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Well, I mean, when they were banned from twitter, people said "build your own twitter", when they built gab and got banned from credit cards processors they sai

Well, I mean, when they were banned from twitter, people said "build your own twitter", when they built gab and got banned from credit cards processors they said "build your own financial system", when they got banned from cloudflare they were told "build your own internet backbone" etc... At which point this is not censorship when companies equivalent to public infra with big public contracts and ties to the government using public infrastructure paid by the people ban you from their services? I mean, imagine if this was happening to some people in China, people would immediately call it censorship, and rightfully so.

nojito 6y ago
These sites aren’t being banned for their views but their blatant disregard for the terms of services for providers.
- rndgermandude 6y ago
  Are they? Some may be, such as proud boys and dailystormer may be afoul of some (vague) hate speech clauses. Others may not be. paypal and CC companies also shut down donations to wikileaks long ago (long before Trump was a thing). And even shut down donations to other foundations, such as the Wau Holland Stiftung of the Chaos Computer Club[0], that collected donations in part for wikileaks. My first real memory of paypal was paypal shutting down the account we used to collect donations to cover server costs for a forum we ran back in the day[1], without any appeals process and freezing all assets, effectively stealing the money[2]. I also find it fascinating e.g. that cloudflare still protects botters (aka outright declared criminals) and people selling child porn[3] (aka the worst of common criminals), but dailystormer, as vile as they are, are somehow too much. [0] German, https://netzpolitik.org/2010/wau-holland-stiftung-geht-gegen-paypal-vor/ https://netzpolitik.org/2010/wau-holland-stiftung-geht-gegen... [1] the forums was a rather benign thing, just for chitchat, nobody sold anything, and it wasn't about anything illegal either. We never got an explanation from paypal, but the account shutdown coincided with a DMCA request for a single red carpet picture some user posted in a thread about the Emmy's. We removed that picture, by the way. [2] Paypal wrote that they would refund the money, but some of our members reported they never did get a refund. [3] I and some other people repeatedly reported a website selling child pornography for crypto (or for users submitting "original content"), mostly of the blackmailed-into-performing-lewd-acts variety targeting young teens and even pre-teens. While we had some success in getting domain registrars to nuke the domains in the past, this only lead to domain hopping, and finally the operator found a registrar that doesn't care (currently a Ukrainian company and .su/.pk domains). Every time the websites were behind cloudflare and every time cloudflare responded to our requests with "we're just a reverse proxy and forwarded it to the hoster" and didn't do anything. The current incarnations of those websites are still online a month later.
  - oarsinsync 6y ago
    > I also find it fascinating e.g. that cloudflare still protects botters (aka outright declared criminals) and people selling child porn[3] (aka the worst of common criminals), but dailystormer, as vile as they are, are somehow too much. The publicly stated motivations behind terminating dailystormer are that dailystormer allegedly suggested that Cloudflare supported them. The content wasn’t the issue, the suggested endorsement was: https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-we-terminated-daily-stormer/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-we-terminated-daily-stormer/ EDIT: this doesn’t gel with my memory of the events at the time, which were that the site got terminated because the CEO or CTO was in a bad mood, mind. It may be some post-hoc rationalisation to make it more palatable and give them cover against the things you’re saying. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
    - rndgermandude 6y ago
      Yeah, the CEO decided to terminate their account because he didn't like them. The bit about "endorsement" was just a rationalization after the fact. >“Literally, I woke up in a bad mood and decided someone shouldn’t be allowed on the Internet,” Prince wrote in an internal memo to employees obtained by Gizmodo and published on Wednesday. “No one should have that power.” https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/17/cloudflare-ceo-says-removing-the-daily-stormer-is-slippery-slope.html https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/17/cloudflare-ceo-says-removing...
      - ceejayoz 6y ago
        > “No one should have that power.” I mean, he doesn't. Cloudflare isn't the Internet. HN itself is an example.
  - nojito 6y ago
    I'm sorry but no one should have any right to tell private organizations who they can and can't do business with. What you're advocating for is extremely dangerous and shortsighted.
    - rndgermandude 6y ago
ceejayoz 6y ago
Look, if you get a reputation for entering businesses and shitting on the floor, you'll find yourself banned from all of them eventually. The same is true for online businesses.
- toomuchtodo 6y ago
  Money is speech, so says the supreme court (Citizens United). Impeding the transfer of fiat (infra which should be a utility) is a violation of constitutional rights (arguably) if you're not breaking the law. Even if I disagree with the speech (I do! Vehemently!), rights must be inalienable. Maybe this should be patched in Section 230 legislation versus 18 USC § 1960, would have to read more statute to provide a proper opinion on which statute should protect money as speech transmittal (IANAL, would like to hear a JD's legal opinion).
  - ceejayoz 6y ago
    SCOTUS has also ruled companies and people have a right to free association, with the exception of discrimination based on a protected class. Proud Boys are not a protected class.
    - toomuchtodo 6y ago
      Up for revisiting if another case makes it to SCOTUS once it tilts conservative with Barrett's confirmation.
      - ceejayoz 6y ago
        "Companies should be able to reject customers" is the conservative position, in cases like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masterpiece_Cakeshop_v._Colorado_Civil_Rights_Commission https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masterpiece_Cakeshop_v._Colora.... It's likely to tilt more in that direction, not less.
    - mainstreem 6y ago
      They came for the Proud Boys, but I thought they were a fascist group because I believe whatever the trustworthy media says, so I said nothing. Then the trustworthy media said I was a fascist, and they came for me, and no one believed I wasn't a fascist.
virgil_disgr4ce 6y ago
"ties to the government?" Even if that were more than vague and nebulous, it's still not "actually the government." Private companies terminating accounts of their own volition is not censorship.
- gruez 6y ago
  >Private companies terminating accounts of their own volition is not censorship. Are you conflating 1st amendment protections with "censorship"? Definition of censorship: >The use of state or group power to control freedom of expression or press, such as passing laws to prevent media from being published or propagated. (emphasis mine)
  - rndgermandude 6y ago
    Indeed, companies may have the legal right to censor like this, but it's censorship regardless.
    - NovemberWhiskey 6y ago
      You can draw the definition as widely as you like: not even the ACLU says that censorship carried out by private citizens is illegal or that the right response to it is more laws.
      - rndgermandude 6y ago
        I didn't say either, I didn't say it was illegal - quite the opposite - or that the right response is more laws. However, I did say in the past, that in certain circumstances I do think the right response is laws. There are laws e.g. prohibiting utility companies from refusing customers they do not like like people who criticize the company or nazis and "nazis". I do think that common infrastructure companies (analog to the utilities companies, just essential digital services) such as cloudflare, dns registrars, hosting and cloud providers shouldn't be allowed to discriminate against people with the "wrong" opinions. And even "social media" companies of a certain size/marketshare/market power should be severely limited in what they can censor (e.g. banning nudity and porn and gore etc is OK in my opinion, banning speech inciting violence is too, if narrowly defined, banning people because they belong to a certain political party or stream is not). Yeah, here be dragons; it would be hard to find a good balance, but given the alternative of a few (social) media companies right now growing ever more powerful it still would be the right thing to do.
x86_64Ubuntu 6y ago
Proud Boys and Gab not being able to do whatever is a world of difference from the plight of the Uighurs in China or Hong Kong.
jasonlotito 6y ago
> At which point this is not censorship when companies equivalent to public infra But they aren't public infrastructure. Twitter isn't. Cloudflare isn't. CC companies aren't. They are private companies, and as as these people were fine with private companies denying services to left-leaning individuals in the past, they don't have much of a leg to stand on now that they are on the receiving end of it.
sascha_sl 6y ago
Except that is explicitly not the argument of those that actually want these folks deplatformed, but those that fear their own speech will somehow be in danger and want to solve every issue in existence with technology. The "it could happen to you argument" is really tiring. Gab is abusing your idealism. If you spent any amount of time on Gab you'd know it was a deeply right wing bubble full of hate, with a lot of harassment coordination happening. I say has because it has gone a bit out of fashion and these people moved on to Parlor now. This is not merely a place where people have opinions (that someone thinks are bad). That exists on YouTube. If the bar really was "the consensus thinks you're wrong, filled with bias and not interested in productive exchange", Stephen Crowder, Dennis Prager and Tim Pool would not be on YouTube. James Damore would not have been on every conservative program in existence. Society has drawn a line, and you can argue if it's too strict or leniant, but to say we could never draw one without the possibility of false positives is defeatist idealism. Sites like Gab or, let me dare mention their name, Kiwi Farms, are different. They facilitate material harm in a very tangible clear-cut way. They are very definitely beyond the point where tolerance does not actively work to destroy itself.
jasonvorhe 6y ago
So you're basically in the same space as porn (not that I'm comparing porn to right wing activists!): People DDoS you, payment providers don't want to do business with you, social media companies only accept you if you adhere to their strict rules (no nipples, no close ups of your intimate parts, nothing explicit) - where is the outrage regarding the people who had to deal with this since the birth of the mainstream internet?
commandlinefan 6y ago
> when they built gab and got banned from credit cards processors they said "build your own financial system" As a free speech absolutist, I'm always a little optimistic when I see this sort of thing happen, because it always has the opposite effect than its intent: the censors expect that the things they don't like to disappear completely as if they had never existed, but what ends up happening is that censorship drives further decentralization, which is even harder to censor. This event exposed another single point of failure - its up to the infrastructure to fix that.
colejohnson66 6y ago
You’re ignoring that they refused to answer the KYC laws in the US. You know, those laws that require PayPal to ask certain questions, and to refuse business if they don’t answer?

nojito 6y ago

These sites aren’t being banned for their views but their blatant disregard for the terms of services for providers.

rndgermandude 6y ago
Are they? Some may be, such as proud boys and dailystormer may be afoul of some (vague) hate speech clauses. Others may not be. paypal and CC companies also shut down donations to wikileaks long ago (long before Trump was a thing). And even shut down donations to other foundations, such as the Wau Holland Stiftung of the Chaos Computer Club[0], that collected donations in part for wikileaks. My first real memory of paypal was paypal shutting down the account we used to collect donations to cover server costs for a forum we ran back in the day[1], without any appeals process and freezing all assets, effectively stealing the money[2]. I also find it fascinating e.g. that cloudflare still protects botters (aka outright declared criminals) and people selling child porn[3] (aka the worst of common criminals), but dailystormer, as vile as they are, are somehow too much. [0] German, https://netzpolitik.org/2010/wau-holland-stiftung-geht-gegen-paypal-vor/ https://netzpolitik.org/2010/wau-holland-stiftung-geht-gegen... [1] the forums was a rather benign thing, just for chitchat, nobody sold anything, and it wasn't about anything illegal either. We never got an explanation from paypal, but the account shutdown coincided with a DMCA request for a single red carpet picture some user posted in a thread about the Emmy's. We removed that picture, by the way. [2] Paypal wrote that they would refund the money, but some of our members reported they never did get a refund. [3] I and some other people repeatedly reported a website selling child pornography for crypto (or for users submitting "original content"), mostly of the blackmailed-into-performing-lewd-acts variety targeting young teens and even pre-teens. While we had some success in getting domain registrars to nuke the domains in the past, this only lead to domain hopping, and finally the operator found a registrar that doesn't care (currently a Ukrainian company and .su/.pk domains). Every time the websites were behind cloudflare and every time cloudflare responded to our requests with "we're just a reverse proxy and forwarded it to the hoster" and didn't do anything. The current incarnations of those websites are still online a month later.
- oarsinsync 6y ago
  > I also find it fascinating e.g. that cloudflare still protects botters (aka outright declared criminals) and people selling child porn[3] (aka the worst of common criminals), but dailystormer, as vile as they are, are somehow too much. The publicly stated motivations behind terminating dailystormer are that dailystormer allegedly suggested that Cloudflare supported them. The content wasn’t the issue, the suggested endorsement was: https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-we-terminated-daily-stormer/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-we-terminated-daily-stormer/ EDIT: this doesn’t gel with my memory of the events at the time, which were that the site got terminated because the CEO or CTO was in a bad mood, mind. It may be some post-hoc rationalisation to make it more palatable and give them cover against the things you’re saying. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
  - rndgermandude 6y ago
    Yeah, the CEO decided to terminate their account because he didn't like them. The bit about "endorsement" was just a rationalization after the fact. >“Literally, I woke up in a bad mood and decided someone shouldn’t be allowed on the Internet,” Prince wrote in an internal memo to employees obtained by Gizmodo and published on Wednesday. “No one should have that power.” https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/17/cloudflare-ceo-says-removing-the-daily-stormer-is-slippery-slope.html https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/17/cloudflare-ceo-says-removing...
    - ceejayoz 6y ago
      > “No one should have that power.” I mean, he doesn't. Cloudflare isn't the Internet. HN itself is an example.
- nojito 6y ago
  I'm sorry but no one should have any right to tell private organizations who they can and can't do business with. What you're advocating for is extremely dangerous and shortsighted.
  - rndgermandude 6y ago

ceejayoz 6y ago

Look, if you get a reputation for entering businesses and shitting on the floor, you'll find yourself banned from all of them eventually. The same is true for online businesses.

toomuchtodo 6y ago
Money is speech, so says the supreme court (Citizens United). Impeding the transfer of fiat (infra which should be a utility) is a violation of constitutional rights (arguably) if you're not breaking the law. Even if I disagree with the speech (I do! Vehemently!), rights must be inalienable. Maybe this should be patched in Section 230 legislation versus 18 USC § 1960, would have to read more statute to provide a proper opinion on which statute should protect money as speech transmittal (IANAL, would like to hear a JD's legal opinion).
- ceejayoz 6y ago
  SCOTUS has also ruled companies and people have a right to free association, with the exception of discrimination based on a protected class. Proud Boys are not a protected class.
  - toomuchtodo 6y ago
    Up for revisiting if another case makes it to SCOTUS once it tilts conservative with Barrett's confirmation.
    - ceejayoz 6y ago
      "Companies should be able to reject customers" is the conservative position, in cases like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masterpiece_Cakeshop_v._Colorado_Civil_Rights_Commission https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masterpiece_Cakeshop_v._Colora.... It's likely to tilt more in that direction, not less.
  - mainstreem 6y ago
    They came for the Proud Boys, but I thought they were a fascist group because I believe whatever the trustworthy media says, so I said nothing. Then the trustworthy media said I was a fascist, and they came for me, and no one believed I wasn't a fascist.

virgil_disgr4ce 6y ago

"ties to the government?" Even if that were more than vague and nebulous, it's still not "actually the government." Private companies terminating accounts of their own volition is not censorship.

gruez 6y ago
>Private companies terminating accounts of their own volition is not censorship. Are you conflating 1st amendment protections with "censorship"? Definition of censorship: >The use of state or group power to control freedom of expression or press, such as passing laws to prevent media from being published or propagated. (emphasis mine)
- rndgermandude 6y ago
  Indeed, companies may have the legal right to censor like this, but it's censorship regardless.
  - NovemberWhiskey 6y ago
    You can draw the definition as widely as you like: not even the ACLU says that censorship carried out by private citizens is illegal or that the right response to it is more laws.
    - rndgermandude 6y ago
      I didn't say either, I didn't say it was illegal - quite the opposite - or that the right response is more laws. However, I did say in the past, that in certain circumstances I do think the right response is laws. There are laws e.g. prohibiting utility companies from refusing customers they do not like like people who criticize the company or nazis and "nazis". I do think that common infrastructure companies (analog to the utilities companies, just essential digital services) such as cloudflare, dns registrars, hosting and cloud providers shouldn't be allowed to discriminate against people with the "wrong" opinions. And even "social media" companies of a certain size/marketshare/market power should be severely limited in what they can censor (e.g. banning nudity and porn and gore etc is OK in my opinion, banning speech inciting violence is too, if narrowly defined, banning people because they belong to a certain political party or stream is not). Yeah, here be dragons; it would be hard to find a good balance, but given the alternative of a few (social) media companies right now growing ever more powerful it still would be the right thing to do.

x86_64Ubuntu 6y ago

Proud Boys and Gab not being able to do whatever is a world of difference from the plight of the Uighurs in China or Hong Kong.

jasonlotito 6y ago

> At which point this is not censorship when companies equivalent to public infra But they aren't public infrastructure. Twitter isn't. Cloudflare isn't. CC companies aren't. They are private companies, and as as these people were fine with private companies denying services to left-leaning individuals in the past, they don't have much of a leg to stand on now that they are on the receiving end of it.

sascha_sl 6y ago

Except that is explicitly not the argument of those that actually want these folks deplatformed, but those that fear their own speech will somehow be in danger and want to solve every issue in existence with technology. The "it could happen to you argument" is really tiring. Gab is abusing your idealism. If you spent any amount of time on Gab you'd know it was a deeply right wing bubble full of hate, with a lot of harassment coordination happening. I say has because it has gone a bit out of fashion and these people moved on to Parlor now. This is not merely a place where people have opinions (that someone thinks are bad). That exists on YouTube. If the bar really was "the consensus thinks you're wrong, filled with bias and not interested in productive exchange", Stephen Crowder, Dennis Prager and Tim Pool would not be on YouTube. James Damore would not have been on every conservative program in existence. Society has drawn a line, and you can argue if it's too strict or leniant, but to say we could never draw one without the possibility of false positives is defeatist idealism. Sites like Gab or, let me dare mention their name, Kiwi Farms, are different. They facilitate material harm in a very tangible clear-cut way. They are very definitely beyond the point where tolerance does not actively work to destroy itself.

jasonvorhe 6y ago

So you're basically in the same space as porn (not that I'm comparing porn to right wing activists!): People DDoS you, payment providers don't want to do business with you, social media companies only accept you if you adhere to their strict rules (no nipples, no close ups of your intimate parts, nothing explicit) - where is the outrage regarding the people who had to deal with this since the birth of the mainstream internet?

commandlinefan 6y ago

> when they built gab and got banned from credit cards processors they said "build your own financial system" As a free speech absolutist, I'm always a little optimistic when I see this sort of thing happen, because it always has the opposite effect than its intent: the censors expect that the things they don't like to disappear completely as if they had never existed, but what ends up happening is that censorship drives further decentralization, which is even harder to censor. This event exposed another single point of failure - its up to the infrastructure to fix that.

colejohnson66 6y ago

You’re ignoring that they refused to answer the KYC laws in the US. You know, those laws that require PayPal to ask certain questions, and to refuse business if they don’t answer?