I'm shocked by how many liberals who really ought to know better are cheering for the deployment of corporate oligopolistic censorship at this scale. We're not talking about just kicking someone off Twitter... now we're talking about kicking them off supposedly neutral public cloud platforms.
This is a major escalation and honestly it's changing my mind a bit about the whole issue. I was a fence sitter before but now I'm siding with the libertarian crowd on this one, and I say this as someone who is nowhere near the alt-right politically.
We're going from what amounts to forum policing (though on huge scale quasi-public forums) to infrastructure level censorship. No longer can you just "go set up your own site." Even more significantly we are seeing an incredible amount of coordination between corporations on this, proving that competition and diversity in the marketplace is not sufficient to protect the openness of the Internet as a system.
Once again: liberals really should know better, especially any that care about net neutrality. This is a really extreme example of ISP traffic discrimination and it sets a precedent that this kind of thing is okay. A top level infrastructure provider blackballing a site for speech should be a third rail regardless of the content in question.
Censors always start with the least popular ideas and speakers. They do that for a reason: they want to gauge what they can get away with and they want to shift the Overton window toward increasing support for censorship. They know that few people will overtly stand up to defend Nazis, trolls, and blithering red faced demagogues, so that's where they start. Other popular targets in the past included pornographers, lewd writers and musicians, and religious blasphemers.
Two thoughts that ought to keep you up at night even if you are inclined to agree with these moves:
(1) What happens if/when the political winds shift and someone like Donald Trump or maybe someone even to the right of him ends up in control of these powers? Who gets silenced then? A power once created becomes a political entity that can easily be handed off.
(2) What happens if/when some liberal cause -- like a reboot of unionization and a new labor movement for example -- really threatens corporate and Wall St. profits at a large scale? Will Neo-unionists get this deplatformed and shadow banned now that it's been legitimized? Will anyone even notice?
Again... we are setting a precedent here that this is okay. You really all ought to know better. The reference metric for freedom of speech is the freedom enjoyed by the most offensive and least popular speakers: political fanatics, pornographers, demagogues, hate-mongers, etc. If they are free to speak then you are free to speak. If they're not then the process of clamp-down has started and you are next.
There's a reason the ACLU has in the past defended neo-Nazis and other unpopular speakers, and it's not because they support these speakers' messages. It's because you need a canary in the coal mine.
Edit:
The conspiracy nut devil that hangs out on my shoulder whispers that this combined with the abolition of net neutrality is a coordinated campaign. Use massively unpopular triggering demagogues to get the left to abandon its commitment to free speech while simultaneously using fallacious libertarian arguments to get the right to eliminate net neutrality. Put those together and you have a Great Firewall of America and enough public support from a broad enough subset of Americans to deploy it.
(The libertarian arguments against NN are fallacious because ISPs are government backed and sometimes even funded monopolies.)
The next ratcheting up would be for peering points to refuse to peer Internet traffic that they don't like, and abolition of net neutrality would allow that. That means Gab (or tomorrow moveon.org, who knows) couldn't even host at an indie hosting provider or overseas.
But that's crazy talk right?
If sites like Gab get banned from being hosted the next step for them will be to move to decentralized platforms or Tor. If the above is true I predict that this combined with the words or deeds of a few nutjobs will be used to start convincing both liberals and libertarian-minded conservatives to start supporting bans on un-escrowed encryption as well as ISP and cloud provider efforts to block "horizontal" network traffic. This is how you'll be convinced to support a ban on P2P protocols and privacy technologies.
> Censors always start with the least popular ideas and speakers. They do that for a reason: they want to gauge what they can get away with and they want to shift the Overton window toward increasing support for censorship.
Every time a neo-Nazi gets shut down, people trot out the "First they came for the communists…" — and yet the next time, it's a neo-Nazi again, every time. It would be bad if people who aren't promoting harm start getting shut down, but I don't see any evidence that current events will lead to that.
> (1) What happens if/when the political winds shift and someone like Donald Trump or maybe someone even to the right of him ends up in control of these powers? Who gets silenced then? A power once created becomes a political entity that can easily be handed off.
We're not talking about the creation of a new power here. This is a power that already exists, and bad actors' ability to use it isn't based on whether or not it's used for good.
> What happens if/when some liberal cause -- like a reboot of unionization and a new labor movement for example -- really threatens corporate and Wall St. profits at a large scale? Will Neo-unionists get this deplatformed and shadow banned now that it's been legitimized? Will anyone even notice?
Again, there is no causal line between "Neo-Nazis get deplatformed" and "Corporations deplatform their critics." You can have either one without the other.
In general, your fears seem to be based on an assumption that looks something like "Bad people won't do anything to good people that good people don't do to them." But history has repeatedly shown that this is not the case. Our refusal to take the threat of Nazism seriously the first time didn't in any way constrain the things they did to people.
You have to take a long view of this. Whatever powers we cede to the state or corporations now will remain long after nobody remembers Alex Jones or that Nazi punching bag (forget his name already!)
After 9/11 there was a mad rush to cede civil liberties and deploy surveillance. Many liberals and libertarians pointed out quite correctly that terrorism remained even after 9/11 a fringe activity and a statistically insignificant risk. Was it really worth it to toss the bill of rights (and the Geneva convention) for a risk that didn't even rank when compared with routine low probability accidents?
The same logic applies now. The Nazis are loud and obnoxious but few in number, and those hurt by these clowns number far less than the dead from Oklahoma City or 9/11.
Open discourse, free speech, and net neutrality are more valuable than this.
Gave you an upvote since I don't think what you wrote was that unreasonable. I just think it's short sighted.
>There's a reason the ACLU has in the past defended neo-Nazis and other unpopular speakers, and it's not because they support these speakers' messages. It's because you need a canary in the coal mine.
People aren't mentioning this, but this has already happened.
I'm not white, just to be clear, however back sometime last year I knew infrastructure-level censorship was coming when DNS services, GoDaddy in particular, started censoring sites. The canary in the coalmine was the Daily Stormer.
It's one thing to want them to be quiet. It's another thing to set the precedent of infrastructure forcing them to be quiet. As you said, it sets a precedent.
EDIT: DNS censorship has indeed been mentioned in this thread.
Except that the Daily Stormer is still online. As long as net neutrality exists (in practice if not in law) there is no "infrastructure-level censorship" to speak of beyond a slight lack of convenience. What is the worst-case outcome of DNS registrars refusing to do business with nazis? People who want to visit nazi websites would have to type in numerical IP addresses.
The only "infrastructure-level censorship" we should worry about is the Internet itself. As long as you can set up your own servers and host your own services, your free speech rights are not really in jeopardy. Free speech does not mean you have the right to buy the megaphone of your choosing; it does mean that you can voice your opinion using a megaphone, even if you had to assemble the megaphone yourself.
>libertarian crowd on this one, and I say this as someone who is nowhere near the alt-right politically.
This is one thing that concerns me is people who stand up for this or lean libertarian being seen as alt-right simply because they disagree with this corporate censorship. To me this censorship or suppression goes against the founding principles of the internet. I don't understand why it is acceptable to label everyone as such.
Censorship of legal speech isn't the answer, ever. I can't wait for SV to find it's compass again and return to the love of free speech. That said, I do think we need a solution to have our open platforms where people can avoid certain things they find toxic. I don't want to read ideas from certain people, so letting the end user decide is the best solution.
This is a major escalation and honestly it's changing my mind a bit about the whole issue. I was a fence sitter before but now I'm siding with the libertarian crowd on this one, and I say this as someone who is nowhere near the alt-right politically.
We're going from what amounts to forum policing (though on huge scale quasi-public forums) to infrastructure level censorship. No longer can you just "go set up your own site." Even more significantly we are seeing an incredible amount of coordination between corporations on this, proving that competition and diversity in the marketplace is not sufficient to protect the openness of the Internet as a system.
Once again: liberals really should know better, especially any that care about net neutrality. This is a really extreme example of ISP traffic discrimination and it sets a precedent that this kind of thing is okay. A top level infrastructure provider blackballing a site for speech should be a third rail regardless of the content in question.
Censors always start with the least popular ideas and speakers. They do that for a reason: they want to gauge what they can get away with and they want to shift the Overton window toward increasing support for censorship. They know that few people will overtly stand up to defend Nazis, trolls, and blithering red faced demagogues, so that's where they start. Other popular targets in the past included pornographers, lewd writers and musicians, and religious blasphemers.
Two thoughts that ought to keep you up at night even if you are inclined to agree with these moves:
(1) What happens if/when the political winds shift and someone like Donald Trump or maybe someone even to the right of him ends up in control of these powers? Who gets silenced then? A power once created becomes a political entity that can easily be handed off.
(2) What happens if/when some liberal cause -- like a reboot of unionization and a new labor movement for example -- really threatens corporate and Wall St. profits at a large scale? Will Neo-unionists get this deplatformed and shadow banned now that it's been legitimized? Will anyone even notice?
Again... we are setting a precedent here that this is okay. You really all ought to know better. The reference metric for freedom of speech is the freedom enjoyed by the most offensive and least popular speakers: political fanatics, pornographers, demagogues, hate-mongers, etc. If they are free to speak then you are free to speak. If they're not then the process of clamp-down has started and you are next.
There's a reason the ACLU has in the past defended neo-Nazis and other unpopular speakers, and it's not because they support these speakers' messages. It's because you need a canary in the coal mine.
Edit:
The conspiracy nut devil that hangs out on my shoulder whispers that this combined with the abolition of net neutrality is a coordinated campaign. Use massively unpopular triggering demagogues to get the left to abandon its commitment to free speech while simultaneously using fallacious libertarian arguments to get the right to eliminate net neutrality. Put those together and you have a Great Firewall of America and enough public support from a broad enough subset of Americans to deploy it.
(The libertarian arguments against NN are fallacious because ISPs are government backed and sometimes even funded monopolies.)
The next ratcheting up would be for peering points to refuse to peer Internet traffic that they don't like, and abolition of net neutrality would allow that. That means Gab (or tomorrow moveon.org, who knows) couldn't even host at an indie hosting provider or overseas.
But that's crazy talk right?
If sites like Gab get banned from being hosted the next step for them will be to move to decentralized platforms or Tor. If the above is true I predict that this combined with the words or deeds of a few nutjobs will be used to start convincing both liberals and libertarian-minded conservatives to start supporting bans on un-escrowed encryption as well as ISP and cloud provider efforts to block "horizontal" network traffic. This is how you'll be convinced to support a ban on P2P protocols and privacy technologies.