10 ms·

GoDaddy to suspend domain name Gab.com tomorrow

113 points by daenz 8y ago

forgottenpass 8y ago
What can be used to silence your opposition will be used to silence you.
nyolfen 8y ago
> The moral of the story is: if you’re against witch-hunts, and you promise to found your own little utopian community where witch-hunts will never happen, your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches. It will be a terrible place to live even if witch-hunts are genuinely wrong. http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/01/neutral-vs-conservative-the-eternal-struggle/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/01/neutral-vs-conservative...
- spaceman1331 8y ago
  https://archive.org/details/TheCityOfTheDead1960 https://archive.org/details/TheCityOfTheDead1960
kennywinker 8y ago
Massive eye roll at the linked tweet. Acting like a company severing their service is an attack on their freedom of speech is completely crying wolf. I'm sure there are many domain registrars who will take their money. This is not a case where any speech is being chilled. Gab is making money off a platform where people are saying horrible things. Godaddy is distancing themselves because they don't want to be associated with those things. That's the cost of doing horrible business.
- dionian 8y ago
  > That's the cost of doing horrible business. But doesn't Twitter have many people saying horrible things? If gab is letting people talk about murdering people and not taking action, I'm fine with it - but is that the case?
  - anonymous5133 8y ago
    Yup and so does facebook, youtube, reddit and so on.
    - manicdee 8y ago
      Gab was specifically founded because Reddit didn’t let them say the things they like saying.
      - anonymous5133 8y ago
        Yup but it still persists. The users just spread out into other subs and do it there as well.
      - fweespeech 8y ago
        That was Voat. Gab is the same but Twitter. But for all their bitching, they are still active on both in large numbers. Both platforms really only engage in token bans.
    - slg 8y ago
      One could argue that the Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, etc are also more dangerous because they allow the recruitment and radicalization of normal people. Before social media was around someone would have had to seek out a site like Stormfront. They would have had to take an active interest in these hate groups. With social media the hate comes to them and is mixed in with all the usual cat pictures and memes. This serves to normalize hate and creates an easy avenue to recruit disenfranchised people who might never have previously been exposed to this type of thing pre-social media.
      - anonymous5133 8y ago
        One could also argue that twitter, reddit and facebook also discourage people from joining hate groups and so on. All of these platforms can be used for good or bad. Maybe someone was a jew hater before but then they watch a documentary about Israel and realize that the jews aren't so bad etc. That same person might also watch a documentary about hate groups and realize they are a member of one and decide to make a positive change in their life.
- fma 8y ago
  It always amuses me when pro-business conservatives/Republicans aren't pro-business when it hurts their feelings. Amusing isn't the right word...but I have no other way to describe it. If GoDaddy won't handle their domain name, I'm sure some registrar in Russia would glady give them gab.ru
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - kennywinker 8y ago
    The .ai tld belongs to the country of Anguilla, not godaddy. They can switch registrars without switching the domain itself.
    - philjohn 8y ago
      Then they should do that. A business doesn't have to keep doing business with a customer, they are free to cut them off.
- jake_the_third 8y ago
  > Godaddy is distancing themselves because they don't want to be associated with those things. Would it also be reasonable for browsers also black list the website in question "because they don't want to be associated with those things"?
  - EGreg 8y ago
    This is the difference between open source platforms and capitalistic platforms. One is far more benign and is simply an unopinionated tool. The other has a huge power and daya asymmetry can do anything at any time, subject only to the reputational and competition constraints. And the competition needs to build everything from scratch instead of just forking. Guess which one always wins in the end :) As time goes on, the Atlas Shrugged argument of “but who will want to build the next thing if you limit their upside with taxes and regulations?” will be less and less relevant. I’d like to see a society where instead of John Galts we have collaborative snowballs like Wikipedia and Science where everyone adds a tiny bit without chilling effects of intellectual property lawsuits. But how will people eat? UBI.
    - omnimus 8y ago
      I am afraid ruling class reads too much Ayn Rand and will never allow this. Only way is to go around. Somehow.
  - asdfasgasdgasdg 8y ago
    Sure, if they felt that was necessary to protect their image! (Or if they wanted to for any other reason, but the image idea seems most likely.) Right now, that's not an issue because all of the browsers are equally able to access all websites. So no browser's image is tarnished by providing access to Gab. Like imagine if there were four browsers but only one could be used to access Gab.ai. And people who don't like antisemitism knew that and began threatening to boycott that browser and encourage others to do the same. It would be totally reasonable for that browser to remove support for Gab.ai at that point.
warent 8y ago
PayPal and GoDaddy terminating business with them? I must be living under a rock because I don't think I've heard of gab.com before these tweets started appearing on HN. What exactly did they do to piss everyone off?
- anonymous5133 8y ago
  Basically they created a platform for freedom of speech. The problem is that every crack pot on the internet basically flocked to the site to say very mean thing about other people. I think we all agree that hate speech is not good but outright silencing people is not the correct solution. If you want to eliminate hate speech then you need to confront the people doing the hate speech and argue with them about why they're wrong. Many other social media sites also suffer from massive amounts of hate speech as well.
  - belltaco 8y ago
    > and argue with them about why they're wrong. It's hard to argue with people that are not even wrong. For example, some hold beliefs like "Women are subhuman and only exist to serve men and were created for that purpose." How do you even argue against something like that?
  - philjohn 8y ago
    They haven't been silenced, a business they use has decided that they no longer want to do business with them. They can go and get another registrar, and if they need another payment provider, they can always set up one themselves, or start taking bitcoin.
  - TheSpiceIsLife 8y ago
    > and argue with them about why they're wrong. Does that actually work?
    - Faark 8y ago
      It can work. It doesn't help that simple imaginary solutions that probably blame some scape goat are easy to sell compared to complicated trade-offs that marginally reduce systemic issues our society has. The US political system practically allowing only two parties doesn't help, since it makes it easy to disregard everyone not with your team instead of having to engage with a large set of different opinions. But you quite often see people post something like "thanks for saving me from being an alt-righter" in the community of for example twitch-streamer Destiny. He did engage alt right youtubers in discussions, but recently scaled that back somewhat... apparently having a right wing mob hate you is a real thread to your livelihood as well. He says he has still no idea why he got his permanent twitter ban... so yeah, I'd love someone to look into that... Anyway, we are talking about the marketplace of ideas. As with any marketplace, you need marketing to sell the good (idea). Guess what kind of ideas are worth paying for? Probably the kind that will benefit those with lots of capital. And for that reason do real lefties think capitalism will eventually always end in fascism once disillusioned people demand change and only a communist revolution can save us. I always disregarded that as stupid, but the last few years make it more and more difficult...
liftbigweights 8y ago
That is ridiculous. We really have to address the bias/extremism in the tech hierarchy and their shortsighted foolishness. Gab did nothing illegal. All this does is opens up godaddy to pressure to start suspending other "offensive" domains. These groups of large tech companies are acting as puritans and social engineers in concert are worrying. The same companies complaining about other countries forcing them to censor and going above and beyond censoring at home. Edit: 10 years ago, nobody with any sense would have supported this. People valued free speech. The anti-free speech brigading is rather shocking, especially on a site like hacker news.
- anonymous5133 8y ago
  I agree, it is a slippery slope for the domain hosters. Hopefully they will just shift into tor where censorship does not exist.
  - alphabettsy 8y ago
    The slippery slope is a logical fallacy. Is there evidence this extends beyond this specific case or hate speech in general?
- tdb7893 8y ago
  The thing is that "nothing illegal" is too low a bar. From a purely ethical standpoint taking money from a platform that supports hate speech is pretty sketchy even if it's not illegal
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- fma 8y ago
  I actually agreed with you, except with the edit. GoDaddy did nothing illegal, either. GoDaddy is executing their free speech. Per Citizens United (pushed by the right, of course) "The United States Supreme Court held (5–4) on January 21, 2010, that the free speech clause of the First Amendment to the Constitution prohibits the government from restricting independent expenditures for communications by nonprofit corporations, for-profit corporations, labor unions, and other associations". We should just admit that businesses censor one way or another - whether suppressing speech (removal of tweets), or extreme bias in information dissemination (looking at you, Fox News).
msaharia 8y ago
So I guess Gab is a Twitter clone like Voat was supposed to be for Reddit. As an aside, how does Mastodon deals/will deal with the issue? Because it is almost guaranteed that the most extremist elements will flock to it (I'm sold on its long term usefulness).
- beatgammit 8y ago
  Mastodon deals with it my not being popular enough even for trolls ;) In seriousness, isn't it federated like PeerTube? In that case, you'd likely only allow people to link to your network if you trust them, and each network would be responsible for vetting its users. If a particular network becomes a cesspool, you just remove them from your network instead of having to completely overhaul the entire system.
- smacktoward 8y ago
  Mastodon deals with it by leaving it up to the operators of each instance whether or not to federate with any other instance. If an instance takes a hard turn for the crazy, you can just turn off federation with that instance and you will never hear from it again.
- egypturnash 8y ago
  So imagine you run a Mastodon instance. You try to keep it a chill place. You start getting lots of reports for not just one, but multiple users on boner.lol. There's just a lot of people there who like pissing people off, it seems. You look up who boner.lol's admin is and they are posting the exact same kind of stuff people are reporting their users for, and rabidly defending users who're being called out on other instances for doing this. So you shrug, and silence the whole instance. Now nobody on boner.lol can talk to anyone on your instance. But what about @niceguy@boner.lol? @niceguy has a lot of friends on your instance, and wasn't doing any of the stuff that got boner.lol silenced. They just thought 'boner.lol' sounded funny. They want to talk to their friends, so they make a new account elsewhere - maybe on your instance if registration is open, maybe elsewhere. Eventually they pretty much move operations to their new account because they just can't talk to anyone they want to with their boner.lol account. This continues for a while. Maybe you toot something about how you silenced boner.lol and some of the other instance admins you're friendly with decide to preemptively silence boner.lol as well. Other admins silence it after their own direct experience with it. Maybe it gets added to one of the lists of Instances You Might Wanna Silence If You Want Things To Be Chill. Eventually the only other instances that don't silence boner.lol are ones that allow the same kind of behavior that got them silenced on your instance. And the admin of boner.lol now has a userbase consisting of nothing but the kind of people who enjoy pissing each other off. Which sure doesn't sound like a very rewarding thing to run, financially or emotionally. There is at least one instance I could name which has run down this path, and is no more.
Firebrand 8y ago
There's nothing more liberal in 2018 than worshipping at the altar of billion dollar banking institutions and web hosters for colluding to suppress the speech of people they disagree with.
- drb91 8y ago
  Centrist and neoliberal, maybe.
- bobbyT314 8y ago
  As a private (non-govermental) organization, GoDaddy isn't bound to providing free speech to anyone. Gab.com is welcome to keep gabbing on someone else's platform.
- sixothree 8y ago
  I don't understand the point you're trying to make here. It looks like you're trying to associate something a large corporation is doing, and has every right to do, with an entire swath of America because... because... why? Are you feeling particularly repressed by liberals as of late?
- patrickg_zill 8y ago
  It's why the NPC meme is so hated. Just a leeeeeetle too close to the truth...
jake_the_third 8y ago
Ignoring the offending content in question: What does a registrar have to do with the content of the website the domain points to? They are not hosting the content themselves, nor are they even pointing to it (assuming private nameservers are used). I don't see any grounds on which godaddy could reasonably claim policy jurisdiction over objectionable content they do not actively host themselves. To me, this seems like a conservative phone company bricking users phones because they've been used to watch porn. If the hosted content is illegal, they should be reported to authorities. If it is not, godaddy should act like the transparent utility service that it is and not intervene. Am I wrong in my line of thinking?
- cthulha 8y ago
  You're wrong at a couple of points: - GoDaddy isn't a transparent utility service, it's a for-profit business - You seem to think GoDaddy needs a reasonable claim on their jurisdiction... customers agree to their TOS, which usually is very much in the provider's favour and allows the provider to do anything they want without requiring justification. Your example scenario should be something more like "The customer is using their phone to organise a terrorist attack on American soil, should the telco brick the phone", because that is a much closer analogy to the present situation.
- ggggtez 8y ago
  Yup you're wrong, because they have a financial relationship. And Utility law doesn't affect the internet at all.
  - ibrault 8y ago
    Yep, according to the 2017 FCC net neutrality ruling, the Internet is no longer regulated as a utility.
    - asdfasgasdgasdg 8y ago
      Even then, only ISPs were to be regulated like utilities. Registrars were not in scope.
illiac_1962 8y ago
Suspending domain name registration is truly disturbing. I'm literally speechless and I feel like a line has been crossed. This is domain registration, an abstract service that routes requests based on a name. How did the policing of speech get to this level? I don't have words for the things I'm feeling right now. The actions of a mentally ill person has triggered full on censorship. This is entire situation is fucked up beyond words. We just need to man up and legally ban hate speech instead of beating around the bush and before we start quietly, effectively banning other forms of speech.
- belltaco 8y ago
  >The actions of a mentally ill person has triggered full on censorship How do you know he was mentally ill? Lot of non-mentally ill people commit crimes. Were all the Nazis mentally ill? Was Hitler mentally ill?
- kingkawn 8y ago
  The policing of speech got to this level when the site owner expresses no responsibility for contributing to the murderous radicalization of its members.
  - bassman9000 8y ago
    Far worse content is seen in Twitter, and they keep their domain. How so. edit: immediate downvoting with no response. Really? So isn't there abhorrent content divulgated by Twitter/Facebook/YouTube/etc? Are any of their domains threatened by it? Any of the downvoters, feel free to engage in discussion.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - jaydz 8y ago
      The difference is Twitter is willing to remove the "far worse content" while Gab is not.
altmind 8y ago
It's probably not related, but I cannot be quiet about management access outage GoDaddy is experiencing right now - nobody can login to their accounts and multiple authoritative dns servers dont work https://puck.nether.net/pipermail/outages/2018-October/011779.html https://puck.nether.net/pipermail/outages/2018-October/01177...
someguydave 8y ago
Using horrific and tragic deaths as a cudgel to beat your political enemies discredits any moral claims in my opinion.
- threeseed 8y ago
  1) Please stop with the hyperbole. This isn't war. 2) Godaddy is apolitical. They are merely trying to distance themselves from the actions of the Gab site like everyone else is.
  - someguydave 8y ago
    1.) It's not hyperbole. Innocent people on gab.ai are now cut-off from discussion with each other because some loon happened to post on their site. 2.) "distancing yourself" is the same as taking a political stance.
JohnTHaller 8y ago
"We may terminate your access to and use of the Services, at our sole discretion, at any time and without notice to you." - Gab Terms of Service
- altmind 8y ago
  this clause was added this week
daenz 8y ago
This might be an unpopular opinion, but I think it's time for the US government to step up and provide its citizens with minimal tax-funded government-managed hosting and domain services, for people to say whatever lawful speech that they want, without being censored. It's becoming clearer that the public sphere for speech is now online, and that space is managed only by private companies. If we want principles like free speech to continue, we need to segment some of that sphere to be funded and protected by the government. I say all this, because I believe both that a) yes, these private companies should be able to do what they want WRT who they associate with and b) online is the new "public space" for voices to be heard, which is currently only occupied by private companies. If you believe private companies shouldn't be able to buy up all the public land, then I think you would support something like this. The internet is the new public land, but it is theoretically infinite, and for some reason it's only occupied and controlled by private companies.
- leoh 8y ago
  What? By this logic, the government should have funded printing presses. Gab.com is going to find another provider. They are unhinged and no private entity is required to serve them. Also, this XKCD: https://www.xkcd.com/1357/ https://www.xkcd.com/1357/
  - regecks 8y ago
    Isn't that the OP's point? What if no accredited .com registrar wants to serve them for fear of being criticized in the media? Gab would be SOL and lose the ability to meaningfully exist on the internet. Why are private companies the gatekeepers to being able to express yourself online, all of a sudden? Domain registration that is immune to knee-jerk responses like GoDaddy's would be nice. I am reminded of the time that GoDaddy revoked that "fake" Stripe EV cert (https://stripe.ian.sh/ https://stripe.ian.sh/) because of media reporting, even though it was acceptable under the CABF EV guidelines. In other words, arbitrary.
    - PurpleBoxDragon 8y ago
      At some point we have to consider that internet exists because of the government. Where that is can be debated, but without government enforcing certain regulations and restrictions, the internet wouldn't exist. The companies that benefit directly from those regulations and restrictions should have the First Amendment apply to them, or else the regulations and restrictions should be removed. Take the physical wires. They only exist spread everywhere because the government forced people to accept them and allowed companies to run wires over or under public land. At that point, the companies not benefiting from those wires are no longer fully private institutes.
wmf 8y ago
We're in a weird place where the presence of multiple competing intermediaries (in this case DNS registrars, but you see the same thing with banks and such) leads to them not being regulated as utilities. So when every single intermediary exercises their right to refuse service to someone they end up locked out of the system but nobody's responsible.
- threeseed 8y ago
  1) Not every intermediary has exercised their right so it's a strawman argument. 2) Not sure why you bring up the utility argument. It's basically equivalent to traditional newspapers where if I write some incendiary letter to the editor I am not guaranteed that any of them will post it.
danesparza 8y ago
Does anybody else see the irony of a self-proclaimed 'social networking service' turning to Twitter because nobody would notice if they posted something on their own service?
- c0brac0bra 8y ago
  They can't post on their own service because their hosting was pulled by joyent.
  - alphabettsy 8y ago
    True, but it’s also how they posted about other businesses refusing to do business with them.
- paulddraper 8y ago
  Microsoft still runs ads on Google.
nafizh 8y ago
Wonderful news. There is no such thing as absolute freedom of speech. People are threatening and inciting violence against some target demographic, and you are only being obtuse by trying to be apathetic to that in the name of free speech. Besides, godaddy is a private company. It is not obligated to give rights of freedom of speech to anyone.
- s9w 8y ago
  There was a facebook livestream where a disabled man was tortured. Twitter contains horrible racism. Why is Gab measured different? It's simply free speech. Not even that by the way, since certain types of porn were recently banned.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
Waterluvian 8y ago
I feel almost too defeated to share this. I'm somewhat ignorant on the issue, which might come across as having a politicial leaning. I don't. This is a proxy battle for "Big Tech is Liberal and Liberals are trying to shut down Conservative speech", is it? Or am I wrong? If it is, why don't Conservatives just create their own tech stuff? Like what is fundamentally stopping people from being heard if the government isn't the one stopping them? Is it currently too hard to create another registrar so we're stuck with the ones we have?
- fooey 8y ago
  This isn't a battle between liberals and conservatives, this is big corporations being terrified of liability. Gab and their ilk are giant targets for lawsuits for negligence and who knows whatever else, and no one wants to the deeper pockets further up the food chain The risk/reward of associating with products like Gab has gotten very negative
- olliej 8y ago
  The underlying problem is that the “conservative movement” has decided that when a site decides to ban nazis (and their racist, homophobe, etc friends) that is the same thing as banning “conservatives”.
  - fzeroracer 8y ago
    I have trouble understanding how anyone can defend Gab considering the major meltdown their twitter account is going through, including reaching out to Alex Jones as well as perpetuating alt-right memes and conspiracy theories. No one wants to be associated with Gab because it's clear to anyone that it's a garbage fire of a website. It's similar to what happened with Stormfront.
- paulddraper 8y ago
  > If it is, why don't Conservative just create their own tech stuff? That's literally what Gab is. > Is it currently too hard to create another registrar so we're stuck with the ones we have? Sort of. In theory it's possible [1], but it's hard enough almost no one does it. Not even Twitter has their own registrar (which it why they went down during the DynDNS attack). [1] https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/accreditation-2012-02-25-en https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/accreditation-2012-02-...
djsumdog 8y ago
GoDaddy is US based and in the US, you can discriminate against customers except for very specific things (race, sex, etc.) The Colorado cake case is a weird and bad example, because it came down to people wanting him to commission art (most of that Supreme Court case was about whether or not the cake was an artistic expression, protected by the first 1st amendment). Interestingly that cake shop no longer does custom cakes, so technically they do have to sell to everyone now. There is another Supreme Court case coming up which will address speech and platforms. This is going to be big. I wrote about this last year and I think it's really relevant today: https://fightthefuture.org/article/the-new-era-of-corporate-censorship/ https://fightthefuture.org/article/the-new-era-of-corporate-... You might not say anything now, because you might hate Gab and think it's hate speech, but just wait for them to come to a platform you don't think is wrong, but goes against the current mindset of what people think is right. There are too few providers and they are way too big. If AWS, DigitalOcean, Vultr, Dreamhost, etc. all deny you a platform, where are you going to go? Are you now going to pay out the ass for platforms that cater to Adult Website hosting? So few people even visit websites anymore either, unless they're linked via Facebook/Twitter, which are both deleting things they don't agree with enmass! Furthermore, this just pushes people more into these outlying platforms, further polarizing them to deal exclusively with ostracised people and opinions. It literally gives them more validity by censoring them (versus ignoring them)! If the shooter had posted on Facebook instead of Gab, we wouldn't demand Facebook go down would we? I think there are really serious implications to all of this, and many of them are not good.
- Mattasher 8y ago
  I'm not sure people understand the extent to which domain names (and thus registrars & registries) are the linch pins of freedom of speech and identity right now. This, and the ongoing breakdown in the reputational barrier between consumer and service provider do not bode well at all for online freedom: https://beforetheban.com/BeforeTheBanWhitepaper2018_10_01.pdf https://beforetheban.com/BeforeTheBanWhitepaper2018_10_01.pd...
tehwebguy 8y ago
The only reason I can imagine their domain is registered with GoDaddy is so that they could gain attention from its inevitable suspension. Everyone knows GoDaddy does things like this.
mooseburger 8y ago
Aside from the "this chills speech/does not" discussion, I just want to point out that hate speech laws or deplatforming don't actually accomplish any of their stated goals. Timothy McVeigh did not need any online echo chambers to perpetrate the Oklahoma City Bombing. In the Weimar Republic, there were hate speech laws (https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/copenhagen-speech-violence https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/copenhagen-speech-v...). Relevant quote: "Researching my book, I looked into what actually happened in the Weimar Republic. I found that, contrary to what most people think, Weimar Germany did have hate-speech laws, and they were applied quite frequently. The assertion that Nazi propaganda played a significant role in mobilizing anti-Jewish sentiment is, of course, irrefutable. But to claim that the Holocaust could have been prevented if only anti-Semitic speech and Nazi propaganda had been banned has little basis in reality. Leading Nazis such as Joseph Goebbels, Theodor Fritsch, and Julius Streicher were all prosecuted for anti-Semitic speech. Streicher served two prison sentences. Rather than deterring the Nazis and countering anti-Semitism, the many court cases served as effective public-relations machinery, affording Streicher the kind of attention he would never have found in a climate of a free and open debate. In the years from 1923 to 1933, Der Stürmer [Streicher's newspaper] was either confiscated or editors taken to court on no fewer than thirty-six occasions. The more charges Streicher faced, the greater became the admiration of his supporters. The courts became an important platform for Streicher's campaign against the Jews. In the words of a present-day civil-rights campaigner, pre-Hitler Germany had laws very much like the anti-hate laws of today, and they were enforced with some vigor. As history so painfully testifies, this type of legislation proved ineffectual on the one occasion when there was a real argument for it." Hell, Hitler himself was convicted of high treason, but only got a slap on the wrist because the judge and jury were basically on his side. The only thing strong or soft speech policing contributes to is the further erosion of our civil liberties.
shiado 8y ago
Why stop with Gab? The CIA has a fucking verified account on Twitter. Why should a platform which not only tolerates but tacitly endorses organizations which perform extrajudicial torture and murder be allowed to keep their domain?
- mikesickler 8y ago
  Lots of noble and admirable people use Twitter, in addition to shitbags. I challenge you to find a decent person who is an active user of Gab.
iamnothere 8y ago
Well, so it finally happened. The Rubicon has been breached. One of the great things about the Internet, up until recent times, has been the relative neutrality of the infrastructure. No matter who you were, it was fairly easy to set up shop as long as your content was not super illegal. In general, you could count on having your host back you up unless you were incredibly controversial, and it was out of the question that a mainstream US provider would drop your .com name! A US-hosted .com was a "gold standard" you could count on. The first indication that things were changing was the DMCA. But for all its faults, at least it has a process. This new political "anything goes" trend is going to be awful for anyone not already in the Fortune 500. But I guess that's the point, isn't it? The useful idiots standing by these actions are going to be shocked, SHOCKED when the political winds shift and their favorite site is suddenly forced off the net by tech oligarchs. Do you really think this won't get turned against left-leaning/anti-war sites the moment we get into a large-scale conflict again? But I guess that's the point, too, isn't it!! I'm appalled that anyone on the left who remembers the GWB "with us or against us" era of politics would support this kind of politicization of our infrastructure. The left would NEVER have been able to elect Obama without being able to organize on a free and open Internet! This kind of action is killing what little remains of the open Internet! And all for a petty, temporary victory over a fringe political group! What are you throwing away???
- aninhumer 8y ago
  Except the actual left has been complaining about centralised capitalist control of the media for decades. Indeed, it's precisely because of that control that you've apparently never heard anything other than liberal centrists talking about access to speech. >This new political "anything goes" trend is going to be awful for anyone not already in the Fortune 500. But I guess that's the point, isn't it? Yes of course. Welcome to Capitalism. When the system starts to break down from the inevitable inequality it causes, capitalists turn to fascism to maintain control. It happened in the Weimar Republic, and it's happening again now. We're seeing business news outlets openly talking about the "investment opportunities" in Brazil as a result of the election of an overt fascist. >And all for a petty, temporary victory over a fringe political group! The left celebrates this, not because the control is good, but because the threat of fascism has become so overt that this is the best we can hope for right now.
dr-rachet 8y ago
I’m an observant Jew. I’ve never considered posting a comment on here before. Despite disliking the anti-Semitic speech hosted on sites like gab, silencing them this way puts a bad taste in my mouth. Yes, their speech is hateful. Yes, these are private entities that are well within their rights to refuse service. But that’s not the point. At the moment, a majority agrees this type of speech is unacceptable. But what’s next? Maybe next time it’s speaking against google or anything, for that matter. The famous saying “first they came for the X..., then the Y..., who was left to speak for me?” Is appropriate here. I don’t condone hate speech, but just words aren’t hurting others. Until that speech becomes action or highly encourages action, it is just words. Additionally, if the majority destroys the gathering place of the minority, they’ll just go to ground. Burying themselves deeper, re-enforcing their conspiracy theories, and polarizing them more. Our actions will be the catalyst to their radicalization. We need to think, long and hard, before jumping on this bandwagon.
- philjohn 8y ago
  I suggest you read "The Paradox of Tolerance" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- alphabettsy 8y ago
  I see your point, but there is also the issue of helping to make this kind of content available. If the content is hard to find or hidden then maybe less people are exposed to it? Is that the answer? I have no idea, but to me there’s a big difference between arguing the merits of single-payor healthcare and whether or not certain people should be allowed to exist. There are loads of racist and bigoted opinions on Facebook and Twitter, but Gab takes that to another level. The people being banned from Twitter aren’t saying things like black people have lower IQs, they’re saying they’re animals that shouldn’t exist in this country, etc. That’s not the same.
  - dr-rachet 8y ago
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113 points by daenz 8y ago

What can be used to silence your opposition will be used to silence you.

> The moral of the story is: if you’re against witch-hunts, and you promise to found your own little utopian community where witch-hunts will never happen, your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches. It will be a terrible place to live even if witch-hunts are genuinely wrong. http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/01/neutral-vs-conservative-the-eternal-struggle/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/01/neutral-vs-conservative...

spaceman1331 8y ago
https://archive.org/details/TheCityOfTheDead1960 https://archive.org/details/TheCityOfTheDead1960

kennywinker 8y ago

Massive eye roll at the linked tweet. Acting like a company severing their service is an attack on their freedom of speech is completely crying wolf. I'm sure there are many domain registrars who will take their money. This is not a case where any speech is being chilled. Gab is making money off a platform where people are saying horrible things. Godaddy is distancing themselves because they don't want to be associated with those things. That's the cost of doing horrible business.

dionian 8y ago
> That's the cost of doing horrible business. But doesn't Twitter have many people saying horrible things? If gab is letting people talk about murdering people and not taking action, I'm fine with it - but is that the case?
- anonymous5133 8y ago
  Yup and so does facebook, youtube, reddit and so on.
  - manicdee 8y ago
    Gab was specifically founded because Reddit didn’t let them say the things they like saying.
    - anonymous5133 8y ago
      Yup but it still persists. The users just spread out into other subs and do it there as well.
    - fweespeech 8y ago
      That was Voat. Gab is the same but Twitter. But for all their bitching, they are still active on both in large numbers. Both platforms really only engage in token bans.
  - slg 8y ago
    One could argue that the Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, etc are also more dangerous because they allow the recruitment and radicalization of normal people. Before social media was around someone would have had to seek out a site like Stormfront. They would have had to take an active interest in these hate groups. With social media the hate comes to them and is mixed in with all the usual cat pictures and memes. This serves to normalize hate and creates an easy avenue to recruit disenfranchised people who might never have previously been exposed to this type of thing pre-social media.
    - anonymous5133 8y ago
      One could also argue that twitter, reddit and facebook also discourage people from joining hate groups and so on. All of these platforms can be used for good or bad. Maybe someone was a jew hater before but then they watch a documentary about Israel and realize that the jews aren't so bad etc. That same person might also watch a documentary about hate groups and realize they are a member of one and decide to make a positive change in their life.
fma 8y ago
It always amuses me when pro-business conservatives/Republicans aren't pro-business when it hurts their feelings. Amusing isn't the right word...but I have no other way to describe it. If GoDaddy won't handle their domain name, I'm sure some registrar in Russia would glady give them gab.ru
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- kennywinker 8y ago
  The .ai tld belongs to the country of Anguilla, not godaddy. They can switch registrars without switching the domain itself.
  - philjohn 8y ago
    Then they should do that. A business doesn't have to keep doing business with a customer, they are free to cut them off.
jake_the_third 8y ago
> Godaddy is distancing themselves because they don't want to be associated with those things. Would it also be reasonable for browsers also black list the website in question "because they don't want to be associated with those things"?
- EGreg 8y ago
  This is the difference between open source platforms and capitalistic platforms. One is far more benign and is simply an unopinionated tool. The other has a huge power and daya asymmetry can do anything at any time, subject only to the reputational and competition constraints. And the competition needs to build everything from scratch instead of just forking. Guess which one always wins in the end :) As time goes on, the Atlas Shrugged argument of “but who will want to build the next thing if you limit their upside with taxes and regulations?” will be less and less relevant. I’d like to see a society where instead of John Galts we have collaborative snowballs like Wikipedia and Science where everyone adds a tiny bit without chilling effects of intellectual property lawsuits. But how will people eat? UBI.
  - omnimus 8y ago
    I am afraid ruling class reads too much Ayn Rand and will never allow this. Only way is to go around. Somehow.
- asdfasgasdgasdg 8y ago
  Sure, if they felt that was necessary to protect their image! (Or if they wanted to for any other reason, but the image idea seems most likely.) Right now, that's not an issue because all of the browsers are equally able to access all websites. So no browser's image is tarnished by providing access to Gab. Like imagine if there were four browsers but only one could be used to access Gab.ai. And people who don't like antisemitism knew that and began threatening to boycott that browser and encourage others to do the same. It would be totally reasonable for that browser to remove support for Gab.ai at that point.

warent 8y ago

PayPal and GoDaddy terminating business with them? I must be living under a rock because I don't think I've heard of gab.com before these tweets started appearing on HN. What exactly did they do to piss everyone off?

anonymous5133 8y ago
Basically they created a platform for freedom of speech. The problem is that every crack pot on the internet basically flocked to the site to say very mean thing about other people. I think we all agree that hate speech is not good but outright silencing people is not the correct solution. If you want to eliminate hate speech then you need to confront the people doing the hate speech and argue with them about why they're wrong. Many other social media sites also suffer from massive amounts of hate speech as well.
- belltaco 8y ago
  > and argue with them about why they're wrong. It's hard to argue with people that are not even wrong. For example, some hold beliefs like "Women are subhuman and only exist to serve men and were created for that purpose." How do you even argue against something like that?
- philjohn 8y ago
  They haven't been silenced, a business they use has decided that they no longer want to do business with them. They can go and get another registrar, and if they need another payment provider, they can always set up one themselves, or start taking bitcoin.
- TheSpiceIsLife 8y ago
  > and argue with them about why they're wrong. Does that actually work?
  - Faark 8y ago
    It can work. It doesn't help that simple imaginary solutions that probably blame some scape goat are easy to sell compared to complicated trade-offs that marginally reduce systemic issues our society has. The US political system practically allowing only two parties doesn't help, since it makes it easy to disregard everyone not with your team instead of having to engage with a large set of different opinions. But you quite often see people post something like "thanks for saving me from being an alt-righter" in the community of for example twitch-streamer Destiny. He did engage alt right youtubers in discussions, but recently scaled that back somewhat... apparently having a right wing mob hate you is a real thread to your livelihood as well. He says he has still no idea why he got his permanent twitter ban... so yeah, I'd love someone to look into that... Anyway, we are talking about the marketplace of ideas. As with any marketplace, you need marketing to sell the good (idea). Guess what kind of ideas are worth paying for? Probably the kind that will benefit those with lots of capital. And for that reason do real lefties think capitalism will eventually always end in fascism once disillusioned people demand change and only a communist revolution can save us. I always disregarded that as stupid, but the last few years make it more and more difficult...

liftbigweights 8y ago

That is ridiculous. We really have to address the bias/extremism in the tech hierarchy and their shortsighted foolishness. Gab did nothing illegal. All this does is opens up godaddy to pressure to start suspending other "offensive" domains. These groups of large tech companies are acting as puritans and social engineers in concert are worrying. The same companies complaining about other countries forcing them to censor and going above and beyond censoring at home. Edit: 10 years ago, nobody with any sense would have supported this. People valued free speech. The anti-free speech brigading is rather shocking, especially on a site like hacker news.

anonymous5133 8y ago
I agree, it is a slippery slope for the domain hosters. Hopefully they will just shift into tor where censorship does not exist.
- alphabettsy 8y ago
  The slippery slope is a logical fallacy. Is there evidence this extends beyond this specific case or hate speech in general?
tdb7893 8y ago
The thing is that "nothing illegal" is too low a bar. From a purely ethical standpoint taking money from a platform that supports hate speech is pretty sketchy even if it's not illegal
deleted 8y ago
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fma 8y ago
I actually agreed with you, except with the edit. GoDaddy did nothing illegal, either. GoDaddy is executing their free speech. Per Citizens United (pushed by the right, of course) "The United States Supreme Court held (5–4) on January 21, 2010, that the free speech clause of the First Amendment to the Constitution prohibits the government from restricting independent expenditures for communications by nonprofit corporations, for-profit corporations, labor unions, and other associations". We should just admit that businesses censor one way or another - whether suppressing speech (removal of tweets), or extreme bias in information dissemination (looking at you, Fox News).

msaharia 8y ago

So I guess Gab is a Twitter clone like Voat was supposed to be for Reddit. As an aside, how does Mastodon deals/will deal with the issue? Because it is almost guaranteed that the most extremist elements will flock to it (I'm sold on its long term usefulness).

beatgammit 8y ago
Mastodon deals with it my not being popular enough even for trolls ;) In seriousness, isn't it federated like PeerTube? In that case, you'd likely only allow people to link to your network if you trust them, and each network would be responsible for vetting its users. If a particular network becomes a cesspool, you just remove them from your network instead of having to completely overhaul the entire system.
smacktoward 8y ago
Mastodon deals with it by leaving it up to the operators of each instance whether or not to federate with any other instance. If an instance takes a hard turn for the crazy, you can just turn off federation with that instance and you will never hear from it again.
egypturnash 8y ago
So imagine you run a Mastodon instance. You try to keep it a chill place. You start getting lots of reports for not just one, but multiple users on boner.lol. There's just a lot of people there who like pissing people off, it seems. You look up who boner.lol's admin is and they are posting the exact same kind of stuff people are reporting their users for, and rabidly defending users who're being called out on other instances for doing this. So you shrug, and silence the whole instance. Now nobody on boner.lol can talk to anyone on your instance. But what about @niceguy@boner.lol? @niceguy has a lot of friends on your instance, and wasn't doing any of the stuff that got boner.lol silenced. They just thought 'boner.lol' sounded funny. They want to talk to their friends, so they make a new account elsewhere - maybe on your instance if registration is open, maybe elsewhere. Eventually they pretty much move operations to their new account because they just can't talk to anyone they want to with their boner.lol account. This continues for a while. Maybe you toot something about how you silenced boner.lol and some of the other instance admins you're friendly with decide to preemptively silence boner.lol as well. Other admins silence it after their own direct experience with it. Maybe it gets added to one of the lists of Instances You Might Wanna Silence If You Want Things To Be Chill. Eventually the only other instances that don't silence boner.lol are ones that allow the same kind of behavior that got them silenced on your instance. And the admin of boner.lol now has a userbase consisting of nothing but the kind of people who enjoy pissing each other off. Which sure doesn't sound like a very rewarding thing to run, financially or emotionally. There is at least one instance I could name which has run down this path, and is no more.

Firebrand 8y ago

There's nothing more liberal in 2018 than worshipping at the altar of billion dollar banking institutions and web hosters for colluding to suppress the speech of people they disagree with.

drb91 8y ago
Centrist and neoliberal, maybe.
bobbyT314 8y ago
As a private (non-govermental) organization, GoDaddy isn't bound to providing free speech to anyone. Gab.com is welcome to keep gabbing on someone else's platform.
sixothree 8y ago
I don't understand the point you're trying to make here. It looks like you're trying to associate something a large corporation is doing, and has every right to do, with an entire swath of America because... because... why? Are you feeling particularly repressed by liberals as of late?
patrickg_zill 8y ago
It's why the NPC meme is so hated. Just a leeeeeetle too close to the truth...

jake_the_third 8y ago

Ignoring the offending content in question: What does a registrar have to do with the content of the website the domain points to? They are not hosting the content themselves, nor are they even pointing to it (assuming private nameservers are used). I don't see any grounds on which godaddy could reasonably claim policy jurisdiction over objectionable content they do not actively host themselves. To me, this seems like a conservative phone company bricking users phones because they've been used to watch porn. If the hosted content is illegal, they should be reported to authorities. If it is not, godaddy should act like the transparent utility service that it is and not intervene. Am I wrong in my line of thinking?

cthulha 8y ago
You're wrong at a couple of points: - GoDaddy isn't a transparent utility service, it's a for-profit business - You seem to think GoDaddy needs a reasonable claim on their jurisdiction... customers agree to their TOS, which usually is very much in the provider's favour and allows the provider to do anything they want without requiring justification. Your example scenario should be something more like "The customer is using their phone to organise a terrorist attack on American soil, should the telco brick the phone", because that is a much closer analogy to the present situation.
ggggtez 8y ago
Yup you're wrong, because they have a financial relationship. And Utility law doesn't affect the internet at all.
- ibrault 8y ago
  Yep, according to the 2017 FCC net neutrality ruling, the Internet is no longer regulated as a utility.
  - asdfasgasdgasdg 8y ago
    Even then, only ISPs were to be regulated like utilities. Registrars were not in scope.

illiac_1962 8y ago

Suspending domain name registration is truly disturbing. I'm literally speechless and I feel like a line has been crossed. This is domain registration, an abstract service that routes requests based on a name. How did the policing of speech get to this level? I don't have words for the things I'm feeling right now. The actions of a mentally ill person has triggered full on censorship. This is entire situation is fucked up beyond words. We just need to man up and legally ban hate speech instead of beating around the bush and before we start quietly, effectively banning other forms of speech.

belltaco 8y ago
>The actions of a mentally ill person has triggered full on censorship How do you know he was mentally ill? Lot of non-mentally ill people commit crimes. Were all the Nazis mentally ill? Was Hitler mentally ill?
kingkawn 8y ago
The policing of speech got to this level when the site owner expresses no responsibility for contributing to the murderous radicalization of its members.
- bassman9000 8y ago
  Far worse content is seen in Twitter, and they keep their domain. How so. edit: immediate downvoting with no response. Really? So isn't there abhorrent content divulgated by Twitter/Facebook/YouTube/etc? Are any of their domains threatened by it? Any of the downvoters, feel free to engage in discussion.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - jaydz 8y ago
    The difference is Twitter is willing to remove the "far worse content" while Gab is not.

altmind 8y ago

It's probably not related, but I cannot be quiet about management access outage GoDaddy is experiencing right now - nobody can login to their accounts and multiple authoritative dns servers dont work https://puck.nether.net/pipermail/outages/2018-October/011779.html https://puck.nether.net/pipermail/outages/2018-October/01177...

someguydave 8y ago

Using horrific and tragic deaths as a cudgel to beat your political enemies discredits any moral claims in my opinion.

threeseed 8y ago
1) Please stop with the hyperbole. This isn't war. 2) Godaddy is apolitical. They are merely trying to distance themselves from the actions of the Gab site like everyone else is.
- someguydave 8y ago
  1.) It's not hyperbole. Innocent people on gab.ai are now cut-off from discussion with each other because some loon happened to post on their site. 2.) "distancing yourself" is the same as taking a political stance.

JohnTHaller 8y ago

"We may terminate your access to and use of the Services, at our sole discretion, at any time and without notice to you." - Gab Terms of Service

altmind 8y ago
this clause was added this week

daenz 8y ago

This might be an unpopular opinion, but I think it's time for the US government to step up and provide its citizens with minimal tax-funded government-managed hosting and domain services, for people to say whatever lawful speech that they want, without being censored. It's becoming clearer that the public sphere for speech is now online, and that space is managed only by private companies. If we want principles like free speech to continue, we need to segment some of that sphere to be funded and protected by the government. I say all this, because I believe both that a) yes, these private companies should be able to do what they want WRT who they associate with and b) online is the new "public space" for voices to be heard, which is currently only occupied by private companies. If you believe private companies shouldn't be able to buy up all the public land, then I think you would support something like this. The internet is the new public land, but it is theoretically infinite, and for some reason it's only occupied and controlled by private companies.

leoh 8y ago
What? By this logic, the government should have funded printing presses. Gab.com is going to find another provider. They are unhinged and no private entity is required to serve them. Also, this XKCD: https://www.xkcd.com/1357/ https://www.xkcd.com/1357/
- regecks 8y ago
  Isn't that the OP's point? What if no accredited .com registrar wants to serve them for fear of being criticized in the media? Gab would be SOL and lose the ability to meaningfully exist on the internet. Why are private companies the gatekeepers to being able to express yourself online, all of a sudden? Domain registration that is immune to knee-jerk responses like GoDaddy's would be nice. I am reminded of the time that GoDaddy revoked that "fake" Stripe EV cert (https://stripe.ian.sh/ https://stripe.ian.sh/) because of media reporting, even though it was acceptable under the CABF EV guidelines. In other words, arbitrary.
  - PurpleBoxDragon 8y ago
    At some point we have to consider that internet exists because of the government. Where that is can be debated, but without government enforcing certain regulations and restrictions, the internet wouldn't exist. The companies that benefit directly from those regulations and restrictions should have the First Amendment apply to them, or else the regulations and restrictions should be removed. Take the physical wires. They only exist spread everywhere because the government forced people to accept them and allowed companies to run wires over or under public land. At that point, the companies not benefiting from those wires are no longer fully private institutes.

wmf 8y ago

We're in a weird place where the presence of multiple competing intermediaries (in this case DNS registrars, but you see the same thing with banks and such) leads to them not being regulated as utilities. So when every single intermediary exercises their right to refuse service to someone they end up locked out of the system but nobody's responsible.

threeseed 8y ago
1) Not every intermediary has exercised their right so it's a strawman argument. 2) Not sure why you bring up the utility argument. It's basically equivalent to traditional newspapers where if I write some incendiary letter to the editor I am not guaranteed that any of them will post it.

danesparza 8y ago

Does anybody else see the irony of a self-proclaimed 'social networking service' turning to Twitter because nobody would notice if they posted something on their own service?

c0brac0bra 8y ago
They can't post on their own service because their hosting was pulled by joyent.
- alphabettsy 8y ago
  True, but it’s also how they posted about other businesses refusing to do business with them.
paulddraper 8y ago
Microsoft still runs ads on Google.

nafizh 8y ago

Wonderful news. There is no such thing as absolute freedom of speech. People are threatening and inciting violence against some target demographic, and you are only being obtuse by trying to be apathetic to that in the name of free speech. Besides, godaddy is a private company. It is not obligated to give rights of freedom of speech to anyone.

s9w 8y ago
There was a facebook livestream where a disabled man was tortured. Twitter contains horrible racism. Why is Gab measured different? It's simply free speech. Not even that by the way, since certain types of porn were recently banned.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

Waterluvian 8y ago

I feel almost too defeated to share this. I'm somewhat ignorant on the issue, which might come across as having a politicial leaning. I don't. This is a proxy battle for "Big Tech is Liberal and Liberals are trying to shut down Conservative speech", is it? Or am I wrong? If it is, why don't Conservatives just create their own tech stuff? Like what is fundamentally stopping people from being heard if the government isn't the one stopping them? Is it currently too hard to create another registrar so we're stuck with the ones we have?

fooey 8y ago
This isn't a battle between liberals and conservatives, this is big corporations being terrified of liability. Gab and their ilk are giant targets for lawsuits for negligence and who knows whatever else, and no one wants to the deeper pockets further up the food chain The risk/reward of associating with products like Gab has gotten very negative
olliej 8y ago
The underlying problem is that the “conservative movement” has decided that when a site decides to ban nazis (and their racist, homophobe, etc friends) that is the same thing as banning “conservatives”.
- fzeroracer 8y ago
  I have trouble understanding how anyone can defend Gab considering the major meltdown their twitter account is going through, including reaching out to Alex Jones as well as perpetuating alt-right memes and conspiracy theories. No one wants to be associated with Gab because it's clear to anyone that it's a garbage fire of a website. It's similar to what happened with Stormfront.
paulddraper 8y ago
> If it is, why don't Conservative just create their own tech stuff? That's literally what Gab is. > Is it currently too hard to create another registrar so we're stuck with the ones we have? Sort of. In theory it's possible [1], but it's hard enough almost no one does it. Not even Twitter has their own registrar (which it why they went down during the DynDNS attack). [1] https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/accreditation-2012-02-25-en https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/accreditation-2012-02-...

djsumdog 8y ago

GoDaddy is US based and in the US, you can discriminate against customers except for very specific things (race, sex, etc.) The Colorado cake case is a weird and bad example, because it came down to people wanting him to commission art (most of that Supreme Court case was about whether or not the cake was an artistic expression, protected by the first 1st amendment). Interestingly that cake shop no longer does custom cakes, so technically they do have to sell to everyone now. There is another Supreme Court case coming up which will address speech and platforms. This is going to be big. I wrote about this last year and I think it's really relevant today: https://fightthefuture.org/article/the-new-era-of-corporate-censorship/ https://fightthefuture.org/article/the-new-era-of-corporate-... You might not say anything now, because you might hate Gab and think it's hate speech, but just wait for them to come to a platform you don't think is wrong, but goes against the current mindset of what people think is right. There are too few providers and they are way too big. If AWS, DigitalOcean, Vultr, Dreamhost, etc. all deny you a platform, where are you going to go? Are you now going to pay out the ass for platforms that cater to Adult Website hosting? So few people even visit websites anymore either, unless they're linked via Facebook/Twitter, which are both deleting things they don't agree with enmass! Furthermore, this just pushes people more into these outlying platforms, further polarizing them to deal exclusively with ostracised people and opinions. It literally gives them more validity by censoring them (versus ignoring them)! If the shooter had posted on Facebook instead of Gab, we wouldn't demand Facebook go down would we? I think there are really serious implications to all of this, and many of them are not good.

Mattasher 8y ago
I'm not sure people understand the extent to which domain names (and thus registrars & registries) are the linch pins of freedom of speech and identity right now. This, and the ongoing breakdown in the reputational barrier between consumer and service provider do not bode well at all for online freedom: https://beforetheban.com/BeforeTheBanWhitepaper2018_10_01.pdf https://beforetheban.com/BeforeTheBanWhitepaper2018_10_01.pd...

tehwebguy 8y ago

The only reason I can imagine their domain is registered with GoDaddy is so that they could gain attention from its inevitable suspension. Everyone knows GoDaddy does things like this.

mooseburger 8y ago

Aside from the "this chills speech/does not" discussion, I just want to point out that hate speech laws or deplatforming don't actually accomplish any of their stated goals. Timothy McVeigh did not need any online echo chambers to perpetrate the Oklahoma City Bombing. In the Weimar Republic, there were hate speech laws (https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/copenhagen-speech-violence https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/copenhagen-speech-v...). Relevant quote: "Researching my book, I looked into what actually happened in the Weimar Republic. I found that, contrary to what most people think, Weimar Germany did have hate-speech laws, and they were applied quite frequently. The assertion that Nazi propaganda played a significant role in mobilizing anti-Jewish sentiment is, of course, irrefutable. But to claim that the Holocaust could have been prevented if only anti-Semitic speech and Nazi propaganda had been banned has little basis in reality. Leading Nazis such as Joseph Goebbels, Theodor Fritsch, and Julius Streicher were all prosecuted for anti-Semitic speech. Streicher served two prison sentences. Rather than deterring the Nazis and countering anti-Semitism, the many court cases served as effective public-relations machinery, affording Streicher the kind of attention he would never have found in a climate of a free and open debate. In the years from 1923 to 1933, Der Stürmer [Streicher's newspaper] was either confiscated or editors taken to court on no fewer than thirty-six occasions. The more charges Streicher faced, the greater became the admiration of his supporters. The courts became an important platform for Streicher's campaign against the Jews. In the words of a present-day civil-rights campaigner, pre-Hitler Germany had laws very much like the anti-hate laws of today, and they were enforced with some vigor. As history so painfully testifies, this type of legislation proved ineffectual on the one occasion when there was a real argument for it." Hell, Hitler himself was convicted of high treason, but only got a slap on the wrist because the judge and jury were basically on his side. The only thing strong or soft speech policing contributes to is the further erosion of our civil liberties.

shiado 8y ago

Why stop with Gab? The CIA has a fucking verified account on Twitter. Why should a platform which not only tolerates but tacitly endorses organizations which perform extrajudicial torture and murder be allowed to keep their domain?

mikesickler 8y ago
Lots of noble and admirable people use Twitter, in addition to shitbags. I challenge you to find a decent person who is an active user of Gab.

iamnothere 8y ago

Well, so it finally happened. The Rubicon has been breached. One of the great things about the Internet, up until recent times, has been the relative neutrality of the infrastructure. No matter who you were, it was fairly easy to set up shop as long as your content was not super illegal. In general, you could count on having your host back you up unless you were incredibly controversial, and it was out of the question that a mainstream US provider would drop your .com name! A US-hosted .com was a "gold standard" you could count on. The first indication that things were changing was the DMCA. But for all its faults, at least it has a process. This new political "anything goes" trend is going to be awful for anyone not already in the Fortune 500. But I guess that's the point, isn't it? The useful idiots standing by these actions are going to be shocked, SHOCKED when the political winds shift and their favorite site is suddenly forced off the net by tech oligarchs. Do you really think this won't get turned against left-leaning/anti-war sites the moment we get into a large-scale conflict again? But I guess that's the point, too, isn't it!! I'm appalled that anyone on the left who remembers the GWB "with us or against us" era of politics would support this kind of politicization of our infrastructure. The left would NEVER have been able to elect Obama without being able to organize on a free and open Internet! This kind of action is killing what little remains of the open Internet! And all for a petty, temporary victory over a fringe political group! What are you throwing away???

aninhumer 8y ago
Except the actual left has been complaining about centralised capitalist control of the media for decades. Indeed, it's precisely because of that control that you've apparently never heard anything other than liberal centrists talking about access to speech. >This new political "anything goes" trend is going to be awful for anyone not already in the Fortune 500. But I guess that's the point, isn't it? Yes of course. Welcome to Capitalism. When the system starts to break down from the inevitable inequality it causes, capitalists turn to fascism to maintain control. It happened in the Weimar Republic, and it's happening again now. We're seeing business news outlets openly talking about the "investment opportunities" in Brazil as a result of the election of an overt fascist. >And all for a petty, temporary victory over a fringe political group! The left celebrates this, not because the control is good, but because the threat of fascism has become so overt that this is the best we can hope for right now.

dr-rachet 8y ago

I’m an observant Jew. I’ve never considered posting a comment on here before. Despite disliking the anti-Semitic speech hosted on sites like gab, silencing them this way puts a bad taste in my mouth. Yes, their speech is hateful. Yes, these are private entities that are well within their rights to refuse service. But that’s not the point. At the moment, a majority agrees this type of speech is unacceptable. But what’s next? Maybe next time it’s speaking against google or anything, for that matter. The famous saying “first they came for the X..., then the Y..., who was left to speak for me?” Is appropriate here. I don’t condone hate speech, but just words aren’t hurting others. Until that speech becomes action or highly encourages action, it is just words. Additionally, if the majority destroys the gathering place of the minority, they’ll just go to ground. Burying themselves deeper, re-enforcing their conspiracy theories, and polarizing them more. Our actions will be the catalyst to their radicalization. We need to think, long and hard, before jumping on this bandwagon.

philjohn 8y ago
I suggest you read "The Paradox of Tolerance" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
deleted 8y ago
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alphabettsy 8y ago
I see your point, but there is also the issue of helping to make this kind of content available. If the content is hard to find or hidden then maybe less people are exposed to it? Is that the answer? I have no idea, but to me there’s a big difference between arguing the merits of single-payor healthcare and whether or not certain people should be allowed to exist. There are loads of racist and bigoted opinions on Facebook and Twitter, but Gab takes that to another level. The people being banned from Twitter aren’t saying things like black people have lower IQs, they’re saying they’re animals that shouldn’t exist in this country, etc. That’s not the same.
- dr-rachet 8y ago

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