8 ms·

Firefox bans free speech commenting plugin Dissenter from its extensions gallery

47 points by rancyber 7y ago

Not_a_pizza 7y ago
Big money loves censorship. Why else would every big tech firm be so adamantly involved in it?
luhego 7y ago
Please, tell me again why Firefox is not evil and respect their users.
- jjulius 7y ago
  Because Dissenter was created by Gab, a far/alt-right online platform. Such groups are known for fostering hostile environments online towards people of various religions, races, cultural/political views, etc.. It is by no means a stretch of the imagination for Mozilla to claim that users of the app were using it for such purposes. As such, it would be apropos for Mozilla to remove an app that provides a platform for individuals to disrespect others. Were Mozilla to keep it up, they would not be "respect[ing] their users".
  - phasnox 7y ago
    This is a lie. Gab is not a far/alt right specific platform. It's just a place where you can say whatever you want. Problem is the left calls far right or offensive to anything they disagree with.
  - howiroll 7y ago
    Yeah.... immagine trying to respect everyone on the planet and to start a conversation. Oh? Mozila did not respect the dissenter’s users, did they? Why are they not respecting them to respect others? Does respect have priority or preference? Yesterday’s agenda for authoritarianism was against hate crime and child protection. It seems today’s agenda for authoritarianism is respect. Pathetic.
  - freshm087 7y ago
    Because Dissenter was created by Gab, a far/alt-right online platform. So what? I'm not trolling, I'm trying to understand. It's doesn't look like anybody was forced to use the extension, you don't like it - don't use it. If it's ok to use clear-cut ideological censorship for plugins/extensions, then it's ok to block websites. Personally, I find it hard to accept.
    - evgen 7y ago
      Does the removal of the extension from the extension gallery prevent people from using the extension or just limit its exposure? If the latter then there is not censorship but simply Mozilla deciding the cost is not worth the bother. No one has any particular right to be promoted by Mozilla.
      - freshm087 7y ago
        So if Verizon would block certain websites for its customers it will not be censorship? Well, it will be. You seem to believe that censorship implies denying legal rights, and only is real when it's total. But censorship can be perfectly legal, and it's never total (albeit it requires either efforts, or money, you can reach forbidden websites in China). I'm not arguing about legality of Mozilla's decision at all. Nevertheless, it is censorship, and as long as it's motivated by ideological differences it's ideological censorship. And as Mozilla pretends to be just browser (not some party's browser) it looks weird, and no exactly smart. My question is why anybody who's not fanatically partisan would support it? Does it mean one feels a lot of pain using Mozilla just because political adversaries use it too? Consequently, do we need a separate fork of every browser for every faction nowadays (apparently, with separate sets of ideologically proven extensions)?
      - javagram 7y ago
        As far as i can see from the article, Mozilla is still agreeing to sign the addon, just not to list it in the AMO site. The article lists an 8 step process and claims users would have to follow that on each restart of Firefox to enable the addon. I’m not sure if that’s true, as the guidelines I can see on other websites seem to suggest self hosting addons shouldn’t have that problem.
  - syshum 7y ago
    So if dissenter was created by Antifa it would be ok?
  - cheez 7y ago
    Dissenter was created by a person or group of people who have thoughts and opinions that deserve to be protected.
    - jjulius 7y ago
      They're free to voice those thoughts wherever they can, just as Mozilla is free to opt not to host their app if they find said thoughts and opinions to be offensive. Freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences of said speech. If Mozilla received enough complaints about the speech being promoted via the app, then it is within their right to choose not to host it. How is that such a hard concept for so many people in this thread to understand?
      - cybersnowflake 7y ago
        True freedom of speech ultimately comes from a society's culture and morality not a law. The 1st Amendment doesn't mean much if the powerful can harass and intimidate its opponents into silence while still remaining in the technical letter of the law. Just like you'd probably wouldn't like it if women were denied employment opportunities because only 'men were created equal' How is this such a hard concept for liberals, the supposed founders of the 'Free Speech Movement' to understand?
        jjulius 7y ago
        Here's what I posted elsewhere in this thread - twice now - and is what so many people seem to be missing. It's not the subjects they're discussing, it's likely the manner in which their users are discussing them. >Mozilla themselves has said that they didn't remove it for political reasons [or "ideological censorship" as you put it], rather it was the language and vitriol being used on the platform. As an example, it's one thing to use something like Dissenter to calmly and rationally discuss why you might think a nation should close its borders to all immigrants, it's another thing to use that same platform to say stuff like, "Fuck those worthless lazy piece of shit beaners coming to this country and stealing white jobs" (not my opinion, btw). >I'm not going to pretend to know that stuff like that was posted to Dissenter, but you and I both know that language like that is commonplace on alt/far-right platforms. It's by no means a stretch to imagine that those kinds of posts are what got Dissenter banned. This is the point: Discuss whatever you want, that's OK. Just don't be surprised if you get banned for being an asshole while discussing it.
  - cybersnowflake 7y ago
    There is no sign at Gab saying 'no commies allowed' At its core, Gab itself is apolitical or at least far more so than its rivals. The left are welcome to use it as much as the right. The main difference is that Gab allows more freedom in many respects, which apparently is a rightwing thing to some people.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - jjulius 7y ago
      It might position itself as apolitical, but in practice it is not. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gab_(social_network) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gab_(social_network)
      - cybersnowflake 7y ago
        The only thing Gab/Dissenter itself does is have less speech restrictions than their competitors. Are you saying thats political?
- Digital-Citizen 7y ago
  Because Mozilla (unlike most other web browser publishers) publishes free software -- software users are allowed to run, inspect, modify, and share at any time for any reason. This is known as respecting a user's software freedom. Programs that don't respect a user's software freedom are called non-free or proprietary. That's the saving grace of Firefox. That's what makes Firefox better than any of the other currently widely-used browsers. A program's technical problems can be fixed, a program's speed can be improved (Mozilla recently proved this in the most recent versions of Firefox), but software freedom cannot be added to a proprietary program. Therefore if you don't like how Mozilla treats add-on programmers or Firefox users, you have the software freedom needed to make a free derivative of Firefox which behaves in a better way (where "better" is up to you to define, it's purposefully vague). Perhaps you want your Firefox derivative to let its users easily install whatever add-on they like that will persist across restarts, or get add-on updates without hassles by checking multiple sources for updates, or installing add-ons signed with unfamiliar keys after getting a user's approval. I'm sure there are plenty of other ideas you could come up with to implement. But with software freedom the limits of what you can implement are limits you impose on yourself. This doesn't make Mozilla or Firefox evil and distributing free software is respectful of the users. Don't confuse unrewarded labor (complaining that Mozilla doesn't make Firefox do what you want) with respect for the users. The Dissent add-on, similarly, is really just another single point of censorship forum. We can't evaluate whether it is better at respecting user's free speech until they are challenged in a serious way (such as the implicit threats to big social media firms when they are given vague inactionable requests to 'do better' when their CEOs are brought before Congressional hearings and told to respond favorably to Russiagate lies). Already on this forum we see some posters confusing freedom of speech with reading something that echoes their views. One post, for instance, claimed "[Dissent's] audience is primarily folk on the far/alt-right". As George Orwell said, "Freedom is the right to tell people what they don't want to hear". Or as Noam Chomsky reminds us, "Goebbels was in favor of free speech for views he liked. So was Stalin. If you're really in favor of free speech, then you're in favor of freedom of speech for precisely the views you despise. Otherwise, you're not in favor of free speech.". So both Firefox's add-on repo and Dissent's forum are singletons that don't liberate users so much as they establish their respective admins as censors. Perhaps you could come up with a way to let users more easily distribute comments from their own comment database so that all comment threads on a website come from multiple servers, and no censor power exists because no single user has admin control over all of the comment servers. Dissent is also free software (licensed under Apache License 2.0) so even if you believe Gab or Dissent aren't to be trusted, you could choose to improve Dissent to make it decentralized.
jjulius 7y ago
I didn't know much about Dissenter until I Googled it just now, and it looks like its audience is primarily folk on the far/alt-right. Hell, it was created by Gab[1]. Given the rhetoric that is often found in comments from those groups, it's not too hard to imagine that the complaints Mozilla cited as the reasons for removal are legitimate. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gab_(social_network)#Dissenter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gab_(social_network)#Dissenter
- identity_zero 7y ago
  So, if the audience was far-left/Communist it would be okay? Because that seems to be what Facebook is trying to do.
  - chris_mc 7y ago
    It's not the side they are on, right or left, it's the violent and hateful rhetoric they use.
    - toomuchtodo 7y ago
      Which is protected by constitutional rights in the country Mozilla’s nexus exists in. It’s not necessary for a bloated non profit to remove access to an extension for political reasons (versus technical deficiencies). Free speech is useless if you’re not willing to defend that which you find most disagreeable.
      - cheez 7y ago
        Which I would imagine is a problem if Mozilla receives federal funding.
        syshum 7y ago
        In a way they do... They are tax exempt which means there is a case to be made as being Tax Exempt comes with Strings For example we do not allow Churches to comment on politics they have to remain neutral or they lose their tax exemption The same should apply to Mozilla. They need to be politically neutral, up holding Legal Speech, or they need to shutdown the Mozilla Foundation and become a for profit organization
jressey 7y ago
If you have to create a special message board that is the only place where you can say what you want to, perhaps you should think about what you are saying. This is so obviously not an issue of "free speech." Free speech means the government cannot prosecute you for what you say. Any company can tell you to fuck off for any reason though, and that's the free market all the "free speech" advocates love so much.
- deogeo 7y ago
  > Free speech means the government cannot prosecute you for what you say. No, that's the 1st amendment of the US constitution. Free speech is a broader concept, and the 1st amendment defends it only from government interference.
  - CM30 7y ago
    Thank you. So many people seem to assume the US constitution is the be all and end all answer about freedom of speech (or anything else included in it) whereas it's only one interpretation used by the government/legal system in a certain part of the world. Censorship not necessarily equal government censorship, and its ludicrous that people seem to assume it does.
- Nasrudith 7y ago
  > If you have to create a special message board that is the only place where you can say what you want to, perhaps you should think about what you are saying. That only shows that reception to what is being said is overwhelmingly negative. Society has an unfortunate long history of doing that for arbitrary and stupid things. There are legitimate reasons for using something like this. Granted with the "alt-right" it is a clear case of "They laughed at Einstein but they also laughed at Bozo the Clown". I can't help but think it is a shame that an overlay messageboard concept like that wound up being used in a double rot13 cryptofascist dumpster fire. Although it would probably always tend toward toxicity given its usefulness for hatedoms of any sort. I'm imagining a useful fact checker one slapped over news websites and even maintaining "score" of accuracy per author, site, and topic.
jakeogh 7y ago
It's almost like they want to fail.
diminoten 7y ago
I don't think these folks understand the first amendment if they think it's relevant here...
peterhadlaw 7y ago
It's stuff like this that makes it a far cry to call Mozilla "open" and "free"
- 0815test 7y ago
  Dissenters is a commercial platform, Mozilla are simply under no obligation to promote it or give it a spotlight under addons.mozilla.org. Unless you can point to a similar addon from some alt-left site that they have approved, there's no reason to suspect that this was a political decision.
  - writepub 7y ago
    yes yes - this was completely apolitical. The conservative bent of the community banned was completely incidental, just like ALL other bans of conservative thought by San Francisco based companies. Firefox is just being an neutral arbiter - nothing to see here folks, go home and celebrate true freedom: the freedom of SV companies to systemically censor conservative speech with impunity
  - mymindstorm 7y ago
    Firefox requires that extension files be signed by Mozilla if you want to install a .xpi file from a website. They don't have to be given a spotlight, but this effectively makes it impossible for anyone who doesn't know how to manually compile and install the extension to even use it.
    - Karunamon 7y ago
      No compilation necessary. You just download the addon source, flip on the "debug plugins" option, and point it at the manifest file. Still a pain in the ass.
    - yoasif_ 7y ago
      Mozilla continues to offer Dissenter the ability to sign their add-on and distribute it themselves. Look at the takedown notice, where they recommend this approach.
writepub 7y ago
Playbook of valley companies in 2019: - Systemically ban and censor conservative speech. Never-mind that 50% of the country and about 70% of the world adheres to the EXACT same, fairly reasonable opinions. - Launch a massive PR campaign (opening salvo of which is accusations of Nazi adherence) against those crying foul, or pointing out the clear ultra-left bias in censorship and actions - Claim that private companies hold no MORAL responsibility to uphold constitutionally guaranteed free speech laws - Claim that the internet be treated as a utility, with free access to everyone, but ignore the fact that massive monopolies controlling the REAL utilitarian aspects of the internet (search, email, payments, hosting, cloud, etc. ) are all in cahoots to kill conservative speech, with cognitive dissonance of how they've combined to de-platform entire philosophies from the internet that they control - Behave with absolute impunity with political agendas, and claim to be neutral
flukus 7y ago
What's the status of third party, unauthorized firefox extensions these days, didn't they ban them or make them a pain in the arse to use several years ago? They might not have to host it, but if they make it hard/impossible for others to host and use it then they're certainly violating the first of the four freedoms of free software: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html
Karunamon 7y ago
This is censorship, pure and simple. Gab, and Dissenter itself for that matter, are apolitical entitles whose stated goal is to allow any speech so long as it doesn't violate law. Say whatever you want, regardless of your political leanings. Admirable. Mozilla has made their stance on such a goal clear. I don't believe for a hot second that this wasn't a politically-motivated decision, and it really puts the lie to their claims of protecting "a free and open web". "Free and open" is diametrically opposed to blocking an addon whose sole purpose is to allow access to a third party web service.

47 points by rancyber 7y ago

Not_a_pizza 7y ago

Big money loves censorship. Why else would every big tech firm be so adamantly involved in it?

luhego 7y ago

Please, tell me again why Firefox is not evil and respect their users.

jjulius 7y ago
Because Dissenter was created by Gab, a far/alt-right online platform. Such groups are known for fostering hostile environments online towards people of various religions, races, cultural/political views, etc.. It is by no means a stretch of the imagination for Mozilla to claim that users of the app were using it for such purposes. As such, it would be apropos for Mozilla to remove an app that provides a platform for individuals to disrespect others. Were Mozilla to keep it up, they would not be "respect[ing] their users".
- phasnox 7y ago
  This is a lie. Gab is not a far/alt right specific platform. It's just a place where you can say whatever you want. Problem is the left calls far right or offensive to anything they disagree with.
- howiroll 7y ago
  Yeah.... immagine trying to respect everyone on the planet and to start a conversation. Oh? Mozila did not respect the dissenter’s users, did they? Why are they not respecting them to respect others? Does respect have priority or preference? Yesterday’s agenda for authoritarianism was against hate crime and child protection. It seems today’s agenda for authoritarianism is respect. Pathetic.
- freshm087 7y ago
  Because Dissenter was created by Gab, a far/alt-right online platform. So what? I'm not trolling, I'm trying to understand. It's doesn't look like anybody was forced to use the extension, you don't like it - don't use it. If it's ok to use clear-cut ideological censorship for plugins/extensions, then it's ok to block websites. Personally, I find it hard to accept.
  - evgen 7y ago
    Does the removal of the extension from the extension gallery prevent people from using the extension or just limit its exposure? If the latter then there is not censorship but simply Mozilla deciding the cost is not worth the bother. No one has any particular right to be promoted by Mozilla.
    - freshm087 7y ago
      So if Verizon would block certain websites for its customers it will not be censorship? Well, it will be. You seem to believe that censorship implies denying legal rights, and only is real when it's total. But censorship can be perfectly legal, and it's never total (albeit it requires either efforts, or money, you can reach forbidden websites in China). I'm not arguing about legality of Mozilla's decision at all. Nevertheless, it is censorship, and as long as it's motivated by ideological differences it's ideological censorship. And as Mozilla pretends to be just browser (not some party's browser) it looks weird, and no exactly smart. My question is why anybody who's not fanatically partisan would support it? Does it mean one feels a lot of pain using Mozilla just because political adversaries use it too? Consequently, do we need a separate fork of every browser for every faction nowadays (apparently, with separate sets of ideologically proven extensions)?
    - javagram 7y ago
      As far as i can see from the article, Mozilla is still agreeing to sign the addon, just not to list it in the AMO site. The article lists an 8 step process and claims users would have to follow that on each restart of Firefox to enable the addon. I’m not sure if that’s true, as the guidelines I can see on other websites seem to suggest self hosting addons shouldn’t have that problem.
- syshum 7y ago
  So if dissenter was created by Antifa it would be ok?
- cheez 7y ago
  Dissenter was created by a person or group of people who have thoughts and opinions that deserve to be protected.
  - jjulius 7y ago
    They're free to voice those thoughts wherever they can, just as Mozilla is free to opt not to host their app if they find said thoughts and opinions to be offensive. Freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences of said speech. If Mozilla received enough complaints about the speech being promoted via the app, then it is within their right to choose not to host it. How is that such a hard concept for so many people in this thread to understand?
    - cybersnowflake 7y ago
      True freedom of speech ultimately comes from a society's culture and morality not a law. The 1st Amendment doesn't mean much if the powerful can harass and intimidate its opponents into silence while still remaining in the technical letter of the law. Just like you'd probably wouldn't like it if women were denied employment opportunities because only 'men were created equal' How is this such a hard concept for liberals, the supposed founders of the 'Free Speech Movement' to understand?
      - jjulius 7y ago
        Here's what I posted elsewhere in this thread - twice now - and is what so many people seem to be missing. It's not the subjects they're discussing, it's likely the manner in which their users are discussing them. >Mozilla themselves has said that they didn't remove it for political reasons [or "ideological censorship" as you put it], rather it was the language and vitriol being used on the platform. As an example, it's one thing to use something like Dissenter to calmly and rationally discuss why you might think a nation should close its borders to all immigrants, it's another thing to use that same platform to say stuff like, "Fuck those worthless lazy piece of shit beaners coming to this country and stealing white jobs" (not my opinion, btw). >I'm not going to pretend to know that stuff like that was posted to Dissenter, but you and I both know that language like that is commonplace on alt/far-right platforms. It's by no means a stretch to imagine that those kinds of posts are what got Dissenter banned. This is the point: Discuss whatever you want, that's OK. Just don't be surprised if you get banned for being an asshole while discussing it.
- cybersnowflake 7y ago
  There is no sign at Gab saying 'no commies allowed' At its core, Gab itself is apolitical or at least far more so than its rivals. The left are welcome to use it as much as the right. The main difference is that Gab allows more freedom in many respects, which apparently is a rightwing thing to some people.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - jjulius 7y ago
    It might position itself as apolitical, but in practice it is not. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gab_(social_network) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gab_(social_network)
    - cybersnowflake 7y ago
      The only thing Gab/Dissenter itself does is have less speech restrictions than their competitors. Are you saying thats political?
Digital-Citizen 7y ago
Because Mozilla (unlike most other web browser publishers) publishes free software -- software users are allowed to run, inspect, modify, and share at any time for any reason. This is known as respecting a user's software freedom. Programs that don't respect a user's software freedom are called non-free or proprietary. That's the saving grace of Firefox. That's what makes Firefox better than any of the other currently widely-used browsers. A program's technical problems can be fixed, a program's speed can be improved (Mozilla recently proved this in the most recent versions of Firefox), but software freedom cannot be added to a proprietary program. Therefore if you don't like how Mozilla treats add-on programmers or Firefox users, you have the software freedom needed to make a free derivative of Firefox which behaves in a better way (where "better" is up to you to define, it's purposefully vague). Perhaps you want your Firefox derivative to let its users easily install whatever add-on they like that will persist across restarts, or get add-on updates without hassles by checking multiple sources for updates, or installing add-ons signed with unfamiliar keys after getting a user's approval. I'm sure there are plenty of other ideas you could come up with to implement. But with software freedom the limits of what you can implement are limits you impose on yourself. This doesn't make Mozilla or Firefox evil and distributing free software is respectful of the users. Don't confuse unrewarded labor (complaining that Mozilla doesn't make Firefox do what you want) with respect for the users. The Dissent add-on, similarly, is really just another single point of censorship forum. We can't evaluate whether it is better at respecting user's free speech until they are challenged in a serious way (such as the implicit threats to big social media firms when they are given vague inactionable requests to 'do better' when their CEOs are brought before Congressional hearings and told to respond favorably to Russiagate lies). Already on this forum we see some posters confusing freedom of speech with reading something that echoes their views. One post, for instance, claimed "[Dissent's] audience is primarily folk on the far/alt-right". As George Orwell said, "Freedom is the right to tell people what they don't want to hear". Or as Noam Chomsky reminds us, "Goebbels was in favor of free speech for views he liked. So was Stalin. If you're really in favor of free speech, then you're in favor of freedom of speech for precisely the views you despise. Otherwise, you're not in favor of free speech.". So both Firefox's add-on repo and Dissent's forum are singletons that don't liberate users so much as they establish their respective admins as censors. Perhaps you could come up with a way to let users more easily distribute comments from their own comment database so that all comment threads on a website come from multiple servers, and no censor power exists because no single user has admin control over all of the comment servers. Dissent is also free software (licensed under Apache License 2.0) so even if you believe Gab or Dissent aren't to be trusted, you could choose to improve Dissent to make it decentralized.

jjulius 7y ago

I didn't know much about Dissenter until I Googled it just now, and it looks like its audience is primarily folk on the far/alt-right. Hell, it was created by Gab[1]. Given the rhetoric that is often found in comments from those groups, it's not too hard to imagine that the complaints Mozilla cited as the reasons for removal are legitimate. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gab_(social_network)#Dissenter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gab_(social_network)#Dissenter

identity_zero 7y ago
So, if the audience was far-left/Communist it would be okay? Because that seems to be what Facebook is trying to do.
- chris_mc 7y ago
  It's not the side they are on, right or left, it's the violent and hateful rhetoric they use.
  - toomuchtodo 7y ago
    Which is protected by constitutional rights in the country Mozilla’s nexus exists in. It’s not necessary for a bloated non profit to remove access to an extension for political reasons (versus technical deficiencies). Free speech is useless if you’re not willing to defend that which you find most disagreeable.
    - cheez 7y ago
      Which I would imagine is a problem if Mozilla receives federal funding.
      - syshum 7y ago
        In a way they do... They are tax exempt which means there is a case to be made as being Tax Exempt comes with Strings For example we do not allow Churches to comment on politics they have to remain neutral or they lose their tax exemption The same should apply to Mozilla. They need to be politically neutral, up holding Legal Speech, or they need to shutdown the Mozilla Foundation and become a for profit organization

jressey 7y ago

If you have to create a special message board that is the only place where you can say what you want to, perhaps you should think about what you are saying. This is so obviously not an issue of "free speech." Free speech means the government cannot prosecute you for what you say. Any company can tell you to fuck off for any reason though, and that's the free market all the "free speech" advocates love so much.

deogeo 7y ago
> Free speech means the government cannot prosecute you for what you say. No, that's the 1st amendment of the US constitution. Free speech is a broader concept, and the 1st amendment defends it only from government interference.
- CM30 7y ago
  Thank you. So many people seem to assume the US constitution is the be all and end all answer about freedom of speech (or anything else included in it) whereas it's only one interpretation used by the government/legal system in a certain part of the world. Censorship not necessarily equal government censorship, and its ludicrous that people seem to assume it does.
Nasrudith 7y ago
> If you have to create a special message board that is the only place where you can say what you want to, perhaps you should think about what you are saying. That only shows that reception to what is being said is overwhelmingly negative. Society has an unfortunate long history of doing that for arbitrary and stupid things. There are legitimate reasons for using something like this. Granted with the "alt-right" it is a clear case of "They laughed at Einstein but they also laughed at Bozo the Clown". I can't help but think it is a shame that an overlay messageboard concept like that wound up being used in a double rot13 cryptofascist dumpster fire. Although it would probably always tend toward toxicity given its usefulness for hatedoms of any sort. I'm imagining a useful fact checker one slapped over news websites and even maintaining "score" of accuracy per author, site, and topic.

jakeogh 7y ago

It's almost like they want to fail.

diminoten 7y ago

I don't think these folks understand the first amendment if they think it's relevant here...

peterhadlaw 7y ago

It's stuff like this that makes it a far cry to call Mozilla "open" and "free"

0815test 7y ago
Dissenters is a commercial platform, Mozilla are simply under no obligation to promote it or give it a spotlight under addons.mozilla.org. Unless you can point to a similar addon from some alt-left site that they have approved, there's no reason to suspect that this was a political decision.
- writepub 7y ago
  yes yes - this was completely apolitical. The conservative bent of the community banned was completely incidental, just like ALL other bans of conservative thought by San Francisco based companies. Firefox is just being an neutral arbiter - nothing to see here folks, go home and celebrate true freedom: the freedom of SV companies to systemically censor conservative speech with impunity
- mymindstorm 7y ago
  Firefox requires that extension files be signed by Mozilla if you want to install a .xpi file from a website. They don't have to be given a spotlight, but this effectively makes it impossible for anyone who doesn't know how to manually compile and install the extension to even use it.
  - Karunamon 7y ago
    No compilation necessary. You just download the addon source, flip on the "debug plugins" option, and point it at the manifest file. Still a pain in the ass.
  - yoasif_ 7y ago
    Mozilla continues to offer Dissenter the ability to sign their add-on and distribute it themselves. Look at the takedown notice, where they recommend this approach.

writepub 7y ago

Playbook of valley companies in 2019: - Systemically ban and censor conservative speech. Never-mind that 50% of the country and about 70% of the world adheres to the EXACT same, fairly reasonable opinions. - Launch a massive PR campaign (opening salvo of which is accusations of Nazi adherence) against those crying foul, or pointing out the clear ultra-left bias in censorship and actions - Claim that private companies hold no MORAL responsibility to uphold constitutionally guaranteed free speech laws - Claim that the internet be treated as a utility, with free access to everyone, but ignore the fact that massive monopolies controlling the REAL utilitarian aspects of the internet (search, email, payments, hosting, cloud, etc. ) are all in cahoots to kill conservative speech, with cognitive dissonance of how they've combined to de-platform entire philosophies from the internet that they control - Behave with absolute impunity with political agendas, and claim to be neutral

flukus 7y ago

What's the status of third party, unauthorized firefox extensions these days, didn't they ban them or make them a pain in the arse to use several years ago? They might not have to host it, but if they make it hard/impossible for others to host and use it then they're certainly violating the first of the four freedoms of free software: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html

Karunamon 7y ago

This is censorship, pure and simple. Gab, and Dissenter itself for that matter, are apolitical entitles whose stated goal is to allow any speech so long as it doesn't violate law. Say whatever you want, regardless of your political leanings. Admirable. Mozilla has made their stance on such a goal clear. I don't believe for a hot second that this wasn't a politically-motivated decision, and it really puts the lie to their claims of protecting "a free and open web". "Free and open" is diametrically opposed to blocking an addon whose sole purpose is to allow access to a third party web service.