12 ms·

We Are At War For A Free And Open Internet

119 points by cft 9y ago

Jaruzel 9y ago
From the article: The free and open internet as we know it is under attack. Yes, not only from those agencies listed, but from Doxxers, Spammers, RevengePorners, and various other online trollers. We will never have a 'free and open internet' until humanity grows up and people like the above evolve into more socially-inclusive human beings. Unfortunately, I can never see that happening. What will happen is the slow loss of anonymity across the internet, where all new signups require id verification or the use of a 3rd party 'trusted' authentication provider. On one hand, I think this may be a good thing - regardless of where you do it, you should be liable for any offensive behaviour you do that upsets other people. However on the other hand where do all the whistle blowers and free speech advocates go? It's a tricky balance, but one things for sure, anonymous online trolling is the reason why we can't have nice [internet] things...
- teddyh 9y ago
  > However on the other hand where do all the whistle blowers and free speech advocates go? Not only those: http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Who_is_harmed_by_a_%22Real_Names%22_policy%3F http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Who_is_harmed_by_a_%22Rea...
- madshiva 9y ago
  Trolling is not the issue. It has been taken by Media to promote online harassment, etc in a bad way. Troll was about amusement, joke. People now don't see any benefit but troll are benefit, they teach people to don't listen anybody on the Internet and to not respond with so much emotion. Now people are weak, emotionally weak, so easily offended.
  - happyrock 9y ago
    > Now people are weak, emotionally weak, so easily offended. Or, more likely, they play up their "offendedness" and victimhood in order to gain the moral high ground over their opponents. People didn't just suddenly become easier to offend -- it has a payoff for them in political leverage.
  - pjc50 9y ago
    > teach people to don't listen anybody on the Internet That is in its own way bad for free speech; what use is speech if nobody is listening? Harassment can genuinely make the internet or parts of it unusable for some people. I bet Diane Abbot doesn't open her Twitter Mentions, for example. http://metro.co.uk/2017/09/04/almost-half-of-all-abuse-targeting-female-mps-was-sent-to-diane-abbott-6903171/ http://metro.co.uk/2017/09/04/almost-half-of-all-abuse-targe... > and to not respond with so much emotion Desensitisation is not the solution either.
    - jerf 9y ago
      "That is in its own way bad for free speech; what use is speech if nobody is listening?" I think if you carefully sit down and work out what "free speech" really means, it also comes to encompass the right to not have to listen to things you don't want to listen to, via avoidance. (Not via taking it all down, and there are some intricacies I'm skipping over because this is an HN comment and not a blogspew; for instance in "public spaces" there is a certain element of not necessarily being able to just "turn off" someone on a soap box, but still.) This manifests because of the way some people will insist that you must listen to them and that if their particular content doesn't show up in some feed somewhere, they're being censored. "Harassment can genuinely make the internet or parts of it unusable for some people. " True. However, the "boil the ocean" solution that everyone seems to be reaching for of some form of eliminating all the bad behavior on the internet is not feasible, even before we get into the fundamental ambiguity of what "bad behavior" is, and the IMHO observable fact that once you start down this road you get the twin problems of A: people deliberately skewing the definition of "bad behavior" in their favor and B: people deliberately getting more and more theatrically sensitive to "bad behavior" in proportion to its decreasing presence, for several reasons. I think what we're really looking at here is increasingly undeniable evidence that this form of community does not scale. Twitter is fundamentally unscalable. Tiny little Gab may well have already passed its community scaling event horizon. Facebook shards the world much more carefully and still probably is past its scaling event horizon, too. Reddit shards the world in a different way, but its mega-subreddits also often pass the community event horizon. Basically, I'd say that any company it is whose ambition it is to create "one global community", even one broken up like Facebook's or Reddit's, is doomed to failure at scale. (HN itself may already be on the large side of what can be sustained. It has, I believe, two full time moderators and curators of the community, so when you look at HN you have to keep in mind that that's where this site is; already at "full time moderator" status. If you put up a new "free speech!" HN-2 and promise not to moderate anything, what you see here on the real HN is probably literally unattainable to you.) Given the choice between Free Speech and Facebook/Twitter/Gab/etc., I'll take Free Speech. We're going to have to figure out some other mechanism for online communication that doesn't involve trying to pour every single person who speaks a given language into one small room. Many of the people reading this probably have personal experience as to how bad that idea can be if it just includes their direct family or circle of friends, let alone millions of people. (I've actually believed this sort of thing for a long time, and I live it. HN is probably the largest community I actually participate in. I participate in several subreddits, but pretty much only ones that are cut off from the "main body" of Reddit entirely. Even my blog has been affected; I know what it would have taken to "be successful" in that space over a decade ago, and I found myself reluctant to put the work in to do that, just because I realized I don't actually want to build a community and be responsible for it.)
  - thex10 9y ago
    > Now people are weak, emotionally weak, so easily offended. Back in the day white Americans would throw a goddamn hissy fit if negroes drank out of the same public water fountain. They were so offended by the presence of these folks doing normal human things, and so incapable of handling their emotional responses to it, that beatings and murders and other violence were hardly unheard of. I encourage you to take your "people these days are so weak and easily offended" hot take and throw it in the garbage, where it belongs.
    - chippy 9y ago
      Agreed, and this lends more weight to the parent comment - "you should be liable for any offensive behaviour you do that upsets other people" If we allow people to be liable for who and what they offend then we run the risk of allowing beatings and other violence. There is a real reason why Free Speech in the USA is associated with the Civil Rights movement.
    - TeMPOraL 9y ago
      This only highlights that being offended is a sign of one's emotional immaturity. It's not a good thing to base any policing on.
- moomin 9y ago
  It's got to the point where "free speech" has become a dog whistle for the alt-right. Taking the concept back from them is going to be hard.
  - patrickg_zill 9y ago
    Yes, taking back the concept of free speech is especially difficult, when you don't believe in it yourself.
    - moomin 9y ago
      Doesn't seem to have stopped the alt-right.
  - 0xBA5ED 9y ago
    Sounds like you're saying one particular group should control the concept of free speech at the expense of another group or groups.
    - moomin 9y ago
      Nah, I'm saying that we need to talk about free speech in the context of diverse viewpoints and needs and stop prioritising fascists. It's ok, I knew this would be controversial.
  - anon1385 9y ago
    That's not a new thing. The fascist Oswald Mosley complained about a lack of free speech when he was repeatedly prevented from speaking and marching in predominantly Jewish parts of London in the 30s by large violent crowds[1]. Post war there were very organised groups dedicated to disrupting fascist "free speech", like 43 Group which was made up of Jewish ex-servicemen[2]. Again in the 60s Mosley cited "free speech" when his fascist rallies were violently disrupted[3]. Fascists have been using "free speech" as a shield since the beginning, and similarly liberals were handwringing about the fascists right to "free speech" while fascists beat up and killed Jews and other minorities and burned down synagogs. The liberals were wrong in the 30s to tolerate fascism and they're wrong now. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Cable_Street https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Cable_Street being the most famous example [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/43_Group https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/43_Group [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RRS4NR_BZ1w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RRS4NR_BZ1w and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-Ef3WYWJYc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-Ef3WYWJYc for example
- nippples 9y ago
  > Doxxers, Spammers, RevengePorners, and various other online trollers They do not all fit one same category and we cannot have one-approach-fits-all * RevengePorners: Clear cut criminal behavior, have the service cooperate with prosecution. * Spammers: Depends on whether they're leading you into malware. Filters have gone a long way in dealing with that specific thing. In some legislations plain spamming may be criminal too. * Doxxers: Grey area of law tbh, when paired with threats could easily categorize into criminal behavior. * Trolls: Take the internet less seriously, be more conservative about sharing your identity online and lurk more. Of all things I don't understand why the current zeitgeist is "take all trolling as seriously as possible and give them stupidly large amounts of power and act surprised when trolling only gets worse".
  - pjc50 9y ago
    > Clear cut criminal behavior, have the service cooperate with prosecution. Surprisingly, this isn't illegal in very many jurisdictions. One of the first to ban it was Scotland, this year.
- beaconstudios 9y ago
  I'm not sure I agree that "upsetting people" is a cause that needs policing by private companies, especially when people can choose to act upset about virtually anything. If two people get into a heated argument and one calls the other a dick or something like that, should that person be kicked off the internet?
  - soundwave106 9y ago
    Well, should the government tell said private company not to kick this person off of their servers, use their bandwidth, etc? That's really what this boils down to, as the only "solution" I can think of for this issue is essentially... government regulation. Telling corporations that they have to support things on their platform they necessarily may not want to support, often for business reasons. For instance, take Twitter. Business reports often mention things like a reputation for harassment and trolling as a big concern towards their growth, because a lot of people aren't going to sign up if their user experience is poor. If they think it would be more profitable to "censor" people engaged in harassment or trolling and try to get rid of that reputation, why would they not do so? No different than other forms of "censorship" they try and do (often poorly, I might add) to improve user experience (eg: kicking off spamming bots, putting up restrictions for pornographic or graphic content, kicking off impersonators, preventing private information from being posted, etc.) If they want to kick someone off for heated arguments and curse words, that's their choice too. That doesn't seem like something a profit-oriented large company like Twitter would do, but I've been in forums where moderators would indeed ban people for these sort of reasons and/or remove heated posts before things turned into a shitstorm. As long as there is room for any sort of corporations or organizations with all kinds of content policies, I don't see an issue with this arrangement. If you don't like a place's content policy, you can go elsewhere. To me this certainly is preferred versus a world where a government dictates exactly what content policy everyone should have. There is, I think, an argument to be made that the consolidation of Internet social media and its overwhelming private corporate nature may have the potential to stifle marginal voices by also consolidating content policy. That's the gist I got from the article, and I would agree with the concern. I just don't see a great solution for this concern at the moment without potentially causing something worse.
- psyc 9y ago
  This is doublespeak.
CM30 9y ago
Perhaps the solution may be to treat domain registrars as common carriers and bar them from taking down customer domains based on anything that's legal in their country. Similar thing may need to be done for web hosting, since without web hosting and domain registrations a viable (read, independent with free speech) internet presence can't be established nowadays.
- rsynnott 9y ago
  It may not have been legal in the registrar's countries. Based on the screenshot posted in the comments, harassment is often criminal, even if it's over the internet.
- jerkstate 9y ago
  I've been pointing out that some of the same organizations who have been lobbying for net neutrality as an anti-censorship necessity are leading the charge of censoring reprehensible speech. It seems pretty short-sighted, but luckily for them, the mob tends to have a short memory, so they will probably still be able to cast net neutrality as anti-censorship at the next opportunity, and still exclude themselves from the regulated parties.
steventhedev 9y ago
Why are they doing business through some 3rd party registrar and not through the official anguillan registrar? Not to mention #36 in the FAQ[0], which pretty clearly states they only disallow outright illegal behavior. [0]: https://whois.ai/faq.html https://whois.ai/faq.html
- rsynnott 9y ago
  Depends what the complaint the registrar got, but it could well have been a complaint of criminal harassment, given the content.
  - steventhedev 9y ago
    RTA. It was an obscenity complaint. Gab usually tags it NSFW, which they normally do, but in this case they got an existential threat to their business. It's also not like AsiaRegistry makes things cheaper. Using whois.ai directly you only spend 100 to renew every 2 years, not 200.
gfosco 9y ago
What would it take to avoid this kind of censorship?... One possible route: a new TLD specifically based on free speech principles. That's not a perfect solution either, because you'd have to trust that organization and all its future owners to keep it that way.
- nippples 9y ago
  > What would it take to avoid this kind of censorship? Decentralization & p2p technologies
  - turk183 9y ago
    And encrypt everything.
  - programmarchy 9y ago
    For anyone wondering, looks like Namecoin and the .bit domain could be a potential solution. It's still a huge barrier for non-technical folk though, and censored content won't show up on search engines.
orasis 9y ago
This post is about AsianRegistry. I use 101domain for my .ai domain. I assume I'm immune from AsianRegistry's influence? Can anyone confirm?
Rotten194 9y ago
FWIW, I found the original post on the Wayback Machine and it's pretty gross: http://i.imgur.com/NYJiQXc.jpg http://i.imgur.com/NYJiQXc.jpg (I pixelated the face, was fully in view before) Taking someone's Tinder picture and sharing it on the internet to mock them is harassment (especially nowadays when software can take a person's face and look up their social media profiles). Say what you will about free speech, but this isn't a hill I particularly care about dying on.
- lanevorockz 9y ago
  End of free speech is just one step a way of ending personal thought and individuality.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - pgeorgi 9y ago
    Free speech came _long_ after personal thought and individuality, so while free speech helps (and is a good idea in general), it's probably not necessary.
    - revmoo 9y ago
      You're insane
    - angersock 9y ago
      I mean, universal suffrage came _long_ after democracy, and so while universal suffrage helps (and is a good idea in general), it's probably not necessary. You need to make a better argument here. Edit: tweaked analogy
      - deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
  - confounded 9y ago
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
throwanem 9y ago
For those perhaps unfamiliar with the context, this is another example of Andrew Anglin making a base and pointless personal attack against Heather Heyer, the woman killed in the violence surrounding the Charlottesville rally a few weeks ago. It's interesting to watch Anglin continue to force people in his vicinity to choose between compromising on principle and defending the utterly indefensible. One wonders what he hopes to accomplish, and even more what anyone else might hope to achieve by continuing to tolerate his presence - I get that quoting Niemoller is somewhat popular in this connection, but I don't see how the situations are parallel when this one revolves around a person who appears to have no greater aim in his public behavior than simply to bring about whatever ruin he can find a way to produce. I don't know. Perhaps he has a point to make about the tension between freedom of speech and relative oligopoly over the notionally public forum in which such speech can most productively be published. If so, he's picked the worst way in the world to do it, because by making himself a stench in the nostrils of civilization he only adds strength to the argument that the very concept of freedom of speech is one which has outlived its usefulness and merits deprecation in favor of a restricted realm beyond which suppression is the universally acknowledged default. That's the most charitable interpretation of his actions that I'm capable of constructing - but not one in which I especially confide.
- silentOpen 9y ago
  Some more context: Andrew Anglin is the editor of The Daily Stormer neo-nazi web site. I re-watched American History X last night and I greatly recommend it to anyone who wants a little (dramatic) insight into modern American white supremacy motivations. In particular, the main character, Derek, gives a speech to a group of skinheads which is disturbingly similar to some of Trump's campaign speeches (though more eloquent).
  - stcredzero 9y ago
    Also, I recommend that any concerned intellectual read this book: http://a.co/bAOViyI http://a.co/bAOViyI (Warning, the cover has a picture of the Hitler salute, but it's squarely anti-Fascist.) It details the ideological underpinnings of the above. They say explicitly that they want to replace the current social order. The erosion of human rights is one of the explicit ideological goals of the leadership of both the far extreme right and the far extreme left.
common_ 9y ago
"Free and Open Internet" You mean, the network created by the US government for the use of military and research institutions? The idea of the Internet as an anarchist state is a far more temporary concept than that of the Internet as a regulated environment where people are supposed to act with a sense of decency. Anyone who argues otherwise is too young, or too ignorant, to know what they're talking about ... And it doesn't surprise me that most of these Internet trolls whining about censorship were born in the 1980s and later.
- ktta 9y ago
  That's a bit like saying men should hunt and women must raise children because that what they were doing for a long time and that's what they were 'meant' to do. Internet is no longer a network for the US government and research institutions.
psyc 9y ago
Seems like a lot of people are right on board with Internet-wide censorship by community standards. I'm very disappointed that so many have chosen to cast the problem only in terms of bad people posting bad things. You've missed the whole point. I've conducted some research in the past into how to solve this simple problem: how to reliably host potentially offensive content, given the content is legal in the US. I concluded it's currently infeasible. All US hosts are responsive to mobs, and all hosts that market themselves as "pro free speech" are in jurisdictions with a variety of "hate speech" or "anti insult" laws. I've concluded that the only way forward is probably a P2P web. Given this is Hacker News, I wish that people wanted to talk about that sort of thing, rather than, as has happened here, bikeshedding about what those global community standards should be in our personal opinions.
- idle_zealot 9y ago
  I've seen a handful of p2p internet solutions pop up, but all seem immature. Is there one in particular that you have hopes for?
  - psyc 9y ago
    Not really. It's a commonly proposed application for blockchains, but calling most of those immature would actually be generous. The only one I'm aware of is Substratum, but I honestly don't know whether it's a fly-by-night ICO or not.
- cft 9y ago
  Here we are talking about a domain registrar, not a host. Aren't there registrars that don't issue similar threats for legal content in their jurisdiction (e.g. in the US?) Would be nice to publisize a list. By the way, I am sure that large web sites like Dropbox or Twitter have actually illegal content, but their registrar obviously doesn't threaten them. PS. Curious what the reason was to downvote this?
- yjftsjthsd-h 9y ago
  Does this include Nearly Free Speech?
DiNovi 9y ago
Not shocking nazis can take something people might agree with them on and then twist the knife into something super gross, like being an apologist for murder.
JediWing 9y ago
Title: "We Are At War For A Free And Open Internet" Domain: "medium.com" Irony meter rating: off charts
- davisjung 9y ago
  Why?
jkelsey 9y ago
Here we go with another nazi attempt to lecture us on civil liberties. If they had more political power (and I shudder at the notion), they would be the first ones to clamp down on speech and free expression (it's kinda their thing). We have more pressing free speech matters at hand right now with authoritarian states and corporate monopolies. Nazis don't get a free ride on the hard work being done just so they can turn the gun around on us when they have power. We recognize racism and sexism for what it is, and don't let it distract us from building a better society for us all. Do we have to reference the xkcd comic again?
- stcredzero 9y ago
  Please don't. I think Monroe has fallen down as a speaker of truth. If Free Speech is suppressed through societal pressure, it's just as bad as the government doing it. The mechanisms Monroe trumpets were once used to suppress LGBT people, Jewish people, and Black people. The kind of society he wants is just as authoritarian and socially stifling as Victorian society -- it just fits his particular tastes. XKCD of all people should know better.
  - jkelsey 9y ago
    > If Free Speech is suppressed through societal pressure, it's just as bad as the government doing it. You're confusing the market of free ideas with speech. Governments have militaries and police forces. Societies have public opinion. Are you suggesting that societies shouldn't have the ability to guide themselves by rejecting speech that is harmful to itself (i.e. racist/sexist dogma perpetuated by a majority that wants to get rid of its minorities)? Honestly, this all sounds like nihilism which I know is all the currently all the rage to wealthy and white Silicon Valley, but I'm sure your perspective will be altered if you should ever be unfortunate to have nazis start targeting you.
    - stcredzero 9y ago
      You're confusing the market of free ideas with speech...Are you suggesting that societies shouldn't have the ability to guide themselves by rejecting speech that is harmful to itself I have seen many things which are touted as part of "the marketplace of ideas" that are really attempts to skew speech in civil society through non-governmental bureaucratic power. This is dishonest. It's not a real "marketplace of ideas" when certain things are placed in an inaccessible part of the store. We've seen this "technically not censorship" thing before. Noam Chomsky helped bring it to the world's attention. http://a.co/658KATJ http://a.co/658KATJ Honestly, this all sounds like nihilism which I know is all the currently all the rage to wealthy and white Silicon Valley, but I'm sure your perspective will be altered if you should ever be unfortunate to have nazis start targeting you. I have been racially targeted by groups of poor whites. My perspective changed when extreme elements on the left started behaving in much the same way. When your "activism" starts depending on the magnitude of horribleness of the enemy for its justification, this is a historical sign that something is out of kilter. No one who says they can do anything, because they're less horrible than some bad guys, gets to wield the special liminal power of activism in my name. Groupthink is groupthink. It feels much the same way, no matter where it is based on the political spectrum. The justified hate of White Supremacists is much the same as hateful ideologues of a different stripe. I abhor the nihilism of Silicon Valley, however, it's not a white phenomenon, nor is it particular to one ethnic group. Shortly after I moved to the Bay Area, I got to see a drunken self-styled startup nerd spill beer all over the laptop of a cancer-patient female techie who was trying to get her life together, then try to pretend he had nothing to do with it. (Pre-Obamacare, so her life seemed pretty precarious. He thought it was a good idea to dive into his bunk at the hacker hostel I was staying at.) He was proof by counterexample that being white is not at all necessary for entitlement. The nihilism of Silicon Valley and the Bay Area is mostly derived from the nihilism of the Postmodernist left. We have as much to fear from the radicalism of the left as the radicalism of the extreme Fascist right. Both of those groups have in common collectivist and nihilistic ideologies that reject logic and rationality. You only have to read the writings of the esoteric thought leaders of both groups to see this. Therein lies the real danger. The left-right spectrum is only incidental.

119 points by cft 9y ago

From the article: The free and open internet as we know it is under attack. Yes, not only from those agencies listed, but from Doxxers, Spammers, RevengePorners, and various other online trollers. We will never have a 'free and open internet' until humanity grows up and people like the above evolve into more socially-inclusive human beings. Unfortunately, I can never see that happening. What will happen is the slow loss of anonymity across the internet, where all new signups require id verification or the use of a 3rd party 'trusted' authentication provider. On one hand, I think this may be a good thing - regardless of where you do it, you should be liable for any offensive behaviour you do that upsets other people. However on the other hand where do all the whistle blowers and free speech advocates go? It's a tricky balance, but one things for sure, anonymous online trolling is the reason why we can't have nice [internet] things...

teddyh 9y ago
> However on the other hand where do all the whistle blowers and free speech advocates go? Not only those: http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Who_is_harmed_by_a_%22Real_Names%22_policy%3F http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Who_is_harmed_by_a_%22Rea...
madshiva 9y ago
Trolling is not the issue. It has been taken by Media to promote online harassment, etc in a bad way. Troll was about amusement, joke. People now don't see any benefit but troll are benefit, they teach people to don't listen anybody on the Internet and to not respond with so much emotion. Now people are weak, emotionally weak, so easily offended.
- happyrock 9y ago
  > Now people are weak, emotionally weak, so easily offended. Or, more likely, they play up their "offendedness" and victimhood in order to gain the moral high ground over their opponents. People didn't just suddenly become easier to offend -- it has a payoff for them in political leverage.
- pjc50 9y ago
  > teach people to don't listen anybody on the Internet That is in its own way bad for free speech; what use is speech if nobody is listening? Harassment can genuinely make the internet or parts of it unusable for some people. I bet Diane Abbot doesn't open her Twitter Mentions, for example. http://metro.co.uk/2017/09/04/almost-half-of-all-abuse-targeting-female-mps-was-sent-to-diane-abbott-6903171/ http://metro.co.uk/2017/09/04/almost-half-of-all-abuse-targe... > and to not respond with so much emotion Desensitisation is not the solution either.
  - jerf 9y ago
    "That is in its own way bad for free speech; what use is speech if nobody is listening?" I think if you carefully sit down and work out what "free speech" really means, it also comes to encompass the right to not have to listen to things you don't want to listen to, via avoidance. (Not via taking it all down, and there are some intricacies I'm skipping over because this is an HN comment and not a blogspew; for instance in "public spaces" there is a certain element of not necessarily being able to just "turn off" someone on a soap box, but still.) This manifests because of the way some people will insist that you must listen to them and that if their particular content doesn't show up in some feed somewhere, they're being censored. "Harassment can genuinely make the internet or parts of it unusable for some people. " True. However, the "boil the ocean" solution that everyone seems to be reaching for of some form of eliminating all the bad behavior on the internet is not feasible, even before we get into the fundamental ambiguity of what "bad behavior" is, and the IMHO observable fact that once you start down this road you get the twin problems of A: people deliberately skewing the definition of "bad behavior" in their favor and B: people deliberately getting more and more theatrically sensitive to "bad behavior" in proportion to its decreasing presence, for several reasons. I think what we're really looking at here is increasingly undeniable evidence that this form of community does not scale. Twitter is fundamentally unscalable. Tiny little Gab may well have already passed its community scaling event horizon. Facebook shards the world much more carefully and still probably is past its scaling event horizon, too. Reddit shards the world in a different way, but its mega-subreddits also often pass the community event horizon. Basically, I'd say that any company it is whose ambition it is to create "one global community", even one broken up like Facebook's or Reddit's, is doomed to failure at scale. (HN itself may already be on the large side of what can be sustained. It has, I believe, two full time moderators and curators of the community, so when you look at HN you have to keep in mind that that's where this site is; already at "full time moderator" status. If you put up a new "free speech!" HN-2 and promise not to moderate anything, what you see here on the real HN is probably literally unattainable to you.) Given the choice between Free Speech and Facebook/Twitter/Gab/etc., I'll take Free Speech. We're going to have to figure out some other mechanism for online communication that doesn't involve trying to pour every single person who speaks a given language into one small room. Many of the people reading this probably have personal experience as to how bad that idea can be if it just includes their direct family or circle of friends, let alone millions of people. (I've actually believed this sort of thing for a long time, and I live it. HN is probably the largest community I actually participate in. I participate in several subreddits, but pretty much only ones that are cut off from the "main body" of Reddit entirely. Even my blog has been affected; I know what it would have taken to "be successful" in that space over a decade ago, and I found myself reluctant to put the work in to do that, just because I realized I don't actually want to build a community and be responsible for it.)
- thex10 9y ago
  > Now people are weak, emotionally weak, so easily offended. Back in the day white Americans would throw a goddamn hissy fit if negroes drank out of the same public water fountain. They were so offended by the presence of these folks doing normal human things, and so incapable of handling their emotional responses to it, that beatings and murders and other violence were hardly unheard of. I encourage you to take your "people these days are so weak and easily offended" hot take and throw it in the garbage, where it belongs.
  - chippy 9y ago
    Agreed, and this lends more weight to the parent comment - "you should be liable for any offensive behaviour you do that upsets other people" If we allow people to be liable for who and what they offend then we run the risk of allowing beatings and other violence. There is a real reason why Free Speech in the USA is associated with the Civil Rights movement.
  - TeMPOraL 9y ago
    This only highlights that being offended is a sign of one's emotional immaturity. It's not a good thing to base any policing on.
moomin 9y ago
It's got to the point where "free speech" has become a dog whistle for the alt-right. Taking the concept back from them is going to be hard.
- patrickg_zill 9y ago
  Yes, taking back the concept of free speech is especially difficult, when you don't believe in it yourself.
  - moomin 9y ago
    Doesn't seem to have stopped the alt-right.
- 0xBA5ED 9y ago
  Sounds like you're saying one particular group should control the concept of free speech at the expense of another group or groups.
  - moomin 9y ago
    Nah, I'm saying that we need to talk about free speech in the context of diverse viewpoints and needs and stop prioritising fascists. It's ok, I knew this would be controversial.
- anon1385 9y ago
  That's not a new thing. The fascist Oswald Mosley complained about a lack of free speech when he was repeatedly prevented from speaking and marching in predominantly Jewish parts of London in the 30s by large violent crowds[1]. Post war there were very organised groups dedicated to disrupting fascist "free speech", like 43 Group which was made up of Jewish ex-servicemen[2]. Again in the 60s Mosley cited "free speech" when his fascist rallies were violently disrupted[3]. Fascists have been using "free speech" as a shield since the beginning, and similarly liberals were handwringing about the fascists right to "free speech" while fascists beat up and killed Jews and other minorities and burned down synagogs. The liberals were wrong in the 30s to tolerate fascism and they're wrong now. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Cable_Street https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Cable_Street being the most famous example [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/43_Group https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/43_Group [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RRS4NR_BZ1w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RRS4NR_BZ1w and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-Ef3WYWJYc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-Ef3WYWJYc for example
nippples 9y ago
> Doxxers, Spammers, RevengePorners, and various other online trollers They do not all fit one same category and we cannot have one-approach-fits-all * RevengePorners: Clear cut criminal behavior, have the service cooperate with prosecution. * Spammers: Depends on whether they're leading you into malware. Filters have gone a long way in dealing with that specific thing. In some legislations plain spamming may be criminal too. * Doxxers: Grey area of law tbh, when paired with threats could easily categorize into criminal behavior. * Trolls: Take the internet less seriously, be more conservative about sharing your identity online and lurk more. Of all things I don't understand why the current zeitgeist is "take all trolling as seriously as possible and give them stupidly large amounts of power and act surprised when trolling only gets worse".
- pjc50 9y ago
  > Clear cut criminal behavior, have the service cooperate with prosecution. Surprisingly, this isn't illegal in very many jurisdictions. One of the first to ban it was Scotland, this year.
beaconstudios 9y ago
I'm not sure I agree that "upsetting people" is a cause that needs policing by private companies, especially when people can choose to act upset about virtually anything. If two people get into a heated argument and one calls the other a dick or something like that, should that person be kicked off the internet?
- soundwave106 9y ago
  Well, should the government tell said private company not to kick this person off of their servers, use their bandwidth, etc? That's really what this boils down to, as the only "solution" I can think of for this issue is essentially... government regulation. Telling corporations that they have to support things on their platform they necessarily may not want to support, often for business reasons. For instance, take Twitter. Business reports often mention things like a reputation for harassment and trolling as a big concern towards their growth, because a lot of people aren't going to sign up if their user experience is poor. If they think it would be more profitable to "censor" people engaged in harassment or trolling and try to get rid of that reputation, why would they not do so? No different than other forms of "censorship" they try and do (often poorly, I might add) to improve user experience (eg: kicking off spamming bots, putting up restrictions for pornographic or graphic content, kicking off impersonators, preventing private information from being posted, etc.) If they want to kick someone off for heated arguments and curse words, that's their choice too. That doesn't seem like something a profit-oriented large company like Twitter would do, but I've been in forums where moderators would indeed ban people for these sort of reasons and/or remove heated posts before things turned into a shitstorm. As long as there is room for any sort of corporations or organizations with all kinds of content policies, I don't see an issue with this arrangement. If you don't like a place's content policy, you can go elsewhere. To me this certainly is preferred versus a world where a government dictates exactly what content policy everyone should have. There is, I think, an argument to be made that the consolidation of Internet social media and its overwhelming private corporate nature may have the potential to stifle marginal voices by also consolidating content policy. That's the gist I got from the article, and I would agree with the concern. I just don't see a great solution for this concern at the moment without potentially causing something worse.
psyc 9y ago
This is doublespeak.

CM30 9y ago

Perhaps the solution may be to treat domain registrars as common carriers and bar them from taking down customer domains based on anything that's legal in their country. Similar thing may need to be done for web hosting, since without web hosting and domain registrations a viable (read, independent with free speech) internet presence can't be established nowadays.

rsynnott 9y ago
It may not have been legal in the registrar's countries. Based on the screenshot posted in the comments, harassment is often criminal, even if it's over the internet.
jerkstate 9y ago
I've been pointing out that some of the same organizations who have been lobbying for net neutrality as an anti-censorship necessity are leading the charge of censoring reprehensible speech. It seems pretty short-sighted, but luckily for them, the mob tends to have a short memory, so they will probably still be able to cast net neutrality as anti-censorship at the next opportunity, and still exclude themselves from the regulated parties.

steventhedev 9y ago

Why are they doing business through some 3rd party registrar and not through the official anguillan registrar? Not to mention #36 in the FAQ[0], which pretty clearly states they only disallow outright illegal behavior. [0]: https://whois.ai/faq.html https://whois.ai/faq.html

rsynnott 9y ago
Depends what the complaint the registrar got, but it could well have been a complaint of criminal harassment, given the content.
- steventhedev 9y ago
  RTA. It was an obscenity complaint. Gab usually tags it NSFW, which they normally do, but in this case they got an existential threat to their business. It's also not like AsiaRegistry makes things cheaper. Using whois.ai directly you only spend 100 to renew every 2 years, not 200.

gfosco 9y ago

What would it take to avoid this kind of censorship?... One possible route: a new TLD specifically based on free speech principles. That's not a perfect solution either, because you'd have to trust that organization and all its future owners to keep it that way.

nippples 9y ago
> What would it take to avoid this kind of censorship? Decentralization & p2p technologies
- turk183 9y ago
  And encrypt everything.
- programmarchy 9y ago
  For anyone wondering, looks like Namecoin and the .bit domain could be a potential solution. It's still a huge barrier for non-technical folk though, and censored content won't show up on search engines.

orasis 9y ago

This post is about AsianRegistry. I use 101domain for my .ai domain. I assume I'm immune from AsianRegistry's influence? Can anyone confirm?

Rotten194 9y ago

FWIW, I found the original post on the Wayback Machine and it's pretty gross: http://i.imgur.com/NYJiQXc.jpg http://i.imgur.com/NYJiQXc.jpg (I pixelated the face, was fully in view before) Taking someone's Tinder picture and sharing it on the internet to mock them is harassment (especially nowadays when software can take a person's face and look up their social media profiles). Say what you will about free speech, but this isn't a hill I particularly care about dying on.

lanevorockz 9y ago
End of free speech is just one step a way of ending personal thought and individuality.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- pgeorgi 9y ago
  Free speech came _long_ after personal thought and individuality, so while free speech helps (and is a good idea in general), it's probably not necessary.
  - revmoo 9y ago
    You're insane
  - angersock 9y ago
    I mean, universal suffrage came _long_ after democracy, and so while universal suffrage helps (and is a good idea in general), it's probably not necessary. You need to make a better argument here. Edit: tweaked analogy
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
- confounded 9y ago

deleted 9y ago

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throwanem 9y ago

For those perhaps unfamiliar with the context, this is another example of Andrew Anglin making a base and pointless personal attack against Heather Heyer, the woman killed in the violence surrounding the Charlottesville rally a few weeks ago. It's interesting to watch Anglin continue to force people in his vicinity to choose between compromising on principle and defending the utterly indefensible. One wonders what he hopes to accomplish, and even more what anyone else might hope to achieve by continuing to tolerate his presence - I get that quoting Niemoller is somewhat popular in this connection, but I don't see how the situations are parallel when this one revolves around a person who appears to have no greater aim in his public behavior than simply to bring about whatever ruin he can find a way to produce. I don't know. Perhaps he has a point to make about the tension between freedom of speech and relative oligopoly over the notionally public forum in which such speech can most productively be published. If so, he's picked the worst way in the world to do it, because by making himself a stench in the nostrils of civilization he only adds strength to the argument that the very concept of freedom of speech is one which has outlived its usefulness and merits deprecation in favor of a restricted realm beyond which suppression is the universally acknowledged default. That's the most charitable interpretation of his actions that I'm capable of constructing - but not one in which I especially confide.

silentOpen 9y ago
Some more context: Andrew Anglin is the editor of The Daily Stormer neo-nazi web site. I re-watched American History X last night and I greatly recommend it to anyone who wants a little (dramatic) insight into modern American white supremacy motivations. In particular, the main character, Derek, gives a speech to a group of skinheads which is disturbingly similar to some of Trump's campaign speeches (though more eloquent).
- stcredzero 9y ago
  Also, I recommend that any concerned intellectual read this book: http://a.co/bAOViyI http://a.co/bAOViyI (Warning, the cover has a picture of the Hitler salute, but it's squarely anti-Fascist.) It details the ideological underpinnings of the above. They say explicitly that they want to replace the current social order. The erosion of human rights is one of the explicit ideological goals of the leadership of both the far extreme right and the far extreme left.

common_ 9y ago

"Free and Open Internet" You mean, the network created by the US government for the use of military and research institutions? The idea of the Internet as an anarchist state is a far more temporary concept than that of the Internet as a regulated environment where people are supposed to act with a sense of decency. Anyone who argues otherwise is too young, or too ignorant, to know what they're talking about ... And it doesn't surprise me that most of these Internet trolls whining about censorship were born in the 1980s and later.

ktta 9y ago
That's a bit like saying men should hunt and women must raise children because that what they were doing for a long time and that's what they were 'meant' to do. Internet is no longer a network for the US government and research institutions.

psyc 9y ago

Seems like a lot of people are right on board with Internet-wide censorship by community standards. I'm very disappointed that so many have chosen to cast the problem only in terms of bad people posting bad things. You've missed the whole point. I've conducted some research in the past into how to solve this simple problem: how to reliably host potentially offensive content, given the content is legal in the US. I concluded it's currently infeasible. All US hosts are responsive to mobs, and all hosts that market themselves as "pro free speech" are in jurisdictions with a variety of "hate speech" or "anti insult" laws. I've concluded that the only way forward is probably a P2P web. Given this is Hacker News, I wish that people wanted to talk about that sort of thing, rather than, as has happened here, bikeshedding about what those global community standards should be in our personal opinions.

idle_zealot 9y ago
I've seen a handful of p2p internet solutions pop up, but all seem immature. Is there one in particular that you have hopes for?
- psyc 9y ago
  Not really. It's a commonly proposed application for blockchains, but calling most of those immature would actually be generous. The only one I'm aware of is Substratum, but I honestly don't know whether it's a fly-by-night ICO or not.
cft 9y ago
Here we are talking about a domain registrar, not a host. Aren't there registrars that don't issue similar threats for legal content in their jurisdiction (e.g. in the US?) Would be nice to publisize a list. By the way, I am sure that large web sites like Dropbox or Twitter have actually illegal content, but their registrar obviously doesn't threaten them. PS. Curious what the reason was to downvote this?
yjftsjthsd-h 9y ago
Does this include Nearly Free Speech?

DiNovi 9y ago

Not shocking nazis can take something people might agree with them on and then twist the knife into something super gross, like being an apologist for murder.

JediWing 9y ago

Title: "We Are At War For A Free And Open Internet" Domain: "medium.com" Irony meter rating: off charts

davisjung 9y ago
Why?

jkelsey 9y ago

Here we go with another nazi attempt to lecture us on civil liberties. If they had more political power (and I shudder at the notion), they would be the first ones to clamp down on speech and free expression (it's kinda their thing). We have more pressing free speech matters at hand right now with authoritarian states and corporate monopolies. Nazis don't get a free ride on the hard work being done just so they can turn the gun around on us when they have power. We recognize racism and sexism for what it is, and don't let it distract us from building a better society for us all. Do we have to reference the xkcd comic again?

stcredzero 9y ago
Please don't. I think Monroe has fallen down as a speaker of truth. If Free Speech is suppressed through societal pressure, it's just as bad as the government doing it. The mechanisms Monroe trumpets were once used to suppress LGBT people, Jewish people, and Black people. The kind of society he wants is just as authoritarian and socially stifling as Victorian society -- it just fits his particular tastes. XKCD of all people should know better.
- jkelsey 9y ago
  > If Free Speech is suppressed through societal pressure, it's just as bad as the government doing it. You're confusing the market of free ideas with speech. Governments have militaries and police forces. Societies have public opinion. Are you suggesting that societies shouldn't have the ability to guide themselves by rejecting speech that is harmful to itself (i.e. racist/sexist dogma perpetuated by a majority that wants to get rid of its minorities)? Honestly, this all sounds like nihilism which I know is all the currently all the rage to wealthy and white Silicon Valley, but I'm sure your perspective will be altered if you should ever be unfortunate to have nazis start targeting you.
  - stcredzero 9y ago
    You're confusing the market of free ideas with speech...Are you suggesting that societies shouldn't have the ability to guide themselves by rejecting speech that is harmful to itself I have seen many things which are touted as part of "the marketplace of ideas" that are really attempts to skew speech in civil society through non-governmental bureaucratic power. This is dishonest. It's not a real "marketplace of ideas" when certain things are placed in an inaccessible part of the store. We've seen this "technically not censorship" thing before. Noam Chomsky helped bring it to the world's attention. http://a.co/658KATJ http://a.co/658KATJ Honestly, this all sounds like nihilism which I know is all the currently all the rage to wealthy and white Silicon Valley, but I'm sure your perspective will be altered if you should ever be unfortunate to have nazis start targeting you. I have been racially targeted by groups of poor whites. My perspective changed when extreme elements on the left started behaving in much the same way. When your "activism" starts depending on the magnitude of horribleness of the enemy for its justification, this is a historical sign that something is out of kilter. No one who says they can do anything, because they're less horrible than some bad guys, gets to wield the special liminal power of activism in my name. Groupthink is groupthink. It feels much the same way, no matter where it is based on the political spectrum. The justified hate of White Supremacists is much the same as hateful ideologues of a different stripe. I abhor the nihilism of Silicon Valley, however, it's not a white phenomenon, nor is it particular to one ethnic group. Shortly after I moved to the Bay Area, I got to see a drunken self-styled startup nerd spill beer all over the laptop of a cancer-patient female techie who was trying to get her life together, then try to pretend he had nothing to do with it. (Pre-Obamacare, so her life seemed pretty precarious. He thought it was a good idea to dive into his bunk at the hacker hostel I was staying at.) He was proof by counterexample that being white is not at all necessary for entitlement. The nihilism of Silicon Valley and the Bay Area is mostly derived from the nihilism of the Postmodernist left. We have as much to fear from the radicalism of the left as the radicalism of the extreme Fascist right. Both of those groups have in common collectivist and nihilistic ideologies that reject logic and rationality. You only have to read the writings of the esoteric thought leaders of both groups to see this. Therein lies the real danger. The left-right spectrum is only incidental.