11 ms·

Same. I've long worried lurking there was going to cause more harm than it's worth (for example, by letting me inadvertently slip into extremism) but the abilit

• renewiltord 6y ago
  As in let's encrypt is going to blacklist their domain? Sounds unlikely. It doesn't really matter. If this starts being a problem, we'll use a decentralized web of trust for SSL. It doesn't have to be centralized.
  • gfodor 6y ago
    Yeah I'll admit I didn't follow it completely and didn't care enough to investigate. I'm sure it'll bubble up here if it does with more details just like when they got nuked from Reddit. Arguably sites like this one are a good way to gauge the true robustness of the Internet - given the situation this week they clearly now are in the realm of law enforcement, but up until these rather insane events to me their continued presence was an existence proof that speech on the web is still in a good place. Now if they get taken down I won't judge it too harshly against that thesis since they basically fomented a theoretical insurrection by the letter of the law, even though in practice the "coup" turns out was never a real threat given how ridiculous things went once the dog caught the car.
    • blisterpeanuts 6y ago
      Suppose that the only violence was caused by a group of antifa supporters wearing pro-Trump hats etc., which some eyewitnesses are now claiming. Suppose further that about 100 people actually passed the barricades (which were inexplicably opened by the police, by the way, video evidence shows) out of the estimated 40,000 at the rally. If that is the case, is it really fair to shut down major pro-Trump websites? If so, it would prove that a few instigators can pretty much undermine any organization by these kinds of tactics. I would also note that there has been terrible violence associated with BLM protests, much worse than was seen this week, with buildings burned, police cars smashed or lit on fire, dozens of police assaulted, people shot, stores looted, passersby beaten up... and to my knowledge, no effort was made to close down BLM websites. I'm all for law and order, and I was against the trespassing that happened and whatever violence did occur at that rally, but we shouldn't be so quick to just throw out freedom of speech and equal access to the internet, or it will come back to bite us, guaranteed. The Internet was established by public funding, university research, and millions of people paying into services & resources; it mustn't be turned into a private club.
      • gfodor 6y ago
        You may be reading too much into what I wrote. My standard here is simply that I think if a website is literally organizing something which explicitly, literally, supports violent overthrow of the government, then I'm going to yield to the legal system to enforce whatever laws exist to properly regulate that speech. I don't have a strong opinion beyond that since I am not a lawyer. My point is that if the mechanism to enforce those laws includes SSL or CDN interference, I won't include such interference on the list of things I'd be concerned about in my bucket of "corporate interests mediating acceptable global speech."
        • jcranmer 6y ago
          I'm not sure if you're aware of this, but in the US, the current standard for free speech (Brandenburg v Ohio) holds that literally advocating for violent overthrow of the government is constitutionally-protected free speech. The bar that you have to hit is incitement to "imminent lawless action." This standard of free speech is much higher than most of the rest of the world.
          • gfodor 6y ago
            That makes sense - I appreciate the info and upon first glance that seems like a sane standard. (Beyond being ignorant on the legal aspect to this, my phrasing lacked the specificity in that what was going on on TDW, especially ex-post, was clearly organizing such imminent action at a specific time and place. I'd suspect the standard you mention would have been met.)
          • throwawaysea 6y ago
            Thanks for this clarification. I am also still confused as to why Trump himself has been the target of all these tech/social media platforms. As far as I can tell he has not incited violence - imminent or otherwise. Yes he has made exaggerated/false claims about the election, yes he has not condemned the criminal acts of the capitol rioters, but as far as I can tell he has not encouraged or incited violence. And each time I have asked this question of friends or on HN, I've not received a substantive answer.
• daniel957 6y ago
  You didn’t need to look at those sites to predict what was going to happen.
  • gfodor 6y ago
    I disagree, as someone who observed this site as well as everything else, I can tell you at least for me my prior was heavily influenced by the shift in tone, sentiment, and desperation I observed there relative to the usual din of more front-facing social media grifters.
    • daniel957 6y ago
      Oh, I think that’s just a convoluted way of saying you lived in a bubble. It was quite clear that this was going to happen. No one on my timeline is shocked at all. In fact, I’ve been complaining about these deplorables since 2013 (even before the phrase was coined).
      • gfodor 6y ago
        What bubble are you referring to? Saying it was obvious now doesn't say anything about having good predictive ability. My recollection is up until about Monday, most people were asleep on this. And then around Tuesday the zeitguest was this was going to be a dumb clown show. The number of people claiming that violence was inevitable and the capitol was going to be stormed, outside of the obvious circles, was in my experience marginal.
        • daniel957 6y ago
          I wasn’t trying to offend you. Everyone lives in a bubble or several. My timeline consists mainly of 80% American minorities and 20% graduates from elite US universities (with some overlap between the two groups obviously). What about yours? No one on my timeline was surprised. And if they were, they were privileged white people (no offense just being honest when talking about Harvard/MIT grads). These insurrectionists complained all year about wearing masks. Some of them even shot retail workers because they were so upset. How could you not see this coming? It’s sort of hard for me to tell based on your comments. Do you live in the U.S. and where about? I could see how one would be surprised if they lived abroad and only used mainstream social media to gauge what’s going on. But if you’ve lived in the U.S. and read any of the think pieces in mainstream newspapers or even popular Medium articles over the last 4 years, you would have likely learned about the surge in domestic terrorism committed by white supremacists. There were so many articles, especially this past year in the summer. How could you not have read any of them? Well, I do know that those sort of articles get downvoted on HN and don’t surface to the top. I’m not sure why articles with titles like “FBI confirms a surge in domestic terrorism” aren’t important to HN. (That was sarcasm.) I literally had a conversation with dang@ the other day about this, and he didn’t believe me.
• Bayart 6y ago
  >Which, it probably goes without saying, should scare the shit out of anyone who cares about the principles of the free Internet. Service-providers giving the boot to « problematic » users is as far as I know as old as the Internet.
  • razius 6y ago
    Problematic as in contrarian view?
  • thotsBgone 6y ago
    Example?
    • crisper78 6y ago
      I have about 30 examples, none of which will ever be shared on the Internet!
    • cpach 6y ago
      For example, I know that Hezbollah had problems finding an ISP back in the 90s.
    • d1zzy 6y ago
      When I worked at an ISP years back, if we had a DDOS attack against a customer the way we handled that was to drop all traffic incoming towards that customer's IP at our external peer level (meaning the bigger ISP we were getting most of the external Internet from). That was necessary so all of that DDOS traffic wasn't eating from the bandwidth available to all other customers that weren't being DDOS-ed. But it also meant that the DDOS-ed customer was losing all Internet access (which wasn't really much of a change considering that they were receiving a DDOS that filled all their allocated bandwidth). Repeat customers that would get DDOS too many times (cybercafes would fall into that category often) would have to either pay more to cover for the cost of the network engineers dealing with the DDOS or get the boot. From what I remember it's quite similar with many service providers, including hosting providers. Their TOS will allow them discretion to stop providing services to anyone that may negatively impact their business, it's not like there's any law that forces them to provide service to a customer.
• umvi 6y ago
  > Which, it probably goes without saying, should scare the shit out of anyone who cares about the principles of the free Internet Big tech companies are largely left-leaning internally (which isn't surprising since California is the most left leaning state), so there is nothing to fear as long as you lean left yourself, (i.e. I guarantee you won't be censored for left-leaning speech any time soon).
  • rat87 6y ago
    That is definitely not true
    • blisterpeanuts 6y ago
      It is definitely true. There are hundreds if not thousands of right-leaning voices that have been silenced on left-leaning platforms like YT, Insta, Twit, & FB.
      • kstrauser 6y ago
        I’ve yet to see a single right-leaning voice that was silenced for being right-leaning. Without exception, every one I’ve seen silenced was for calling for violence, using ethnic slurs, or otherwise violating the site’s ToS. It seems possible to me, even likely, that if more right-leaning accounts are being banned then it’s because more of them are breaking the rules. Also, I find the idea of classifying FB as left-leaning to be laughable.
        • umvi 6y ago
          > otherwise violating the site’s ToS Your list was pretty narrow in scope until this one. ToS could contain anything and be used to censor speech for any reason.
          • kstrauser 6y ago
            Because I respect the rights of private property, I have to allow social media sites to post rules at the entrance explaining what you’re allowed to do. As long as they enforce those rules evenly, then you know what you’re signing up for when you register an account. I’ve not heard any legitimate, evidence-backed claim that any of the major sites are enforcing their rules unfairly. Instead, the claims are usually along the lines of: “I got banned for saying we should do violent stuff! And yet they allow this other ideologically opposite person to have an account!” “Can you point to a specific post where the other person is saying we should be violent?” “No, but everyone knows they support it!” Well, “everyone knows” isn’t evidence.
• vdnkh 6y ago
  >free Internet A private company choosing who to allow on their platform? Seems like the freedom to me. And in the absence of any government action against these domestic terrorists (they have been planning exactly this violence for weeks), it's great to see private companies step in and take action.
  • gfodor 6y ago
    You're oversimplifying this as well as constructing a strawman argument which implies it's a simple issue. It's not. You are on Hacker News, do you think people here are think that the framing you make is objectively the singular one that has any moral standing?
    • vdnkh 6y ago
      What a fantastic rant
      • gfodor 6y ago
        OK, so you went with "lol fag" (as per pg's hierarchy of rebuttals) - I tried :)
    • x86_64Ubuntu 6y ago
      It's not oversimplifying. For such a strongly libertarian leaning userbase, it's comical to see HN throw out the property rights of these ISPs and aggregators and replace it with screeching about FreeSpeech. None of these private entities are required to do business with you on the basis of your message.
      • gfodor 6y ago
        I see. So if, for example, the phone company were to spy on your private conversations, and determine you are not a person they want to be associated with (say for example, you talk trash about their CEO) - if they were to terminate your phone coverage, we should just accept it in light of their property rights? It's not an analogy to imply ISPs are exactly the same, but property right supremacy when it comes to infrastructure is not a simple question.
• gbrown 6y ago
  > Which, it probably goes without saying, should scare the shit out of anyone who cares about the principles of the free Internet. I worry more about Google et. al. killing the free and open internet by creating centralized walled gardens. I worry more about legislative attacks on encryption, about the overzealous use of copyright law and the sorry state of intellectual property generally. If service providers want to deplatform centers of radicalization, I think that's ok.
  • gfodor 6y ago
    I worry about all of that as well, but the problem with your last point is you are opening the door for network providers to be the arbiters of what is considered radicalization or not. They shouldn't be the decider of that, our laws should. If the FBI tells them to shut something down with a legal order, and our society has concluded it is just, so be it. In the limit what you would get is a world where speech is basically under the influence of people who, for all intents and purposes, are operating infrastructure services the whole world runs on. Those downvoting me I guess feel they trust the arbitrary CEOs of a few large corporations to never deem their actions online of worthy of being censored. Just because you want to live in that world doesn't mean I ought to accept it.
    • dleslie 6y ago
      Eh, curation and moderation is a valuable service that many are willing to pay for. The issue isn't that service providers are arbiters, the problem is that there are so few service providers that one can meaningfully choose from due in large part to the difficulty of taking one's social network along with you. If service providers had federated communication then it would be a different story.
      • gfodor 6y ago
        I agree with you, my argued solution to most of the problems surrounding the Internet is regulation which will create emergent conditions to incentivize decentralization. The design of the Internet got us about 90% of what we needed, but we need our government to close the final 10% of the gap to realize the full benefits of the thesis of the Internet, much like anti-trust laws are a pre-requisite to realize maximal benefits from capitalism. (Not getting into an argument about that here, it's just an analogy in this very narrow sense of regulation leading to outsized benefits.)
• watwut 6y ago
  Interestingly, I have seen Twitter thread from months ago predicting exactly what happened. Like, literally long time ago.
• maxlamb 6y ago
  How did it let you slip into extremism?
  • gfodor 6y ago
    Memes are mind viruses and a robust immune system built from exposure and defeating of them is a good protection from the bad ones, but a good way to prevent being infected by a mind virus is to just never enter places where most people are already infected.
  • yxwvut 6y ago
    Repeated exposure to things you know to be false or to bad arguments has been shown many times to shift your beliefs towards those false beliefs. It effectively wears your mind's defenses down. This 'repeat a lie enough and it becomes the truth' idea is a Trump specialty: 'Crooked Hillary', the wall, voter fraud, etc. Re: extermism, the far right's arguments are bad but if you're not actively exposed to counterarguments/lived experience it's easy to fall prey to such bombastic arguments that cities are crime ridden shitholes, BLM burned down everything, urban voting is rife with fraud, etc (not to mention even more harmful dehumanizing memes about minorities that further ingrain negative sterotypes). They offer a facile, comforting (to white suburbanites) view of the complex, often unsatisfying world that is easy to lower your defenses to.
    • saynay 6y ago
      Indeed. Repetition of phrases, images, or ideas - regardless of their truth - is the basis of propaganda and brainwashing.
      • doodlebugging 6y ago
        Yep, I totally agree. I've always said that you can prove anything if you ignore enough facts. Law of Propaganda Design. Just throw out anything that doesn't fit your narrative and keep your message on repeat and your audience will fall captive eventually since most are not open to doing their own fact-checking.
• simias 6y ago
  These website clearly radicalize some people. I too lurk from time to time on thedonald.win and far-right subreddits, you can see that over there reality is completely distorted, calls to violence are constant and they just feed off each other's insecurities, fears and hate. Nothing good comes out of these places, regardless of where in the political spectrum you position yourself (except maybe downright fascists). Look at what happened at the Capitol, did he further the right's agenda? Of course not, if anything it put them in a much more awkward situation. Reddit admins are enablers and they share a part of the blame. Remember how subreddits like /r/jailbait and /r/creepshots were allowed on the website for months, if not years (among many others I can't be bother to remember, including some extremely explicitly racist ones)? Then it's always the same thing, some news outlet or politician talks publicly about how Reddit hosts fascists/pedos/racists or something like that and within two days you have bans and a heartfelt post by the admins saying how they felt that it was their duty to do something and "think of the children" and all kinds of bullshit. Reddit is 4chan wearing a tie to try to look more business friendly. These subreddits and websites don't host free speech, they host hate speech. I have zero issue drawing a line in the sand here. "First they came for the fascists, and I said nothing because I'm not a fascist, and the world was a better place. The end."
  • gfodor 6y ago
    You claim "nothing good comes out of these places" - that's a strong claim to make. Here's my argument: having this stuff out in the open does have benefits. Most people lurk. Lurking these sites has a lot of benefits despite the risk of being drawn into radicalization: - It allows you to truly understand the motives of these kinds of people, and predict what they will do. - Understanding these motives allows you to address root causes that lead to this extremism. For every radical who storms the capitol, there are a thousand people who have slightly watered down but directionally parallel beliefs. This is good to understand so you can contribute to finding solutions to any justifiable grievances motivating their higher order beliefs (some won't be justified, some will), to help pull them in the other direction. - Seeing this stuff full-on and not heard about through second hand accounts demystifies it. There are people like yourself who look at this, get a sense of revulsion from it, and then that both hardens their mind away from it and also motivates them to counteract it when they see people in their own lives starting to echo similar sentiments. If you don't truly grok the mental models these people have, you lack the prerequisites needed to disarm any version of them in the minds of people you care about. This isn't a sure thing, but anyone who doesn't will have no effect.
• dboreham 6y ago
  > inadvertently slip into extremism Hate when that happens..
  • seph-reed 6y ago
    It's happening on pretty much all sides simultaneously. Most people believe that escalation is a means to an end. It's not, resolution is made through mutual understanding and not vilification. I'm not preaching tolerance here, but the more you understand your opponent the more you approach the inevitable conclusion: people are creatures of convenience, rarely going out of their own way for the sake of concepts like good or evil. If you want to change the way people act, the only way to really do it is to change what is convenient for them. Or to take certain conveniences away.
  • devmunchies 6y ago
    I loved it actually. Its was invigorating—like a cold shower. But this was years ago when I was in my 20s. I don't go on 4chan anymore (or any social media outside HN [1]) and have mellowed out but it gave me the courage to call BS from either "side". My theory is that 4chan hasn't become more extreme in the last 10 years. It's that "judgment-zones" like twitter and reddit have caused everyone else to become softer. [1]: I'm serious, I didn't know about any stuff happening in the capitol until I saw it on HN.
  • gfodor 6y ago
    Thinking you are not susceptible to becoming radicalized just shows you are basically at the kindergarten level of understanding how such radicalization works. Those least susceptible to radicalization are those who fear it for themselves the most, since they understand their innate flaws as human beings and their susceptibility to it. Nobody is immune to it, and the mass radicalization of normally good people over these past 4 years ought to be evidence enough that ignorance about the danger is widespread. (Everyone thinks they are not susceptible to it and only other people are - the people who say that I believe the most are the ones who have gone to hell and returned to tell the tale.)
• sangnoir 6y ago
  > for example, by letting me inadvertently slip into extremism You are right to worry - I remember reading an article about (FB?) moderators on anti-vaxxer pages finding themselves inadvertently internalizing that worldview, despite previously consciously not believing in it. The human mind appears to absorb information after repeated exposure, despite any conscious efforts not too - I assume it's similar to how the placebo effect works even when the person "knows" it's a placebo.
• xref 6y ago
  You’re not required to have an SSL cert behind cloudflare anyway, CF provides the cert the browser sees. You then put a self-signed cert on your origin and CF will accept it.