manifesto, we have no indication that caused his radicalization.
Empirical evidence suggests that the 'lone wolf' stereotype is not well grounded in reality, and that social networks can be essential for the development of both ideological conviction and the acquisition of practical know-how.
While we need to wait for more detail to fully understand the path of radicalization, I am moderately confident in predicting the El Paso shooter visited 8ch regularly for at least 6 months, probably much longer, but posted infrequently if at all.
That only works if you're actually going to act on the intelligence gathered from having the discussion centralized. That's something the U.S. is clearly willing to do with, e.g., ISIS. But even what limited programs we had towards combating white nationalist terrorism were canceled by Trump.
That makes sense when the hydra is just quietly plotting. But what about if the site is the hydra's head-growing organ, i.e. radicalization platform? Disrupting recruitment seems like a viable strategy against hydras of all sorts.
These aren't exactly organized bands of people funneling in millions of dollars for carrying out actual training and misson planning/execution. They're watering holes where disaffected elements of society hyperbolically play up various happenings.
Just take a step back for a moment. We have an increasing population and increasing saturation of that population with streams of data. When something happens, we know with a speed that is uncommon in human history (to be euphemistic about it).
More population = more happenings = more things to emotionally charge people in the same 24 hour frame. Even if population increases by a bajillion, we still only have 24 hours in a media cycle.
Even if the per capita incidence of violence decreases, a rising population means more slices of highly charged emotional manipulation within the same media cycle.
Edit: So instead of increasing population, resultant increasing pop density, increasing information density, and a myriad of clusterf* systems running haywire (even in an era where we're safer than even 20 years ago)...4chan and 8chan are the devil and satan for allowing people to shitpost in a hyperbolic hyperironic manner?
The "hyperirony" excuse is complete bullshit. It's not redeeming when the defense is that they only support, encourage, and enable terrorism because it's a joke. That would make it more despicable, even. Instead we have incredibly racist and hateful people who don't see themselves that way making excuses. They're still shit humans. You don't murder people and say it was irony as your defense.
Shit humans have always existed. But claiming they support "terrorism" in the same sense that we think of organizational terrorism is ridiculous.
4chan and 8chan didn't create hyperirony (although they certainly cultivate massive gardens of it) or densensitization. Our media cycle has created it in tandem with a feedback loop that synergizes with the principle of "more people + same time amount = more hyperslices of emotion eliciting news that distort mental maps of larger-than-self situations"
You're safer at a wal-mart than prior 4chan and 8chan. But if you combine higher population density and information density, you'll get more raw events of violence even if the chance of experiencing violence has gone down.
Imo, there's a more insidious risk in allotting more powers of censorship to entities who are far less subject to reciprocal investigation. Think of 9/11. If we had done nothing, we would be safer and more prosperous today. We let the fleas provoke us into gouging untold amounts of flesh to stop itches.
Edit: A more simple way to phrase it is that hyperirony and the lack of "proper affect", which is really what people seem to be most horrified about, is a defense against the 24/7 atrocity exhibition which turns emotion into banality.
I guess it would fall under stochastic terrorism, so the modus operandi is different (it doesn't need secretive cell networks for example), but it's not ridiculous to compare it.
It is ridiculous because it's a consequence of anonymity which is still precious enough to ward off against knee jerk emotionalism. As I said, 9/11 was my lesson on how much more magnificentally messed up a sort of societal "immunological reaction" can be in comparison to the actual illness. The thought of a crackdown is both a more chilling outcome and a potential catalyst for actual organizational terrorism if people can't let off steam*
* - Note that more people, especially younger folks with their hyperbolic tendencies, and anonymity means more raw sociopathy and psychopathy being displayed in relation to those events. It's at least partially a function of the numbers game.
Your tactic is identical to that of Weimar-republic anti-Semites, but aimed at a different hub of people. You even threw in the genocide-incoming bit, "they're trying to kill as many of us as possible"!
I recommend you have a look at the Kabbalah.info course on anti-Semitism - who can have more experience with it than the Jews themselves?
(I'm saying this glibly because this is unpleasant work and the amount of work it requires to be able to say this is vastly underestimated.)
Perhaps... communicate, then think, then understand and only then act?
You've moved from "counter terrorism", to "root out terrorism", to "root out image boards" - which is "root out the congregation".
Breathing pause. "Root out the radical congregations, Jews, fags, Roma's, chans, white nationalists, whatever, just root them out completely" is the WW2 analogy.
The next move is: "root out the causes of terrorism" - but we didn't get to that last time. It sure isn't any particular group of people.
Solve the root causes. It's either that or keep mirroring their impotent group defense mechanism on a more subtle level, which will in fact justify them to do whatever they initially wanted on a larger scale.
The solution to anti-Semitism sure as hell is not "destroy the anti-Semitec communities, burn their homes, kill their sons, rape their wives"! That is throwing gasoline onto the bonfire.
Edit: comment, please. I don't like throwing cold water on outrage porn either, but I don't want this to escalate further.
If it escalates further, the chans will go full dark, which means a massive influx of teenagers on the darkweb, and the good parts of the darkweb becoming a lot less cool, also, incidentally.
And yet, we let Islam continue to be preached in this nation. When will we recognize that extremist ideologies like these can not be allowed to fester? Freedom of speech needs its limits.
We wouldn't tolerate the existence of an Islamist site that glorified and helped perpetrate mass incidents of terror against our society.
We used to, until quite recently. You could read Dabiq, the well-produced magazine of ISIL/ISIS.[1] They definitely glorified their terrorist incidents. With color pictures of their operations. All with religious justification. "Islam is the religion of the sword, not pacifism". (Dabiq, issue 7.)
Dabiq probably inspired enemies more than supporters. Dabiq says that there can be no compromise until the followers of Allah rule the earth. So ISIS could never have a peaceful border with anybody. On March 23, 2019, the last territory controlled by ISIS was captured.
8Chan is a minor annoyance in comparison. I'd let them blither and look foolish.
There is a fallacy in your thinking imo. Sites like 8chan are not entirely devoted to radicalisation, just like a mosque is not devoted to radicalisation.
Yet sometimes in a mosque some evil islamic imam or something preaches radicalisation.
Yet we tolerate and welcome mosques. Then why shouldn’t we tolerate and welcome sites like 8chan?
Also please keep in mind that now that 8chan has been basically shut down, we have no way of make an opinion of our own.
What are you talking about? We can and do arrest, charge, and convict "evil islamic imams" that "preach radicalization", and don't let them operate mosques. We tolerate and welcome mosques because they ban radicals and report them to the FBI:
"Monteilh eventually so unnerved Orange County's Muslim community that that they got a restraining order against him. [T]hey also reported Monteilh to the FBI"
You do know that Homeland is a TV show and not real life, right?
A mosque that openly fostered extremism like 8chan did would of course get shut down. By contrast, 8chan has not been shut down. Its operations have been disrupted, but it hasn't shut down, anymore than Cloudflare has shut down just because they had a site outage last month.
> What are you talking about? We can and do arrest, charge, and convict "evil islamic imams" that "preach radicalization", and don't let them operate mosques.
Indeed, you arrest the single imam, you don't shut down the whole mosque. That's the point.
If a mosque openly fostered extremism in spite of arrests and multiple massacres, you'd have a problem with their landlord refusing to continue to rent to them?
> We wouldn't tolerate the existence of an Islamist site that glorified and helped perpetrate mass incidents of terror against our society.
I completely disagree. I've read Dabiq[1] and similar publications because I want to know why people believe the things they believe. It is a good thing that such horrible ideas are available to the public, and for the same reason that it's good that flat earth sites are available to the public. JS Mill puts it best[2]:
> But the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it.
> If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.
It is for these same reasons that I also read /pol/ and /leftypol/ on 8chan.
Right, all those people who were having fun on 8chan will now see the error of their ways, take up sensitivity training, and post only non-controversial things where ever they land next.
Shutting down 8chan will not shut these people up. they will find somewhere else to talk to each other, as people do. While they're looking many message boards will be graced with new users: the form 8chan brigades are I fear going to discover they can land on places they don't like and cause their shutdown now too.
- Voxility's actions are admirable given the nature of the content hosted on 8chan;
- I can't say much about Epik's services;
- Voxility is absolutely the worst of the worst. The content nature and their shady 'business practices' are an absolute abomination. They do a lot of spam and 'transit' a lot of shady traffic.
The truth is that information does not radicalize people - censorship does. That's why the channers are as radicalized as they are - they've been censored everywhere else. Censor their last remaining outlets and you will increase violence by orders of magnitude.
Let me start by stating my views on free speech and rights in general, and then how they are shaped by these events.
I think that human rights and freedoms are just that: personal freedoms. Freedom of religion is about personal religious observance without harming others. These freedoms philosophically should not mean entitlement to unlimited exercise thereof.
The right to bear arms doesn’t mean you should be able able to stockpile unlimited amounts of ammunition and incendiary devices etc.
Similarly, FREEDOM of speech to me is a PERSONAL human freedom. You can say what you want, and not be punished by the government for it. You can say it in a car, you can say it in a bar, you can say it very far, you can wish upon a star. But there are limits to how many people can hear you. Maybe 10 or 100 people at an event.
Once you get into situations where 5,000,000 people can hear a tweet, that’s clearly not about FREEDOM of speech in its strict sense. It is about entitlement to use a PLATFORM, maintained by an ORGANIZATION that involves many people, to broadcast arbitrary, unfiltered one-to-many messages to everyone.
I think this latter thing is toxic, in both directions. Society listening to tweets of celebrities cheapens public discussion and civic thought. And being reachable by the whole world using email (rather than through networks of shared invited/capabilities) leads to constant spam and papparazzi for celebrities. What happened here is an ORGANIZATION put on a show or movie and catapulted this celebrity into the limelight and carefully maintains their stature, along with their own publicists, social media team on twitter, etc.
This is the society we live in, where we have heroes. But entitlement to unlimited unfiltered megaphones is NOT the same as freedom of speech, any more than being a leader if a paramilitary group of unlimited size is the same as the right to bear arms.
So, freedoms and rights have limits. Where those limits lie is the heap paradox - as you take away grains, when is a heap no longer a heap? etc.
So what is the alternative to this type of misnamed “free speech” aka megaphones run by organizations, super PACs, mainstream media, and so on? It is COLLABORATION.
Look at Wikipedia.
Look at peer reviewed journals and science.
Look at large open source projects
There, individual contributions are filtered and often butt up against changes, revisions, etc. The result is that when the general public sees something, it is the result of a collaborative process of filtering and refining the presentation of information, citing sources, etc. There are no heroes on wikipedia, and only a few in science and open source. Most contributions are filtered by a community of experts, not state governments or platforms employing boiler rooms of low paid workers to determine what’s true.
I would like to see more of that COLLABORATION and less of COMPETITION. I would like to see a patentleft movement in drug research, instead of big pharma. I would like to see news reported like Wikipedia with footage submitted by everyday people on the ground instead of “intrepid reporters in a warzone”. CNN used to have a motto that they have “no celebrities”. News agencies tried to stay lukewarm and neutral. FOX News changed the game, lots of people copied the model. The Internet eliminated newspapers and classifieds. News had to adapt because capitalism and cutthroat competition for the same ad dollars means MORE clickbait and MORE lockin to one type of audience. For-profit Social networks further use this content to herd us into echo chambers of outrage, because that’s what drives the most engagement, which the social networks need to monetize. They send notifications in an increasingly desperate attempt to grab your attention in a tragedy of the commons where the commons is our attention.
This has had a corrosive effect on society. The capitalist (competition based) news has made us more polarized and outraged, while the capitalist (competition based...
Your thoughts on E2E are ridiculous, everyone needs E2E for many things they do every day. Isn't it a bit absurd to claim to be in favor of free speech in public, but against private speech?
I am in favor of free speech in private and in public. I am saying exactly what I said... that this freedom is different than an entire organization giving you an unfiltered megaphone. Do you have some substantive critique or question?
>Even with numerical limits on each person’s audience, a hateful message can attract people who make plans to use technology to asymetrically perpetrate criminal acts. And end-to-end encryption means we won’t know what they’re saying.
Yea why do you feel the need to know everything that is said? You stop just short of calling for back doors in encryption.
>Fbi should honey pot everything
It's a bit weird to be pro free speech and pro Orwellian police state. It seems like a strategy to force people to speak in a certain way, coerced self-censorship. Are you a "government contractor" by chance?
Can any free speech absolutists explain to me the legitimate public interest that is served by allowing terrorist breeding grounds like 8chan to continue to operate?
Reducing the subjective evaluation of the content of private citizens' speech.
[Edit: Why would you down-vote? That's the legitimate interest on the other side of the balance. It's not an opinion on the merit of shutting down 8chan. In this case, the benefit in permitting this speech may be grossly outweighed by the benefit of stopping it, but the benefit in allowing 8chan to continue to exist is non-zero. In its most nefarious use, subjective elimination of speech to subvert the speech's goal is commonly known as "censorship".]
It is both the right and responsibility of every member of a civil society to make ethical judgments about what kind of society they want to create. Free speech is a means to achieve those ends, and not an end in itself.
It can be an end itself if you find that any limits are prone enough to corruption to not be tolerated.
Take encryption. It is used for some of the most vile evil content that exists on the internet. But I support encryption because I know that any limits on it will soon be corrupted by those in power to use for reasons far less just than ending the aforementioned content. Thus I see enabling encryption as an end to itself regardless of how it is used because I see any society that does differently as inferior.
> It can be an end itself if you find that any limits are prone enough to corruption to not be tolerated.
I understand that some people see things that way. And I'm saying that it's an insufficient, naïve, and (in our zeitgeist) actually unethical position.
With even first world governments engaging in significant censorship of harmful incidents, I would respond that anyone seeking to empower governments to limit freedom of speech is in the unethical position, and any trust in a government is naïve. How many more cover ups and incidents of government corruption are needed before we realize that centralizing violence is itself a bad thing and we should seek maximization of individual liberty?
Yet around the world this solution has largely failed, especially as private entities with enough political power (and money, as these are often interchangeable) have learned how to exploit flaws in human psychology to for their advantage. Until we fix these issues the best option is to minimize the possible harm caused by minimizing the instances where we fine violence an acceptable option.
> Yet around the world this solution has largely failed
That's a cynic's worldview and it's one that I totally reject. Take your pessimism to a hole in the ground and wither yourself away there. Let those of us invested in the progress and future of humanity get on with our work.
>That's a cynic's worldview and it's one that I totally reject.
Your rejection doesn't change the reality of how the word operates today.
>Take your pessimism to a hole in the ground and wither yourself away there.
Why? So others can continue to double down on failed policies that end up costing others?
>Let those of us invested in the progress and future of humanity get on with our work.
You see yourself as some benevolent being moving humanity forward but reject any criticism of the costs of your actions. You even immediately judge those who disagree with you as standing against humans, a tactic to dehumanize opposition instead of engaging with it. It is a dangerous mindset that has led to the deaths of tens of millions.
Why not take a lesson from nature that shows that a single entity that tries to do it all is far less likely to survive the future that many separate entities that each find their niche?
> You see yourself as some benevolent being moving humanity forward but reject any criticism of the costs of your actions.
I reject specifically your criticism, the criticism of cynics. I (obviously) don't agree with your characterization of which policies are "failed policies that end up costing others" or "how the world operates". Humans are of nature but also possess the ethical and rational systems to rise above it. We're not bound by our natural impulses; on the contrary, our gifts oblige us to be better than them.
Bluntly, I have no interest in living in a tribe with my Dunbar's number of tribespeople, organizing my thoughts and our policies under some presupposed limits of ambition. My ambition is boundless. So I say again, if you want to close ranks and subvert broad collective action and live in fear (or as you would say, some kind of steely-eyed realism) go dig a hole and do it well away from me. I've no interest in that moribund nihilism.
Sure, but if you reasonably suspect someone to possess such content in encrypted form, is there any moral problem with socially engineering them into giving up their private key?
Depends upon the extent of such actions. Throwing someone into prison until they give you a password they might not have is a problem. Wire tapping their phone after getting a warrant to see if they discuss the password with another person is not. Without a warrant is once again a problem.
One man's terrorist rhetoric is another's glorious revolutionary thought. If you don't think that the precedents being set today won't affect leftist spaces which seek to alter America's failed state version of capitalism you are truly naive. Was the Patriot act and subsequent rights degrading laws about combating Islamic terrorism? Or was it about legalizing oppressive control and mass surveillance?
I'm fairly leftist and would have no problem with individual leftist spaces being shut down if they start breeding so much hatred against the right that they incite and celebrate many explicitly-politically-motivated mass murderers.
i don’t have a strong opinion about free speech but i think the argument is: who gets to decide what’s “in the public interest”. if you don’t like somebody’s book, pamphlet, blog post, comment, or tweet, just declare it “not in the public interest”. there you have the makings of tyranny.
Not a speech absolutist. I believe certain kind of speeches should be banned.
What irked me is that CloudFlare was the one who makes the decision to do censorship.
It's not really a due process. No one argue for the defendant's side. It would seem better coming from US court through a due process or something like two lawyers arguing for both sides and etc.
I dislike the rationale of "CloudFlare is a private company. They can do whatever they want" ... like wut?
Also, if what those people do is illegal, should we arrest them, instead of merely banning the site?
This is the same thing with Trump's speech on Twitter. People yelling at Twitter to ban Trump because what Trump said is very very bad. If it's so bad, he should be arrested, not simply banned from Twitter.
------------
Edit: to address the main concern in my replies.
So, we think the speech is so bad that CloudFlare should ban it. But it is not bad enough to be banned by every CDN. That sounds contradictory.
For me, the speech is bad and it should be banned by every CDN. But government should make the judgement on the speech through a due process, ban it, and arrest someone if there's illegal activity involved.
Yes, compared to a censorship coming from companies.
One point is that the decision process is rather secretive. Who argued for? Who argued against? What were their supporting arguments and etc.? Doing censorship through court would be better.
If you have a different position, could you explain why censorship coming from CloudFlare is better than censorchip coming from US government?
There's some sort of contradiction here that: you think the speech is bad that CloudFlare should ban it. But not bad enough to be banned from every CDN.
I think Cloudflare kicking them off their service is the moral and ethical thing to do.
I don't think 100% of the CDN providers in the entire world will do the moral and ethical thing, and I recognize that the First Amendment would (should) handily prevent legislation requiring that they do.
At best, it seems inconsistent that we are okay with other CDN providers not doing moral and ethical things. (Since we are okay with the speech being hosted elsewhere).
One is censorship and the other isn't. One need not carry a brief for Cloudflare to recognize that, protected categories aside, like any business they have the right to refuse service to anyone. 8chan falling into no protected categories, and there in any case being no shortage of other network service providers, you need first to establish that Cloudflare has acted wrongly, and your arguments thus far fall somewhat short of compelling agreement on that score.
> Yes, compared to a censorship coming from companies.
This is literally the exact opposite intention of the 2nd amendment.
> If you have a different position, could you explain why censorship coming from CloudFlare is better than censorchip coming from US government?
Cloudflare isn't an entity supported (e.g. paid) by the general populace. CF not hosting their site isn't censoring their content, they are just actively choosing not to do business with them. People on 8chan can certainly say the same exact thing on any other medium (pen/paper, facebook, etc) and no one is stopping them from doing so.
2. You can think the speech is wrong, and that CDNs shouldn't host it, while having concerns about the US government getting involved in censorship in direct violation of the First Amendment.
The chances of every CDN in the world jumping on the bandwagon is vanishingly small. The Daily Stormer managed to find hosting. Even child porn manages it. That doesn’t mean Cloudflare has to be the one to do it.
That there are minor exceptions to the First Amendment doesn’t mean we should throw it all out.
- Government shouldn't ban it even though the speech is bad.
- You are okay with the speech being hosted elsewhere.
We aren't talking about a grey area here. We are talking about promoting mass-shooting. Every sane person, including you and me, agrees the speech is extremely bad.
Wouldn't you want it to be banned everywhere?
This is the main point I'm trying to drive. We are somehow oddly satisfied that the speech is banned on CloudFlare.
Shouldn't we try to get this specific speech banned everywhere?
There will be some CDNs who do not make the ethical choice. That's a fact of life.
I am uncomfortable with government intervention that makes the ethical choice the legally required choice in this case, as I'm wary of fucking with the First Amendment. (It's also somewhat a fool's errand, as you can host a CDN outside of US jurisdiction if you really want.)
> Government is much better equipped, and the process would be more open.
Maybe - I tend to think governments have a harder time with rapidly changing scenarios, as in privacy issues in the tech world - but the flip side of that is there's little recourse if the process makes a bad decision. Both companies and government are susceptible to bad decisions.
I can switch CDN providers if one makes a stupid call. Switching governments is far less doable.
The US government, at least, has explicit restrictions on how it can censor speech. They're required to abide by the 1st amendment, and even have requirements for due process and such.
By contrast, none of the corporations that host the sites you use daily have any such restrictions. If Google wants to delist your website, that's too bad for you. If AWS no longer wants to host it, you have no recourse. If Comcast decides to block you, there's nothing you can do.
Do you want the corporations that control everything you see on the internet to be more neutral? That will require oversite by the government (probably the FCC specifically).
If you want to be really cynical, you could say the government is controlled by corporate money... but then what does it matter?
IMO, blind cynicism isn't helping anyone, and the government is at least ostensibly supposed to do what's in the interest of the nation, and has some limits about what it can and cannot censor. I'd rather that, than an amoral corporation motivated only by money.
> The US government, at least, has explicit restrictions on how it can censor speech. They're required to abide by the 1st amendment, and even have requirements for due process and such.
Right, which is why I'm baffled someone worried about free speech would be happy with giving them that power.
> By contrast, none of the corporations that host the sites you use daily have any such restrictions. If Google wants to delist your website, that's too bad for you. If AWS no longer wants to host it, you have no recourse. If Comcast decides to block you, there's nothing you can do.
Sure there is - you go elsewhere. Just like 8chan will, just like the Daily Stormer did.
> Right, which is why I'm baffled someone worried about free speech would be happy with giving them that power.
Ok, I'll try again. Corporations can actively censor you. The government is more restricted in what speech it can stomp on.
> Sure there is - you go elsewhere.
How do you "go elsewhere" when Comcast refuses to allow customers to see your website?
How do you "go elsewhere" when google delists you?
If 8ch gets hosted in a foreign country after being delisted from google and refused by US hosts, that's censorship. That's an infringement on freedom of speech.
If you're ok with that freedom of speech, then you are saying that it's ok for corporations to censor. That's a coherent stance... but one with which I vehemently disagree. I don't want ANYONE to have the power to censor, but with multinational mega-corps controlling the vast majority of the internet, that's simply not possible.
Considering the fact that internet providers and online services control the vast majority of the content I consume, I'd much rather have some regulation that limits what these companies can do.
> Ok, I'll try again. Corporations can actively censor you. The government is more restricted in what speech it can stomp on.
And I'll try again. Responding to "corporations can censor you" by saying "we should therefore break the First Amendment and let government censor" is bizarre if you're pro-free speech.
I get "neither should be able to censor" as a position, even if I disagree with it. I don't get "I value free speech and thus want the government to be the speech arbiter" at all.
> How do you "go elsewhere" when Comcast refuses to allow customers to see your website?
Hang on, we're talking about CDNs. Not ISPs. Where I live, there's only one real choice for broadband ISPs, and I'd argue they should be largely treated as a utility in that scenario.
> How do you "go elsewhere" when google delists you?
Bing?
> If 8ch gets hosted in a foreign country after being delisted from google and refused by US hosts, that's censorship. That's an infringement on freedom of speech.
So's me telling my kids to be quiet and eat their dinner. It's thankfully 100% legal.
> "we should therefore break the First Amendment and let government censor"
I never said any such thing. Please don't misrepresent my comments.
> we're talking about CDNs. Not ISPs.
I'm actively discussing both. Legislation regulating who can censor what must necessarily start with ISPs before we can even think about regulating edge providers.
> Bing?
You can't move to bing, because you're not the one searching for your website.
> So's me telling my kids to be quiet and eat their dinner. It's thankfully 100% legal.
I'm saying it shouldn't be legal for corporations to suppress speech in this way.
> I dislike the rationale of "CloudFlare is a private company. They can do whatever they want" ... like wut?
Doesn't CloudFlare have the same free speech rights to express their own views towards hate speech (i.e., by not providing service to white supremacists)?
Yes, they do. But that's not the world we should strive for.
In your opinion, would it be better for a government to make this kind of judgement than a company?
Do you think the speech should be banned everywhere? Or should it be banned only on CloudFlare? Or you don't have your judgement on this specific speech?
That's why it's weird that people are cheering Cloudflare for making the right decision. Then, put forward an argument that "well, the speech can be on another platform".
The US constitution does not have a monopoly on the definition of "censorship". Just because government censorship is the only kind it talks about doesn't mean the word doesn't extend to censorship imposed by other entities.
> What irked me is that CloudFlare was the one who makes the decision to do censorship.
I'm not sure what makes you think cloudfront is "censoring" anyone; 8chan no longer is using cloudflare's (likely) free service, so they need to reconfigure their DNS and go about their day.
A good majority of the internet does not use cloudflare; free or paid.
> What irked me is that CloudFlare was the one who makes the decision to do censorship.
It's their property, and they have an absolute right to decide how their property is to be used. The right to freedom of association is the most fundamental human right there is.
Not that hard, 8chan has other sub forums which are related to other interests, they should have given time to 8chan admins to temp block /pol till they figured out how to moderate illegal posts.
The theoretical argument is simple- if you ban one kind of speech, where does it end? The line can keep getting moved closer until what's not allowed is in a gray area and that's not where we want to be.
However, the practical side of this is pretty clear.. hate speech is hate speech. It's not a debate. The people who are for being racist/bigots are wrong- plain and simple. So removing their forum of speech is OK in my book.
Still even after saying that- it's never that simple.. I think collectively the US does not want to turn into what parts of even europe has in which you can literally get in trouble just for saying things. And trying to "ban" even the clearest of wrong views is one step closer to getting somewhere we don't want to be.
Moral principles don't need to be justified by the "legitimate public interest" (in the short run), otherwise we would kill all babies that we predict will become criminals, even thought they've done nothing wrong yet.
I think laws should be fair and consistent. Censorship is inconsistent with freedom and justice. Additionally, the interpretation of messages is subjective.
If laws are inconsistent and arbitrary (and consequently, unfair), then you might as well throw moral principles out the window altogether and become a fascist, a white supremacist, etc.
The only way to have a just society, in my opinion, is when freedom of the individual is the base of all laws, and those laws are logical and consistent with each other.
Well, what about the rights of the 29 individuals that were randomly murdered, plus the scores of others wounded this past weekend? What about their justice?
I'm sure it's fun for you to treat all of this as some sort of abstract thought experiment, but the reality is that people are dying senselessly and violently for no reason other than we as a society won't make difficult decisions in the name of "principle".
Except we only apply that thinking to things we don't like, and that varies from individual to individual. If alcohol results in more deaths than hate speech, do we ban bars? Or do you think you should be allowed to make grown-up decisions because you're not the one killing people?
edit: And to be clear, I fully support a private company's refusal to do further business with 8chan as much as their contract allows. But I tire of these arguments about how somebody died, so we have to do something, and ignoring all further reasoning.
That's a completely irrelevant comparison. People who die from alcohol-related deaths have a choice whether or not to consume alcohol. The 29 people who died this past weekend in El Paso and Dayton were not given a choice whether they wanted to get shot by terrorists.
>> People who die from alcohol-related deaths have a choice whether or not to consume alcohol.
That's not always true - many people die as the innocent victims in DUI collisions. If there were more people dying innocently from alcohol, would you support shutting down bars that had been used by people who drove drunk, because other individuals lost their freedom?
To TallGuyShort, since I can't reply to you: Bartenders can be held criminally responsible if they continue to serve somebody who is obviously intoxicated, and who then goes out and kills somebody in a drunk driving crash. If bars continue to have problems over serving they can lose their liquor license. That's the analogue here. 8chan is the bar that's over-serving.
Shooting people is obviously against freedom, should be illegal and is illegal.
You're insinuating that if freedom of speech laws in the US were less principled, those people wouldn't have died. But maybe if news outlets didn't report on mass shootings those people wouldn't have died too, should we prohibit news outlets from reporting these things?
It's not the fault of free speech that some mentally unstable person killed people, the same way it's not the fault of the journalists that report these tragedies.
Your definition of "justice" is warped beyond recognition. Justice doesn't mean bad things don't happen, it means people who wrong others pay for their actions.
Thousands of people every year are randomly murdered for no good reason. Many actually never get closed, meaning no one actually goes to jail or gets punished for their murder. These people actually don't receive justice, but obviously we can't live in a perfect society.
You're oversimplifying a complex issue to accuse others of being heartless. It's the lazy moralizing of tyranny.
It's the ability to chip away at free speech. First 8chan, then something else that's bad, then something slightly intolerant, then what? Is it really worth censoring when something else will pop up to take it's place? Monitor and move on.
I see you have invoked the Slippery Slope fallacy, which is primarily a way to sidestep talking about the actual issue at hand by comparing it to hypothetical events. What's not hypothetical is that scores of people are dying in the meantime. Furthermore, the First Amendment was designed by the founders as a way to protect citizens who criticized the government. I find it unbelievable that they themselves would support extending those protections towards people who would seek to explicitly provoke mass, random violence.
It is illegal to be an accessory to murder. It is illegal to incite riots. I still haven't heard a good reason why forums that are havens for users openly and explicitly encouraging terroristic acts should not bear any responsibility, beyond lazy slippery slope arguments.
> What's not hypothetical is that scores of people are dying in the meantime.
What’s hypothetical is that banning 8ch will do anything about that.
> Furthermore, the First Amendment was designed by the founders as a way to protect citizens who criticized the government. I find it unbelievable that they themselves would support extending those protections towards people who would seek to explicitly provoke mass, random violence.
Another thing that’s hypothetical.
> I still haven't heard a good reason why forums that are havens for users openly and explicitly encouraging terroristic acts should not bear any responsibility, beyond lazy slippery slope arguments.
Considering you’re just dismissing the presented argument as a fallacy, it’s surprising that your own argument contains so little substance. Or is it?
This is so naive. Terrorists use FB, Twitter, Youtube, Google, Cloudflare, Apache, PHP, Java, Volkswagens, US Senators, phones, pagers, etc. etc.
So here is a formula for you to use in case you want to send us back to the dark ages:
> Can any free speech absolutists explain to me the legitimate public interest that is served by allowing terrorist breeding grounds like _INSERT ANY OF THE PRODUCTS FROM THE LIST ABOVE_to continue to operate?
Didn’t know 8chan hosted their stuff at Voxility, it’s a small world. I’m saying this because Voxility is a Romanian company, I am Romanian, and my company used to also host our stuff at their premises until 3 or 4 years ago.
I remember that on one of my visits there (there was always a hard-drive that needed to be handed in person or something like that) I’m 100% sure that I had bumped into what looked to be an FBI team inspecting some of the machines in there. I’m saying FBI but they could also have been the the US Secret Service or whatever agency is in charge with protecting US citizens against online bad things, in any case, the people I saw inspecting stuff were definetely people working for the US government, you could tell by their pants and the way they matched (or, better yet, how they didn’t match) with their white snickers.
All this to say that I’m pretty sure that the US 3-letter agencies had direct physical access to the 8chan servers, not sure how they let all this get so out of control.
I think they only switched to Epik/Voxility for a few hours after being kicked off Cloudflare, but I'm not familiar with where they would have been hosted or what services they used 3-4 years ago.
They spoke American English and a couple of days after that there were a couple of news reports about the US authorities having come to Romania in order to catch some Internet bad guys, so after the fact I just put 2 and 2 together. And believe it or not an American person usually stands out when outside of the States (and maybe a few other European Western countries), it’a like porn, difficult to put down in words but you know it when you see it.
Business people wearing sneakers is more common in the US than elsewhere. When I came to the US I was like 'wow, so many of these people are planning on going for a jog during their lunch breaks!' Nope, people just wear running shoes with their slacks.
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[ 5.3 ms ] story [ 369 ms ] threadI wonder if they'd describe themselves that way.
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/internet-hate-machine?full=1
They’re just too big and too popular to fail.
And those last two, those aren't old ladies, those a shit people who aren't technically literate enough to find 8chan.
Facebook takes their hosting to a whole new level by being part of the ICANN as a domain registrar which their domains are registered under themselves, making it close to impossible to be shutdown on the domain level.
With 8chan, I legitimately don't know what my opinion is. I've read it before, and I spent a few hours reading it this weekend, and it's beyond clear to me that it absolutely had the potential to radicalize shooters and terrorists. I'm not referring to the simple use of racial or ethnic slurs -- of course this was extremely common there, but I don't think this is the part of the site that encouraged actual violence. Rather, among the many ideological threads that were more or less constantly ongoing on 8chan, one of them just straight-up encouraged mass shootings. "The fire rises" is a common phrase I saw there celebrating the frequency of shootings. For instance, here's a quote I saw this weekend (I screenshotted a bunch of stuff like this in anticipation of the site going down):
"holy fucking shit, a third mass shooting toda [referencing an incident near Douglas Park in Chicago], white guy shot 7 people, no one dead yet but the meter is still running!!! shooter still active!!!
its absolutely fucking happening !!! the FIRE RISES!!!"
This was attached to a picture of Trump with the text "it's happening" superimposed.
While 8chan overall was absolutely all over the place, this thread of support for shootings and terrorism was seemingly always present in the background.
There is absolutely no evidence that the 8chan circle-hate happening out in the open has had any mitigating effect. It only made it accessible to even the technically illiterate among the potential audience.
But one of the biggest ponds you own lies still and stagnant. A perfect place for mosquitos to lay their eggs. In fact you’ve managed to make it especially hospitable to mosquitos that carry malaria. And all your other ponds are next to it, all your other ponds connect to it. Lots of people who come to your ponds for other things end up with malaria.
Should you be allowed to keep operating these ponds?
But let's roll with it anyway. What we have here is actually a large-scale land owner who leases out the land to anyone without further conditions to the lessee. It would seem silly to blame the leaser and not the lessee for what happens on those lands. Of course the government can still come in and request that they do something about the mosquitoes, if laws and regulations require that, but until then they won't become active because it would mean going back on their lease agreements which grant the lessee free use.
Are your actions illegal? I don't want pond ownership determined by the moral outage of the day.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_shootings_in_th...
Of course more people die of cancer, diabetes, heart disease, car accidents (and probably any number of other things) than in mass shootings every day.
But the seemingly random and violent nature of it is what's scary.
I can eat healthier, exercise, buy a safer car, drive more carefully, etc etc. But mass shooters aren't really avoidable while leading a normal life. That makes it scary and noteworth.
Presumably you have some threshold of statistical significance that would cause you to be worried about risk factors, but that threshold is itself subjective. Besides the questionable proposition that the number of deaths below that threshold don't matter, a lack of interest in the problem impairs the ability to make future predictions, since by the time you do take it seriously, you'll have to do a lot of catching up before you can assess the future course of events.
you might like to think about this in similar terms to epidemiology. while a small number of fatalities from a disease outbreak in a remote location isn't that troubling to most people, epidemiologists are in the business o assessing the potential scope, speed, and severity of communicable diseases and seem to prefer nipping things in the bud to waiting to see whether they develop into a pandemic if left alone.
It's very easy to shout the mantra of "Free speech!!! OMG!!!" but we gain nothing by acting like there aren't natural consequences to it. By having a liberal free-speech system, you are going to expose glitches in the "marketplace of ideas", and demagogues and radicals are going to be able to exploit it.
It might still be worth it (I haven't made up my mind yet on where we draw the line in censorship).
there have always been hyper-radical idiots. with 8chan and such, you can see them.
you're not getting rid of anything, you're just sticking your head into the sand.
Sure, I'm aware that the KKK existed before the internet.
> you're not getting rid of anything, you're just sticking your head into the sand.
I didn't claim I was getting rid of anyone or anything. I didn't really claim much at all in my post, but there's a difference between "getting rid" of stuff and deplatforming it.
For that matter, how does your logic make any sense? If I hire a hitman to kill someone, could my defense in court be "Well he was going to kill somebody anyway! You're just sticking your head in the sand by blaming me for it!"
Is your argument that rhetoric, delivered consistently enough and effectively enough, can't possibly influence people to do reprehensible things?
I just wonder with all the technology we have at our disposal, how is it these people continue to slip through the system undeterred to escalate this type of violence?
There are a huge number of people who claim they support the Confederate flag in honor of those who lost their lives under it.
Okay. It was a racist and oppressive government, but I can understand that logic. People gave their lives, and even sacrifice in favor of an unjust cause is sacrifice.
That said... if that's what it's really about for them, then why didn't those folks say something when the flag was claimed by racists and white supremacists? Why didn't they defend it from those who would appropriate the symbol?
Silence carries its own liability.
And a lot of 8chan-style behavior that isn't guilty of outright instigation is certainly guilty of immoral silence.
Source: living in a southern US state
I don't hear much about the Sons and Daughters of the Confederacy loudly denouncing racism.
If you're tangential to violence and hate, and you don't denounce it strongly and frequently, people are going to wonder.
People voice their trashy opinions there - which is totally fine - but there are so few balancing/calming opinions. Especially if you have some conspiracy affine news site/YT video, these balancing/calming opinions are just not present.
My conclusion at the moment is that more balanced people (no, not bots :)) should visit these sites and write calming/positive comments. Dialogue has become pretty unfashionable in 2019, monologues seem to have become the norm unfortunately although I think there is hope.
I agree in principle with what your suggesting, but at this point those boards are echo chambers, not spaces for discussion.
I recently got an account at a more or less alt-right news website and the comments there were all just rants that stood for themselves.
The classic extremist play is to patiently gnaw at the edges of acceptability. Subtle digs at Jews, blacks, Hispanics, muslims or non-muslims (you can insert any group here, really) pave the way for innuendos about their morals, work ethic, intellectual capacity etc.
You can gaslight perfectly normal, upstanding citizens into doubting their strongly held ethical convictions, first enough that they don't argue against e.g. racist loudmouths, then to the point that they don't argue for equal treatment of "out" groups. As this process plays out, it starts to seem dangerous to defend the maligned against violence, and eventually enough citizens will have had their sense of normal behaviour pushed far enough that atrocities become possible.
I don't know how to break that cycle. I do think the root causes need to be addressed, because poverty and social decline provide fertile ground for demagogues pointing fingers.
I don't think I'm an idiot, and I would like to think that I'm normally a pretty decent human, and yet I was still able to be persuaded by morons on Youtube like Sargon of Akkad and Thunderf00t, and I spread the stupid memes along with most of my friends; I can easily see the alternate universe where I didn't realize I was wrong, and went further down the rabbit hole watching idiots like Stefan Molyneux or something.
I think people like to pretend that they and everyone they care about are immune to propaganda.
Period.
I continue to be surprised at the level to which people misunderstand this.
I think that 8chan is terrible and I would rather it not exist, but at the same time, I would be pretty against denying its owners water or something, since we've decided that utilities don't get to take sides.
I'm not saying I disagree with you, evidently; the line in which we draw "utility" is a discussion that I really don't know that I have a good viewpoint. Are you entitled to having a soapbox to shout off of? I'm genuinely not sure.
What do we even do, besides sit and watch? I've totally shifted the way I browse the web to reduce my exposure to toxic information, and I think that the whole corporate banning of Alex Jones was a net positive, but what happens when a voice I agree with gets shunned in the same way?
What a messy problem
It isn't "misunderstanding" it is willfully ignoring to push a narrative. I sincerely doubt most of the people here calling this a violation of free speech are doing so in good faith.
It is a pretty basic set of logical steps to determine that a private business refusing to serve a customer is perfectly okay and should be encouraged. Arguing that a private business should be forced at gunpoint by government goons to do business with nazis or racist assholes doesn't make any sense at all.
All the attempts to derail into minutia like "cloudflare is a utility" is simply done to wear you out.
It's granted that people are within their rights to throw out speech they dislike and that there's a world of difference between severing a voluntary business relationship and the deployment of state force, but the implications of an anxious, PR-sensitive set of internet infrastructure providers is certainly fair game for discussion.
If we get into the habit of shutting down every site that attracts a spate of negative attention, it still has the aggregate effect of chilling free discourse. If a shooter came onto HN and posted a manifesto here, would it withstand the mainstream media onslaught?
That's probably because you are actually the one misunderstanding. The argument it sounds like you're making (I apologize if I'm reading you wrong) is the often made one that "Freedom of speech only protects you from the government". This argument equivocates the idea of freedom of speech with the First Amendment.
Many Americans, and freedom loving folks internationally, believe that freedom of speech is critical for a liberal democracy to exist. Many of the American founders believed in the idea and enshrined it in our Bill of Rights to make sure the Government can not violate it. They did not, however, create he idea of freedom of speech, which existed long before the Bill of Rights, exists outside of America and outside of the context of Government and Citizens.
Think of it like murder. People do not find murder reprehensible because it is illegal. It is illegal because it is reprehensible, and most people would not support it regardless of its legal status (I hope). The idea of murder and the legality of murder are related but separate.
Your argument is therefore taking as narrow a scope of the idea of freedom of speech as possible and then arguing against that, which is a type of straw man argument. I hope that clarifies the logic fallacies involved in your argument and helps you better understand those you disagree with.
I mean, it literally radicalized white supremacist terrorists. There's no "had the potential" anymore, it's a fact.
It also sounds like it held plenty of child porn, so I don't understand why it took until now for anyone to do anything about the site.
So it ran as a honeypot? I understand that 8chan wasn't hosted anonymously, the owners are known. If they provided a safe haven to child pornography, I assume law enforcement would put an end to that very quickly, especially with obvious and easy ways to apprehend the owners. They've been very active and successful in bringing down hidden services, it's not plausible that they looked the other way for a clearnet site.
I don't think so. What seems more likely to me is that one or more of the following is the case:
1) The "fast-flux" nature of imageboards makes it difficult for law enforcement to effectively respond to illegal content hosted on them.
2) Deleting content upon reports places board administrators technically within the boundaries of the law.
3) The arm's-length separation between the owners of 8ch, the users who operate boards on the site, and the users who post content on the site allows the owners to claim a lack of responsibility for that content.
Only when the platform embraces it does that statement make sense, which apparently 8chan did not if I understand you correctly.
I don't see anything wrong with that considering the limited and volunteer-based resources they have. Youtube-style content ID pre-censoring built into everything shouldn't be a goal we're striving for.
Unless you aren't attempting to imply anything about them being at fault. Although, as long as they are making that good faith effort to take down CP, they can't be taken down by the US govt at least.
https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/foment
Otherwise there's no reason to oppose real images, since the harm is done before the image is ever seen.
We ban specifically real images for two general reasons - one is that allowing them encourages the production of more such images, necessitating additional abuse, and the second is that for the children involved, knowing that other people are looking at those images is a huge violation.
Neither of those applies for "artificial but real-looking" images.
They're all behind variable IP VPNs. Permanently getting rid of them is nearly impossible.
"Things we legally cannot host" is exactly where one would expect them to draw the line. Whether or not you agree with that position is another matter.
Lot’s of places on this planet have hyper radicalized portions of their populations that commit aggregious acts of violence, and they lack free speech.
Yet free speech is being used as the red herring to blame.
Unequivocally, your assessment of these forums causing the radicalization is wrong. Plain wrong. These people exist in any environment, they go into the shadows, they continue to lash out, and removing and restricting rights for every person DOES NOT STOP THIS BEHAVIOR.
Now, that's not to say disruptions of communication systems (e.g. censorship) is the right answer. But existence doesn't mean we shrug our shoulders and do nothing. At the very least you can stop encouraging and normalizing them.
Regardless of that, is your solution to a decades old problem that pre dated the internet is to ban online forums that don’t tow approved narratives?
I think you will be incredibly disappointed in the results of your solution.
I do not like companies being the arbiters of good, but in this case (as far as CF is concerned [1]) I believe they did no wrong.
They clearly state that they should not be in the business of policing legal content they host, but also work hard to make sure they are not hosting illegal content. This way is better than a twitter-like approach where you only pay attention to high profile situations.
(In many senses twitter is doing a good job, but in other senses they (and their employees) have a strong political bias that bubbles up to how they enforce policies)
[1] https://new.blog.cloudflare.com/terminating-service-for-8cha...
I think we have a fundamental issue with men and how they are treated from a young age in our society, and it has nothing to do with the chans.
You can look at the symptoms or look at the underlying pathology that creates the symptoms.
Nasty people do exist in any environment, but in just the same way that network effects can enormously magnify things like charitable fundraising or the production of cat memes, they can also amplify the production of terrorism or other undesirable activities. Damaging social infrastructure which allows that is an effective way to impede recruitment and organization.
DUI laws don't stop DUI related accidents, but having and enforcing DUI laws decrease DUI related accidents. And while you can't prevent anything 100% of the time, you can actively work toward reducing the chances of something bad happening.
If our ultimate goals are to reduce driver impairment and maximize highway safety, we should be punishing reckless driving. It shouldn't matter if it's caused by alcohol, sleep deprivation, prescription medication, text messaging, or road rage. If lawmakers want to stick it to dangerous drivers who threaten everyone else on the road, they can dial up the civil and criminal liability for reckless driving, especially in cases that result in injury or property damage.
Doing away with the specific charge of drunk driving sounds radical at first blush, but it would put the focus back on impairment, where it belongs. It might repair some of the civil-liberties damage done by the invasive powers the government says it needs to catch and convict drunk drivers. If the offense were reckless driving rather than drunk driving, for example, repeated swerving over the median line would be enough to justify the charge. There would be no need for a cop to jam a needle in your arm alongside a busy highway.
https://reason.com/2010/10/11/abolish-drunk-driving-laws-2/
There is an underlying issue in our society that creates this lashing out behavior, and hiding it under the precept of preventing radicalization instead of engaging it will not stop the behavior.
We are all adults here. I have children, as many of you do. When your children exhibit a bad behavior, do you ban it or engage it and fix it?
I can tell my children to stop doing something until I’m blue in the face. I can BAN the action from my home, but until I engage with them it’s meaningless and only serves to make me feel good while they continue said things behind my back.
My point is, let’s look at the deeper issues instead of the emotional knee jerk tripe of ban guns, ban speech, blame racism. We have a problem that requires more rational behavior and level heads.
If it was an ISIS board we wouldn't even be having this conversation, it would already be offline.
Other than the fact that 8chan had things on it that you didn’t like, where is the evidence to support this claim? How do we know that it was a website that was responsible for the views of its userbase, as opposed to any other media they accessed? How do we know that 8chan specifically was the factor that caused the outcome?
You can't stop the signal. ThePirateBay proved it many many times.
We need to address the sources of the problem, not the symptoms.
If someone creates an app that connects to some sort of distributed indestructible backend, it's game over, and all you need is an app.
The internet has shown just how much making that slide easier means way more people fall into it. Used to be to get sucked into a world of neonazi/etc propaganda you had to know one and consciously choose to associate with it but now it gets lightly slipped into discussions online and is easy to find articles taking you to the next step.
I'm ashamed I ever let myself fall into the decaying orbit I did, but when the attractor was removed, I didn't seek out a new one. I didn't even have to install tor if I wanted to: they had just moved to Voat. Still, that tiny barrier to entry caught me. And I'm glad it did.
That's already too much work for the vast majority of the population. If you can't just randomly stumble on it somewhere, it has no real discoverability.
The very small subset of the population who live in a area where govt has blocked Piratebay can just use a VPN (which they likely already are for stuff like YouTube and Netflix).
I thought the idea expressed by NearlyFreeSpeech.net in the following link was nice:
https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/about/faq#TheLongGame
Not necessarily - more like taking the megaphone away. You're right that some/many will find a hub to congregate in, but if it's discoverable by the current 8chan users, there's no reason to think it won't be discoverable by media outlets/journalists either.
Like most things, obfuscation/suppression isn't going to solve the issue, but by providing spaces that allow for discussions, the views can be legitimised in the eyes of people who otherwise may not believe them. I'm for the most part against suppression of speech or views, but I do believe there is a line, and to me 4/8chan can (and do) regularly cross this line.
So the crime is mostly in allowing individuals to connect with other individuals interested in a particular topic.
In that case, isn't Google a far more reaching megaphone? One can find far more vicious communities through Google. I remember browsing through racist forums as a kid because a friend had found it on Google (presumably because he looked for it). The community in there certainly matched the worst 8chan boards in their belief and conviction in hateful ideals.
The only difference is 8chan is a neutral rank by popularity, while Google also filters by a user-supplied search string. The same type of communities can be found through both sites.
No, the megaphone was the site facilitating the discussion, not the ranking. In fact, by anonymising the discussion, they make it even more difficult to infer whether something is "groupthink" or just a lone spammer.
>In that case, isn't Google a far more reaching megaphone?
This is textbook whataboutism, but yes it is. That doesn't change the discussion in any way other than to attempt to muddy the discussion.
> . I remember browsing through racist forums as a kid because a friend
The internet has changed hugely in the last few years, and comparing what was on Google 10+ years ago doesn't compare to the discussions that are happening in other places today.
Nobody would call for Google to be shut down for the "evil" content they mirror and link to. We all have an implicit understanding that Google is simply a tool, a neutral platform to connect people to websites.
In fact, we believe the exact contrary. For us well educated folks, it's preventing access to Google on the basis of its content that is seen as a backward, deeply offensive move (China, Iran).
We look at the purpose and nature of the platform itself when we judge Google. Well, the purpose of 8chan has never been to promote hate, but instead to provide an open alternative to 4chan, where everyone is welcome to open a board about any topic[1].
The reason why 8chan is ridden by "evil" content has more to do with the heavily controlled state of the giant internet networks, than the nature of 8chan in itself. Nothing about 8chan caters to hateful communities in particular. It's simply one of the few open social networks on the web, which naturally attracts the people rejected from mainstream social networks first. Were it to be more popular, the ratio of "evil" to "decent" communities would trend towards the ratio found in other social networks.
So why do we call for it to be shut down, when its only real fault is to be too small? If you were the user of an 8chan community about cooking cupcakes (or furries, or BDSM), you certainly wouldn't want 8chan to be shut down just because some people are using the site differently.
___
Now I don't disagree with the reality that intellectually vulnerable people can be influenced by hateful communities in sites like 8chan, and that this is a problem to solve.
But in my opinion, the solution is to go in the total opposite direction of what you propose. The urge to seek out and enter fringe communities is healthy, and at least a necessary step in one's intellectual development. People will from time to time look to escape out of controlled environments, into the bigger space of possibilities. This won't change for as long as we keep teaching kids that freedom is good.
The problem is that, as conventional social networks get more and more controlled, and havens of diversity suppressed (Tumblr, ...), the only remaining places of freedom are those where all the "evil" has been funneled in. That's how people wanting to escape oppression or simply discover new possibilities, get shoved in places where "evil" looks like the norm.
Therefore, the solution is not to shut down one of the last places of diversity on the internet, Instead, we should try to make diversity and openness of thought as widespread as possible, so that "evil" doesn't seem like the only option to a lost, vulnerable individual.
[1]: the Al-Jazeera documentary about its founder is pretty nice even if skewed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REnlB3631Nw
It's definitely an issue worldwide regardless of race, religion or gender and unfortunately no one has the answer. I don't know if 8chan going down really helps stop radicalization but I don't think it hurts. I also don't think it's an affront to free speech if a hosting provider stops doing business with them. If the US government started arresting posters on 8chan that's most definitely a concern but losing your Cloudflare service or hosting is not breaking any first amendment rights.
I think it is rather strong[1] implied assumption here that places like 8chan can't change peoples' ideologies.
[1] If you ask me, the assumption is wrong.
No free speech rights were trampled on, and no censorship took place.
"Censorship is the suppression of speech, public communication, or other information, on the basis that such material is considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, or "inconvenient". Censorship can be conducted by a government,[5] private institutions, and corporations."
This is the wikipedia definition of censorship, so that makes your definition wrong.
- did censoring 8chan significantly limit any sort of harmful behavior?
- is censoring 8chan "right"?
- does this merely hide the problem, preventing an open discussion?
- should CloudFlare, an entity with massive control of Internet infrastructure, really be acting as a moral arbiter? Or do we expect some kind of neutrality from them? Do our expectations matter?
The line isn't as clear when you generalize the action.
You don't.
The notion that we could reach them on 8chan is a bit idealistic, the only thing we're able to reach is the manifestos within seconds of the news breaking as far as I can see. If your goal is to _reach_ them, then do it in reality.
Reddit found that banning hate subreddits reduced the overall usage of hate speech on the website. Even though the most dedicated users probably moved to voat, now some clueless kid who just wants to see look at memes is much less likely to just stumble upon that content.
What was it you read there that convinced you that websites are capable of turning people into murderers any more than video games are?
I personally doubt violent video games turn people into murderers; I suspect they do desensitize people to violence, and normalize violence. That's the problem with 8chan: violence, hated, bigotry, etc are normalized
you mean the same thing alot of movies and videogames do also?
It has also not prevented the US to go into a de-facto oligarchy state if anything the NRA and others have manipulated the "free speech cult" to promote private interest over a public one.
Same as with gun ownership, that sad illusion that owning guns will prevent tyranny is beyond hilarious at this point.
It's not just that they inspire a few shooters and mass murders. They inspire a hell of a lot of other once-reasonable people to be deeply and irredeemably terrible in many other ways.
To paraphrase GP: everything on the web is one click away.
Of course no sane person takes it literally.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Oregon_Trail_(1971_video_g...
>Prior to the start of Rawitsch's history unit, Heinemann and Dillenberger let some students at their school play it to test; the students were enthusiastic about the game, staying late at school to play. The other teachers were not as interested, but did recommend changes to the game, particularly removing negative depictions of Native Americans as they were based more on Western movies and television than history, and could be problematic towards the several students with Native American ancestry at the schools.
But they partially addressed that in the 1974 MECC version:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Oregon_Trail_(1971_video_g...
>He also added in more positive depictions of Native Americans, as his research indicated that many settlers received assistance from them along the trail. He placed The Oregon Trail into the organization's time-sharing network in 1975, where it could be accessed by schools across Minnesota.
Now the developer, Don Rawitsch, would like to create a version of the game from the Native American perspective.
https://newsmaven.io/indiancountrytoday/archive/it-s-a-white...
>But developers still field questions about the game’s stereotypical portrayal of Native Americans. During a recent gaming conference, Don Rawitsch, one of three aspiring teachers who developed The Oregon Trail, said he has dreams of reimagining the game with a Native American perspective.
>“If I were to create something like Oregon Trail today, I would create the Native American version,” he said during a panel discussion at the Game Developers Conference in March. “What would it be like on the other side of the wall, so to speak?”
But even the cowboys-and-indians-movie 1971 version of Oregon Trail was a far cry from 8chan.
The idea that these movements are leaderless collectives is part of their propaganda and should not be passed on without skepticism.
The problem with most of the internet is that there are so many psychological incentives to repress unpopular opinions and to fit in with the hive mind. Reddit is the pinnacle of that where your opinion is literally shown or hidden based on its popularity. Now this is good for lazy content consumption since most of the time the popular content is what you want to see. But it's also very dangerous. Very very dangerous. Not only because it discourages changes in thinking but also because malicious entities can literally manipulate what you're thinking.
So yes, I may not always like what I read on 4chan. It may act as a platform for mentally ill people. But a lot of greatness also comes from it too. I mean it's no coincidence that a disproportionate amount of internet memes originate there. But a lot of thoughtful discourse also occurs there, often inciting interesting arguments where elsewhere on the internet it'd be buried by downvotes or deleted by moderators.
It's like asking if you'd rather eat your own poop or a handful of one inch nails. As unpalatable as the former certainly is, the latter is unambiguously worse.
Although I strongly disagree regarding 4chan being unambiguously worse. Maybe if you're talking about just /b/ and /pol/ I'd agree but the site is so much more than that.
For instance, the game development community there much more human and helpful than most other communities I've participated in. But there's a hundreds of other micro communities that are really great if you know where to find them.
I think the chans were cool and interesting back in the early-mid 2000s but since then they've been taken over by not-actually-ironic trolls, political propagandists and astroturfers, and other nasties. Since the forums are anonymous there's no real way to police it or even tell who you're talking to or whether they're a "real person" or a sock puppet of some kind.
I distinctly remember what to me felt like the chans' shark-jumping moment: Ebola Chan.
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/ebola-chan
When that appeared along with a thread full of seemingly not actually ironic comments like "maybe Ebola will de-populate Africa," I felt that the chans were done.
A lot of people on 4chan view these boards as a sort of filter to scare away outsiders. The majority of the site isn't nearly that edgy and largely discuss the various relevant topics for each respective board.
The answer is structuring society, socialization, and culture in a way that doesn't disenfranchise people or leave them feeling helpless enough to turn to extremism, hate, and violence.
But that requires empathy and effort, things often in short supply.
People only go down the dark paths that lead to 8chan et al when the avenues to belonging they were presented with by their parents and by default failed them.
Edit: seems we have some Nazi-sympathizer downvoters on HN.
Go figure.
Fascists or Ethno-Centrists are both better terms, and cover the ideologies that most people attribute to the alt right.
Why are invoking alt-right? One of the two shooters was radically left, and he posted his threats on Twitter.
This bubble is so large it no longer appears to be a bubble.
Is that what passes as reasoned thinking these days?
I call him radical because he actually was. He posted overt, politically charged threats on Twitter, for example: "I want socialism, and i’ll not wait for the idiots to finally come round to understanding."
[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/how-three-conspiracy-...
[2] https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a22664244/qanon-boyfri...
[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/how-three-conspiracy-...
[2] https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a22664244/qanon-boyfri...
There is a whole cottage industry of people attempting to radicalize jaded white teens and "skeptics" to turn them from ideological libertarians or politically unaffiliated into hateful, "alt-right" fascists. One of them was Steve Bannon [0].
[0] https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/talkingtech/2017/07/18/s...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/apr/02/putin-kremlin-...
>55 Savushkina Street, St Petersburg, said to be the headquarters of Russia’s ‘troll army’.
So what exactly causes white nationalism to be rising everywhere, not just on 8chan?
Personally, Twitter has been a much bigger source of anger, shock and hate than 4chan ever was. Some of the shit I've seen on Twitter made it unbearable to go on my day and yet on 4chan, on boards like /vg/, /ck/, /g/, /wg/ it was mostly just shitposts and once in a while you would see a good post.
All I can do is shrug.. People with no clue will always just yell.
Do you ever see people openly hoping for shootings, cheering them on, and then posting manifestos there (referencing not only the ideology they learned from the site, but even the in-jokes of the people cheering for it on the site) before doing their own shootings? And then after that, do those sites regularly completely refuse the concept of doing anything to try to prevent repeats?
I'm sure that other sites have been guilty of bits and pieces of that, but the combination makes 8chan on another level than any of those.
I'm in the same boat as DonHopkins. I've seen people who used to be friends get sucked into far alt-right stuff through 8chan specifically. Maybe it happens with Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit, but I haven't seen it and haven't seen many people here bring up any experiences like that.
Yes I have many times. Just this weekend alone, the Ohio shooter tweeted "Kill every fascist", retweeted several violent Antifa posts. His Twitter profile read “he/him / anime fan / metalhead / leftist / i’m going to hell and i’m not coming back.” His top pinned tweet said “Millennials have a message for the Joe Biden generation: hurry up and die.” In May, he tweeted, “You’ll never be rid of me. I’ll haunt your life like a fucking vengeful spirit.” He added, “My Horoscope Just Reads ‘Doom.'” He shared posts about “concentration camps” at the border and wrote, “Cut the fences down. Slice ICE tires. Throw bolt cutters over the fences.” He retweeted a post from another person about stealing from “right wingers” at a Trump rally. One of his tweets referred to white people. “Imagine if we did the thing you liked, but in a way that totally ruins what you liked about it! Wouldn’t that be fun? Ha ha Also, of course they’re all white people, of course they are,” he wrote.
From another comment:
> "Dayton shooter Was The Lead Singer Of A "Pornogrind" Metal Band - The gunman, identified as 24 year-old (wont be named), was a member of Menstrual Munchies, a three-man band that performed regularly on the Midwest death metal scene. All the Dark Metal Bands that were friends with the shooter are distancing themselves extremely fast. All their music supports antifascists (aka antifa) and their genre of music is defined by its explicit subject matter and themes of gore and violence, specifically sexual violence and necrophilia."
> "Betts was also in a “Pornogrind” Band that, according to Vice News, “released songs about raping and killing women.” Vice called it the “extreme metal music scene.” The bands he performed in sometimes were called Menstrual Munchies and Putrid Liquid, and the songs contained vile names like “6 Ways of Female Butchery” and “Preeteen Daughter Pu$$y Slaughter,” Vice reported."
> Betts’ Twitter profile read, “he/him / anime fan / metalhead / leftist / i’m going to hell and i’m not coming back.” One tweet on his page read, “Off to Midnight Mass. At least the songs are good. #athiestsonchristmas.” The page handle? I am the spookster. On one selfie, he included the hashtags, “#selfie4satan #HailSatan @SatanTweeting.” On the date of Republican Sen. John McCain’s death, he wrote, “F*ck John McCain.” He also liked tweets referencing the El Paso mass shooting in the hours before Dayton. The Twitter page contains multiple selfies of Betts.
Archive of the tweets:
http://archive.is/https://twitter.com/iamthespookster https://heavy.com/news/2019/08/connor-betts/ https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EBKBsgSUIAALHBg?format=jpg&name=... https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EBKBsgsU0AAiB4O?format=jpg&name=... http://archive.is/7niS2
If the groups of these other shooters had instead responded by distributing propaganda that literally canonized the shooters like saints and praised future shooters in order to encourage more, then it might be comparable. (You don't have to look far at all on 8chan for this type of thing.) I'm probably only in the tamest of lefty circles, but I've never seen anything remotely like that. I don't see these shootings celebrated; it seems like a much harder argument to make that they're encouraged in lefty places than the argument that 8chan encourages violence.
Note that this is a sincere question, since I haven't had exposure to 4chan since before the Internet went mainstream, and even then it was fairly limited. I've heard horrible things about what it's become since, but I don't know much about it.
No nuance, no grey area. The leftists do have a point and reality is somewhere in the middle.
If he were Muslim or dark skinned we'd be losing our shit but because he's a white Christian male he's a lone wolf and it's solely his responsibility. Excuse me but I find that to be utter horsecrap.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Like otaku. Or furries. Can't imagine anything more terribly dangerous than furry otaku spreading GNU Manifesto and forcing you to install Gentoo. Awful place!
So framing an event and pushing a narrative when one neither likes the frame nor the narrative is now an offence requiring the sacking of media?
When mass-media is busy framing and legitimizting the next War On Something it's in the cards again!
Hypocrisy.
If people can't handle reality, you should accept that not shut it out.
Of course that's dangerous thinking in itself, because there's always potential for abuse when you let someone decide what people aren't allowed to say. But there has to be a balance somewhere. I hope we can find it.
the free speech argument is that racist assholes should be allowed to say whatever they want, but cloudflare or voxility or any other service provider should also be allowed to tell 8chan to STFU and go away. that's part of free speech too. 8chan doesn't and shouldn't have any more rights here than cloudflare does.
That creates a powder keg waiting on a fight/flight trigger. Without a tribe to back someone, such a trigger will cause a flight response, but with that tribe they’ll feel emboldened and choose a fight strategy. Sites that encourage the formation of communities that promote violence will inevitably lead to actual violence once they’re past a certain size. It doesn’t even really matter what the ideology is, it just matters that they preach violence.
I would not doubt that a not very small percentage of the conspiracy theories posted are done so by people who don't actually believe it but want to see how many others they can convince.
However, I do also believe that some pretty sick people use 8chan to recruit people to continue their campaign of hate.
If printing, a supplier has no obligation to provide paper or ink or typesetting.
The same is true for music producers. Make all the Nazi Punk garage band cassettes you want, but don't expect Jack FM to give you airplay.
Good data providers don't want Federal heat or the drag on the public perception.
> With 8chan, I legitimately don't know what my opinion is.
You can support free speech and still condemn 8chan, by considering Karl Popper’s Paradox of Tolerance[1]. If a person or group enacts violence on another person or group because of their ideas, the elements of the latter will curb their speech out of fear.
Violent groups use “free speech” as an excuse because it works. They’re only interested in free speech for themselves, not others. In fact, they’re so incapable of tolerating the free speech of others that they resort to killing them.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
I also firmly believe that everyone has biases and inclinations that are morally wrong. The sooner we learn how to deal with the "good guys" unfair biases, the sooner we can figure out how to deal with the "bad guys" too.
Sure, there are some alternatives that are harder to restrict and monitor, like if all the radicals move to private Telegram groups or the dark web or something.
However all the vulnerable people at risk of being radicalised are less likely to be radicalised if they're using a similar forum to 8chan but without all the white supremacist and other hateful memes and "jokes", that obviously have radicalised a lot of people. Even if most people just scroll past them.
It helps prevent the on-boarding of people who can be potentially radicalized.
There is also plenty of astroturfing also going on in this message boards by entities that want to cause chaos.
The available evidence says the opposite is true.
http://comp.social.gatech.edu/papers/cscw18-chand-hate.pdf
The way to deal with the "bad guys" is for private businesses to not give them a platform to spew their hate from. And it's up to us to pressure these private businesses to do that.
> And it's up to us to pressure these private businesses to do that.
No it isn't. I am fed up of something I like being ruined by moral busy bodies such as yourself. My friend and I like the "edgy" jokes because we work in environments where you have to be political correct and I need to let off some steam.
8chan isn't the problem. The problem is that large portions of the population aren't engaged in society at large. The is a huge problem with loneliness, suicide and general lack of meaning to life.
Censorship and harassing companies that run image board won't fix the problem. All you will do it hide it.
Do you think that this is the root cause of violent islamic extremists as well?
Extremists that grow up in the Middle-East. No idea I haven't spent a lot of time in the Middle-East (only Israel).
And it will come back much worse, and you won't know how to recognize it or fight it.
> My friend and I like the "edgy" jokes
Liberals like to make off-color jokes too, they're just in denial about it.
Yep.
> Liberals like to make off-color jokes too, they're just in denial about it.
The logic is "it is okay when we do it".
Are they? Myself, a liberal, and all my liberal friends and family, make off color jokes all the time and are totally aware of it. Similarly, we don't castigate conservative friends for making off color jokes.
I think you're purposefully misstating the fact that people disagree on the (admittedly fuzzy) line between off color jokes and sincere expressions of hatred.
If speech crosses the line, law enforcement should pursue and prosecute.
Short of that (e.g. the "we were just joking" crowd), the best possible aggregate outcome seems like it would be companies making independent moral judgements and acting on them.
If Cloudflare doesn't want to be associated with 8chan, they refuse them as a customer.
Other customers are then free to judge Cloudflare for that action and use / not use them as they decide.
This seems far preferable to more draconian, government-enforced options.
Companies are inherently political, and a diversity of options is the healthiest ecosystem.
Not, this requires that we have functioning alternatives. For something like 8chan, Cloudflare's services are probably avoidable, but there's a market penetration at with "must serve" should be considered.
E.g. if Facebook banned a political party
> Companies are inherently political
I am fed up of everything be political. I know someone is going to make Doom Eternal political somehow when the game is about a man that is too angry to die taking on the legions of the hell dimension (that is literally the plot of the game).
Gilette have tried making how I remove hair from my face political.
I want companies to sell their product and as long are people are using it legally they should probably not take a political stance.
Ergo, merely by selling to the market and interacting with it, companies make political choices.
These choices may be more or less obvious, but they're always there. The apolitical company is a myth.
Note: I am using political in the greater, rather than "red vs blue" sense.
I don't buy bog roll as a political decision, I buy it so I can wipe my arse.
Beyond that, to use the same analogy, one brand might be dump their bleaching agents in the ocean.
It's up to the companies if they want to trumpet their behavior loudly or say nothing about it. And it's up to consumers if they care about whatever type of behavior is involved.
This logic as previously stated is a horrible mind worm that infests everything and ruins a great many things that are just useful (razor blades) or fun (video games).
Politics is a set of power games done by people we call politicians and promoted by their activists. It has nothing to do with right and wrong.
Without politicians, politics would still exist.
Well said. The American melting pot makes this loneliness stronger still as there’s no sense of community left for these people. They live amongst us but they’re not connected to anyone around them.
I’m convinced there’s twisted weirdos all over the world, but traditionally communities did a better job of watching their own and making sure they were not endangering others. That simply does not exist any more, so the dark thoughts fester and grow until they’ve taken total control.
I don’t know how to fix any of this, but know it going to require either bringing those people into the light or occasionally joining them in their darkness.
There's a difference between policing your own corner of the internet; versus policing the entire internet.
Also, it seems like the group egging them on motivates these shooters. Tragically seems related to internet likes. So, by deflating the social network surrounding these ideas, there will be less social motivation to carry out such horrible actions.
And, finally, people have a social concept of truth, and if such ideas are considered to only be fringe crazy ideas instead of consistent with mainstream Darwinian theory, then people will be less likely to believe such ideas are true and less likely to act on them. As it is, social Darwinism seems to be one of those unpleasant truths due to the social weight given to the idea. Such social weight needs to be eradicated.
I'd expect stuff done in the open on 'chan sites to be much easier to monitor than stuff done in private encrypted channels elsewhere.
>Also, it seems like the group egging them on motivates these shooters. //
In private where all the voices coalesce around a single ideology then the effect (Echo Chamber) makes it appear that _everyone_ [who matters] shares that ideal.
Moreover, it's easier to "other" the out group, make them in to a caricature; dehumanise them. (See 2-party political systems!)
Cults don't operate in the open, forcing people underground creates a sort of cultist environment.
Contact with genuine people who are considered part of the out-group appears to be highly effective in breaking down these sorts of barriers .. that can happen on generalist sites but will never happen in closed ideology-bad groups.
It seems to me that shutting down places like 8chan is going to lead to _more_ radicalised groups (that are more extremely radicalised), though they may be smaller groups and a smaller overall population. I think bigger, less cohesive, in-the-open groups are easier to monitor and take action against when necessary.
I wonder if there are any useful models that can give actionable input to this question.
De-platforming fractures the echo chambers and forces the population to find newer, smaller echo chambers, which reduces the impact of each echo.
Assuming this is true, plenty of people still slip through the cracks
You know you can't yell fire in a crowded room and not get litigation and charges brought against you.
So, maybe 8chan just ran past the fine line of hate speech vs encouraging acts of hate. I.e you can be racist but you cannot encourage acts of extremism.
If 8Chan was a breeding ground for Islamic Extremists would people be okay with still existing?
Depends on whether those people support free speech or not.
Even US law recognizes this. You're not allowed to invite violence or rioting for example. There are also rules about perjury, liable, and other things that directly limit freedom of expression.
The real questions we should be asking here are where the line is between stating an opinion and inciting violence... And what should ISPs and edge providers be asked/allowed to do?
Because not being forced to provide a platform for the speech of someone else may also be a valid freedom. If I come into your property and say things you don't like, are you allowed to ask me to leave? What if I put up a sign in my front yard? Can I take it down?
IMO, we need neutrality regulations to protect ourselves from the corporations who control everything we see... But such neutrality regulations must necessarily include ISPs as well as edge providers. Otherwise they're worthless.
I'm not sure if that's the kind of history you want to align yourself with.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schenck_v._United_States
If speech is meant to directly lead to harm, it should be constrained.
EDIT: Even so, that test was IIRC conceived as a means of measuring whether political speech — specifically, advocating the use of force or criminal behavior — was 1A-protected, so I really wonder whether this line of thought isn't moot.
Whether or not the analogy applies now, is irrelevant. It's history makes it a bad analogy.
It'd be like saying stuff like "it's Ok to be white". It may be a true statement, but it was used by people who were trying to make racial attacks.
> Whether or not the analogy applies now, is irrelevant. It's history makes it a bad analogy.
I appreciate your motivation, but I just can't get behind this line of reasoning. For one thing, most people aren't aware of the history.
For another, almost every good idea has a tainted history. (e.g. the golden rule. "Eh that? That's just something that Jesus guy said, and look how many people his followers killed in the crusades, witch-hunts, etc.")
Lastly, it's just not a form of rational thinking. Obviously the connotations of our words matter, but unless we can separate the connotation from the denotation we have no hope of arriving at the truth.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandenburg_v._Ohio
I think there's a lesson in that: when we tolerate any censorship, it will inevitably be used by the powerful to oppress the powerless. If the powerful need to compare the targeted speech to "fire in a crowded theater" or "Nazism" or whatever, they'll do it whether it makes sense or not.
Now that 8chan is down why not every other site with a subset of (violent?) racist users?
By doing something about one and not doing anything about another, is Cloudflare not basically giving their ideology a greenlight to exist? This is the type of backwards anti-intellectual thinking that will seep into the decision making.
"Slippery slopes" are a cliche for a reason when talking about this stuff because it never stops with one really good example nor within a very narrow scope. Making this debate all about 8chan misses the larger point because it sets a precedent. There's already tons of people who want way more than 8chan banned from the internet.
The next time twitter blows up at Cloudflare [or insert tech company name] over a tragedy what's going to happen?
Does this apply to Islamic Extremism or some radical groups in Ukraine or some hypothetical Flemish separatist group who is openly violent and posts similar un-moderated content? Or is it only for some highly touchy US problems since they're a US company or the topic got the most noise on Twitter/news sites?
If 8chan wants to exist on the internet without worrying about being knocked offline then 8chan needs to either build their infrastructure or find companies that are willing to risk their reputation to support them.
Strangely enough, most people who find censorship ideologically palatable consider Jihadists a more sympathetic group than Incels. Note that ISIS beheadings have been subject to far less censorship than the Christchurch shooter's propaganda, for example.
The Islamic God and the Catholic God are one and the same.
The Islamic view is that Jesus of Nazareth was a prophet.[2][3] (The audio answer is a bit long, but quite good.)
The argument that Allah is the same as the Father in the Christian trinity depends on various heresies[4] (incorrect claims), maybe one of Monarchianism, Sabellianism, Tritheism.
So, no, neither religion accepts that they are one and the same. And this is due to central tenets of each respective faith.
[1]: http://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG0015/__P1I.HTM
[2]: http://www.askislam.org/people/prophets/jesus/question_566.h...
[3]: http://www.askimam.org/public/question_detail/40921
[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_movements_declared_her...
It's a shame how far some are from God.
As it's impossible to quantify the unknown, when we approach a subject we're not familiar with, our bias is to assume it's very simple. So I think it's helpful to dig in a little to give a hint at the vast amount of scholarly work done on these subjects.
Of course you can yell 'fire' in a crowded room and not have any charges that stick brought against you. Are you arguing the point it is not allowed to yell to a large audience? Or there is something else here you are not mentioning, like for example whether or not the statement is true is the actual crux of the matter? Of course you can yell 'fire' in a crowded room - if there is a fire!
There are already limits to free speech that most people don't complain about. The most frequent example is defamation.
I do like how Canada handles hate speed -- like defamation, it is illegal. There's really no benefit to protecting hate speech. If you argue it is a slippery slope, we're already on a slope with defamation so the benefits of adding hate speech out weight the risks of slipping further.
Hate speech is almost the definitive slippery slope, the definition changes in real-time and can easily and always expand.
widely known and not really legally disputed.
> You know you can't yell fire in a crowded room and not get litigation and charges brought against you.
this seems like empty rhetoric; we already know that there are classes of speech that aren't 1A protected. this isn't controversial.
> If 8Chan was a breeding ground for Islamic Extremists would people be okay with still existing?
whether or not people "are okay" with something isn't relevant when discussing the legality of said thing, which seems to be what the rest of your post is focused on. so this seems like a red herring, or alternatively, the rest of your post was a red herring.
if your line of reasoning about the closure is legally oriented, then i'm sure you can find lots of things people aren't okay with, e.g. campaign finance.
More importantly, his talk is worth watching for a strong understanding of why free speech is so vital.
You can say anything. But if the thing you say carries consequences beyond the utterance, the freedom of speech does not immunize that sayer from assuming responsibility for those consequences.
It's not about what happens afterward. It's about not removing someone's voice, for fear of what they might say with it.
8chan is not required to support freedom of speech; it's not the government. It is itself free to pick and choose who is allowed to use its platform. My opinion is that it should not engage in content-based censorship, because no one should. Once you start doing that, there's no ethically clear place where the line between acceptable and unacceptable should lie. If you can make a case for banning neo-Nazis and Boko Haram and Sinaloa Cartel and such, you can also make a case for banning people who put pineapple on pizza or ketchup on hot dogs, with the argument variables set to different values.
Information is not the dangerous thing, nor misinformation. When someone is recruited and turned into a soldier via online image boards, using the exact same psychology as state-based militaries around the world--dehumanizing the xeno, and propagandizing them as an existential threat to the in-group identity tribe--that isn't the fault of the medium. It is the responsibility of the recruiter, the propagandist.
The rightful answer to speech with undesired consequences is not censorship, but counter-propaganda, and to some extent psychological hardening of the whole populace, by encouraging skepticism, critical thought, and formation of individual identity and self-image over group identities.
The former is a more active measure that unfortunately requires a bloody-minded relentlessness combined with unending tolerance for nonsense. Imagine a Bill Nye vs. Ken Ham debate that lasts literally forever, and the toll that would surely take on Nye. Now sub in a pants-on-head flat-earther time-cube woo-woo troll for Ham. No one person could take it. And that's why when these fools show up, the thought-terminating cliches have to be countered with thought-provoking dissent. If you see bullshit, call bullshit.
And the latter is something that probably has to happen in young people, coming with a side effect of making them less governable, and harder to convince of anything. Resistance to radicalization over the Internet would directly translate to more difficult military recruiting, drops in the strength of religious affiliations, and harder political campaigns. Not exactly popular among those loving god and country.
It's probably easier to just censor the things the state doesn't want people to say, and just trust that they will stop with the threshold line in the correct place.
Any violent thug can go spread their message in the town streets as long as they're not causing a disturbance. It doesn't happen very much, because it requires effort and it's sure to attract opposition. That opposition is necessary, like anti-bodies attacking an invading bacteria. By shutting out the harmful bacteria where anti-bodies can't reach them, they'll do nothing but grow and fester.
Are you saying that if person X goes out and starts calling for mass shootings to rid the world of Y, that they wouldn't be arrested?
Very few people actually want such a site arrangement. Believe it or not, I have no interest in interfacing with people who want to kill me unless they are open to honest and rational debate, which few are. One of the reasons I enjoy Hacker News is because I know won't have to deal with the type of people that will frequent the fringe elements of the style of site you are advocating for.
Also, I'd hardly call a business led moratorium on speech advocating terrorism and genocide "moving towards Orwellian style censorship". Absolutely nothing is stopping these individuals from standing up their own server and hosting this content themselves. They aren't banned by an ISP. Moreover, business owners should be allowed to express their opinions too, including who to do business with.
I’m not really in favor of what CloudFlare’s done here, but it’s really a fact of basic statistics that exposing the mainstream to well-made propaganda is far more dangerous than exposing radicals to the mainstream.
Imagine 1% of non-radicalized people exposed to radicalism become dangerous and 50% of radicalized people are de-radicalized by exposure to the mainstream (laughably optimistic). If you start with 100 million non-radicals and 500 thousand radicals, you have a 125% increase in radicalization.
This is how we now have so many flat earthers. When you have massive reach, it’s easy to grow your numbers.
I hope you make it!
1. Make users tag their content if it touches on certain topics and use harsh punishment if they fail to. If it's fringe content for example, make them tag it as such so default users will not see it unless they really want to. If someone doesn't know their ramblings are racist, they should be banned on incompetence grounds and not due to censorship.
2. Rethink real time posting. It's nice, but a 1 minute delay would be very beneficial. You could even conscript volunteer users, perhaps give them "free premium" accounts that act as sentinels for all new content so they can see all new content in real time, like a mod of sorts, and can flag inappropriately tagged content as such so it's kicked back to the poster as "You forgot to add a violence tag".
Essentially the only people who should be de-platformed are those who are either banned for legal reasons or because they're simply too incompetent or unwilling to tag their content with appropriate fringe tags.
People are really, really good at circumventing automated filters, while non automated filtering means subjecting people to horrific content for 8 hours a day.
I really want to be on the side of the broadest possible interpretation of free speech, but my experience leads me in a different direction. It's been my experience that corralling the fringe doesn't work because the people in that fringe are intent on spreading their message/content as far and wide as possible. Even against the wishes of the general populace of a given site like Reddit. That behaviour seems to spring from the same attention-seeking place as that of griefers like Goonswarm in EVE, whose stated goal was at one point to ruin as many people's fun in that game as possible.
So there's perhaps two parts to the freedom of speech argument space: One is that there are people who want to create/share/consume content that the general populace doesn't want to see. Then the second is that there are people who aren't acting in good faith, whose goal seems to be to ruin as much as possible.
The first group there will probably keep to themselves, manage their communities and cooperate with governmental authorities to remove illegal content or activities. Of course that doesn't take into account when those groups are acting against those authorities while still having the moral support of most of the population. For instance campaigning for marijuana legalization, which most people would say should be protected speech.
But then there's the second group, who hide within the first often enough, or who falsely act like the first because they want to destroy things because they seem to have no emotional investment in society. (in my opinion)
The second group thrives because no one wants to commit the manpower to track and manage them. I don't know how to fix that problem, I don't even know if it's possible. Heck there will be many who will argue it's not necessary at all.
How many free speech absolutists have "skin in the game", or whatever? Every alternative to censorship suggested always puts the burden on the victimized. Like, "if you debate it in public you will defeat these bad ideas". Few who are free speech absolutists roll up their sleeves and volunteer to take the action they prescribe.
Or, you have the sophists who believe free speech is the most important thing in the world but will deny that speech has any connection to its consequences. For example, separating the white nationalist rhetoric on 8chan from the white nationalist terrorism perpetrated by 8channers.
At the same time, if someone points a finger at you and shouts "I'm going to kill you", then we're getting outside of speech and into actions, and certainly actions can be prohibited. The question we have, really, is whether the content of 8chan was just speech (and therefore should be protected unless you buy into censorship) or crosses into actions (convincing someone to massacre immigrants). From what I've seen, 8chan certainly seems to be in the action category.
Another reply to my comment supposed my criticism means that the alternative is a Soviet surveillance state. Really?
In the context of 8chan, I think there's a difference between allowing people to say whatever they want online and punishing the people that use that freedom to incite violence.
The part where it gets blurry to me is the hateful rhetoric that doesn't directly call for violence, but the only logical conclusion of the position is genocidal or otherwise racial violence. Talking about "invaders" or "American cities under foreign occupation" for example.
The more we censor, the less we know, the farther from the enemy we are.
You have to understand, we don't live in a go lucky happy world, thousands to millions of people die every day. Livestream vs Youtube.
The more statistics we can get before a threat occurs, the better. I really don't understand why "normal web" doesn't grasp this concept.
At least in my state, this is not actionable as described.
For it to be actionable, the person saying "I'm going to kill you" needs to reasonably be in a position to do so - i.e. brandishing a weapon, etc.
Idle threats and banter do not actions make.
Thought crime isn't what we want, is it?
For libertarian extremists who, just treat the right to be left in peace to live your life as you see fit... as a property right.
The details make the case. Coaxing in detail throngs online to attack immigrants, in my non-legal non-expert opinion, seems to be more in the actionable case.
> The details make the case.
That's pretty much what I was saying, as well, I believe.
In and of itself, saying (even in person) "I'm going to kill you" is an idle threat that the police in my state will not do anything about in a vacuum.
However, saying such a thing while also being in a position to reasonably carry out such an action, the Police will step in on those threats.
In the situation you described, unfortunately, the first time they may just tell the couple to stay at different places that night to cool off. This assumes by the time they arrive there are no visible marks on the victim and no weapons out.
Now if they have to come out for several of these calls, it's no longer "in a vacuum", and they can probably detain the threatening person.
Your state or country's police force may operate under different rules and laws.
I agree with this, and I'd further say that no man is really fit to rule or have real power over his fellow men. But human society can't function, or defend itself from tyrants, without some sort of power structure. The best we can do is try to make sure that the people in power aren't tyrants.
Users on 8chan, perhaps, but no the website itself. 8chan has cooperated with law enforcement against individuals making legally-actionable threats effectively since the website's beginning.
If ethno-nationalists are not allowed to make their political case with speech, what alternative would they have but violence? You obviously can't change their minds with censorship, only harden them.
Citation?
EDIT: Lots of votes, no citations. OK. Sometimes HN looks a lot like Reddit
I’m joking of course, not going to provide either, you can find them yourself if you’re not biased.
See, two can play at that game.
It's not some "gotcha game".
If the claim is [Donald Trump supports and advocates for ethno-nationalists causes] ...
I'd like to a source for that claim because it seems like Orange Man Bad delusions, but I'm willing to remain open minded if someone can provide a citation!
Since you already incline to the view that such assertions are delusional and employ a common political trope to characterize such delusions, I feel nagging doubts about your purported open-mindedness. Discussions like this generally devolve into pedantic quibbling which would be a waste of both your time and mine.
You don't have a plan, just a knee jerk impulse to censor.
If they want to speak in public, they are free to. They probably won't get a warm reception.
If 1% of the people on a site agree with you, you will have an harder time memeing with your buddies undisturbed.
Whether in practice the tradeoff is worth it, is another topic.
[1] http://comp.social.gatech.edu/papers/cscw18-chand-hate.pdf
If a man can't speak his truth, what alternative does he have to violence?
No one is stopping anyone from speaking their truth. They're just saying they're not going to help you.
If you want to speak your truth, speak it. Go down to a public square and preach. Write your truth down, print it, and hand it out. If its truth and you believe it so much, you'll do the work necessary in getting it out there.
And that essentially is not going to happen. Companies are "people too". They are allowed to express their free speech by not doing business with you.
Cloud Flare is within their rights to protect their stock value by doing business with whomever they choose. If the government declared the opposite, then it would truly require a massive shakeup of law and precedent.
Culture and custom generally precede law and government. If the Internet is a public square, it is only so as a result of our various social relations. Passing laws would be merely to preserve it as such.
That study does show that banning content within a forum means that you will get less of that content on that forum. A useful but not entirely surprising result. As a Reddit user, I'm glad that the site has less of such content.
It does not prove that censorship reduces "radicalization" (whatever that is). As the study says, many of those users just moved their content to Voat.
*By which I mean cognitive empathy: the capacity to infer the motivational states of other people and anticipate their actions.
Agree, hyperrational people often forget how easy it is to lie with (true) numbers.
Plenty of nazi sites on the web where they make all sorts of “political cases”. Don’t confuse inability to make the case with repugnance to that case in general public.
It is sadly true that some people are capable to manipulate others without the need for censorship to isolate them first.
"The free speech of muslims"? It's almost as if you think 9/11 was caused by a domestic terrorist. You do realize the hijackers were mostly from Saudi Arabia right? And there is no free speech there? So... what are you trying to imply? Please use more clear language instead of just trying to meme.
These arguments can be directly used to argue for the suppression of Islamic religious speech. Using the same "guilt by association" reasoning, you can easily argue that 9/11 is proof that Islam itself is a hateful and dangerous ideology which, when spread, has "consequences".
“Extremist Islamic terrorists” on the other hand, that is a narrowly defined enough population to feel justified in going to war against.
But the point is, no one’s speech in particular is being suppressed. To keep the metaphor, a “mosque got too radical” and was shut down. People who were practicing there will have to find another place to go.
A mosque in America that openly fostered extremism like 8chan did would of course get shut down.
Those motivated by animus towards a minority group do generally target areas frequented by members of that group, like in the Texas shooting where the gunman targeted a Walmart in a largely Hispanic community. As a non-Hispanic white person (who lives in the US), that does put me at less risk of being a victim of that type of shooting. Also, to the extent that terrorism’s impact is emotional rather than purely rational, I’m less impacted simply because I don’t feel targeted in the same way.
Nevertheless, I wouldn’t say the risk is zero; it’s not impossible that I could be in a place like that when the next shooting happens. So I have at least a bit of skin in the game.
Edit: Also, while perhaps not 8chan specifically, Internet forums have been implicated in shootings that weren’t targeting ethnic groups and thus would put me at more risk. An example would be Elliot Rodger’s shooting, which was driven by a hatred of women, but ended up killing an equal number of men and women (not too surprising, since people don’t self-segregate by gender to the same extent they do by race and religion).
Isn't this usually where hate crimes come into the picture?
Be extremely careful about drawing conclusions about people based on the books they read or the websites they visit.
This wasn’t a blow against 8chan or 8channers, this was a blow against everyone who reads things on the internet.
Moreover 8chan posts, though vile, arguably do not fit the narrow free speech exemptions of the US such as true threat or incitement. The law and judicial precedent would require a reasonable reader to take it seriously. All that is moot though as the government has taken no action here.
Really? I guess I can believe this. I wish I didn't, but I have overheard plenty of bullshit over the years myself.
Hell, there was a thread on HN awhile back with posters essentially advocating for eugenics and the mods here didn't blink an eye.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20542738
ITT: "Eugenics were crushed with violence, they weren't actually disproved."
A ton of thinly veiled arguments for Social Darwinism and selective breeding in that thread. Disgusting. Yet the mods let it go.
See these examples:
https://nypost.com/2000/08/16/howard-stern-caller-busted-in-... (2000s; a caller threatens to kill Senator Lieberman on air)
https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/665af0/til_t... (Mid 90s; Stern plays gunshots during a Selena song)
https://variety.com/2014/voices/columns/howard-sterns-white-... (Stern books the Overland Park Jewish Community Center shooter)
https://www.howardstern.com/show/2016/10/24/ronnie-limo-driv... (2016 Twitter spat with implied threats of violence with Stern-affiliated staff)
Radicalizing terrorists to such an extent that they actually go through with it -- multiple times -- is extreme enough to make me wonder.
The El Paso shooter's manifesto was posted on 8chan for a reason. The manifesto was written specifically for other potential shooters. It contains tips and advice. It explains the shooter's choice of gear and that he needed to use heat-resistant gloves because one of the guns he used was prone to overheating if fired rapidly. It encourages potential shooters to avoid heavily guarded areas and to avoid engaging with security personnel regardless of how confident they are.
Throughout 8chan, I saw many posts subscribing to the general theory that racial violence has been accepted throughout most of human history and the only people who disapprove constitute a tiny little blip on the grand tapestry. The whole point of this ideology was to encourage people to commit acts of violence by indoctrinating them into the belief system that all their ancestors would not only have approved but would have done it themselves.
Mass shooters are a problem that must be dealt with. Pretending that everything to the right of mainstream Democrats is a pipeline to mass shooters that must be silenced is the type of thing that radicalizes people. It's unduly oppressive and it dehumanizes people you may not happen to agree with.
However, one of the largest social media sites out there (reddit) does NOT have to allow them to congregate together. Reddit should have banned them years ago. They are actively responsible for providing a place for hate to thrive.
You can be 100% pro free-speech and still agree that no one (except the government is some form, meaning sure they can hold meetings in public places, etc) HAS to give them a platform. Anything private can and should say NO.
My knowledge of human history mostly validates this theory.
It should be obvious to state that if you get rid of 8chan, those people aren't suddenly deradicalized and they're still in the country holding the same beliefs. Those people who are today at risk of continuing in this shooter's footsteps have already read the manifesto. People like the shooter often do these things because they want to be heard and they want to contribute to the course of history. Taking away what little voice they have in their own spaces makes them feel less heard. Destroying the little community that they have removes their stake in the world. Suppressing their only place to express their grievances causes them to lose hope. This is the cocktail for more violence, not less.
The *chans are the furthest from centers of indoctrination because the moderation is the weakest of all social media platforms. All ideas are present and little to nothing is suppressed. Dissent is commonplace and general consensus has no power. Sure, it means ugly ideas get spread, but it means that people actually have to refine their moral argumentation. No longer can you assume that the other person has the common ground of "racism is wrong", you have to actually dive into why racism is wrong. You can act outraged all you like, but it won't convince people to change their mind. Changing minds is going to be the only effective course of action to avoid tragedies like these.
More importantly, you should ask yourself how they found 8chan. They were using other means of communications that didn't disappear. The invisible force that gathered them together on 8chan is still there and can definitely do that again.
That being said, I grew up reading TOTSE, which might by this conversation's context in today's world, also sound like a source of the same.
The rest of us can decide we really don't want to publish Nazi propaganda.
You can stop people from talking publicly.
People will break and do harm to others, but having a vehicle to know what that harm might be in advance is invaluable.
On the other hand, we're already in cages. The difference is that in modern society, nobody realizes they are caged.
That makes all the difference.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
The supreme court has ruled time and time again that the right to free speech implies the right to be heard.
While CloudFlare obviously isn't legally required to serve 8chan, the only service they are really providing is making it so that 8chan can't be DDOS'd. And DDOS'ing is very clearly a tactic that violates the first amendment. So really by no longer serving 8chan, the only thing they are doing is allowing and/or encouraging others to violate 8chan's constitutional rights.
It reminds me a lot of Charlottesville, where people showed up to try to shout over the white nationalists and it just ended up with a bunch of people getting run over by a car. As if something like that happening wasn't entirely predictable.
If 8chan is inciting violence or doing other things not covered by the first amendment then it should be the government's job to police that.
CloudFlare is a private company.
The right to free speech in the context of the Constitution only applies when it's the government trying to restrict it.
The moral reasoning behind restraining the government from denying speech and other rights is that the government is a monopoly (in this case of force). This reasoning extends to restrictions on the ability of other monopolies, such as local utilities, to deny service.
If every service provider with the capacity to serve the needs of Website X were to deny service, the DE FACTO effect is precisely the same as a single monopoly doing so. In which case, the moral reasoning behind restraint of government and other monopolies comes into play.
I can't confidently say one way or another, but it feels more acceptable to me.
Assuming each company did reach that decision independently (and that's a big assumption) and not as a result of bad PR brought on by an angry internet mob.
The effect is the same, but the legal interpretation of the situation isn't, as long as new players are free to join the game.
You can find lots of examples where two cases of real-world events are the same, but are interpreted differently by law, depending on the context that is purely juridical.
> the moral reasoning behind restraint of government and other monopolies comes into play.
Governments hold the monopoly on violence, thus they are fundamentally different from any other entity.
The Dayton shooter was a leftist, not a white nationalist.
The monopoly on violence does not necessarily have much to do with this.
The First Amendment is a law, but it's an imperfect representation of an idea, and that idea is that everyone has a right to (among other things) express ideas free from organized oppression. A lot of people see "organized oppression" to be exclusively possible by a governing body, but some others see that to mean the platforms themselves.
"The First Amendment" is oftentimes used as a conversational shortcut to talk about the moral right of expression. Is it entirely accurate? No, and accuracy matters. However, the conversation doesn't die when the correction is made. Here, it's true that CloudFlare isn't in violation of the First Amendment of the US Constitution, however the argument being made is that they have a moral obligation to stay a "dumb pipe", to prevent the oppression of a minority voice.
I'm not making that argument, I just wanted to point out the nuance of invoking "The First Amendment" here, that it's often not literally a reference to the legal authority of the private entity in question.
California has an affirmative right to free speech, broader than the First Amendment's negative command to Congress.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pruneyard_Shopping_Center_v._R... (IANAL)
> And DDOS'ing is very clearly a tactic that violates the first amendment.
I don't follow this, much less find it "very clear." DDOSing is a crime and the prevention of it is a service provided by a third party. It's not a free speech issue.
Furthermore, you're really blaming the victim in your analysis of Charlottesville.
Well they're both the victims and the perpetrators. It's not legal to drive over them, but it's also not legal for them to try to prevent the people from organizing the rally from speaking.
Stuff like this has been happening for hundreds of years, there's actually a reason why the laws are the way they are.
Sometimes. If organizing a rally requires a government permit, then having the government give another permit for the same time and place to people whose aim was to disrupt the rally would probably violate the first amendment rights of the rally organizers. And that's basically what happened in Charlottesville, the rally organizers had permits and the protestors did not.
You keep saying that this violates the first amendment rights of the protesters but yet again you're not backing that up in any way. How does this violate their first amendment right? I'm just not seeing it.
Wait, what are you trying to say here? That these people deserved to get run over because they dared to shout at white nationalists??
Violence happens because these people follow a hateful, violent ideology whose specific articulated intent is to deprive others of liberty, life, and land. People looking for excuses to be violent will find them.
Also, refusing to provide commercial DDOS mitigation technologies to hostile entities is not the same as "allowing people to DDOS" them.
If colleges need to guarantee first amendment rights since they are partially government funded, and the Internet itself is partially government funded, then I think there is a decent case for the government being required to provide a public solution for mitigating DDOS attacks if the market can't sort it out.
DDoSing doesn't "violate the first amendment" anymore than a loud bar violates my first amendment rights.
The concept of free speech and the first amendment aren't the same thing. The first amendment, in part, attempts to stop the government from violating its citizens' free speech.
Yelling over you does not violate your rights. Not giving you something does not violate your rights.
Another right the first amendment guarantees is the right to assemble. That means I can associate with whomever I want. That means Cloudflare can associate with whomever they want. They choose not to associate with 8chan. That is their choice and their right. We cannot force Cloudfare to associate with 8chan.
Also, what does Charlottesville have to do with anything here? Are you trying to say the guy running over others is guilty of violating the "shouters" first amendment rights? And that they should have predicted that "shouting at white nationalists" means they would get run over? And how does that remind you of Cloudflare not hosting 8chan? Did they run a car through the server?
Everything is covered by the first amendment.
So. It's a real good look for CloudFlare because they're no longer the company that associates with white nationalists.
There are the usual side-debates though: the ban being strategically effective and the ban being in-line with how the us constitutions concept of free speech gets interpreted.
Personally I'm not sure to what degree the latter might be relevant for an apparently(?) Filipino company.
The constitution only applies to the government's relationship with its people. Only the government can violate a citizen's constitutional rights. Other individuals (or companies) cannot violate another person's constitutional rights. Cloudflare, in ceasing its relationship with 8chan, is not impeding on their first amendment rights.
Even so, the first amendment is not a blanket right to say whatever you want or incite violence. The first amendment is much narrower than you may realize, and in the narrowest (most protected) case, only applies to political speech. Hate speech is definitely not protected.
While 8chan, as an operator, is not directly responsible for what happens on their site, they start taking on liability when they are knowingly aware of and take no action against people who are using the site for criminal activity. The same goes for a landlord who knowingly lets his/her house be used for criminal activity, such as crack house.
Why disparage the innocent victims a politically-motivated terrorist? Because they "shouted" at the very extremists who celebrated that act of murder?
People showed up to exercise their own first amendment rights, which is how the whole free speech thing works.
Those with opposing points of view also showed up to demonstrate that ordinary people wouldn't be intimidated by white nationalists marching and carrying intimidating symbols from the past.
Are you suggesting that the best response to these regressive viewpoints is for ordinary decent folk to let them alone and do their own thing in peace? Cowardice.
That would only serve to embolden them, and an emboldened hate group is even more likely to engage in violent activity against the targets of their hate.
Sorry, if I may clarify. It ended up with a bunch of people protesting white nationalism being run over by a white nationalist, who has been sentenced for killing a woman with his car.
In the Charlottesville case, the people inciting violence and the people performing violence are both white nationalists.
Leftypol is not devoted to "leftist politics", it's a counterpart to /pol which stands for "politically incorrect". /leftypol by extension is politically incorrect that curved to the left. In reality /leftypol and /pol are not that dissimilar. Both attract off-the-rocker crazy conspiracy-theory types the likes of QAnon. If you looked at /leftypol during say attempted coup in Venezuela the content you would have encountered would have been just as offensive as /pol.
That's true for almost every other board, but /pol/ isn't individually run. It was seized by the site administration, and they make its rules.
I think.. I think I will be starting free speech focused entity. Like NRA. Laser focus. No restrictions on free speech of any kind. Ever.
This may be the only thing to prevent US from losing its list of temporary priviledges.
I'm not aware of any country which allows for speech with "no restrictions"
That free speech is sure making a lot of people free right.
So there is no need to be glib here.
There is quite evidently no move to legally curtail any freedoms. Nor are the restrictions put on by these companies in any substantially onerous or making free speech impossible.
That's true!
Unfortunately it gets a little more complicated than that.
As providers enjoy PLATFORM protections that align with the ideas of free speech. Meaning they will enjoy legal immunity from content they host so long as they won't decide who gets a voice or why so long as the content is legally allowed. They aren't liable because they didn't have a say in what it was. They are required to remove illegal things of course.
The issue here is the PLATFORMS are now deciding they're going to keep these legal protections they basically require in order to exist - while also acting a PUBLISHERS that curate otherwise legal content to be aligned with their views.
Admit that many of the same people celebrating "they're a private company they can do what they want!" were also yelling "make the cake you bigots!"
This may be a cake-centric issue now that I think about it. Because CF, SV, FAANG are Having Cake + Eating Cake.
We can't hold a platform liable for content because it is technically impossible to perfectly block infringing content, so we realize it is unfair to hold platforms accountable.
However, this doesn't mean a platform can't make ANY effort to control what content is on their system without losing this protection. YouTube doesn't lose safe harbor protection just because they have contentid...
I didn't make this up, it's the entire intent of the system.
They are in no way using a public good, so arguing that they need to follow the rules that we place on public good doesn't make sense.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good
These people are trying to kill as many of us as possible. In no way should society accept it. It's simple societal self-defense. Root out the terrorists wherever they may congregate, regardless of whichever flavor of terrorist they happen to be.
yes, and that entire article is about people trying to get them to take them down and the criminal statute they're using to force the issue, which is part of the GP's point. Not a lot of folks in the federal government hand wringing about deplatforming on that one.
IMO the reason Cloudflare took down TDS and 8chan but not the Taliban or Hamas is simply outgroup vs fargroup. [0] The operators, users and targets of 8chan or TDS are all familiarly western but different enough to hate, while islamic terror organizations are so different it's hard to relate to them - sort of like that joke about how the more similar two religious denominations are, the more likely it is that they hate the other. [1]
0: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anythin...
1: https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2005/sep/29/comedy.religio...
I don't see this working out well for them when it comes to total negative news. Would we have seen nearly as many requests to Cloudflare asking for 8chan to be cut off if they had not already done so for The Daily Stormer?
This is relevant as the censorship here (whether justified or not, right or wrong it is censorship) is not done by CF, but by a faceless internet mob that is attacking both CF and 8chan.
CF has all the right to terminate its relationships with anyone. social media mobs should not force companies to exercise that right.
I think an appropriate qualifier here might be that they used to hold on as long as possible. I don't think that's universally true anymore.
> This is relevant as the censorship here (whether justified or not, right or wrong it is censorship) is not done by CF, but by a faceless internet mob that is attacking both CF and 8chan.
In the same sense that a mob outside the courthouse ensured a guilty verdict, perhaps. But it's still the jurors who actually acted.
I am not sure what you mean here... but I would find in both cases very problematic that a mob could wield such power. A mob is not a democratic representation.
The reason the mob has power is in the end that they do not get criticized by those they respect.
I do think cloudflare will be forced to be more palatable to enterprise customers if they go public. One biggest factors why I don’t use them is who they provide access to.
Speak for yourself, I would. I've downloaded and distributed ISIS propaganda videos before out of sheer intrigue.
Just because someone says something you don't like doesn't mean you should ban it. Of course, this will be downvoted to hell because this is a hot topic at the moment, but we shouldn't let that too-near emotion influence out policies. We've seen that lead to stuff like the PATRIOT act in the past and we surely don't need another one of those.
To me, it goes to show that there is no limit to the censorial impulse.
That should tell you something.
Personal attacks, in particular, will get you banned here, so please don't do that again.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Are you a moderator?
The point was downvotes. That's how the HN community shows someone the door. HN itself shows someone the door by banning them.
Speaking for the whole site like that comes off as rather pompous. Not to mention the comment is now "in the black" on points, so it's not even clear that the community even agrees with you.
Yea, I wouldn't pretend to speak for the community - for some reason our OP insinuated I do by asking if I'm a moderator.
What I'm trying to say is that a negative karma post has been shown the door by the community. That statement remains true from my perspective regardless if I upvoted, downvoted, or did not engage with that comment.
OK
and distributed ISIS propaganda videos
Do elaborate on your motives for and style of distribution.
More Americans should read the writings of Osama bin Laden too.
It's not that this material isn't horrendous, but it's very different from what you'd expect -- the people behind it are not dumb, and like all good propaganda the rationale is selectively built on compelling facts.
It will be downvoted because it's INSANE, not because it's a hot topic.
ISIS propaganda isn't banned for the fun of it or because "too near emotions influencing policies", it's banned for the effect that it casuses, the intention it has, and the attorcities it shows.
There's a difference between supporting free speech and you spreading around videos of murders, executions of innocent people who have families, and calls for more murders of innocent people all over the world. Just because those things don't make you want to kill someone, doesn't change the fact that they do help radicalize other people.
What rational person will see an ISIS video and go: "Hmm this looks good, guess I should join ISIS".
They didn't get the ideas to do that out of the blue, without seeing or hearing any of the propaganda content.
You seem strongly opinionated on this one though, I'm curious, what do you think of Tor or BitTorrent? Should such services be banned as they aid in the distribution of this type of thing too? If you're running a Tor middle node you're part of the distribution of not just all sorts of propaganda like this, but far, far worse things.
Do you think banning these services, reigning in control of information to "help prevent radicalization" in a China-esque way would be a good decision? In my view this is just part of living in a free society, freedom sometimes costs security.
Platforms that can, but do not, enforce rules to remove such content should also be punished and forbidden.
I would not sacrifice the lives of the ones I love in the name of free speech. Promoting terrorist content increases ever so slightly the chances of your loved ones and your family being hurt by those who get radicalized due to such content.
If "China-esque way" is what it takes then so be it.
Tor operators in doing so are making a choice: they feel the freedom of anonymity and speech are more important than human lives, even the lives of children.
I'd argue that running a Tor node is explicitly making that choice and that statement, so then it confuses me why you seem to be okay with Tor but more questioning of 8chan and similar services where the choice is made less directly. Is it a matter of having the ability to discern "good" uses from "evil"? You're surely accepting both uses by operating a Tor node and knowingly doing so, so I don't see how that makes sense.
If you want to look at gun laws on the other hand, that's a freedom for security trade that seems more debatable given that other countries have the same access to information, but not nearly the same gun violence problems.
Why? Think about what you're saying. Imagine equivalents:
1. We wouldn't allow cell phones that let terrorists communicate
2. We wouldn't allow roads that allow anyone to carry whatever contra-ban they want down them.
3. We wouldn't allow trains that allow just anyone to carry books on whatever topic they want.
4. We can't allow for air that allows two willing participants to communicate using sound waves.
The hubris to imagine that we dare have a say in whether a group of adults date to communicate with each other.
Nobody depends on 8chan. 8chan is not comparable to "air".
This point is so incredibly banal that I'm surprised to find myself making it.
Why is that a remotely controversial statement? Nobody is suggesting that chan-tards should be rounded up for unamerican activities, and I'd be the first to speak against that, but CF don't need to tarnish their brand with 8chans bullshit.
They're free to withhold their support and so express an opinion.
Because Cloudflare used to say that they would never take anyone down, and now they have. I think it's valid to wonder if they'll be more willing to take down other content, and perhaps become a target by groups looking to restrict the spread of certain information now that they've shown that this is something they're willing to do. This also brings up the point of why Cloudflare thought this specific website was worth taking down, and not the other horrible things that they do support.
I certainly would tolerate those sites. Free speech arguments aside, you can't kill the hydra, but you can severely degrade intelligence operations watching that hydra. Best case the bad guys all end up on sites already being surveilled, worst case they slip under the radar.
We had this problem years ago, hacktivists targeting ISIS channels. They scatter to the winds, intelligence ends up doing more work for less rewards.
Feel good outrage made things worse.
IOW, mission accomplished.
I'll be quite honest, I don't know what a "good" solution here is, but I really don't think this is it.
At the very least a good post-mortem analysis would be nice.
I guess I'll settle for watching the finger-pointing dumpster fire.
In war, degrading your enemy's communications and lines of supply is often more effective than engaging in battle.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/321955758_End_of_th...
While we need to wait for more detail to fully understand the path of radicalization, I am moderately confident in predicting the El Paso shooter visited 8ch regularly for at least 6 months, probably much longer, but posted infrequently if at all.
These aren't exactly organized bands of people funneling in millions of dollars for carrying out actual training and misson planning/execution. They're watering holes where disaffected elements of society hyperbolically play up various happenings.
Just take a step back for a moment. We have an increasing population and increasing saturation of that population with streams of data. When something happens, we know with a speed that is uncommon in human history (to be euphemistic about it).
More population = more happenings = more things to emotionally charge people in the same 24 hour frame. Even if population increases by a bajillion, we still only have 24 hours in a media cycle.
Even if the per capita incidence of violence decreases, a rising population means more slices of highly charged emotional manipulation within the same media cycle.
Edit: So instead of increasing population, resultant increasing pop density, increasing information density, and a myriad of clusterf* systems running haywire (even in an era where we're safer than even 20 years ago)...4chan and 8chan are the devil and satan for allowing people to shitpost in a hyperbolic hyperironic manner?
4chan and 8chan didn't create hyperirony (although they certainly cultivate massive gardens of it) or densensitization. Our media cycle has created it in tandem with a feedback loop that synergizes with the principle of "more people + same time amount = more hyperslices of emotion eliciting news that distort mental maps of larger-than-self situations"
You're safer at a wal-mart than prior 4chan and 8chan. But if you combine higher population density and information density, you'll get more raw events of violence even if the chance of experiencing violence has gone down.
Imo, there's a more insidious risk in allotting more powers of censorship to entities who are far less subject to reciprocal investigation. Think of 9/11. If we had done nothing, we would be safer and more prosperous today. We let the fleas provoke us into gouging untold amounts of flesh to stop itches.
Edit: A more simple way to phrase it is that hyperirony and the lack of "proper affect", which is really what people seem to be most horrified about, is a defense against the 24/7 atrocity exhibition which turns emotion into banality.
* - Note that more people, especially younger folks with their hyperbolic tendencies, and anonymity means more raw sociopathy and psychopathy being displayed in relation to those events. It's at least partially a function of the numbers game.
I recommend you have a look at the Kabbalah.info course on anti-Semitism - who can have more experience with it than the Jews themselves?
(I'm saying this glibly because this is unpleasant work and the amount of work it requires to be able to say this is vastly underestimated.)
Perhaps... communicate, then think, then understand and only then act?
You've moved from "counter terrorism", to "root out terrorism", to "root out image boards" - which is "root out the congregation".
Breathing pause. "Root out the radical congregations, Jews, fags, Roma's, chans, white nationalists, whatever, just root them out completely" is the WW2 analogy.
The next move is: "root out the causes of terrorism" - but we didn't get to that last time. It sure isn't any particular group of people.
Solve the root causes. It's either that or keep mirroring their impotent group defense mechanism on a more subtle level, which will in fact justify them to do whatever they initially wanted on a larger scale.
The solution to anti-Semitism sure as hell is not "destroy the anti-Semitec communities, burn their homes, kill their sons, rape their wives"! That is throwing gasoline onto the bonfire.
Edit: comment, please. I don't like throwing cold water on outrage porn either, but I don't want this to escalate further.
If it escalates further, the chans will go full dark, which means a massive influx of teenagers on the darkweb, and the good parts of the darkweb becoming a lot less cool, also, incidentally.
We used to, until quite recently. You could read Dabiq, the well-produced magazine of ISIL/ISIS.[1] They definitely glorified their terrorist incidents. With color pictures of their operations. All with religious justification. "Islam is the religion of the sword, not pacifism". (Dabiq, issue 7.)
Dabiq probably inspired enemies more than supporters. Dabiq says that there can be no compromise until the followers of Allah rule the earth. So ISIS could never have a peaceful border with anybody. On March 23, 2019, the last territory controlled by ISIS was captured.
8Chan is a minor annoyance in comparison. I'd let them blither and look foolish.
[1] https://clarionproject.org/islamic-state-isis-isil-propagand...
Yet sometimes in a mosque some evil islamic imam or something preaches radicalisation.
Yet we tolerate and welcome mosques. Then why shouldn’t we tolerate and welcome sites like 8chan?
Also please keep in mind that now that 8chan has been basically shut down, we have no way of make an opinion of our own.
"Monteilh eventually so unnerved Orange County's Muslim community that that they got a restraining order against him. [T]hey also reported Monteilh to the FBI"
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/mar/20/fbi-informant
You do know that Homeland is a TV show and not real life, right?
A mosque that openly fostered extremism like 8chan did would of course get shut down. By contrast, 8chan has not been shut down. Its operations have been disrupted, but it hasn't shut down, anymore than Cloudflare has shut down just because they had a site outage last month.
Indeed, you arrest the single imam, you don't shut down the whole mosque. That's the point.
I completely disagree. I've read Dabiq[1] and similar publications because I want to know why people believe the things they believe. It is a good thing that such horrible ideas are available to the public, and for the same reason that it's good that flat earth sites are available to the public. JS Mill puts it best[2]:
> But the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it.
> If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.
It is for these same reasons that I also read /pol/ and /leftypol/ on 8chan.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dabiq_(magazine)
2. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/On_Liberty/Chapter_2
Sorry but I can't empathize with your statement since bigotry, racism, hatred, and white supremacy don't come off as 'fun'
- Voxility's actions are admirable given the nature of the content hosted on 8chan;
- I can't say much about Epik's services;
- Voxility is absolutely the worst of the worst. The content nature and their shady 'business practices' are an absolute abomination. They do a lot of spam and 'transit' a lot of shady traffic.
- Their technical support team is shit;
- The owner of the (google it) is a crook.
I'd be fascinated by an attempt to elaborate on this frankly incredible statement.
I think that human rights and freedoms are just that: personal freedoms. Freedom of religion is about personal religious observance without harming others. These freedoms philosophically should not mean entitlement to unlimited exercise thereof. The right to bear arms doesn’t mean you should be able able to stockpile unlimited amounts of ammunition and incendiary devices etc.
Similarly, FREEDOM of speech to me is a PERSONAL human freedom. You can say what you want, and not be punished by the government for it. You can say it in a car, you can say it in a bar, you can say it very far, you can wish upon a star. But there are limits to how many people can hear you. Maybe 10 or 100 people at an event.
Once you get into situations where 5,000,000 people can hear a tweet, that’s clearly not about FREEDOM of speech in its strict sense. It is about entitlement to use a PLATFORM, maintained by an ORGANIZATION that involves many people, to broadcast arbitrary, unfiltered one-to-many messages to everyone.
I think this latter thing is toxic, in both directions. Society listening to tweets of celebrities cheapens public discussion and civic thought. And being reachable by the whole world using email (rather than through networks of shared invited/capabilities) leads to constant spam and papparazzi for celebrities. What happened here is an ORGANIZATION put on a show or movie and catapulted this celebrity into the limelight and carefully maintains their stature, along with their own publicists, social media team on twitter, etc.
This is the society we live in, where we have heroes. But entitlement to unlimited unfiltered megaphones is NOT the same as freedom of speech, any more than being a leader if a paramilitary group of unlimited size is the same as the right to bear arms.
So, freedoms and rights have limits. Where those limits lie is the heap paradox - as you take away grains, when is a heap no longer a heap? etc.
So what is the alternative to this type of misnamed “free speech” aka megaphones run by organizations, super PACs, mainstream media, and so on? It is COLLABORATION.
There, individual contributions are filtered and often butt up against changes, revisions, etc. The result is that when the general public sees something, it is the result of a collaborative process of filtering and refining the presentation of information, citing sources, etc. There are no heroes on wikipedia, and only a few in science and open source. Most contributions are filtered by a community of experts, not state governments or platforms employing boiler rooms of low paid workers to determine what’s true.I would like to see more of that COLLABORATION and less of COMPETITION. I would like to see a patentleft movement in drug research, instead of big pharma. I would like to see news reported like Wikipedia with footage submitted by everyday people on the ground instead of “intrepid reporters in a warzone”. CNN used to have a motto that they have “no celebrities”. News agencies tried to stay lukewarm and neutral. FOX News changed the game, lots of people copied the model. The Internet eliminated newspapers and classifieds. News had to adapt because capitalism and cutthroat competition for the same ad dollars means MORE clickbait and MORE lockin to one type of audience. For-profit Social networks further use this content to herd us into echo chambers of outrage, because that’s what drives the most engagement, which the social networks need to monetize. They send notifications in an increasingly desperate attempt to grab your attention in a tragedy of the commons where the commons is our attention.
This has had a corrosive effect on society. The capitalist (competition based) news has made us more polarized and outraged, while the capitalist (competition based...
Our attention spans are one casualty of today's technology, as I said in the piece (somewhere towards the end).
Or is this copy pasta and I've missed the joke?
Yea why do you feel the need to know everything that is said? You stop just short of calling for back doors in encryption.
>Fbi should honey pot everything
It's a bit weird to be pro free speech and pro Orwellian police state. It seems like a strategy to force people to speak in a certain way, coerced self-censorship. Are you a "government contractor" by chance?
[Edit: Why would you down-vote? That's the legitimate interest on the other side of the balance. It's not an opinion on the merit of shutting down 8chan. In this case, the benefit in permitting this speech may be grossly outweighed by the benefit of stopping it, but the benefit in allowing 8chan to continue to exist is non-zero. In its most nefarious use, subjective elimination of speech to subvert the speech's goal is commonly known as "censorship".]
Take encryption. It is used for some of the most vile evil content that exists on the internet. But I support encryption because I know that any limits on it will soon be corrupted by those in power to use for reasons far less just than ending the aforementioned content. Thus I see enabling encryption as an end to itself regardless of how it is used because I see any society that does differently as inferior.
I understand that some people see things that way. And I'm saying that it's an insufficient, naïve, and (in our zeitgeist) actually unethical position.
Government isn't separate from society, it is composed of society, and the voice with which a society enacts its will.
If government is corrupt, the solution is to fix government, not strip government of its necessary and ethical power.
Yet around the world this solution has largely failed, especially as private entities with enough political power (and money, as these are often interchangeable) have learned how to exploit flaws in human psychology to for their advantage. Until we fix these issues the best option is to minimize the possible harm caused by minimizing the instances where we fine violence an acceptable option.
That's a cynic's worldview and it's one that I totally reject. Take your pessimism to a hole in the ground and wither yourself away there. Let those of us invested in the progress and future of humanity get on with our work.
Your rejection doesn't change the reality of how the word operates today.
>Take your pessimism to a hole in the ground and wither yourself away there.
Why? So others can continue to double down on failed policies that end up costing others?
>Let those of us invested in the progress and future of humanity get on with our work.
You see yourself as some benevolent being moving humanity forward but reject any criticism of the costs of your actions. You even immediately judge those who disagree with you as standing against humans, a tactic to dehumanize opposition instead of engaging with it. It is a dangerous mindset that has led to the deaths of tens of millions.
Why not take a lesson from nature that shows that a single entity that tries to do it all is far less likely to survive the future that many separate entities that each find their niche?
I reject specifically your criticism, the criticism of cynics. I (obviously) don't agree with your characterization of which policies are "failed policies that end up costing others" or "how the world operates". Humans are of nature but also possess the ethical and rational systems to rise above it. We're not bound by our natural impulses; on the contrary, our gifts oblige us to be better than them.
Bluntly, I have no interest in living in a tribe with my Dunbar's number of tribespeople, organizing my thoughts and our policies under some presupposed limits of ambition. My ambition is boundless. So I say again, if you want to close ranks and subvert broad collective action and live in fear (or as you would say, some kind of steely-eyed realism) go dig a hole and do it well away from me. I've no interest in that moribund nihilism.
What irked me is that CloudFlare was the one who makes the decision to do censorship.
It's not really a due process. No one argue for the defendant's side. It would seem better coming from US court through a due process or something like two lawyers arguing for both sides and etc.
I dislike the rationale of "CloudFlare is a private company. They can do whatever they want" ... like wut?
Also, if what those people do is illegal, should we arrest them, instead of merely banning the site?
This is the same thing with Trump's speech on Twitter. People yelling at Twitter to ban Trump because what Trump said is very very bad. If it's so bad, he should be arrested, not simply banned from Twitter.
------------
Edit: to address the main concern in my replies.
So, we think the speech is so bad that CloudFlare should ban it. But it is not bad enough to be banned by every CDN. That sounds contradictory.
For me, the speech is bad and it should be banned by every CDN. But government should make the judgement on the speech through a due process, ban it, and arrest someone if there's illegal activity involved.
One point is that the decision process is rather secretive. Who argued for? Who argued against? What were their supporting arguments and etc.? Doing censorship through court would be better.
If you have a different position, could you explain why censorship coming from CloudFlare is better than censorchip coming from US government?
I can engage a different CDN provider. I can't (easily) engage a different government.
I don't think 100% of the CDN providers in the entire world will do the moral and ethical thing, and I recognize that the First Amendment would (should) handily prevent legislation requiring that they do.
At best, it seems inconsistent that we are okay with other CDN providers not doing moral and ethical things. (Since we are okay with the speech being hosted elsewhere).
This is literally the exact opposite intention of the 2nd amendment.
> If you have a different position, could you explain why censorship coming from CloudFlare is better than censorchip coming from US government?
Cloudflare isn't an entity supported (e.g. paid) by the general populace. CF not hosting their site isn't censoring their content, they are just actively choosing not to do business with them. People on 8chan can certainly say the same exact thing on any other medium (pen/paper, facebook, etc) and no one is stopping them from doing so.
1. You think the speech is not wrong. Then, cloudflare taking of an okay speech is pretty strange.
2. You think the speech is wrong. Then, why are you okay with the speech being on a different CDN? Shouldn't it be banned everywhere?
2. You can think the speech is wrong, and that CDNs shouldn't host it, while having concerns about the US government getting involved in censorship in direct violation of the First Amendment.
That's why I'd rather see an open process of making such judgement.
Also, let's not kid ourselves. US does censor certain kinds of speeches.
Which ones? Please elaborate.
That there are minor exceptions to the First Amendment doesn’t mean we should throw it all out.
- the speech is bad
- Cloudflare's action is ethical.
- Other CDNs are also ethical for not banning it.
- Government shouldn't ban it even though the speech is bad.
- You are okay with the speech being hosted elsewhere.
We aren't talking about a grey area here. We are talking about promoting mass-shooting. Every sane person, including you and me, agrees the speech is extremely bad.
Wouldn't you want it to be banned everywhere?
This is the main point I'm trying to drive. We are somehow oddly satisfied that the speech is banned on CloudFlare.
Shouldn't we try to get this specific speech banned everywhere?
No, this is where you're missing the point.
There will be some CDNs who do not make the ethical choice. That's a fact of life.
I am uncomfortable with government intervention that makes the ethical choice the legally required choice in this case, as I'm wary of fucking with the First Amendment. (It's also somewhat a fool's errand, as you can host a CDN outside of US jurisdiction if you really want.)
> There will be some CDNs who do not make the ethical choice. That's a fact of life.
- We want everyone to ban it (because that's the ethical way). But government banning it is not okay.
- Government enforcing the ban is not okay. But CloudFlare enforcing it is okay.
I don't think CloudFlare (or any company) is equipped to make this kind of judgement. The process would be secretive and biased.
Government is much better equipped, and the process would be more open.
That's why I would be more comfortable with government taking the lead on this kind of judgement.
I guess we're just gonna agree to disagree on this one.
> you can host a CDN outside of US jurisdiction if you really want.
I'd say outside of US is really out of the scope here. We don't really have much power to enforce anything outside US.
If we're gonna expand our scope to outside of US, there will many many more horrendous things to discuss. And the discussion would never end.
Maybe - I tend to think governments have a harder time with rapidly changing scenarios, as in privacy issues in the tech world - but the flip side of that is there's little recourse if the process makes a bad decision. Both companies and government are susceptible to bad decisions.
I can switch CDN providers if one makes a stupid call. Switching governments is far less doable.
By contrast, none of the corporations that host the sites you use daily have any such restrictions. If Google wants to delist your website, that's too bad for you. If AWS no longer wants to host it, you have no recourse. If Comcast decides to block you, there's nothing you can do.
Do you want the corporations that control everything you see on the internet to be more neutral? That will require oversite by the government (probably the FCC specifically).
If you want to be really cynical, you could say the government is controlled by corporate money... but then what does it matter?
IMO, blind cynicism isn't helping anyone, and the government is at least ostensibly supposed to do what's in the interest of the nation, and has some limits about what it can and cannot censor. I'd rather that, than an amoral corporation motivated only by money.
Right, which is why I'm baffled someone worried about free speech would be happy with giving them that power.
> By contrast, none of the corporations that host the sites you use daily have any such restrictions. If Google wants to delist your website, that's too bad for you. If AWS no longer wants to host it, you have no recourse. If Comcast decides to block you, there's nothing you can do.
Sure there is - you go elsewhere. Just like 8chan will, just like the Daily Stormer did.
Ok, I'll try again. Corporations can actively censor you. The government is more restricted in what speech it can stomp on.
> Sure there is - you go elsewhere.
How do you "go elsewhere" when Comcast refuses to allow customers to see your website?
How do you "go elsewhere" when google delists you?
If 8ch gets hosted in a foreign country after being delisted from google and refused by US hosts, that's censorship. That's an infringement on freedom of speech.
If you're ok with that freedom of speech, then you are saying that it's ok for corporations to censor. That's a coherent stance... but one with which I vehemently disagree. I don't want ANYONE to have the power to censor, but with multinational mega-corps controlling the vast majority of the internet, that's simply not possible.
Considering the fact that internet providers and online services control the vast majority of the content I consume, I'd much rather have some regulation that limits what these companies can do.
And I'll try again. Responding to "corporations can censor you" by saying "we should therefore break the First Amendment and let government censor" is bizarre if you're pro-free speech.
I get "neither should be able to censor" as a position, even if I disagree with it. I don't get "I value free speech and thus want the government to be the speech arbiter" at all.
> How do you "go elsewhere" when Comcast refuses to allow customers to see your website?
Hang on, we're talking about CDNs. Not ISPs. Where I live, there's only one real choice for broadband ISPs, and I'd argue they should be largely treated as a utility in that scenario.
> How do you "go elsewhere" when google delists you?
Bing?
> If 8ch gets hosted in a foreign country after being delisted from google and refused by US hosts, that's censorship. That's an infringement on freedom of speech.
So's me telling my kids to be quiet and eat their dinner. It's thankfully 100% legal.
I never said any such thing. Please don't misrepresent my comments.
> we're talking about CDNs. Not ISPs.
I'm actively discussing both. Legislation regulating who can censor what must necessarily start with ISPs before we can even think about regulating edge providers.
> Bing?
You can't move to bing, because you're not the one searching for your website.
> So's me telling my kids to be quiet and eat their dinner. It's thankfully 100% legal.
I'm saying it shouldn't be legal for corporations to suppress speech in this way.
Doesn't CloudFlare have the same free speech rights to express their own views towards hate speech (i.e., by not providing service to white supremacists)?
In your opinion, would it be better for a government to make this kind of judgement than a company?
Do you think the speech should be banned everywhere? Or should it be banned only on CloudFlare? Or you don't have your judgement on this specific speech?
That's why it's weird that people are cheering Cloudflare for making the right decision. Then, put forward an argument that "well, the speech can be on another platform".
I'm not sure what makes you think cloudfront is "censoring" anyone; 8chan no longer is using cloudflare's (likely) free service, so they need to reconfigure their DNS and go about their day.
A good majority of the internet does not use cloudflare; free or paid.
It's their property, and they have an absolute right to decide how their property is to be used. The right to freedom of association is the most fundamental human right there is.
However, the practical side of this is pretty clear.. hate speech is hate speech. It's not a debate. The people who are for being racist/bigots are wrong- plain and simple. So removing their forum of speech is OK in my book.
Still even after saying that- it's never that simple.. I think collectively the US does not want to turn into what parts of even europe has in which you can literally get in trouble just for saying things. And trying to "ban" even the clearest of wrong views is one step closer to getting somewhere we don't want to be.
You're all bigots and shallow intellectuals who lack integrity and bravery.
I think laws should be fair and consistent. Censorship is inconsistent with freedom and justice. Additionally, the interpretation of messages is subjective.
If laws are inconsistent and arbitrary (and consequently, unfair), then you might as well throw moral principles out the window altogether and become a fascist, a white supremacist, etc.
The only way to have a just society, in my opinion, is when freedom of the individual is the base of all laws, and those laws are logical and consistent with each other.
Yes. The Individual.
Well, what about the rights of the 29 individuals that were randomly murdered, plus the scores of others wounded this past weekend? What about their justice?
I'm sure it's fun for you to treat all of this as some sort of abstract thought experiment, but the reality is that people are dying senselessly and violently for no reason other than we as a society won't make difficult decisions in the name of "principle".
edit: And to be clear, I fully support a private company's refusal to do further business with 8chan as much as their contract allows. But I tire of these arguments about how somebody died, so we have to do something, and ignoring all further reasoning.
That's not always true - many people die as the innocent victims in DUI collisions. If there were more people dying innocently from alcohol, would you support shutting down bars that had been used by people who drove drunk, because other individuals lost their freedom?
You're insinuating that if freedom of speech laws in the US were less principled, those people wouldn't have died. But maybe if news outlets didn't report on mass shootings those people wouldn't have died too, should we prohibit news outlets from reporting these things?
It's not the fault of free speech that some mentally unstable person killed people, the same way it's not the fault of the journalists that report these tragedies.
Assumes facts not in evidence
Thousands of people every year are randomly murdered for no good reason. Many actually never get closed, meaning no one actually goes to jail or gets punished for their murder. These people actually don't receive justice, but obviously we can't live in a perfect society.
You're oversimplifying a complex issue to accuse others of being heartless. It's the lazy moralizing of tyranny.
It's the ability to chip away at free speech. First 8chan, then something else that's bad, then something slightly intolerant, then what? Is it really worth censoring when something else will pop up to take it's place? Monitor and move on.
It is illegal to be an accessory to murder. It is illegal to incite riots. I still haven't heard a good reason why forums that are havens for users openly and explicitly encouraging terroristic acts should not bear any responsibility, beyond lazy slippery slope arguments.
What’s hypothetical is that banning 8ch will do anything about that.
> Furthermore, the First Amendment was designed by the founders as a way to protect citizens who criticized the government. I find it unbelievable that they themselves would support extending those protections towards people who would seek to explicitly provoke mass, random violence.
Another thing that’s hypothetical.
> I still haven't heard a good reason why forums that are havens for users openly and explicitly encouraging terroristic acts should not bear any responsibility, beyond lazy slippery slope arguments.
Considering you’re just dismissing the presented argument as a fallacy, it’s surprising that your own argument contains so little substance. Or is it?
So here is a formula for you to use in case you want to send us back to the dark ages:
> Can any free speech absolutists explain to me the legitimate public interest that is served by allowing terrorist breeding grounds like _INSERT ANY OF THE PRODUCTS FROM THE LIST ABOVE_to continue to operate?
I remember that on one of my visits there (there was always a hard-drive that needed to be handed in person or something like that) I’m 100% sure that I had bumped into what looked to be an FBI team inspecting some of the machines in there. I’m saying FBI but they could also have been the the US Secret Service or whatever agency is in charge with protecting US citizens against online bad things, in any case, the people I saw inspecting stuff were definetely people working for the US government, you could tell by their pants and the way they matched (or, better yet, how they didn’t match) with their white snickers.
All this to say that I’m pretty sure that the US 3-letter agencies had direct physical access to the 8chan servers, not sure how they let all this get so out of control.