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8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service

• Y_Y 7y ago
  > Internet hate forum I wonder if they'd describe themselves that way.
  • fwn 7y ago
    4chan used the "internet hate machine" meme for quite some time. https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/internet-hate-machine?full=1 https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/internet-hate-machine?full=1
  • mrweasel 7y ago
    This is why Facebook host their own servers... well not the only reason, but you could easily make the argument that Facebook is an "Internet hate forum" and should be shut down for failing to police their site.
    • vorpalhex 7y ago
      No, not really, no. Facebook is a media company that has half-assed moderation because it's not profitable to them to be any better about it, and is mostly old ladies posting ancient memes and chain letters.
      • yhamv 7y ago
        Just imagine how hard it would be for Facebook to exist if they didn't host their own servers. They would have to be under constant threats of being kicked off from whatever ISP they used because of the content users submit. And also quite obviously the press would be yelling at ISPs for hosting them, same they are doing with 8chan
        • javagram 7y ago
          Surely Facebook still has ISPs they use and all sorts of companies they rely on for services. They’re just too big and too popular to fail.
      • mrweasel 7y ago
        But it's not just half-assed is it, it's misguide, misleading and misdirected. Facebook will actively block a post selling baby items from a "non-smoking home" because their shitty A.I. and $2 an hour moderators can tell that the post isn't selling tobacco or animals. At the same time they can't find an entire group applauding the death of police officers or groups encouraging violent racism. And those last two, those aren't old ladies, those a shit people who aren't technically literate enough to find 8chan.
    • rvz 7y ago
      Not even hosting your own servers would do much to prevent a site shutdown since the domain can also be censored by the company that owns the TLD. Facebook takes their hosting to a whole new level by being part of the ICANN as a domain registrar which their domains are registered under themselves, making it close to impossible to be shutdown on the domain level.
  • Sonnol53 7y ago
    They call themselves the darkest part of the internet
    • pferde 7y ago
      Somewhat ironic, given that they're a haven for white supremacists. :)
• nilkn 7y ago
  I've generally been on the free speech side of this debate, as some of my previous comments on HN will show. With 8chan, I legitimately don't know what my opinion is. I've read it before, and I spent a few hours reading it this weekend, and it's beyond clear to me that it absolutely had the potential to radicalize shooters and terrorists. I'm not referring to the simple use of racial or ethnic slurs -- of course this was extremely common there, but I don't think this is the part of the site that encouraged actual violence. Rather, among the many ideological threads that were more or less constantly ongoing on 8chan, one of them just straight-up encouraged mass shootings. "The fire rises" is a common phrase I saw there celebrating the frequency of shootings. For instance, here's a quote I saw this weekend (I screenshotted a bunch of stuff like this in anticipation of the site going down): "holy fucking shit, a third mass shooting toda [referencing an incident near Douglas Park in Chicago], white guy shot 7 people, no one dead yet but the meter is still running!!! shooter still active!!! its absolutely fucking happening !!! the FIRE RISES!!!" This was attached to a picture of Trump with the text "it's happening" superimposed. While 8chan overall was absolutely all over the place, this thread of support for shootings and terrorism was seemingly always present in the background.
  • not_a_cop75 7y ago
    You could simply say that threat actors that are allowed to post in the open are much more accessible and predictable than ones who do not.
    • IfOnlyYouKnew 7y ago
      You could say that. But you'd be wrong. There is absolutely no evidence that the 8chan circle-hate happening out in the open has had any mitigating effect. It only made it accessible to even the technically illiterate among the potential audience.
      • deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
      • not_a_cop75 7y ago
• gwbas1c 7y ago
  I'm of the opinion that if we suppress it, it doesn't go away. When it comes back, it's much harder to control. I also firmly believe that everyone has biases and inclinations that are morally wrong. The sooner we learn how to deal with the "good guys" unfair biases, the sooner we can figure out how to deal with the "bad guys" too.
  • ZoidbergWill 7y ago
    The already radicalised don't go away, but de-platforming does help. Sure, there are some alternatives that are harder to restrict and monitor, like if all the radicals move to private Telegram groups or the dark web or something. However all the vulnerable people at risk of being radicalised are less likely to be radicalised if they're using a similar forum to 8chan but without all the white supremacist and other hateful memes and "jokes", that obviously have radicalised a lot of people. Even if most people just scroll past them.
    • shdh 7y ago
      > The already radicalised don't go away, but de-platforming does help. It helps prevent the on-boarding of people who can be potentially radicalized. There is also plenty of astroturfing also going on in this message boards by entities that want to cause chaos.
  • hashmap 7y ago
    > I'm of the opinion that if we suppress it, it doesn't go away. When it comes back, it's much harder to control. The available evidence says the opposite is true. http://comp.social.gatech.edu/papers/cscw18-chand-hate.pdf http://comp.social.gatech.edu/papers/cscw18-chand-hate.pdf The way to deal with the "bad guys" is for private businesses to not give them a platform to spew their hate from. And it's up to us to pressure these private businesses to do that.
    • davesmith1983 7y ago
      The "bad guys" just went somewhere else. This doesn't fix the problem it just pushed the problem away from reddit. > And it's up to us to pressure these private businesses to do that. No it isn't. I am fed up of something I like being ruined by moral busy bodies such as yourself. My friend and I like the "edgy" jokes because we work in environments where you have to be political correct and I need to let off some steam. 8chan isn't the problem. The problem is that large portions of the population aren't engaged in society at large. The is a huge problem with loneliness, suicide and general lack of meaning to life. Censorship and harassing companies that run image board won't fix the problem. All you will do it hide it.
• commanderjroc 7y ago
  I guess you could say that free speech has limits that are acceptable. You know you can't yell fire in a crowded room and not get litigation and charges brought against you. So, maybe 8chan just ran past the fine line of hate speech vs encouraging acts of hate. I.e you can be racist but you cannot encourage acts of extremism. If 8Chan was a breeding ground for Islamic Extremists would people be okay with still existing?
  • yhamv 7y ago
    >If 8Chan was a breeding ground for Islamic Extremists would people be okay with still existing? Depends on whether those people support free speech or not.
    • tombert 7y ago
      Not the OP, but I think you're missing the point of the question; the question is about hypocrisy. I think the poster was trying to say "a lot of people who claim that they love free speech would suddenly become really uncomfortable with the idea of a breeding ground for Islamic Extremists".
    • falcrist 7y ago
      I don't think there's a contradiction between supporting freedom of expression and suggesting that such a freedom isn't absolute. There are limits, particularly when the use of that freedom treads on the freedoms of others. Even US law recognizes this. You're not allowed to invite violence or rioting for example. There are also rules about perjury, liable, and other things that directly limit freedom of expression. The real questions we should be asking here are where the line is between stating an opinion and inciting violence... And what should ISPs and edge providers be asked/allowed to do? Because not being forced to provide a platform for the speech of someone else may also be a valid freedom. If I come into your property and say things you don't like, are you allowed to ask me to leave? What if I put up a sign in my front yard? Can I take it down? IMO, we need neutrality regulations to protect ourselves from the corporations who control everything we see... But such neutrality regulations must necessarily include ISPs as well as edge providers. Otherwise they're worthless.
• yhamv 7y ago
  Voxility GmbH? Did they really move 8chan to Germany, a country with very restricted speech?
  • deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  • nik736 7y ago
    How would you even come to the conclusion that it would be a german company? They are HQd in Romania and only have a virtual office address in Frankfurt, for their GmbH.
• RandomTisk 7y ago
  I'm still waiting for a new platform to take the world by storm: The freedom of Gab, with sane content filtering options to make it look as tame as reddit so by default users don't see all the fringe crap, but lets them if they really want, right to the legal edge.
  • jredwards 7y ago
    People are not fringe will tend to abandon sites that embrace people who are, even tacitly. Sites that create havens for them will naturally tend to become sites that consist almost solely of them.
    • RandomTisk 7y ago
      That's been the status quo up until now, but it doesn't have to be. We're moving towards orwellian style censorship at a breakneck pace with SV leading the charge. Any violent thug can go spread their message in the town streets as long as they're not causing a disturbance. It doesn't happen very much, because it requires effort and it's sure to attract opposition. That opposition is necessary, like anti-bodies attacking an invading bacteria. By shutting out the harmful bacteria where anti-bodies can't reach them, they'll do nothing but grow and fester.
      • commanderjroc 7y ago
        >> Any violent thug can go spread their message in the town streets as long as they're not causing a disturbance. Are you saying that if person X goes out and starts calling for mass shootings to rid the world of Y, that they wouldn't be arrested?
        • RandomTisk 7y ago
          Not at all, I'm only referring to legal speech.
      • Thriptic 7y ago
        > That's been the status quo up until now, but it doesn't have to be. We're moving towards orwellian style censorship at a breakneck pace with SV leading the charge. Very few people actually want such a site arrangement. Believe it or not, I have no interest in interfacing with people who want to kill me unless they are open to honest and rational debate, which few are. One of the reasons I enjoy Hacker News is because I know won't have to deal with the type of people that will frequent the fringe elements of the style of site you are advocating for. Also, I'd hardly call a business led moratorium on speech advocating terrorism and genocide "moving towards Orwellian style censorship". Absolutely nothing is stopping these individuals from standing up their own server and hosting this content themselves. They aren't banned by an ISP. Moreover, business owners should be allowed to express their opinions too, including who to do business with.
• GrumpyNl 7y ago
  When will the same rules apply to other big companies. FB has never been taken down, and they have been streamig some questionable things. I know its a bit, but look at them. Im just struggeling with the feeling. I have only visisted 8chan a while a go to get a taste whats going on and its like all the other "free" boards, no moderators and it becomes a mess.
  • throwaway2048 7y ago
    Facebook actually makes an effort to curb people calling for and celebrating mass shootings.
  • ceejayoz 7y ago
    There's a major difference between "we take that stuff down, but aren't great at finding it" and "we outright refuse to take that stuff down".
  • einarfd 7y ago
    I'm one of the ones that believe that Facebook should be better at policing there content. But they do pull down manifestos from mass murders and have been doing that for a long time. The first instances of that I'm aware of is the manifesto of the guy behind the 2011 attack on Norway. As soon as FB figured out who he was and what happened. His page and his manifesto went down, never to come back up again. I'm sure they did similar things earlier than that too, but that one I payed a lot of attention too, and remember like it was yesterday.
  • 13415 7y ago
    What do you mean by rules? It was the company who decided this out of their free will.
• RappingBoomer 7y ago
  sad...another center of free speech stifled...
• danharaj 7y ago
  "I disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the deaths of others your right to say it." How many free speech absolutists have "skin in the game", or whatever? Every alternative to censorship suggested always puts the burden on the victimized. Like, "if you debate it in public you will defeat these bad ideas". Few who are free speech absolutists roll up their sleeves and volunteer to take the action they prescribe. Or, you have the sophists who believe free speech is the most important thing in the world but will deny that speech has any connection to its consequences. For example, separating the white nationalist rhetoric on 8chan from the white nationalist terrorism perpetrated by 8channers.
  • vorpalhex 7y ago
    It's not that speech doesn't have consequences. If speech had no consequences, it wouldn't be worth defending. Rather, it's that no man is fit to play the censor - not the Government which would censor political criticism of itself, not a king who would censor his opponents, nor even a billionaire who would censor the media when it spurns him. At the same time, if someone points a finger at you and shouts "I'm going to kill you", then we're getting outside of speech and into actions, and certainly actions can be prohibited. The question we have, really, is whether the content of 8chan was just speech (and therefore should be protected unless you buy into censorship) or crosses into actions (convincing someone to massacre immigrants). From what I've seen, 8chan certainly seems to be in the action category.
    • danharaj 7y ago
      What you say is reasonable, and is not free speech absolutist. This isn't a No True Scotsman sort of thing. There are people on this very forum who reject out of hand any question that 8chan should be censored. Another reply to my comment supposed my criticism means that the alternative is a Soviet surveillance state. Really?
      • throwaway542134 7y ago
        I think the point is more that there's nuance in preventing speech (like censorship) and punishing the actions as a result of speech. I get that some would call those the same thing. In the context of 8chan, I think there's a difference between allowing people to say whatever they want online and punishing the people that use that freedom to incite violence. The part where it gets blurry to me is the hateful rhetoric that doesn't directly call for violence, but the only logical conclusion of the position is genocidal or otherwise racial violence. Talking about "invaders" or "American cities under foreign occupation" for example.
• yters 7y ago
  A lot of these mass shooters (and a number of serial killers) quote social Darwinism nonsense as inspiration. I wonder why that ideological portion is not being dealt with more. I hear social Darwinism ideas fairly frequently in everyday conversations with people, like casual lunch conversations.
  • Sonnol53 7y ago
    So what makes them think that they are superior to others and it tips them in conducting mass shootings?
    • yters 7y ago
      It's a twisted tautology. They are the ones shooting, which makes them in their mind the predator and superior being.
    • cat199 7y ago
      .. not to mention that most mass shooters don't have children and end up shot during the situation..
      • yters 7y ago
        It is not individual Darwinism but social Darwinism. They think they are part of a superior race, and so it does not matter as much what happens to them individually.
  • codesushi42 7y ago
    I hear social Darwinism ideas fairly frequently in everyday conversations with people, like casual lunch conversations. Really? I guess I can believe this. I wish I didn't, but I have overheard plenty of bullshit over the years myself. Hell, there was a thread on HN awhile back with posters essentially advocating for eugenics and the mods here didn't blink an eye. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20542738 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20542738 ITT: "Eugenics were crushed with violence, they weren't actually disproved." A ton of thinly veiled arguments for Social Darwinism and selective breeding in that thread. Disgusting. Yet the mods let it go.
• commandlinefan 7y ago
  I’m old enough to remember when Howard Stern, as quaint as that seems today, was considered one of the greatest threats to civilization and had to be “de-platformed” before he could successfully destroy society - and the reasoning they used against him was _exactly_ the same as this reasoning: “he, himself (8chan, itself) is not going out and doing horrible things, but he’s encouraging people to go out and do horrible things, so he (it) must be shut down”.
  • atonse 7y ago
    Oh yea? Howard Stern was encouraging mass murder? Something that isn't, nor has EVER been protected speech?
    • Donald 7y ago
      The call-in segments on Stern's show have been frequently used as a platform for extreme and fringe positions, including calls for violence. Through the mid 90s, these came from Stern himself, although he has matured and tempered with time. See these examples: https://nypost.com/2000/08/16/howard-stern-caller-busted-in-lieberman-death-threat/ https://nypost.com/2000/08/16/howard-stern-caller-busted-in-... (2000s; a caller threatens to kill Senator Lieberman on air) https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/665af0/til_that_howard_stern_mocked_selena_quintanilla/ https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/665af0/til_t... (Mid 90s; Stern plays gunshots during a Selena song) https://variety.com/2014/voices/columns/howard-sterns-white-supremacist-interview-suddenly-doesnt-look-so-funny-1201157977/ https://variety.com/2014/voices/columns/howard-sterns-white-... (Stern books the Overland Park Jewish Community Center shooter) https://www.howardstern.com/show/2016/10/24/ronnie-limo-driver-mund-makes-veiled-threats-against-brent-hatley-twitter/ https://www.howardstern.com/show/2016/10/24/ronnie-limo-driv... (2016 Twitter spat with implied threats of violence with Stern-affiliated staff)
  • jredwards 7y ago
    I think there's a pretty big gap between making dick jokes and encouraging mass murder.
• freen 7y ago
  Your regular reminder that only a government can censor. The rest of us can decide we really don't want to publish Nazi propaganda.
• not_a_cop75 7y ago
  Communism now.
  • vorpalhex 7y ago
    How would that help the situation?
    • not_a_cop75 7y ago
      Just summing up the paradigm of needing to control the masses by preventing people from doing things that people will inevitably do. You can't stop people from talking. You can stop people from talking publicly. People will break and do harm to others, but having a vehicle to know what that harm might be in advance is invaluable.
      • vorpalhex 7y ago
        Society would be much easier to control if we simply kept all the people in cages and let them out occasionally to work for the good of the people. On the other hand, it wouldn't be much of a society now, would it?
        • not_a_cop75 7y ago
          That is entirely my point. Thank you. On the other hand, we're already in cages. The difference is that in modern society, nobody realizes they are caged. That makes all the difference.
          • Retra 7y ago
            This cage metaphor really doesn't work when the 'cage' is big enough to allow international travel completely within its confines.
  • deleted 7y ago
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  • 7y ago
• Alex3917 7y ago
  IMHO this reflects poorly on CloudFlare. The supreme court has ruled time and time again that the right to free speech implies the right to be heard. While CloudFlare obviously isn't legally required to serve 8chan, the only service they are really providing is making it so that 8chan can't be DDOS'd. And DDOS'ing is very clearly a tactic that violates the first amendment. So really by no longer serving 8chan, the only thing they are doing is allowing and/or encouraging others to violate 8chan's constitutional rights. It reminds me a lot of Charlottesville, where people showed up to try to shout over the white nationalists and it just ended up with a bunch of people getting run over by a car. As if something like that happening wasn't entirely predictable. If 8chan is inciting violence or doing other things not covered by the first amendment then it should be the government's job to police that.
  • atonse 7y ago
    The First Amendment is completely irrelevant to this situation. No relation whatsoever. CloudFlare is a private company.
    • commandlinefan 7y ago
      When Facebook and Twitter started de-platforming right-wing types like Alex Jones and Milo Yannopoulis, the actions-of-a-private-company-are-beyond-criticism types immediately defended them with “it’s not like they’re being thrown off the internet entirely - they can always create their own websites!” Well now, they are being thrown off the internet entirely. And a disturbingly large number of people think this is a positive thing.
      • aqme28 7y ago
        But they're not being thrown off the internet entirely! There are other services they can create or use (voat, gab). The internet itself is still open for them to use.
        • commandlinefan 7y ago
• grawprog 7y ago
  The problem with 8chan is, it's not a cohesive whole. Each board is individually ran and the global moderators won't get involved unless it's content that's blatantly illegal. Not all boards there are the same. Not all the people there are the same. The problem is the hateful supremicists all congregate there. /pol/ is the board where most of them hang out. Other boards have nothing to do with politics and have completely different kinds of people that post there. There's even a /leftypol/ devoted to leftist politics that contains no white supremicists.
  • anthonybsd 7y ago
    >There's even a /leftypol/ devoted to leftist politics that contains no white supremicists. Leftypol is not devoted to "leftist politics", it's a counterpart to /pol which stands for "politically incorrect". /leftypol by extension is politically incorrect that curved to the left. In reality /leftypol and /pol are not that dissimilar. Both attract off-the-rocker crazy conspiracy-theory types the likes of QAnon. If you looked at /leftypol during say attempted coup in Venezuela the content you would have encountered would have been just as offensive as /pol.
  • irvwash 7y ago
    > Each board is individually ran and the global moderators won't get involved unless it's content that's blatantly illegal. That's true for almost every other board, but /pol/ isn't individually run. It was seized by the site administration, and they make its rules.
• A4ET8a8uTh0 7y ago
  I am genuinely upset over this. And that is after CEO pinky swears he will not do it in the future. It will be that much easier to do it now that there is a precedent. I doubt he does not know it. I think.. I think I will be starting free speech focused entity. Like NRA. Laser focus. No restrictions on free speech of any kind. Ever. This may be the only thing to prevent US from losing its list of temporary priviledges.
  • iooi 7y ago
    Even CP? I don't think you've thought this all the way through.
    • steve1011 7y ago
      that is not free speech though, that is explicitly illegal.
  • favorited 7y ago
    > No restrictions on free speech of any kind I'm not aware of any country which allows for speech with "no restrictions"
    • A4ET8a8uTh0 7y ago
      I am saying. Like with NRA's second amendment, absolutist position must be taken since compromise clearly does not work.
  • Daishiman 7y ago
    We're so glad you consider that more important than the continued shootings that only the US seems to suffer from on a frequent and permanent basis. That free speech is sure making a lot of people free right.
    • A4ET8a8uTh0 7y ago
      Freedom of speech IS more important than few dead people. This entire country was founded on this particular issue. People went to war for it. So there is no need to be glib here.
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• CydeWeys 7y ago
  We wouldn't tolerate the existence of an Islamist site that glorified and helped perpetrate mass incidents of terror against our society. What 8chan is doing is exactly the same, minus the Islamist part, yet there's hypocrisy in how they're treated vs e.g. the social media wing of ISIS. These people are trying to kill as many of us as possible. In no way should society accept it. It's simple societal self-defense. Root out the terrorists wherever they may congregate, regardless of whichever flavor of terrorist they happen to be.
  • rory096 7y ago
    Cloudflare provides services to a number of Islamist terror organizations: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/cloudflare-cybersecurity-terrorist-groups_n_5c127778e4b0835fe3277f2f https://www.huffpost.com/entry/cloudflare-cybersecurity-terr...
    • magicalist 7y ago
      > Cloudflare provides services to a number of Islamist terror organizations yes, and that entire article is about people trying to get them to take them down and the criminal statute they're using to force the issue, which is part of the GP's point. Not a lot of folks in the federal government hand wringing about deplatforming on that one.
      • DuskStar 7y ago
        And yet, Cloudflare didn't take them down proactively like they did with The Daily Stormer and now 8chan. Under what standards are sites like 8chan worse than the Taliban?
        • mcguire 7y ago
          Proactively?
          • DuskStar 7y ago
• miguelmota 7y ago
  Just like how we pull weeds in gardens all year round; deplatforming will remove majority of these users with undesirable qualities.
  • h2odragon 7y ago
    Right, all those people who were having fun on 8chan will now see the error of their ways, take up sensitivity training, and post only non-controversial things where ever they land next.
    • ausbah 7y ago
      No, but if they don't have an easily accessible platform their message can't spread.
      • mythrwy 7y ago
        If only the internet wasn't an international phenomenon that anyone anywhere can build upon.
        • ausbah 7y ago
          It is, but governments can exercise extreme control over the internet 99% of the population receives.
      • jtx22 7y ago
        If you think you can stall the flow of information on the internet, I have some bad news for you.
    • happytoexplain 7y ago
      What are you using hyperbole to communicate? Can you be more explicit?
      • deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
• throwaway_this 7y ago
  A couple of facts about the this event: - Voxility's actions are admirable given the nature of the content hosted on 8chan; - I can't say much about Epik's services; - Voxility is absolutely the worst of the worst. The content nature and their shady 'business practices' are an absolute abomination. They do a lot of spam and 'transit' a lot of shady traffic. - Their technical support team is shit; - The owner of the (google it) is a crook.
• deleted 7y ago
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• DrDimension 7y ago
  The truth is that information does not radicalize people - censorship does. That's why the channers are as radicalized as they are - they've been censored everywhere else. Censor their last remaining outlets and you will increase violence by orders of magnitude.
  • lovehashbrowns 7y ago
    How is that true? You'd expect radicalization to decrease on 8chan since that was clearly not censoring them..
  • joshypants 7y ago
    Um no. The reason these people hate and want to kill immigrants is not because they've been censored. Grow up.
  • jredwards 7y ago
    I'm not sure how one arrives at that conclusion. I don't think either of these things is what radicalizes people.
  • happytoexplain 7y ago
    >The truth is that information does not radicalize people I'd be fascinated by an attempt to elaborate on this frankly incredible statement.
    • DrDimension 7y ago
      Please give me one example of true information that would radicalize a person.
  • deleted 7y ago
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• EGreg 7y ago
  Let me start by stating my views on free speech and rights in general, and then how they are shaped by these events. I think that human rights and freedoms are just that: personal freedoms. Freedom of religion is about personal religious observance without harming others. These freedoms philosophically should not mean entitlement to unlimited exercise thereof. The right to bear arms doesn’t mean you should be able able to stockpile unlimited amounts of ammunition and incendiary devices etc. Similarly, FREEDOM of speech to me is a PERSONAL human freedom. You can say what you want, and not be punished by the government for it. You can say it in a car, you can say it in a bar, you can say it very far, you can wish upon a star. But there are limits to how many people can hear you. Maybe 10 or 100 people at an event. Once you get into situations where 5,000,000 people can hear a tweet, that’s clearly not about FREEDOM of speech in its strict sense. It is about entitlement to use a PLATFORM, maintained by an ORGANIZATION that involves many people, to broadcast arbitrary, unfiltered one-to-many messages to everyone. I think this latter thing is toxic, in both directions. Society listening to tweets of celebrities cheapens public discussion and civic thought. And being reachable by the whole world using email (rather than through networks of shared invited/capabilities) leads to constant spam and papparazzi for celebrities. What happened here is an ORGANIZATION put on a show or movie and catapulted this celebrity into the limelight and carefully maintains their stature, along with their own publicists, social media team on twitter, etc. This is the society we live in, where we have heroes. But entitlement to unlimited unfiltered megaphones is NOT the same as freedom of speech, any more than being a leader if a paramilitary group of unlimited size is the same as the right to bear arms. So, freedoms and rights have limits. Where those limits lie is the heap paradox - as you take away grains, when is a heap no longer a heap? etc. So what is the alternative to this type of misnamed “free speech” aka megaphones run by organizations, super PACs, mainstream media, and so on? It is COLLABORATION. Look at Wikipedia. Look at peer reviewed journals and science. Look at large open source projects There, individual contributions are filtered and often butt up against changes, revisions, etc. The result is that when the general public sees something, it is the result of a collaborative process of filtering and refining the presentation of information, citing sources, etc. There are no heroes on wikipedia, and only a few in science and open source. Most contributions are filtered by a community of experts, not state governments or platforms employing boiler rooms of low paid workers to determine what’s true. I would like to see more of that COLLABORATION and less of COMPETITION. I would like to see a patentleft movement in drug research, instead of big pharma. I would like to see news reported like Wikipedia with footage submitted by everyday people on the ground instead of “intrepid reporters in a warzone”. CNN used to have a motto that they have “no celebrities”. News agencies tried to stay lukewarm and neutral. FOX News changed the game, lots of people copied the model. The Internet eliminated newspapers and classifieds. News had to adapt because capitalism and cutthroat competition for the same ad dollars means MORE clickbait and MORE lockin to one type of audience. For-profit Social networks further use this content to herd us into echo chambers of outrage, because that’s what drives the most engagement, which the social networks need to monetize. They send notifications in an increasingly desperate attempt to grab your attention in a tragedy of the commons where the commons is our attention. This has had a corrosive effect on society. The capitalist (competition based) news has made us more polarized and outraged, while the capitalist (competition based) social networks have made us more addicted to our notification slot machine, with smaller attention spans and self control, responding to that stranger on the internet over that latest outrage. THIS is the culture that leads to more mass shootings. The fact that we have giant platforms instead of peer to peer is another problem. By banning extremist people from platforms, a platform can pop up which attracts the worst extremists, and feeds them. This platform should ABSOLUTELY be a honeypot for the FBI to watch these people. In our world of centralized platforms, Platforms like this should be RUN by the FBI. Instead, our government takes the wrong approach. They shut down the Craigslist and Backpage hookers sections instead of using them to entrap and catch traffickers. Then they threaten large platforms with SESTA (2018) when they should be the ones catching the people who are out there. The platforms should be honeypots! Anyway. So although I feel my stance is correct, and beneficial to society, there are three practical problems with it: 1. First Amendment is not interpreted as I do. In fact Citizens United even allowed our politics to be run by PACs with huge money and megaphones (although nonprofits could have always done that). So legally my literal understanding of limits of freedoms is not matching the traditional ones (slander, yelling fire etc.) 2. This may be the more serious one. As we have more end to end encryption and better personal technology, all well-meaning ideas about limits of freedom of speech and arms melt away. Imagine Alex Jones on SAFE Network with 1,000,000 people subscribed to his encrypted feed. Or imagine 3d printed guns from illegally shared 3d models, stored in 10% of the homes in NYC. Can’t stop people using a turing complete language to turn out banned material. 3. Even with numerical limits on each person’s audience, a hateful message can attract people who make plans to use technology to asymetrically perpetrate criminal acts. And end-to-end encryption means we won’t know what they’re saying. However, I believe that if we took the freedoms in the way I defined them, and moved to collaborative platforms instead of competitive ones, our society’s health would measurably improve.
• LargeWu 7y ago
  Can any free speech absolutists explain to me the legitimate public interest that is served by allowing terrorist breeding grounds like 8chan to continue to operate?
  • piker 7y ago
    Reducing the subjective evaluation of the content of private citizens' speech. [Edit: Why would you down-vote? That's the legitimate interest on the other side of the balance. It's not an opinion on the merit of shutting down 8chan. In this case, the benefit in permitting this speech may be grossly outweighed by the benefit of stopping it, but the benefit in allowing 8chan to continue to exist is non-zero. In its most nefarious use, subjective elimination of speech to subvert the speech's goal is commonly known as "censorship".]
    • sagichmal 7y ago
      It is both the right and responsibility of every member of a civil society to make ethical judgments about what kind of society they want to create. Free speech is a means to achieve those ends, and not an end in itself.
      • SkyBelow 7y ago
        It can be an end itself if you find that any limits are prone enough to corruption to not be tolerated. Take encryption. It is used for some of the most vile evil content that exists on the internet. But I support encryption because I know that any limits on it will soon be corrupted by those in power to use for reasons far less just than ending the aforementioned content. Thus I see enabling encryption as an end to itself regardless of how it is used because I see any society that does differently as inferior.
        • sagichmal 7y ago
          > It can be an end itself if you find that any limits are prone enough to corruption to not be tolerated. I understand that some people see things that way. And I'm saying that it's an insufficient, naïve, and (in our zeitgeist) actually unethical position.
• paganel 7y ago
  Didn’t know 8chan hosted their stuff at Voxility, it’s a small world. I’m saying this because Voxility is a Romanian company, I am Romanian, and my company used to also host our stuff at their premises until 3 or 4 years ago. I remember that on one of my visits there (there was always a hard-drive that needed to be handed in person or something like that) I’m 100% sure that I had bumped into what looked to be an FBI team inspecting some of the machines in there. I’m saying FBI but they could also have been the the US Secret Service or whatever agency is in charge with protecting US citizens against online bad things, in any case, the people I saw inspecting stuff were definetely people working for the US government, you could tell by their pants and the way they matched (or, better yet, how they didn’t match) with their white snickers. All this to say that I’m pretty sure that the US 3-letter agencies had direct physical access to the 8chan servers, not sure how they let all this get so out of control.
  • thinkalone 7y ago
    I think they only switched to Epik/Voxility for a few hours after being kicked off Cloudflare, but I'm not familiar with where they would have been hosted or what services they used 3-4 years ago.
  • goda90 7y ago
    They could have been using it as a honeypot. Or they were going after something very specific with a limited warrant.
  • cbg0 7y ago
    This wild speculation of yours is based on how the "agent's" pants matched their "snickers" ?
    • paganel 7y ago
      They spoke American English and a couple of days after that there were a couple of news reports about the US authorities having come to Romania in order to catch some Internet bad guys, so after the fact I just put 2 and 2 together. And believe it or not an American person usually stands out when outside of the States (and maybe a few other European Western countries), it’a like porn, difficult to put down in words but you know it when you see it.
• tepidandroid 7y ago
  My opinion is that freedom of speech is a fine ideal to strive for, but it relies on having a stable society with some minimum level of education (moral and philosophical too, not just the technical kind). It requires people who are able to fully parse the implications of what they are hearing to make sound and rational judgements on the rejection of an idea or the embrace of it. It creates a moral duty for the people who are listening to not only reject, but to actively push back against ideals which are universally understood to be reprehensible. The concept of freedom of speech falls apart if universally reprehensible speech is allowed to be publicaly espoused without being firmly challenged. Forums like 8chan and 4chan effectively incubate hate speech by providing a safe space for anonymized, like-minded individuals to congregate, espouse their basest thoughts and feelings and receive gratification for it -all without challenge. Moderate people are repulsed by such forums and the quantity of hate-speech they generate, which further compounds the negative feedback loop. Unchecked extremism compounded by more unchecked extremism inevitably leads to scenarios like the ones we’re witnessing more and more often.
  • slg 7y ago
    >The concept of freedom of speech falls apart if universally reprehensible speech is allowed to be publicaly espoused without being firmly challenged. Forums like 8chan and 4chan effectively incubate hate speech by providing a safe space for anonymized, like-minded individuals to congregate, espouse their basest thoughts and feelings and receive gratification for it -all without challenge. Moderate people are repulsed by such forums and the quantity of hate-speech they generate, which further compounds the negative feedback loop. These boards do more than allow this hate to fester. They allow hate to grow as they become a recruiting ground that can radicalize people who never would have fallen into this mindset without these boards. 8chan might be compartmentalized in a way that allows it to become an echo chamber of hate, but it also is highly connect to boards about general topics like video games, TV, and movies. This normalizes the hate and it becomes just another thing to talk about. I would bet a small minority of people who spew hateful things on 8chan sought the site out because of their own hate. Maybe they went there to talk about the new Call of Duty game. Before too long they are ingrained in the whole Gamergate mindset. Then they eventual start hanging out on /pol and before you know it they are a full fledged white nationalist. (A similar thing has been reported about Youtube's recommendation algorithm [1]) This wouldn't happen if the hateful sections of 8chan were sectioned off into their own site. No one accidentally stumbles upon The Daily Stormer and becomes a white nationalist. Just visiting that site genuinely requires a predilection towards hate and a sympathetic ear to white nationalism. [1] - https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/06/08/technology/youtube-radical.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/06/08/technology/yo...
• anewguy9000 7y ago
  meanwhile, to us canadians, it's painfully obvious that the problem isn't websites, but guns. curbing free speech is not going to solve this problem for you.
  • Theodores 7y ago
    It is always something else. If it wasn't 8chan it would be 4chan. If it wasn't 4chan it would be video games. If it wasn't video games it would be video nasties. If it wasn't video nasties it would be drugs. Anything except the guns. Interesting how the U.S. President can say how he wants the perpetrators executed. There is a whole culture of killing just south of that border of yours.
  • g00s3_caLL_x2 7y ago
    https://dailycaller.com/2015/10/12/remember-the-2007-harvard-study-showing-more-guns-led-to-less-crime/ https://dailycaller.com/2015/10/12/remember-the-2007-harvard... It's interesting that the link that was @ Harvard with a pdf of the results (that Harvard published...) is now a broken link. Here is a working copy: https://www.garymauser.net/pdf/KatesMauserHJPP.pdf https://www.garymauser.net/pdf/KatesMauserHJPP.pdf Gary Mauser who is also a Candadian criminologist. Interesting indeed. https://www.sfu.ca/~mauser/ https://www.sfu.ca/~mauser/
    • anewguy9000 7y ago
      That link should be flagged. "This would explain why shootings occur in “gun free zone” schools and movie theaters rather than in police stations or gun clubs." Seriously HN?
      • deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
      • g00s3_caLL_x2 7y ago
        "That's like...your opinion..man" - The Dude.
    • 7y ago
• Meekro 7y ago
  When I was much younger, I remember being filled with wonder when I learned about the Skokie case[1], where the ACLU went to court to protect the rights of Nazis to hold a rally in a mostly-Jewish town. "Wait, they faced down criticism from every direction, and took a massive loss in donations, to stand up for the fundamental rights of people they despise? Is this what liberals do? I want to be a liberal!" Sadly, if that happened today they'd probably say something about not tolerating intolerance and side with the government to shut them down. [1] https://www.aclu.org/other/aclu-history-taking-stand-free-speech-skokie https://www.aclu.org/other/aclu-history-taking-stand-free-sp...
  • sagichmal 7y ago
    Not sadly, but hopefully! Free speech absolutism is a maladaptive local optima. Free speech isn’t an end in itself, it’s a means, a tool, that every society must use to create just and ethical outcomes.
    • DuskStar 7y ago
      And the reason we had free speech absolutism was that no one should be able to dictate what the proper "just and ethical outcomes" should be. Is today's morality the end of all things? By locking down speech, what developments will we prevent?
      • sagichmal 7y ago
        > No one should be able to dictate what the proper "just and ethical outcomes" should be Not only is every human _able_ to dictate what "just and ethical outcomes" are, we're _obliged_ to, if we intend to form civil society. > Is today's morality the end of all things? No, of course not. Everyone is obliged to continuously engage in the conversation, to push the course of all society away from suffering and toward justice.
        • DuskStar 7y ago
          > No, of course not. Everyone is obliged to continuously engage in the conversation, to push the course of all society away from suffering and toward justice. Well how the fuck are you supposed to be able to do this if all wrongthink is banned? Because things like "women are equal to men", "race doesn't matter", "slavery is wrong", etc were most certainly wrongthink to begin with.
• romaaeterna 7y ago
  If we're going to have internet censorship, I don't want it to be a backroom thing. It needs to be transparent, auditable, appealable, with bright line rules and due process guarantees. It's unfortunate if we need to live with some level of censorship. But I don't accept it being carried out in back rooms by unaccountable companies operating hand-in-hand with illegal DDoS attacks. Put it out there in the open, and let's have a legal democratic process around it that tries to guarantee some amount of fairness and attempts to give the weak protection from the strong.
  • idlewords 7y ago
    Speaking as someone who runs a public site with the discretion to ban accounts, no thanks. Due process means people will game your policies. We've had arbitrary internet censorship by site operators since day 1 and it works pretty well.
    • romaaeterna 7y ago
      Nobody is talking about your discussion forum. Rather this is an issue for internet backbone companies like AWS or Cloudflare. If any of these groups wants to get into the censorship business, I want them to do it in a heavily regulated environment than guarantees accountability, transparency, bright line rules, right to appeal, and due process. Same for ISPs (many of us fought hard for net neutrality for this reason). And I feel the same if the large platform monopoly companies like Google, Facebook, or Twitter, want to be in the censorship business. Not regulating their censorship practices is incompatible with us keeping democratic government for very much longer.
    • Karunamon 7y ago
      >Due process means people will game your policies. And? If your policies are liable to being "gamed", then either your policies or your enforcement is insufficient. And I say this with a pretty good deal of forum moderation experience. When you find something that your objectively defined rules miss, you update your rules appropriately and continue on. Life as a mod is about a million times easier, for both you and your users, when you minimize the amount of judgment calls on edge cases that have to be made.
• o_p 7y ago
  This is a ridiculous witchhunt, 8chan is a platform for many different boards with different opinions, the media framing it as a right-wing white supremacist forum makes wonder if its ignorance or malice, /leftypol/ is probably as big as the /pol/ boogeyman, and thats just politics which is just a part of the rest of the boards. No one is asking to close Facebook because Tarrant uploaded his shooting video there, why it would be any different in this case?
  • idlewords 7y ago
    The media will tend to focus on the part of any site that promotes and radicalizes participants into mass murder. Facebook, as you know, moved extremely aggressively to remove the NZ shooting video, along with other extremist content. Basically Facebook employs a raft of people to prevent the thing that 8chan was trying to encourage.
    • o_p 7y ago
      Again, 8chan is not one person, most users dont encourage this at all because it brings problems like exactly this one. Its the price of a truly free platform, sadly it seems americans hate freedom. In the practical sense, I doubt this will counter shootings at all, intelligence services had them contained in a single board, now they will just spill around the internet.
  • happytoexplain 7y ago
    Do you have much experience with the chans? I've spent an embarrassing amount of time on them over the years, and my experience is that it would be ridiculous to compare the ratios of politically hateful, extremist content to normal content between Facebook and the chans. The difference is night and day. The chans are full of great, diverse content, but an absolutely solid core of their identity is inevitably dominated by the worst elements of society at any given time - it's just inevitable due to the nature of the format and rules.
    • o_p 7y ago
      If we are worried about hateful propaganda the ratio is not really a relevant measure, the chans have a small user base compared to social networks, propaganda in Facebook could have a massive reach, thats a bigger risk than a fringe group in their own circlejerk, people are just irrationally attacking what they dont know about, for fear and/or pushing the agenda.
• boramalper 7y ago
  What people (seemingly) fail to realise is that neither Cloudflare is the Internet nor Voxility is a public infrastructure. They are private enterprises which are free to act in however they want with regards to the service they provide as laid out in their contract. That is the danger of centralisation; when they remove their service, it feels as if your rights has been violated because (a) you have been so used to them (b) you cannot exist without them practically. Now imagine it resurrecting on IPFS/Dat/..., where every visitor could "pin" the website.
  • piker 7y ago
    > What people (seemingly) fail to realise is that neither Cloudflare is the Internet nor Voxility is a public infrastructure. Everyone realizes that. We're past relying on the First Amendment argument.
    • ulkesh 7y ago
      > Everyone realizes that. Based on some of the posts in this thread, I disagree.
      • Karunamon 7y ago
        There are a lot of people in this thread that don't seem to understand the difference between the law and the principle. The first amendment law protects the principle. It doesn't create it. While these hosts might not be in violation of any law, they are absolutely acting contrary to the principle of free speech.
        • throwanem 7y ago
          "The laws of necessity, of self-preservation, of saving our country when in danger, are of higher obligation. To lose our country by a scrupulous adherence to the written law, would be to lose the law itself, with life, liberty, property and all those who are enjoying them with us; thus absurdly sacrificing the ends to the means."
• mythrwy 7y ago
  This might be an unpopular opinion for those who view more rules as the answer. Banning (or discontinuing or deplatforming or whatever you want to call it) may do little but harden the resolve of key ideologues of whatever stripe. For them, it leads credence to the idea that there is conspiracy against the group afoot. Besides, when has banning actually been effective? Sure, it may reduce manifestation and reduce recruitment, but drugs and spam pretty much show wack-a-mole is not really an effective policy. That's to say nothing of the moral hazards of thought police determining who can say what. However it is obvious that leaving these kind of groups to echo chamber louder and more extreme, egging each other on also leads to bad outcomes. Perhaps a solution may be proactive counter speech. Some sort of volunteer regiment or something that finds where these sorts congregate and offers counterpoints to violent idiocy. Obviously flat out threats or calls to action are crimes in and of themselves and should be treated as such. This would be a pretty thankless task because who wants to deal with this type of idiocy and darkness all day? But I think it could be more effective if properly done than banning as far as changing minds and hearts, especially before people get sucked too far down echo chambers and start seeing the world in a way it really isn't. Other people, smart people, articulate people, right there calling out wrongness, calling out stupidity, calling out misunderstanding, giving counterpoints, arguing for right action, this might be a more effective way to damp down the extremism.
  • dd36 7y ago
    The ideologues are already very well hardened. White supremacy isn’t a new ideology.
    • mythrwy 7y ago
      So we make more laws and rules which we hope we can actually enforce and hope the baddies dissipate into the ether? Chase them from reddit to 4-chan to 8-chan then have cloudflare ban 8-chan and proclaim "mission accomplished!"? I'm just saying I think the effective way to fix this is by breaking the echo chamber. With argument and knowledge and guidance and wit and mockery and whatever we have. Young males of this primate species need guidance and leadership and direction. They need answers. They are a pack dog really. Without someone there personally spanking them verbally when they get out line they apparently devolve into feral internet packs. But nobody (understandably) wants to deal with them nor put up with their abuse and trash, so they coagulate into places they can find direction and meaning. That is what I think needs to be addressed. Not trying to stamp out places, which I doubt will work long term. Nor most especially encouraging them to self filter into these packs.
• DrDimension 7y ago
  ATTENTION: This is a discussion thread about CENSORSHIP. Please stop using the DOWN VOTE feature against everyone makes a case against censorship - it's simply too ironic, and only goes to show that there is no limit to the censorial impulse. THANK YOU!
  • deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
• cfv 7y ago
  The invisible hand of the market seems to know what shame is. Good.
• Smithalicious 7y ago
  This once again goes to show that you can do nothing illegal and still be virtually locked out of the internet. The viewpoint that "it's okay to kick 8chan off the internet" is not consistent with the viewpoint that "the internet should be neutral infrastructure". Take from that what you will. People are doing the "yada yada not entitled to a platform" thing, but the distinction between free speech and having a platform is meaningless in reality. It's like saying "you can say anything you want, but we won't let you use the atmosphere to propagate the sound waves". We now live in a society where it is acceptable for private companies to essentially completely ban individuals from exercising their free speech on the internet. The canary in the coalmine was The Daily Stormer; all the content there would be considered very objectionable and completely without merit by any remotely sensible person, so few people complained about it being shut down. Then came Gab and such. Now it's 8chan, which last time I checked still had more posts about video games and anime than about politics. Make no mistake, sites you use will be next. /r/the_donald is already quarantined. Youtube and Twitter have gotten much more aggressive with their moderation too. We need to allow people on the edges of the spectrum to say what they want even if it is without merit. Extreme speech is what prevents normal speech from being censored. More than anything we can not allow random internet companies to be de-facto lawmakers and speech police by controlling who is allowed to say things on the internet.
  • jordigh 7y ago
    It's fine, we can get rid of the bad. It's not impossible to tell good and bad apart, so we don't need to keep the bad if we also want the good. The slopes are not that slippery. Germany isn't a dystopian hell-hole because they banned Nazism.
    • sneak 7y ago
      No, Germany is a dystopian hell-hole because the taxes are insane and collected without consent, the free and unrestricted private ownership of arms by Jews is still prohibited by the German state, and the entirety of the society is heavily surveilled by the BND. Also, video games and other harmless expressions of art are subject to prior restraint, if you wish to nonviolently depict violence. It’s insane. I call it the invisible dystopia: it is transparent to 99% of human beings who do nothing exceptional or out of the ordinary. Only when you start to challenge the status quo does it begin to affect you, like a prison with invisible walls.
• patientplatypus 7y ago
  So I've posted before about how bad this is, and been flagged and downvoted, which sort of proves the point - this is not an open platform for the exchange of ideas in the same way a chan board is. However, rather than reiterate my previous points, let me pose a question. Where are all the angry young men going to go to now? Will the problem become worse because now people with mental health issues have no place else to form community? I feel we are in uncharted territory and keep trying to fix the symptoms of a broken society rather than the cause. Make no mistake, what these young people did was sick and wrong. But they were social "losers" that no one helped or cared for. Because that costs time, money, and "sharing" social capital. By which I mean sometimes you've got to let the little guy win, because humans are social animals and we're hard wired to desire "fairness". And our society doesn't promote fairness and fraternity. The US, as a culture, just does not give a shit about the little guy. You want the shootings to stop? Start giving people more than McJobs, make mental health professionals cheap and accessible, start trying to gasp figure out how to get incels laid. Do we do any of that? Fuck no. Society makes fun of nerdy anti-social people, because it makes people feel big to put others down. Sometimes I feel like I'm living in the land of the crazy people...
• ergothus 7y ago
  Free speech is a fascinating debate to me. When I was younger, I was a free speech absolutist. I believed in rationality and that if you couldn't defend/oppose ideas then your position had no strength. Censorship was a sign of weakness. Even clearly "good" censorship (say, banning child porn) has problematic boundaries. Now...I'm far less confident. I still believe in rationality, but I also see clear weaknesses in human's ability to process. Rationality emerges over time, not in the moment. Speech isn't just ideas, it's emotion. It creates social pressure, fears, threats. And humans are social creatures. Even this forum is chock-ful of signaling patterns and inclusion. These aren't personal failures, but human facts - to be without these would be to dissolve the functions that make us form communities - to remove the items that make us NOT be "defectors" (to signal). We have to trust others, or we'll spend all our time verifying all the information we get and never accomplish anything. But this introduces the ability for others to exploit this. Speech has never been inherently good nor bad, and thus "free speech" is also neither inherently good nor bad. It is just a force multiplier for whatever you try to do. And "good" speech can't be solely dedicated to battling "bad" speech if it wants to achieve any change, while bad speech achieves its goals just by existing, or even by demanding the attention of those giving "good" speech. An inherent imbalance. In the big picture, this all shakes out over time. The good speech investigates and explores ideas. Bad speech is beaten. Speech in the middle helps ensure that the "good" speech really is good, and periodic bouts of bad speech help the system enforce the boundaries that move everything in a healthy-for-society direction. But to zoom out to that level is to ignore all the suffering such a system entails. "You can't have a society that is afraid of hurting feelings!" free speech advocates will cry out...correctly. Some amount of suffering is unavoidable. Pick any arbitrary line between restricted speech and unrestricted speech and it's easy to see that people will suffer as a result. But that does not mean that we should automatically accept that unrestricted speech is the answer. That we should be blind to all the suffering that IS happening because we fear the suffering that MIGHT happen. Or perhaps unrestricted speech IS the answer...but a lot more of us need to be calling out for the societal responsibilities. Free speech is a powerful tool, and like any tool should be used wisely. If we aren't calling people out for using it poorly, but are calling out people for any attempt to restrict it, we're empowering only one side of the equation. But that gets into a circular argument, because if you replace government restrictions with social ones, you have the same result - restricted speech. I don't know where I stand on this. The only thing I see clearly is that the number of people that seem to be seriously examining the issue is vanishingly small relative to the population.
• reilly3000 7y ago
  I think that is a travesty, and not for free speech reasons. Like many, I spent some time on the site this weekend. It was incredibly disturbing, but kind of inline of what some chan sites are about. I had an idea to try to mobilize some people to start spamming /pol/ with goodness. Pics of bunny rabbits and bible verses and MLK quotes. Anon is for all, but channers have intentionally scared off almost everybody else. If a massive amount of people meaningfully engaged with the board, started open discussions and appealed to reason, maybe some lives could be saved. Too bad its gone. Their community will simply move and dig in, and reaching them will be much harder.
• disease 7y ago
  I realize this may not be the best place to talk about it, but is there some good explanation for what seems to be a totally insatiable thirst for white supremacy in America these days? It seems to me like this is the real story here and, for the most part, it is not being covered in any real sense by either liberal, conservative or independent media.
  • syn0byte 7y ago
    The vested interest media and political parties have in making it seem like there is an insatiable thirst for white supremacy in America. It's on average not any worse than it ever was, but showing us how bad its always been right now serves a useful political goal in division and diversion. Its not a conspiracy, just stupidity and greed. Outrage generates views and votes, no cartel required.
  • inscionent 7y ago
    The Southern Poverty Law Center tracks hate groups in the US and is a good source of information. https://www.splcenter.org/issues/hate-and-extremism https://www.splcenter.org/issues/hate-and-extremism
    • whenchamenia 7y ago
      Splc thinks juggalos are a hate group, id not suggest that source.
  • sarcasmOrTears 7y ago
    I live in Italy. Today the biggest leftists mainstream newspaper (repubblica) opened up with a title "slaughters by the white man". They would never dare to write "black man" and most importantly, the expression "white man" was never used before in Italy, in such a context. There is an international anti-white culture and I'm tired to pretend there isn't a problem. 99% of "alt-righters" who got interested in politics, have done so since gamergate, and before just wanted to play videogames and live a decent life and unlike progressives were truly color blind. I know this is difficult to understand for many, but that's the truth and I hope one day you'll see how much suffering you've caused to whites only because of the color of their skin. I wrote this for a place of love of all the people of the world and a desire of peace. I'm really tired of this nonsense. Please wake up. Edit: gonna specify that I don't endorse violence or even coercion through the State, I just want anti-white culture to go away
• pier25 7y ago
  Are 8chan and 4chan related?
• hacknat 7y ago
  What does free speech have to do with this? Cloudflare and other companies have 1st amendment rights as well. One of them is that they can serve customers as they like, as long as they are not violating the rights of a protected class. Political ideology or party affiliation is not a protected class, nor should it be. Twitter could ban every Republican on its platform tomorrow and it if the government tried to stop them the Supreme Court would likely side with Twitter. Companies are allowed to discriminate against political ideology as much as they like. It’s their 1st amendment right to do so. So 1st amendment advocates should be on the side of company censorship, not the other way around.
  • DuskStar 7y ago
    > One of them is that they can serve customers as they like, as long as they are not violating the rights of a protected class. Political ideology or party affiliation is not a protected class, nor should it be. Twitter could ban every Republican on its platform tomorrow and it if the government tried to stop them the Supreme Court would likely side with Twitter. Where's the line between "political ideology" and "religion"? Is it your assertion that "kill all the jews because we're nazis and our leaders say jews are evil" is something that you should be able to ban while "kill all the jews because islam says jews are evil" is protected? Since religion is almost always a protected class.
    • jaf656s 7y ago
      "kill all the jews because islam says jews are evil" is not protected speech by any stretch of the imagination
      • DuskStar 7y ago
        What about "jews should all be killed because Islam says jews are evil"? How is that different (I mean, besides the obvious) than "murderers should be put to death because the Bible says so"?
        • jaf656s 7y ago
• corodra 7y ago
  A bit out of the loop. The hell is 8chan? Similar to 4chan? Are the by the same people? I always knew 4chan was a cesspool, just like youtube comment sections. So, never ventured. Next question, is there any actual evidence or proof that they're "apart of it"? Literally, out of the loop and I trust a random person on HN a bit more than CNN. I saw the thing about Cloudflare here... was it yesterday? Day before? I figured, whatever, a private company can think what they want and do what the want as long as they're honoring the terms of the contract (as in there's a warning that service can be cut because of "our reasons"). Just curious about this 8chan thing and where the hell it came from.
  • Karunamon 7y ago
    8chan is basically 4chan, but with a Reddit-esque spin: anyone can create their own sub-board and moderate it as they please so long as the content they allow isn't illegal in the USA.
  • cm2012 7y ago
    8chan is where the people too extreme and gross for 4chan went.
  • deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  • lainon 7y ago
    It's an Imageboard, there are many of them. 8chan gained a lot of traffic because of the Gamergate [1] controversy in late 2014 The site has nothing to-do with 4chan in terms of administration. I can't say anything about how 8chan is involved in the El Paso shooting, since it's been some time I've been active on 8chan, but the Christchurch mosque shootings was announced on 8chan. There are many more of such incidents where Imageboards have played a role - e.g. the killing of a kid by Marcel H. in Herne, Germany was posted and documented on 4chan. So, it's very possible that they're part of it. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamergate_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamergate_controversy
• metalgearsolid 7y ago
  I think it's really important that the web be free and open and I think Cloudflare and now Voxility have done a tremendous job in exercising their freedom as private entities to shut down voices of hate. Other service providers can step up to the plate and bear the consequences of providing service to communities that incite violence to the point of having direct ties to mass shootings.
• SCAQTony 7y ago
  The law plainly defines free speech and intent. From "Justia": "...A conspiracy occurs when two or more people agree to commit an illegal act and take some step toward its completion. Conspiracy is an inchoate crime because it does not require that the illegal act actually has been completed. ..." Elements of a conspiracy here; https://www.justia.com/criminal/offenses/inchoate-crimes/conspiracy/ https://www.justia.com/criminal/offenses/inchoate-crimes/con... Conspiracy and encouragement to harm others by seeking agreement online by providing detailed plans, strategies, and the execution therein, as witnessed in some hastily written screeds and manifestos by shooters and terrorists, appears to cross that line. Is 8Chan guilty as an active contributor to the horror that has occurred? More than plausible, but its liability albeit civil of punishable has seemingly not yet been defined.
• octosphere 7y ago
  Title is misleading. When I read "go dark" I think of a service doing the clever thing and burrowing itself in the darkweb where it's nearly impossible to take down (unless it gets DDOSed of course). But even DDOS'ing can be mitigated by hardening your server, and doing rudimentary things like rate limiting and filtering out bots with captchas. Things are made even easier by using a tricked out NGINX[0] server or even Varnish cache[1]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nginx https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nginx [1] https://www.varnish-cache.org/ https://www.varnish-cache.org/
• rpmcmurphy 7y ago
  Good riddance
• s9w 7y ago
  So the campaigns against free speech show results. The wheels are in motion, the dominoes are falling. Funny how here on HN the use of the term "free speech absolutists"/"free speech absolutism" has absolutely skyrocketed for example. So are these the last days of the internet? 4chan is still there, voat too (although barely) - but I don't know how much longer. 100% legal sites are taken offline for absolutely no reason at all besides being on the "wrong side". And the internet is cheering. What a sad time
  • kaolti 7y ago
    Yea. I find it quite ironic that HN of all places is generally speaking supportive of this. I do think though that the internet is kind of a different game though. I don't think anything can be banned altogether. People will always find a way. Ultimately we'll just end up creating new anonymous and distributed services where we can talk freely and corporations (lol) and governments can't dictate what is acceptable.
    • s9w 7y ago
      The pace has quickened though. The big corporations are all coordinated now. Hosters, domain registrars, other infrastructure, payment processors, Traditional and Social Media... everyone is locked in and blindly banning everyone who isn't theirs
      • kaolti 7y ago
        True, I'm just saying you can't stop people talking. Nature always balances out one way or another.
        • kypro 7y ago
          The problem with stopping people from talking is that they have no choice but to get violent. In my opinion it's the politicians have ignored the public for so long on issues such as immigration which are fueling this.
• sergiotapia 7y ago
  We need a truly distributed way to host content and communicate. We shouldn't need cloudflare, aws, stripe or any other monopoly to police free speech. Think of our children and what we're going to leave them. Is this the internet we had as kids? It wasn't.
• kaolti 7y ago
  I've been waiting for answers to these question: What do we think happens to hate when when we ban it in discussions? Evaporates into thin air? Also, is there ANY proof at all that banning hate speech is effective in stopping hateful actions in the short and long term? Answering these questions should be the BASIS for any decisions we make right?
  • irvwash 7y ago
    Deciding to commit mass murder rarely happens in a vacuum. It typically happens when you surround yourself all day by people who tell you that mass murder is a good idea. Radicalization is a social phenomenon. I'm critical of censorship, but not because I think it's ineffective.
    • kaolti 7y ago
      You've made a case for how radicalisation happens, you've not proved that banning words is effective against it.
      • irvwash 7y ago
        Radicalization happens through words. You can ban radicalization by banning words. That won't completely get rid of it, but it can make it a lot less accessible, which reduces the amount of radicalization that occurs. I don't think people start out with the intent to get radicalized. They stumble upon a place like /pol/ and see that it's interesting and so they stick around and gradually get convinced. It's much harder to stumble upon a Tor hidden service or a private chatroom than a publicly accessible webpage. China's great firewall is not terribly hard to get around, but it's very effective regardless. Inconvenience is powerful.
        • kaolti 7y ago
          China is exactly where we end up if we start banning speech. If you think that's a good direction I rest my case.
• huduyeue 7y ago
  hN commenters are basically proven themselves to be fascists who want to control all speech everywhere to ensure it contains enough of the progressive agenda otherwise they'll contort themselves to redefine free speech to not actually be free or even speech. Bigots.
• DiseasedBadger 7y ago
  This should be a wakeup call for anyone still using cloudflare.
• PeterStuer 7y ago
  " It requires people who are able to fully parse the implications of what they are hearing to make sound and rational judgements on the rejection of an idea or the embrace of it." Just like democracy, right?
• calimac 7y ago
  SJW Big Tech is playing with fire! Its all out push to win 2020. The ends justify the means and they stomp on the first amendment rationalizing their distorted symmetrical beliefs into justification of their Orwellian acts
• geophile 7y ago
  The usual argument on this topic is: whether suppression of free speech is even effective; you just push the ugliness underground and it festers; sunlight is the best disinfectant; etc. However, those arguments go back way before the internet and social media. And do not account for the fact that social media accelerates the spread of hatred and actual, physical danger. As we are seeing. The role of 8chan (and, let's be real: Fox "News"), is similar to that of the broadcast hate messages that led to the Rwandan genocide. https://www.concordia.ca/research/migs/resources/rwanda-radio-transcripts.html https://www.concordia.ca/research/migs/resources/rwanda-radi...
• rukittenme 7y ago
  This will be an interesting experiment. Will the banning of 8chan prevent future tragedies? Or will we see the rate of these tragedies continue unabated. Either way we should have some evidentiary support for the arguments made in this thread. "Can free speech go to far?" "Should free speech be limited only to those mentally capable of the responsibility?" "Are safe spaces key in the radicalization process?" "Should speech be limited to only those ideas which society wishes to debate?" "Are calls to violence speech?" I'm pretty keen on tracking some of these arguments. Please suggest more arguments (and potential indicators for that argument's truth) if you feel I've neglected some aspect of the conversation.
• CM30 7y ago
  On a related note, 8chan has both a Tor/hidden service version and a ZeroNet version, and there are ads going around on how to access those. So it's clear the folks running the site knew that something like this might happen, and set up alternatives (on 'uncensorable' services) to provide access in such a situation. It may provide for an interesting case study in whether a community site like this moving to P2P services or Tor can maintain the same level of activity as on the clearweb, or whether that effectively hides it for a decent percentage of the userbase.
  • deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
• rzwitserloot 7y ago
  There's this notion of 'bad money chases out the good'; stems from the time when coinage was made from expensive rare metals. Because weighing your currency is annoying, the state decrees that any stamped coin is to be treated as if it is worth precisely what it says its worth, even if it is a little light. In such scenarios, everyone saves up their fat coins and spends their most shaved off misshapen light coins. Eventually ALL the money in circulation is the 'bad' money. The same seems to happen with social networks: _IF_ you allow questionable stuff on your site, soon all the other users will go elsewhere, and your social network eventually caters ONLY to the questionable stuff. The counterweight to that would be lots of users who put inherent value in the notion that the social network they are a part of 'does not believe in censorship', but I think we all know a vanishingly small amount of non-incel/dailystormer/etc users care enough about it to hang out on the incel/dailystormer/etc social network, where every stranger you meet, is likely tweaked in the head. Give it some time and I bet soon the same thing again will happen to CDNs: If most CDNs band together to censorship such content, on one hand there'll always be a CDN that sees a mission (and perhaps, a business case) in being anti-censorship. But, soon, the ONLY thing that CDN will be hosting is questionable content. And at that point, I bet plenty of sites, filters, firewalls, internet providers, etc, will just blanket-ban the entire CDN and be rid of it all. And then sites like 8chan possibly truly cannot survive. Or not. Maybe they'll find a way. But if that happens, the 'council of CDNs' will have quite a bit of power to wield. So far the messaging coming from at least cloudflare is that they understand this and take this seriously (and so far do not appear to want to open the can of worms if they can avoid it), but it feels inevitable.
• kaolti 7y ago
  We're constantly denying our responsibility to manage our emotions and giving it away to others, so that they can protect us from ever seeing anything that might upset us. Some people seem to think that there are authorities we can trust to enforce the lines we draw in the sand on what is acceptable speech and what isn't. There is no such authority. People abuse authority because they can and guess what. When you'll try to say "Hey, you can't do that!" they'll just ban you too. It is hard and unpleasant and disturbing to deal with reality. It's still real though.
  • dominostars 7y ago
    8Chan isn't being targeted because they hurt people's feelings, they're targeted for being a breeding ground for terrorists. Feel free to make whatever argument you want about whether platforms should be forced to provide service to websites that radicalize terrorists, but please don't make this about something it's not.
    • read_if_gay_ 7y ago
      > please don't make this about something it's not. No, you are. How do you think 8ch manages to be a breeding ground for terrorists? By kidnapping people and sending them off to terrorist training camps? Obviously their method is emotional manipulation. That includes hurting people’s feelings. Censoring speech to protect people from that is a piss poor long term strategy compared to equipping them to properly deal with it. Society will end up as a bunch of babies unable to deal with reality.
      • kaolti 7y ago
        Agree. We're well on our way to be honest. Might be no way of stopping it. It'll just swing around on it's own in a few hundred years.
• Jonahgay 7y ago
  Reminder that closing 8chan won't stop mass shoting. it just stops them from announcing it.
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• yyyk 7y ago
  1) 8chan richly deserved to go down and its a good thing for all of us they are down. Hopefully this stays that way. 2) That does not change the structural reality that a small collection of private entities can now act as gatekeepers. This is not a result of this affair - but something that already existed. Can we rely on this power always being used for good purposes? I dunno. If you deal with controversial stuff, better have a backup plan. Good thing 8chan were too stupid to have one. Conclusion: the result is good, the path indicates some troubling realities. I often oppose the 'get a good result in a dubious way' method, but here the balance tilted strongly towards action. My tolerance drops to zero when it comes to terrorist breeding sites and the 'damage' merely shows us what already existed. There's an argument this should have been done much earlier.
• psbmt 7y ago
  >Personally I'm in agreement with Popper's view that societies should tolerate everything except intolerance. That invariably forces the political landscape to move to the left. Which, I guess, is the intended result of holding that point of view.
  • FussyZeus 7y ago
    I'm completely fine with that until we have literally any logical or scientific reasons to oppose tolerance.
    • wesammikhail 7y ago
      So if science and logic one day makes a good case for you to be intolerant you will then leave the tolerant side and become intolerant? That, if anything, is the nature of ideological possession. What a weird view to hold. Besides, science and reason can tell you very little about morality as tolerance is a moral concept not a scientific one. In fact, science can make no moral claims as those by nature are value claims which by definition are the antithesis of the scientific method. So I have no idea how you intend on squaring that circle. And the fact that you are "completely fine" with what the parent said just goes to show how little consideration you have given the topic before making such an ideologically driven comment :/
      • FussyZeus 7y ago
        > So if science and logic one day makes a good case for you to be intolerant you will then leave the tolerant side and become intolerant? Yes. And since there is no reason or logic behind intolerance, I'm not seeing that as a risky bet of any sort. And you're right, I don't have consideration for this topic because there is no topic as far as I'm concerned. I used to be on the right, and I used to hold all kinds of cognitive dissonances in my head at once to explain the belief system therein. And yes, it made total sense to me at the time, but with the benefit of hindsight and a lot of experience in life, I can say with complete confidence that I was 100% full of shit, indoctrinated into a moral system that has no basis in any kind of rational thought, that is largely based on fear and maintaining a status quo under which I benefitted greatly. There is no reason behind intolerance. There is bigotry, fear, oftentimes disgust, and occasionally just good old fashioned hate. But there is no reason, no logic, and certainly no science.
• shultays 7y ago
  People keep telling "they are a peivate company, they can serve whoever they". Can they really? Can I open a shop that doesn't serve people with political view X? Or religion? Race?
  • dointheatl 7y ago
    Yes, no and no, at least in the USA.
    • shultays 7y ago
      Huh, really? that was surprising for me. I would put political views right next to someone's religional beliefs.
• Havoc 7y ago
  Even the dark corners of the internet need to have limits
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• tomohawk 7y ago
  There are many times when the political, religious, or other leanings of people committing these crimes have been misrepresented by 'media' organizations and politicians and others pushing an agenda, and trying to tie the despicable acts to their opponents, etc., or to make political points. I've seen far left crazies characterized as far right. I've seen atheists characterized as being christian. I've seen mentally ill people characterized as following some ideology. In this sort of environment, cutting off access to raw sources just makes these kinds of mischaracterizations even easier to do. Cutting off people's ability to communicate does not have any benefit. All it does is signal that those cutting off the communication do not have a better idea, or do not know how to sell their idea. It strengthens the hand of those being censored by giving them a real grievance, and makes it more likely that they will find other ways to express their views, which will likely be more violent.
• jimbob45 7y ago
  I don't usually like to pull the deus ex machina card but..... CloudFlare is going public next month. This seems like a clear-cut publicity stunt.
• lunias 7y ago
  Good stalling tactic, but this really just inconveniences (i.e. makes mad) a bunch of extreme individuals who will undoubtably rally through other means almost immediately. We really need to start talking to people before they act and not shutdown their communications after the fact. Where are the extremists now? They used to be on 8chan... now they're... ?
• mynameishere 7y ago
  Painfully, painfully stupid comments here. If someone says X, and then goes on a rampage, that does not discredit X. Yes, the media wants you to believe that, unless it's Unabomber-style ramblings involved. Is it that hard to understand?
• pault 7y ago
  The CEO of 8chan's hosting provider is literally a Monster.
• bdcravens 7y ago
  Most days I randomly grab a t-shirt to wear. Today I ended up wearing my Cloudflare shirt.
• KorematsuFred 7y ago
  There is a price for every freedom we have. Free speech also comes with some price. Which can include riots and deaths. All we need to ask if whether slippery slope of restrictions on free speech would lead to a higher price or a lower price. An FBI agent working on child rape cases told me how on one occasion he was 100% sure who the criminal was and yet he had to let him go because the person had rights. Now many such freed criminals are the price for having 4t hand 5th amendment in first place. USA as a society needs to debate whether the freedoms of having free speech or freedom to own guns are worth it. Either ways it is their choice and outsiders like me would only be curious as to what choice americans would make.
• bsaul 7y ago
  So instead of banning pro-guns websites and associations, internet self-righteous companies prefer to ban pro-freedom of speech websites. How brave ! Edit: to people disagreeing, ask yourself : why is mass shooting only happening with such a high frequency in the US ? Internet is global and billions of people speak and write english. So what is the originality ? This knee-jerk reaction for censorship needs to stop, we’re heading toward censorship at full speed, and everybody is applauding for being so responsible and mature. If people are calling publicly for mass murdering, and if it’s illegal to do so in their country, then let the police get access to the people identity and arrest them. But don’t kill the messenger or the media !
• robomartin 7y ago
  The part that I concerned with has to do with discoverability. If you push these people underground they will not disappear. That has never happened in the history of humanity. I would much rather the exist in plain view, free to voice their hatred in plain view. I would much rather the algorithms and people of sound mind monitor these individuals and groups in broad daylight than have them exist behind encrypted radicalization chat rooms. If the standard is to shutdown services that can lead to radicalization and, therefore, harm or death, then the government should shut down Facebook, Twitter, Google and maybe more. Why treat this any differently that 737 MAX crashes? The only reason I can see not to do this is to be able to keep an eye on people who self-radicalize. Sadly I have an example of this in my own family. We have an older relative (late 70’s) who, up until about two years ago, did not own a computer or use the Internet. He was given a computer by a family member so he could use FB to keep in touch with family in the US and abroad. We have been watching, in absolute horror, as he has been going down a path towards ever increasing hatred. No, not what you think. I won’t go into details other than to say that he had his political leanings a couple of years ago and FB turned them into nothing less than hatred, constant unrelenting hatred. No, he isn’t going to go hurt anyone. He is hurting himself. He is in a solid gradient descent into a sad existence and likely already very much in the grips if depression. I know it’s FB because that’s all he does with the computer. He is, otherwise, computer illiterate. He doesn’t have much if an education, which makes the constant stream of hateful memes, posts and articles impossible for him to filter. He is, effectively, mostly incapable of critical thinking now that he has been pulled down into this dark cave. Precisely because this is happening in plain sight, various members of our family, myself included, have been engaging with him to try and pull him out of Plato’s proverbial cave. This task is incredibly difficult. FB feeds him a constant stream of similar material and the world of reason evaporates behind a cloud of hatred. All he sees are shadows on the wall. We need this in the open in order to be able to help those we love as well as others. We also need FB and others to understand how much harm their algorithms seem to be causing.
  • anigbrowl 7y ago
    Precisely because this is happening in plain sight, various members of our family, myself included, have been engaging with him to try and pull him out of Plato’s proverbial cave. This task is incredibly difficult. [...] It's enormously difficult to deal with even for a family member that you know fairly well. Now imagine trying to deal with it at scale where you're trying to reach (likely) complete strangers who are not confused, but actively engaged as conscious information and/or real world warriors and smart enough to anticipate, avoid, and deflect counter-arguments. There are already people who monitor these social groups but actively and algorithmically, and because of that are aware of where and how to locate them when a hub goes down.
• booboolayla 7y ago
  One thing is glaringly obvious to me in this debate: There are no factual examples of any of the accusations being laid onto 8chan. All I see is people regurgitating media opinions, parroting YouTube videos "explaining" what 8chan is, etc. Lots of people seem to know everything about a place they've only heard about from other sources.
• graphememes 7y ago
  This is why we have mass shootings, just saying. People taking things away from other people. I have a feeling this will lead to more shootings.
  • pcbro141 7y ago
    What was unfairly 'taken away' from these recent (Gilroy, El Paso, Dayton) mass shooters?
    • graphememes 7y ago
      So let's poke a bee hive to have more? Let's remove a very easy to access, scrape, court order, platform that potential shooters feel comfortable posting to hours / days before hand that the FBI / Police could use to prevent such things. Yeah great move. Clap clap.
      • pcbro141 7y ago
        You said we have mass shootings because we take things away from people. I'm just asking what was taken away from these mass shooters (Gilroy, El Paso, Dayton)? Surely you can't mean 8chan being 'taken away', since the outage has only happened today, after these attacks.
        • graphememes 7y ago
          Taking away a platform from people, who aren't even related to it, who are now thinking about it. It's not about the shooters. It's about the ripple effect of actions.
  • inscionent 7y ago
    20 people had their lives abruptly ended while they where attempting to complete mundane errands at a WalMart and this is what you have to add to this conversation? Fuck you, just saying.
    • 7y ago
• asdfasdfasdfa 7y ago
  I 100% think cloudflare, google, facebook, or whomever should shut down 8chan. I 100% don't think the US government should. I don't know why everyone is conflating these two very different scenarios.
• kleton 7y ago
  Consider an alternative hypothesis: that sites like those are containment zones. If those sorts of people don't have any peaceful outlet for their feelings, what then?
• moonbug 7y ago
  Good riddance.
• kys228 7y ago
  When will they learn that more censorship equals more mass shootings?
• FDSGSG 7y ago
  You can still access 8chan directly at 206.223.147.222 and 206.223.147.215. curl 206.223.147.222/index.html -H 'Host: 8ch.net' This is their backend hosted at https://digitalrealty.com/data-centers/san-francisco/200-paul-ave-san-francisco-ca https://digitalrealty.com/data-centers/san-francisco/200-pau... by http://www.centaurico.com/ http://www.centaurico.com/
• downrightmike 7y ago
  This boasts well for cloudflare and the potential IPO in September.
• neom 7y ago
  For those curious, here is the Canadian Governments information on the bounds around hate and freedom in speech: https://lop.parl.ca/sites/PublicWebsite/default/en_CA/ResearchPublications/201825E https://lop.parl.ca/sites/PublicWebsite/default/en_CA/Resear...
• mirimir 7y ago
  8chan and its ilk are primarily symptoms. Of just exactly what, I'm not sure. But major factors in the US are very likely ongoing deindustrialization, increasing wealth inequity, global climate change, and changes in gender roles. Which of those are ultimately good or bad is another conversation. Although I gotta say that gender roles certainly needed change. But the fact remains that they're happening. But of course, 8chan and its ilk are also mechanisms that exacerbate those symptoms. However, while shutting them down may be morally satisfying, it's no substitute for actually addressing (yeah, politics speak) the underlying problems. Not that I have much of a clue how, sadly enough. This ain't going to end well.
• pard68 7y ago
  So long as it is a private entity freedoms don't play a part because private entities don't owe other private entities any freedoms.
• Darth_Hobo 7y ago
  As a free expression absolutists I see no problem with private companies refusing service, as long as they are not breaking their contract. And ideally it should be perfectly fine to have whites-only restaurants, or do a discriminatory hiring practice and not hire any women. Because I see no logical reason why freedom of association should have any limits, as long as you are not bound by some obligations that you have agreed to. As for people crying about how internet is getting censored - don't be an impotent and start programming decentralized alternatives. Like Fediverse and Crypto devs do. If you really care about freedom that is. At this point it should be pretty clear that the major enabler of internet censorship is the whole paradigm of centralized services, because it concentrates too much power in one hands. In order to combat it we should create high-quality decentralized alternatives, where everyone owns a small chunk of the system and can only ban somebody from that specific chunk.
• krick 7y ago
  This is ridiculous, how many people in the comments appear to think this can be considered good in any way. I'm honestly shocked, like WTF I'm even reading...
• rolltiide 7y ago
  they just switch web hosts and CDNs right? literally anyone looking for a large customer right now is salivating. Its like how all those encrypted data stores have employees that love the vision and have no idea that all their customers are porn companies until one day they realize and also realize leadership doesn't care and is highly entertained at this reality get those revenue numbers up
• znpy 7y ago
  I don’t know. Everybody is keen on pointing the finger towards 8chan, no one is talking about how easy is to get firearms and bullets in the United States of America. In the meantime, we lost one of the few spaces where we could talk anonymously and express ourselves freely. I am not sure whether i should feel sorry for America at this point. The problem with shootings has been around for a lot if time now, yet pretty much nothing has been done. Firearms still get sold as easy as candy. Shootings like this will keep happening because they are a symptom, not the root cause. People will find other places to rant about stuff, get radicalised and decide to go on a killing spree. In the meantime, we lost a place of free and anonymous conversation.
• colechristensen 7y ago
  Many people are talking about freedom of speech, and yes it is something very important to support when you're talking about what governments cannot do. But CloudFlare and whatever hosting company this is are not governments. Freedom of speech doesn't mean others are required to be your megaphone when you're saying objectionable things. The government should be very restricted in its ability to censor you, but your publisher? not so much. If you really don't like it, make your own publisher (internet hardware company, CDN, etc.)
• dzonga 7y ago
  paradox of tolerance.
• google2342 7y ago
  wow, does this really deserve 1000+ comments?
• dsfg345ds23 7y ago
  talking about freedom of speech on HN is such a complete joke and generally a waste of time given the incredibly heavy hand of censorship and moderation that occurs here. people here can pretend they are having a discussion but this community has already removed so many voices that HN is essentially just an elite enclave, like a bunch of british colonists discussing what the savages outside are allowed to say. HN are the bigots who cannot tolerant the speech of others.
• ElijahLynn 7y ago
  Just gonna put this here so everyone has a basis to go from: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances." https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/first_amendment https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/first_amendment
  • koboll 7y ago
    The 1st Amendment was developed in a time when there was no such conceivable thing as an anonymous forum of people that encouraged each other to kill crowds of civilians at random with machine guns, leading to such killings actually being carried out, repeatedly. The idea that "the answer to bad speech is more speech" breaks down in such a situation. There is no amount of "more speech" that can fix what's wrong with 8chan, because there's no way for mass condemnation to have any effect on it. It only serves to feed the trolls. And when the trolls are fed, the killings become more likely. If you've got a better solution than deplatforming, I'd like to hear it. I'm certainly a free speech advocate in the abstract. But it's increasingly difficult to ignore that anonymous online communities are threatening to undercut the basic premises on which free speech as an ideal stands.
• dsfg345ds23 7y ago
  talking about freedom of speech on HN is such a complete joke and generally a waste of time given the incredibly heavy hand of censorship and moderation that occurs here. people here can pretend they are having a discussion but this community has already removed so many voices that HN is essentially just an elite enclave, like a bunch of british colonists discussing what the savages outside are allowed to say. HN are the bigots who cannot tolerant the speech of others.
• dsfg345ds23 7y ago
  funny, not even my comments are dead, just auto deleted -- i suppose my speech was intolerant. bigots. Thanks MODS for your contribution to censorship.
• jjellyy 7y ago
  This is totally ridiculous. Every major political issue in the USA has been injected with a “protected” group so any criticism can be silenced as it now fits the criteria for hate speech.
• yew 7y ago
  Speech has consequences. It must have limits. (As for "free-speech activists" and so-called pacifists who complain about actions against you-know-who more than violence by them - I don't see the value of their words.) But better norms are developing, even if it should have happened faster. And not just in technology, but in education and writing and many other spaces.
• Lt_Riza_Hawkeye 7y ago
  >Internet hate forum If 8chan is an internet hate forum, so is reddit. Yes, 8chan has little to no moderation. People go on 8chan and talk about whatever, the fact that there is hate speech somewhere in there, and it is allowed to stay there, doesn't mean the entire site is dedicated to hate speech. We don't say "Internet Cat Photo Forum" about reddit just because /r/aww exists. There will always be places "providing providing a safe space for anonymized, like-minded individuals to congregate, espouse their basest thoughts and feelings." This is firmly a good thing. You can always hang out somewhere else if you don't prefer it. 8chan going down means nothing in the long run. One goes down another survives.
• njharman 7y ago
  1st amendment issue. As in persons, including those that own companies have the right to associate or not associate(1) with whomever they choose. As upheld in USA with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NAACP_v._Alabama https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NAACP_v._Alabama 1) The "not associate" is not clearly as protected and is frequently abridged to protect "protected classes" eg housing, employment, ADA laws. I doubt any US court will uphold "bigot" as a protected class.
  • whenchamenia 7y ago
    Idk, denying rights to 'bigots' seems possibly bigoted. Please turn in your speech card.
• awt 7y ago
  8chan is not the problem. Deplatforming 8chan is shooting the messenger.
  • awt 7y ago
    Also, no one is talking about taking down Twitter, which is where the Dayton murderer hung out.
• puskavi 7y ago
  Lets drive hatey-sites to deepweb where we can't cencor them! What a great idea!
• jeanvalmarc 7y ago
  This seems like a good move, and the opposite of a slippery, "government restricted our free speech" slope. It's more like, "companies and individuals are under no obligation to offer their services to people they perceive to be assholes." The reason governments shouldn't do this is because there is no alternative. Companies and individuals are the right place to make an individual choice about what they wish to endorse, host, and support. People (i.e. the Cloudflare CEO saying "no one should have this power") wishing the government would let them off the moral hook for hosting literal Nazis is pretty absurd.
• bArray 7y ago
  I've always disliked the Verge and this article reminds me of why. > Internet hate forum 8chan [..] Indifference to what is perceived as good or evil is not good or evil within itself. There's objectively a lot of hate in those forums, but there's also a lot of good. 4chan for example came up with a solution to an unsolved mathematics problem [1]. > [..] following the latest of at least three mass shootings linked to 8chan. I think far many more terrorists have had social media platforms on services such as Twitter or Facebook. As I've also said before, the reason they are here is because they kicked them out of everywhere else - of course they will now concentrate on these platforms. Beforehand there may have been a chance to de-radicalize these people with exposure to everyday persons, but when you isolate them this is what you get. The fact of the matter is, these people exist whether you like it or not and they will find somewhere to talk. > [..] when Voxility discovered the content, it cut ties with Epik almost immediately. I remember also that Cloudflare gave 8chan 24 hours notice. Also look at how internet services have treated the people of Iran, blocking them from basic resources without warning. In some ways I am glad to see this, as I now know which providers to avoid - I don't want any service provider I use to take a political stance and give me 24 hours or less to rethink my platform strategy. > Over the past year, Epik has raised its profile by working with far-right-friendly sites (like Gab) that have been banned by other web service companies. Disingenuous, Gab is free-speech-friendly, not "far-right-friendly". But even if it was far-right friendly by definition, so what? People with a different political stance have a shared platform, just look at Bread Tube for the far-left [2]. Neither are evil by default and both have their share of shitheads. [1] https://oeis.org/A180632/a180632.pdf https://oeis.org/A180632/a180632.pdf [2] https://breadtube.tv/ https://breadtube.tv/
• mikedilger 7y ago
  According to Andrew Torba of Gab (I cannot speak to the veracity of this myself): "As predicted in our statement to Buzzfeed: 8chan is indeed online. It's on ZeroNet, a decentralized and open source peer-to-peer version of the internet. It literally can not be censored now. By anyone. At all. Not admins. Not governments. No one. This isn't as good as it sounds. It means no illegal content can be permanently removed, including things like child exploitation, human trafficking, etc. Happy now, media elites?" https://gab.com/a/posts/102568802463422885 https://gab.com/a/posts/102568802463422885
  • JulianMorrison 7y ago
    The way to remove those things is to arrest the operators and demand they hand over access to the hosting, and shut it down and prosecute them.
    • whenchamenia 7y ago
      The whole issue is that no laws have been broken. How and why would we arrest innovent citizens?
• birracerveza 7y ago
  I might be late to the party. However, I still want to warn you guys that by shutting down these sites, you are doing nothing more than hiding the filth under the rug. There is an adagio going on 4chan that shutting down /b/ would be similar to clogging a toilet: it WILL overflow somewhere else. Congratulations, you have shut down yet another site. Do you think these people and their ideologies have disappeared? Nope, they are now gone into an even more remote corner of the internet to foster even more anger.
• nimbius 7y ago
  all philosophy aside, these decisions were not made based on a moral conscience of any sort. Just because corporations are in some sense treated like people in the United States doesnt mean they act in any way like them. Epik and Cloudflare are donning the cloak of moral turpitude to protect their shareholders. Cloudflare and Epik are keenly aware that if they do not take some tangible action immediately, they expose the company to enormous risk. They understand that Americans will not be able to get satisfaction from their government or law enforcement. People will file lawsuits that will be well funded, and increasingly difficult to defend. Even if there is no lawsuit, there could still be a mass exodus from these providers. GoDaddy enjoyed the same such exodus after years of bad PR and Cloudflare is no different. Host the site that planned a mass shooting, and companies will flee from your service to protect their brand. This is really no different than Subway dropping Jared, or Disney dropping PewDiePie.
• JulianMorrison 7y ago
  Couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of scum and villainy. The internet has to grow up and conclusively eject these kinds of people - don't tolerate them, don't tolerate their providers.
• skrowl 7y ago
  UPDATE - It's now back up on ZeroNet. Install & run https://zeronet.io/ https://zeronet.io/ and then go to http://127.0.0.1:43110/1DdPHedr5Tz55EtQWxqvsbEXPdc4uCVi9D http://127.0.0.1:43110/1DdPHedr5Tz55EtQWxqvsbEXPdc4uCVi9D Amusingly, it's now the #1 site on ZeroNet, with even more users than then ZeroNet homepage.
  • sprash 7y ago
    This site looks like 8chan but has actually nothing to do with the original 8chan. However, for better or worse, pandoras box of decentralized uncensurable internet for the masses is now officially open.
    • skrowl 7y ago
      Yeah, taking down 8chan will certainly get the word out about ZeroNet (and similar) at least.
  • smugllama 7y ago
    I have to say, this is very exciting technology. This makes an impossible to censor network. The only downside seems to be that it doesn't seem to have as good of privacy as traditional chans because this one is peer to peer.
• tripzilch 7y ago
  Anyone got any news on the hardware provider that provided the gun? Cause the guy could've gone to any other fringe site to get inspired by, just like he could have gone to any other gun dealer to get armed by. One of these two things isn't a motherfucking big elephant in a room.
• ulzeraj 7y ago
  When Cloudflare pulled the plug on them I didn’t saw that as a good idea because by doing that you are forcing the community underground and further radicalization is the next step. And here they are using the daily stormer CDN. On the other hand as deplatforming becomes a norm perhaps we could see a rise in demand for decentralized platforms like IPFS or ActivityPub.
• nickthemagicman 7y ago
  Looking at this logically, 8chan is available all over the world. Yet only America has these shooting happening regularly. Could it not be 8chan but America that has the issues? I have a feeling 8chan and Video Games and guns are not the issue here but structural social problems with America.
• batat 7y ago
  Oh yes, there indeed will be no more mass shooting if you close down %SITE_NAME%.
• parliament32 7y ago
  In comparison, NFS' policy on offensive content: https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/about/faq#TheLongGame https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/about/faq#TheLongGame >Of course, the simplest reason is that it's not up to us to decide what the rest of the world should or shouldn't see. Bad news, it's not up to you either. Worse news, it's still true even when we agree. Which is probably most of the time. >Finally, censorship is always bad, for a variety of well understood reasons that we don't need to repeat here. But in the case of some types of content, it has special dangers. When you censor a web site based on the extreme or dangerous views of its creator(s), you haven't stopped those people from thinking that way. You haven't made them go away. You certainly haven't stopped the people who hold those views from doing whatever else they do when they're not posting on the Internet. What you've actually done is given yourself a false sense of accomplishment by closing your eyes, clapping your hands over your ears, and yelling "Lalala! I can't hear you!" at the top of your voice. Pretending a problem doesn't exist is not only not a solution, it makes real solutions harder to reach.
• Fjolsvith 7y ago
  So curious that out of 1592 comments, not one mentions the QAnon movement. This is the true reason 8chan was brought down. An attempt to disrupt their communications.