2 ms·

Ok, so the situation right now: you make a web forum, and delete posts that are about your friends doing bad things but leave posts about that organizer because

by saurik 7y ago

Ok, so the situation right now: you make a web forum, and delete posts that are about your friends doing bad things but leave posts about that organizer because you don't know then and don't bother to look into reports that it is all, in fact, libel, because that's work and you aren't liable. Meanwhile, you take down posts of people talking about how the tournament did not offer gender neutral bathrooms or how there aren't enough female chess masters, because that's "political" and off topic, but then turn a blind eye towards people harassing women on the forum and require them to keep begging you with the flag buttons to clean up your mess. The result of this is just that the powerful majority gets something akin to a working filter and all the marginalized people don't just get lip service to their issues: they end up being unable to even bring up their complaints, because those complaints are divisive and often themselves against some terms of service banning meta-conversation (a common enough issue that this website--Hacker News--has such an indefensible clause). This is all just not OK: you don't get to have immunity and have control. The idea that you should be able to restrict some of what happens but somehow not be even sort of responsible for everything else that happens is the kind of position you can only hold if you are part of the powerful majority, whatever it might be (cishet white males, corporate stooges, western prudes... take your pick) :/. So, I guess, "congratulations tzs": you are demonstrating loud and clear that you think the legal position of running a chess forum that actively distorts the world view of everyone using it is more important to defend than the rights of groups like breast feeding mothers (a group that is routinely thrown off of websites and deplatfored even as alt-right groups are empowered). (Meanwhile, the entire premise that people should get to sort of look like a platform without really being a platform is robbing the world of actual platforms, and it is ridiculous: the existence of things that almost work like platforms for the majority of powerful people means that getting people to tolerate the pain of using fully distributed systems is by and large off the table :/. Either these large websites should offer real platforms or they should be forced to not pretend to do so, so we can actually launch and use distributed systems instead.)

geofft 7y ago
The danger here, it seems to me, is that once you make it clear that the people saying that there aren't enough female chess masters have a legal right to be on this forum and cannot have their posts thrown out as "political," the people saying that men are naturally more suited to the game of chess and women should get back in the kitchen will rub their hands in glee and realize that they now have a legal right to be on every other chess forum, because their posts, too, are merely "political" and not libelous. They know how to toe that line - doing so a core competency of internet trolls (see also "hide your power level"). That is, the tradeoff of saying that the powerful majority no longer gets to regulate forums and must give the marginalized a voice is saying that the marginalized no longer get to regulate forums either and must give the powerful majority a voice - and the powerful majority is, after all, powerful, and will take advantage of this too. So the practical result is that only people with the resources to moderate their forums to the point that they're willing to accept liability will run moderated forums. That requires either significant resources to run the moderation program (and a chilling effect on what gets approved) or significant resources to deal with liability and American-style lawsuits. The breastfeeding mother who's setting up a blog for her three closest friends to comment on will technically be fine, but she can no longer grow her community beyond her three closest friends. The powerful (whether that's "big companies" or "socially powerful races" or whatever) are happy to keep restricting what happens on their platform and take on liability because that liability will affect them less. I don't have a solution for this, and I find your argument mostly compelling, but I don't know that it gets us where we want to be either. I'm not really comfortable with "The price we pay for keeping MRAs from derailing forums is allowing people to say that feminists are derailing forums," but "The price we pay for making sure feminists can speak is making sure MRAs can speak" feels equally uncomfortable. (BTW - I upvoted both of you because I think you both made good points.)
- ta999999171 7y ago
  The solution is to anonymize and decentralize the internet, and we've been saying it for decades.
  - geofft 7y ago
    That's a slightly different solution from just decentralizing the internet, which 'saurik advocated above. (I'm in favor of decentralization on principle, to be clear, I'm just not sure it solves this problem.) The problem with anonymizing the internet is that it prevents forming real-world communities. If you're forced to remain hidden so that you escape scrutiny, the breastfeeding mother has no way of finding others in her city beyond her three existing friends, because none of them want to be known as the dissident who supports breastfeeding. There's still value to the online communities, yes, but this seems like a significant abdication of the power of the internet to help society. The problem with decentralizing the internet without anonymizing it is that any legal restrictions remain. If there's a law that says that Twitter can't kick breastfeeding mothers off their website without taking legal responsibility, that same law will say that my Mastodon instance must federate with every alt-right-but-toeing-the-line Mastodon instance if I don't want to take legal responsibility for everything that shows up on my Mastodon instance.
    - quadrifoliate 7y ago
      >...that same law will say that my Mastodon instance must federate with every alt-right-but-toeing-the-line Mastodon instance if I don't want to take legal responsibility for everything that shows up on my Mastodon instance. This seems highly unlikely to me. What if you are running a different version of the codebase or something from those instances? v2.0.1special. Even leaving aside constraints like that, volume of inbound traffic, etc. are direct costs to federation with other instances that I doubt laws would be willing to force you to pay. I wonder if there are examples of this having been done in the past. Microsoft's antitrust case is the closest that comes to mind, but they were operating from an absolutely dominant standpoint at the time. If Mastodon/ActivityPub ever reaches that level, I'd consider it...a win?
shadowgovt 7y ago
Isn't the powerful majority you describe one any individual can enter into by becoming the administrator of their own site? The scenario you describe sounds like it makes for a pretty terrible chess site, and I bet people would like an alternative.
droithomme 7y ago
The only solution is to kill all small independent boards and only allow everything to be handled by Facebook et al who are sufficiently armed with lawyers. Death to independent free speech publishers.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
franga2000 7y ago
> you think the legal position of running a chess forum that actively distorts the world view of everyone using it is more important to defend than the rights of groups like breast feeding mothers Wait, are you claiming chess forums are known to often discriminate against breastfeeding mothers? Or did you quietly jump from the specific to the general case? If so, are you saying Internet communities tend to discriminate against them? Hell, the closest I've seen is people IRL complaining about breastfeeding on public transit/other small, closed, public spaces. Justified or not, how is this infringing on any rights and how is any of this related to the Internet? How would one even know someone is a breastfeeding mother on a pseudonymous mostly text-based platform? > The idea that you should be able to restrict some of what happens but somehow not be even sort of responsible for everything else... But is that the case? If you don't restrict porn etc., you get hit by children's safety laws. If you don't remove ISIS videos you get hit by anti-terrorism laws. Same for hate speech, although I believe you're liable only if you refuse to take it down after being ordered to. (basing this on a mix of US and EU laws since I forger which are which). These things apply to "platforms" as well. But besides that, you can't have a perfectly neutral platform anyways. If you want the platform to survive, it needs to be usable. A chess forum that's full of politics is not usable and neither is a cooking forum full of nazis.

by saurik 7y ago

geofft 7y ago

The danger here, it seems to me, is that once you make it clear that the people saying that there aren't enough female chess masters have a legal right to be on this forum and cannot have their posts thrown out as "political," the people saying that men are naturally more suited to the game of chess and women should get back in the kitchen will rub their hands in glee and realize that they now have a legal right to be on every other chess forum, because their posts, too, are merely "political" and not libelous. They know how to toe that line - doing so a core competency of internet trolls (see also "hide your power level"). That is, the tradeoff of saying that the powerful majority no longer gets to regulate forums and must give the marginalized a voice is saying that the marginalized no longer get to regulate forums either and must give the powerful majority a voice - and the powerful majority is, after all, powerful, and will take advantage of this too. So the practical result is that only people with the resources to moderate their forums to the point that they're willing to accept liability will run moderated forums. That requires either significant resources to run the moderation program (and a chilling effect on what gets approved) or significant resources to deal with liability and American-style lawsuits. The breastfeeding mother who's setting up a blog for her three closest friends to comment on will technically be fine, but she can no longer grow her community beyond her three closest friends. The powerful (whether that's "big companies" or "socially powerful races" or whatever) are happy to keep restricting what happens on their platform and take on liability because that liability will affect them less. I don't have a solution for this, and I find your argument mostly compelling, but I don't know that it gets us where we want to be either. I'm not really comfortable with "The price we pay for keeping MRAs from derailing forums is allowing people to say that feminists are derailing forums," but "The price we pay for making sure feminists can speak is making sure MRAs can speak" feels equally uncomfortable. (BTW - I upvoted both of you because I think you both made good points.)

ta999999171 7y ago
The solution is to anonymize and decentralize the internet, and we've been saying it for decades.
- geofft 7y ago
  That's a slightly different solution from just decentralizing the internet, which 'saurik advocated above. (I'm in favor of decentralization on principle, to be clear, I'm just not sure it solves this problem.) The problem with anonymizing the internet is that it prevents forming real-world communities. If you're forced to remain hidden so that you escape scrutiny, the breastfeeding mother has no way of finding others in her city beyond her three existing friends, because none of them want to be known as the dissident who supports breastfeeding. There's still value to the online communities, yes, but this seems like a significant abdication of the power of the internet to help society. The problem with decentralizing the internet without anonymizing it is that any legal restrictions remain. If there's a law that says that Twitter can't kick breastfeeding mothers off their website without taking legal responsibility, that same law will say that my Mastodon instance must federate with every alt-right-but-toeing-the-line Mastodon instance if I don't want to take legal responsibility for everything that shows up on my Mastodon instance.
  - quadrifoliate 7y ago
    >...that same law will say that my Mastodon instance must federate with every alt-right-but-toeing-the-line Mastodon instance if I don't want to take legal responsibility for everything that shows up on my Mastodon instance. This seems highly unlikely to me. What if you are running a different version of the codebase or something from those instances? v2.0.1special. Even leaving aside constraints like that, volume of inbound traffic, etc. are direct costs to federation with other instances that I doubt laws would be willing to force you to pay. I wonder if there are examples of this having been done in the past. Microsoft's antitrust case is the closest that comes to mind, but they were operating from an absolutely dominant standpoint at the time. If Mastodon/ActivityPub ever reaches that level, I'd consider it...a win?

shadowgovt 7y ago

Isn't the powerful majority you describe one any individual can enter into by becoming the administrator of their own site? The scenario you describe sounds like it makes for a pretty terrible chess site, and I bet people would like an alternative.

droithomme 7y ago

The only solution is to kill all small independent boards and only allow everything to be handled by Facebook et al who are sufficiently armed with lawyers. Death to independent free speech publishers.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

franga2000 7y ago

> you think the legal position of running a chess forum that actively distorts the world view of everyone using it is more important to defend than the rights of groups like breast feeding mothers Wait, are you claiming chess forums are known to often discriminate against breastfeeding mothers? Or did you quietly jump from the specific to the general case? If so, are you saying Internet communities tend to discriminate against them? Hell, the closest I've seen is people IRL complaining about breastfeeding on public transit/other small, closed, public spaces. Justified or not, how is this infringing on any rights and how is any of this related to the Internet? How would one even know someone is a breastfeeding mother on a pseudonymous mostly text-based platform? > The idea that you should be able to restrict some of what happens but somehow not be even sort of responsible for everything else... But is that the case? If you don't restrict porn etc., you get hit by children's safety laws. If you don't remove ISIS videos you get hit by anti-terrorism laws. Same for hate speech, although I believe you're liable only if you refuse to take it down after being ordered to. (basing this on a mix of US and EU laws since I forger which are which). These things apply to "platforms" as well. But besides that, you can't have a perfectly neutral platform anyways. If you want the platform to survive, it needs to be usable. A chess forum that's full of politics is not usable and neither is a cooking forum full of nazis.