
8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service - gregmac
https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/5/20754943/8chan-epik-offline-voxility-service-cutoff-hate-speech-ban
======
tepidandroid
My opinion is that freedom of speech is a fine ideal to strive for, but it
relies on having a stable society with some minimum level of education (moral
and philosophical too, not just the technical kind). It requires people who
are able to fully parse the implications of what they are hearing to make
sound and rational judgements on the rejection of an idea or the embrace of
it. It creates a moral duty for the people who are listening to not only
reject, but to actively push back against ideals which are universally
understood to be reprehensible.

The concept of freedom of speech falls apart if universally reprehensible
speech is allowed to be publicaly espoused without being firmly challenged.
Forums like 8chan and 4chan effectively incubate hate speech by providing a
safe space for anonymized, like-minded individuals to congregate, espouse
their basest thoughts and feelings _and receive gratification for it_ -all
without challenge. Moderate people are repulsed by such forums and the
quantity of hate-speech they generate, which further compounds the negative
feedback loop.

Unchecked extremism compounded by more unchecked extremism inevitably leads to
scenarios like the ones we’re witnessing more and more often.

~~~
ddebernardy
Personally I'm in agreement with Popper's view that societies should tolerate
everything except intolerance. It draws a fine line between what's acceptable
speech and what is not. And going by it, things like 8chan should get shut
down.

The line of thought you put forward, by contrast, rubs me in a very wrong way.
It was used to justify, depending on the period and country, not allowing
people to vote on the basis that they didn't have enough revenue, didn't own
enough land, couldn't read and write well enough, etc. Allowing to
disenfranchise voters on some arbitrary sophistication basis can and, if
history is anything to go by, unfortunately will get abused. It breaks down
to: who decides what's sophisticated enough?

Popper's tolerance criteria, by contrast, seems clearcut in a you know it when
you see it kind of way.

~~~
irrational
>Popper's tolerance criteria, by contrast, seems clearcut

What is that criteria? Because I can easily see people disagreeing on what is
and is not intolerant. Would you agree that saying that a baker in Colorado
must make a cake for a gay wedding is intolerant of the baker's belief?
Because I'm certain a sizeable proportion of the US population would agree
that it is intolerant.

~~~
ajross
> I can easily see people disagreeing on what is and is not intolerant

Not in the subject at hand. I think pretty much everyone reasonable agrees
that "kill the {jews,muslims,hispanics}" (once more, folks, this was the THIRD
ethnic massacre advertised on 8chan!) is intolerant, no? Can't we start there?

~~~
wesammikhail
> I think pretty much everyone reasonable agrees that "kill the _INSERT
> GROUP_" is intolerant

I don´t know why but every time I read a sentence that starts with "I think
pretty much everyone reasonable agrees that ..." I get the feeling that the
person saying it haven´t really thought things through and does not see how
vastly more complex the world is than they assume.

Think about it this way: what if in the mind of the person making that claim,
it is one of self-defense and self-preservation? is it still intolerant?

Here is an example: As someone who grew up in the middle east, I heard people
out in the open say things like: "Jews ought to be killed off" or "the
imperialist American fucks deserve whatever happens to them" and if you ask
them why they believe and say such evil shit, the answer in some way, shape or
form always comes back to: they invaded our land, killed our ancestors and are
threatening to do the same to us now, and hence we are not being intolerant
but rather, we are just trying to defend ourselves (tribalism in other words).

You and I can agree that it is despicable and disgusting that people think
that way. But in __their __minds, you are the unreasonable one. What you call
intolerance to them is not that at all.

Take away: Perspectives matter in the world; and if you make a
hard/deterministic rule based on a subjective understanding of an issue
followed by projecting it as "what reasonable people should think", you will
always get into some shady edge cases that cannot be resolved by the
deterministic rule that you initially set because the world is not made up of
a bunch of you:s.

You and I probably agree on what is intolerant/tolerant in most cases.
However, other people who do not have the same cultural and moral upbringing
might disagree with us. Hence the parent´s comment: "I can easily see people
disagreeing on what is and is not intolerant"

~~~
ajross
I'm sorry, can you be specific: why shouldn't we burn 8chan to the ground?
Which other sites do you want to preserve that would get swept up by our
censorship run amok?

I'm gathering from your example that you're trying to preserve the rights of a
bunch of middle easterners to say things like "kill the jews", and not
understanding why you think that's permissible.

I mean, the El Paso shooter genuinely believes that the US is under invasion
by mexicans too. Everyone has opinions. The point is that _some opinions are
just wrong_. This is like morality 101. You aren't entitled to kill folks, no
matter how much you want to. And you aren't entitled to egg other folks on to
kill folks either.

~~~
wesammikhail
> I'm gathering from your example that you're trying to preserve the rights of
> a bunch of middle easterners to say things like "kill the jews"

You seem to have extracted the wrong conclusion from the post made because you
are thinking in identitarian terms.

> The point is that some opinions are just wrong. This is like morality 101.
> You aren't entitled to kill folks, no matter how much you want to. And you
> aren't entitled to egg other folks on to kill folks either.

You are 100% right, some opinions are wrong. But the point is: who´s to judge
which ones are right and which one are wrong? I assume that you, in your
infinite wisdom, find yourself to be of such a high caliber that all of
humanity should use what is obvious to you as the "gold standard"? You took
__your __inherited moral values from your culture, and projected them as the
natural and obvious conclusion we should all reach. Now if that isn´t
arrogance, I don´t know what is. And I am not trying to be offensive here,
this is what your comment indicates. And that is what you should have gathered
from the previous comment.

The funny thing is, I agree with you completely here. Again, you and I would
probably agree on 99% in terms of what we deem "moral" because both you and I
have inherited the those values from our cultures. However, you are in a sense
dictating that the moral values you inherited are infinitely more superior
than all the others. I mean you are making deterministic statements about
subjective issues while calling those who dare not agree "unreasonable"
without considering for a second that other people that live in other parts of
the world might have different views.

Let me put it in a different way: I am not defending group X´s right to say or
do Y. No matter the group. I hate identity politics beyond belief. I am merely
rejecting the notion that YOU are reasonable enough to make claim as to what
people should or shouldn´t be able to say. Because just as you think yourself
to be the wise and saintly moral crusader that you are, others think the same
about themselves. Soon enough HN user "bjross" will be writing the exact
opposite of what you are writing while claiming that he/she is the moral
authority on the subject.

It isn´t that I am defending the evil doers; it´s that I am opposing your
(proposed) evil which I think is far worse as it leads down a slippery slope
like which the world have seen many times before.

~~~
pron
> who´s to judge which ones are right and which one are wrong?

Who's to judge that anything is wrong? Murder, theft etc.? In the end, we must
organize a society. If you don't like thinking of society's judgment -- made
through whatever institutions it creates -- as universal moral rulings, think
of them as organizational rules. If you kill someone under certain conditions,
society puts you in jail, and the word "wrong" is used for those things
society deems jail-worthy (and probably beyond that, too). In this case,
society does decide what opinions are right or wrong in the correctness sense,
only what ideas can be detrimental to its own survival to a degree that
justifies enforcement. Who decides where is that line? The same institutions
that decide the penalty for reckless driving.

~~~
kodt
So those with power to enforce their ideals on society get to decide morality
then?

~~~
pron
Well, normally morality is "decided" by a social process, which also shapes
the rules, so they don't often diverge by much. But my point is to separate
the two issues: society decides the rules; who "decides" morality is another
discussion.

~~~
geargrinder
Freedom of speech is the social process that works because ideas can be aired
and then opposed or supported. Free conversations are where extremes can be
moderated. Driving ideas or words underground where they cannot be easily
heard or clearly countered is a path to authoritarianism.

~~~
pron
Your argument is not very meaningful because freedom of speech means something
_very_ different in the US and in, say, France, and both of these different
things can be said to "work well". I, too, agree that freedom of speech is
very important, but can have a completely different opinion on whether 8chan
should be shut down, because what I mean by freedom of speech is different
from what you mean, and I believe neither of us means the freedom to say
anything, at any place, in any medium, and in any time or circumstance. We
just differ on the degree to which we limit that freedom, or _whose_ freedoms
we value.

 _Any_ freedom is some compromise. If a society has two people or more, then
either one person is allowed to, say, enslave the other, in which case the
society isn't totally free, or not, in which case the society also isn't
totally free. So there is no such thing as absolute freedom, and whenever we
say freedom we actually mean some point on a spectrum. We could argue over
what that reasonable point is, but absolute freedom is something that can't
exist. So instead of speaking in absolutes, let's acknowledge that we're
arguing over a favorite compromise.

------
nilkn
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.

~~~
DonHopkins
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.

~~~
moab
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.

~~~
ibejoeb
>promote alt-right ideologies

Why are invoking alt-right? One of the two shooters was radically left, and he
posted his threats on Twitter.

~~~
moab
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.

~~~
_carl_jung
> If you know of a board with a contingent of alt-left/identity-politics

This bubble is so large it no longer appears to be a bubble.

------
CydeWeys
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.

~~~
buildzr
> 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.

~~~
a254613e
> 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.

~~~
megla_
> it's banned for the effect that it casuses, the intention it has, and the
> attorcities it shows.

What rational person will see an ISIS video and go: "Hmm this looks good,
guess I should join ISIS".

~~~
a254613e
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.

------
Smithalicious
This once again goes to show that you can do nothing illegal and still be
virtually locked out of the internet. The viewpoint that "it's okay to kick
8chan off the internet" is not consistent with the viewpoint that "the
internet should be neutral infrastructure". Take from that what you will.

People are doing the "yada yada not entitled to a platform" thing, but the
distinction between free speech and having a platform is meaningless in
reality. It's like saying "you can say anything you want, but we won't let you
use the atmosphere to propagate the sound waves".

We now live in a society where it is acceptable for private companies to
essentially completely ban individuals from exercising their free speech on
the internet. The canary in the coalmine was The Daily Stormer; all the
content there would be considered very objectionable and completely without
merit by any remotely sensible person, so few people complained about it being
shut down. Then came Gab and such. Now it's 8chan, which last time I checked
still had more posts about video games and anime than about politics.

Make no mistake, sites you use will be next. /r/the_donald is already
quarantined. Youtube and Twitter have gotten much more aggressive with their
moderation too.

We need to allow people on the edges of the spectrum to say what they want
even if it is without merit. Extreme speech is what prevents normal speech
from being censored.

More than anything we can not allow random internet companies to be de-facto
lawmakers and speech police by controlling who is allowed to say things on the
internet.

~~~
allemagne
I get that you're trying to address a larger philosophical question, but what
action are you actually suggesting in this particular instance?

Should Cloudflare be _forced_ to host 8chan?

Even more than YouTube/Twitter, this seems like a clear case of business
owners deciding that 8chan is too much of a liability to do business with.

~~~
jimbobimbo
If we think of CF/Voxility as of a "neutral infrastructure", CF and Voxility
shouldn't be "forced to host", but also shouldn't proactively shut down sites,
unless there's an obvious violation of ToS. There's a process of forcing
companies to do something, and it involves a judge and a jury.

I find it ironic to see cheering of these actions by The Verge, who is in the
tank for "net neutrality". I don't like what site in question was hosting, but
there're other ways of dealing with them.

~~~
throwawayjava
_> If we think of CF/Voxility as of a "neutral infrastructure"_

"Property rights for me but not for you"

~~~
jimbobimbo
Nobody denies property rights to CF and Voxility. At the same time, both
companies went into the contract with the site in question. Did said site
violate the contract? From my reading of the situation, no. "Contract
obligations for me but not for thee?"

And to be clear: I do think that companies have capacity to terminate
contracts, however, there either should be clear violation of ToS, or court's
decision behind that. Neither seem to have had happened in this case.

~~~
throwawayjava
_> there either should be clear violation of ToS_

I'm not aware of any consumer-accessible supplier who provides ToS that
require abuse. In particular, CS doesn't:

"we may at our sole discretion terminate your user account or suspend or
terminate your access to the Service at any time, with or without notice for
any reason or no reason at all. We also reserve the right to modify or
discontinue the Service at any time (including, without limitation, by
limiting or discontinuing certain features of the Service) without notice to
you. We will have no liability whatsoever on account of any change to the
Service or any suspension or termination of your access to or use of the
Service. You may terminate your account at any time through the Service’s
account dashboard."

And there was certainly meeting of the minds on this term. CF has booted sites
in the past due to political backlash. Those boots were high-profile and well-
covered in the news. And even without those high-profile boots, any reasonable
person will expect someone using CF and running a site like 8chan to know what
CF's terms say about terms for continuing service with any/no reason.

If you want your site to stay up even in the event of one of your customers
committing a mass murder while your other customers cheer him on, then don't
use CF.

It's true that finding another provider might be hard unless you have $$$
because the market for that product is really small -- not even 8chan's
original founder is in that target market.

Oh well. I want $0.001 diapers for my kid and a lower grocery bill. The market
doesn't provide those either. But if universal access to cheap diapers and
high-quality food aren't fundamental human rights, I don't see why cheap
anything-goes top-of-the-line DDoS protection services should be.

------
danharaj
"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.

~~~
DrDimension
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.

~~~
adamch
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?

[1] [http://comp.social.gatech.edu/papers/cscw18-chand-
hate.pdf](http://comp.social.gatech.edu/papers/cscw18-chand-hate.pdf)

~~~
DrDimension
That study only proves that it moves extremists somewhere else...

If a man can't speak his truth, what alternative does he have to violence?

~~~
lliamander
Someone once said "The pen is mightier than the sword. But when you have taken
my pen, what choice do I have?"

~~~
adamch
Forgive me if I prefer to base my policy analysis on quantitative studies
rather than idioms.

~~~
lliamander
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.

~~~
afiori
> Shallow statistics are never going to replace empathy* when it comes to
> sound policy making.

Agree, hyperrational people often forget how easy it is to lie with (true)
numbers.

------
s9w
So the campaigns against free speech show results. The wheels are in motion,
the dominoes are falling. Funny how here on HN the use of the term "free
speech absolutists"/"free speech absolutism" has absolutely skyrocketed for
example. So are these the last days of the internet? 4chan is still there,
voat too (although barely) - but I don't know how much longer. 100% legal
sites are taken offline for absolutely no reason at all besides being on the
"wrong side". And the internet is cheering. What a sad time

~~~
kaolti
Yea. I find it quite ironic that HN of all places is generally speaking
supportive of this.

I do think though that the internet is kind of a different game though. I
don't think anything can be banned altogether. People will always find a way.

Ultimately we'll just end up creating new anonymous and distributed services
where we can talk freely and corporations (lol) and governments can't dictate
what is acceptable.

~~~
s9w
The pace has quickened though. The big corporations are all coordinated now.
Hosters, domain registrars, other infrastructure, payment processors,
Traditional and Social Media... everyone is locked in and blindly banning
everyone who isn't theirs

~~~
kaolti
True, I'm just saying you can't stop people talking. Nature always balances
out one way or another.

~~~
kypro
The problem with stopping people from talking is that they have no choice but
to get violent. In my opinion it's the politicians have ignored the public for
so long on issues such as immigration which are fueling this.

~~~
kaolti
Exactly. Censoring has the opposite effect.

------
hacknat
What does free speech have to do with this? Cloudflare and other companies
have 1st amendment rights as well. One of them is that they can serve
customers as they like, as long as they are not violating the rights of a
protected class. Political ideology or party affiliation is not a protected
class, nor should it be. Twitter could ban every Republican on its platform
tomorrow and it if the government tried to stop them the Supreme Court would
likely side with Twitter.

Companies are allowed to discriminate against political ideology as much as
they like. It’s _their_ 1st amendment right to do so. So 1st amendment
advocates should be on the side of company censorship, not the other way
around.

~~~
dcolkitt
Imagine an alternate scenario.

Say the major tech companies get fed up with Elizabeth Warren's calls to
regulate them.

Facebook removes all her groups. Cloudflare shuts down her websites. Youtube
removes her videos. Google only leaves anti-Elizabeth Warren search results
up, etc. Basically a major presidential candidate is completely locked out of
having any presence on the Internet whatsoever.

Would your reaction be the same? "This has nothing to do with free speech.
These are merely private companies deciding they don't want to associate with
Elizabeth Warren."

~~~
hacknat
I think market retribution would take care of their decision pretty handily. I
also think the same is true for Republicans. Twitter could never survive the
market retaliation if they banned the Republican Party, but they have every
legal right to do so.

Also, changing the players in my scenario has nothing to do with anything,
mine isn’t an opinion it is a matter of rule of law. If you don’t share that
assumption with me than I have to fall silent.

~~~
Taek
Market retribution would take time, and I'm not sure the impact on market
usage would be as big as you suggest. Certainly the market retribution on
Facebook invading privacy has been slow a minimal.

And that aside, Warren would certainly lose the election if that happened. The
election would be materially interfered with, regardless of whether the market
responded to the moderation or not.

------
boramalper
What people (seemingly) fail to realise is that neither Cloudflare is the
Internet nor Voxility is a public infrastructure. They are _private_
enterprises which are free to act in however they want with regards to the
service they provide as laid out in their contract.

That is the danger of centralisation; when they remove their service, it feels
as if your rights has been violated because (a) you have been so used to them
(b) you cannot exist without them practically.

Now imagine it resurrecting on IPFS/Dat/..., where every visitor could "pin"
the website.

~~~
DrDimension
A private company must act as public infrastructure once it becomes a de facto
monopoly.

~~~
castis
edit: nah

~~~
DrDimension
The regulation applied to electric and telephone companies in the US...

How can people be this ignorant of recent history?

------
commanderjroc
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?

~~~
harryh
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.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schenck_v._United_States](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schenck_v._United_States)

~~~
jonny_eh
The justice's analogy in that case was bad, but otherwise it would have been a
good argument.

If speech is meant to directly lead to harm, it should be constrained.

~~~
stale2002
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.

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.

~~~
lliamander
> 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.

------
commandlinefan
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”.

~~~
nilkn
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.

~~~
mrguyorama
/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.

~~~
malvosenior
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.

------
grawprog
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.

~~~
anthonybsd
>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.

------
FDSGSG
You can still access 8chan directly at 206.223.147.222 and 206.223.147.215.

    
    
      curl 206.223.147.222/index.html -H 'Host: 8ch.net'
    

This is their backend hosted at [https://digitalrealty.com/data-centers/san-
francisco/200-pau...](https://digitalrealty.com/data-centers/san-
francisco/200-paul-ave-san-francisco-ca) by
[http://www.centaurico.com/](http://www.centaurico.com/)

------
kaolti
We're constantly denying our responsibility to manage our emotions and giving
it away to others, so that they can protect us from ever seeing anything that
might upset us.

Some people seem to think that there are authorities we can trust to enforce
the lines we draw in the sand on what is acceptable speech and what isn't.

There is no such authority. People abuse authority because they can and guess
what. When you'll try to say "Hey, you can't do that!" they'll just ban you
too.

It is hard and unpleasant and disturbing to deal with reality. It's still real
though.

~~~
dominostars
8Chan isn't being targeted because they hurt people's feelings, they're
targeted for being a breeding ground for terrorists.

Feel free to make whatever argument you want about whether platforms should be
forced to provide service to websites that radicalize terrorists, but please
don't make this about something it's not.

~~~
read_if_gay_
> please don't make this about something it's not.

No, you are. How do you think 8ch manages to be a breeding ground for
terrorists? By kidnapping people and sending them off to terrorist training
camps?

Obviously their method is emotional manipulation. That includes hurting
people’s feelings. Censoring speech to protect people from that is a piss poor
long term strategy compared to equipping them to properly deal with it.
Society will end up as a bunch of babies unable to deal with reality.

~~~
kaolti
Agree. We're well on our way to be honest. Might be no way of stopping it.
It'll just swing around on it's own in a few hundred years.

------
LargeWu
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?

~~~
ergocoder
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.

~~~
ceejayoz
Wait, you'd be _more_ comfortable if the censorship came from the government?

~~~
ergocoder
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?

~~~
mbesto
> 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.

~~~
ergocoder
That's why it's weird.

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?

~~~
ceejayoz
1\. The speech is wrong.

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.

~~~
ergocoder
I'd say every CDN decides to not host it is effectively similar to US
government bans it.

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.

~~~
ceejayoz
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.

~~~
ergocoder
Ok, so your position is:

\- 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?

~~~
ceejayoz
> Other CDNs are also ethical for not banning it.

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.)

~~~
ergocoder
It's still absurd to me.

> 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.

------
CM30
On a related note, 8chan has both a Tor/hidden service version and a ZeroNet
version, and there are ads going around on how to access those.

So it's clear the folks running the site knew that something like this might
happen, and set up alternatives (on 'uncensorable' services) to provide access
in such a situation.

It may provide for an interesting case study in whether a community site like
this moving to P2P services or Tor can maintain the same level of activity as
on the clearweb, or whether that effectively hides it for a decent percentage
of the userbase.

------
mikedilger
According to Andrew Torba of Gab (I cannot speak to the veracity of this
myself): "As predicted in our statement to Buzzfeed: 8chan is indeed online.
It's on ZeroNet, a decentralized and open source peer-to-peer version of the
internet. It literally can not be censored now. By anyone. At all. Not admins.
Not governments. No one. This isn't as good as it sounds. It means no illegal
content can be permanently removed, including things like child exploitation,
human trafficking, etc. Happy now, media elites?"
[https://gab.com/a/posts/102568802463422885](https://gab.com/a/posts/102568802463422885)

~~~
JulianMorrison
The way to remove those things is to arrest the operators and demand they hand
over access to the hosting, and shut it down and prosecute them.

~~~
whenchamenia
The whole issue is that no laws have been broken. How and why would we arrest
innovent citizens?

------
Darth_Hobo
As a free expression absolutists I see no problem with private companies
refusing service, as long as they are not breaking their contract. And ideally
it should be perfectly fine to have whites-only restaurants, or do a
discriminatory hiring practice and not hire any women. Because I see no
logical reason why freedom of association should have any limits, as long as
you are not bound by some obligations that you have agreed to.

As for people crying about how internet is getting censored - don't be an
impotent and start programming decentralized alternatives. Like Fediverse and
Crypto devs do. If you really care about freedom that is. At this point it
should be pretty clear that the major enabler of internet censorship is the
whole paradigm of centralized services, because it concentrates too much power
in one hands. In order to combat it we should create high-quality
decentralized alternatives, where everyone owns a small chunk of the system
and can only ban somebody from that specific chunk.

------
lunias
Good stalling tactic, but this really just inconveniences (i.e. makes mad) a
bunch of extreme individuals who will undoubtably rally through other means
almost immediately.

We really need to start talking to people before they act and not shutdown
their communications after the fact.

Where are the extremists now? They used to be on 8chan... now they're... ?

------
romaaeterna
If we're going to have internet censorship, I don't want it to be a backroom
thing. It needs to be transparent, auditable, appealable, with bright line
rules and due process guarantees.

It's unfortunate if we need to live with some level of censorship. But I don't
accept it being carried out in back rooms by unaccountable companies operating
hand-in-hand with illegal DDoS attacks. Put it out there in the open, and
let's have a legal democratic process around it that tries to guarantee some
amount of fairness and attempts to give the weak protection from the strong.

~~~
idlewords
Speaking as someone who runs a public site with the discretion to ban
accounts, no thanks. Due process means people will game your policies. We've
had arbitrary internet censorship by site operators since day 1 and it works
pretty well.

~~~
Karunamon
> _Due process means people will game your policies._

And? If your policies are liable to being "gamed", then either your policies
or your enforcement is insufficient. And I say this with a pretty good deal of
forum moderation experience. When you find something that your _objectively
defined_ rules miss, you update your rules appropriately and continue on.

Life as a mod is about a million times easier, for both you and your users,
when you minimize the amount of judgment calls on edge cases that have to be
made.

~~~
amyjess
> Life as a mod is about a million times easier, for both you and your users,
> when you minimize the amount of judgment calls on edge cases that have to be
> made.

No, life is much easier when rule 0 is "don't piss off the people running the
show", and anyone who complains about mod actions gets instantly permabanned.

~~~
Karunamon
I should have added "if you want happy users and not a e-fiefdom". I've been a
part of many forums that moderate according to your description, and they're
almost without exception, miserable places to be that could be so much better
if the mods didn't let petty bureaucrat syndrome go to their heads.

------
metalgearsolid
I think it's really important that the web be free and open and I think
Cloudflare and now Voxility have done a tremendous job in exercising their
freedom as private entities to shut down voices of hate.

Other service providers can step up to the plate and bear the consequences of
providing service to communities that incite violence to the point of having
direct ties to mass shootings.

------
nimbius
all philosophy aside, these decisions were not made based on a moral
conscience of any sort. Just because corporations are in some sense treated
like people in the United States doesnt mean they act in any way like them.
Epik and Cloudflare are donning the cloak of moral turpitude to protect their
shareholders.

Cloudflare and Epik are keenly aware that if they do not take some tangible
action immediately, they expose the company to enormous risk. They understand
that Americans will not be able to get satisfaction from their government or
law enforcement. People will file lawsuits that will be well funded, and
increasingly difficult to defend.

Even if there is no lawsuit, there could still be a mass exodus from these
providers. GoDaddy enjoyed the same such exodus after years of bad PR and
Cloudflare is no different. Host the site that planned a mass shooting, and
companies will flee from your service to protect their brand.

This is really no different than Subway dropping Jared, or Disney dropping
PewDiePie.

------
disease
I realize this may not be the best place to talk about it, but is there some
good explanation for what seems to be a totally insatiable thirst for white
supremacy in America these days? It seems to me like this is the real story
here and, for the most part, it is not being covered in any real sense by
either liberal, conservative or independent media.

~~~
inscionent
The Southern Poverty Law Center tracks hate groups in the US and is a good
source of information.

[https://www.splcenter.org/issues/hate-and-
extremism](https://www.splcenter.org/issues/hate-and-extremism)

~~~
whenchamenia
Splc thinks juggalos are a hate group, id not suggest that source.

------
Lt_Riza_Hawkeye
>Internet hate forum

If 8chan is an internet hate forum, so is reddit. Yes, 8chan has little to no
moderation. People go on 8chan and talk about whatever, the fact that there is
hate speech _somewhere_ in there, and it is allowed to stay there, doesn't
mean the _entire site_ is dedicated to hate speech. We don't say "Internet Cat
Photo Forum" about reddit just because /r/aww exists.

There will always be places "providing providing a safe space for anonymized,
like-minded individuals to congregate, espouse their basest thoughts and
feelings." This is firmly a good thing. You can always hang out somewhere else
if you don't prefer it. 8chan going down means nothing in the long run. One
goes down another survives.

------
mirimir
8chan and its ilk are primarily symptoms. Of just exactly what, I'm not sure.
But major factors in the US are very likely ongoing deindustrialization,
increasing wealth inequity, global climate change, and changes in gender
roles.

Which of those are ultimately good or bad is another conversation. Although I
gotta say that gender roles certainly needed change. But the fact remains that
they're happening.

But of course, 8chan and its ilk are also mechanisms that exacerbate those
symptoms. However, while shutting them down may be morally satisfying, it's no
substitute for actually addressing (yeah, politics speak) the underlying
problems.

Not that I have much of a clue how, sadly enough.

This ain't going to end well.

------
DiseasedBadger
This should be a wakeup call for anyone still using cloudflare.

------
colechristensen
Many people are talking about freedom of speech, and yes it is something very
important to support when you're talking about what governments cannot do.

But CloudFlare and whatever hosting company this is are not governments.
Freedom of speech doesn't mean others are required to be your megaphone when
you're saying objectionable things. The _government_ should be very restricted
in its ability to censor you, but your publisher? not so much.

If you really don't like it, make your own publisher (internet hardware
company, CDN, etc.)

------
birracerveza
I might be late to the party. However, I still want to warn you guys that by
shutting down these sites, you are doing nothing more than hiding the filth
under the rug. There is an adagio going on 4chan that shutting down /b/ would
be similar to clogging a toilet: it WILL overflow somewhere else.
Congratulations, you have shut down yet another site. Do you think these
people and their ideologies have disappeared? Nope, they are now gone into an
even more remote corner of the internet to foster even more anger.

------
parliament32
In comparison, NFS' policy on offensive content:
[https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/about/faq#TheLongGame](https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/about/faq#TheLongGame)

>Of course, the simplest reason is that it's not up to us to decide what the
rest of the world should or shouldn't see. Bad news, it's not up to you
either. Worse news, it's still true even when we agree. Which is probably most
of the time.

>Finally, censorship is always bad, for a variety of well understood reasons
that we don't need to repeat here. But in the case of some types of content,
it has special dangers. When you censor a web site based on the extreme or
dangerous views of its creator(s), you haven't stopped those people from
thinking that way. You haven't made them go away. You certainly haven't
stopped the people who hold those views from doing whatever else they do when
they're not posting on the Internet. What you've actually done is given
yourself a false sense of accomplishment by closing your eyes, clapping your
hands over your ears, and yelling "Lalala! I can't hear you!" at the top of
your voice. Pretending a problem doesn't exist is not only not a solution, it
makes real solutions harder to reach.

------
bdcravens
Most days I randomly grab a t-shirt to wear. Today I ended up wearing my
Cloudflare shirt.

------
paganel
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.

~~~
cbg0
This wild speculation of yours is based on how the "agent's" pants matched
their "snickers" ?

~~~
paganel
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.

------
neom
For those curious, here is the Canadian Governments information on the bounds
around hate and freedom in speech:
[https://lop.parl.ca/sites/PublicWebsite/default/en_CA/Resear...](https://lop.parl.ca/sites/PublicWebsite/default/en_CA/ResearchPublications/201825E)

------
ulzeraj
When Cloudflare pulled the plug on them I didn’t saw that as a good idea
because by doing that you are forcing the community underground and further
radicalization is the next step. And here they are using the daily stormer
CDN.

On the other hand as deplatforming becomes a norm perhaps we could see a rise
in demand for decentralized platforms like IPFS or ActivityPub.

------
ergothus
Free speech is a fascinating debate to me.

When I was younger, I was a free speech absolutist. I believed in rationality
and that if you couldn't defend/oppose ideas then your position had no
strength. Censorship was a sign of weakness. Even clearly "good" censorship
(say, banning child porn) has problematic boundaries.

Now...I'm far less confident. I still believe in rationality, but I also see
clear weaknesses in human's ability to process. Rationality emerges over time,
not in the moment. Speech isn't just ideas, it's emotion. It creates social
pressure, fears, threats. And humans are social creatures. Even this forum is
chock-ful of signaling patterns and inclusion. These aren't personal failures,
but human facts - to be without these would be to dissolve the functions that
make us form communities - to remove the items that make us NOT be "defectors"
(to signal).

We have to trust others, or we'll spend all our time verifying all the
information we get and never accomplish anything. But this introduces the
ability for others to exploit this. Speech has never been inherently good nor
bad, and thus "free speech" is also neither inherently good nor bad. It is
just a force multiplier for whatever you try to do. And "good" speech can't be
solely dedicated to battling "bad" speech if it wants to achieve any change,
while bad speech achieves its goals just by existing, or even by demanding the
attention of those giving "good" speech. An inherent imbalance.

In the big picture, this all shakes out over time. The good speech
investigates and explores ideas. Bad speech is beaten. Speech in the middle
helps ensure that the "good" speech really is good, and periodic bouts of bad
speech help the system enforce the boundaries that move everything in a
healthy-for-society direction. But to zoom out to that level is to ignore all
the suffering such a system entails. "You can't have a society that is afraid
of hurting feelings!" free speech advocates will cry out...correctly. Some
amount of suffering is unavoidable. Pick any arbitrary line between restricted
speech and unrestricted speech and it's easy to see that people will suffer as
a result. But that does not mean that we should automatically accept that
unrestricted speech is the answer. That we should be blind to all the
suffering that IS happening because we fear the suffering that MIGHT happen.

Or perhaps unrestricted speech IS the answer...but a lot more of us need to be
calling out for the societal responsibilities. Free speech is a powerful tool,
and like any tool should be used wisely. If we aren't calling people out for
using it poorly, but are calling out people for any attempt to restrict it,
we're empowering only one side of the equation. But that gets into a circular
argument, because if you replace government restrictions with social ones, you
have the same result - restricted speech.

I don't know where I stand on this. The only thing I see clearly is that the
number of people that seem to be seriously examining the issue is vanishingly
small relative to the population.

------
kaolti
I've been waiting for answers to these question:

What do we think happens to hate when when we ban it in discussions?
Evaporates into thin air?

Also, is there ANY proof at all that banning hate speech is effective in
stopping hateful actions in the short and long term?

Answering these questions should be the BASIS for any decisions we make right?

~~~
irvwash
Deciding to commit mass murder rarely happens in a vacuum. It typically
happens when you surround yourself all day by people who tell you that mass
murder is a good idea. Radicalization is a social phenomenon.

I'm critical of censorship, but not because I think it's ineffective.

~~~
kaolti
You've made a case for how radicalisation happens, you've not proved that
banning words is effective against it.

~~~
irvwash
Radicalization happens through words. You can ban radicalization by banning
words.

That won't completely get rid of it, but it can make it a lot less accessible,
which reduces the amount of radicalization that occurs. I don't think people
start out with the intent to get radicalized. They stumble upon a place like
/pol/ and see that it's interesting and so they stick around and gradually get
convinced. It's much harder to stumble upon a Tor hidden service or a private
chatroom than a publicly accessible webpage.

China's great firewall is not terribly hard to get around, but it's very
effective regardless. Inconvenience is powerful.

~~~
kaolti
China is exactly where we end up if we start banning speech. If you think
that's a good direction I rest my case.

~~~
irvwash
Like I said before, I'm critical of censorship. I used to be a free speech
absolutist. I think I'm not quite an absolutist any more (using 8chan for
years disillusioned me a little), but I still think censorship is rarely
justified. China is of course terrible.

That said, I don't buy the slippery slope argument. My country bans holocaust
denial, and though I think that ideally it shouldn't, it hasn't actually
slipped down the slope and the situation seems stable. 8chan currently bans
certain content that it didn't in the past (it's now much stricter against
photographs of children) and it's still incredibly permissive.

If 8chan stopped allowing posts that promote shootings it wouldn't end up
becoming like China. I don't think it would lead to other more draconian
restrictions.

The harm of censorship usually outweighs the benefit (if any), but not in this
case, I think. It's probably ok for 8chan to change its policies a little -
and I do mean just a little.

~~~
kaolti
I'm happy you expanded your opinion. I'm with you in that I think absolute
free speech is very hard to defend.

At the same time I definitely think slippery slope is the right analogy. The
definition of what is acceptable speech is constantly changing and IMO there
is no telling what the effect of banning unacceptable speech is - over a long
enough time frame.

My view is things might seem stable at the moment, but who's to say what the
relevant timeframe is?

------
rukittenme
This will be an interesting experiment. Will the banning of 8chan prevent
future tragedies? Or will we see the rate of these tragedies continue
unabated.

Either way we should have some evidentiary support for the arguments made in
this thread. "Can free speech go to far?" "Should free speech be limited only
to those mentally capable of the responsibility?" "Are safe spaces key in the
radicalization process?" "Should speech be limited to only those ideas which
society wishes to debate?" "Are calls to violence speech?"

I'm pretty keen on tracking some of these arguments. Please suggest more
arguments (and potential indicators for that argument's truth) if you feel
I've neglected some aspect of the conversation.

------
KorematsuFred
There is a price for every freedom we have. Free speech also comes with some
price. Which can include riots and deaths. All we need to ask if whether
slippery slope of restrictions on free speech would lead to a higher price or
a lower price.

An FBI agent working on child rape cases told me how on one occasion he was
100% sure who the criminal was and yet he had to let him go because the person
had rights. Now many such freed criminals are the price for having 4t hand 5th
amendment in first place.

USA as a society needs to debate whether the freedoms of having free speech or
freedom to own guns are worth it. Either ways it is their choice and outsiders
like me would only be curious as to what choice americans would make.

------
tripzilch
Anyone got any news on the hardware provider that provided the gun?

Cause the guy could've gone to any other fringe site to get inspired by, just
like he could have gone to any other gun dealer to get armed by.

One of these two things isn't a motherfucking big elephant in a room.

------
reilly3000
I think that is a travesty, and not for free speech reasons. Like many, I
spent some time on the site this weekend. It was incredibly disturbing, but
kind of inline of what some chan sites are about. I had an idea to try to
mobilize some people to start spamming /pol/ with goodness. Pics of bunny
rabbits and bible verses and MLK quotes. Anon is for all, but channers have
intentionally scared off almost everybody else. If a massive amount of people
meaningfully engaged with the board, started open discussions and appealed to
reason, maybe some lives could be saved.

Too bad its gone. Their community will simply move and dig in, and reaching
them will be much harder.

------
znpy
I don’t know.

Everybody is keen on pointing the finger towards 8chan, no one is talking
about how easy is to get firearms and bullets in the United States of America.

In the meantime, we lost one of the few spaces where we could talk anonymously
and express ourselves freely.

I am not sure whether i should feel sorry for America at this point. The
problem with shootings has been around for a lot if time now, yet pretty much
nothing has been done. Firearms still get sold as easy as candy.

Shootings like this will keep happening because they are a symptom, not the
root cause.

People will find other places to rant about stuff, get radicalised and decide
to go on a killing spree. In the meantime, we lost a place of free and
anonymous conversation.

------
bArray
I've always disliked the Verge and this article reminds me of why.

> Internet hate forum 8chan [..]

Indifference to what is perceived as good or evil is not good or evil within
itself. There's objectively a lot of hate in those forums, but there's also a
lot of good. 4chan for example came up with a solution to an unsolved
mathematics problem [1].

> [..] following the latest of at least three mass shootings linked to 8chan.

I think far many more terrorists have had social media platforms on services
such as Twitter or Facebook. As I've also said before, the reason they are
here is because they kicked them out of everywhere else - of course they will
now concentrate on these platforms. Beforehand there may have been a chance to
de-radicalize these people with exposure to everyday persons, but when you
isolate them this is what you get. The fact of the matter is, these people
exist whether you like it or not and they will find somewhere to talk.

> [..] when Voxility discovered the content, it cut ties with Epik almost
> immediately.

I remember also that Cloudflare gave 8chan 24 hours notice. Also look at how
internet services have treated the people of Iran, blocking them from basic
resources without warning. In some ways I am glad to see this, as I now know
which providers to avoid - I don't want any service provider I use to take a
political stance and give me 24 hours or less to rethink my platform strategy.

> Over the past year, Epik has raised its profile by working with far-right-
> friendly sites (like Gab) that have been banned by other web service
> companies.

Disingenuous, Gab is free-speech-friendly, not "far-right-friendly". But even
if it was far-right friendly by definition, so what? People with a different
political stance have a shared platform, just look at Bread Tube for the far-
left [2]. Neither are evil by default and both have their share of shitheads.

[1]
[https://oeis.org/A180632/a180632.pdf](https://oeis.org/A180632/a180632.pdf)

[2] [https://breadtube.tv/](https://breadtube.tv/)

------
njharman
1st amendment issue. As in persons, including those that own companies have
the right to associate or not associate(1) with whomever they choose. As
upheld in USA with
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NAACP_v._Alabama](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NAACP_v._Alabama)

1) The " _not_ associate" is not clearly as protected and is frequently
abridged to protect "protected classes" eg housing, employment, ADA laws. I
doubt any US court will uphold "bigot" as a protected class.

~~~
whenchamenia
Idk, denying rights to 'bigots' seems possibly bigoted. Please turn in your
speech card.

------
ElijahLynn
Just gonna put this here so everyone has a basis to go from:

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or
prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or
of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to
petition the government for a redress of grievances."

[https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/first_amendment](https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/first_amendment)

~~~
koboll
The 1st Amendment was developed in a time when there was no such conceivable
thing as an anonymous forum of people that encouraged each other to kill
crowds of civilians at random with machine guns, leading to such killings
actually being carried out, repeatedly.

The idea that "the answer to bad speech is more speech" breaks down in such a
situation. There is no amount of "more speech" that can fix what's wrong with
8chan, because there's no way for mass condemnation to have any effect on it.
It only serves to feed the trolls. And when the trolls are fed, the killings
become more likely.

If you've got a better solution than deplatforming, I'd like to hear it. I'm
certainly a free speech advocate in the abstract. But it's increasingly
difficult to ignore that anonymous online communities are threatening to
undercut the basic premises on which free speech as an ideal stands.

------
cfv
The invisible hand of the market seems to know what shame is. Good.

------
skrowl
UPDATE - It's now back up on ZeroNet. Install & run
[https://zeronet.io/](https://zeronet.io/) and then go to
[http://127.0.0.1:43110/1DdPHedr5Tz55EtQWxqvsbEXPdc4uCVi9D](http://127.0.0.1:43110/1DdPHedr5Tz55EtQWxqvsbEXPdc4uCVi9D)

Amusingly, it's now the #1 site on ZeroNet, with even more users than then
ZeroNet homepage.

~~~
sprash
This site looks like 8chan but has actually nothing to do with the original
8chan.

However, for better or worse, pandoras box of decentralized uncensurable
internet for the masses is now officially open.

~~~
skrowl
Yeah, taking down 8chan will certainly get the word out about ZeroNet (and
similar) at least.

------
yew
Speech has consequences. It must have limits.

(As for "free-speech activists" and so-called pacifists who complain about
actions _against_ you-know-who more than violence _by_ them - I don't see the
value of their words.)

But better norms are developing, even if it should have happened faster. And
not just in technology, but in education and writing and many other spaces.

------
mythrwy
This might be an unpopular opinion for those who view more rules as the
answer.

Banning (or discontinuing or deplatforming or whatever you want to call it)
may do little but harden the resolve of key ideologues of whatever stripe. For
them, it leads credence to the idea that there is conspiracy against the group
afoot. Besides, when has banning actually been effective? Sure, it may reduce
manifestation and reduce recruitment, but drugs and spam pretty much show
wack-a-mole is not really an effective policy. That's to say nothing of the
moral hazards of thought police determining who can say what.

However it is obvious that leaving these kind of groups to echo chamber louder
and more extreme, egging each other on also leads to bad outcomes.

Perhaps a solution may be proactive counter speech. Some sort of volunteer
regiment or something that finds where these sorts congregate and offers
counterpoints to violent idiocy. Obviously flat out threats or calls to action
are crimes in and of themselves and should be treated as such.

This would be a pretty thankless task because who wants to deal with this type
of idiocy and darkness all day? But I think it could be more effective if
properly done than banning as far as changing minds and hearts, especially
before people get sucked too far down echo chambers and start seeing the world
in a way it really isn't. Other people, smart people, articulate people, right
there calling out wrongness, calling out stupidity, calling out
misunderstanding, giving counterpoints, arguing for right action, this might
be a more effective way to damp down the extremism.

~~~
dd36
The ideologues are already very well hardened. White supremacy isn’t a new
ideology.

~~~
MrRadar
Furthermore, leaving it out in the open allows it to spread. There's good
evidence that "de-platforming" is highly effective at preventing the _spread_
of hate.

------
yters
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.

~~~
Sonnol53
So what makes them think that they are superior to others and it tips them in
conducting mass shootings?

~~~
cat199
.. not to mention that most mass shooters don't have children and end up shot
during the situation..

~~~
yters
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.

------
nickthemagicman
Looking at this logically, 8chan is available all over the world. Yet only
America has these shooting happening regularly. Could it not be 8chan but
America that has the issues?

I have a feeling 8chan and Video Games and guns are not the issue here but
structural social problems with America.

------
robomartin
The part that I concerned with has to do with discoverability. If you push
these people underground they will not disappear. That has never happened in
the history of humanity.

I would much rather the exist in plain view, free to voice their hatred in
plain view. I would much rather the algorithms and people of sound mind
monitor these individuals and groups in broad daylight than have them exist
behind encrypted radicalization chat rooms.

If the standard is to shutdown services that can lead to radicalization and,
therefore, harm or death, then the government should shut down Facebook,
Twitter, Google and maybe more.

Why treat this any differently that 737 MAX crashes?

The only reason I can see not to do this is to be able to keep an eye on
people who self-radicalize.

Sadly I have an example of this in my own family. We have an older relative
(late 70’s) who, up until about two years ago, did not own a computer or use
the Internet.

He was given a computer by a family member so he could use FB to keep in touch
with family in the US and abroad.

We have been watching, in absolute horror, as he has been going down a path
towards ever increasing hatred. No, not what you think. I won’t go into
details other than to say that he had his political leanings a couple of years
ago and FB turned them into nothing less than hatred, constant unrelenting
hatred.

No, he isn’t going to go hurt anyone. He is hurting himself. He is in a solid
gradient descent into a sad existence and likely already very much in the
grips if depression.

I know it’s FB because that’s all he does with the computer. He is, otherwise,
computer illiterate. He doesn’t have much if an education, which makes the
constant stream of hateful memes, posts and articles impossible for him to
filter. He is, effectively, mostly incapable of critical thinking now that he
has been pulled down into this dark cave.

Precisely because this is happening in plain sight, various members of our
family, myself included, have been engaging with him to try and pull him out
of Plato’s proverbial cave.

This task is incredibly difficult. FB feeds him a constant stream of similar
material and the world of reason evaporates behind a cloud of hatred. All he
sees are shadows on the wall.

We need this in the open in order to be able to help those we love as well as
others.

We also need FB and others to understand how much harm their algorithms seem
to be causing.

~~~
anigbrowl
_Precisely because this is happening in plain sight, various members of our
family, myself included, have been engaging with him to try and pull him out
of Plato’s proverbial cave. This task is incredibly difficult. [...]_

It's enormously difficult to deal with even for a family member that you know
fairly well. Now imagine trying to deal with it at scale where you're trying
to reach (likely) complete strangers who are not confused, but actively
engaged as conscious information and/or real world warriors and smart enough
to anticipate, avoid, and deflect counter-arguments.

There are already people who monitor these social groups but actively and
algorithmically, and because of that are aware of where and how to locate them
when a hub goes down.

~~~
robomartin
I'm assuming you are echoing my case for making sure they do their business in
the open. Or did I misread you?

In our particular case there violence isn't of concern at all. It's just an
older man getting pulled into a dark corner full of hateful messaging. This is
having negative consequences as friends and some family don't want to be
around that kind of negativity.

In other words, our older family member's case is more about FB effectively
destroying his quality of life than him becoming a problem for someone else.
It's really sad to watch.

With regards to your comment about it being harder to intercede in the case of
complete strangers. Yes, absolutely agreed, it's nearly impossible with
someone you've known your entire life I could not imagine what it might take
to "reprogram" a complete stranger.

My assumption, when it comes to the case of random strangers, wasn't that
someone would necessarily intercede to try and play amateur psychologist. What
I would expect is for law enforcement to become involved, bring experts into
the fold and deal with each case as necessary. I am not a psychologist, so I
can't even being to presume to know how or if this could be done.

My other assumption is that the task is much easier when the conversations
happen in the open. That said, I am not in law enforcement, I could be
completely wrong, it might be the case that the various agencies can do a
better job when these people think they are invisible. I don't know.

------
SCAQTony
The law plainly defines free speech and intent.

From "Justia": "...A conspiracy occurs when two or more people agree to commit
an illegal act and take some step toward its completion. Conspiracy is an
inchoate crime because it does not require that the illegal act actually has
been completed. ..."

Elements of a conspiracy here;
[https://www.justia.com/criminal/offenses/inchoate-
crimes/con...](https://www.justia.com/criminal/offenses/inchoate-
crimes/conspiracy/)

Conspiracy and encouragement to harm others by seeking agreement online by
providing detailed plans, strategies, and the execution therein, as witnessed
in some hastily written screeds and manifestos by shooters and terrorists,
appears to cross that line.

Is 8Chan guilty as an active contributor to the horror that has occurred? More
than plausible, but its liability albeit civil of punishable has seemingly not
yet been defined.

------
batat
Oh yes, there indeed will be no more mass shooting if you close down
%SITE_NAME%.

------
PeterStuer
" It requires people who are able to fully parse the implications of what they
are hearing to make sound and rational judgements on the rejection of an idea
or the embrace of it."

Just like democracy, right?

------
JulianMorrison
Couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of scum and villainy. The internet has to
grow up and conclusively eject these kinds of people - don't tolerate them,
don't tolerate their providers.

------
corodra
A bit out of the loop. The hell is 8chan? Similar to 4chan? Are the by the
same people? I always knew 4chan was a cesspool, just like youtube comment
sections. So, never ventured.

Next question, is there any actual evidence or proof that they're "apart of
it"?

Literally, out of the loop and I trust a random person on HN a bit more than
CNN. I saw the thing about Cloudflare here... was it yesterday? Day before? I
figured, whatever, a private company can think what they want and do what the
want as long as they're honoring the terms of the contract (as in there's a
warning that service can be cut because of "our reasons").

Just curious about this 8chan thing and where the hell it came from.

~~~
lainon
It's an Imageboard, there are many of them. 8chan gained a lot of traffic
because of the Gamergate [1] controversy in late 2014 The site has nothing to-
do with 4chan in terms of administration.

I can't say anything about how 8chan is involved in the El Paso shooting,
since it's been some time I've been active on 8chan, but the Christchurch
mosque shootings was announced on 8chan. There are many more of such incidents
where Imageboards have played a role - e.g. the killing of a kid by Marcel H.
in Herne, Germany was posted and documented on 4chan.

So, it's very possible that they're part of it.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamergate_controversy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamergate_controversy)

------
yyyk
1) 8chan richly deserved to go down and its a good thing for all of us they
are down. Hopefully this stays that way.

2) That does not change the structural reality that a small collection of
private entities can now act as gatekeepers. This is not a result of this
affair - but something that already existed. Can we rely on this power always
being used for good purposes? I dunno. If you deal with controversial stuff,
better have a backup plan. Good thing 8chan were too stupid to have one.

Conclusion: the result is good, the path indicates some troubling realities. I
often oppose the 'get a good result in a dubious way' method, but here the
balance tilted strongly towards action. My tolerance drops to zero when it
comes to terrorist breeding sites and the 'damage' merely shows us what
already existed. There's an argument this should have been done much earlier.

------
Fjolsvith
So curious that out of 1592 comments, not one mentions the QAnon movement.
This is the true reason 8chan was brought down. An attempt to disrupt their
communications.

------
anewguy9000
meanwhile, to us canadians, it's painfully obvious that the problem isn't
websites, but guns. curbing free speech is not going to solve this problem for
you.

~~~
Pigo
That's an extremely narrow view of a nuanced issue. We have divisive cultural
issues, a severe mental health problem, an opiate addiction problem, and
problems with access to guns in some areas. We also have a huge country. We
also have a huge country, taking away guns from people in Alaska will solve
nothing.

How's the knife banning in London going btw?

~~~
messick
It's going great. Stabbing deaths in London in 2018 were just over 3 "El
Pasos". It's less than 3X if you change the metric to "2019 mass shootings
posted to 8chan ahead of time".

I'm sorry that Fox News has led you so astray, but the whole "actually
everyone in London gets stabbed because they don't have guns" narrative is
horseshit.

~~~
Pigo
You guys should really get on top of that pointy stick situation now.

Fox News???

------
Y_Y
> Internet hate forum

I wonder if they'd describe themselves that way.

~~~
mrweasel
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.

~~~
vorpalhex
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.

~~~
yhamv
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

~~~
javagram
Surely Facebook still has ISPs they use and all sorts of companies they rely
on for services.

They’re just too big and too popular to fail.

------
pard68
So long as it is a private entity freedoms don't play a part because private
entities don't owe other private entities any freedoms.

------
puskavi
Lets drive hatey-sites to deepweb where we can't cencor them! What a great
idea!

------
awt
8chan is not the problem. Deplatforming 8chan is shooting the messenger.

~~~
awt
Also, no one is talking about taking down Twitter, which is where the Dayton
murderer hung out.

------
downrightmike
This boasts well for cloudflare and the potential IPO in September.

------
geophile
The usual argument on this topic is: whether suppression of free speech is
even effective; you just push the ugliness underground and it festers;
sunlight is the best disinfectant; etc. However, those arguments go back way
before the internet and social media. And do not account for the fact that
social media accelerates the spread of hatred and actual, physical danger. As
we are seeing.

The role of 8chan (and, let's be real: Fox "News"), is similar to that of the
broadcast hate messages that led to the Rwandan genocide.
[https://www.concordia.ca/research/migs/resources/rwanda-
radi...](https://www.concordia.ca/research/migs/resources/rwanda-radio-
transcripts.html)

------
Havoc
Even the dark corners of the internet need to have limits

------
shultays
People keep telling "they are a peivate company, they can serve whoever they".
Can they really? Can I open a shop that doesn't serve people with political
view X? Or religion? Race?

~~~
dointheatl
Yes, no and no, at least in the USA.

~~~
shultays
Huh, really? that was surprising for me. I would put political views right
next to someone's religional beliefs.

------
jjellyy
This is totally ridiculous. Every major political issue in the USA has been
injected with a “protected” group so any criticism can be silenced as it now
fits the criteria for hate speech.

------
jeanvalmarc
This seems like a good move, and the opposite of a slippery, "government
restricted our free speech" slope. It's more like, "companies and individuals
are under no obligation to offer their services to people they perceive to be
assholes." The reason governments shouldn't do this is because _there is no
alternative._ Companies and individuals are the _right_ place to make an
individual choice about what they wish to endorse, host, and support.

People (i.e. the Cloudflare CEO saying "no one should have this power")
wishing the government would let them off the moral hook for hosting literal
Nazis is pretty absurd.

------
kleton
Consider an alternative hypothesis: that sites like those are containment
zones. If those sorts of people don't have any peaceful outlet for their
feelings, what then?

------
krick
This is ridiculous, how many people in the comments appear to think this can
be considered good in any way. I'm honestly shocked, like WTF I'm even
reading...

------
jimbob45
I don't usually like to pull the deus ex machina card but.....

CloudFlare is going public next month. This seems like a clear-cut publicity
stunt.

------
rolltiide
they just switch web hosts and CDNs right?

literally anyone looking for a large customer right now is salivating.

Its like how all those encrypted data stores have employees that love the
vision and have no idea that all their customers are porn companies until one
day they realize and also realize leadership doesn't care and is highly
entertained at this reality

get those revenue numbers up

------
pier25
Are 8chan and 4chan related?

------
pault
The CEO of 8chan's hosting provider is literally a Monster.

------
dzonga
paradox of tolerance.

------
rpmcmurphy
Good riddance

------
EGreg
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) social networks have made us more addicted to our
notification slot machine, with smaller attention spans and self control,
responding to that stranger on the internet over that latest outrage.

THIS is the culture that leads to more mass shootings. The fact that we have
giant platforms instead of peer to peer is another problem. By banning
extremist people from platforms, a platform can pop up which attracts the
worst extremists, and feeds them. This platform should ABSOLUTELY be a
honeypot for the FBI to watch these people. In our world of centralized
platforms, Platforms like this should be RUN by the FBI.

Instead, our government takes the wrong approach. They shut down the
Craigslist and Backpage hookers sections instead of using them to entrap and
catch traffickers. Then they threaten large platforms with SESTA (2018) when
they should be the ones catching the people who are out there. The platforms
should be honeypots!

Anyway. So although I feel my stance is correct, and beneficial to society,
there are three practical problems with it:

1\. First Amendment is not interpreted as I do. In fact Citizens United even
allowed our politics to be run by PACs with huge money and megaphones
(although nonprofits could have always done that). So legally my literal
understanding of limits of freedoms is not matching the traditional ones
(slander, yelling fire etc.)

2\. This may be the more serious one. As we have more end to end encryption
and better personal technology, all well-meaning ideas about limits of freedom
of speech and arms melt away. Imagine Alex Jones on SAFE Network with
1,000,000 people subscribed to his encrypted feed. Or imagine 3d printed guns
from illegally shared 3d models, stored in 10% of the homes in NYC. Can’t stop
people using a turing complete language to turn out banned material.

3\. 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.

However, I believe that if we took the freedoms in the way I defined them, and
moved to collaborative platforms instead of competitive ones, our society’s
health would _measurably_ improve.

~~~
thatcat
Please don't use capitalization to emphisize your points in the future.

~~~
EGreg
That’s the main and only thing you wanted to respond to from what I wrote?

~~~
idlewords
If you had written less, we would have read more!

~~~
ulkesh
Not sure if you're being ironic, or are one who simply doesn't read anything
but headlines. Hopefully it's the former.

------
yhamv
Voxility GmbH? Did they really move 8chan to Germany, a country with very
restricted speech?

~~~
nik736
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.

------
patientplatypus
So I've posted before about how bad this is, and been flagged and downvoted,
which sort of proves the point - this is not an open platform for the exchange
of ideas in the same way a chan board is.

However, rather than reiterate my previous points, let me pose a question.
Where are all the angry young men going to go to now? Will the problem become
_worse_ because now people with mental health issues have no place else to
form community?

I feel we are in uncharted territory and keep trying to fix the symptoms of a
broken society rather than the cause.

Make no mistake, what these young people did was sick and wrong. But they were
social "losers" that no one helped or cared for. Because that costs time,
money, and "sharing" social capital. By which I mean sometimes you've got to
let the little guy win, because humans are social animals and we're hard wired
to desire "fairness".

And our society doesn't promote fairness and fraternity. The US, as a culture,
just does not give a shit about the little guy.

You want the shootings to stop? Start giving people more than McJobs, make
mental health professionals _cheap and accessible_ , start trying to _gasp_
figure out how to get incels laid.

Do we do any of that? Fuck no. Society makes fun of nerdy anti-social people,
because it makes people feel big to put others down.

Sometimes I feel like I'm living in the land of the crazy people...

------
psbmt
>Personally I'm in agreement with Popper's view that societies should tolerate
everything except intolerance.

That invariably forces the political landscape to move to the left. Which, I
guess, is the intended result of holding that point of view.

~~~
FussyZeus
I'm completely fine with that until we have literally any logical or
scientific reasons to oppose tolerance.

~~~
throwaway156503
This claim to logic or scientific reasoning in the face of not tolerating
intolerance seems flawed and, to me, does not serve as a meaningful
replacement for the subject of morality:

Imagine you have a child, who is not yours, screaming in your ear at the
nearby supermarket. You do not tolerate it. You are intolerant of it.

At face value, with the paradox of tolerance in the form of "society must be
intolerant of intolerance," you would need to hold to the position that
society should not be tolerant of your intolerance to children screaming in
your ear.

You'd need to accept that it's acceptable for children to scream in your ear.

~~~
pritambaral
Your example is flawed for the following reason:

The child's right to scream ends where my right to peacefully exist in a
public space begins. The child's act of screaming directly in my ear clearly
violates my right and is thus intolerant of it.

~~~
FussyZeus
I would say this example is also flawed because children scream in public all
the time. It's just... reality. Kids scream sometimes for any number of good
or not good reasons and making the parent feel even shittier than they already
do about disturbing everyone around them isn't going to solve anything.

~~~
pritambaral
> I would say this example is also flawed because ...

1\. I do not present any "example". I present only a fact within the parent's
example.

2\. None of the reasons you cite in the continuation invalidate my claims.
"Accept the reality" does not erase anyone's rights.

> ... and making the parent feel even shittier than they already do ...

I do not see where I said anything remotely related to making any child's
parent feel anything

~~~
FussyZeus
I think you misunderstood, I was agreeing with you and expanding on your
point. Not arguing.

------
not_a_cop75
Communism now.

~~~
vorpalhex
How would that help the situation?

~~~
not_a_cop75
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.

~~~
vorpalhex
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?

------
moonbug
Good riddance.

------
o_p
This is a ridiculous witchhunt, 8chan is a platform for many different boards
with different opinions, the media framing it as a right-wing white
supremacist forum makes wonder if its ignorance or malice, /leftypol/ is
probably as big as the /pol/ boogeyman, and thats just politics which is just
a part of the rest of the boards.

No one is asking to close Facebook because Tarrant uploaded his shooting video
there, why it would be any different in this case?

~~~
happytoexplain
Do you have much experience with the chans? I've spent an embarrassing amount
of time on them over the years, and my experience is that it would be
ridiculous to compare the ratios of politically hateful, extremist content to
normal content between Facebook and the chans. The difference is night and
day. The chans are full of great, diverse content, but an absolutely solid
core of their identity is inevitably dominated by the worst elements of
society at any given time - it's just inevitable due to the nature of the
format and rules.

------
Meekro
When I was much younger, I remember being filled with wonder when I learned
about the Skokie case[1], where the ACLU went to court to protect the rights
of Nazis to hold a rally in a mostly-Jewish town.

"Wait, they faced down criticism from every direction, and took a massive loss
in donations, to stand up for the fundamental rights of people they despise?
Is this what _liberals_ do? _I want to be a liberal!_ "

Sadly, if that happened today they'd probably say something about not
tolerating intolerance and side with the government to shut them down.

[1] [https://www.aclu.org/other/aclu-history-taking-stand-free-
sp...](https://www.aclu.org/other/aclu-history-taking-stand-free-speech-
skokie)

~~~
sagichmal
Not sadly, but hopefully!

Free speech absolutism is a maladaptive local optima. Free speech isn’t an end
in itself, it’s a means, a tool, that every society must use to create just
and ethical outcomes.

~~~
DuskStar
And the reason we had free speech absolutism was that no one should be able to
dictate what the proper "just and ethical outcomes" should be. Is today's
morality the end of all things? By locking down speech, what developments will
we prevent?

~~~
sagichmal
> No one should be able to dictate what the proper "just and ethical outcomes"
> should be

Not only is every human _able_ to dictate what "just and ethical outcomes"
are, we're _obliged_ to, if we intend to form civil society.

> Is today's morality the end of all things?

No, of course not. Everyone is obliged to continuously engage in the
conversation, to push the course of all society away from suffering and toward
justice.

~~~
DuskStar
> No, of course not. Everyone is obliged to continuously engage in the
> conversation, to push the course of all society away from suffering and
> toward justice.

Well how the fuck are you supposed to be able to do this if all wrongthink is
banned? Because things like "women are equal to men", "race doesn't matter",
"slavery is wrong", etc were _most certainly_ wrongthink to begin with.

~~~
sagichmal
I’m going to turn it around on you: how can we have a just society if women
legitimately fear for their safety when they go to certain places? We’re not
obliged to suffer white nationalists carrying tiki torches down the national
mall chanting “Blood and thunder” and making the world unambiguously worse
because we need to know their position exists. Sunlight is not always the best
disinfectant.

~~~
DuskStar
> how can we have a just society if women legitimately fear for their safety
> when they go to certain places?

This is a really hard question, partly because those women are _generally_
wrong - men are much more likely to be mugged/assaulted/killed than women in
every US location I've seen statistics for.

> We’re not obliged to suffer white nationalists carrying tiki torches down
> the national mall chanting “Blood and thunder” and making the world
> unambiguously worse because we need to know their position exists.

Should we also not be obliged to suffer black supremacists doing the same? Or,
more recently, gay rights advocates? How is that not exactly analogous to
pride parades?

Yes, we now agree with (and approve of) some values and not others. But
locking those values in place 20 years ago would have been clearly wrong (no
gay marriage, etc), so why do we assume that doing the same today would have
been better? _How can we differentiate between 'acceptable' and 'unacceptable'
while still allowing the next gay rights movement to take place?_

~~~
sagichmal
> Should we also not be obliged to suffer ... gay rights advocates?

If you want to make a case that gay rights advocates make the world
unambiguously worse, be my guest. At a societal scale, you will fail, because
there is a clear and categorical difference between that example and mine.

It's fine that not everyone feels that way. The people who think gay rights
advocates make the world worse are wrong, and society has the right to judge
them that way.

Just because you can swap the nouns in a formulation of a policy and turn it
from good to bad (or bad to good) doesn't mean that policy is wrong, or bad,
or shouldn't be used. Social policy don't need to be content-agnostic to be
useful. We can apply a policy against nouns that, in outcome, make the world
better; and refuse to apply the same policy against nouns that, in outcome,
make the world worse. We're gonna get those determinations wrong sometimes,
and that's inevitable and fine, we can just course-correct and carry on in
good faith.

~~~
DuskStar
> If you want to make a case that gay rights advocates make the world
> unambiguously worse, be my guest. At a societal scale, you will fail,
> because there is a clear and categorical difference between that example and
> mine.

My point was that 20 years ago, there are a _hell of a lot of people_ that
would have made that argument. There's probably still a double-digit
percentage of Americans who believe that today.

It's like evaluating a stock trading strategy on historical data - success
there does not guarantee success in the real world, but failure highly implies
it. Your proposed policy - which as far as I can tell simplifies to "ban
advocating for things that a supermajority of the population finds
distasteful" \- would have prevented (or at least harmed) quite a few
movements over the past century or three, and so I say that if implemented
today it would do the same in the future.

~~~
sagichmal
> My point was that 20 years ago, there are a hell of a lot of people that
> would have made that argument.

I understand that's your point. And policy reflected that majority opinion
back then. But, it was wrong, and we fixed it. That's fine. That's how things
should work.

> Your proposed policy - which as far as I can tell simplifies to "ban
> advocating for things that a supermajority of the population finds
> distasteful"

I'm making no policy proposals. I'm saying society is justified in making
moral decisions via policy, and in many cases is ethically obligated to do so.

I'm saying that a blanket position of moral agnosticism by government (which
is, as far as I can tell, what you're suggesting) is naïve in the best case,
and actually actively unethical in the worst case, when that position prevents
a society from protecting itself from disease.

We still have courts even though there is the possibility of convicting the
innocent, a society without a justice system is unworkable. In the same way,
we still have the right and responsibility to make policy on moral and ethical
grounds even though we might choose incorrectly, a society without that
ability is unworkable.

------
sergiotapia
We need a truly distributed way to host content and communicate. We shouldn't
need cloudflare, aws, stripe or any other monopoly to police free speech.

Think of our children and what we're going to leave them. Is this the internet
we had as kids? It wasn't.

------
asdfasdfasdfa
I 100% think cloudflare, google, facebook, or whomever should shut down 8chan.

I 100% don't think the US government should.

I don't know why everyone is conflating these two very different scenarios.

------
miguelmota
Just like how we pull weeds in gardens all year round; deplatforming will
remove majority of these users with undesirable qualities.

~~~
h2odragon
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.

~~~
ausbah
No, but if they don't have an easily accessible platform their message can't
spread.

~~~
mythrwy
If only the internet wasn't an international phenomenon that anyone anywhere
can build upon.

~~~
ausbah
It is, but governments can exercise extreme control over the internet 99% of
the population receives.

------
mynameishere
Painfully, painfully stupid comments here. If someone says X, and then goes on
a rampage, that does not discredit X. Yes, the media wants you to believe
that, unless it's Unabomber-style ramblings involved.

Is it that hard to understand?

------
RandomTisk
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.

~~~
jredwards
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.

~~~
RandomTisk
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.

~~~
commanderjroc
>> Any violent thug can go spread their message in the town streets as long as
they're not causing a disturbance.

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?

~~~
RandomTisk
Not at all, I'm only referring to legal speech.

------
GrumpyNl
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.

~~~
einarfd
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.

------
octosphere
Title is misleading. When I read "go dark" I think of a service doing the
clever thing and burrowing itself in the darkweb where it's nearly impossible
to take down (unless it gets DDOSed of course).

But even DDOS'ing can be mitigated by hardening your server, and doing
rudimentary things like rate limiting and filtering out bots with captchas.
Things are made even easier by using a tricked out NGINX[0] server or even
Varnish cache[1].

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nginx](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nginx)

[1] [https://www.varnish-cache.org/](https://www.varnish-cache.org/)

------
rzwitserloot
There's this notion of 'bad money chases out the good'; stems from the time
when coinage was made from expensive rare metals. Because weighing your
currency is annoying, the state decrees that any stamped coin is to be treated
as if it is worth precisely what it says its worth, even if it is a little
light.

In such scenarios, everyone saves up their fat coins and spends their most
shaved off misshapen light coins. Eventually ALL the money in circulation is
the 'bad' money.

The same seems to happen with social networks: _IF_ you allow questionable
stuff on your site, soon all the other users will go elsewhere, and your
social network eventually caters ONLY to the questionable stuff. The
counterweight to that would be lots of users who put inherent value in the
notion that the social network they are a part of 'does not believe in
censorship', but I think we all know a vanishingly small amount of non-
incel/dailystormer/etc users care enough about it to hang out on the
incel/dailystormer/etc social network, where every stranger you meet, is
likely tweaked in the head.

Give it some time and I bet soon the same thing again will happen to CDNs: If
most CDNs band together to censorship such content, on one hand there'll
always be a CDN that sees a mission (and perhaps, a business case) in being
anti-censorship. But, soon, the ONLY thing that CDN will be hosting is
questionable content. And at that point, I bet plenty of sites, filters,
firewalls, internet providers, etc, will just blanket-ban the entire CDN and
be rid of it all.

And then sites like 8chan possibly truly cannot survive.

Or not. Maybe they'll find a way.

But if that happens, the 'council of CDNs' will have quite a bit of power to
wield. So far the messaging coming from at least cloudflare is that they
understand this and take this seriously (and so far do not appear to want to
open the can of worms if they can avoid it), but it feels inevitable.

------
gwbas1c
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.

~~~
hashmap
> 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.

The available evidence says the opposite is true.

[http://comp.social.gatech.edu/papers/cscw18-chand-
hate.pdf](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.

~~~
davesmith1983
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.

~~~
gwbas1c
> Censorship and harassing companies that run image board won't fix the
> problem. All you will do it hide it.

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.

~~~
happytoexplain
>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.

~~~
mrguyorama
Or even just off color jokes that go over a line. For example, n __ __* jokes

------
tomohawk
There are many times when the political, religious, or other leanings of
people committing these crimes have been misrepresented by 'media'
organizations and politicians and others pushing an agenda, and trying to tie
the despicable acts to their opponents, etc., or to make political points.

I've seen far left crazies characterized as far right. I've seen atheists
characterized as being christian. I've seen mentally ill people characterized
as following some ideology.

In this sort of environment, cutting off access to raw sources just makes
these kinds of mischaracterizations even easier to do.

Cutting off people's ability to communicate does not have any benefit. All it
does is signal that those cutting off the communication do not have a better
idea, or do not know how to sell their idea. It strengthens the hand of those
being censored by giving them a real grievance, and makes it more likely that
they will find other ways to express their views, which will likely be more
violent.

------
A4ET8a8uTh0
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.

~~~
cortesoft
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.

~~~
SlowRobotAhead
>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.

~~~
cortesoft
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...

~~~
SlowRobotAhead
Why? Those publisher protections are directly modeled after the first
amendment. This was literally the idea.

I didn't make this up, it's the entire intent of the system.

~~~
cortesoft
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?

------
bsaul
So instead of banning pro-guns websites and associations, internet self-
righteous companies prefer to ban pro-freedom of speech websites.

How brave !

Edit: to people disagreeing, ask yourself : why is mass shooting only
happening with such a high frequency in the US ? Internet is global and
billions of people speak and write english. So what is the originality ?

This knee-jerk reaction for censorship needs to stop, we’re heading toward
censorship at full speed, and everybody is applauding for being so responsible
and mature. If people are calling publicly for mass murdering, and if it’s
illegal to do so in their country, then let the police get access to the
people identity and arrest them. But don’t kill the messenger or the media !

------
throwaway_this
A couple of facts about the this event:

\- 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.

------
DrDimension
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.

~~~
happytoexplain
>The truth is that information does not radicalize people

I'd be fascinated by an attempt to elaborate on this frankly incredible
statement.

~~~
DrDimension
Please give me one example of true information that would radicalize a person.

------
Alex3917
IMHO this reflects poorly on CloudFlare.

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.

~~~
atonse
The First Amendment is completely irrelevant to this situation. No relation
whatsoever.

CloudFlare is a private company.

~~~
commandlinefan
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.

~~~
aqme28
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.

~~~
commandlinefan
... until the hosting providers stop hosting voat, for the same reason, and
start blocking gab via deep packet inspection... for the same reason.

