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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

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.
- Smithalicious 7y ago
  Good and bad is not a binary, it's a spectrum. If you put the cutoff for what is allowed very close to the limit of hwat you think is "good" (i.e. you try to ban everything you would consider "bad"), there will inevitably be people with different viewpoints who can bring up a convincing argument that your cutoff also bans some good tihngs. We need a "buffer" of things generally considered "bad" but not too bad, so that we can ensure that good things really are allowed; allowing good things is more important than banning bad things. That is a key principle of having a free society. Of course, things wihch are obviously really very bad should be banned. Good news: they already are! Hate speech is banned in virtually every country I can think of. I'm explicitly not arguing against legal action against hate speech here; I'm arguing against private ocmpanies banning things which are not illegal. Leaving all that aside, even if you think all bad things should be banned, I do not think that Cloudflare of all things should be the arbiter of right and wrong.
- mopsi 7y ago
  > Germany isn't a dystopian hell-hole because they banned Nazism. Despite several recent high-profile banning attempts, Germany still has a nazi party, established in 1964. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Democratic_Party_of_Germany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Democratic_Party_of_G...
SkyBelow 7y ago
Makes me wonder how many people like GPL and free software. One of the core tenants of free software is the ability to do anything with it (freedom 0). This includes being able to do evil. https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html The original JSON license is even deemed not free because it limits the ability to use it for Evil. https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#JSON https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#JSON There is a reason for this decision and it applies to speech as much as it does to software.
- simlevesque 7y ago
  > This includes being able to do evil. This also includes booting someone off your platform.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- lifthrasiir 7y ago
  > There is a reason for this decision [...] You seem to misunderstand that reason. It is because qualifying the evil is best done out of the license, and not because qualifying the evil is universally bad. It should be noted that the Debian Free Software Guidelines words that decision as "no discrimination" and this choice is not light---it is there to prevent prejudicial behaviors by licenses. And that doesn't mean that the society should not judge them either (otherwise it won't function at all). The DFSG doesn't prevent you from doing evil with a free software and face the postjudicial consequence at all. > [...] it applies to speech as much as it does to software. And that's where your comparison is wrong. Not because the freedom of speech is not absolute (this is a tough topic by itself) but because 8chan was blamed because it didn't even acknowledge the post-judgement.
  - SkyBelow 7y ago
    > It is because qualifying the evil is best done out of the license The example in case does not qualify what counts as evil, only that it bans evil. It thus leaves it to others, outside of the license, to qualify evil when they determine how the license applies. Thus the license the FSF rejects does what you claim should be done. >The DFSG doesn't prevent you from doing evil with a free software and face the postjudicial consequence at all. It does suggest not using licenses that would increase the legal consequences of doing such evil. >because 8chan was blamed because it didn't even acknowledge the post-judgement. Does encryption acknowledge the post-judgment of all the evil it enables?
arwineap 7y ago
> People are doing the "yada yada not entitled to a platform" thing cloudfront is not really a platform. It's more like a CDN, or WAF. I think your point is worth discussing, just seems to link less to the context of 8chan. > 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. I wonder if the anonymous portion of these boards is what makes them so toxic? Plenty of fringe forums for example have account names. Frequent posters are known and have reputations, if a known person says something controversial, they can be challenged by others, known or not. I think it really just allows for discussions to happen in good faith. Half the time I think some of the most toxic discussions are not even between any two people but are actually between tens of different unique trolls who may not even be following the thread at all. Maybe bots, who knows.
- Smithalicious 7y ago
  I used the word "platform" because that's what others are saying. What I really mean to say is "infrastructure".
  - arwineap 7y ago
    Turns out their ISP dropped out too. I'll go ahead and eat my words now :)
hrktb 7y ago
Inciting violence is not legal though. It’s reasonable to cut support to players that relentlessly fail to comply with the rules. The platforms are not turning against them, they are constantly abusing the ToS of these platforms . Now some people disagree with the ToS in the first place, but it’s another discussion to be done at another plane. There has always been a filtering of what goes to a super wide audience, movies airing on public broadcast have always been filtered, the same logic applies to platforms as wide as reddit.
- adnzzzzZ 7y ago
  8chan took the shooter's manifesto down way faster than it took Facebook to take down the Christchurch shooter's streams. You're mistaken if you think that 8chan "relentlessly fails to comply with the rules", anyone paying attention knows that they're very responsive. This is nothing more than a witchhunt because people want the site to go away.
  - afiori 7y ago
    Facebook and others focus an inane amount of energy in keeping up a "healthy place" facade. Even if 8chan was super meticulous on the rules I doubt it could pull off the same feat without comparable effort.
  - hrktb 7y ago
    I get your point, but I think responsiveness is just an aspect of the issue. For 8chan and for any other platform. For instance if you were harrassed on twitter, twitter being blazingly fast at taking down tweets you report wouldn’t help you much, you’d still have to report every single tweet of users harrassing you. Even if 8chan takes down every violence threat, if it still propagated enough to be worth it for the poster, 8chan’s modus operandi has very little impact on the situation. I am not saying it’s easy, just that they clearly haven’t found a good solution.
- Ajedi32 7y ago
  If what 8Chan was doing was not legal, then perhaps they should have been shut down through an actual legal process, not an arbitrary decision by a cloud infrastructure provider.
allemagne 7y ago
I get that you're trying to address a larger philosophical question, but what action are you actually suggesting in this particular instance? Should Cloudflare be forced to host 8chan? Even more than YouTube/Twitter, this seems like a clear case of business owners deciding that 8chan is too much of a liability to do business with.
- Smithalicious 7y ago
  This is a good point that I do not have a solution to. I do see that "I think the internet should be a neutral platform", "I think that the internet should be run by private companies" and "I think that private companies should be free to decide who to do business with" is also a set of incompatible beliefs (that I personally hold). Thankfully, I do not need to have all the answers to point out the issue :)
  - klntsky 7y ago
    The problem here is that you don't see the difference between the informal "should" from the first stance and the legal "should" from the third. You can't even say things like "the internet legally should X" because the internet is not a single entity that can be coerced to do X (yep, the legal talk all comes down to the issue of who should be coerced to do what). Read Hayek BTW.
- jimbobimbo 7y ago
  If we think of CF/Voxility as of a "neutral infrastructure", CF and Voxility shouldn't be "forced to host", but also shouldn't proactively shut down sites, unless there's an obvious violation of ToS. There's a process of forcing companies to do something, and it involves a judge and a jury. I find it ironic to see cheering of these actions by The Verge, who is in the tank for "net neutrality". I don't like what site in question was hosting, but there're other ways of dealing with them.
  - throwawayjava 7y ago
    > If we think of CF/Voxility as of a "neutral infrastructure" "Property rights for me but not for you"
ebspelman 7y ago
> 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. This is phrased as something to be fearful of here, but I think I'm actually fine with this precedent. There's nothing to stop people with extreme right-wing ideologies from marshaling the resources required to stand up all the pieces of web infrastructure they find themselves blocked from. If they can't amass those resources, that's ultimately a market decision, no? And if they were able to stand up that infrastructure, it would indicate a high level of financial support for their agenda, which would be the real thing to be afraid of, in my own opinion.
- stale2002 7y ago
  Are you going to be saying the same thing when Elisabeth Warren's or Bernie Sander's webites/ads/donations methods get taken off the internet because big corporations don't like that they want to raise taxes? The purpose of the canary in the coal mine is not to protect the canary. It is to protect the miner from the encroaching danger.
  - ebspelman 7y ago
    Hmm. I'd say the canary is in the Wal-Mart.
zamfi 7y ago
> 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". But the size of the platform is commensurate with the tolerability of the speech, right? No one is preventing you from standing in a public place making whatever objectionable claims you want. But reddit/facebook/cloudflare/whoever don't have an obligation to let you use their platform to publish it if they don't like it. This is certainly not a meaningless distinction. In the age of print media, some random guy's fringe opinions were not "required to be published" -- you couldn't even buy a classified ad espousing objectionable content in large publications. No "ban" required. > We now live in a society where it is acceptable for private companies to essentially completely ban individuals from exercising their free speech We have always lived in such a society. And it's not "private companies" it's people. Some person makes this decision.
- Thorentis 7y ago
  > no one is preventing you from standing in a public place Social media is now the equivalent of standing in a public place. Times have changed. The town crier that used to tell people that latest headline? That's now the Facebook news feed. Public library/coffee shop where people can go discuss whatever new subversive political idea they've had? That's now online chat rooms. Sticking our heads in the sand and thinking that the Internet is anything other than the new public square is disingenuous. People need to wake up and realise that at present, the "public space" once protected by our rights has become almost entirely controlled by private monopolies.
  - danem 7y ago
    Using Twitter and speaking in a public place are not at all equivalent. You are not entitled to use Twitter's resources that they pay money for to amplify your speech. You simply aren't. Just because we have the means of broadcasting speech more widely and cheaply than ever before in no way entitles you to those resources. Just as the Wall Street Journal is in no way obligated to publish your letter to the editor, Twitter is allowed to broadcast what they wish. Nothing at all is stopping 8chan from hosting their content on their own infrastructure.
thatswrong0 7y ago
> /r/the_donald is already quarantined That happened because they repeatedly violated rules on Reddit, not because of their extremist views. Reddit was lenient with them for a looong time. > We need to allow people on the edges of the spectrum to say what they want even if it is without merit /r/jailbait was banned, but it was technically "free speech" and technically legal, so according to your standards Reddit should have allowed the community to continue to exist, right? (Even though it existing probably led to some deviant / reprehensible / illegal behavior) But to me, it's obvious that that doesn't need to be allowed to exist on the platform. So to me, that means there is some line that we as a society draw between allowed speech and not. It's not codified in law, but it does exist. That line can move based on the whims of society. Right now, at least in the tech world, that line seems to be moving in such a way so as to not allow right-wing extremist speech. And that's totally fine in my book - in the same way that /r/jailbait is rightfully considered unacceptable "free speech" now, so is right-wing extremist "free speech". There are still places to congregate online for that sort of speech if you want. Or you could spin up your own server. It's not disallowed by law. But it's just not as accessible as it was before.
klntsky 7y ago
> 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". I'd rephrase the first: "it's okay for 8chan to be kicked off the internet, if there is no one who is willing to host it". > It's like saying "you can say anything you want, but we won't let you use the atmosphere to propagate the sound waves". And what you are saying is more like "I have the right to say anything I want but I'm too lazy to move the muscles of my face, so everyone (those who I point at, actually, by calling them EVIL MONOPOLIES) MUST help me in this noble mission of spreading the truth".
mcguire 7y ago
"virtually locked out of the internet"? How so? They're welcome to come here anytime.
lanstin 7y ago
There are things that you can say which will make your entire village shun you. True. Always has been. Probably always will be. Our world is now a village. It is a new thing to deal with. So far not many have adjusted well. People who fail to appreciate why their fellow citizens find a website cheering on the murder of groups of outsiders to be shun-worthy, their understanding of humans is woefully incomplete.
ArlenBales 7y ago
> We need to allow people on the edges of the spectrum to say what they want even if it is without merit Those people can say whatever they want, but no other individual or company needs to allow them the soapbox to do it.
inscionent 7y ago
> private companies to essentially completely ban individuals from exercising their free speech on the internet. "Free speech on the internet" is not something found in law. > The canary in the coalmine was The Daily Stormer Because The Daily Stormer was just a site to share ideas, right? > The Daily Stormer, which has established 31 physical chapters in the United States and more in Canada > Some of its readers do more than issue threats. Dylann Roof, who massacred nine African Americans in Charleston in 2015, posted on the site. Thomas Mair, the neo-Nazi assassin who last year killed Jo Cox, a British member of Parliament, was a regular reader. And just last month, another Daily Stormer reader, James Jackson, was charged with murder and terrorism after carrying out a plan to go to New York City to kill a black man at random. How ever will the Nazis share their hateful and violent ideas without the private internet companies? Oh no, the poor racists! > One message included an image of Gersh being sprayed with a green gas, along with the words: Hickory dickory dock, the kike ran up the clock. The clock struck three and the Internet Nazis trolls gassed the rest of them. https://www.splcenter.org/news/2017/04/18/splc-sues-neo-nazi-leader-who-targeted-jewish-woman-anti-semitic-harassment-campaign https://www.splcenter.org/news/2017/04/18/splc-sues-neo-nazi...
anigbrowl 7y ago
Murdering people permanently limits their free speech, no? If a website's content is full of discussions about why people ought to be murdered, and how to go about it, and exhortations that it take place as soon as possible, isn't that an attack on the free speech (as well as all other freedoms) of the intended target(s)?
jasonvorhe 7y ago
Extreme speech fosters more extreme views and welcomes people who would otherwise not feel welcome anywhere else which might bring them back to a more socially acceptable train of thought. 8chan and the like instead make these people believe that their ideology is normal and that there's a big community of like-minded people out there. It's toxic and intolerable.
zaroth 7y ago
Mob rule and mob justice is a powerful strong drug. The more it is shown to work, the more that these errant acts of violence will be exploited to obtain a desired political outcome. Of course people look for something to blame, and there’s nothing quite a satisfying as shooting the messenger. It’s also convenient when a site is small enough, there’s not quite such a backlash when companies fall into PR ass-covering mode and terminate their service. Now, there’s no forcing CloudFlare to keep hosting any particular site, and there’s no convincing the mob that bowing to their demands is a really piss poor long term strategy for everyone involved. It takes very strong leadership to stand up against the mob and say “that’s no how we do things” and these days most people would rather just pile on, than risk the guilt by association.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

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.
Smithalicious 7y ago
Good and bad is not a binary, it's a spectrum. If you put the cutoff for what is allowed very close to the limit of hwat you think is "good" (i.e. you try to ban everything you would consider "bad"), there will inevitably be people with different viewpoints who can bring up a convincing argument that your cutoff also bans some good tihngs. We need a "buffer" of things generally considered "bad" but not too bad, so that we can ensure that good things really are allowed; allowing good things is more important than banning bad things. That is a key principle of having a free society. Of course, things wihch are obviously really very bad should be banned. Good news: they already are! Hate speech is banned in virtually every country I can think of. I'm explicitly not arguing against legal action against hate speech here; I'm arguing against private ocmpanies banning things which are not illegal. Leaving all that aside, even if you think all bad things should be banned, I do not think that Cloudflare of all things should be the arbiter of right and wrong.
mopsi 7y ago
> Germany isn't a dystopian hell-hole because they banned Nazism. Despite several recent high-profile banning attempts, Germany still has a nazi party, established in 1964. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Democratic_Party_of_Germany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Democratic_Party_of_G...

SkyBelow 7y ago

Makes me wonder how many people like GPL and free software. One of the core tenants of free software is the ability to do anything with it (freedom 0). This includes being able to do evil. https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html The original JSON license is even deemed not free because it limits the ability to use it for Evil. https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#JSON https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#JSON There is a reason for this decision and it applies to speech as much as it does to software.

simlevesque 7y ago
> This includes being able to do evil. This also includes booting someone off your platform.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
lifthrasiir 7y ago
> There is a reason for this decision [...] You seem to misunderstand that reason. It is because qualifying the evil is best done out of the license, and not because qualifying the evil is universally bad. It should be noted that the Debian Free Software Guidelines words that decision as "no discrimination" and this choice is not light---it is there to prevent prejudicial behaviors by licenses. And that doesn't mean that the society should not judge them either (otherwise it won't function at all). The DFSG doesn't prevent you from doing evil with a free software and face the postjudicial consequence at all. > [...] it applies to speech as much as it does to software. And that's where your comparison is wrong. Not because the freedom of speech is not absolute (this is a tough topic by itself) but because 8chan was blamed because it didn't even acknowledge the post-judgement.
- SkyBelow 7y ago
  > It is because qualifying the evil is best done out of the license The example in case does not qualify what counts as evil, only that it bans evil. It thus leaves it to others, outside of the license, to qualify evil when they determine how the license applies. Thus the license the FSF rejects does what you claim should be done. >The DFSG doesn't prevent you from doing evil with a free software and face the postjudicial consequence at all. It does suggest not using licenses that would increase the legal consequences of doing such evil. >because 8chan was blamed because it didn't even acknowledge the post-judgement. Does encryption acknowledge the post-judgment of all the evil it enables?

arwineap 7y ago

> People are doing the "yada yada not entitled to a platform" thing cloudfront is not really a platform. It's more like a CDN, or WAF. I think your point is worth discussing, just seems to link less to the context of 8chan. > 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. I wonder if the anonymous portion of these boards is what makes them so toxic? Plenty of fringe forums for example have account names. Frequent posters are known and have reputations, if a known person says something controversial, they can be challenged by others, known or not. I think it really just allows for discussions to happen in good faith. Half the time I think some of the most toxic discussions are not even between any two people but are actually between tens of different unique trolls who may not even be following the thread at all. Maybe bots, who knows.

Smithalicious 7y ago
I used the word "platform" because that's what others are saying. What I really mean to say is "infrastructure".
- arwineap 7y ago
  Turns out their ISP dropped out too. I'll go ahead and eat my words now :)

hrktb 7y ago

Inciting violence is not legal though. It’s reasonable to cut support to players that relentlessly fail to comply with the rules. The platforms are not turning against them, they are constantly abusing the ToS of these platforms . Now some people disagree with the ToS in the first place, but it’s another discussion to be done at another plane. There has always been a filtering of what goes to a super wide audience, movies airing on public broadcast have always been filtered, the same logic applies to platforms as wide as reddit.

adnzzzzZ 7y ago
8chan took the shooter's manifesto down way faster than it took Facebook to take down the Christchurch shooter's streams. You're mistaken if you think that 8chan "relentlessly fails to comply with the rules", anyone paying attention knows that they're very responsive. This is nothing more than a witchhunt because people want the site to go away.
- afiori 7y ago
  Facebook and others focus an inane amount of energy in keeping up a "healthy place" facade. Even if 8chan was super meticulous on the rules I doubt it could pull off the same feat without comparable effort.
- hrktb 7y ago
  I get your point, but I think responsiveness is just an aspect of the issue. For 8chan and for any other platform. For instance if you were harrassed on twitter, twitter being blazingly fast at taking down tweets you report wouldn’t help you much, you’d still have to report every single tweet of users harrassing you. Even if 8chan takes down every violence threat, if it still propagated enough to be worth it for the poster, 8chan’s modus operandi has very little impact on the situation. I am not saying it’s easy, just that they clearly haven’t found a good solution.
Ajedi32 7y ago
If what 8Chan was doing was not legal, then perhaps they should have been shut down through an actual legal process, not an arbitrary decision by a cloud infrastructure provider.

allemagne 7y ago

I get that you're trying to address a larger philosophical question, but what action are you actually suggesting in this particular instance? Should Cloudflare be forced to host 8chan? Even more than YouTube/Twitter, this seems like a clear case of business owners deciding that 8chan is too much of a liability to do business with.

Smithalicious 7y ago
This is a good point that I do not have a solution to. I do see that "I think the internet should be a neutral platform", "I think that the internet should be run by private companies" and "I think that private companies should be free to decide who to do business with" is also a set of incompatible beliefs (that I personally hold). Thankfully, I do not need to have all the answers to point out the issue :)
- klntsky 7y ago
  The problem here is that you don't see the difference between the informal "should" from the first stance and the legal "should" from the third. You can't even say things like "the internet legally should X" because the internet is not a single entity that can be coerced to do X (yep, the legal talk all comes down to the issue of who should be coerced to do what). Read Hayek BTW.
jimbobimbo 7y ago
If we think of CF/Voxility as of a "neutral infrastructure", CF and Voxility shouldn't be "forced to host", but also shouldn't proactively shut down sites, unless there's an obvious violation of ToS. There's a process of forcing companies to do something, and it involves a judge and a jury. I find it ironic to see cheering of these actions by The Verge, who is in the tank for "net neutrality". I don't like what site in question was hosting, but there're other ways of dealing with them.
- throwawayjava 7y ago
  > If we think of CF/Voxility as of a "neutral infrastructure" "Property rights for me but not for you"

ebspelman 7y ago

> 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. This is phrased as something to be fearful of here, but I think I'm actually fine with this precedent. There's nothing to stop people with extreme right-wing ideologies from marshaling the resources required to stand up all the pieces of web infrastructure they find themselves blocked from. If they can't amass those resources, that's ultimately a market decision, no? And if they were able to stand up that infrastructure, it would indicate a high level of financial support for their agenda, which would be the real thing to be afraid of, in my own opinion.

stale2002 7y ago
Are you going to be saying the same thing when Elisabeth Warren's or Bernie Sander's webites/ads/donations methods get taken off the internet because big corporations don't like that they want to raise taxes? The purpose of the canary in the coal mine is not to protect the canary. It is to protect the miner from the encroaching danger.
- ebspelman 7y ago
  Hmm. I'd say the canary is in the Wal-Mart.

zamfi 7y ago

> 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". But the size of the platform is commensurate with the tolerability of the speech, right? No one is preventing you from standing in a public place making whatever objectionable claims you want. But reddit/facebook/cloudflare/whoever don't have an obligation to let you use their platform to publish it if they don't like it. This is certainly not a meaningless distinction. In the age of print media, some random guy's fringe opinions were not "required to be published" -- you couldn't even buy a classified ad espousing objectionable content in large publications. No "ban" required. > We now live in a society where it is acceptable for private companies to essentially completely ban individuals from exercising their free speech We have always lived in such a society. And it's not "private companies" it's people. Some person makes this decision.

Thorentis 7y ago
> no one is preventing you from standing in a public place Social media is now the equivalent of standing in a public place. Times have changed. The town crier that used to tell people that latest headline? That's now the Facebook news feed. Public library/coffee shop where people can go discuss whatever new subversive political idea they've had? That's now online chat rooms. Sticking our heads in the sand and thinking that the Internet is anything other than the new public square is disingenuous. People need to wake up and realise that at present, the "public space" once protected by our rights has become almost entirely controlled by private monopolies.
- danem 7y ago
  Using Twitter and speaking in a public place are not at all equivalent. You are not entitled to use Twitter's resources that they pay money for to amplify your speech. You simply aren't. Just because we have the means of broadcasting speech more widely and cheaply than ever before in no way entitles you to those resources. Just as the Wall Street Journal is in no way obligated to publish your letter to the editor, Twitter is allowed to broadcast what they wish. Nothing at all is stopping 8chan from hosting their content on their own infrastructure.

thatswrong0 7y ago

> /r/the_donald is already quarantined That happened because they repeatedly violated rules on Reddit, not because of their extremist views. Reddit was lenient with them for a looong time. > We need to allow people on the edges of the spectrum to say what they want even if it is without merit /r/jailbait was banned, but it was technically "free speech" and technically legal, so according to your standards Reddit should have allowed the community to continue to exist, right? (Even though it existing probably led to some deviant / reprehensible / illegal behavior) But to me, it's obvious that that doesn't need to be allowed to exist on the platform. So to me, that means there is some line that we as a society draw between allowed speech and not. It's not codified in law, but it does exist. That line can move based on the whims of society. Right now, at least in the tech world, that line seems to be moving in such a way so as to not allow right-wing extremist speech. And that's totally fine in my book - in the same way that /r/jailbait is rightfully considered unacceptable "free speech" now, so is right-wing extremist "free speech". There are still places to congregate online for that sort of speech if you want. Or you could spin up your own server. It's not disallowed by law. But it's just not as accessible as it was before.

klntsky 7y ago

> 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". I'd rephrase the first: "it's okay for 8chan to be kicked off the internet, if there is no one who is willing to host it". > It's like saying "you can say anything you want, but we won't let you use the atmosphere to propagate the sound waves". And what you are saying is more like "I have the right to say anything I want but I'm too lazy to move the muscles of my face, so everyone (those who I point at, actually, by calling them EVIL MONOPOLIES) MUST help me in this noble mission of spreading the truth".

mcguire 7y ago

"virtually locked out of the internet"? How so? They're welcome to come here anytime.

lanstin 7y ago

There are things that you can say which will make your entire village shun you. True. Always has been. Probably always will be. Our world is now a village. It is a new thing to deal with. So far not many have adjusted well. People who fail to appreciate why their fellow citizens find a website cheering on the murder of groups of outsiders to be shun-worthy, their understanding of humans is woefully incomplete.

ArlenBales 7y ago

> We need to allow people on the edges of the spectrum to say what they want even if it is without merit Those people can say whatever they want, but no other individual or company needs to allow them the soapbox to do it.

inscionent 7y ago

> private companies to essentially completely ban individuals from exercising their free speech on the internet. "Free speech on the internet" is not something found in law. > The canary in the coalmine was The Daily Stormer Because The Daily Stormer was just a site to share ideas, right? > The Daily Stormer, which has established 31 physical chapters in the United States and more in Canada > Some of its readers do more than issue threats. Dylann Roof, who massacred nine African Americans in Charleston in 2015, posted on the site. Thomas Mair, the neo-Nazi assassin who last year killed Jo Cox, a British member of Parliament, was a regular reader. And just last month, another Daily Stormer reader, James Jackson, was charged with murder and terrorism after carrying out a plan to go to New York City to kill a black man at random. How ever will the Nazis share their hateful and violent ideas without the private internet companies? Oh no, the poor racists! > One message included an image of Gersh being sprayed with a green gas, along with the words: Hickory dickory dock, the kike ran up the clock. The clock struck three and the Internet Nazis trolls gassed the rest of them. https://www.splcenter.org/news/2017/04/18/splc-sues-neo-nazi-leader-who-targeted-jewish-woman-anti-semitic-harassment-campaign https://www.splcenter.org/news/2017/04/18/splc-sues-neo-nazi...

anigbrowl 7y ago

Murdering people permanently limits their free speech, no? If a website's content is full of discussions about why people ought to be murdered, and how to go about it, and exhortations that it take place as soon as possible, isn't that an attack on the free speech (as well as all other freedoms) of the intended target(s)?

jasonvorhe 7y ago

Extreme speech fosters more extreme views and welcomes people who would otherwise not feel welcome anywhere else which might bring them back to a more socially acceptable train of thought. 8chan and the like instead make these people believe that their ideology is normal and that there's a big community of like-minded people out there. It's toxic and intolerable.

zaroth 7y ago

Mob rule and mob justice is a powerful strong drug. The more it is shown to work, the more that these errant acts of violence will be exploited to obtain a desired political outcome. Of course people look for something to blame, and there’s nothing quite a satisfying as shooting the messenger. It’s also convenient when a site is small enough, there’s not quite such a backlash when companies fall into PR ass-covering mode and terminate their service. Now, there’s no forcing CloudFlare to keep hosting any particular site, and there’s no convincing the mob that bowing to their demands is a really piss poor long term strategy for everyone involved. It takes very strong leadership to stand up against the mob and say “that’s no how we do things” and these days most people would rather just pile on, than risk the guilt by association.

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