
The United Nations has a radical, dangerous vision for the future of the Web - tomp
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/09/24/the-united-nations-has-a-radical-dangerous-vision-for-the-future-of-the-web/
======
phaemon
The newspaper article is really exaggerating this report. Note how few actual
quotes there are and how many "in other words". Read the report for yourself
at:

[http://www.broadbandcommission.org/Documents/reports/bb-
wg-g...](http://www.broadbandcommission.org/Documents/reports/bb-wg-gender-
report2015.pdf)

It's mainly describing the current state of things, not advocating any
specific solutions. The one mention of licensing is one bullet point in a
chapter, not any kind of main focus. Half the actual suggestions are things
that people are mentioning in these comments as _alternatives_.

~~~
vilda
The report is exaggerating. That's expected and not surprising.

Groups within UN are fighting for funding. You won't get funded if the problem
you aim for does not receive attention. It won't receive attention unless it's
shoking in some way. That's why's there "pandemic proportion", "staggering
number", "sheer volume"\--not exactly scientific terminology.

The "report" should be called a "proposal".

------
jwess
According to the article, "the UN believes that online platforms should be (a)
generally responsible for the actions of their users and (b) specifically
responsible for making sure those people aren’t harassers."

Many websites already have problems with flippant takedown notices through the
DMCA. This article leads me to believe that the UN wants to apply a similar
process to eliminate "harassment", which is a fairly nebulous term. The
benefits of this proposal seem minuscule, while the costs of making "online
platforms generally responsible for the actions of their users" would be
enormous. Why would anyone think this is a good idea?

~~~
Rusky
Points a and b in that quote actually sound eminently reasonable to me. Online
forums already have moderators to make sure discussion stays civil, and it
sounds like a good idea to include "prevent people from organizing stalking
and SWATting campaigns" in that.

~~~
radu_floricica
The problem isn't if it's a good idea to moderate forums. Problem is when it
becomes a liability not to. The possibility of fines, lawsuits or god forbid
prison time can have the kind of chilling effects we can't even imagine.

~~~
Rusky
No, the problem _is_ whether to moderate forums- it's not happening and when
people try to come up with codes of conduct so they can moderate better,
there's a huge outcry.

It would be fine if we had better moderation in more places, even without any
laws. But even that's not happening.

~~~
oldmanjay
That huge outcry isn't going to go away no matter how patiently a censor
explains that censorship is good for everyone

------
choward
Some people just don't understand software. They treat it as if it were
something physical. For example, if I own a bar it is my responsibility to
make sure my customers don't get too crazy and to make sure underage people
don't drink. This law is relatively enforceable.

You can't apply this kind of thinking to the Internet. Software isn't a bar
for many reasons. You can duplicate software trivially. You can't possibly
monitor every copy of that software. For example, a site like reddit is open
source (for the most part I think). So in theory anyone could just host their
own reddit (or any other software). There are many open source web apps that
you can easily deploy your own copy of today. Which brings me to my next
point.

Where do you draw the line? Web sites are responsible for content their users
post. Are web hosting companies responsible for the sites their customers post
and therefore responsible for the comments too? What about ISPs? They let the
data through. Shouldn't they also be monitoring it? What about hardware
manufactures? They are letting the web hosting company run "bad" web sites.

If someone does something illegal on the Internet investigate it and blame the
user. It's really as simple as that.

~~~
Rusky
We have the exact same line-drawing question in the real world. All kind of
infrastructure and different levels over ownership go into a place like a bar,
but that doesn't mean the bar owner isn't responsible.

There is a similarly clear difference between an ISP (how the customer gets to
the bar), a web host (the landlord, maybe), and the website itself (the bar).

On the other hand, investigating whether someone committed a crime is a little
bit different online vs in the real world. Part of what websites could do is
make it easier to run those investigations by making reporting easier- Twitter
reporting, for example, is relatively hostile to people trying to report bad
behavior.

------
tomp
An interesting analysis:

[https://medium.com/@KingFrostFive/citation-games-by-the-
unit...](https://medium.com/@KingFrostFive/citation-games-by-the-united-
nations-cyberviolence-e8bb1336c8d1)

 _Using the metric of removing duplicate citations, not counting broken links,
those with little to no effort shown for those missing links (as in, not even
bothering to check the website), and removing anything that didn’t seem to
exist, only 64% remained._

~~~
danso
Not so long ago, we learned that the U.N. is a world-saving organization that
can't even pay its own interns. Not because it thought was morally OK to not
pay, but because they just didn't want to do the paperwork and rulemaking to
offer their interns a pittance. Ignoring the likely possibility that this
paper was partly compiled by the kind of work you get from unpaid laborers...I
doubt that an institution that can't do the easy, moral thing for its most
vulnerable employees is the type of institution that has the patience and
attention to detail to double-check its own footnotes.

------
leeleelee
The concept is a little ridiculous. First, there is this link which actually
shows that men receive more online bullying than women do:

[http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/06/01/the-
darkest-...](http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/06/01/the-darkest-side-
of-online-harassment-menacing-behavior/)

Second of all, the concept of policing every piece of content that appears on
social media is also ridiculous. With this line of thinking, why stop at just
social media?

Our e-mails, and in fact anything that can be deemed as
messaging/communication of some sort should also be monitored. Sending a
private google hangout message, a private facebook message, etc.

The policing of content should also pertain to individual websites, news
organizations like the washington post (before any article is published, a
government official should have to approve it), and perhaps we should even be
forced to allow random inspections by the government in our houses to prevent
domestic violence.

Obviously this concept is completely ridiculous, and I think the general
public will agree.

------
stared
I think that in a few years we get a browser add-on which automatically all
online harassments (at some cost of silencing false positives, as always). But
then each person will be able to set their threshold, depending on one's
sensitivity.

Global censorship actions (and especially be people not understanding
Internet... or even worse - wanting to make the information flow top-down) are
putting much greater burden... and risk.

While I don't want to downplay the online harassment, I (for a number of
years) used Internet as the only tool to escape from it. (Online it is much
easier to choose a place one is comfortable in.)

------
golemotron
I think the neologism "cyber-violence" is incredibly loaded terminology. They
need to be called out on it.

Violence according the dictionary is "behavior involving physical force
intended to hurt, damage, or kill someone or something."

There is no physical force over the internet. Being subject to harassment is
not violence.

~~~
pluma
The problem is that "violence" isn't the subject matter in the first place.
The subject is abusive behaviour. Abusive behaviour can involve physical
violence but it can also involve things that aren't physical (e.g. threats of
violence) or that are physical but not strictly violent (e.g. inappropriate
touching).

But "cyber-abuse" makes it sound like we're talking about spam and virus
attacks, so there's no useful term to slap "cyber" onto and call it a day. Not
that that's a good way to name these problems in the first place.

"Cyber" bullying is just bullying. "Cyber" harassment is just harassment.
Whether you do it face to face in person, remotely via phone or from the other
side of the world using the Internet is not a useful distinction.

Of course "the other side" (not the actual victims, just those speaking on
their behalf or portraying themselves as victims in order to suppress
criticism) isn't really helping by crying wolf and spreading the idea that
every single utterance in the world suddenly needs trigger warnings and gender
neutral (or reverse gendered) language. Sometimes a cigar isn't a rape tool of
the patriarchy.

------
ZoeZoeBee
I'm quite surprised at the number of users calling for censorship on <u>Hacker
News</u>....

~~~
geofft
Hackers have been wanting to "censor" the internet since September 1993: not
to enforce top-down rules, but to keep it a group of people (hopefully all
people, eventually) who respect social convention and respect each other. The
group that thinks it's a free-for-all without rules is a late-coming one
trying to claim the mantle of hackerdom. And in many cases, as with ESR's de-
facto takeover of the Jargon File, they've succeeded in presenting themselves
as the original hackers.

Don't be fooled. The technical design of the Internet and its serious non-
resilience to spam, malware, and other various opportunists (because we all
trusted that Internet users were _reasonable people_ ) should show you that
none of this was in the original vision. "Be conservative in what you send,
and liberal in what you accept from others" worked because everyone respected
that without enforcement, and there was no crowd demanding the _right_ to be
liberal in what they sent.

------
xacaxulu
Amongst other things, the UN has some extremely dangerous leftist (like
farrrrr left) tendencies, bordering on dystopian nanny-statist ideas. It's
almost considered a cabal in political circles that I've worked in.

Christopher Hitchens gave a brilliant speech on why censorship should not be
allowed called the Tyranny of Censorship.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IcJxN1VlcuA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IcJxN1VlcuA)

Context: I've done UNDP security work in Afghanistan and worked at various US
Embassies abroad.

------
grej
“The respect for and security of girls and women must at all times be front
and center,” the report reads...

(Except when we're selecting Saudi Arabia to chair our Human Rights Council:
[http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/anger-after-saudi-
ar...](http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/anger-after-saudi-arabia-
chosen-to-head-key-un-human-rights-panel-10509716.html))

------
devit
Why "Future"? It's the present.

None of the most popular websites supports free speech, in the sense that they
will not censor anything legal for them to distribute.

~~~
moron4hire
Child pornography is not free speech. Free speech is not "say whatever you
want."

~~~
tomp
I'm not sure parent was referring to pornography, but to countless examples of
sites like Facebook, Twitter, Reddit censoring information that they find
inconvenient (e.g. the fappening, r/fatpeoplehate, etc.).

> Free speech is not "say whatever you want."

Parent clearly defines "free speech" as "they will not censor anything legal",
which the websites above unfortunately don't follow.

> Child pornography is not free speech.

Ironically, in many jurisdictions "child pornography" includes virtual child
pornography and cartoons, which any sensible person would say should be free
(we can see movies depicting children getting murdered, people getting
decapitated and women getting raped, but not of 17 year olds having sex?!?)

~~~
RaleyField
> Reddit censoring information that they find inconvenient (e.g. the
> fappening, r/fatpeoplehate, etc.)

Calling it information is being generous. As a private entity they simply
don't have to suffer that speech. Fappening is probably illegal, and even if
it were not it would be an acceptable courtesy call to remove it.
Fatpeoplehate was about moderators harassing employees of imgur.

------
mtgx
I hope large tech companies like Google, Facebook and Twitter are happy now.
They started this. They were warned that if they "build the infrastructure"
for censorship - even for the most heinous of crimes - _more requests will
come_ for much more trivial stuff. Because it's easy to ask it of them once
they've proven it _can be done_.

The same will be true of backdoors. As soon as they start enabling backdoors
in China or India or Russia, you can bet not just the U.S. will want them
enabled, but many other countries, and they'll all have various reasons for
asking for them.

This is why, at least with the backdoor issue, they need to be _pro-active_ ,
and start building end-to-end encryption into their services and products
_now_ , so they can actually say later on that they "can't" give access to the
private communications of their users.

If they would've done this years ago, like pre-Snowden revelations, Russia and
China (and soon EU) would've had fewer excuses to "worry about national
security and privacy" and then ask them to build local data centers, costing
them billions.

------
moron4hire
This is so easy. Let the market decide. If such censorship is so fucking
great, let a new startup create a censored social network and see if all the
downtrodden people of the world flock to it, or see if they prefer to stick
with the rest of the world in the places where they may speak freely about
their own pet issues.

~~~
vezzy-fnord
Last I checked, Facebook wasn't exactly a bastion of free speech. It seems
like the market has indeed spoken, though I'd personally be very wary of
ascribing any moral judgments from macro-level market transactions --
especially given that in practice we live in highly complicated mixed market
societies, and not anything resembling laissez-faire.

------
rdlecler1
Policy makers consider the benefits, but not the costs. If we now need
licensing and content monitoring this protects incumbents because only they
have the resources to actually handle this, in the end we end up with a few
big organizations and the. Surprise suprise we try to regulate them because
they are too big.

------
littletimmy
Now this, is bullshit. We cannot sacrifice every little freedom we have in the
name of security.

I might get downvoted to hell for saying this, but women have to learn to be
comfortable with some degree of harassment if the only alternative is to
convert the internet into some limited speech zone.

~~~
rayiner
As a society we have the prerogative to balance values like freedom from
harassment and free speech. I fall strongly in favor of free speech myself,
but nobody has to learn to get comfortable with something they find
objectionable. Democracy means that people get to live in the society they
want to live in.

~~~
avn2109
Where I come from, in the American West, it is your job to fence your
neighbor's cattle _out_ if you don't want them on your land. It is not his job
to fence them _in_ so they stay on his land. This principle is enshrined in
centuries of statues and legal precedent. It works really well.

Similarly, I claim that in a free and open society, with lively and vibrant
debate constantly transpiring in the metaphorical agora, it is your job to
_not be offended_ by things that other people say, not their job _to avoid
offending you_.

~~~
geofft
What is the relevance of people being offended to this discussion? This is
about threats and harassment, not being "offended".

Neither the original article nor any other comment in this thread talks about
people being "offended". The UN report itself only mentions "offensive
behaviour" or similar a few times: a small number of times in quoting other
people's opinions or existing policies, once in regards to "sending offensive
emails from victim's email account" (that is, it is not the "offensive"
content per se that is a problem, but the impersonation), and once favorably
quoting Facebook's policy: "We prohibit content deemed to be directly harmful,
but allow content that is offensive or controversial. We define harmful
content as anything organising real world violence, theft, or property
destruction, or that directly inflicts emotional distress on a specific
private individual (e.g., bullying)."

The threat to "lively and vibrant debate" here is entirely invented, and it is
disingenuous for you to pretend that this discussion is about being "offended"
by things that people say. The discussion here is about threats and
harassment, which have no part in encouraging lively and vibrant debate, not
about potentially "offensive" ideas.

~~~
oldmanjay
A passionate defense of an unworkable mindset is a truly a sign of the
munificence of our age.

~~~
geofft
I'm sorry, I don't understand this comment. Which mindset do you believe is
unworkable, which defense do you believe is passionate, in what way would you
say our age is munificent, and is that a good or bad thing?

------
a3n
I'm trying to imagine this article written by the NYT, or pre-Bezos WP.

The WP is feeling very vaguely and subtly an outlet for Bezos/Amazon's
interests.

------
brighteyes
I agree with the article that the changes propose are radical and dangerous.
Instead, improvement could be achieved bottom up. For example, many women
complain about online dating being an unpleasant experience for women. Some
women decided to do something about it and started Bumble,

[http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/apr/12/bumble-
dat...](http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/apr/12/bumble-dating-app-
women-call-shots-whitney-wolfe)

A dating app that only lets women message men. It's an interesting idea and
totally changes the dynamic.

If online harassment is a problem on dating sites, women can and have created
a better solution for themselves in Bumble. Women can do the same with a safer
Twitter and Facebook - if they want. It's never been easier to do so, with
Kickstarter and other funding options.

Women are not a minority - they are over 50% of the population, and more than
capable of solving problems like this, again, if they want. Apparently things
were bad enough in dating for Bumble, but since there isn't a female-oriented
Twitter or Facebook, I suspect the problems are overstated on those sites.

