I agree, we've got far too many entities that should just be 'dumb pipes' trying to play moral police at the moment, and it's a very worrying situation when it comes to free speech on the internet. Cloudflare is an often brought up example, as are payment processors like Visa and Mastercard and app stores like the iOS and Play Stores, but ISPs trying to block traffic for a site that's not actually illegal feels like a step even further than that.
It feels like private companies are de facto writing the laws about what's allowed online and in society right now, and that it's almost become a loophole for censoring free speech on a whim.
And while the site in question here is ethically bankrupt in basically every way, it doesn't seem too far fetched to assume the same thing could (and potentially will) happen for sites many more people agree with because someone/some group at an ISP doesn't like them or think they should be accessible.
That's right. Authoritarian censors found an exploit. They couldn't use the government to clamp down on civil liberties because of the pesky constitution, so they invaded the administrative layer of big tech. It's not the engineers who built the web and these companies with Silicon Valley ideals. They were never intended to be used this way and are secretly horrified.
From the article, the EFF explicitly calls out the government for failing to enforce existing laws which would have shut down Kiwifarms
>That’s what must happen here. The cops and the courts should be working to protect the victims of KF and go after the perpetrators with every legal tool at their disposal. We should be giving them the resources and societal mandate to do so. Solid enforcement of existing laws is something that has been sorely lacking for harassment and abuse online, and it’s one of the reasons people turn to censorship strategies. Finally, we should enact strong data privacy laws that target, among others, the data brokers whose services help enable doxxing.
The issue there is that as best I can tell, kiwifarms the site doesn't break any laws. It officially discourages actual harassment of the people it insults. Individual users may harass people but as far as I could tell from my previous skim they do not organize this harassment in the open.
And requiring service providers to monitor private communications for organisation of harassment seems Orwellian to me. (Intuition pump: imagine the postal service opening every letter to check to see if someone's organising a letter writing campaign sending abuse to George Washington)
As does prohibiting people saying unpleasant things about semi-public figures in public.
I'm curious what the function of publishing a targets home address, personal phone number, place of employment, and so on is supposed to be if they don't condone harassment. One might suspect that the rule against harrassment is just paper-thin ass-covering. Officially they'll also tell you they just collate and archive freely available information, while for example publishing and micro-analyzing the hacked bank statements of a streamer they don't like, with enthusiastic support from the moderators.
It's annoying that they're trying to remove your comment via downvoting.
It's amazing to me that some people are so determined to defend KF when it appears that the best defense they have is: "no suicides have been definitively linked to KF." I know their public reason is all about censorship etc, but I'd like to know what their private reason really is.
I'm downvoting the comment due to the same principle that makes me downvote EVERY comment about astroturfing hackernews. Because it's literally against the guidelines of this website, as any real hackernews denizen would know.
They linked this thread on the kiwifarms website so people are coming here from the site. One of them even called out my posting as particularly objectionable to their point of view. I would link it so you can see, but I think that would break HN rules because of the doxing materials on the site.
It's not that we want to defend KF, it's that we want to have a discussion on the merits of the issue not the reputation of the participants.
KF is ultimately an archive site. It "keeps receipts" in their words. If storing someone's posts is bad, is archive.org bad for performing the same function?
If KF supports harassment campaigns then make that case, but they seem not to. I've seen more harassment and threats on Twitter (literally!) than on KF threads.
If suicide is your metric, are you also against storing the words of people you find objectionable in case they commit suicide when discovered? What if a neo-nazi was recorded being a nazi and killed himself, is that bad?
I personally support storing the speech (because it's censorship not to allow it) and I support legal charges for people who go beyond - let the courts sort out the fine lines.
I doubt this. Hackernews still has a disproportionately large number of principled libertarians like me. I've personally gone on kiwifarms twice, both times triggered by a big hackernews story.
You know what would counter disinformation? Links to analysis of kiwifarms with methodology and citations. E.g. what proportion of threads (from, say, a random sample of 20) contain doxxing on the first page?
Edit: I've now done this. Looks like about 25%. Damn, that's high.
No one is going to link to victim dox in a public HN thread. It would get our accounts banned and also further victimizes these people who were harassed by the site. Thank you for looking at the site for yourself.
Reasonable people disagreeing is not evidence of astroturfing or disinformation. It is possible for people to just disagree with you. There is no organized conspiracy against your viewpoint.
They linked this thread on the kiwifarms website so people are coming here from the site. One of them even called out my posting as particularly objectionable to their point of view. I would link it so you can see, but I think that would break HN rules because of the doxing materials on the site.
It's a bullshit, paper-thin "policy" that exists only for KF to cover their own asses.
Let's make one thing clear, the only purpose for publishing someone's home address, place of employment, phone number, etc. (aka, "doxxing") is to condone harassment of that individual. Any claims otherwise are completely bad faith and bullshit. Nobody believes you. Stop claiming "Oh, but this information is publicly available!"
If KF truly discouraged harassment, they'd do what every other sane site does and immediately delete the post and ban the user that posted it.
> the only purpose for publishing someone's home address, place of employment, phone number, etc.
I do not recall seeing those in the threads I looked at (which all have an opening post collecting information about the individual).
Can you confirm what proportion, if any, of main posts had that info? Can you also confirm that KF does not have a policy of removing that info?
I can't access kiwifarms at the moment to check, but I strongly suspect that information is in obscure posts by individuals and their "community" as a whole does not condone it and it is removed where obvious.
Edit: I have now accessed the site and confirm a culture of doxxing, with 3 of the 10 opening posts proudly having "doxx" sections.
Give me some numbers and methodology. You apparently have access to the site, pick the ten top threads about people and tell us how many many post addresses, phone numbers or emails on the first page.
Edit: I went through the hassle of figuring out how to get on that website. I can confirm 2 or the five pages I checked had doxx info on them and agree that kiwifarms does not seem to have a policy against doxxing and in fact has a culture that promotes it. This is bad.
So, you learned what you could have learned from reading the Wikipedia article or any number of other secondary sources (which you were earlier insinuating could not be trusted on these points). I'm glad that you've proved to your own satisfaction that Kiwi Farms is exactly as awful as almost everyone consistently says that it is, but there might be a lesson here about not being irrationally skeptical of 'mainstream' sources.
Thank you for putting the effort in. I can't in good faith link to these people's dox in a comment here just to prove this to you. I would also get banned off this site for doing so.
For what it's worth, there are many sites that are just about posting people's PII. Sites like doxbin, which seem to be up with impunity. I'm surprised KF got got, while DB sticks around - DB seems overall worse to me considering that it _is_ a site that is expressly created for harassment
> Let's make one thing clear, the only purpose for [doxxing] is to condone harassment of that individual. Any claims otherwise are completely bad faith and bullshit. Nobody believes you. Stop claiming "Oh, but this information is publicly available!"
Yes, I acknowledge it's all public, but that doesn't explain why you would want to aggregate that information and post it in a public forum and make it easier to acquire. What purpose does it achieve?
> Edit: I went through the hassle of figuring out how to get on that website. I can confirm 2 or the five pages I checked had doxx info on them and agree that kiwifarms does not seem to have a policy against doxxing and in fact has a culture that promotes it. This is bad.
Anyone who claims that KiwiFarms is not a site for harassing and doxxing people has done zero research and is trusting some lying "news" source that tells them something else. I really wish I could understand the mentality of thinking otherwise. Are you really so hung up on "thinking for yourself" that you automatically assume anything said by the mainstream media is a lie? Skepticism is great and I highly encourage it, but automatic knee-jerk rejection is not skepticism, it's basically setting you up for falling for reverse psychology. Just because the mainstream media says one thing while fringe reporters say something else does not automatically mean the mainstream is lying.
> Anyone who claims that KiwiFarms is not a site for harassing and doxxing people has done zero research and is trusting some lying "news" source that tells them something else.
Two notes:
1. Kiwifarms, by volume, based on the sampling of posts I've read today, is first and foremost a site for talking about, insulting and mocking people. The harassing and doxxing do not seem to have focus and it would require a relatively minor change (banning and removing doxxing) in order for it to claim innocence of harassment and doxxing.
2. "Does more than zero research" is a very high bar that few meet. The number of people I've found on the internet who cite primary sources, government stats/papers and scientific papers is less than 0% to the nearest tenth of a percent. While its true that sometimes research can take half an hour or more, so often it takes five minutes (like checking out stats on the uk gov website regarding criminal convictions of British Pakistanis for having sex with under 16 year olds to settle the myth of Pakistani child rape).
Ideally everyone would do research and cite real sources, in practice less than one in a thousand do.
>1. Kiwifarms, by volume, based on the sampling of posts I've read today, is first and foremost a site for talking about, insulting and mocking people. The harassing and doxxing do not seem to have focus and it would require a relatively minor change (banning and removing doxxing) in order for it to claim innocence of harassment and doxxing.
(I only mention his real name because he's public about his identity, and he's sometimes referred to in the news by either name).
Here is another ocassion, the admin of the site, outright said he was ok with users posting stolen financial information, such as Social Security Numbers and Credit cards. Source: https://archive.is/0fOcS .
There are many examples of private financial information being posted on the site.
go on kf and click a few, there's a ton on there. or just look at their _entire forum_ about a trans-woman named christine chandler, in which they document not only her address, but even have photos of her at walmart, game stores, etc
> go on kf and click a few, there's a ton on there. or just look at their _entire forum_ about a trans-woman named christine chandler, in which they document not only her address, but even have photos of her at walmart, game stores, etc
Chris Chan has been a notorious and divisive figure online long before the existence of the Kiwi Farms. They are arguably one of the most well-known Internet personalities.
Merely referring to them as "a trans woman" throws away a massive amount of context why Kiwi Farms (and many other sites) seems so obsessed.
that is such a circular argument. they are a microcelebrity who has spent the majority of their life being intensely tracked and harassed by a small but dedicated community, the majority of which is on kf.
The original name of kiwifarms was "CWCki", and CWC are the initials of their first victim. The entire premise of the site was harassment of a severely autistic person to trigger "funny" reactions. It's beyond gross.
To understand why the poster is asserting irrelevant materials. Is it their confusion or are they being purposefully obtuse. May I ask why you asked me?
> Intuition pump: imagine the postal service opening every letter to check to see if someone's organising a letter writing campaign sending abuse to George Washington
Just on this specific point: this is not a particularly weird scenario at all. There are very strong rules about what you can and cannot send in the mail, and these rules are enforced. The most obvious example is the Comstock laws, which regulate "obscene and immoral materials" sent through the mail (including things like information about birth control). They're from the 1800s, but several are still on the books. It's not a strange concept at all in American law to regulate what can and cannot be sent through the mail.
If you read up on the Kiwifarms Wikipedia page [0] it sounds like someone needs to go to jail. Until this moment I'd never believed that sending someone a pizza would qualify as an act of violence - but now I can see it. If the site doesn't break laws then there is no reason to ban it. But there are criminals using that site and they should be caught. Banning the site is just dodging the real problem.
Specifically, wikipedia is not an unbiased source on any issue that is of particular concern to the terminally online. Anything to do with US politics or culture war is going to be heavily distorted due to the nature of the beast (its something people care a lot about, there were strong founder effects and there was a purity spiral).
The sources that are allowed/disallowed and their respective biases (e.g. what they publish or don't say) are a big factor.
I have in the past[1], several times It gets old having the same false things posted over and over. often my posts[1] with the linked are also "flagged" because people here do not want to truth, they want the narrative.
> I would have to disagree with the characterization of two opinion blog posts from relatively unknown authors as “unbiased sources.”
The first link is from Destiny, a well-known (albeit controversial) online figure. It seems to be a factual timeline of events with citations for every claim made, which is far from an opinion piece.
Presence of citations has near zero meaning in terms of goals of the writing or bias. These are so clearly opinion pieces. One is bordering on an attack piece.
> Presence of citations has near zero meaning in terms of goals of the writing or bias. These are so clearly opinion pieces.
Completely dismissing the content because you believe it must be biased is somewhat ironic.
Would you at least then concede that the Wikipedia article is also unreliable and biased?
> One is bordering on an attack piece.
Which one? If you're referring to the piece published by Destiny, what constitutes an "attack piece" if all the claims made are rigorously cited? Would being an attack piece invalidate the claims even if they're demonstrably true?
Not the person you responded to, but this[1] is a very thorough and well-sourced criticism of the person behind the campaign to get Kiwifarms removed from Cloudflare. Sections two and three specifically go into the lies, misrepresentation and bad journalism surrounding Kiwifarms itself if you'd prefer not to read the whole thing.
Probably because due to the nature of the issue even actual unbiased source will likely be perceived as biased. The issue is contentious enough for strong tribes to form on both sides - linking to any source in that situation means taking a risk of making either of them, or often both, hostile to you.
Moreover, if it's about the situation mentioned earlier this year on HN, it's problematic because of its complexity and gravity. Even with just facts and only facts, the change of the narrative (ie. the order you present the facts in) is enough for the same reasonable person to come to opposite conclusions. And that's before accounting for rhetorical devices that aim to manipulate the reader while still not crossing the line and sticking to facts - happily employed by both sides of the discussion in staggering quantities. (Then, of course, there's the other 90% of sources full of lies and fabrications, but let's leave those alone on HN at least...)
In short - it's not worth the hassle unless you're invested in the matter enough to care a lot, and once you are, odds are you won't post an unbiased source anyway. You'll need to do your own research, wade through a metric crapton of some of the worst humanity has to offer, and form your own opinion based on that. I don't think there's a shortcut here.
Go on the kiwifarms website itself and ask yourself if it's okay/legal to be posting this manner of personal information on harassment victims. Make your own determination from the original source. Ask yourself if an infrastructure company should be forced against its will to support this.
> Ask yourself if an infrastructure company should be forced against its will to support this.
Come on, that is the literal fucking purpose of infrastructure. Water/sewage doesn't get to refuse to flush my toilet because the content of my stool doesn't meet their nutritional expectations.
That Wikipedia article is full of unverifiable bullshit, and I think you know it.
> I'd never believed that sending someone a pizza would qualify as an act of violence
It doesn't unless you interpret every instance of adversity as an attempt on your life.
Nobody trying to kill anybody sends a pizza, unless the intent is to induce poisoning or choking.
> [Wikipedia] Users also leaked sexually explicit photos of her
"Leaked" sounds so much worse than the truth of the photos being found on a 2257-compliant commercial porn site, which Keffals willingly worked as a onetime model for under a 4-letter pseudonym. To say they were "leaked" is being intentionally dishonest. They were available for sale, by the studio that took them. Users shared the preview images that were publicly posted, because nobody involved felt they were worth paying for.
Don't take my word for it; anyone can see for themselves-- they're helpfully posted in her KF thread, if the site is even up anymore.
> Just because there’s a serious problem doesn’t mean that every response is a good one
Problem: a forum full of misanthropes dedicated to saying the worst things allowed under the first amendment.
Bad solution: erode 1A at the case law level
Bad solution: censor the internet at the backbone level
Freedom isn't free. We're lucky to live in country with robust speech protections. The tradeoff is that there will always be some people who get a kick out of going right to edge of what they can get away. My view is that our civil liberties are worth it.
The operator of the kiwifarms is himself a US citizen with a US business. It is an advertised fact that if a police force comes after or shuts him down with a legal reason, it will cease to exist and he himself has stated he wouldn't operate it out of any other country than the US.
Pirate bay and sci-hub get affected by copyright law more than anything else and, to the best of my knowledge, kiwifarms is protected by section 230 in that respect and has always complied with legitimate takedown requests.
I think Kiwifarms is (borderline) criminal. Null, the admin of the site, outright said he was ok with users posting stolen financial information, such as Social Security Numbers and Credit cards. Source: https://archive.is/0fOcS . There are many examples of private financial information being posted on the site.
I would describe them as operating with a paper thin layer of "plausible" deniability. Officially you aren't allowed to harass or interact with the targets. But posting their home address, stolen passwords, phone numbers, and information about relatives is all allowed. Obviously, if they didn't want their targets harassed, they wouldn't post that. Kiwifarms, now banned, official twitter page said their goal was “exploitation of the mentally handicapped for amusement purposes”. ( Source: https://archive.is/jYp5p ).
But even the rule against interacting with "lolcows" (called "cowtipping") is haphazardly enforced. For example, one user had sex with a "lolcow" and posted photos. The admin explicitly said they would allow the content to remain up: https://archive.is/zYnpK#35%
I could probably post many other examples. Null is entirely willing to host revenge porn on his website. He's also willing to host nudes that he knows were stolen by hackers.
People probably aren't going to want to send takedown requests, when that requires revealing their identity to a site that is known for doxing and harassing people.
Transparency I assume. I understand the admin likes free speech and maintains some transparency, to explain why content has been removed, and giving away your information is always a risk in legal issues.
From what I understand re twitter and others, it's the government that found a loophole. They used big tech to censor according to their agenda. The administrative class, while I agree probably has been invaded in some sense, is really just risk aversion run amok, like it always it, and will self organize to do what it can to minimize controversy.
This is not speculation much less crazy theorizing. Read the Missouri v Biden injunction. It’s crystal clear that FedGov infiltrated and basically zombified social media platforms to perform constitutionally prohibited censorship.
They should have taken the regulation. At least that forces it into the public eye and allows for accountability via voting. This way only generates a shadow government.
You need to decide if these are private companies or public utilities. If they’re public utilities, the government should provide them. Restricting company’s freedom to choose a business model is not the answer.
You might not like it, but that’s kind of the point, either let the market decide or take the market out of it.
My own opinion is that the role of government should be mostly limited to common defense, ensuring essential infrastructure and enforcing/resolving legal disputes. Essential infrastructure should include banking and internet access at this point as it's nearly impossible to function in society without them.
Infrastructure providers should not be able to refuse customers engaging in lawful activity. Your phone company can't shut you off because you say, "I wish $POLITICIAN were dead." You don't have to like or agree with everything everyone says, but it's a very dangerous slippery slope.
Personal liberty should be maximalized so as not to infringe on the rights of others. You do not have the right to live a life without risk of being offended.
> Restricting company’s freedom to choose a business model is not the answer.
Only, that's not how it works in our (and pretty much any) society. We, as a society, choose what we think is acceptable. And then we make laws to enforce that people behave in a way consistent with that. A company is not free to deny service to someone that is gay, or black, or married; just because that is their chosen business model.
They are, however, free to stop you from pushing Nazi propaganda on their resources.
I’m quite discouraged by this thread not being taken down despite the very obvious brigade of alt-right Nazi sympathizers pretending that being gay is the same as yelling for the genocide of gay people.
Yes. But we saw how quickly censorship went from Alex Jones being banned from having a Twitter,Reddit, Twitch, Mailchimp, Shopify, YouTube/Google, Facebook/Instagram account, and being banned from all those platforms simultaneously. To having Donald Trump the Republican Nominee and at the time sitting duck President having his Twitter, Reddit, Twitch, Mailchimp, Shopify, YouTube/Google, Facebook/Instagram account being banned simultaneously. Starting off with "we want to stop Nazi propaganda" turning into banning Republicans is like saying "We want to stop Communist Propaganda" and Blacklisting Liberals
Trump represents Republicans. Literally. It's representative democracy. The point is not Alex Jones is a republican, just that it's a not many months between Alex Jones being deplatformed who was by all definitions fringe to the representative in our representative democracy being deplatformed and alienating half the country. Trump has over 90% approval rating among Republicans.
I mean, if you think that 90% of Republicans are traitors to US democracy, you've just made a great case for deplatforming them, irrespective of how many there are, but I think you were arguing against that?
If you treat 90% of Republicans like traitors, don't be surprised when they treat 90% of Democrats like traitors. Shoe's going to be on the other foot eventually.
Trump wasn’t banned for being a republican. He was banned, ultimately, for Jan 6.
In reality, Trump broke all those platforms rules on several occasions and was given a free pass till he tried to steal an election. He’s actually the poster boy for the fact that republicans get MORE leeway on social platforms, not less.
In an interesting way it is also an exploitable facet of small government. If the private sector is susceptible to moral policing then then government downsizing implies a larger attack surface.
I think the implication is government putting pressure (or working with) businesses to censor speech. Smaller government would mean less attack surface in that case.
Market forces and competition should help keep speech free because if a private company doesn't allow x group to use their platform, it is likely a competitor will spring up to capture the orphaned market. We see this play out in reality.
>Market forces and competition should help keep speech free because if a private company doesn't allow x group to use their platform, it is likely a competitor will spring up to capture the orphaned market.
This doesn't really apply in the same way in social media. Social media platforms organically turn into monopolies.
X and Facebook and Reddit and Hackernews and Whatsapp are all social media, sure, but they are not in direct competition. One does not start or stop using Instagram because they use Reddit. Same with Hackernews and X, etc etc. The product is different.
When you ban an ideology or a group from a piece of social media, they do run to competitors, but "competitors" which can never penetrate the market because they don't have the userbase, which is the main incentive of social media.
So far-right people get banned from Twitter and they run to Gab, but Gab and Twitter aren't really competitors because Twitter can't ever penetrate into Gab's market (they banned that market to begin with) and Gab can't penetrate Twitter's market (because Twitter is the more attractive platform to begin with, having more users)
The better product is better because of its userbase. There is no real competition, and as such, no upholding of freedom of speech due to it.
Are you suggesting that government (big or small) is immune to moral policing and that it's confined to the private sector? Any centralized system is subject to attack, the bigger the better.
I'm suggesting something different than that. I couched it with an if and I should have phrased it a bit differently in retrospect:
If the private sector is more susceptible to moral policing than the public sector, then (all things being equal) if public services are transferred to the public sector(ie: smaller government) then the attack area increases.
There are two conditions, and one conclusion. If you don't agree that the premises apply, then the argument doesn't really matter and also doesn't apply.
>>It's not the engineers who built the web and these companies
I 100% disagree with this, the engineering level of silicon valley left the old "libertarian" hacker ethos behind a long time ago, at the engineering layer there is idea about using technology to build a "better society" where "better society" is ensuring people with "wrong opinions" isolated so they can not "harm" others with their "violence" and violence is now words on the internet.
In fact recent activism coming from the engineer levels at Big Tech (google, Amazon, FB, etc) has me believe that that administrative layer is not really in control, and the policy changes are a reflection coming from the activism in the engineering layer
We also see this through out Open Source with the raise of the CoC to implement systemic changes with in open source to ensure only those with "correct opinions" are allowed to contribute moving from just caring about code, to then caring about code and conduct with in a project and project related events, to now even more expansive monitoring of developers entire lives, and activities completely removed and unrelated to any development activities.
Exactly right. Most of the new engineers have nothing of the libertarian spirit of the 2600 era. It was engineers who implemented censorship at online platforms, most incredulous of which was PayPal charging customers $2,500 in damages for spreading "misinformation." I cancelled my PayPal account the moment I read the news.
For shame. But, things go in cycles. What was once great becomes a ruin, and then rises again. We are now in the heading steadily towards the ruin phase.
Preference falsification from engineers, which was normalized after James Damore had his character publicly assassinated. Throwing rotten tomatoes at him and screaming "shame shame" before chopping off his head was a warning to everyone else to keep quiet or echo the correct opinions.
There's a lot of tribal signaling and "don't hurt me I'm one of you".
Then there's a new brand of engineer, and some old gen converts, who are true believers in the new religion and programming is just a lucrative way to participate in late stage capitalism as a wage slave. Many among them are aggressive bullies and codify their beliefs into CoCs and concern themselves with purity testing.
> I 100% disagree with this, the engineering level of silicon valley left the old "libertarian" hacker ethos behind a long time ago
And thank fuck for that.
> at the engineering layer there is idea about using technology to build a "better society" where "better society" is ensuring people with "wrong opinions" isolated so they can not "harm" others with their "violence" and violence is now words on the internet.
People are so glib about this and it's such a catastrophic failure to engage in empathy and respect for other human beings that it simply blows my mind that people can say things like this and think they're in the moral correct. "Being bullied to death by the Internet" isn't even that uncommon anymore. Especially for people who will have a hard time finding community in the real spaces in which they live, Internet communities of like-people become a literal lifeline. Entire relationships both communal and intimate are carried out through the lens of online communication. "Words on the internet" indeed.
And if said words can be a lifeline of communication and community to like-minded people and alleviate suffering, you can be damn well assured that works the other way too. Having personally known and helped people through being the subject of online alt-right hate mobs, I assure you, "words on the internet" can absolutely kill people. I have watched in happen in real time and pulled people back from the precipice.
> We also see this through out Open Source with the raise of the CoC to implement systemic changes with in open source to ensure only those with "correct opinions" are allowed to contribute moving from just caring about code, to then caring about code and conduct with in a project and project related events, to now even more expansive monitoring of developers entire lives, and activities completely removed and unrelated to any development activities.
Yeah I don't particularly want to use software, especially pay to use software, made by people who want to exterminate people I call friends and family. If a developer comes out on their social media and broadcasts about how my friends are some combination of insane/dangerous for being who they are, no, I'm not using their product ever again and I will spread word about it to people I know who feel similarly. This is just how social networks (in the sociology sense, not the technological sense) work and always have.
I guess what I'm saying is if you want maximum capture on your product, tell your team to park their opinions on which groups of people deserve to die on personal, anonymous accounts. I don't think this is a massive ask, personally, but I also don't want anyone dead so I can't really comment on it.
This is the oddly standard wording used in defense of these newly-fashionable 'everything you've ever done ever can be used against you' contributor codes of conduct and I have to find it very disingenuous.
By and large nobody wants to exterminate anybody. People have legitimate differences of opinion and when they attempt to express them they're being told that even _thinking_ that opinion is tantamount to violence.
If you can't see it as anything other than a transparent attempt to restrict discourse I don't know what to tell you. It isn't like this is the first time this strategy has been used.
> This is the oddly standard wording used in defense of these newly-fashionable 'everything you've ever done ever can be used against you' contributor codes of conduct and I have to find it very disingenuous.
Please provide me an example of a code of conduct you find objectionable on these grounds. I have yet to see one that fits the language used both in this and the parent comment I originally replied to of being "orwellian."
Clearly you have not followed this topic closely, how about you look into the DruPal issues or "Dongle Gate" or the Firing the Firefox CEO, James Damore, or 100's of other examples of people being removed from projects for differences of opinions far far far far less than wanting to "exterminate" people
It's projection. The people making that accusation are themselves all-but-literally exterminating individuals from society. They are engaging in dangerous levels of othering using a cloak of false kindness.
I believe it is result of a raise in Authoritarian ideology in both technology and in wider society, This streak of Authoritarianism is coming from both "political sides"
The concepts of pluralism, tolerance, and peaceful coexistence with people whom we disagree is replaced with forced acceptance, mono-culturalism, speech controls and a rank intolerance of opposing views often supplanted with a rather obtuse perversion of the "paradox of tolerance" where by intolerant people of both political sides justify their actions actions as morally and ethically correct, as being on the "correct side of history" or other such platitudes
The "paradox of tolerance" is much better stated as the "contract of tolerance." Anyone who agrees to be tolerant, is entitled in turn to tolerance themselves. This ensures that intolerable views, such as the view that certain lifestyles are inherently immoral based on one's beliefs, are not respected. Because they shouldn't be. If your personal moral compass has decided that women deserve fewer rights, that's perfectly fine for any woman who also subscribes to that belief system to accept their reduced stature in society. Why they would do that, I have no idea, but if they want to, good for them. However you are not entitled to inflict that intolerance on other people who don't share that belief.
Ergo: if you treat everyone around you with the respect and recognition of their personhood, you in turn are 100% entitled to that same respect and recognition. If however you make statements or act in such a way as to diminish the personhood of others, you are no longer entitled to that respect.
I think it's a nice little system and resolves the paradox quite nicely. To promote a tolerant society means being intolerant of intolerance.
Easy, both are trying to enforce their view of culture on the other via law and other government regulation.
The right is most seen on this in the modern era Womens Rights, Schools, Gay Marriage, etc
The left is most seen on this with Speech Codes around "Hate Speech" and Pronouns, in Employment Regulations, in Equity Regulation (enforced by law not market) ,etc
No that is 2 very different mono-culture attempting to eliminate the other
You seem to believe that because 2 cultures exist it is "multicultural" but that is not the reality, "multicultural" would be accepting the other culture as equally as valid as your own, tolerating their existence in a legal and market framework (i.e willing to do business with them, and not use government power to make their culture illegal)
What we have today is 2 cultures attempt each attempting to banish the other both using markets, and using governments.
I think that's a vast overdramatization based upon reading the most fringe elements into everything else. The reality is the vast majority of people exist well within the edges and aren't anywhere near as fatalistic as you describe
That's all projection and appeal to emotion to justify censoring and bullying people into submission. How many people have had their characters assassinated, ostracized and fired, sometimes commiting suicide as a result, just because they said the wrong thing now or in the past according to the current moral fashion police. How many are self censoring and falsifying preferences to appease the authoritarians. They say it's about kindness and respect, inbetween destroying the next individual's life. Authoritarian bullies cloaking themselves in a veneer of kindness and moral fashion is not new.
> That's all projection and appeal to emotion to justify censoring and bullying people into submission.
It isn't an "appeal to emotion," it is emotion. Emotion is not this ephemeral second-class citizen in your mind. It's you. It's the part of you that cares about things. A response being largely emotional does not make it inherently less valid, and not everyone is required to discard half of the human experience in order to be taken seriously.
> How many people have had their characters assassinated, ostracized and fired, sometimes commiting suicide as a result, just because they said the wrong thing now or in the past according to the current moral fashion police.
I would say far too many, but also I would caveat that by pointing to the other pile of corpses from people who did the same thing for just being themselves in the wrong place. Or worse still, had the violence inflicted upon them by another's hand.
So clearly, at the very least, we can agree that it's not just "words on the internet?" They clearly have dire consequences for all parties involved.
> How many are self censoring and falsifying preferences to appease the authoritarians.
"Everyone agrees with me but they're too afraid to say it" is a convenient excuse to hold reprehensible beliefs that you don't want to take responsibility for. If everyone is afraid to say something, maybe that's because it's disgusting? And given what people are happily not only saying, but being paid to say, (usually while whining about how censored they are but I digress) I'm frankly incredibly skeptical of this position.
> They say it's about kindness and respect, inbetween destroying the next individual's life. Authoritarian bullies cloaking themselves in a veneer of kindness is not new.
Again though, while there I am certain are some examples of people being bullied to that point, I have a hard time seeing it. I personally have carried friends through that mess and to that, I can testify first party. However on the opposite side, all I really see is people complaining about how censored they are, on public platforms, to a wide audience, and usually in some way monetizing it: book sales, shows, public speaking engagements, all the while moaning about how they can't speak their minds... while speaking their minds. Repeatedly. For profit.
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I'm rewriting this because the comment above changed substantially since it was originally posted. Below is the original thing I wrote which I'm leaving up because I'm proud of it:
This notion that "well what's objectionable is subjective and therefore having any standard is having an agenda" is frankly, bullhockety. Yes, it does vary from person to person. Different people will have different tolerances to different things, and part of community building is all of those people coming together and, through trial and error, through difficult conversations, through awkward moments, etc. slowly constructing a line in the sand where upon one side is beyond tolerance, and the other side is not, and that line in itself being subject to change based upon new cultural events, new people joining the community, other people being removed from the community for infraction, etc. etc.
We have been doing this since roughly the taming of fire. The only thing that's changed is the mode of enforcement. Now instead of chucking people out of our tribes and telling them to piss off, we block them on social media and revoke their access rights. Same exact thing. If you want to participate in a community, that participation has always, always been conditional upon agreeing to a mutually agreed upon set of rules, that yes, change over time and that can mean you by virtue of being an imperfect human can stumble over them without meaning harm. The differentiator from that point is how you handle that situation and if your reflex is to post on your own social media about how everyone involved in the community you have transgressed against is censoring you and you have a right to say XYZ, then that community in all likelihood is going to reject you in a more permanent fashion. If your individual liberty to say XYZ is more important to you than membership in that community, then that's the choice you make. I don't judge you inherently for that. I have joined and left many communities over the years as my and those communities' values shifted around. This is just how social organizations work and have always worked.
And you in turn are free to demand access to whatever space but that entitlement needs to be articulated, and I am inherently suspicious of this almost reflexive "well I guess I just had the WRONG OPINIONS" response, which almost universally is presented without the opinions attached. (Including in this comment.) What were the opinions? Why were they "wrong?"
And I will grant: in the digital age, the enforcement of being rejected is much easier with a much lower emotional energy gate than it was previously. Now you don't need to confront people, to have conversations, if you don't want to and that makes a certain kind of person perhaps itchier on the trigger finger than is ideal. And that's unfortunate. But on the flip side of that, sometimes the transgression involved is too extreme. Sometimes the transgression makes the people who would confront an individual feel unsafe to do so. Sometimes there is no path to resolution and there's nothing to do but block and move on.
> It isn't an "appeal to emotion," it is emotion. Emotion is not this ephemeral second-class citizen in your mind. It's you. It's the part of you that cares about things
Regardless, it's not an argument. Your emotion has no direct weight on the correctness of an outcome you're arguing for, and trying to appeal to other's emotions in an attempt to sway them is attempting to bypass their critical analysis.
Argue the facts and let emotions happen. They "are you" but should not drive you.
> "Everyone agrees with me but they're too afraid to say it" is a convenient excuse to hold reprehensible beliefs that you don't want to take responsibility for. If everyone is afraid to say something, maybe that's because it's disgusting?
No, likely outcomes and consequences for discussing something are rarely aligned. You're discussing hounding people out of work/home/politics because of your emotional take on what they're saying, without any actual analysis of it or how actionable it is.
In my mind, that's incredibly dangerous (and thus, if I chose to use emotional language - disgusting) but I'm not advocating taking away your right to say it.
> Again though, while there I am certain are some examples of people being bullied to that point, I have a hard time seeing it.
James Damore is a great example. He didn't broadcast his views - he responded privately to questions in a hiring review panel at Google, discussing how the company could improve its hiring of women by understanding the roles it was offering in the light of modern psychological analysis using the "Big Five" traits model.
Specifically, he did not say that women were worse engineers in any way, either holistically or in individual skills, OR less suited to engineering than males. He argued that Google's roles were less suitable for "traditionally female" interests. Again, this was privately, in the context of a panel trying to evaluate why Google wasn't great at hiring women engineers.
His communications were leaked, with the context stripped, in an edited form without any references to gawker-style media who were prompted with the lead 'white guy says - "Don't hire women"' to prompt them into the "right" emotional headspace to write an attack piece.
To tie this back to emotion, obviously someone read his words and let their emotion at those words (I myself don't like psychobabble) override their analysis of what was said. Their emotions are "valid lived experience" but the attacks they called for, and lies used to do so, are not helpful or justified.
Yes there’s a strange double standard with the “its just words on the internet” perspective. On the one hand, it’s an Orwellian nightmare that Twitter would ban accounts for “having the wrong opinions”, but on the other hand who cares it’s just talking on the internet.
Which one is it? Does your speech have a real world impact? If yes, then you have to acknowledge that it can cause real damage and that private companies have no obligation to accommodate that. If its just meaningless words, then why does it matter that companies ban anyone for any speech?
> That is a failure of mental health and the direction of psychology in general where by they are teaching people that everyone, everywhere must affirm you, must support you, and everything you do is perfect.
Your ideas on needing an internal framework for emotional stability is on the spot, but this idea that "they" are teaching people whatever is in itself a partisan cop-out. The onus of failure for not providing adequate mental health tools is on parents who had no idea how to handle the sudden rise of technology & a general failure of leadership figures to step in. There isn't some big leftist boogeyman teaching people that others "must" do anything.
> do you believe someone refusing to use neo-pronouns is "bullying"
There are a lot of qualifying questions that need answered before this one could be considered. Like what constitutes bullying - your definition is different than everyone else's. Do we frame this under your perception of bullying, or mine? If something is a large part of your internally perceived identity & someone else actively denies that part of your identity, is that okay? Do you have an experiential framework with which to tackle that identity scenario in the first place, to understand in any fashion how they feel about that? Are you willing to employ empathy?
I'm trying to find a moral justification for not simply calling someone what they ask to be called, or walking away from the situation - if you're dredging up old dated phrases, whatever happened to "if you have nothing nice to say, say nothing at all?" If someone wants to be called Xir or whatever, my question is "how the fuck do I say that" not "why should I."
> in return anyone that refuses to use neo-pronouns should be bullied themselves
No, but they should be made aware that they're being assholes. Outside of this hypothetical vacuum scenario, we know statistically that it's more likely for the person refusing to use pronouns to engage in actual violence than someone requesting to be referred using those pronouns, so things become much muddier after the point of "you're being an asshole" - but in this scenario, that's where it should end.
It shouldn't be surprising or incomprehensible to anyone that folks on one side of this field are suddenly stepping up to the same field that the other side is. It doesn't justify it, but it should be well-understood that attacks from the left are not predicated on nothing.
> or banned from society
No. Rather I'd like to see our mental health systems improve enough that we don't have millions of people that erroneously believe that other humans don't have just as much right to exist as they do. That's why people get "banned from society" or whatever inane scenario you're trying to claim happens.
> If they don't agree with your political dogma then bullying is perfectly fine right, they deserve it...
The hilarious part of this statement, at least in this specific context, is that it goes both ways. Our monkeys are flinging shit at their monkeys, and for some reason their monkeys are throwing shit back! How dare they.
I agree that 'cancelling' people - in the view that you've provided - is wrong. That said...
> Now lets say an Employee at Walmart happens to go the Republican National Convention and wears a MAGA hat, you see a photo of this online, then proceed to find their friends, employers, family, and attempt to get them evicted from their apartment, fired from walmart, and when they get a new job at Target attempt to get them fired from that as well, attempt get their mother fired, and attempt get their roommate fired as well just for good measure. (true story form left wing cancellation BTW)
You wanna know a true story from right-wing cancellation? Being bound by chains and dragged behind a truck. Gunning down an entire building full of gay people. Being burned alive in their own home. These events, steeped in alt-right online cultures of stoking fear and hatred towards leftists. Is this not the ultimate form of cancellation, the end-of-the-line of this whole scenario? As you put it, this is a common tactic for those on the authoritarian right. This is the extermination the other person is referring to. Murdering people based on shit they heard online, without actually bothering to interact with those people or build any kind of basis of empathy, to understand the challenges they face in a world where they feel the need to lash out like you've seen.
This is not justification of leftist actions, but you should also keep in mind the cauldron that they've been stewing in for decades upon decades - and the atrocities that the group you're defending have also committed. They are not innocent of wrongdoing, but you seem to casually miss that part.
> I used to work with this very devote christian, she would pray for me everyday [...] Today some people would report her to HR, get her fired, etc...
If they asked her to stop, and she didn't stop, she's in the wrong. Yes, absolutely report her to HR. What was the point of this story?
I will also save you the time by stating I don't intend on discussing this topic with you. I believe, based on the ideas you've expressed here, that you lack the empathy necessary to engage with a very emotional & "human" topic. Have a good one.
>>You wanna know a true story from right-wing cancellation? Being bound by chains and dragged behind a truck. Gunning down an entire building full of gay people.
You believe there is no violence on the left? Shall I pull video of people being beaten and pulled from their cars during BLM "peaceful" protests? Or of the police captian that was burned alive in a store? Or of the Nashville mass school shotting for which the FBI is still withholding the manifesto that has it been a right wing person would have been on ever news outlet the next day?
>This is not justification of leftist actions,
if not outright justification it is attempt to "but but but look over there they are worse"
>>group you're defending
Not defending anyone, I am pointing it out is not left / Right. it is Authoritarian vs Libertarians.
Authoritarians are violent, that is how they weld authority. Right, left does not matter, In this community (technologists) people tend to want to believe only Right Authoritarians exist, and only Right are violent. That there is a nazi on every corner, and that nazi is a republican...
>>I will also save you the time by stating I don't intend on discussing this topic with you.
then I welcome your non-reply... If you did not intend on discussing this then you should have refrained from reply at all.
ironically I am a very empathetic person. I empathize with people suffering real hardship, like the people that are going to lose everything in the hurricane, not because someone on twitter did not use Xe or Xir correctly....
Thank you, and I definitely agree to all points. From my own observations, I feel that the right is often wrong on many things, but the far left has gone off the rails, and most of the left is either, willing, blind, useful idiots or outright evil. There's definitely a few racist, violent right wing assholes in the world, but they don't even compare to the numbers the far left weild.
It also irks me to no end, when people refer to leftists as "liberal" when they are no such thing at this point. I can deal with liberals, and as a libertarian share most of the values. More like Progressive past the point of usefulness to society.
> From my own observations, I feel that the right is often wrong on many things, but the far left has gone off the rails
The difference, I feel, is that I know many people whose identity is "leftist" or "progressive" and I don't personally know anyone who identifies as a "rightist". The right is a centuries-old boogeyman of the left, and it encompasses everyone who disagrees with the critical-analysis class-based views of the left.
The worst term the left has is "far-right" which just means very-heretical. The worst thing you can do is let your opinions diverge from the groupthink.
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>so they invaded the administrative layer of big tech.
Not exactly. While there are certainly people who espouse anti-free-speech views in the big tech, I'm pretty sure the companies themselves are pressured/threatened with increased regulatory scrutiny, anti-thrust action and anything else that is at congress/government's disposal. These congress/senate hearings about misinformation are exactly that.
> It's not the engineers who built the web and these companies with Silicon Valley ideals. They were never intended to be used this way and are secretly horrified.
Such a laughable statement given that Silicon Valley was from the beginning a military project, with social control as an explicit aim. Milquetoast lamentations about a lost libertarian dream are no different than old cries about the closing of the Western frontier or Jeffersonian myths about a pastoralist capitalism corrupted by industry.
> It feels like private companies are de facto writing the laws about what's allowed online and in society right now, and that it's almost become a loophole for censoring free speech on a whim.
This is why monopoly power is dangerous as without it you could just move to a more tolerant competitor and be on with your business. The courts almost never consider the "secondary markets" that exist around these behemoths, and how all of our interests and independence are significantly damaged by allowing these monopolies to merge into existence.
Of course, even this feels like the conversation they would _like_ you to have, because the other side I never see considered is what does it take to buy an "indulgence" from these companies? Is it easy? Is it often done? How often are these "scions of social justice" actually just "turning a blind eye?"
Monopoly power seems secondary here, with the real problem being that there are sufficiently many people now with a totalitarian impulse to forbid others from engaging in speech they dislike that overrides almost any other principle, and no equally obstinate opposition. I am not engaged in and have no interest in any KF-like activity, but merely wanting to choose an ISP, domain registrar, Mastodon instance or email provider that would not filter them as a matter of principle would expose me to the risk of becoming collateral damage, as the armchair censors pressure the closest amenable nodes to participate in what they see as "cutting out the rot" - excise DNS records, range-ban, defederate from your node and recursively any node that would not participate in defederating you, thus forcing the whole world to pick a side.
> Promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all and build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels
Comcast has an all-women Open Source Program Office, which sounds like a way to include females in engineering. But they define women as "females and males who want to be seen as female" which doesn't help women actually get jobs.
The Scottish National Party has sex-quotas to achieve more-equal representation by men and women, but they let men who claim to be women take these seats.
Are either actually inclusive? Are they inclusive of women? If you have a daughter, do either of those measures better her life.
And yet both actions meet the 'Social' criteria of ESG scores, and serve to boost a company's rankings and thus lower its interest rate on sustainability linked loans.
Nothing about 'affirmative action' is inclusive. People just see it as positive 'because minority.' It can not lead to a positive outcome longer term (even now, where all-female teams are now seen as a positive but all-male teams are a negative, regardless of context).
What should happen is across the board equality of opportunity. While making sure the opportunity is truly fair, focus on stamping out prejudice and 'isms. You can't force immediate changes, but you can remove the barriers to equality to let the changes happen.
At least payment providers can plausibly point to financial risks and legal concerns as why they engage in what comes off as moral policing. It's pretty clear that any similar claim on HE's part would be pretextual.
>It feels like private companies are de facto writing the laws about what's allowed online and in society right now, and that it's almost become a loophole for censoring free speech on a whim.
"Feels like"? This is clearly embraced as a necessary step to preserve democracy by a small-but-powerful segment of population.
IMO, practically speaking, payment processors are a much bigger headache than anything else. It's hard to end-run around them and run any kind of successful business. It's really weird how much power they have to play moral police, even deciding what kind of porn is "ok" and what isn't.
Yep. It's especially concerning when clients are cut off for political reasons. Being able to effectively financially sanction people for having the wrong views is truly dangerous to democracy. Like with a lot of things, I suspect the reason they haven't faced more regulation is just that governments largely support these actions, and enjoy having a backdoor that they can ask to hamper undesirables without going through pesky courts
My biggest pet peeve and oft-cited example of US puritanism being imposed upon the entire world is the closed captioning system on YouTube that censors out words like s**t, f**k..
I have nothing whatsoever to do with the US, my Google account is based in a jurisdiction where I'm well past the legal age for adults and where hearing such words (and "worse") is quite normal at 14.
And yet I can't get this multinational behemoth to stop nannying me.
// private companies a re de facto writing the laws //
We can certainly discuss whether these services should be publicly or privately owned. I'm a pretty liberal guy, and wouldn't mind seeing publically-owned versions of Twitter, ChatGPT, or Google, as a guard against corporations dominating the information age.
But calling for more government regulation of privately-owned services? Forcing private companies to do what you want them to do, even when they would prefer not to? The whole point of private property is that it carves out a space of freedom for you, the owner of the private property, to use it as you wish!!!
I really wonder how I became the radical conservative here......
> * The whole point of private property is that it carves out a space of freedom for you, the owner of the private property, to use it as you wish!!!*
Be careful here not to conflate personal property and lucrative property. The first (like a home) is what you say. The second (like a factory) is a way to tell others what to do on your turf, for your benefit rather than theirs.
Private companies are of the second kind: more freedom for shareholders, fewer freedoms for employees… and if they’re big and inevitable enough (like YouTube), that’s fewer freedoms for users as well.
Even if we didn’t distinguish the two kinds of property, I could easily twist your sentence into meaning that the whole point of property is to make sure rich owners have more freedom than the poor. Which is probably not the point you were trying to make.
Freedom is certainly a tricky thing to balance, and private property rights are not absolute. But neither are freedom of speech rights.
Here's a way to cut the Gordian knot: publicly-owned services and utilities. E.g. NPR as a way to check distortions which privately-owned news organizations would otherwise be subject to. We could have a national public twitter, a national public chatGTP, etc.
So those of you who are now thinking of all the drawbacks typically associated with publicly-owned companies (real or imagined), well, the more you let the government regulate the private companies, the more the private companies will behave like public companies anyways.
Instead of getting the best of both worlds, you'll get the worst of both worlds: heavily-regulated, inefficient companies which still control the public discourse, which deliver profits not to the public but to private interests.
> "Forcing private companies to do what you want them to do, even when they would prefer not to?"
That's exactly the argument that bigots who owned businesses used to refuse service to PoC and oppressed people before the civil rights legislations of the '50s and '60s were passed. Funny to hear old discredited arguments used by far-right conservatives decades ago coming out of the mouths of the left these days. It's almost enough to make one start taking the horseshoe theory seriously.
There is a very bright-line difference in the case of the civil rights-related curbs on private property privilege: Those actually were effective in solving the problem! Because the solution to the problem was very clear: everybody should be able to ride the bus, eat in a restaurant, etc.
The contrast with regulating the media companies couldn't be greater. What, exactly, should these regulations be? I haven't heard anything but the most vague notions--which are so undercooked that they do not rise to the level of any kind of concrete proposal.
In point of fact, no matter what regulations are adopted, there will be media winners and media losers, and the losers will always feel the system is against them. Our media will become even more hyper-politicized than it is now, because its fate would be determined by politicians who can't even agree that it's probably a good idea to pay our debt.
You start off with a very clear solution, but don't explain why that very clear solution doesn't apply
Everyone should be able to use the bus, eat in a restaurant, use a water fountain or a post office bathroom
Everyone should be able to use Twitter, Facebook, Google, Uber, Shopify, Reddit.
It's the same problem in both cases. Why is it different now so we should apply an exclusionary standard?
Great question, which made me think about how they are more similar than I had originally thought. In both cases we're talking about carriers, quasi-utilities, network effects and (alas) real potential for abuse. But wouldn't this very similarity tend to strengthen our intuitions about the need for community standards?
E.g. You are sitting on a bus, and a venerable person comes aboard and launches into paean to Bolshevism, urging the present company to rise up and seize the means of production. Certainly protected speech. You might find it entertaining. You might even feel a pang of nostalgia for a lost world and its simpler problems.
But after a few hours of this, would you really feel like a free speech abuse had happened if the bus driver asks our comrade to give it a rest; or, if he feels honor-bound to continue, would he please go do it on somebody else's bus?
But you asked how I thought they were different, and I do think they are very different, because human attention is limited in a different way than the number of busses, or ISPs are. If you can't fit one more person on a bus without kicking another one off, you can just buy more busses.
Human attention is not like that. No matter how many clones of twitter there are, I can't doom scroll for more than 24 hours a day. If some content is promoted on my feed, that means other content is inevitably excluded from my feed. And isn't this really what people are unhappy about? Not just that their views are not stored in some database somewhere. No, they want people to pay attention to what they are saying.
Can that problem be solved by additional regulations? I really don't think so. No matter what regulations we put on carriers, there will be media winners and media losers. And the losers will always feel like the system is systematically excluding them. And no wonder they feel that way--they are right. They can even go beyond vague complaints of corporate collusion and point to specific line items community standards, or--if we do adopt regulations--to specific regulations which are having the effect of suppressing their speech, perhaps even unconstitutionally suppressing their speech. But the conundrum is that this would be true for any set of regulations. The regulations can change who gets attention and who gets ignored. And they can make a bus ride or a social network more pleasant or less pleasant. But I have a hard time seeing how it can actually solve the problem of people being ignored.
Sure, pretty much everyone except extreme libertarians agrees that there are limits to private property rights that can be overriden in certain circumstances. However, if we (rightly) force businesses not to discriminate on the grounds of race, then it seems logically consistent to also allow businesses to refuse to associate with racists. I am not sure how someone could be ok with government intervention to prevent "whites only" restaurants and yet not ok with the government merely refraining from interfering with businesses that voluntarily choose not to associate with racists.
I'm not saying it's a great policy, but it makes sense to me.
Running a whites-only business overlaps but is different from being racist.
In this scenario, it would be weird to force your business to associate with whites-only businesses. But those are illegal, so you're not forced to do that. You're only forced to work with racists that don't run whites-only businesses.
Yes, I suppose there is a logically consistent space there, but not one that seems either appealing or consistent with the way the legal lines have been drawn in the US. For example, as it is not illegal in the US to express hatred for people of a particular ethnicity, should bakeries therefore be required to bake 'Ethnicity X sucks' cakes? That seems both absurd and inconsistent with the eventual outcome of the Masterpiece Cakeshop case.
My overall point here is that it does not make much sense to object to the freedom of association arguments being made in this thread on the grounds that similar arguments were used to support discrimination against Black Americans prior to the Civil Rights Act. The Civil Rights Act recognized racism as a unique evil that required special legal remedy; it did not recognize racists as requiring special legal protection. So, yes, freedom of association permits you to avoid associating with racists but does not (in all cases) permit you to avoid associating with people of a particular ethnicity.
Unfortunately progressives have been acting like ancaps on these issues for a while. I've long since stopped being surprised to see someone with "socialist" in their bio saying it's a good thing that unelected corporations have de facto control over online political expression, or that employers should be able to threaten people's livelihoods for supporting the wrong party, and acting like it's anathema to suggest regulating a private company in any way. Very short sighted, both forwards and backwards
chuckle I certainly have been lost in wonder that now I'm the one defending corporate power :-)
But, what would a solution to the problem look like, on your view? Would we really be better off having, say, Elon must having to get his decision to remove blocking approved by some media czar in the Ministry of Truth? Would that really stop people from thinking that their views are not being systematically suppressed?
Progressives (like Americans generally) are skeptical of all power, pubic and private, and (like Americans generally) don't want government interference in society unless it might have some hope of actually solving the problem.
But I haven't seen any concrete proposals at all, let alone anything which I would have any confidence that would actually solve the problem. Quite the contrary; no matter what regulations are imposed, surely there will always be those who feel they are being systematically suppressed--and come to think of it, they would be correct in thinking that way.
Private property rights are not absolute, sure. But is regulating media companies going to solve anything? Are there any regulations which both sides could be happy with, or would it just open up a whole new front in the culture wars, of endless, highly-politicized and ham-fisted control over, say, whether or not twitter has a block function or not?
> Private property rights are not absolute, sure. But is regulating media companies going to solve anything?
I am not sure if you were aware, but this article is about ISPs and we currently have laws that already regulate them and make the behavior described in the article as illegal.
So yes we do regulate them. And these laws are called common carrier laws. And those have have existed for decades and uncontroversial, and yes they work.
> Are there any regulations which both sides could be happy with
Both sides are indeed already happy with our existing common carrier laws that apply to ISPs, yes. Common carrier laws are not controversial.
Your point about common-carrier regulations already existing is very well taken.
What's not so clear to me is whether (A) the allegations against the ISP have any merit (the article itself states it has no confirmation), or (B) even if they were true that they would run afoul of the common carrier laws. As far as I understand, these regulations do not prohibit the carriers from selectively promoting (and, ipso facto, selectively suppressing) the content they carry.
Indeed, how could it be otherwise? The capacity of the carrier is always going to be finite, therefore, tough choices are always going to have to be made as to who gets priority access.
Common carrier legislation can happily co-exist with a "no shirt, no shoes, no service" sign on the shop door.
How about, "no company shall refuse access to essential infrastructure to anyone because they engage in lawful activity." That's what I think the bar should be on this issue and should include banking and internet services.
Sounds good to me, but (as another perceptive commentator wrote) we do already have common carrier laws on the books; don't they pretty much cover what is intended here?
Yes, but I was mostly responding to the "no shirt, no shoes.." portion of the comment, and don't think that common carrier status goes quite far enough in terms of ensuring access. I also think that the status should include banking, and possibly internet hosting providers and services, not just client access.
I think the Telephone company model is fine.
Have you ever had the phone company disconnect your call or cancel your services because they didn't like something you said?
> But calling for more government regulation of privately-owned services? Forcing private companies to do what you want them to do, even when they would prefer not to?
Yes! That's what it's going to take. If you want checks and balances, this is how you get them. Ultimately capitalism is supposed to benefit society as a whole and when it doesn't it needs a kick in the ass.
> The whole point of private property is that it carves out a space of freedom for you, the owner of the private property, to use it as you wish!!!
That's correct but as soon as you're "open to the public" the rules, necessarily, change.
What, exactly, do you think these regulations should be? What kind of regulation would solve this problem?
E.g. contrast with, say, regulation of pharmaceuticals by the FDA. Certainly a curb on private property rights, but, its also pretty clear what the regulations should do: allow companies to sell only drugs which have been proven to be both safe and effective.
Is there such a very clear idea of how these proposed regulations should be written? Where do we draw the line? Does anybody really have a very clear idea let all what the solution would look like?
I don't really think this is as complicated as you're making it in this case. The regulation should be that ISPs are to simply pass along data that comes their way. If they fail to do that by impeding certain traffic, they should be fined or in egregious cases jailed. No different from how you'd fine or jail something like a restaurant owner for violating health codes. You would expect a restaurant to serve you clean, un-tampered food; likewise, you should be able to expect your ISP to serve you data and to not tamper with it.
This sort of questioning just supports maintaining the status quo even if that benefits nobody.
I don't know what the regulations should be but that doesn't mean regulations shouldn't exist. Businesses are under perhaps thousands of regulations and I can only name a few. How many can you name? What problems do those regulations solve? Do you think they shouldn't exist as well?
// This sort of questioning //
chuckle Surely you are not trying to suppress my right to ask questions? :-) We are all frustrated here and know things have got to change somehow. It's just not exactly obvious how, not to me anyways.
But suppose we actually did have a concrete proposal, something we could legislate. No matter what the legislation was, there would still be media winners and media losers. And the media losers would still feel they are being systematically excluded.
Here's the kicker--they would be absolutely right!! Moreover, they wouldn't have to appeal to vague dissatisfactions about "corporate abuses"--they could point to specific line items of regulations which had the effect of suppressing their speech. There would be endless, highly politicized fights about what the regulations should be, but no matter what they were, the regulations would inevitably have the effect of promoting some points of view and suppressing others.
I.E. I really don't how regulations could provide any sort of solution to this problem.
Winners and losers exist now -- it's just that whatever is the status quo is the assumed baseline. It's just how humans view things but it's not logical.
We didn't used to let private companies control the public discourse. The mail is government-run and there are mail privacy protections as deep as the constitution. In the age of radio and TV we at least had the equal time rule and some level of public oversight.
Following all my opinion, but easier to write without constant hedging:
IMO public discourse is less controlled by private corporations/organizations now than at basically any other point in our history, with the possible exception of like, 10 years ago.
There was never previously any realistic method for a private citizen to gain a platform to meaningfully influence discourse. Traditional media _literally_ defined the narratives in play. I’d argue that a whole lot of the ideological carnage and polarization going on is directly a result of the “democratization” of public discourse.
While there was some oversight, the reality is that news media still had basically total control over whatever narrative they were interested in pushing.
In fact, I’d argue that a lot of the ideological chaos and subsequent censorship we have seen recently is precisely a result of private corporations losing control of public discourse.
The truth is that before the internet, there wasn't really any genuine public discourse. If you wanted any reach at all, you had to go through a gatekeeper of some sort.
In the US, related to this specific situation, the laws are called "Net Neutrality" and "Common Carrier" laws.
Such laws are well established and uncontroversial. Pretty much everyone agrees that it is a good thing that the power company can't shut off your electricity just because you said something that it didn't like.
If you want an example of something that is almost quite literally the public square, you could look at the court case robin vs pruneyard.
In this case, the government forced privately owned malls to allow political protests. So yes the government has forced public squares to be open to the public and prevents private companies from censoring political speech in those public squares.
> or a mass communication system though
Common carriers quite literally are mass communication systems. What do you think common carriers "carry"? The answer is that many of them carry communication.
Things like the phone system are for mass communication.
So yes, we have laws that effect both the public square and mass communication systems.
ISPs are also communication systems and laws called "net neutrality" laws force them to do certain things.
In fact, this article itself is about how the ISP is acting illegally and is breaking existing laws about what the ISPs can censor.
In fact, the reason the First Amendment limits the government, exclusively, is that the ability to abridge free speech (to choose which forms of speech you support, spread, or disassociate from) is implicitly a part of individual liberty, held by the people. Free speech has never guaranteed anyone a platform.
That's not a bug, it's a feature. Yes, it can be messy. Yes, it can be abused. Yes, it means social media companies are allowed to ban you for any reason they like, just as restaurants are allowed to refuse you service. Yes it means ISPs don't have to do business with nazis and assholes.
The alternative is that the government - that controls the monopoly on violence - controls all speech, at all levels, and any business that engages in any form of speech. That it forces you to publish speech against your will, against your interests, even against your safety.
The great thing about ISPs being private is that you can always find another ISP. Kiwifarms did. Being banned from social media isn't the end of the world. But I can't as easily find another government if mine reads my social media posts and decides I'm too "woke" to live.
You're not free to not associate with people in the U.S. Businesses are not allowed to discriminate against protected classes. This is because businesses are foundational to modern life, so being excluded from them greatly hurts a person. I don't think it's unreasonable to think that we should look to expand such protections to all people for certain services, especially those which are more like infrastructure for modern life. Not saying sites can't have a TOS, but an ISP should have a really good business reason for blocking you(illegal activity, spam).
> You're not free to not associate with people in the U.S.
I'm not? There are certain exceptions, such as certain police interactions, or a court order, or protected classes when I'm doing business stuff, but I don't think that's correct in general.
>You're not free to not associate with people in the U.S.
Yes I am. If Jehovah's Witnesses come to my door I am perfectly within my rights to tell them to go away. I don't have to go to church if I don't want to. I'm perfectly allowed not to associate with racists and homophobes.
Businesses are not allowed to discriminate against protected classes, true, but being an asshole is not a protected class, and every bar and restaurant still has a sign saying they can refuse service to anyone.
>Not saying sites can't have a TOS, but an ISP should have a really good business reason for blocking you(illegal activity, spam).
I'd be willing to agree if I didn't remember the last few months of vociferous support for repealing Section 230, having the government take over social media platforms and make TOS's and most forms of moderation illegal. Even make "algorithms" illegal.
On the one hand, I get the free speech argument, but on the other hand, there is a right-wing accelerationist agenda using that argument to push the Overton window of acceptable regulations far enough that it becomes illegal, de facto or de jure, for any site to engage in any form of moderation. I don't believe for a second that people are going to be satisfied with simply regulating ISPs, even if I'm far more sympathetic to the argument that they should be considered infrastructure than websites themselves.
For the time being, the market seems to be working. Conservative and right-wing alternatives are rising to take advantage of sites being pushed out of the mainstream, and I think that's acceptable.
> Yes I am. If Jehovah's Witnesses come to my door I am perfectly within my rights to tell them to go away. I don't have to go to church if I don't want to. I'm perfectly allowed not to associate with racists and homophobes.
> Businesses are not allowed to discriminate against protected classes, true, but being an asshole is not a protected class, and every bar and restaurant still has a sign saying they can refuse service to anyone.
Clearly I'm not talking about interpersonal association. We're talking about your freedom when conducting business, which is normal to regulate in the U.S in this way.
> I'd be willing to agree if I didn't remember the last few months of vociferous support for repealing Section 230, having the government take over social media platforms and make TOS's and most forms of moderation illegal. Even make "algorithms" illegal.
Do you think I support repealing section 230 when I said "Not saying sites can't have a TOS"?
> On the one hand, I get the free speech argument
Nothing I said has anything to do with free speech. As stated above, I think it's fine for sites to moderate themselves in a partisan manner.
> but on the other hand, there is a right-wing accelerationist agenda using that argument to push the Overton window of acceptable regulations far enough that it becomes illegal, de facto or de jure, for any site to engage in any form of moderation. I don't believe for a second that people are going to be satisfied with simply regulating ISPs, even if I'm far more sympathetic to the argument that they should be considered infrastructure than websites themselves.
There are other threats besides right wing extremism, like the centralization of power. Even if the power is wielded by some collective consciousness, I have interests that are not shared by the collective, so I don't want them having the ability to dictate my life. I think many people would also share this concern, so the government is a good way to solve that.
> For the time being, the market seems to be working. Conservative and right-wing alternatives are rising to take advantage of sites being pushed out of the mainstream, and I think that's acceptable.
That seems to be the exact opposite of what you want, doesn't it?Extremism is very popular and profitable.
Focus on speech though. Can the Phone company cut you off because of the content of your communication? Assuming you aren't breaking any other law like harassment?
The deciding factor is if your business revolves around facilitating speech. The law has some way to go to catch up with the current state of affairs, but right now the government is enjoying the power of censoring that speech so it may not be an easy path.
Good, then it should be easy for the police to shutdown the website if that's the case. Tell the authorities and let the justice system to deal with it.
> That’s what must happen here. The cops and the courts should be working to protect the victims of KF and go after the perpetrators with every legal tool at their disposal. We should be giving them the resources and societal mandate to do so. Solid enforcement of existing laws is something that has been sorely lacking for harassment and abuse online, and it’s one of the reasons people turn to censorship strategies. Finally, we should enact strong data privacy laws that target, among others, the data brokers whose services help enable doxxing.
But the authorities and the justice system seem unwilling to do so, and - in the face of their refusal to act - you can't expect people to just give up and not defend themselves, not when they can exert other forms of pressure.
>But the authorities and the justice system seem unwilling to do so
To me sounds like a conspiracy theory. If their crimes are so unquestionable and clear, it should be pretty easy and straightforward to prove it in a court of law. The other alternative being, of course, that there is no crime happening here, at least under the US law, and their actions, as tasteless and despicable as they might be, are covered under the american law and KF opponents are using corporations to censor legally protected speech.
I would like you to pay attention to the word "seem", which describe how their action - or lack thereof - appear to a third party, especially one which has been subject - and continues to be subject - to said "tasteless and despicable" actions, and to avoid jumping to conclusions.
> The other alternative being, of course, that there is no crime happening here [...]
That hardly sounds like the only other alternative. Even without assuming the malice of some hypothetical "conspiracy", it might be the case that
(1) the crime isn't happening here, on US soil, and thus the relevant authorities lack the power to pursue it (see also: spam call centers located in foreign countries);
(2) whoever is tasked with pursuing said crime has other, higher-priority crimes to deal with, and decided that the potential pay-off was not worth the cost of prosecution (see also: the whole US justice system);
(3) the prosecution is waiting to build a stronger case;
(4) it is not clear who should prosecute who (see also: diffusion of responsibility);
(5) the file was lost;
(6) the file got eaten by a grue;
(7) any other reason for why a large and complex machine might turn out to not be effective in dealing, in a timely manner, with a loose group of people who gather on servers hosted on foreign soil, which are not "KF opponents [...] using corporations to censor legally protected [sic] speech";
There is a reason why KiwiFarms is not hosted in my country. We have hate speech and data privacy laws that would prevent it from being hosted here. All that dox crap alone violates the GDPR.
There even was a thread on that forum where the admin asked for advice about alternate hosting locations and could not find any.
The USA is the only country with speech laws permissive enough and data privacy laws weak enough for that site to be legal there.
I don't know if you've noticed, but in the short time since we have basically removed all gatekeepers things have not gone well.
Our democracy is on the verge of collapsing because liars and frauds have grabbed their newly available megaphone and convinced a very significant portion of the population that any election they lose is rigged.
If our democracy even survives this, which is questionable right now, we really need to rein in social media if we don't want to live under a despot.
Typically dumb pipe companies get involved in this side of things due to legal requirements. Less often, though often justified as such, it is due to sincere concerns by the provider.
For example, banks don't typically want to service car dealerships simply because they are a prime target for money laundering. Same for legal cannabis firms due to being unbanked previously or because the whole industry isn't traceable.
Frankly, while I understand the historical reasons for having a "big brother" watch financial transactions, it's way to convoluted to satisfy and represents a big cost in the economy.
> private companies are de facto writing the laws about what's allowed online
It's hard when it's your line people are using to put their brand of ugliness "online".
Cloudflare comes up so regularly because so many legally problematic websites use their free service to evade even judicial blocks that ISPs are ordered to implement at national level. CF are used as a free proxy that's very hard to block unless Cloudflare takes a stand.
When they don't take a stand, when they try to stay impartial, they're attacked for enabling terrorism, child abuse, human trafficking, etc, etc, etc. So they do something, and they're attacked for being moral arbiters.
They're here to do business, not please everyone. Perhaps letting them pick isn't so bad. You can decide whether or not you want to do business with them then based on their actions and everybody can not use them if they're that much of a moral problem for them. I think many people would benefit from knowing they don't always get their way.
"Oh but I have no choice of ISPs" is absolutely a problem, but it's not this problem. Your ISP having a monopoly can be fixed separately.
>When they don't take a stand, when they try to stay impartial, they're attacked for enabling terrorism, child abuse, human trafficking, etc, etc, etc.
Imo the problem lies here. On the idea that servicing someone implies support for their actions or ideology. For all the talk about acceptance and tolerance it would seem a good deal of society is ok with the idea that those doing reprehensible stuff ought to be completely ostracized from society, laws be damned.
Yeah, this is where things are so immature. Where language has been twisted into “silence is violence”. People that think this way either have an intense moral agenda and they’re intolerant of real diversity, or they can’t actually mentally separate the concept of basic human respect (as in servicing someone you disagree with because they’re human) and political support a la providing internet to Kiwi farms perpetuates violence you’re part of the problem.
If you let authoritarians kafka trap you or you peers into thought terminating cliches left and right, and you don’t call the BS, this is the society you end up in.
Corporations are essentially citizens, and citizens have the right to free speech. We can agree or disagree, but this where we've allowed ourselves to get.
HE is within their rights to say no, we will not host or route to KF, to stop us would violate our constitutional rights to freedom of speech and expression. They would then point to a litany of issues surrounding KF, how it would impact their business, and then win their case with ease.
I'm kind of shocked EFF went to bat for KF If I'm being honest. When your speech is unaliving people, or responsible for wide scale harassment of minors, guess what, I'm not interested in doing business with you, and that's perfectly fine. The fact that they use such a weak argument like utilities, and mail service as a comparison to commercial internet service is wild.
The idea of corporations being legal people is questionable in the first place, but now you’re going to argue that they’re not only people but citizens?!
I don't disagree. If a corporation has civil rights, they're akin to being a person/entity in which those rights are guaranteed aka citizenship. Some might argue that America is a "corporatocracy" for this very reason.
No, you’ve got weird ideas about citizenship and civil rights if you think that’s the case.
Plenty of rights are conferred by merely being within the borders of a country, regardless of citizenship status. You can be a tourist or even an illegal immigrant in the US and have the right to habeas corpus or the right of non-self-incrimination, for example.
Talking about elevating corporations to be on par with citizens is a fascist idea, which is absolutely adjacent to corporatism.
You can think these ideas are weird, they're not mine, I think a corporation having civil rights is weird too. The infamous line "corporations are people" comes from American politicians, so as weird as it may be, the government itself is inferring it and a court is justifying it as the law of the land.
A key tenet of fascism is protecting corporate interest and power... but okay.
Is that some sort of subtle trolling? I mean, with that Newspeak verb randomly thrown in, it must be, but then again it wouldn't surprise me if there exist communities on the internet who'd develop slang that ends up being basically Newspeak.
It's basically just making a very poor case for corporate personhood.
The more elegant argument is that the organization has no right, but every human being that is a member of that organization has rights
You have an individual right to practice religion, and you have a group right to practice religion. Your ability to practice religion is not limited by joining a Parish or church organization. The Citizens United of Citizens United v. FEC wanted to Produce, Advertise and Air a documentary. They have an individual right to make a movie, and the court affirmed they have a right to make speech as a group. Citizens have a right to address political Grievances. So do Citizens United
It's also worthwhile to note that the FEC's argument included that there was no limiting principle to their power. They could ban a book if a single sentence advocated for a person or ban a union from hiring someone to write a book. It is completely unsurprising that SCOTUS ruled against unlimited cosmic power.
The lack of government regulations will make businesses "regulate" themselves
What you're seeing is how government is born. Corporatoctacy is just another form of authoritarianism and the more government pulls up stakes, they get replaced.
The global strain of far right ethno isolationist politics is creating the public void these corporations are filling.
Please. We can see how much regulation matters when they're not enforced.
If you went to San Fransisco you would be surprised to know it's against the rules to break into people's cars or shoplift hundreds of dollars of stuff, considering how many people guilty of doing those things are tried convicted and serve time
Which is why society needs to turn ISPs into non-discriminating common carriers of information. Now nobody will be able to "resort" to leaning on them anymore.
It feels like private companies are de facto writing the laws about what's allowed online and in society right now, and that it's almost become a loophole for censoring free speech on a whim.
And while the site in question here is ethically bankrupt in basically every way, it doesn't seem too far fetched to assume the same thing could (and potentially will) happen for sites many more people agree with because someone/some group at an ISP doesn't like them or think they should be accessible.