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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 agre
by 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 agoThen you dont get freedom of speech. Defending rights isn't easy.
- DanBC 8y agoMost 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 agoCan you explain how US free speech causes harm?
- fixermark 8y agoThe 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 agoAn 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 agoI 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 agoSure. 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 agoThe 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 agoBecause he doesn't like it and doesn't consider government "tyranny" harm.
- SmellyGeekBoy 8y agoI'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 agoIn 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 agoIs this still accurate after SESTA/FOSTA?
- fixermark 8y agoIn 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 agoI believe you mean that separation of hate speech from freedom of speech rights isn't easy.
- detcader 8y agoI 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 agoDebating 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 agoI 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 agoFreedom 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 agoPeople like you are the reason the first amendment exists. Reconsider your belief system, please.
- fixermark 8y agoRemember 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 agoYou 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 agoDon'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 agoThat'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 agoSupporting knee-jerk censorship should never be supported as "understandable". The fact one could consider this understandable is concerning itself.
- realusername 8y agoISPs 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 agoThe 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 agoSo 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 ago8chan is founded by people who thought 4chan was too tame and restrictive
- rdtsc 8y agoOk. Thanks for explaining.
- jerkstate 8y agoThere 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 agoIn 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 agoAt 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.