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Australian telcos block access to 4chan, other sites

68 points by jumbopapa 8y ago

ratling 8y ago
They and others should permanently block 8chan. TBH if NZ/AUS started DDOSing it I'd be fine with that too but I doubt we're there yet. The others I don't agree with long term (4chan is 4chan, Zerohedge is moronic but mostly benign, liveleak is concerning but I get why they did it) but 8chan is just cancer. I get freedom of speech, but there has to be a limit somewhere. Those animals would drop nukes for funsies if they had the opportunity.
- gdhbcc 8y ago
  Then you dont get freedom of speech. Defending rights isn't easy.
  - DanBC 8y ago
    Most of the world is fine with their version of freedom of speech. The extremist version from the US is rare, and causes huge amounts of harm. US business owners need to wake up to the fact that their products are seen as publishers, not pipes, and that publishers in most of the world are regulated.
    - thatcat 8y ago
      Can you explain how US free speech causes harm?
      - fixermark 8y ago
        The white nationalist rally in Charlottesville was the sort of fascist rally that other countries would categorically refuse a permit to. The US does not, in general, refuse permits under the assumption that a group (even a group with a violent ideology) will turn from a peaceable demonstration to a violent riot. Federal, state, and local law is heavily bent toward assumption of good faith. Charlottesville had several injuries and one death.
        s9w 8y ago
        An overweight woman died from a heart attack. Meanwhile over here we have a dead German every day on average. If I were to name the ethnic origin of the murderers I would get sued. This goes both ways.
        fixermark 8y ago
        I take it you're contradicting the coroner's report that Heather Heyer died of a blunt-force chest injury? Given that the driver of the car was convicted in her murder, you may want to walk that back.
        s9w 8y ago
        Sure. And when a "new German" stabs an "old German" in the heart and kills him, he died of "causes unrelated to the injury" to quote one of our coroners, 6 hours (!) after the attack. These things aren't worth the papers they're printed on. A tool in the hand of politics [1] https://www.welt.de/vermischtes/article181477442/Obduktionsergebnis-22-Jaehriger-in-Koethen-starb-an-akutem-Herzversagen.html https://www.welt.de/vermischtes/article181477442/Obduktionse...
        fixermark 8y ago
        The source you've linked to doesn't mention a stabbing, and nothing I've been able to dig up suggests there was a stabbing in the Köthen death. Death from heart condition was unrelated to the injuries sustained from a fall the victim suffered scuffling with the 18-year-old (which, yes, smells fishy, but I think you're casting aspersions on an unrelated coroner who was looking at a woman with a crushed ribcage because of possible malpractice on a local-to-you coroner's part, which is... Well, this is the sort of misinformation-spreading and stereotyping, and the harm it causes, that we're discussing in this thread). Are you conflating the facts from two situations? Media coverage of the Köthen protests suggests there was a stabbing incident in Chemnitz close in time to Köthen. All of that having been said: I think your point that Germany has laws discouraging you from casting aspersions on groups due to individual actions of the groups, and America has far fewer such restrictions, stands. Except... Germany's homicide rate is lower than the US. So Germany's clearly doing something right relative to its neighbor 'cross the pond (of course, it may not be this---but given that Germany had to deal with actual Nazis and the US has not yet had that challenge, I'm not in the habit of gainsaying Germany's strategy here regarding laissez-faire freedom of speech).
      - rayvd 8y ago
        Because he doesn't like it and doesn't consider government "tyranny" harm.
        SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
        I'm not sure how you consider blocking 4chan "tyranny" compared to some of the stuff the US government (or any government, for that matter) gets up to?
      - afuchs 8y ago
        > Can you explain how US free speech causes harm? A good example that could be considered to be overall harmful would be the anti-vax movement. It has spread by speech over social media through patently inaccurate information.
    - fullofhatred 8y ago
      > extremist version from the US "extreme freedom" :)
    - fixermark 8y ago
      In point of fact, US law defined (via the DMCA "Safe Harbor" clause) most communications-media products (fora, video sharing sites, music repositories, etc.) as pipes for this reason. "They're pipes" is how the US regulates them.
      - iooi 8y ago
        Is this still accurate after SESTA/FOSTA?
        fixermark 8y ago
        In general, yes. SESTA/FOSTA nudged the definition of the safe harbor away from content that facilitated sex trafficking. This has no bearing on whether, say, iTunes is still safe in sharing the subversive, anti-government music of Creedence Clearwater Revival. ;)
  - radiorental 8y ago
    I believe you mean that separation of hate speech from freedom of speech rights isn't easy.
    - detcader 8y ago
      I think the hardest thing for folks is actually arguing that speech X, Y, and Z are hateful, because all people of every political background who log online seem to want to do is legislate others into silence or post innuendo and memes about people's character behind their backs. There's an essay I found pretty unique, "Reflections on Debating The Right" on Current Affairs, explaining why much more public debates would be helpful... of course, that website could well be blocked soon in Australia for their articles on Palestine, given the precedents now set!
      - ratling 8y ago
        Debating a bad actor isn’t debating. People on the right (the proles, not the rich people making money off the whole affair) don’t want to have honest intellectual discourse. They want to ‘own libruls’ and be smug (despite their choices actively hurting their livelihood and their lives leaving little to be smug about). There’s nothing to debate, they’re just idiots. Easy to fleece idiots considering how easy it is to make money by throwing out a bunch of controversial statements and then retracting when their audience has moved on.
        detcader 8y ago
        I hope you're never categorized as a bad actor for a view you develop by your friends or fellow activists. From what I can tell, the bleeding-edge version of the line between honest soul and bad actor is under continuous deployment... it will be crucial to study each set of changelogs! By the way, do you think sex work is liberating, or capitalist exploitation? What do you think, a 2-state solution or not? I wouldn't want to get cancelled by talking to you. I hope to come back to this debate in a few decades and see that Robinson's pieces on debating the right, along with Mark Fisher's "Exiting the Vampire Castle" and Benjamin Studebaker's "The Left is Not a Church" will be considered important overlooked resources.
  - JumpCrisscross 8y ago
    > Then you dont get freedom of speech Does Australia have an enumerated right to free speech? I thought that remains a somewhat novel feature of the American Constitution. (Owing--in large part--to our culture.)
    - Consultant32452 8y ago
      Freedom of speech is not just a law that happens to exist in some countries, it's a moral principle.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- jumbopapa 8y ago
  > I get freedom of speech, but... I don't think you do
- drenvuk 8y ago
  People like you are the reason the first amendment exists. Reconsider your belief system, please.
  - fixermark 8y ago
    Remember when commenting on Hacker News: it's an international community. Australia doesn't protect freedom of expression in the same way the US does. Indeed, there's a decent chunk of the world that's perfectly rational and sees our relatively laissez-faire attitude on some Bill of Rights content as dangerous to a survivable society.
  - ratling 8y ago
    You can’t run in a movie theatre and yell fire. There are limits, the internet does not remove the need for basic human decency.
    - drenvuk 8y ago
      Don't use that. https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/11/its-time-to-stop-using-the-fire-in-a-crowded-theater-quote/264449/ https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/11/its-tim...
- detcader 8y ago
  That's an understandable reaction! But I won't be unpersoning people, especially those who themselves make a hobby out of looking for more people to unperson.
  - zbealeo 8y ago
    Supporting knee-jerk censorship should never be supported as "understandable". The fact one could consider this understandable is concerning itself.
- realusername 8y ago
  ISPs sell internet access, if you believe this website is infringing some of your local laws, you should start a procedure in your own country, it's not the role of an ISP to filter websites by their own initiative.
- theorique 8y ago
  "I get freedom of speech, but I don't believe that people should actually have it."
- luiscleto 8y ago
  The problem is defining those limits. And if you give a regulatory agency the power to do it, odds are they will push too far. It starts with fringe sites that most people would agree on, but the existence of those regulators depends on there being more things to censor. It's in their own interest to expand the scope of the censoring, and the people attracted to those positions and that "power" will be the ones who have things they wish to silence. In addition to this, as the scope creeps you risk forcing the later groups into the same channels as the ones first banned (e.g. people who enjoy dark humor being shoved into the same platforms as people who unironically spread hate and violent messages). It seems to me this will be facilitating radicalization rather than help prevent it - an analogy could be made with people arrested for petty crimes being radicalized or made into full blown criminals in prisons. Before thinking about whether it's actually right or wrong to block access to "problematic opinions" online, I'd like to see satisfying research that government censorship actually works and mitigates these problems, rather than just sweep the mess under the carpet while it keeps building up to an eventual serious problem.
- rdtsc 8y ago
  > They and others should permanently block 8chan ... 4chan is 4chan What is the difference? Neither one sounds like a place I want to go visit to check out for myself. I used to hear about 4chan for a while is 8chan a worse, more concentrated version of it?
  - c1sc0 8y ago
    "Neither one sounds like a place I want to go visit to check out for myself." ... please do. Make up your own mind.
    - rdtsc 8y ago
      So far nothing I've heard about them sounds inviting to me. It's a bit like saying "browse the dark web" or this other terrible place filled with hate speech.
  - Larrikin 8y ago
    8chan is founded by people who thought 4chan was too tame and restrictive
    - rdtsc 8y ago
      Ok. Thanks for explaining.
- jerkstate 8y ago
  There are already limits to the free speech (in the USA) in regards to credible threats, fraud, and defamation. I believe your premise is that limiting ugly/racist speech would limit radicalization, and I don't believe there is any evidence to show that.
  - fixermark 8y ago
    In general, a formal action by the US government would involve a high-bar "prove harm or imminent risk of harm" test. ... but action of private enterprises to cease to do business with an organization (such as telcos black-holing an IP address in their routing fabric) are another matter, unless regulation states otherwise.
- kurtisc 8y ago
  At the time of writing your comment is greyed out so evidently more than one person only values private freedom of speech if it's not yours.
adamrezich 8y ago
It's not mentioned in this article but from what I understand (and someone please correct me if I'm wrong), "blocking" is happening at the ISP DNS level, and anyone living in these affected areas can simply use a different DNS service to continue using these websites unimpeded.
- LinuxBender 8y ago
  That is correct. A decent method of side-stepping ISP DNS is to run Unbound DNS on your home router or a server in your home, if you can. An example snippet from the configuration in Unbound DNS would look like this: forward-zone: name: "." forward-addr: 1.1.1.1 # CloudFlare forward-addr: 1.0.0.1 # CloudFlare forward-addr: 8.8.8.8 # Google forward-addr: 8.8.4.4 # Google forward-addr: 208.67.222.222 # OpenDNS forward-first: no And you can view it's status with unbound-control: unbound-control dump_infra | grep 1\.1\.1 1.1.1.1 . ttl 1745 ping 0 var 71 rtt 284 rto 284 tA 0 tAAAA 0 tother 0 ednsknown 1 edns 0 delay 0 lame dnssec 0 rec 0 A 0 other 0 This method of caching can also slightly improve the privacy of the people using your network. You get the bonus of a local low latency cache, and requests are distributed among multiple destinations, slightly reducing the marketing benefits of running those public DNS servers. You can also enable TCP and TLS for recursive servers that support DoT (DNS over TLS). I prefer this over DoH, as everything in your home can benefit from it, not just your browser. Some of the servers mentioned above listen on TCP 853 for TLS. Just google "Unbound DNS TLS" There are some examples on Calomel as well. [1] [1] - https://calomel.org/unbound_dns.html https://calomel.org/unbound_dns.html
  - LinuxBender 8y ago
    Here is an example using TLS: forward-zone: name: "." forward-ssl-upstream: yes forward-addr: 208.67.222.222@853 forward-addr: 1.1.1.1@853 forward-addr: 8.8.4.4@853 forward-addr: 9.9.9.9@853 forward-first: no unbound-control dump_infra|cut -c 1-60|column -t 9.9.9.9@853 . ttl 851 ping 6 var 84 rtt 342 rto 342 tA 0 tAA 8.8.4.4@853 . ttl 851 ping 13 var 79 rtt 329 rto 329 tA 0 tA 208.67.222.222@853 . ttl 844 ping 876 var 1823 rtt 8168 rto And here [1] [2] are a small list of public servers that support DoT [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_recursive_name_server https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_recursive_name_server [2] - https://dnsprivacy.org/wiki/display/DP/DNS+Privacy+Public+Resolvers https://dnsprivacy.org/wiki/display/DP/DNS+Privacy+Public+Re...
paganel 8y ago
> the blog Zerohedge and video hosting platform Liveleak. Let's say I get why they'd block 4chan and 8chan, but blocking a blog is just over the top. Liveleak I also half-understand, but I also don't approve of it, for a while it was one of the best online video resources on the atrocities committed by ISIS in Syria and Iraq, just hiding our unwanted images under the rug won't help much. Later edit: For example videos of the Tikrit massacre [1] are only available on Liveleak (I'm talking of the "mainstream" web), YouTube has nothing on it. It is my very strong opinion that we need these images to remain in the public psyche so that we'll try our best not to make the same mistakes again, and by censoring access to this kind of videos we're not helping with any of that. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camp_Speicher_massacre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camp_Speicher_massacre
- fixermark 8y ago
  Agreed. It's a longsword where a scalpel is wanted. This is the risk of network-level censorship: too much restriction. ... on the other hand, it puts pressure on Liveleak to take initiative to clean its house, and the only tool the telcos have here is a longsword.
- JumpCrisscross 8y ago
  > blocking a blog is just over the top I'm a fierce fighter for the First Amendment and its free speech protections. But such absolutism around free speech has its drawbacks. Hate speech runs wild. Incivility is given a safe harbor in which to breed. Some really awful sides of humanity can come uncomfortably close to one's day-to-day life. But it's a trade-off our country debated, debates and continues to make. Australia hasn't made the same trade-off. Australians repeatedly elect representatives who pass into law measures I'd consider draconian if raised in America. But Australia isn't America. And within a band, in which both America and Australia lie, there are multiple optima balancing freedom and stability.
  - Aloha 8y ago
    One mans hate speech is another mans freedom. I'm a gay male, but I'm very reluctant to ban 'hate speech' - I'm worried that such laws could be used against other (as yet unknown) marginalized peoples in the future, if such laws, or rather the concept of such laws existed, they could have been used to suppress our struggle for rights. We, for example said some pretty sharp things about religion for example, which in other countries would be prohibited speech, similarly, we were also decidedly uncivil in our struggle for civil rights, so has every successful civil rights movement. Any law used to defend the now status quo, can be used to prevent that from changing in the future, even to welcome other groups under the tent. Simply put, you got to the top, don't pull up the ladder behind you. That said, I wouldnt object to broadening what constitutes a call to action to include doxxing and 'encouraging internet vigilantism'.
calvinqwerty 8y ago
I find the chans interesting. The back and forth between the clans, whoever they represent, mixed with some curious independent posters gives a small picture of what's lurking out there in the darkness. In the private minds. Mostly it's role playing I think.
- fixermark 8y ago
  Unfortunately, it has become more than roleplaying several too many times to accept that excuse, and the chan owners and mods have made it pretty clear they don't consider regulation of the public squares they serve into existence to be their responsibility. I think we're about to learn that the 'net may also interpret incitement to violence risk as damage and route around it.
  - adamrezich 8y ago
    You can't legislate ideas out of existence. Shutting down online venues where certain ideas flourish will do nothing to solve the problem that such an action is presumably trying to solve. Why would you actively push untoward discussion further underground, instead of letting it happen out in the open, on a public website?
    - calvinqwerty 8y ago
      Exactly. Occasionally a chan poster will submit that the boards continue to exist because whomever is keeping tabs on the elements is afraid they'll scatter.
    - fixermark 8y ago
      Because people vulnerable to radicalization view public websites. The solution of "let it happen in the open" doesn't appear to be working in practice. Underground sites are harder for those unaware of the topic to find (and for policing what goes on on those sites, the US has the FBI and the CIA).
      - kadendogthing 8y ago
Daviey 8y ago
And yet, Facebook was the platform that was used to facilitate the live streaming of the horrendous events we saw in New Zealand. I am looking forward to Facebook also being banned.
- anoncoward111 8y ago
  "Hahahaha, that's why we pay lobbyists!" --FB, probably
- falsedan 8y ago
  like guns, 4chan et al. have few positive features and many negative ones. Unlike them, Facebook has a more balanced mix. Please consider the sites as a whole, or please take your false equivalency elsewhere
  - zbealeo 8y ago
    Please take your subjective opinions that you present as facts elsewhere.
  - Konnstann 8y ago
    I would argue that Facebook has many negative features and few positive ones, with the negative features far outweighing the positive ones. The fact that Facebook spends so many resources making sure you can't ignore it speaks volumes. Meanwhile, facebook "news" is mostly garbage, their livestreaming service is full of livestreamed crime, not even touching what they do with your data, and how much they capture that you don't even know about. 4chan, meanwhile, is exactly what you make of it. All you have to do to not get "shot" on 4chan is stick to any board that isn't /b/ or /pol/ and voila you have heavily moderated anonymous imageboards for a ton of topics.
    - falsedan 8y ago
      You would argue that but you'd be wrong/out of alignment of the vast majority of the world's population.
FilterSweep 8y ago
Why don’t they remove cloudflare protection on 4/8chan?
- zbealeo 8y ago
  Who is "they" and why should "they"? Both websites act in according to US law, should we punish every site that participates in your definition of wrong think?
reuben_scratton 8y ago
Ridiculous. "Hate speech" didn't kill 50 innocent people, a goddamned lunatic with an automatic rifle did. As Mark Steyn has remarked on this latest moral panic, "Less speech inevitably means more violence - because, if you can't talk about anything, what's left but to shoot up the joint?"
- jiscariot 8y ago
  Similarly, if you argue speech can be a form of violence, you can easily justify the use of violence against speech.
iooi 8y ago
Everyone is okay with restrictions on freedom of speech when it comes to child pornography. But restricting 8chan is suddenly too much? I'm curious where we draw the line and what the criteria is. It's clear we need a line, since we shouldn't encourage the proliferation of child pornography for example. But should we tolerate a community that had a "Brent Tratton Appreciation Thread" on the day of the NZ shooting? [1] [1] http://archive.fo/xmftv http://archive.fo/xmftv
- reuben_scratton 8y ago
  It's because there's no situation in which you (I hope) or I could conceivably be accused of being child pornographers. It will never affect us and the people it does affect are the worst of the worst and are identified as such by police. I have mild conservative sympathies and get accused by idiots of being a "Nazi" depressingly frequently. It's screamingly obvious that the rush to clamp down on "hate speech" is in reality criminalising political dissent. Which is absolutely guaranteed to lead to more violence, not less.
- CzechTech 8y ago
  The line is in the little thing only backwards people seem to use these days... the law. In the case of 8chan, the US law. It is within the US law to praise terrorists under the Freedom of Speech law (1st Amendment). If you want to change that fact, you can try to change the law. For example, I'm a Czech citizen and it is illegal for me to praise terrorism or nazism. Anyways, until such time that the law is changed, any calls for mass action against 8chan are little more than mob rule. Also, it doesn't help your case than almost all calls for extreme action like deplatforming come from a fringe minority of society (progressive far left activists) who are typically orange man bad, guns bad, free speech bad, low taxes bad, low regulation bad as it makes it hard to find compromises for such a group of people.
- benmmurphy 8y ago
  i think cracking down on imagery created from this violent act or other violent acts is a closer equivalence to child pornography. alternatively, you could compare bans on lolicon to the censorship you are advocating.
EGreg 8y ago
Ok, I am going to say it. I am not a free speech absolutist. But with the coming technology, like MaidSAFE and others, it will become possible for people to communicate and say whatever they want, no way to censor. Full stop. The governments will go back to having moles inside each group they care about, which is more targeted and harder. For numerous examples of why free speech matters, the other way, look at the latest article on at https://qbix.com/blog https://qbix.com/blog It’s like 3d printed guns, or desktop printers or copiers. Things that governments heavily regulated through gatekeepers now can be produced by anyone. I will say this... if you add up ALL the mass shootings in the USA they add up to less than 2% of all shootings. And if you add up ALL shootings and killings, including by Boko Haram and so on, we have far less than 100 years ago, 1000 years ago, 5,000 years ago etc. Steven Pinker was right. We are getting far more peaceful, because of technology. As long as we keep a check on population growth, we may even have enough resources, not too much garbage and sustainable living in every generation. If anything, Boko Haram (which stands against Western education) is an example of values from hundreds of years ago. They are more violent. Today’s values are much less violent but they will only survive if we can live sustainably, and that starts with women’s education and having children later.
ryandrake 8y ago
Called it three days ago [1]. My prediction is the UK is next and the list of sites will be even longer. This horrible event has become a bittersweet gift to politicians who have been waiting for their chance to coerce ISPs into blocking a few more web sites on their "naughty lists". 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19402858 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19402858
batat 8y ago
I'm wondering if it's legal to block sites in Australia simply because "we feel this is the right thing to do"?
QualityReboot 8y ago
Good. Ban them all. Force everyone with an unpopular opinion off the major platforms. While we're at it, let's ban political debate and fake news. Ban NPR and ban Breitbart. Ban religious debate too. If it offends someone, get it off the platforms. Let's make it so every controversial content and comment is forced off YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook. It's the fastest way to end centralization.
batat 8y ago
Just found out that Reddit banned /r/watchpeople for the same reason [1]. I believe all these censorship attempts only makes it worse - we're experiencing the Streisand Effect at its best now. [1] http://fortune.com/2019/03/15/reddit-banned-watch-people-die-new-zealand-mosque-video/ http://fortune.com/2019/03/15/reddit-banned-watch-people-die...
motohagiography 8y ago
It's hard to get out of ones bubble on this. From the govts view, they are acting to contain sectarian violence long enough that their society can find a stable equilibrium after a shock. I don't think appeals to the principle of freedom of speech are meaningful against acts of censorship because it is a tactical response in a perceived crisis and not something that happens under ideal conditions where they can afford to be held to principles. However, tactical approaches like clumsy censorship signal a deeper weakness that risks exacerbating sectarian resolve in all parties. Cynically, the solution here may have been to rate limit content they didn't want instead of blocking it outright, which is insidious, but toward the desired outcome of defusing the spread of violence, people who want the content can get it without having to position themselves against the authorities (become outlaws) to do so, while removing it from casual observation. Reddit's quarantines, and Twitter's shadow bans mitigate some of the virality of reactions. Tagging traffic to these sites for slow path processing would have been trivial, and blocking them was an unforced error. Societies need to respond to events like these by demonstrating unity and strength, which may mean acts of extraordinary tolerance - and not with tactical approaches that make them seem weak and vulnerable to an insurgency.
- nybble41 8y ago
  > I don't think appeals to the principle of freedom of speech are meaningful against acts of censorship because it is a tactical response in a perceived crisis and not something that happens under ideal conditions where they can afford to be held to principles. This bizarre idea that principles are only relevant under "ideal conditions" is part of the problem. We can't afford not to hold governments to principles, especially under non-ideal conditions.
throwawaysea 8y ago
Deplatforming was always a bad idea that puts fundamental freedoms at risk. Now that it has come to telecoms, something has to be done to denounce this trend and stop it. When large privately-owned platforms (e.g. Twitter) or low-level utilities (telecom companies) take action to censor information, it has the same impact and carries the same risks as a government doing it. It stifles expression, exchange of ideas, and imposes personal morality on a broad set of people.
- Aloha 8y ago
  Twitter is the modern day equivalent of a printing press, they can choose to print whatever they'd like, or not - trying to liken them to a common carrier is in my opinion absurdity. The man who owns the press, controls the speech.
nodemaker 8y ago
Ban all the popular toxic websites including facebook, instagram except maybe google and other actually useful sites. If a website adds no value / negative value to people's lives yet is used by a significant number of people for a significant amount of time every day it should be banned or time limited in my opinion. A bit similar to cigarettes or sugary drinks. Who decides? The government does based on recommendation by the judiciary. Its their job to legislate No one is stopping you from registering a new website so please dont argue freedom of speech.

68 points by jumbopapa 8y ago

They and others should permanently block 8chan. TBH if NZ/AUS started DDOSing it I'd be fine with that too but I doubt we're there yet. The others I don't agree with long term (4chan is 4chan, Zerohedge is moronic but mostly benign, liveleak is concerning but I get why they did it) but 8chan is just cancer. I get freedom of speech, but there has to be a limit somewhere. Those animals would drop nukes for funsies if they had the opportunity.

gdhbcc 8y ago
Then you dont get freedom of speech. Defending rights isn't easy.
- DanBC 8y ago
  Most of the world is fine with their version of freedom of speech. The extremist version from the US is rare, and causes huge amounts of harm. US business owners need to wake up to the fact that their products are seen as publishers, not pipes, and that publishers in most of the world are regulated.
  - thatcat 8y ago
    Can you explain how US free speech causes harm?
    - fixermark 8y ago
      The white nationalist rally in Charlottesville was the sort of fascist rally that other countries would categorically refuse a permit to. The US does not, in general, refuse permits under the assumption that a group (even a group with a violent ideology) will turn from a peaceable demonstration to a violent riot. Federal, state, and local law is heavily bent toward assumption of good faith. Charlottesville had several injuries and one death.
      - s9w 8y ago
        An overweight woman died from a heart attack. Meanwhile over here we have a dead German every day on average. If I were to name the ethnic origin of the murderers I would get sued. This goes both ways.
        fixermark 8y ago
        I take it you're contradicting the coroner's report that Heather Heyer died of a blunt-force chest injury? Given that the driver of the car was convicted in her murder, you may want to walk that back.
        s9w 8y ago
        Sure. And when a "new German" stabs an "old German" in the heart and kills him, he died of "causes unrelated to the injury" to quote one of our coroners, 6 hours (!) after the attack. These things aren't worth the papers they're printed on. A tool in the hand of politics [1] https://www.welt.de/vermischtes/article181477442/Obduktionsergebnis-22-Jaehriger-in-Koethen-starb-an-akutem-Herzversagen.html https://www.welt.de/vermischtes/article181477442/Obduktionse...
        fixermark 8y ago
        The source you've linked to doesn't mention a stabbing, and nothing I've been able to dig up suggests there was a stabbing in the Köthen death. Death from heart condition was unrelated to the injuries sustained from a fall the victim suffered scuffling with the 18-year-old (which, yes, smells fishy, but I think you're casting aspersions on an unrelated coroner who was looking at a woman with a crushed ribcage because of possible malpractice on a local-to-you coroner's part, which is... Well, this is the sort of misinformation-spreading and stereotyping, and the harm it causes, that we're discussing in this thread). Are you conflating the facts from two situations? Media coverage of the Köthen protests suggests there was a stabbing incident in Chemnitz close in time to Köthen. All of that having been said: I think your point that Germany has laws discouraging you from casting aspersions on groups due to individual actions of the groups, and America has far fewer such restrictions, stands. Except... Germany's homicide rate is lower than the US. So Germany's clearly doing something right relative to its neighbor 'cross the pond (of course, it may not be this---but given that Germany had to deal with actual Nazis and the US has not yet had that challenge, I'm not in the habit of gainsaying Germany's strategy here regarding laissez-faire freedom of speech).
    - rayvd 8y ago
      Because he doesn't like it and doesn't consider government "tyranny" harm.
      - SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
        I'm not sure how you consider blocking 4chan "tyranny" compared to some of the stuff the US government (or any government, for that matter) gets up to?
    - afuchs 8y ago
      > Can you explain how US free speech causes harm? A good example that could be considered to be overall harmful would be the anti-vax movement. It has spread by speech over social media through patently inaccurate information.
  - fullofhatred 8y ago
    > extremist version from the US "extreme freedom" :)
  - fixermark 8y ago
    In point of fact, US law defined (via the DMCA "Safe Harbor" clause) most communications-media products (fora, video sharing sites, music repositories, etc.) as pipes for this reason. "They're pipes" is how the US regulates them.
    - iooi 8y ago
      Is this still accurate after SESTA/FOSTA?
      - fixermark 8y ago
        In general, yes. SESTA/FOSTA nudged the definition of the safe harbor away from content that facilitated sex trafficking. This has no bearing on whether, say, iTunes is still safe in sharing the subversive, anti-government music of Creedence Clearwater Revival. ;)
- radiorental 8y ago
  I believe you mean that separation of hate speech from freedom of speech rights isn't easy.
  - detcader 8y ago
    I think the hardest thing for folks is actually arguing that speech X, Y, and Z are hateful, because all people of every political background who log online seem to want to do is legislate others into silence or post innuendo and memes about people's character behind their backs. There's an essay I found pretty unique, "Reflections on Debating The Right" on Current Affairs, explaining why much more public debates would be helpful... of course, that website could well be blocked soon in Australia for their articles on Palestine, given the precedents now set!
    - ratling 8y ago
      Debating a bad actor isn’t debating. People on the right (the proles, not the rich people making money off the whole affair) don’t want to have honest intellectual discourse. They want to ‘own libruls’ and be smug (despite their choices actively hurting their livelihood and their lives leaving little to be smug about). There’s nothing to debate, they’re just idiots. Easy to fleece idiots considering how easy it is to make money by throwing out a bunch of controversial statements and then retracting when their audience has moved on.
      - detcader 8y ago
        I hope you're never categorized as a bad actor for a view you develop by your friends or fellow activists. From what I can tell, the bleeding-edge version of the line between honest soul and bad actor is under continuous deployment... it will be crucial to study each set of changelogs! By the way, do you think sex work is liberating, or capitalist exploitation? What do you think, a 2-state solution or not? I wouldn't want to get cancelled by talking to you. I hope to come back to this debate in a few decades and see that Robinson's pieces on debating the right, along with Mark Fisher's "Exiting the Vampire Castle" and Benjamin Studebaker's "The Left is Not a Church" will be considered important overlooked resources.
- JumpCrisscross 8y ago
  > Then you dont get freedom of speech Does Australia have an enumerated right to free speech? I thought that remains a somewhat novel feature of the American Constitution. (Owing--in large part--to our culture.)
  - Consultant32452 8y ago
    Freedom of speech is not just a law that happens to exist in some countries, it's a moral principle.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
jumbopapa 8y ago
> I get freedom of speech, but... I don't think you do
drenvuk 8y ago
People like you are the reason the first amendment exists. Reconsider your belief system, please.
- fixermark 8y ago
  Remember when commenting on Hacker News: it's an international community. Australia doesn't protect freedom of expression in the same way the US does. Indeed, there's a decent chunk of the world that's perfectly rational and sees our relatively laissez-faire attitude on some Bill of Rights content as dangerous to a survivable society.
- ratling 8y ago
  You can’t run in a movie theatre and yell fire. There are limits, the internet does not remove the need for basic human decency.
  - drenvuk 8y ago
    Don't use that. https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/11/its-time-to-stop-using-the-fire-in-a-crowded-theater-quote/264449/ https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/11/its-tim...
detcader 8y ago
That's an understandable reaction! But I won't be unpersoning people, especially those who themselves make a hobby out of looking for more people to unperson.
- zbealeo 8y ago
  Supporting knee-jerk censorship should never be supported as "understandable". The fact one could consider this understandable is concerning itself.
realusername 8y ago
ISPs sell internet access, if you believe this website is infringing some of your local laws, you should start a procedure in your own country, it's not the role of an ISP to filter websites by their own initiative.
theorique 8y ago
"I get freedom of speech, but I don't believe that people should actually have it."
luiscleto 8y ago
The problem is defining those limits. And if you give a regulatory agency the power to do it, odds are they will push too far. It starts with fringe sites that most people would agree on, but the existence of those regulators depends on there being more things to censor. It's in their own interest to expand the scope of the censoring, and the people attracted to those positions and that "power" will be the ones who have things they wish to silence. In addition to this, as the scope creeps you risk forcing the later groups into the same channels as the ones first banned (e.g. people who enjoy dark humor being shoved into the same platforms as people who unironically spread hate and violent messages). It seems to me this will be facilitating radicalization rather than help prevent it - an analogy could be made with people arrested for petty crimes being radicalized or made into full blown criminals in prisons. Before thinking about whether it's actually right or wrong to block access to "problematic opinions" online, I'd like to see satisfying research that government censorship actually works and mitigates these problems, rather than just sweep the mess under the carpet while it keeps building up to an eventual serious problem.
rdtsc 8y ago
> They and others should permanently block 8chan ... 4chan is 4chan What is the difference? Neither one sounds like a place I want to go visit to check out for myself. I used to hear about 4chan for a while is 8chan a worse, more concentrated version of it?
- c1sc0 8y ago
  "Neither one sounds like a place I want to go visit to check out for myself." ... please do. Make up your own mind.
  - rdtsc 8y ago
    So far nothing I've heard about them sounds inviting to me. It's a bit like saying "browse the dark web" or this other terrible place filled with hate speech.
- Larrikin 8y ago
  8chan is founded by people who thought 4chan was too tame and restrictive
  - rdtsc 8y ago
    Ok. Thanks for explaining.
jerkstate 8y ago
There are already limits to the free speech (in the USA) in regards to credible threats, fraud, and defamation. I believe your premise is that limiting ugly/racist speech would limit radicalization, and I don't believe there is any evidence to show that.
- fixermark 8y ago
  In general, a formal action by the US government would involve a high-bar "prove harm or imminent risk of harm" test. ... but action of private enterprises to cease to do business with an organization (such as telcos black-holing an IP address in their routing fabric) are another matter, unless regulation states otherwise.
kurtisc 8y ago
At the time of writing your comment is greyed out so evidently more than one person only values private freedom of speech if it's not yours.

adamrezich 8y ago

It's not mentioned in this article but from what I understand (and someone please correct me if I'm wrong), "blocking" is happening at the ISP DNS level, and anyone living in these affected areas can simply use a different DNS service to continue using these websites unimpeded.

LinuxBender 8y ago
That is correct. A decent method of side-stepping ISP DNS is to run Unbound DNS on your home router or a server in your home, if you can. An example snippet from the configuration in Unbound DNS would look like this: forward-zone: name: "." forward-addr: 1.1.1.1 # CloudFlare forward-addr: 1.0.0.1 # CloudFlare forward-addr: 8.8.8.8 # Google forward-addr: 8.8.4.4 # Google forward-addr: 208.67.222.222 # OpenDNS forward-first: no And you can view it's status with unbound-control: unbound-control dump_infra | grep 1\.1\.1 1.1.1.1 . ttl 1745 ping 0 var 71 rtt 284 rto 284 tA 0 tAAAA 0 tother 0 ednsknown 1 edns 0 delay 0 lame dnssec 0 rec 0 A 0 other 0 This method of caching can also slightly improve the privacy of the people using your network. You get the bonus of a local low latency cache, and requests are distributed among multiple destinations, slightly reducing the marketing benefits of running those public DNS servers. You can also enable TCP and TLS for recursive servers that support DoT (DNS over TLS). I prefer this over DoH, as everything in your home can benefit from it, not just your browser. Some of the servers mentioned above listen on TCP 853 for TLS. Just google "Unbound DNS TLS" There are some examples on Calomel as well. [1] [1] - https://calomel.org/unbound_dns.html https://calomel.org/unbound_dns.html
- LinuxBender 8y ago
  Here is an example using TLS: forward-zone: name: "." forward-ssl-upstream: yes forward-addr: 208.67.222.222@853 forward-addr: 1.1.1.1@853 forward-addr: 8.8.4.4@853 forward-addr: 9.9.9.9@853 forward-first: no unbound-control dump_infra|cut -c 1-60|column -t 9.9.9.9@853 . ttl 851 ping 6 var 84 rtt 342 rto 342 tA 0 tAA 8.8.4.4@853 . ttl 851 ping 13 var 79 rtt 329 rto 329 tA 0 tA 208.67.222.222@853 . ttl 844 ping 876 var 1823 rtt 8168 rto And here [1] [2] are a small list of public servers that support DoT [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_recursive_name_server https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_recursive_name_server [2] - https://dnsprivacy.org/wiki/display/DP/DNS+Privacy+Public+Resolvers https://dnsprivacy.org/wiki/display/DP/DNS+Privacy+Public+Re...

paganel 8y ago

> the blog Zerohedge and video hosting platform Liveleak. Let's say I get why they'd block 4chan and 8chan, but blocking a blog is just over the top. Liveleak I also half-understand, but I also don't approve of it, for a while it was one of the best online video resources on the atrocities committed by ISIS in Syria and Iraq, just hiding our unwanted images under the rug won't help much. Later edit: For example videos of the Tikrit massacre [1] are only available on Liveleak (I'm talking of the "mainstream" web), YouTube has nothing on it. It is my very strong opinion that we need these images to remain in the public psyche so that we'll try our best not to make the same mistakes again, and by censoring access to this kind of videos we're not helping with any of that. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camp_Speicher_massacre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camp_Speicher_massacre

fixermark 8y ago
Agreed. It's a longsword where a scalpel is wanted. This is the risk of network-level censorship: too much restriction. ... on the other hand, it puts pressure on Liveleak to take initiative to clean its house, and the only tool the telcos have here is a longsword.
JumpCrisscross 8y ago
> blocking a blog is just over the top I'm a fierce fighter for the First Amendment and its free speech protections. But such absolutism around free speech has its drawbacks. Hate speech runs wild. Incivility is given a safe harbor in which to breed. Some really awful sides of humanity can come uncomfortably close to one's day-to-day life. But it's a trade-off our country debated, debates and continues to make. Australia hasn't made the same trade-off. Australians repeatedly elect representatives who pass into law measures I'd consider draconian if raised in America. But Australia isn't America. And within a band, in which both America and Australia lie, there are multiple optima balancing freedom and stability.
- Aloha 8y ago
  One mans hate speech is another mans freedom. I'm a gay male, but I'm very reluctant to ban 'hate speech' - I'm worried that such laws could be used against other (as yet unknown) marginalized peoples in the future, if such laws, or rather the concept of such laws existed, they could have been used to suppress our struggle for rights. We, for example said some pretty sharp things about religion for example, which in other countries would be prohibited speech, similarly, we were also decidedly uncivil in our struggle for civil rights, so has every successful civil rights movement. Any law used to defend the now status quo, can be used to prevent that from changing in the future, even to welcome other groups under the tent. Simply put, you got to the top, don't pull up the ladder behind you. That said, I wouldnt object to broadening what constitutes a call to action to include doxxing and 'encouraging internet vigilantism'.

calvinqwerty 8y ago

I find the chans interesting. The back and forth between the clans, whoever they represent, mixed with some curious independent posters gives a small picture of what's lurking out there in the darkness. In the private minds. Mostly it's role playing I think.

fixermark 8y ago
Unfortunately, it has become more than roleplaying several too many times to accept that excuse, and the chan owners and mods have made it pretty clear they don't consider regulation of the public squares they serve into existence to be their responsibility. I think we're about to learn that the 'net may also interpret incitement to violence risk as damage and route around it.
- adamrezich 8y ago
  You can't legislate ideas out of existence. Shutting down online venues where certain ideas flourish will do nothing to solve the problem that such an action is presumably trying to solve. Why would you actively push untoward discussion further underground, instead of letting it happen out in the open, on a public website?
  - calvinqwerty 8y ago
    Exactly. Occasionally a chan poster will submit that the boards continue to exist because whomever is keeping tabs on the elements is afraid they'll scatter.
  - fixermark 8y ago
    Because people vulnerable to radicalization view public websites. The solution of "let it happen in the open" doesn't appear to be working in practice. Underground sites are harder for those unaware of the topic to find (and for policing what goes on on those sites, the US has the FBI and the CIA).
    - kadendogthing 8y ago

Daviey 8y ago

And yet, Facebook was the platform that was used to facilitate the live streaming of the horrendous events we saw in New Zealand. I am looking forward to Facebook also being banned.

anoncoward111 8y ago
"Hahahaha, that's why we pay lobbyists!" --FB, probably
falsedan 8y ago
like guns, 4chan et al. have few positive features and many negative ones. Unlike them, Facebook has a more balanced mix. Please consider the sites as a whole, or please take your false equivalency elsewhere
- zbealeo 8y ago
  Please take your subjective opinions that you present as facts elsewhere.
- Konnstann 8y ago
  I would argue that Facebook has many negative features and few positive ones, with the negative features far outweighing the positive ones. The fact that Facebook spends so many resources making sure you can't ignore it speaks volumes. Meanwhile, facebook "news" is mostly garbage, their livestreaming service is full of livestreamed crime, not even touching what they do with your data, and how much they capture that you don't even know about. 4chan, meanwhile, is exactly what you make of it. All you have to do to not get "shot" on 4chan is stick to any board that isn't /b/ or /pol/ and voila you have heavily moderated anonymous imageboards for a ton of topics.
  - falsedan 8y ago
    You would argue that but you'd be wrong/out of alignment of the vast majority of the world's population.

FilterSweep 8y ago

Why don’t they remove cloudflare protection on 4/8chan?

zbealeo 8y ago
Who is "they" and why should "they"? Both websites act in according to US law, should we punish every site that participates in your definition of wrong think?

reuben_scratton 8y ago

Ridiculous. "Hate speech" didn't kill 50 innocent people, a goddamned lunatic with an automatic rifle did. As Mark Steyn has remarked on this latest moral panic, "Less speech inevitably means more violence - because, if you can't talk about anything, what's left but to shoot up the joint?"

jiscariot 8y ago
Similarly, if you argue speech can be a form of violence, you can easily justify the use of violence against speech.

iooi 8y ago

Everyone is okay with restrictions on freedom of speech when it comes to child pornography. But restricting 8chan is suddenly too much? I'm curious where we draw the line and what the criteria is. It's clear we need a line, since we shouldn't encourage the proliferation of child pornography for example. But should we tolerate a community that had a "Brent Tratton Appreciation Thread" on the day of the NZ shooting? [1] [1] http://archive.fo/xmftv http://archive.fo/xmftv

reuben_scratton 8y ago
It's because there's no situation in which you (I hope) or I could conceivably be accused of being child pornographers. It will never affect us and the people it does affect are the worst of the worst and are identified as such by police. I have mild conservative sympathies and get accused by idiots of being a "Nazi" depressingly frequently. It's screamingly obvious that the rush to clamp down on "hate speech" is in reality criminalising political dissent. Which is absolutely guaranteed to lead to more violence, not less.
CzechTech 8y ago
The line is in the little thing only backwards people seem to use these days... the law. In the case of 8chan, the US law. It is within the US law to praise terrorists under the Freedom of Speech law (1st Amendment). If you want to change that fact, you can try to change the law. For example, I'm a Czech citizen and it is illegal for me to praise terrorism or nazism. Anyways, until such time that the law is changed, any calls for mass action against 8chan are little more than mob rule. Also, it doesn't help your case than almost all calls for extreme action like deplatforming come from a fringe minority of society (progressive far left activists) who are typically orange man bad, guns bad, free speech bad, low taxes bad, low regulation bad as it makes it hard to find compromises for such a group of people.
benmmurphy 8y ago
i think cracking down on imagery created from this violent act or other violent acts is a closer equivalence to child pornography. alternatively, you could compare bans on lolicon to the censorship you are advocating.

EGreg 8y ago

Ok, I am going to say it. I am not a free speech absolutist. But with the coming technology, like MaidSAFE and others, it will become possible for people to communicate and say whatever they want, no way to censor. Full stop. The governments will go back to having moles inside each group they care about, which is more targeted and harder. For numerous examples of why free speech matters, the other way, look at the latest article on at https://qbix.com/blog https://qbix.com/blog It’s like 3d printed guns, or desktop printers or copiers. Things that governments heavily regulated through gatekeepers now can be produced by anyone. I will say this... if you add up ALL the mass shootings in the USA they add up to less than 2% of all shootings. And if you add up ALL shootings and killings, including by Boko Haram and so on, we have far less than 100 years ago, 1000 years ago, 5,000 years ago etc. Steven Pinker was right. We are getting far more peaceful, because of technology. As long as we keep a check on population growth, we may even have enough resources, not too much garbage and sustainable living in every generation. If anything, Boko Haram (which stands against Western education) is an example of values from hundreds of years ago. They are more violent. Today’s values are much less violent but they will only survive if we can live sustainably, and that starts with women’s education and having children later.

ryandrake 8y ago

Called it three days ago [1]. My prediction is the UK is next and the list of sites will be even longer. This horrible event has become a bittersweet gift to politicians who have been waiting for their chance to coerce ISPs into blocking a few more web sites on their "naughty lists". 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19402858 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19402858

batat 8y ago

I'm wondering if it's legal to block sites in Australia simply because "we feel this is the right thing to do"?

QualityReboot 8y ago

Good. Ban them all. Force everyone with an unpopular opinion off the major platforms. While we're at it, let's ban political debate and fake news. Ban NPR and ban Breitbart. Ban religious debate too. If it offends someone, get it off the platforms. Let's make it so every controversial content and comment is forced off YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook. It's the fastest way to end centralization.

batat 8y ago

Just found out that Reddit banned /r/watchpeople for the same reason [1]. I believe all these censorship attempts only makes it worse - we're experiencing the Streisand Effect at its best now. [1] http://fortune.com/2019/03/15/reddit-banned-watch-people-die-new-zealand-mosque-video/ http://fortune.com/2019/03/15/reddit-banned-watch-people-die...

motohagiography 8y ago

It's hard to get out of ones bubble on this. From the govts view, they are acting to contain sectarian violence long enough that their society can find a stable equilibrium after a shock. I don't think appeals to the principle of freedom of speech are meaningful against acts of censorship because it is a tactical response in a perceived crisis and not something that happens under ideal conditions where they can afford to be held to principles. However, tactical approaches like clumsy censorship signal a deeper weakness that risks exacerbating sectarian resolve in all parties. Cynically, the solution here may have been to rate limit content they didn't want instead of blocking it outright, which is insidious, but toward the desired outcome of defusing the spread of violence, people who want the content can get it without having to position themselves against the authorities (become outlaws) to do so, while removing it from casual observation. Reddit's quarantines, and Twitter's shadow bans mitigate some of the virality of reactions. Tagging traffic to these sites for slow path processing would have been trivial, and blocking them was an unforced error. Societies need to respond to events like these by demonstrating unity and strength, which may mean acts of extraordinary tolerance - and not with tactical approaches that make them seem weak and vulnerable to an insurgency.

nybble41 8y ago
> I don't think appeals to the principle of freedom of speech are meaningful against acts of censorship because it is a tactical response in a perceived crisis and not something that happens under ideal conditions where they can afford to be held to principles. This bizarre idea that principles are only relevant under "ideal conditions" is part of the problem. We can't afford not to hold governments to principles, especially under non-ideal conditions.

throwawaysea 8y ago

Deplatforming was always a bad idea that puts fundamental freedoms at risk. Now that it has come to telecoms, something has to be done to denounce this trend and stop it. When large privately-owned platforms (e.g. Twitter) or low-level utilities (telecom companies) take action to censor information, it has the same impact and carries the same risks as a government doing it. It stifles expression, exchange of ideas, and imposes personal morality on a broad set of people.

Aloha 8y ago
Twitter is the modern day equivalent of a printing press, they can choose to print whatever they'd like, or not - trying to liken them to a common carrier is in my opinion absurdity. The man who owns the press, controls the speech.

nodemaker 8y ago

Ban all the popular toxic websites including facebook, instagram except maybe google and other actually useful sites. If a website adds no value / negative value to people's lives yet is used by a significant number of people for a significant amount of time every day it should be banned or time limited in my opinion. A bit similar to cigarettes or sugary drinks. Who decides? The government does based on recommendation by the judiciary. Its their job to legislate No one is stopping you from registering a new website so please dont argue freedom of speech.