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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, RevengePo

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.

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.