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You are mistaking "good faith" for satisfying others' entitlement The spirit of your complaint here is "there should be a reasonably easy path for me to widely

You are mistaking "good faith" for satisfying others' entitlement The spirit of your complaint here is "there should be a reasonably easy path for me to widely distribute my message without getting the rug pulled out from under me". There is exactly one way to distribute your message, and whether it is easy or hard is up to you. That is: satisfy the requirements of every platform you build on top of, and fill in the rest by creating your own infrastructure and audience. I believe in common spaces, and like I said I am glad that if you drill down far enough you will find distributed* protocols that aren't opinionated about your content. Feel free to start there and build an ecosystem and audience - that is how the world discovers who wants to participate in a particular kind of dialogue. The * is that of course central censorship exists at the Telecom and government levels. I (directly) support distributed private protocols to ensure that people can choose to find the information they want as easily as possible. But doing so emphatically doesn't and shouldn't guarantee you an audience.

logifail 8y ago
>> satisfy the requirements of every platform you build on top of This sounds simple, until you realise the requirements aren't well-defined, or that the definitions can be changed arbitrarily (and retroactively) by the platforms.
- evrydayhustling 8y ago
  No argument, and it wasn't meant to sound simple -- just depends on how deeply you are aligned with the goals of the platform. I agree from painful experience that platforms can be capricious and even disingenuous. But that's also part of how they adapt to a changing world and business. Still boils down to: nobody said it would be easy (to get others' attention).
  - logifail 8y ago
    "We're shuttering our API" (which kills your business model) is very concerning if you're the business that's just been torpedoed. "We don't want your sort on our platform because reasons" ought to be concerning at a much wider level (and not just to the sort that apparently aren't wanted on the platform).
    - tptacek 8y ago
      People keep saying this "ought to be concerning". What I see are mainstream commercial conveniences refusing to be complicit in spreading bigoted messages that have gotten people killed. Why am I meant to be surprised by that? If I ran a hosting provider I sure as shit wouldn't let that happen either. We can all think of things we would ban if we ran hosting providers. We all know there's a line. Why are we pretending there isn't?
      - logifail 8y ago
        >> spreading bigoted messages "Bigoted messages"? Would that be content that's * against the law and/or * against the upstream AUP/TOS and/or * "someone said something that offended someone else" >> that have gotten people killed Not wishing to pour more gasoline on the raging fire, but ... source?
        tptacek 8y ago
        I'm sorry, I don't understand what you're asking.
  - Torwald 8y ago
    > …just depends on how deeply you are aligned with the goals of the platform. Here is the problem though: The platform of platforms, then, is politics, if we want to keep biology out of the picture. And the thing with politics these days is, that the state, as a system, is compulsive. I cannot leave the state, I am not free to do so. In other words, the most underlying platform is not of my choice and therefore it is not as simple as you are making it out to be. I like your thinking framework and agree with it.
- skedaddle 8y ago
  It doesn’t sound any more complicated given that. “I had no idea they would have a problem hosting my anti-Semitic writings or calls for violence, because the rules aren’t well defined, and they’re constantly changing, it’s so arbitrary!” is not convincing at all.
colllectorof 8y ago
>You are mistaking "good faith" for satisfying others' entitlement The spirit of your complaint here is "there should be a reasonably easy path for me to widely distribute my message without getting the rug pulled out from under me". There is a reasonably easy path to do exactly that. But it has dependencies, and certain people are manipulating these dependencies in any which way they can to control online discourse. And you're cheering them on, pretending that not publishing someone's article is exactly the same as closing someone's bank account on hearsay. And yet I am 100% sure that if someone started following you around and pressuring companies to close your accounts and stop any dealings with you, you would immediately decry it as grave injustice and invent some reason why it's "different". >I believe in common spaces In hypothetical ones, that don't exist. >Feel free to start there and build an ecosystem and audience - that is how the world discovers who wants to participate in a particular kind of dialogue. So, what exactly in your arguments binds them, preventing you from saying the exact same things about this hypothetical zero-layer public space when it gets sabotaged? Nothing, really. You will just say "you're still free to build another one, somehow".
- colllectorof 8y ago
  After some thought, here is what really matters. The same people who make demands on companies to effect deplatforming are the ones who post about "freedom of association" for those companies when the deed is done. This is not a real argument, just an excuse. When PayPal start banning clients based on their activity outside of monetary transactions, PayPal effectively condemns certain points of view. Which might sound sensible at first, if the views are questionable, but it also implies that not banning an account is a way of endorsing the holder. And just like that, you arrive at the conclusion that PayPal and other service providers are responsible for the moral quality of all their clients, and not just can but have to ban clients who transgress. How's that for freedom of association?
  - evrydayhustling 8y ago
    I love how you're treating customers and employees petitioning a company, and then the company taking their concerns seriously, like it's some kind of bullying conspiracy. Never mind when a platform manager like Matt Prince [1] goes out of his way to make it clear he is autocratically representing his own judgement, after grappling with the very real moral tradeoffs involved in excluding someone. PayPal publicly condemned certain points of view long before Gab: prohibiting "the promotion of hate, violence, racial intolerance or the financial exploitation of a crime" was part of the TOS when Gab signed up, as was the fact that the definition of those things was up to PayPal. They don't seem to share you're opinion that non-fraudulent monetary transactions are the only aspect of their business. And as far as anyone having to ban clients who transgress, when did that happen? As we've tossed around in other threads, you can loudly and proudly make not-banning the core of your business. But you're expressing a personal priority for diverse expression (or at least the type of expression you make welcome, c.f. Gab's Pepe) that other people might not share, or might not prioritize the same way you do. Freedom of association means you make your choice and other people make theirs. [1] https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-we-terminated-daily-stormer/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-we-terminated-daily-stormer/

logifail 8y ago

>> satisfy the requirements of every platform you build on top of This sounds simple, until you realise the requirements aren't well-defined, or that the definitions can be changed arbitrarily (and retroactively) by the platforms.

evrydayhustling 8y ago
No argument, and it wasn't meant to sound simple -- just depends on how deeply you are aligned with the goals of the platform. I agree from painful experience that platforms can be capricious and even disingenuous. But that's also part of how they adapt to a changing world and business. Still boils down to: nobody said it would be easy (to get others' attention).
- logifail 8y ago
  "We're shuttering our API" (which kills your business model) is very concerning if you're the business that's just been torpedoed. "We don't want your sort on our platform because reasons" ought to be concerning at a much wider level (and not just to the sort that apparently aren't wanted on the platform).
  - tptacek 8y ago
    People keep saying this "ought to be concerning". What I see are mainstream commercial conveniences refusing to be complicit in spreading bigoted messages that have gotten people killed. Why am I meant to be surprised by that? If I ran a hosting provider I sure as shit wouldn't let that happen either. We can all think of things we would ban if we ran hosting providers. We all know there's a line. Why are we pretending there isn't?
    - logifail 8y ago
      >> spreading bigoted messages "Bigoted messages"? Would that be content that's * against the law and/or * against the upstream AUP/TOS and/or * "someone said something that offended someone else" >> that have gotten people killed Not wishing to pour more gasoline on the raging fire, but ... source?
      - tptacek 8y ago
        I'm sorry, I don't understand what you're asking.
- Torwald 8y ago
  > …just depends on how deeply you are aligned with the goals of the platform. Here is the problem though: The platform of platforms, then, is politics, if we want to keep biology out of the picture. And the thing with politics these days is, that the state, as a system, is compulsive. I cannot leave the state, I am not free to do so. In other words, the most underlying platform is not of my choice and therefore it is not as simple as you are making it out to be. I like your thinking framework and agree with it.
skedaddle 8y ago
It doesn’t sound any more complicated given that. “I had no idea they would have a problem hosting my anti-Semitic writings or calls for violence, because the rules aren’t well defined, and they’re constantly changing, it’s so arbitrary!” is not convincing at all.

colllectorof 8y ago

>You are mistaking "good faith" for satisfying others' entitlement The spirit of your complaint here is "there should be a reasonably easy path for me to widely distribute my message without getting the rug pulled out from under me". There is a reasonably easy path to do exactly that. But it has dependencies, and certain people are manipulating these dependencies in any which way they can to control online discourse. And you're cheering them on, pretending that not publishing someone's article is exactly the same as closing someone's bank account on hearsay. And yet I am 100% sure that if someone started following you around and pressuring companies to close your accounts and stop any dealings with you, you would immediately decry it as grave injustice and invent some reason why it's "different". >I believe in common spaces In hypothetical ones, that don't exist. >Feel free to start there and build an ecosystem and audience - that is how the world discovers who wants to participate in a particular kind of dialogue. So, what exactly in your arguments binds them, preventing you from saying the exact same things about this hypothetical zero-layer public space when it gets sabotaged? Nothing, really. You will just say "you're still free to build another one, somehow".

colllectorof 8y ago
After some thought, here is what really matters. The same people who make demands on companies to effect deplatforming are the ones who post about "freedom of association" for those companies when the deed is done. This is not a real argument, just an excuse. When PayPal start banning clients based on their activity outside of monetary transactions, PayPal effectively condemns certain points of view. Which might sound sensible at first, if the views are questionable, but it also implies that not banning an account is a way of endorsing the holder. And just like that, you arrive at the conclusion that PayPal and other service providers are responsible for the moral quality of all their clients, and not just can but have to ban clients who transgress. How's that for freedom of association?
- evrydayhustling 8y ago
  I love how you're treating customers and employees petitioning a company, and then the company taking their concerns seriously, like it's some kind of bullying conspiracy. Never mind when a platform manager like Matt Prince [1] goes out of his way to make it clear he is autocratically representing his own judgement, after grappling with the very real moral tradeoffs involved in excluding someone. PayPal publicly condemned certain points of view long before Gab: prohibiting "the promotion of hate, violence, racial intolerance or the financial exploitation of a crime" was part of the TOS when Gab signed up, as was the fact that the definition of those things was up to PayPal. They don't seem to share you're opinion that non-fraudulent monetary transactions are the only aspect of their business. And as far as anyone having to ban clients who transgress, when did that happen? As we've tossed around in other threads, you can loudly and proudly make not-banning the core of your business. But you're expressing a personal priority for diverse expression (or at least the type of expression you make welcome, c.f. Gab's Pepe) that other people might not share, or might not prioritize the same way you do. Freedom of association means you make your choice and other people make theirs. [1] https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-we-terminated-daily-stormer/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-we-terminated-daily-stormer/