7 ms·

The United Nations has a radical, dangerous vision for the future of the Web

80 points by tomp 11y ago

tomp 11y ago
An interesting analysis: https://medium.com/@KingFrostFive/citation-games-by-the-united-nations-cyberviolence-e8bb1336c8d1 https://medium.com/@KingFrostFive/citation-games-by-the-unit... Using the metric of removing duplicate citations, not counting broken links, those with little to no effort shown for those missing links (as in, not even bothering to check the website), and removing anything that didn’t seem to exist, only 64% remained.
- danso 11y ago
  Not so long ago, we learned that the U.N. is a world-saving organization that can't even pay its own interns. Not because it thought was morally OK to not pay, but because they just didn't want to do the paperwork and rulemaking to offer their interns a pittance. Ignoring the likely possibility that this paper was partly compiled by the kind of work you get from unpaid laborers...I doubt that an institution that can't do the easy, moral thing for its most vulnerable employees is the type of institution that has the patience and attention to detail to double-check its own footnotes.
rdlecler1 11y ago
Policy makers consider the benefits, but not the costs. If we now need licensing and content monitoring this protects incumbents because only they have the resources to actually handle this, in the end we end up with a few big organizations and the. Surprise suprise we try to regulate them because they are too big.
devit 11y ago
Why "Future"? It's the present. None of the most popular websites supports free speech, in the sense that they will not censor anything legal for them to distribute.
- moron4hire 11y ago
  Child pornography is not free speech. Free speech is not "say whatever you want."
  - bruceb 11y ago
    Child pornography is not quite the same as saying something. You could say you support child pornography and create stories about it. Just not create it with actual children. Yes free speech is "say whatever you want" What do you think it should be?
  - tomp 11y ago
    I'm not sure parent was referring to pornography, but to countless examples of sites like Facebook, Twitter, Reddit censoring information that they find inconvenient (e.g. the fappening, r/fatpeoplehate, etc.). > Free speech is not "say whatever you want." Parent clearly defines "free speech" as "they will not censor anything legal", which the websites above unfortunately don't follow. > Child pornography is not free speech. Ironically, in many jurisdictions "child pornography" includes virtual child pornography and cartoons, which any sensible person would say should be free (we can see movies depicting children getting murdered, people getting decapitated and women getting raped, but not of 17 year olds having sex?!?)
    - RaleyField 11y ago
      > Reddit censoring information that they find inconvenient (e.g. the fappening, r/fatpeoplehate, etc.) Calling it information is being generous. As a private entity they simply don't have to suffer that speech. Fappening is probably illegal, and even if it were not it would be an acceptable courtesy call to remove it. Fatpeoplehate was about moderators harassing employees of imgur.
  - tiglathphilizar 11y ago
    Free speech is just that FREE even if others consider what a individual says distasteful.If it wasn't for FREE Speech there would have been no civil rights movement. David Finkelhor, a sociologist who directs the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire, sees the moral weight of the law , but not the empirical proof. “The evidence doesn’t yet tell us to what extent the experience of being a pornography victim aggravates the experience of the sexual abuse itself. How do you separate it out?”. What the law says is equivalent to aying voodoo is real. No one has to actually commit a crime they just have a look at an image or have a thought and they are guilty of the crime. A person that observes a digital image that has no form or life then through osmosis gives those images or objects a legal force, a power, is practicing voo-doo. To make things easy judges have allowed government prosecutors use of those unseen images in a computer file that have nor hold no power to communicate in the courtroom. Before long, the people are ensnared by the compulsion to give power to a thing of their own definition. www.truthmovement.us
jwess 11y ago
According to the article, "the UN believes that online platforms should be (a) generally responsible for the actions of their users and (b) specifically responsible for making sure those people aren’t harassers." Many websites already have problems with flippant takedown notices through the DMCA. This article leads me to believe that the UN wants to apply a similar process to eliminate "harassment", which is a fairly nebulous term. The benefits of this proposal seem minuscule, while the costs of making "online platforms generally responsible for the actions of their users" would be enormous. Why would anyone think this is a good idea?
- Rusky 11y ago
  Points a and b in that quote actually sound eminently reasonable to me. Online forums already have moderators to make sure discussion stays civil, and it sounds like a good idea to include "prevent people from organizing stalking and SWATting campaigns" in that.
  - radu_floricica 11y ago
    The problem isn't if it's a good idea to moderate forums. Problem is when it becomes a liability not to. The possibility of fines, lawsuits or god forbid prison time can have the kind of chilling effects we can't even imagine.
    - Rusky 11y ago
      No, the problem is whether to moderate forums- it's not happening and when people try to come up with codes of conduct so they can moderate better, there's a huge outcry. It would be fine if we had better moderation in more places, even without any laws. But even that's not happening.
      - oldmanjay 11y ago
        That huge outcry isn't going to go away no matter how patiently a censor explains that censorship is good for everyone
mtgx 11y ago
I hope large tech companies like Google, Facebook and Twitter are happy now. They started this. They were warned that if they "build the infrastructure" for censorship - even for the most heinous of crimes - more requests will come for much more trivial stuff. Because it's easy to ask it of them once they've proven it can be done. The same will be true of backdoors. As soon as they start enabling backdoors in China or India or Russia, you can bet not just the U.S. will want them enabled, but many other countries, and they'll all have various reasons for asking for them. This is why, at least with the backdoor issue, they need to be pro-active, and start building end-to-end encryption into their services and products now, so they can actually say later on that they "can't" give access to the private communications of their users. If they would've done this years ago, like pre-Snowden revelations, Russia and China (and soon EU) would've had fewer excuses to "worry about national security and privacy" and then ask them to build local data centers, costing them billions.
littletimmy 11y ago
Now this, is bullshit. We cannot sacrifice every little freedom we have in the name of security. I might get downvoted to hell for saying this, but women have to learn to be comfortable with some degree of harassment if the only alternative is to convert the internet into some limited speech zone.
- tomp 11y ago
  > women have to learn to be comfortable I'm a bit reluctant to generalize like this... I think it's mainly a (relatively) small group of people (women and men) that are pushing this agenda to suit their other interests, using "women" simply as an excuse that people can easily emotionally identify with. None of the women I know are bothered by this kind of "violence".
  - pluma 11y ago
    The particularly nefarious aspect of this is that they try abuse the feminist label for credibility and then victimise themselves to avoid criticism. To paraphrase "you shouldn't treat women as if they are more vulnerable/inferior but you can't criticise me because I'm a woman and any criticism by you is sexist even if you are a woman yourself".
- mnkypete 11y ago
  Because there is only two possibilities? I don't think it should be necessary (or desirable) to get comfortable with harassment... It should neither be necessary to cross-check EVERY single post or comment someone writes, I personally see A LOT of middle ground between these two options ... One could think of: - Calling out harassment / reporting it - A better education regarding stuff like that (yes, this is an offline-first problem, only amplified trough anonymity)
  - Spivak 11y ago
    I think the middle ground is letting each platform self-moderate, and let users decide where they want to post. If you want to be anonymous and filter absolutely nothing then you can, if you want to aggressively moderate hate speech then go for it. If government gets involved then its likely going to be all or nothing.
choward 11y ago
Some people just don't understand software. They treat it as if it were something physical. For example, if I own a bar it is my responsibility to make sure my customers don't get too crazy and to make sure underage people don't drink. This law is relatively enforceable. You can't apply this kind of thinking to the Internet. Software isn't a bar for many reasons. You can duplicate software trivially. You can't possibly monitor every copy of that software. For example, a site like reddit is open source (for the most part I think). So in theory anyone could just host their own reddit (or any other software). There are many open source web apps that you can easily deploy your own copy of today. Which brings me to my next point. Where do you draw the line? Web sites are responsible for content their users post. Are web hosting companies responsible for the sites their customers post and therefore responsible for the comments too? What about ISPs? They let the data through. Shouldn't they also be monitoring it? What about hardware manufactures? They are letting the web hosting company run "bad" web sites. If someone does something illegal on the Internet investigate it and blame the user. It's really as simple as that.
- Rusky 11y ago
  We have the exact same line-drawing question in the real world. All kind of infrastructure and different levels over ownership go into a place like a bar, but that doesn't mean the bar owner isn't responsible. There is a similarly clear difference between an ISP (how the customer gets to the bar), a web host (the landlord, maybe), and the website itself (the bar). On the other hand, investigating whether someone committed a crime is a little bit different online vs in the real world. Part of what websites could do is make it easier to run those investigations by making reporting easier- Twitter reporting, for example, is relatively hostile to people trying to report bad behavior.
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moron4hire 11y ago
This is so easy. Let the market decide. If such censorship is so fucking great, let a new startup create a censored social network and see if all the downtrodden people of the world flock to it, or see if they prefer to stick with the rest of the world in the places where they may speak freely about their own pet issues.
- vezzy-fnord 11y ago
  Last I checked, Facebook wasn't exactly a bastion of free speech. It seems like the market has indeed spoken, though I'd personally be very wary of ascribing any moral judgments from macro-level market transactions -- especially given that in practice we live in highly complicated mixed market societies, and not anything resembling laissez-faire.
phaemon 11y ago
The newspaper article is really exaggerating this report. Note how few actual quotes there are and how many "in other words". Read the report for yourself at: http://www.broadbandcommission.org/Documents/reports/bb-wg-gender-report2015.pdf http://www.broadbandcommission.org/Documents/reports/bb-wg-g... It's mainly describing the current state of things, not advocating any specific solutions. The one mention of licensing is one bullet point in a chapter, not any kind of main focus. Half the actual suggestions are things that people are mentioning in these comments as alternatives.
- vilda 11y ago
  The report is exaggerating. That's expected and not surprising. Groups within UN are fighting for funding. You won't get funded if the problem you aim for does not receive attention. It won't receive attention unless it's shoking in some way. That's why's there "pandemic proportion", "staggering number", "sheer volume"--not exactly scientific terminology. The "report" should be called a "proposal".
- ss93 11y ago
  > The newspaper article is really exaggerating this report. You should also note the author of that washington post article is a chronic SJW. I was suspicious when I saw the articles under "Liked that? Try these" all fitted the same narrative. Then I discovered they were all written by Caitlin Dewey. That probably explains the over exaggeration. Also this is relevant http://www.frontpagemag.com/point/259402/why-washington-post-trying-destroy-its-own-daniel-greenfield http://www.frontpagemag.com/point/259402/why-washington-post... I think most SJW journalists are motivated simply by clicks. The more they complain about injustices the more trolls will say hurtful things on purpose, eg the wanting to rape women on twitter comments in the other article she wrote. People need to remember the age old "don't feed the trolls". Grow a spine, without it you're going to live an awfully offended life.
brighteyes 11y ago
I agree with the article that the changes propose are radical and dangerous. Instead, improvement could be achieved bottom up. For example, many women complain about online dating being an unpleasant experience for women. Some women decided to do something about it and started Bumble, http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/apr/12/bumble-dating-app-women-call-shots-whitney-wolfe http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/apr/12/bumble-dat... A dating app that only lets women message men. It's an interesting idea and totally changes the dynamic. If online harassment is a problem on dating sites, women can and have created a better solution for themselves in Bumble. Women can do the same with a safer Twitter and Facebook - if they want. It's never been easier to do so, with Kickstarter and other funding options. Women are not a minority - they are over 50% of the population, and more than capable of solving problems like this, again, if they want. Apparently things were bad enough in dating for Bumble, but since there isn't a female-oriented Twitter or Facebook, I suspect the problems are overstated on those sites.
stared 11y ago
I think that in a few years we get a browser add-on which automatically all online harassments (at some cost of silencing false positives, as always). But then each person will be able to set their threshold, depending on one's sensitivity. Global censorship actions (and especially be people not understanding Internet... or even worse - wanting to make the information flow top-down) are putting much greater burden... and risk. While I don't want to downplay the online harassment, I (for a number of years) used Internet as the only tool to escape from it. (Online it is much easier to choose a place one is comfortable in.)
a3n 11y ago
I'm trying to imagine this article written by the NYT, or pre-Bezos WP. The WP is feeling very vaguely and subtly an outlet for Bezos/Amazon's interests.
ZoeZoeBee 11y ago
I'm quite surprised at the number of users calling for censorship on <u>Hacker News</u>....
- wingless 11y ago
  It's a cult called Social Justice Warriors. Pretty much most of San Fran is brainwashed by them.
- geofft 11y ago
  Hackers have been wanting to "censor" the internet since September 1993: not to enforce top-down rules, but to keep it a group of people (hopefully all people, eventually) who respect social convention and respect each other. The group that thinks it's a free-for-all without rules is a late-coming one trying to claim the mantle of hackerdom. And in many cases, as with ESR's de-facto takeover of the Jargon File, they've succeeded in presenting themselves as the original hackers. Don't be fooled. The technical design of the Internet and its serious non-resilience to spam, malware, and other various opportunists (because we all trusted that Internet users were reasonable people) should show you that none of this was in the original vision. "Be conservative in what you send, and liberal in what you accept from others" worked because everyone respected that without enforcement, and there was no crowd demanding the right to be liberal in what they sent.
leeleelee 11y ago
The concept is a little ridiculous. First, there is this link which actually shows that men receive more online bullying than women do: http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/06/01/the-darkest-side-of-online-harassment-menacing-behavior/ http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/06/01/the-darkest-... Second of all, the concept of policing every piece of content that appears on social media is also ridiculous. With this line of thinking, why stop at just social media? Our e-mails, and in fact anything that can be deemed as messaging/communication of some sort should also be monitored. Sending a private google hangout message, a private facebook message, etc. The policing of content should also pertain to individual websites, news organizations like the washington post (before any article is published, a government official should have to approve it), and perhaps we should even be forced to allow random inspections by the government in our houses to prevent domestic violence. Obviously this concept is completely ridiculous, and I think the general public will agree.
xacaxulu 11y ago
Amongst other things, the UN has some extremely dangerous leftist (like farrrrr left) tendencies, bordering on dystopian nanny-statist ideas. It's almost considered a cabal in political circles that I've worked in. Christopher Hitchens gave a brilliant speech on why censorship should not be allowed called the Tyranny of Censorship. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IcJxN1VlcuA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IcJxN1VlcuA Context: I've done UNDP security work in Afghanistan and worked at various US Embassies abroad.
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grej 11y ago
“The respect for and security of girls and women must at all times be front and center,” the report reads... (Except when we're selecting Saudi Arabia to chair our Human Rights Council: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/anger-after-saudi-arabia-chosen-to-head-key-un-human-rights-panel-10509716.html http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/anger-after-saudi-ar...)
golemotron 11y ago
I think the neologism "cyber-violence" is incredibly loaded terminology. They need to be called out on it. Violence according the dictionary is "behavior involving physical force intended to hurt, damage, or kill someone or something." There is no physical force over the internet. Being subject to harassment is not violence.
- pluma 11y ago
  The problem is that "violence" isn't the subject matter in the first place. The subject is abusive behaviour. Abusive behaviour can involve physical violence but it can also involve things that aren't physical (e.g. threats of violence) or that are physical but not strictly violent (e.g. inappropriate touching). But "cyber-abuse" makes it sound like we're talking about spam and virus attacks, so there's no useful term to slap "cyber" onto and call it a day. Not that that's a good way to name these problems in the first place. "Cyber" bullying is just bullying. "Cyber" harassment is just harassment. Whether you do it face to face in person, remotely via phone or from the other side of the world using the Internet is not a useful distinction. Of course "the other side" (not the actual victims, just those speaking on their behalf or portraying themselves as victims in order to suppress criticism) isn't really helping by crying wolf and spreading the idea that every single utterance in the world suddenly needs trigger warnings and gender neutral (or reverse gendered) language. Sometimes a cigar isn't a rape tool of the patriarchy.

80 points by tomp 11y ago

tomp 11y ago

An interesting analysis: https://medium.com/@KingFrostFive/citation-games-by-the-united-nations-cyberviolence-e8bb1336c8d1 https://medium.com/@KingFrostFive/citation-games-by-the-unit... Using the metric of removing duplicate citations, not counting broken links, those with little to no effort shown for those missing links (as in, not even bothering to check the website), and removing anything that didn’t seem to exist, only 64% remained.

danso 11y ago
Not so long ago, we learned that the U.N. is a world-saving organization that can't even pay its own interns. Not because it thought was morally OK to not pay, but because they just didn't want to do the paperwork and rulemaking to offer their interns a pittance. Ignoring the likely possibility that this paper was partly compiled by the kind of work you get from unpaid laborers...I doubt that an institution that can't do the easy, moral thing for its most vulnerable employees is the type of institution that has the patience and attention to detail to double-check its own footnotes.

rdlecler1 11y ago

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

devit 11y ago

Why "Future"? It's the present. None of the most popular websites supports free speech, in the sense that they will not censor anything legal for them to distribute.

moron4hire 11y ago
Child pornography is not free speech. Free speech is not "say whatever you want."
- bruceb 11y ago
  Child pornography is not quite the same as saying something. You could say you support child pornography and create stories about it. Just not create it with actual children. Yes free speech is "say whatever you want" What do you think it should be?
- tomp 11y ago
  I'm not sure parent was referring to pornography, but to countless examples of sites like Facebook, Twitter, Reddit censoring information that they find inconvenient (e.g. the fappening, r/fatpeoplehate, etc.). > Free speech is not "say whatever you want." Parent clearly defines "free speech" as "they will not censor anything legal", which the websites above unfortunately don't follow. > Child pornography is not free speech. Ironically, in many jurisdictions "child pornography" includes virtual child pornography and cartoons, which any sensible person would say should be free (we can see movies depicting children getting murdered, people getting decapitated and women getting raped, but not of 17 year olds having sex?!?)
  - RaleyField 11y ago
    > Reddit censoring information that they find inconvenient (e.g. the fappening, r/fatpeoplehate, etc.) Calling it information is being generous. As a private entity they simply don't have to suffer that speech. Fappening is probably illegal, and even if it were not it would be an acceptable courtesy call to remove it. Fatpeoplehate was about moderators harassing employees of imgur.
- tiglathphilizar 11y ago
  Free speech is just that FREE even if others consider what a individual says distasteful.If it wasn't for FREE Speech there would have been no civil rights movement. David Finkelhor, a sociologist who directs the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire, sees the moral weight of the law , but not the empirical proof. “The evidence doesn’t yet tell us to what extent the experience of being a pornography victim aggravates the experience of the sexual abuse itself. How do you separate it out?”. What the law says is equivalent to aying voodoo is real. No one has to actually commit a crime they just have a look at an image or have a thought and they are guilty of the crime. A person that observes a digital image that has no form or life then through osmosis gives those images or objects a legal force, a power, is practicing voo-doo. To make things easy judges have allowed government prosecutors use of those unseen images in a computer file that have nor hold no power to communicate in the courtroom. Before long, the people are ensnared by the compulsion to give power to a thing of their own definition. www.truthmovement.us

jwess 11y ago

According to the article, "the UN believes that online platforms should be (a) generally responsible for the actions of their users and (b) specifically responsible for making sure those people aren’t harassers." Many websites already have problems with flippant takedown notices through the DMCA. This article leads me to believe that the UN wants to apply a similar process to eliminate "harassment", which is a fairly nebulous term. The benefits of this proposal seem minuscule, while the costs of making "online platforms generally responsible for the actions of their users" would be enormous. Why would anyone think this is a good idea?

Rusky 11y ago
Points a and b in that quote actually sound eminently reasonable to me. Online forums already have moderators to make sure discussion stays civil, and it sounds like a good idea to include "prevent people from organizing stalking and SWATting campaigns" in that.
- radu_floricica 11y ago
  The problem isn't if it's a good idea to moderate forums. Problem is when it becomes a liability not to. The possibility of fines, lawsuits or god forbid prison time can have the kind of chilling effects we can't even imagine.
  - Rusky 11y ago
    No, the problem is whether to moderate forums- it's not happening and when people try to come up with codes of conduct so they can moderate better, there's a huge outcry. It would be fine if we had better moderation in more places, even without any laws. But even that's not happening.
    - oldmanjay 11y ago
      That huge outcry isn't going to go away no matter how patiently a censor explains that censorship is good for everyone

mtgx 11y ago

I hope large tech companies like Google, Facebook and Twitter are happy now. They started this. They were warned that if they "build the infrastructure" for censorship - even for the most heinous of crimes - more requests will come for much more trivial stuff. Because it's easy to ask it of them once they've proven it can be done. The same will be true of backdoors. As soon as they start enabling backdoors in China or India or Russia, you can bet not just the U.S. will want them enabled, but many other countries, and they'll all have various reasons for asking for them. This is why, at least with the backdoor issue, they need to be pro-active, and start building end-to-end encryption into their services and products now, so they can actually say later on that they "can't" give access to the private communications of their users. If they would've done this years ago, like pre-Snowden revelations, Russia and China (and soon EU) would've had fewer excuses to "worry about national security and privacy" and then ask them to build local data centers, costing them billions.

littletimmy 11y ago

Now this, is bullshit. We cannot sacrifice every little freedom we have in the name of security. I might get downvoted to hell for saying this, but women have to learn to be comfortable with some degree of harassment if the only alternative is to convert the internet into some limited speech zone.

tomp 11y ago
> women have to learn to be comfortable I'm a bit reluctant to generalize like this... I think it's mainly a (relatively) small group of people (women and men) that are pushing this agenda to suit their other interests, using "women" simply as an excuse that people can easily emotionally identify with. None of the women I know are bothered by this kind of "violence".
- pluma 11y ago
  The particularly nefarious aspect of this is that they try abuse the feminist label for credibility and then victimise themselves to avoid criticism. To paraphrase "you shouldn't treat women as if they are more vulnerable/inferior but you can't criticise me because I'm a woman and any criticism by you is sexist even if you are a woman yourself".
mnkypete 11y ago
Because there is only two possibilities? I don't think it should be necessary (or desirable) to get comfortable with harassment... It should neither be necessary to cross-check EVERY single post or comment someone writes, I personally see A LOT of middle ground between these two options ... One could think of: - Calling out harassment / reporting it - A better education regarding stuff like that (yes, this is an offline-first problem, only amplified trough anonymity)
- Spivak 11y ago
  I think the middle ground is letting each platform self-moderate, and let users decide where they want to post. If you want to be anonymous and filter absolutely nothing then you can, if you want to aggressively moderate hate speech then go for it. If government gets involved then its likely going to be all or nothing.

choward 11y ago

Some people just don't understand software. They treat it as if it were something physical. For example, if I own a bar it is my responsibility to make sure my customers don't get too crazy and to make sure underage people don't drink. This law is relatively enforceable. You can't apply this kind of thinking to the Internet. Software isn't a bar for many reasons. You can duplicate software trivially. You can't possibly monitor every copy of that software. For example, a site like reddit is open source (for the most part I think). So in theory anyone could just host their own reddit (or any other software). There are many open source web apps that you can easily deploy your own copy of today. Which brings me to my next point. Where do you draw the line? Web sites are responsible for content their users post. Are web hosting companies responsible for the sites their customers post and therefore responsible for the comments too? What about ISPs? They let the data through. Shouldn't they also be monitoring it? What about hardware manufactures? They are letting the web hosting company run "bad" web sites. If someone does something illegal on the Internet investigate it and blame the user. It's really as simple as that.

Rusky 11y ago
We have the exact same line-drawing question in the real world. All kind of infrastructure and different levels over ownership go into a place like a bar, but that doesn't mean the bar owner isn't responsible. There is a similarly clear difference between an ISP (how the customer gets to the bar), a web host (the landlord, maybe), and the website itself (the bar). On the other hand, investigating whether someone committed a crime is a little bit different online vs in the real world. Part of what websites could do is make it easier to run those investigations by making reporting easier- Twitter reporting, for example, is relatively hostile to people trying to report bad behavior.

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moron4hire 11y ago

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

vezzy-fnord 11y ago
Last I checked, Facebook wasn't exactly a bastion of free speech. It seems like the market has indeed spoken, though I'd personally be very wary of ascribing any moral judgments from macro-level market transactions -- especially given that in practice we live in highly complicated mixed market societies, and not anything resembling laissez-faire.

phaemon 11y ago

The newspaper article is really exaggerating this report. Note how few actual quotes there are and how many "in other words". Read the report for yourself at: http://www.broadbandcommission.org/Documents/reports/bb-wg-gender-report2015.pdf http://www.broadbandcommission.org/Documents/reports/bb-wg-g... It's mainly describing the current state of things, not advocating any specific solutions. The one mention of licensing is one bullet point in a chapter, not any kind of main focus. Half the actual suggestions are things that people are mentioning in these comments as alternatives.

vilda 11y ago
The report is exaggerating. That's expected and not surprising. Groups within UN are fighting for funding. You won't get funded if the problem you aim for does not receive attention. It won't receive attention unless it's shoking in some way. That's why's there "pandemic proportion", "staggering number", "sheer volume"--not exactly scientific terminology. The "report" should be called a "proposal".
ss93 11y ago
> The newspaper article is really exaggerating this report. You should also note the author of that washington post article is a chronic SJW. I was suspicious when I saw the articles under "Liked that? Try these" all fitted the same narrative. Then I discovered they were all written by Caitlin Dewey. That probably explains the over exaggeration. Also this is relevant http://www.frontpagemag.com/point/259402/why-washington-post-trying-destroy-its-own-daniel-greenfield http://www.frontpagemag.com/point/259402/why-washington-post... I think most SJW journalists are motivated simply by clicks. The more they complain about injustices the more trolls will say hurtful things on purpose, eg the wanting to rape women on twitter comments in the other article she wrote. People need to remember the age old "don't feed the trolls". Grow a spine, without it you're going to live an awfully offended life.

brighteyes 11y ago

I agree with the article that the changes propose are radical and dangerous. Instead, improvement could be achieved bottom up. For example, many women complain about online dating being an unpleasant experience for women. Some women decided to do something about it and started Bumble, http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/apr/12/bumble-dating-app-women-call-shots-whitney-wolfe http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/apr/12/bumble-dat... A dating app that only lets women message men. It's an interesting idea and totally changes the dynamic. If online harassment is a problem on dating sites, women can and have created a better solution for themselves in Bumble. Women can do the same with a safer Twitter and Facebook - if they want. It's never been easier to do so, with Kickstarter and other funding options. Women are not a minority - they are over 50% of the population, and more than capable of solving problems like this, again, if they want. Apparently things were bad enough in dating for Bumble, but since there isn't a female-oriented Twitter or Facebook, I suspect the problems are overstated on those sites.

stared 11y ago

I think that in a few years we get a browser add-on which automatically all online harassments (at some cost of silencing false positives, as always). But then each person will be able to set their threshold, depending on one's sensitivity. Global censorship actions (and especially be people not understanding Internet... or even worse - wanting to make the information flow top-down) are putting much greater burden... and risk. While I don't want to downplay the online harassment, I (for a number of years) used Internet as the only tool to escape from it. (Online it is much easier to choose a place one is comfortable in.)

a3n 11y ago

I'm trying to imagine this article written by the NYT, or pre-Bezos WP. The WP is feeling very vaguely and subtly an outlet for Bezos/Amazon's interests.

ZoeZoeBee 11y ago

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

wingless 11y ago
It's a cult called Social Justice Warriors. Pretty much most of San Fran is brainwashed by them.
geofft 11y ago
Hackers have been wanting to "censor" the internet since September 1993: not to enforce top-down rules, but to keep it a group of people (hopefully all people, eventually) who respect social convention and respect each other. The group that thinks it's a free-for-all without rules is a late-coming one trying to claim the mantle of hackerdom. And in many cases, as with ESR's de-facto takeover of the Jargon File, they've succeeded in presenting themselves as the original hackers. Don't be fooled. The technical design of the Internet and its serious non-resilience to spam, malware, and other various opportunists (because we all trusted that Internet users were reasonable people) should show you that none of this was in the original vision. "Be conservative in what you send, and liberal in what you accept from others" worked because everyone respected that without enforcement, and there was no crowd demanding the right to be liberal in what they sent.

leeleelee 11y ago

The concept is a little ridiculous. First, there is this link which actually shows that men receive more online bullying than women do: http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/06/01/the-darkest-side-of-online-harassment-menacing-behavior/ http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/06/01/the-darkest-... Second of all, the concept of policing every piece of content that appears on social media is also ridiculous. With this line of thinking, why stop at just social media? Our e-mails, and in fact anything that can be deemed as messaging/communication of some sort should also be monitored. Sending a private google hangout message, a private facebook message, etc. The policing of content should also pertain to individual websites, news organizations like the washington post (before any article is published, a government official should have to approve it), and perhaps we should even be forced to allow random inspections by the government in our houses to prevent domestic violence. Obviously this concept is completely ridiculous, and I think the general public will agree.

xacaxulu 11y ago

Amongst other things, the UN has some extremely dangerous leftist (like farrrrr left) tendencies, bordering on dystopian nanny-statist ideas. It's almost considered a cabal in political circles that I've worked in. Christopher Hitchens gave a brilliant speech on why censorship should not be allowed called the Tyranny of Censorship. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IcJxN1VlcuA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IcJxN1VlcuA Context: I've done UNDP security work in Afghanistan and worked at various US Embassies abroad.

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grej 11y ago

“The respect for and security of girls and women must at all times be front and center,” the report reads... (Except when we're selecting Saudi Arabia to chair our Human Rights Council: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/anger-after-saudi-arabia-chosen-to-head-key-un-human-rights-panel-10509716.html http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/anger-after-saudi-ar...)

golemotron 11y ago

I think the neologism "cyber-violence" is incredibly loaded terminology. They need to be called out on it. Violence according the dictionary is "behavior involving physical force intended to hurt, damage, or kill someone or something." There is no physical force over the internet. Being subject to harassment is not violence.

pluma 11y ago
The problem is that "violence" isn't the subject matter in the first place. The subject is abusive behaviour. Abusive behaviour can involve physical violence but it can also involve things that aren't physical (e.g. threats of violence) or that are physical but not strictly violent (e.g. inappropriate touching). But "cyber-abuse" makes it sound like we're talking about spam and virus attacks, so there's no useful term to slap "cyber" onto and call it a day. Not that that's a good way to name these problems in the first place. "Cyber" bullying is just bullying. "Cyber" harassment is just harassment. Whether you do it face to face in person, remotely via phone or from the other side of the world using the Internet is not a useful distinction. Of course "the other side" (not the actual victims, just those speaking on their behalf or portraying themselves as victims in order to suppress criticism) isn't really helping by crying wolf and spreading the idea that every single utterance in the world suddenly needs trigger warnings and gender neutral (or reverse gendered) language. Sometimes a cigar isn't a rape tool of the patriarchy.