> Initially, the company said too many customers had requested the sites be blocked, so it would block them for all customers except for those who called the company and requested access. However, the company backtracked on Monday and said those who didn't request the sites be blocked would still have access.
So it's only blocking for people who requested such blocking, then the title is just click bait, I guess "ISP let's it's users block websites they dislike" is not as catchy.
I could be completely wrong, I’m no expert on North Idaho corporate politics; however, my thoughts are that the confusion is arising from your assumption that this is a practical move, rather than a political one
If you want to browse the web with JS enabled, you'll be making lots of requests to Google and Facebook whether you want to or not (analytics, like/share buttons, etc). The most convenient way to stop them is to run something like a Pi-Hole so that those requests never reach Google/Facebook. An ISP offering that as a service sounds like a nice feature.
I would think the people knowledgable enough to know their browser is making requests to FB without actually visiting FB would also be knowledgable enough to block it themselves (with their hosts file, ublock, etc) and not need the ISP to do so.
The email says users didn't want it in their internet "feed," so... this is a load of nonsense. I'm highly skeptical that anyone contacted them about blocking facebook in the first place.
Next thing you'd say "if you don't like somebody's tweets, can't you just not read their twitter feed?"! You're treading on dangerous grounds here, comrade.
"BiG tEcH" People only use this term when they're mad that they can't call for the hanging of American citizens or the burning down of our government.
Amazon, Twitter, FB, Apple, Google—none of them have to tolerate calling for murder and destruction and they aren't going to risk liability by ignoring it and letting people come to harm. If you feel like not being able to call for lynchings of left leaning Americans is curtailing your speech then you need to reflect on why you want Americans dead so badly.
Northern Idaho actually has quite a lot of left-leaning politics/culture. Southern idaho is where all the conservatives live (and the vast majority of people generally).
"Northern Idaho" used to be shorthand for "extreme right wing" due to it being the location of the headquarters of the Aryan Nations and location of the Ruby Ridge standoff. Those references are over twenty years old now, so no idea how much that ideology survives there.
Even NPR's Maria Hinojosa couldn't find any "Nazi Town" in Idaho, as she had expected to. See the "Our Private Idaho" episode of "America By The Numbers":
https://shop.pbs.org/WC6542.html
Ehhh... I'd say that the left leaning people are basically all in the Boise area (Ada county) Sort of west center of Idaho. Beyond that, it's trump town pretty much everywhere else. Especially the pan handle where all the neo-nazis live.
Really only Moscow where the university is, and maybe pockets of CDA. Where-as Boise, Meridian, Twin Falls, and Pocatello are all fairly centrist/left-leaning.
yes, northern idaho, I remember all the left leaning skin heads. . . /s
It has more leftists than southern Idaho, but still, it's not exactly a bastion of progressive thinking. In fact, the state legislator doesn't have a single dem elected north of the boise metro, so I'm not sure how you're quantifying it?
Yes, I agree - the ISP block is censorship also. When China blocks sites with The Great Firewall, we all agree that's censorship. This is the same thing.
I stand by the actions of Facebook, Twitter etc, I'd agree this ISP has the same rights. Now where I could see it getting interesting is if consumers in the area don't have an alternative way to access content. I'd say if that is the case then this ISP here just opened up a door to a potential case to regulate them as utilities which means they wouldn't be able to do this. If the users do have a choice in the area then moot point.
If there is competition, one could think it's okay.
But if they are allowed, I imagine the competitors ask why they can't do that either. If they can, they'll block sites too.
Then what? Residents won't have any choice guaranteeing free access to all websites.
The worse one would be that they actually can block sites and access to the internet is forever changed, now at the will of the ISPs. (fortunately, this would be more plausible under a Republican government, and they're leaving.)
Yup, I was kind of amazed at how the situation played out a few years ago with Wheeler and then onto Pai. You don't need the same type of net neutrality laws if you just make them utilities, but ISPs of course know this and made sure that wasn't going to happen then.
> Now where I could see it getting interesting is if consumers in the area don't have an alternative way to access content.
Assuming private companies have the moral right to fully regulate their services, they're just blocking a specific resource for violating their policy. If you build your case on blocking Facebook, you must argue that the utility chain leads all the way to Facebook. It is all or nothing.
Let's examine two cases for an ISP utility. They both lead to the same conclusion without turning everything downstream of ISPs into utilities.
1. The utility of an ISP is that of an ad hoc communication platform. Here we must ask why an ISP is an ad hoc communication platform and Facebook is not. Either both are or neither is.
2. The utility of an ISP is derived from providing access to Facebook. Again it is either both or none.
Ah see, I disagree that an ISP is in itself an adhoc communications system.
An ISP hooks up the wires, lays and maintains the infrastructure for web connections for which you can build communications on but are not in themselves sufficient as communications. You can also build more than just communications on ISP infrastructure.
As examples, you watch Netflix on the infrastructure of an ISP but Netflix is not communications and you may bank on your bank's website on an ISP and that is not communications those are movie watching and banking respectfully.
I could continue to provide examples, but my point being is an ISP is not in itself sufficient for communications to be established and that you can establish more than communications on an ISP and that is why I don't agree.
There exist many utilities that themselves are built on top of other utilities.
The reason something should be an utility has to do with competition and how much power customers. The primary argument in favor of having Internet providers be an utility is that creating an competing Internet is not really an realistic concept, and the power customers of ISP has in their customer-provider relation is close to nothing. Utility laws exist to solve this specific situation in the market, and making every single company an utility would not be very efficient way to make use of those laws.
I agree a private business may do what they will within the bounds of our laws, so yes, but my framework for how I handle this would have ISPs regulated as natural monpoly which would make them a utility without that choice and that takes care of your concern. In their current state, however, you would not be wrong even if I wouldn't like it.
As stated elsewhere, by asking the question you’re assuming the point is to have a rational argument on consistent beliefs - but it isn’t. It’s to gaslight and misdirect for political gain.
Bingo! Censoring a site because of censorship (even if misguided in terms) is like a kid saying you can’t play kickball because you didn’t invite him to play soccer (futbol)
Well, I'd argue that censoring a site because of censorship is like a society saying you must be do community service (or even be locked into a jail/prison)--as in, lose some of your rights--because you violated someone else's rights.
Silly and retributory, and per the article a pretty clear violation of Washington State's net neutrality laws. But in context, probably not a bad thing for society.
It's not if you consider being an isp like a utility. If the power company had a way to shut your power off anytime you tried to access a web site.
I also disagree with what the other companies did in the first place is censoring. They're removing rule breakers. You can still share your political views, just don't organize and call for the government to be other thrown because you believe everything you read online. You wouldn't freak out because a child porn distribution platform was turned off and claim it's censored.
Usually, state net neutrality laws are there to prohibit the state from purchasing from entities that violet net neutrality.
They don’t regulate transmission because that is federal territory.
Now the article is slightly misleading because they didn’t block Twitter and Facebook globally. They only blocked traffic for those users that asked them to do so.
It really hasn’t been - Twitter, fb, etc have explicit tos disallowing calls for violence, harassment, etc and have just stopped letting prominent people get away with violating those rules.
An ISP is a dumb pipe, that’s the other side of their having access to utility poles and use of people land for their cables.
Also the suspension/bans of individual people and groups for violating well established ToS by a private company, vs banning entire sites out of petulance with no actual grounds.
The obvious follow up is for FB, et al to block the ISP so everyone switches to a different ISP.
I think mirroring free speech standards under the law is probably a good starting point - i.e., censoring is bad by default, but not all speech is protected, and calls for violence and insurrection are a relevant and timely example of non-protected speech.
I'll reiterate that this should be a starting point, not necessarily a hard and fast rule - there may be more nuanced situations where the standards that are appropriate for the government are inappropriate for social networks.
There's also the question of what levels of the stack it's appropriate for any censorship to occur at. Even if censorship of a particular class of speech is appropriate in general, it may not be appropriate for an ISP specifically to conduct that censorship.
Back in the good old days of independent dial-up ISPs, the owner of one of our local ISPs (somehow a logging town had more than one local ISP...crazy to imagine now, isn't it?) found Jesus and decided to filter all traffic for objectionable/"adult" content.
Good point. Still, I'm curious if that's been tested in court.
My impression is that some commercial practices can be widespread, and still fail under eventual court challenge. I'm thinking of the U.S. case regarding the advertised-vs-visible diagonal sizes of CRT monitors back in the day.
Beyond existing censorship (i.e. ISPs already block stuff, sadly), there might be an implied contract along those lines e.g. statistically the vast majority of Twitter traffic is people arguing about nonsense not censorship.
I can't speak to Idaho, but it appears this ISP also serves some areas in eastern Washington (which happens to be my state). As the article says, WA state net neutrality laws explicitly prohibit ISPs from selectively blocking websites so it is pretty slam-dunk illegal.
Do you have the text of said contract? It's not even a worthwhile thought experiment without it. How can one comment on a possible breach of an unknown contract?
As a utility, power is regulated differently from Internet service, so no.
If you're genuinely worried about this with regards to your ISP, consider writing to your lawmakers that ISPs should be treated like utilities as well.
"You can't censor us, we censor you!" - In all seriousness, this only hurts the ISP's customers. Interesting business tactic. We'll have to see how that plays out.
If a company doesn't want to distribute a certain type of content (whether it's for political reasons or because they genuinely think it's better for society that some voices aren't heard), they're under no obligation to do so.
Personally, I think this principle is limited in its application. Sure, Walmart may choose not to distribute specific products but at this point an ISP is essentially a utility, much like your water and electricity providers. As there is not much in the realm of choices for ISPs and many users are locked into contracts, this seems like an abuse of the power ISPs are holding.
Thinking about it this way, what if you worked for Facebook or Twitter as WFH and they blocked these sites. What now, do you move? Get a new job? Suppose they also block VPN traffic as that is a known way around their blocking.
> If a company doesn't want to distribute a certain type of content (whether it's for political reasons or because they genuinely think it's better for society that some voices aren't heard), they're under no obligation to do so.
I thought ISPs were classified as common carriers and thus are obligated? Or are we saying we _don't_ want net neutrality now?
Looks to me like this kind of reasoning will eventually go all the way up to "they can start their own society", and at some point, it will actually happen. surprised pikachu
> It's a private company, they should be free to choose what kind of content they want to provide
Censorship is just a classification of what they are doing. In both cases, it is selectively application of blocking of contents based on one's political believes. Calling them censorship is not an assessment whether they have a legal/illegal/legit/reasonable/unreasonable cause to carry out such acts.
This obviously isn’t the answer. But this is the year that decentralized social media will become mainstream, as a direct consequence of the actions of Facebook, Twitter, and all of the big tech providers that are currently trying to destroy Parler.
Telling 150 million people to sit down and shut up because their party happened to lose an election is a really, really bad idea that has no possible good ending for those doing it.
> Telling 150 million people to sit down and shut up because their party happened to lose an election is a really, really bad idea that has no possible good ending for those doing it.
i do think you mean 74M? anyways i agree with you, it's a recipe for disaster. (and i'm not sure why you're being down-voted here.)
it'd be much more healthy to actively engage this cohort of people; allow them to present "facts" as they see fit and offer evidence to either support or refute their views.
> Telling 150 million people to sit down and shut up because their party happened to lose an election
What country have we shifted to talking about, because no US party has 150 million people, and the one that recently lost a national election—if you apply the percentages from Party ID surveys to the whole US adult population–has about half that many who identify with it.
As a long-time observer of HN, I have noticed that many people resort to pedantry when attempting to respond to comments that they have no real way to argue with, but want to argue with them anyway. Whether the number is 150 or 75 million, it's slightly less than 1/2 of the voting public. Do you think it's a good idea to attempt to silence 40-45% of the voting public in a country as large as the United States?
> Whether the number is 150 or 75 million, it’s slightly less than 1/2 of the voting public.
No, its not. Its not even the 21% of voters who actively support the storming of the Capitol [0]. Its just the even smaller group actively advocating new and further political violence.
Really? More pedantry? We aren't talking about silencing those that "support storming of the capital". We are talking about silencing an entire party of people. Donald Trump received approximately 46.8% of the popular vote. Is that not slightly less than half of the voting public?
46.8% of the people who care about this stuff are being told that they no longer have the right to speak on platforms where it would matter. That's a very serious problem.
> We aren’t talking about silencing those that “support storming of the capital”.
Yes, as I said we are talking about a much smaller group than even that. Nor are we actually talking about silencing them, we're talking about certain forums not serving as megaphones for them.
> We are talking about silencing an entire party of people.
No, we aren’t. I mean, not with any connection to reality, we aren’t.
> Donald Trump received approximately 46.8% of the popular vote.
Yes, but no major platform is adopting a rule that would cutoff access to people who voted for Donald Trump, so that’s not relevant.
> Is that not slightly less than half of the voting public?
Yes, but no one is talking about silencing people based on membership in that group.
> You’re talking about silencing slightly less than 1/2 of the the people who care about this stuff.
It appears that this entire comment and all of its replies have been hidden from public view. Oh the irony! We are the only ones discussing this now lol.
Can you tell me how they're being silenced? Supporting Donald Trump is not the same as inciting violence against the state, so it should be clear to you that punitive reactions against those who aimed to incite violence against the state can only be taken as an action against supporters of Donald Trump if you think supporting Donald Trump is the same as supporting violence against the state.
"Telling 150 million people to sit down and shut up because their party happened to lose an election" is probably the most disingenuous representation of events I've ever seen
> this is the year that decentralized social media will become mainstream
I really hope you're right, but I am also very skeptical. For every centralized platform that a community is cut off from, another centralized platform opens to accept them.
And then you have decentralized platforms that specifically build in censorship in the stupidest places [0] in an effort to stave off "rightoids." It seems most of the people building the decentralized platforms aren't actually interested in the merits of open communication or free thought, but rather pushing their inconsistent, amorphous identity politics bullshit down everyone's throats (and I'm saying this as a communist). They bring their ruling-class-approved "us vs them" mentality into the platforms they are building and try to force participants to "bend the knee" or be banished. Sure, you can run your own instance, but why would you on a platform where you're not sure where you stand? Decentralized social media platforms will need to exercise a bit more tolerance before they see mass adoption.
I'm excited for things like Holochain though, which might help to turn everything on its head.
> "Our company does not believe a [snip] site has the authority to censor what you see [snip]. This is why [snip] we have made this decision to block these two websites from being accessed"
> If your organization uses web tools that allow you to track cookies or the IP addresses of people who visit your website from EU countries, then you fall under the scope of the GDPR. Practically speaking, it’s unclear how strictly this provision will be interpreted or how brazenly it will be enforced. Suppose you run a golf course in Manitoba focused exclusively on your local area, but sometimes people in France stumble across your site. Would you find yourself in the crosshairs of European regulators? It’s not likely. But technically you could be held accountable for tracking these data.
More importantly, what would the regulators do - your not in their country, have no company in their jurisdiction to fine, and you don't really care if they fire-wall you out of country (you're us only, right?), your dns registration and infrastructure are all presumably US based..
So, I've always wondered what they would do? yell at you harshly ?
I could imagine that if you’re a big enough player, they’ll just arrest one of your executives if they ever travel into the EU. Like what happened with Canada and the Huawei CFO.
Probably nothing. Especially since GDPR isn't enforced that heavily.
But I also understand why US companies are doing this. It's kinda like when my dad got parking and speeding tickets sent home from a foreign country. Most likely nothing would happen if he didn't pay them, but you never know when you want to go back to holiday in $country, and the border agent sees them in your "permanent record".
It's at least imaginable that the EU _could_ do something similar, ask for a fine and if not dealt with, the company (or even worse directors of the company) getting some kind of dent in the proverbial permanent record.
(I'm not saying that it's likely, but if EU visitors aren't a big user base for your local regional news paper, I see why it's so tempting to just check the "Block EU visitors" checkbox.)
> So, I've always wondered what they would do? yell at you harshly ?
Downvoters (not necessarily you): This question is why I made sure to quote the paragraph, rather than just link it. "It does" is the lawmakers intent, regardless of feasibility in enforcing it. Avoiding the question entirely is why various sites have decided to block EU access.
No, it does not, anymore than Iran or China get to dictate rules, and for the same reason: the EU has no jurisdiction and no leverage. The EU of course is free to setup their own Great Firewall and block off anyone they dislike, and for people or businesses with assets under their jurisdiction they have an angle to go after that way. But a person or business entirely out of their territory is completely free to flip them the proverbial (or not so proverbial) bird. That is the fundamental nature of "law".
I'll add it's curious this seems to come up on HN with regards to the GDPR so regularly too, precisely because of my first sentence here. It speaks to a real lack of foundation in understanding the basics of law. Are people writing this actually thinking through the implications of every country being able to unilaterally dictate practice worldwide? Or do they think only the EU has this power?
You're pointing out that they may not be able to enforce the law against an entity that does not operate in the EU.
But even if a company doesn't operate in the EU today, it may want to in the future. Or it may want to be acquired by a company that does. The future is unknowable, so I'd imagine they were advised to follow the law, even if there would be no immediate consequences to breaking it.
>The GDPR absolutely does apply outside of Europe.
No, it doesn't, as you yourself admit two sentences later when you write:
>You're pointing out that they may not be able to enforce the law against an entity that does not operate in the EU.
Yes, which by definition means the law does not apply to that person to entity. That is the fundamental nature of law and sovereignty.
>The law itself says so.
Completely irrelevant, in the same way it's irrelevant if you or I order some societal change on our say so. Law is about power. And again, also in the exact same way that it's completely irrelevant if Pakistan or whomever have blasphemy laws on the books they say apply to everyone, China laws against "disrupting society" or someone sues a US entity under the UK's very plaintiff friendly libel laws. They can all be told to pound sand.
>But even if a company doesn't operate in the EU today, it may want to in the future. Or it may want to be acquired by a company that does. The future is unknowable, so I'd imagine they were advised to follow the law, even if there would be no immediate consequences to breaking it.
Sure, but that doesn't mean the law "applies". A company can voluntarily take whatever actions it wishes that it believes may benefit it in the future, but a core point of law is that it's INvoluntary. Since the GDPR doesn't apply to anyone outside of EU jurisdiction (or under treaties giving it local effect), they may choose to run it because they think it's a good idea, or not. Those within EU jurisdiction do not get that choice.
Lol. I mean, you’re right. The EU can’t make laws that apply to the entire universe like they wish they could and claim they do, but that was the whole point of GDPR.
They claim that any company that has dealings with an EU citizen has to follow their laws. Of course they can’t do that. They could have passed a law forbidding their citizens from interacting with businesses that didn’t follow certain rules, since they have the ability to make rules for their citizens, but for some odd reason they decided not to.
They can’t “apply” to me if they don’t apply to me. The whole point of sovereignty is to say where laws apply. Politics and war are the negotiation of those questions.
No, lots of entities (including many at levels far above individuals) have superior authorities that decide how wide the subordinate entities writ runs.
I like it -- if everyone set up their own websites, we would have way less monopolization, censorship, posts promotion. Even ordering of your "News feed" is already a form of content moderation.
It's not hard to understand when you realize it's just the paradox of tolerance. The ISP won't tolerate curated "speech" from those intolerant of free speech.
You have to imagine they realize the nature of it. But it's kind of like "this statement is false." It's a challenge to have somebody stop them. And if that happens, they turn it around the other way.
But society is tolerant of intolerance and I believe it has to be tolerant, if we are to be a free society, as opposed to engineered society controlled by elites.
For example, Western society tolerates to some extent (and it should) bigots, racists, jingoists, people who take religious texts as literal manuals to life, antivaxxers, antimilitary activists, anti police activists, anti globalist activists, environmental activists, etc. These groups are known to be intolerant of some things and some classes of people. And society should tolerate them and allow them the same guarantees of free speech as to other people. There may be exceptions like neonazi/supremacist propaganda in Europe etc. but each exception should be carefully introduced and accepted in the population.
Not tolerating intolerance theoretically reduces, isolates, or rejects the intolerant element, stopping it from committing intolerances and therefore (again, theoretically) reducing net intolerance. Censoring a censoring element only serves as petty retaliation, since it is necessarily a net increase in censorship (if the censoring element is the host of the information, as in this case).
Depends if the censorship is against attempts at overthrowing the society. A society has to be fundamentally intolerant of this or it will cease to exist.
I look at this--with the caveat of casually accepting the frame of "censor" to include "stuff done by private companies" (which isn't, of course, how it is technically defined)--as "you shouldn't be allowed to censor people... but, since Facebook/Twitter think that's somehow OK, we are going to make an exception to our rule about this and censor them to show them how it feels (though of course, if you would prefer to not take part in this, contact us and we will happily turn this off for you, as we're only willing to take this demonstration so far)". FWIW, I consider this frame to be not only consistent but even acceptable, and it is similar to essentially all attempts to ensure freedom: "we believe in the freedom of all people... and so if you attempt to harm someone else's freedom we punish you (and only you) by taking away your freedom".
>FWIW, I consider this entirely acceptable of a frame to take
No, it's a total bullshit false equivalency. Basic physical infrastructure, using public rights of way and subsidies, that is for most people going to be their sole and exclusive choice, is not in any fucking way the same as social media. Stop it.
Setting aside for a moment the false dichotomy you are putting forward that somehow this company's business should be treated differently than any other company's business--which, FWIW, to me is a pretty ridiculous assertion--your frame here is kind of irrelevant to the question of whether there's irony to be had from censoring someone over censorship: as many others have pointed out in this thread, is nothing more than the well-known "paradox of tolerance".
>that somehow this company's business should be treated differently than any other company's business--which, FWIW, to me is a pretty ridiculous assertion
This is such a ludicrous statement I honestly am having trouble thinking out to respond. Companies in different industries being treated differently is the universal rule throughout the world and human history. Airliners aren't accountants aren't computer hardware manufacturers aren't electrical companies aren't sports operations aren't restaurants aren't railways aren't... etc etc. A physical infrastructure company isn't an internet platform, and shouldn't be. Seriously what!?
>your frame here is kind of irrelevant to the question of whether there's irony to be had from censoring someone over censorship
No, it's not remotely irrelevant precisely because different areas of society have different rules. However much you hate Free Speech saurik, at least in America it is the law, and the humans that make up, own, and direct the entities of Twitter or Facebook have the exact same 1st Amendment rights that the rest of us do. It's not "censorship" for you, me, or any other regular private entity to refuse to actively provide help for others' speech. You aren't entitled to my money or property to spread your message, nor am I to yours, unless we are making use of certain public resources.
And that last bit brings us back to ISPs, or USPS/FedEx/UPS for that matter. A physical infrastructure company using public money and rights of way and escaping liability for providing carriage via Common Carrier does not have those same rights, anymore than a public university has the same rights as a private one.
> The Court rejected that contention, noting that ownership "does not always mean absolute dominion." The court pointed out that the more an owner opens his property up to the public in general, the more his rights are circumscribed by the statutory and constitutional rights of those who are invited in.
> In its conclusion, the Court stated that it was essentially weighing the rights of property owners against the rights of citizens to enjoy freedom of press and religion. The Court noted that the rights of citizens under the Bill of Rights occupy a preferred position. Accordingly, the Court held that the property rights of a private entity are not sufficient to justify the restriction of a community of citizens' fundamental rights and liberties.
>Section 230 was created when Twitter (and the likes) were much less important for public discourse.
Section 230 (which was part of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, 10 years before Twitter was founded) has nothing to do with this. This is about the First Amendment. Section 230, by allowing moderation that isn't 100% perfect, certainly does encourage forums to be much more tolerant towards speech since only those who make the speech will be liable. But if Section 230 didn't exist, it wouldn't stop bans one single bit and in fact would only encourage vastly more stringent moderation and banning (assuming any unvetted user created content continued to be allowed at all on the general web).
>Consider this precedent :
Look, particularly with 1A SCOTUS has made many changes over the years and EXCLUSIVELY in the direction of more, not less. So if you're going to cite very old case law you really, really need to double check to what extent it's been superseded since. In this particular case the cite is in fact done for you, because if you'd actually read all the way to the bottom of the very Wikipedia[1] piece you cited you'd have noticed that it already has dealt with this:
>In Lloyd Corp. v. Tanner, the Supreme Court distinguished a private shopping mall from the company town in Marsh v. Alabama* and held that the mall had not been sufficiently dedicated to public use for First Amendment free speech rights to apply within it.
>Recently the case has been highlighted as a potential precedent to treat online communication media like Facebook as a public space to prevent it from censoring speech. However, in Manhattan Community Access Corp. v. Halleck* the Supreme Court found that private companies only count as state actors for first amendment purposes if they exercise “powers traditionally exclusive to the state."*
SCOTUS, particularly the current one, isn't going to eliminate the general 1A rights of organizations despite the authoritarian fever dreams of many.
----
1: Incidentally, the end of 230 would mean that Wikipedia-the-organization would be directly liable for everything users contributed which would result in certain changes, the exact nature of which will be left as an exercise to the reader.
> But if Section 230 didn't exist, it wouldn't stop bans one single bit and in fact would only encourage vastly more stringent moderation and banning (assuming any unvetted user created content continued to be allowed at all on the general web).
> smart lawyers will say that the best way to avoid that kind of liability is not to moderate at all. So Section 230 explicitly overruled that judicial decision, and eliminated liability for moderation choices.
(which would also be bad of course)
So I wouldn't be surprised if in the next years we would see changes :
There could be an intermediary status between hoster and editor : a "displayer" would not be liable for what its users do. It would (unlike a hoster) be liable for the moderating choices that he decides to do.
There might be additional requirements to benefit from the hosting status : of size, power, economic model, &c.
(Some of this has now been implemented in the EU.)
As for Manhattan Community Access Corp. v. Halleck, you'll note that it was decided by 1 voice, and there recently was a change in the SC, and the USA generally seems to have entered a very unstable time, so who knows what the future holds ?
Wy not block google's servers too? They should try that and see what their users say. These enablers of authoritarianism are entrenched in every facet of society. Its sad that we are living in times where lies are so strongly believed.
Pornhub dropped a bunch of content at the behest of MasterCard, so they don't mind their porn being curated.
"Recent studies have found that state-level religious and political conservatism is positively associated with various aggregate indicators of interest in pornography. "
I believe pornhub was under fire for not moderating user-submitted content, which was allowing child pornography and other exploitive content to get through.
No matter stance you take on it, the CESTA amendment to 230 protections holds pornhub accountable, meaning they nuked all their non-verified user content.
FYI if you read on in the twitter thread cited by the story, this has been walked back as bad communication by the company. They say they intended to allow any customer who wants FB and Twitter to be blocked by the ISP to reply to that email and that's what would happen. Not that it would be universally blocked for all customers.
Owner does not seem to be the best communicator, he admits this and says in his defense it has been three days of nonstop emails and calls that he answers even in the middle of the night. So maybe he's not thinking clearly.
From what I gather, they apparently blocked FB and Twitter because they were getting too many customers asking them to block those sites. It was presumably less time consuming to block them all than to handle all those requests individually. Until it blew up, anyway. Suddenly they are losing business and scrambling to enable it for those that want it, so they backtracked on it.
They could have saved a lot of time and anguish if they had simply said "no" to those who originally wanted them blocked.
Sure, they can try to claim that now. It's pretty clear that they blocked it for everyone and people have email them to be whitelisted.
"So we have a solution if you or your family would still like to be able to connect to Facebook or Twitter please let us know and we can add you to the allowed list to be able to not be blocked [...]"
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[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 293 ms ] threadCool.
I think they are back-pedaling after seeing the public response.
I guess "reading the entire article" isn't as catchy as trying to get a quip in the the HN comments.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/america-by-the-numbers/episodes/epi...
https://www.boisestatepublicradio.org/post/why-idahos-racist...
https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/intelligence-report/...
https://www.boisestatepublicradio.org/post/legacy-hate-spect...
Amazon, Twitter, FB, Apple, Google—none of them have to tolerate calling for murder and destruction and they aren't going to risk liability by ignoring it and letting people come to harm. If you feel like not being able to call for lynchings of left leaning Americans is curtailing your speech then you need to reflect on why you want Americans dead so badly.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aryan_Nations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randy_Weaver https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_Ridge
Idaho (particularly northern idaho) is still nazi town.
Fun story, the guy from the oatmeal grew up in northern idaho and made a blog post about the nazis there.
https://theoatmeal.com/blog/bus
Can you name any ten Nazis there? Five? Three?
It has more leftists than southern Idaho, but still, it's not exactly a bastion of progressive thinking. In fact, the state legislator doesn't have a single dem elected north of the boise metro, so I'm not sure how you're quantifying it?
Then what? Residents won't have any choice guaranteeing free access to all websites.
I don't see that working.
The worse one would be that they actually can block sites and access to the internet is forever changed, now at the will of the ISPs. (fortunately, this would be more plausible under a Republican government, and they're leaving.)
Assuming private companies have the moral right to fully regulate their services, they're just blocking a specific resource for violating their policy. If you build your case on blocking Facebook, you must argue that the utility chain leads all the way to Facebook. It is all or nothing.
1. The utility of an ISP is that of an ad hoc communication platform. Here we must ask why an ISP is an ad hoc communication platform and Facebook is not. Either both are or neither is.
2. The utility of an ISP is derived from providing access to Facebook. Again it is either both or none.
edit: s/an ad hoc/a/
An ISP hooks up the wires, lays and maintains the infrastructure for web connections for which you can build communications on but are not in themselves sufficient as communications. You can also build more than just communications on ISP infrastructure.
As examples, you watch Netflix on the infrastructure of an ISP but Netflix is not communications and you may bank on your bank's website on an ISP and that is not communications those are movie watching and banking respectfully.
I could continue to provide examples, but my point being is an ISP is not in itself sufficient for communications to be established and that you can establish more than communications on an ISP and that is why I don't agree.
The reason something should be an utility has to do with competition and how much power customers. The primary argument in favor of having Internet providers be an utility is that creating an competing Internet is not really an realistic concept, and the power customers of ISP has in their customer-provider relation is close to nothing. Utility laws exist to solve this specific situation in the market, and making every single company an utility would not be very efficient way to make use of those laws.
This would be like Amazon banning a specific end user from accessing and AWS hosted product.
This implies you agree with the ban on Network Neutrality, I do not.
It's about supporting authoritarianism & getting people to tolerate the idea.
Sometimes people resign in protest knowing full well the person replacing them will acquiesce more...
Why do you say that?
I also disagree with what the other companies did in the first place is censoring. They're removing rule breakers. You can still share your political views, just don't organize and call for the government to be other thrown because you believe everything you read online. You wouldn't freak out because a child porn distribution platform was turned off and claim it's censored.
They don’t regulate transmission because that is federal territory.
Now the article is slightly misleading because they didn’t block Twitter and Facebook globally. They only blocked traffic for those users that asked them to do so.
Washington's net neutrality law covers home service.[1]
[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/06/first-state-net-...
Also the suspension/bans of individual people and groups for violating well established ToS by a private company, vs banning entire sites out of petulance with no actual grounds.
The obvious follow up is for FB, et al to block the ISP so everyone switches to a different ISP.
I'll reiterate that this should be a starting point, not necessarily a hard and fast rule - there may be more nuanced situations where the standards that are appropriate for the government are inappropriate for social networks.
There's also the question of what levels of the stack it's appropriate for any censorship to occur at. Even if censorship of a particular class of speech is appropriate in general, it may not be appropriate for an ISP specifically to conduct that censorship.
But society is losing sight of that.
They went out of business within the year.
Ah the good old days where people actually had more than one choice of internet provider. I miss those days.
Courts Mostly Back FCC Assault on Net Neutrality https://www.vice.com/en/article/3kx5a9/courts-mostly-back-fc...
I.e., is an ISP implicitly contracted to route packets between its customers and the entire publicly visible Internet?
Plenty of ISPs block certain traffic. Anything from DDOS to torrents.
My impression is that some commercial practices can be widespread, and still fail under eventual court challenge. I'm thinking of the U.S. case regarding the advertised-vs-visible diagonal sizes of CRT monitors back in the day.
Not any crazier than losing your sponsorship because of something your father said before you were even born.
https://www.charlotteobserver.com/sports/nascar-auto-racing/...
If you're genuinely worried about this with regards to your ISP, consider writing to your lawmakers that ISPs should be treated like utilities as well.
I'd be happy if every mainstream ISP does this. Not because I agree to be clear, but because we could use some more competition in the market.
Thinking about it this way, what if you worked for Facebook or Twitter as WFH and they blocked these sites. What now, do you move? Get a new job? Suppose they also block VPN traffic as that is a known way around their blocking.
I thought ISPs were classified as common carriers and thus are obligated? Or are we saying we _don't_ want net neutrality now?
So it's all good your ISP can do whatever.
Censorship is just a classification of what they are doing. In both cases, it is selectively application of blocking of contents based on one's political believes. Calling them censorship is not an assessment whether they have a legal/illegal/legit/reasonable/unreasonable cause to carry out such acts.
I just find this approach somewhat ironic.
BTW, is anyone else getting "You don't have permission to access <URL> on this server" on that page too?
Telling 150 million people to sit down and shut up because their party happened to lose an election is a really, really bad idea that has no possible good ending for those doing it.
i do think you mean 74M? anyways i agree with you, it's a recipe for disaster. (and i'm not sure why you're being down-voted here.)
it'd be much more healthy to actively engage this cohort of people; allow them to present "facts" as they see fit and offer evidence to either support or refute their views.
What country have we shifted to talking about, because no US party has 150 million people, and the one that recently lost a national election—if you apply the percentages from Party ID surveys to the whole US adult population–has about half that many who identify with it.
No, its not. Its not even the 21% of voters who actively support the storming of the Capitol [0]. Its just the even smaller group actively advocating new and further political violence.
https://today.yougov.com/topics/politics/articles-reports/20...
46.8% of the people who care about this stuff are being told that they no longer have the right to speak on platforms where it would matter. That's a very serious problem.
Yes, as I said we are talking about a much smaller group than even that. Nor are we actually talking about silencing them, we're talking about certain forums not serving as megaphones for them.
> We are talking about silencing an entire party of people.
No, we aren’t. I mean, not with any connection to reality, we aren’t.
> Donald Trump received approximately 46.8% of the popular vote.
Yes, but no major platform is adopting a rule that would cutoff access to people who voted for Donald Trump, so that’s not relevant.
> Is that not slightly less than half of the voting public?
Yes, but no one is talking about silencing people based on membership in that group.
> You’re talking about silencing slightly less than 1/2 of the the people who care about this stuff.
No, literally no one is talking about doing that.
How deep are you into things? foxnews crazy, oann crazy, thedonald crazy, or all the way to Q crazy? It's not too far to go back.
Your above statement has no basis in reality. If you really want me to take the time to describe why, I'll be glad to.
I really hope you're right, but I am also very skeptical. For every centralized platform that a community is cut off from, another centralized platform opens to accept them.
And then you have decentralized platforms that specifically build in censorship in the stupidest places [0] in an effort to stave off "rightoids." It seems most of the people building the decentralized platforms aren't actually interested in the merits of open communication or free thought, but rather pushing their inconsistent, amorphous identity politics bullshit down everyone's throats (and I'm saying this as a communist). They bring their ruling-class-approved "us vs them" mentality into the platforms they are building and try to force participants to "bend the knee" or be banished. Sure, you can run your own instance, but why would you on a platform where you're not sure where you stand? Decentralized social media platforms will need to exercise a bit more tolerance before they see mass adoption.
I'm excited for things like Holochain though, which might help to turn everything on its head.
[0]: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/816
I can't tell if this announcement is parody.
Access Denied You don't have permission to access "http://www.kgw.com/article/news/local/idaho-internet-provide..." on this server. Reference #18.6e8e7b5c.1610406044.d4bc76a
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17154971
> If your organization uses web tools that allow you to track cookies or the IP addresses of people who visit your website from EU countries, then you fall under the scope of the GDPR. Practically speaking, it’s unclear how strictly this provision will be interpreted or how brazenly it will be enforced. Suppose you run a golf course in Manitoba focused exclusively on your local area, but sometimes people in France stumble across your site. Would you find yourself in the crosshairs of European regulators? It’s not likely. But technically you could be held accountable for tracking these data.
So, I've always wondered what they would do? yell at you harshly ?
But I also understand why US companies are doing this. It's kinda like when my dad got parking and speeding tickets sent home from a foreign country. Most likely nothing would happen if he didn't pay them, but you never know when you want to go back to holiday in $country, and the border agent sees them in your "permanent record".
It's at least imaginable that the EU _could_ do something similar, ask for a fine and if not dealt with, the company (or even worse directors of the company) getting some kind of dent in the proverbial permanent record.
(I'm not saying that it's likely, but if EU visitors aren't a big user base for your local regional news paper, I see why it's so tempting to just check the "Block EU visitors" checkbox.)
Downvoters (not necessarily you): This question is why I made sure to quote the paragraph, rather than just link it. "It does" is the lawmakers intent, regardless of feasibility in enforcing it. Avoiding the question entirely is why various sites have decided to block EU access.
No, it does not, anymore than Iran or China get to dictate rules, and for the same reason: the EU has no jurisdiction and no leverage. The EU of course is free to setup their own Great Firewall and block off anyone they dislike, and for people or businesses with assets under their jurisdiction they have an angle to go after that way. But a person or business entirely out of their territory is completely free to flip them the proverbial (or not so proverbial) bird. That is the fundamental nature of "law".
I'll add it's curious this seems to come up on HN with regards to the GDPR so regularly too, precisely because of my first sentence here. It speaks to a real lack of foundation in understanding the basics of law. Are people writing this actually thinking through the implications of every country being able to unilaterally dictate practice worldwide? Or do they think only the EU has this power?
But even if a company doesn't operate in the EU today, it may want to in the future. Or it may want to be acquired by a company that does. The future is unknowable, so I'd imagine they were advised to follow the law, even if there would be no immediate consequences to breaking it.
No, it doesn't, as you yourself admit two sentences later when you write:
>You're pointing out that they may not be able to enforce the law against an entity that does not operate in the EU.
Yes, which by definition means the law does not apply to that person to entity. That is the fundamental nature of law and sovereignty.
>The law itself says so.
Completely irrelevant, in the same way it's irrelevant if you or I order some societal change on our say so. Law is about power. And again, also in the exact same way that it's completely irrelevant if Pakistan or whomever have blasphemy laws on the books they say apply to everyone, China laws against "disrupting society" or someone sues a US entity under the UK's very plaintiff friendly libel laws. They can all be told to pound sand.
>But even if a company doesn't operate in the EU today, it may want to in the future. Or it may want to be acquired by a company that does. The future is unknowable, so I'd imagine they were advised to follow the law, even if there would be no immediate consequences to breaking it.
Sure, but that doesn't mean the law "applies". A company can voluntarily take whatever actions it wishes that it believes may benefit it in the future, but a core point of law is that it's INvoluntary. Since the GDPR doesn't apply to anyone outside of EU jurisdiction (or under treaties giving it local effect), they may choose to run it because they think it's a good idea, or not. Those within EU jurisdiction do not get that choice.
They claim that any company that has dealings with an EU citizen has to follow their laws. Of course they can’t do that. They could have passed a law forbidding their citizens from interacting with businesses that didn’t follow certain rules, since they have the ability to make rules for their citizens, but for some odd reason they decided not to.
Yes, they can.
So can (and does!) the US.
Either may have trouble enforcing them in some cases, but that’s true even of laws within their own territorial domain.
No, the whole point of sovereignty is that if you have it, you are ultimately the arbiter of your laws, including the bounds of where they apply.
You may have practical problems getting your hands on people to apply them, of course, but that’s a separate issue.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/citing-censorship-...
For north Idaho I'm sure that's the only option in town for high speed internet.
"Build your own Facebook"
"Build your own hosting service"
"Build your own iphone/android"
"Build your own ISP"
I don't like where we're heading
An "email like" structure, rather than single company lock in.
You have to imagine they realize the nature of it. But it's kind of like "this statement is false." It's a challenge to have somebody stop them. And if that happens, they turn it around the other way.
For example, Western society tolerates to some extent (and it should) bigots, racists, jingoists, people who take religious texts as literal manuals to life, antivaxxers, antimilitary activists, anti police activists, anti globalist activists, environmental activists, etc. These groups are known to be intolerant of some things and some classes of people. And society should tolerate them and allow them the same guarantees of free speech as to other people. There may be exceptions like neonazi/supremacist propaganda in Europe etc. but each exception should be carefully introduced and accepted in the population.
No, it's a total bullshit false equivalency. Basic physical infrastructure, using public rights of way and subsidies, that is for most people going to be their sole and exclusive choice, is not in any fucking way the same as social media. Stop it.
This is such a ludicrous statement I honestly am having trouble thinking out to respond. Companies in different industries being treated differently is the universal rule throughout the world and human history. Airliners aren't accountants aren't computer hardware manufacturers aren't electrical companies aren't sports operations aren't restaurants aren't railways aren't... etc etc. A physical infrastructure company isn't an internet platform, and shouldn't be. Seriously what!?
>your frame here is kind of irrelevant to the question of whether there's irony to be had from censoring someone over censorship
No, it's not remotely irrelevant precisely because different areas of society have different rules. However much you hate Free Speech saurik, at least in America it is the law, and the humans that make up, own, and direct the entities of Twitter or Facebook have the exact same 1st Amendment rights that the rest of us do. It's not "censorship" for you, me, or any other regular private entity to refuse to actively provide help for others' speech. You aren't entitled to my money or property to spread your message, nor am I to yours, unless we are making use of certain public resources.
And that last bit brings us back to ISPs, or USPS/FedEx/UPS for that matter. A physical infrastructure company using public money and rights of way and escaping liability for providing carriage via Common Carrier does not have those same rights, anymore than a public university has the same rights as a private one.
Section 230 was created when Twitter (and the likes) were much less important for public discourse.
I'm willing to bet that it's going to be amended, just like the EU version of it was.
Consider this precedent :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marsh_v._Alabama
> The Court rejected that contention, noting that ownership "does not always mean absolute dominion." The court pointed out that the more an owner opens his property up to the public in general, the more his rights are circumscribed by the statutory and constitutional rights of those who are invited in.
> In its conclusion, the Court stated that it was essentially weighing the rights of property owners against the rights of citizens to enjoy freedom of press and religion. The Court noted that the rights of citizens under the Bill of Rights occupy a preferred position. Accordingly, the Court held that the property rights of a private entity are not sufficient to justify the restriction of a community of citizens' fundamental rights and liberties.
Section 230 (which was part of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, 10 years before Twitter was founded) has nothing to do with this. This is about the First Amendment. Section 230, by allowing moderation that isn't 100% perfect, certainly does encourage forums to be much more tolerant towards speech since only those who make the speech will be liable. But if Section 230 didn't exist, it wouldn't stop bans one single bit and in fact would only encourage vastly more stringent moderation and banning (assuming any unvetted user created content continued to be allowed at all on the general web).
>Consider this precedent :
Look, particularly with 1A SCOTUS has made many changes over the years and EXCLUSIVELY in the direction of more, not less. So if you're going to cite very old case law you really, really need to double check to what extent it's been superseded since. In this particular case the cite is in fact done for you, because if you'd actually read all the way to the bottom of the very Wikipedia[1] piece you cited you'd have noticed that it already has dealt with this:
>In Lloyd Corp. v. Tanner, the Supreme Court distinguished a private shopping mall from the company town in Marsh v. Alabama* and held that the mall had not been sufficiently dedicated to public use for First Amendment free speech rights to apply within it.
>Recently the case has been highlighted as a potential precedent to treat online communication media like Facebook as a public space to prevent it from censoring speech. However, in Manhattan Community Access Corp. v. Halleck* the Supreme Court found that private companies only count as state actors for first amendment purposes if they exercise “powers traditionally exclusive to the state."*
SCOTUS, particularly the current one, isn't going to eliminate the general 1A rights of organizations despite the authoritarian fever dreams of many.
----
1: Incidentally, the end of 230 would mean that Wikipedia-the-organization would be directly liable for everything users contributed which would result in certain changes, the exact nature of which will be left as an exercise to the reader.
That's one way to look at it. On the other hand :
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200531/23325444617/hello...
> smart lawyers will say that the best way to avoid that kind of liability is not to moderate at all. So Section 230 explicitly overruled that judicial decision, and eliminated liability for moderation choices.
(which would also be bad of course)
So I wouldn't be surprised if in the next years we would see changes :
There could be an intermediary status between hoster and editor : a "displayer" would not be liable for what its users do. It would (unlike a hoster) be liable for the moderating choices that he decides to do.
There might be additional requirements to benefit from the hosting status : of size, power, economic model, &c.
https://www.laquadrature.net/2018/10/16/un-tiers-mediaire/ (fr)
(Some of this has now been implemented in the EU.)
As for Manhattan Community Access Corp. v. Halleck, you'll note that it was decided by 1 voice, and there recently was a change in the SC, and the USA generally seems to have entered a very unstable time, so who knows what the future holds ?
"Recent studies have found that state-level religious and political conservatism is positively associated with various aggregate indicators of interest in pornography. "
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/23780231209084...
No matter stance you take on it, the CESTA amendment to 230 protections holds pornhub accountable, meaning they nuked all their non-verified user content.
Owner does not seem to be the best communicator, he admits this and says in his defense it has been three days of nonstop emails and calls that he answers even in the middle of the night. So maybe he's not thinking clearly.
Still, pretty ridiculous.
They could have saved a lot of time and anguish if they had simply said "no" to those who originally wanted them blocked.
"So we have a solution if you or your family would still like to be able to connect to Facebook or Twitter please let us know and we can add you to the allowed list to be able to not be blocked [...]"