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The issue is that we know from experience, after 20+ years of the modern Internet, that if you make a 'free speech' drive/repository place that's widely availab

The issue is that we know from experience, after 20+ years of the modern Internet, that if you make a 'free speech' drive/repository place that's widely available, it will host the absolute worst of the human race. Then, let's say you personally were in charge of said Free Speech Drive- every day you'd get up and hear about people using it for (legal) jailbait photos, Islamic State recruiting, collaboration between extremist militia groups in various countries (including your own), actual illegal content, and so on. Pretty soon the FBI & CIA start contacting you about some of the actual or borderline illegal content being hosted on Free Speech Drive. Do you want to deal with that? For one thing, it's easy to say 'well we'd only take down illegal content'. But in practice there isn't such a bright line, there's lots of borderline stuff, authorities could rule something posted on your site illegal after the fact- lots of these situations are up to a prosecutor's judgement call. Would you risk jail to push the boundaries? Coordinating 1/6 wasn't necessarily illegal until- it was. If Islamic State is recruiting on Free Speech Drive, posting manifestos, encouraging Western residents to actual jihad- you wouldn't take that down? You'd leave it up if it hewed up to the line of being legal- really? Jailbait or non-nude pics of someone's teenage daughter, hosted in the thousands- you wouldn't take that down? It's easy to be an absolutist in an Internet argument, it's much harder when you face the sort of everyday content moderation issues you see in the real world

walrus01 5y ago
a lot of people who say they want an absolute free speech drive/free speech host have never actually worked for a colocation/dedicated server/hosting ISP and seen how the sausage is made.
- travoc 5y ago
  Is “seeing how the sausage is made” a requirement for having beliefs or opinions on the matter?
  - user-the-name 5y ago
    Yeah, actually, yeah, sometimes it is.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - imbnwa 5y ago
    I think it brings one closer to having "skin in the game"
kmeisthax 5y ago
Another wrinkle in all of this is that you can use free speech as a form of censorship. For example, if someone says something you don't like, you can intimidate them into shutting up by, say, threatening to reveal their personal information, such as their legal identity, address of residence, and so on. On certain corners of the Internet, merely dropping dox is good enough to get randos (who won't even be affiliated with you, so +1 to plausible deniability) to harass someone you want to shut up. A more technical variant of this is DDoS attacks. Instead of trying to intimidate someone into shutting up with threats of stochastic terrorism; you shout over them by sending a bunch of traffic to their site until the server crashes or they run out of money. So even if you're a hardcore free speech extremist, you still need to embrace some level of "censoring the censors" if you want the Internet to actually be usable.
- hash872 5y ago
  Agreed. That's not even getting into just pure spam, which from people like Alex Stamos I've heard is 100-1000x the issue that culture war content moderation is. Once you've accepted that a platform can remove the kind of spam that killed MySpace- or doxing or a DDoS attack, as you say- you're already on the (common sense IMO) road to content moderation. Which again, from 25+ years of the modern Internet, we know is just mandatory to have a useable site
- native_samples 5y ago
  That's not censorship though. Threats are what people are forced to do when they cannot censor you, as censorship is much more direct. And DDoS attacks aren't speech.
  - d23 5y ago
    You've seemingly distinguished DDoS attacks from legitimate traffic. If someone is "flooding the zone" with disinformation with the purpose of making it impossible to discern the truth (i.e. it's not legitimate, good faith discourse), is it not reasonable to draw a parallel with DDoSing?
    - 5y ago
semitones 5y ago
It's a real problem. It's easier to suppress such content, but the problem is, it just goes elsewhere where it is almost completely unchecked, and it just proliferates in much darker circles as a result, and we have even less exposure as to its true volume. Maybe there should be more of an effort to reduce peoples' incentive to engage in that sort of behavior in the first place. Why do people join violent extremist groups? Why do people engage with CP? Why do terrorist groups exist? Is it just human nature? Is it a fact that with 7+ billion people we are destined to have millions of people engage in this behavior? De-platforming horrible material is better than nothing, but it feels like whack-a-mole
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
Torwald 5y ago
If I were hosting said Free Speech Drive, I would be oblivious to the contents of what my users host on their drives. I would not violate their privacy by spying on them. Their files, not mine.
- hash872 5y ago
  If your site is widely used and you make it technically impossible for you see or moderate content in any way whatsoever, your site will become a host for real illegal content- not just the borderline examples I gave. As the comment above me notes, even 4chan removes CP. You place yourself in serious legal jeopardy with this decision
  - Torwald 5y ago
    4chan acts as a publisher, not just a host. If I rent out a physical storage unit to you and you use it to run a illegal drug dealing business out of it, would I be liable for that? I suppose not, which shows that the laws in regards to hosting stuff are off and those should be changed.
    - hash872 5y ago
      There is little legal distinction between a 'publisher' and a 'host', which I understand is part of the pseudolegal gibberish that's part of the 'content moderation is censorship' belief system. If your physical storage unit is consistently used for illegal drug dealing despite several arrests there, and several warnings from law enforcement, then yes you'd probably be liable for that. If you had significant scale of illegal content on Free Speech Drive, then yes you absolutely do face liability. I guess if you think you have a clever legal argument otherwise, you're free to spend $100-500k on a defense attorney to make that argument after your public arrest, while your name comes up online for 'Illegal Content Provider' for all time
- nobody_at_all 5y ago
  You would end up criminally charged with disseminating CP, violating copyright and more within a month. It is easy to be an internet tough guy, how about you actually start a simple file server with no restrictions and see how it goes?
the8472 5y ago
> That if you make a 'free speech' drive/repository place that's widely available, it will host the absolute worst of the human race. That's only due to selection effects. If being open were the default then they'd be diluted among all the other people. ISPs themselves, (older) reddit, 4chan all serve as examples that the people you don't want to talk to can be mostly siloed off to some corner and you can have your own corner where you can have fun. Things only get problematic once you add amplification mechanisms like twitter and facebook feeds or reddit's frontpage. > For one thing, it's easy to say 'well we'd only take down illegal content'. But in practice there isn't such a bright line, there's lots of borderline stuff, authorities could rule something posted on your site illegal after the fact- lots of these situations are up to a prosecutor's judgement call. Would you risk jail to push the boundaries? I don't see how that's an issue? They send a court order, you take down the content is a perfectly reasonable default procedure. For some categories of content there already exist specific laws which require takedown on notification without a court order, which exactly depends on jurisdiction of course, in most places that would be at least copyright takedowns and child porn. > Pretty soon the FBI & CIA start contacting you about some of the actual or borderline illegal content being hosted on Free Speech Drive. Do you want to deal with that? That's pretty much what telcos have to deal with for example. Supposedly 4chan also gets requests from the FBI every now and then. It may be a nuisance, but not some insurmountable obstacle. For big players this shouldn't be an issue and smaller ones will fly under the radar most of the time anyway. Also, having stricter policies doesn't make those problems go away. People will still post illegal content, but now in addition to dealing with the FBI you also need to deal with moderation policies, psychiatrists for your traumatized moderators (which you're making see that content) and endusers complaining about your policy covering X but not Y or your policy being inconsistently enforced or whatever.
- ABCLAW 5y ago
  >ISPs themselves, (older) reddit, 4chan all serve as examples that the people you don't want to talk to can be mostly siloed off to some corner and you can have your own corner where you can have fun. Things only get problematic once you add amplification mechanisms like twitter and facebook feeds or reddit's frontpage. This isn't true at all, and the reddit report following their ban wave is pretty clear about it; once areas that actively established a standard of violent or racist discourse as acceptable were banned, the volume of objectionable material across the site dropped. 4ch had a similar situation, where the culture on /b/, which was intentionally left as an explicitly unmoderated segment of the site, a silo, actively invaded other boards with violent, racist content. It isn't that people sit in silos and do nothing otherwise - it's that the silos themselves cause people to believe their content is acceptable, then spread that shit everywhere.
iammisc 5y ago
No I wouldn't. Google is not necessarily wrong here. The issue is that you cannot easily 'own' a part of the internet, despite much of our life playing out there. In the real world, if no one wants to host you and your group, the standard answer is to acquire money and buy your own land, your own broadcasting, etc. On the internet, this is much harder for 'normal' people to do, requiring them to use services like Google. Look, once parler was taken down, I purchased several servers off ebay, rented colocation space, and set up my own services. But I have the technical know-how to actually 'own' part of the internet without depending on anyone else. Most people can't really do this. Thus they depend on Google, et al, who are not selling them something akin to a land title, which is what people feel they ought to have, but rather a service. The reason people got Mad at AWS for taking down parler is because to the common man's mind, when Parler pays for its "website" (because let's be honest, that's as deep as most people go), it 'owns' it, and it ought to be able to hold title to that thing in perpetuity, like land. People felt upset because they felt that amazon simply seized what they perceived to be the equivalent of land or personal property. Of course websites are different because they require active serving by a computer, and parler was paying AWS to do that and Amazon decided not to. But that's not how people view it. To top it off, people are scared because they don't know how to own anything on the internet. Even tech savvy people have no idea how to purchase or lease IP space, set up servers, routes, etc. It's all very confusing.
- jaywalk 5y ago
  > once parler was taken down, I purchased several servers off ebay, rented colocation space, and set up my own services. But I have the technical know-how to actually 'own' part of the internet without depending on anyone else. You said you rented colocation space. You (I assume) are paying a monthly fee for an Internet connection for your servers. You are absolutely depending on others who can be pressured just like AWS was with Parler. Don't kid yourself.
  - iammisc 5y ago
    Sure, but the difference is that... if that happens, I own the computers. They can take down my internet connection (although I have multiple colocation centers owned by different people... I guess I could go international if I really want to add extra redundancy), but the computer is mine. The data on the drive is mine. They cannot touch this stuff. If they did, I can accuse them of larceny, and sue for damages. It's written in the contract that they can take me offline, but they cannot touch my stuff. They can take it off the shelf for non-payment, but there's a period in which they have to retain it and offer it for pick-up. This is wholly different than Amazon not only taking parler down, but also deleting the data, forcing them to download terabytes in three days, over a weekend. And you're still right though. i don't actually own any IP space. In fact, IP space 'ownership' is handled by an NGO with little regulation. That's terrible. It ought to be governmental, because owning parts of the internet is an extremely important part of society. Too important to be left in any non-governmental organization's hands. There are blockchain like systems that could solve this problem in a distributed fashion. There's also urbit. Or we could have proper governmental authority.
TeeMassive 5y ago
> The issue is that we know from experience, after 20+ years of the modern Internet, that if you make a 'free speech' drive/repository place that's widely available, it will host the absolute worst of the human race. Then, let's say you personally were in charge of said Free Speech Drive- every day you'd get up and hear about people using it for (legal) jailbait photos, Islamic State recruiting, collaboration between extremist militia groups in various countries (including your own), actual illegal content, and so on. Pretty soon the FBI & CIA start contacting you about some of the actual or borderline illegal content being hosted on Free Speech Drive. Do you want to deal with that? Imagine if there was some kind of website or network that existed for years with barely no rules or enforcement, like image boards that only remove CP or a decentralized anonymizing network with even decentralized payment systems. That would be the end of the world.
- hash872 5y ago
  Right, and I left this out of my already-lengthy comment just so it wasn't a total wall of text. If you can easily host your 'censored' ideas on some other corner of the Internet- what exactly is the problem? Why are you entitled to Google's private property, specifically? You've been asked to leave one establishment, and are free to simply go elsewhere. We've entered a Golden Age for radical/controversial content- totally unthinkable freedom to say or read anything that would've been technically impossible even in the 80s. It's actually the opposite of censorship- never have people been so free to express any view, thanks to the Internet. I'm not really clear the level of hysteria over Google Drive's policies, specifically- 4chan or another site just like 4chan will always be there
jdasdf 5y ago
>The issue is that we know from experience, after 20+ years of the modern Internet, that if you make a 'free speech' drive/repository place that's widely available, it will host the absolute worst of the human race. And that's just fine. People have the right to be assholes.
- robbrown451 5y ago
  And it's your right to think that. But it's my right to think that containing the degree that people can be assholes makes for a better internet and a better world. In the physical world, if people act badly enough, there will tend to be physical consequences. If someone goes up to a grandmother or little girl or whoever, and starts berating them with vile or threatening speech, they do so at the risk of finding themselves bloodied or worse. Everyone knows this can happen, and unless they are mentally ill, tend to learn at an early age to curtail such behavior behavior before something bad happens to them. All this has had thousands of years to evolve to the current state, where in most places (at least in the first world), interacting with people in public places is generally pleasant and non-confrontational. But online, it isn't that way. When there are zero repercussions, things become very unpleasant for all but... well, those assholes. I get that you prefer such a world, but I don't. How do we work that out? Do we all adopt your way, simply because.... I dunno, I guess because that's what you want?
- nobody_at_all 5y ago
  Oddly enough, there is not a strong business case in allowing the dregs of society to post their garbage all over your servers. If Twitter adopted 4chan policies, it would be destroyed financially in short order. Twitter is pretty loose compared to many of the big social sites. They allow nudity and porn, for example, but of course have rules such as marking it as sensitive. Try that on FB. It is almost like they adopt polices that help their business. Just like brick and mortar businesses have policies on customer conduct and will ban trouble makers that impact their bottom line. People have a right to be assholes but everyone else has the right to shun them from polite society. There is no right to be heard, just to speak and not have the government stomp on you for it. No one else is required to listen or host it.
inlikealamb 5y ago
If you want to know what a "free speech zone" is on the internet go spend time on 4chan. I can't imagine anyone spending long periods of time there without harming their mental health... and that's even with some moderation. I'm convinced the only way to effectively create free speech on the internet is to tie whatever you say online with personal identification. Not because it will prevent people from saying bad things, but because you could use it to ban people from the internet. (for the record, I think that's a horrible idea... but so is free speech on privately owned servers)
kyle_martin1 5y ago
The very worst things in history were actually censored. Ever considered this? Your argument about "worst of humanity" could equally apply to the best of humanity with free speech. In fact...who are you to decide what is good speech and bad speech?
- nobody_at_all 5y ago
  On my property, I have the final say on what is and is not allowed. Why should a company not have the same right on their property? Stores do. Go to a store and cause a ruckus and watch the ban hammer come down on you after the cops drag you away. How is Google different from Ma and Pa's Widget Store? At least law enforcement is not involved after most types of bannings from social media.
  - kyle_martin1 5y ago
    You're saying Google is the same as a small family business? If that's the case then there's no reasonable discussion to be had here...
    - nobody_at_all 5y ago
      It is irrelevant. A private business is a private business and they can set their rules as they please as long as it doesn't run afoul of laws (ADA in the states for example). That you think there is some important distinction where Google loses rights that Ma and Pa's store has shows that you have nothing reasonable to offer.
j0ba 5y ago
> Jailbait or non-nude pics of someone's teenage daughter, hosted in the thousands Even worse, imagine there was a technology that allowed you to print those jailbait photos by the thousands and drop them in Times Square. That would be far too dangerous. Imagine if that technology was used to spread misinformation about the Catholic church. Ban the printing press! It's too dangerous. It should be controlled by the church and the state! Even better, get rid of religion and intertwine religious righteousness with politics. Then the state can control it all!

walrus01 5y ago

a lot of people who say they want an absolute free speech drive/free speech host have never actually worked for a colocation/dedicated server/hosting ISP and seen how the sausage is made.

travoc 5y ago
Is “seeing how the sausage is made” a requirement for having beliefs or opinions on the matter?
- user-the-name 5y ago
  Yeah, actually, yeah, sometimes it is.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- imbnwa 5y ago
  I think it brings one closer to having "skin in the game"

kmeisthax 5y ago

Another wrinkle in all of this is that you can use free speech as a form of censorship. For example, if someone says something you don't like, you can intimidate them into shutting up by, say, threatening to reveal their personal information, such as their legal identity, address of residence, and so on. On certain corners of the Internet, merely dropping dox is good enough to get randos (who won't even be affiliated with you, so +1 to plausible deniability) to harass someone you want to shut up. A more technical variant of this is DDoS attacks. Instead of trying to intimidate someone into shutting up with threats of stochastic terrorism; you shout over them by sending a bunch of traffic to their site until the server crashes or they run out of money. So even if you're a hardcore free speech extremist, you still need to embrace some level of "censoring the censors" if you want the Internet to actually be usable.

hash872 5y ago
Agreed. That's not even getting into just pure spam, which from people like Alex Stamos I've heard is 100-1000x the issue that culture war content moderation is. Once you've accepted that a platform can remove the kind of spam that killed MySpace- or doxing or a DDoS attack, as you say- you're already on the (common sense IMO) road to content moderation. Which again, from 25+ years of the modern Internet, we know is just mandatory to have a useable site
native_samples 5y ago
That's not censorship though. Threats are what people are forced to do when they cannot censor you, as censorship is much more direct. And DDoS attacks aren't speech.
- d23 5y ago
  You've seemingly distinguished DDoS attacks from legitimate traffic. If someone is "flooding the zone" with disinformation with the purpose of making it impossible to discern the truth (i.e. it's not legitimate, good faith discourse), is it not reasonable to draw a parallel with DDoSing?
  - 5y ago

semitones 5y ago

It's a real problem. It's easier to suppress such content, but the problem is, it just goes elsewhere where it is almost completely unchecked, and it just proliferates in much darker circles as a result, and we have even less exposure as to its true volume. Maybe there should be more of an effort to reduce peoples' incentive to engage in that sort of behavior in the first place. Why do people join violent extremist groups? Why do people engage with CP? Why do terrorist groups exist? Is it just human nature? Is it a fact that with 7+ billion people we are destined to have millions of people engage in this behavior? De-platforming horrible material is better than nothing, but it feels like whack-a-mole

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

Torwald 5y ago

If I were hosting said Free Speech Drive, I would be oblivious to the contents of what my users host on their drives. I would not violate their privacy by spying on them. Their files, not mine.

hash872 5y ago
If your site is widely used and you make it technically impossible for you see or moderate content in any way whatsoever, your site will become a host for real illegal content- not just the borderline examples I gave. As the comment above me notes, even 4chan removes CP. You place yourself in serious legal jeopardy with this decision
- Torwald 5y ago
  4chan acts as a publisher, not just a host. If I rent out a physical storage unit to you and you use it to run a illegal drug dealing business out of it, would I be liable for that? I suppose not, which shows that the laws in regards to hosting stuff are off and those should be changed.
  - hash872 5y ago
    There is little legal distinction between a 'publisher' and a 'host', which I understand is part of the pseudolegal gibberish that's part of the 'content moderation is censorship' belief system. If your physical storage unit is consistently used for illegal drug dealing despite several arrests there, and several warnings from law enforcement, then yes you'd probably be liable for that. If you had significant scale of illegal content on Free Speech Drive, then yes you absolutely do face liability. I guess if you think you have a clever legal argument otherwise, you're free to spend $100-500k on a defense attorney to make that argument after your public arrest, while your name comes up online for 'Illegal Content Provider' for all time
nobody_at_all 5y ago
You would end up criminally charged with disseminating CP, violating copyright and more within a month. It is easy to be an internet tough guy, how about you actually start a simple file server with no restrictions and see how it goes?

the8472 5y ago

> That if you make a 'free speech' drive/repository place that's widely available, it will host the absolute worst of the human race. That's only due to selection effects. If being open were the default then they'd be diluted among all the other people. ISPs themselves, (older) reddit, 4chan all serve as examples that the people you don't want to talk to can be mostly siloed off to some corner and you can have your own corner where you can have fun. Things only get problematic once you add amplification mechanisms like twitter and facebook feeds or reddit's frontpage. > For one thing, it's easy to say 'well we'd only take down illegal content'. But in practice there isn't such a bright line, there's lots of borderline stuff, authorities could rule something posted on your site illegal after the fact- lots of these situations are up to a prosecutor's judgement call. Would you risk jail to push the boundaries? I don't see how that's an issue? They send a court order, you take down the content is a perfectly reasonable default procedure. For some categories of content there already exist specific laws which require takedown on notification without a court order, which exactly depends on jurisdiction of course, in most places that would be at least copyright takedowns and child porn. > Pretty soon the FBI & CIA start contacting you about some of the actual or borderline illegal content being hosted on Free Speech Drive. Do you want to deal with that? That's pretty much what telcos have to deal with for example. Supposedly 4chan also gets requests from the FBI every now and then. It may be a nuisance, but not some insurmountable obstacle. For big players this shouldn't be an issue and smaller ones will fly under the radar most of the time anyway. Also, having stricter policies doesn't make those problems go away. People will still post illegal content, but now in addition to dealing with the FBI you also need to deal with moderation policies, psychiatrists for your traumatized moderators (which you're making see that content) and endusers complaining about your policy covering X but not Y or your policy being inconsistently enforced or whatever.

ABCLAW 5y ago
>ISPs themselves, (older) reddit, 4chan all serve as examples that the people you don't want to talk to can be mostly siloed off to some corner and you can have your own corner where you can have fun. Things only get problematic once you add amplification mechanisms like twitter and facebook feeds or reddit's frontpage. This isn't true at all, and the reddit report following their ban wave is pretty clear about it; once areas that actively established a standard of violent or racist discourse as acceptable were banned, the volume of objectionable material across the site dropped. 4ch had a similar situation, where the culture on /b/, which was intentionally left as an explicitly unmoderated segment of the site, a silo, actively invaded other boards with violent, racist content. It isn't that people sit in silos and do nothing otherwise - it's that the silos themselves cause people to believe their content is acceptable, then spread that shit everywhere.

iammisc 5y ago

No I wouldn't. Google is not necessarily wrong here. The issue is that you cannot easily 'own' a part of the internet, despite much of our life playing out there. In the real world, if no one wants to host you and your group, the standard answer is to acquire money and buy your own land, your own broadcasting, etc. On the internet, this is much harder for 'normal' people to do, requiring them to use services like Google. Look, once parler was taken down, I purchased several servers off ebay, rented colocation space, and set up my own services. But I have the technical know-how to actually 'own' part of the internet without depending on anyone else. Most people can't really do this. Thus they depend on Google, et al, who are not selling them something akin to a land title, which is what people feel they ought to have, but rather a service. The reason people got Mad at AWS for taking down parler is because to the common man's mind, when Parler pays for its "website" (because let's be honest, that's as deep as most people go), it 'owns' it, and it ought to be able to hold title to that thing in perpetuity, like land. People felt upset because they felt that amazon simply seized what they perceived to be the equivalent of land or personal property. Of course websites are different because they require active serving by a computer, and parler was paying AWS to do that and Amazon decided not to. But that's not how people view it. To top it off, people are scared because they don't know how to own anything on the internet. Even tech savvy people have no idea how to purchase or lease IP space, set up servers, routes, etc. It's all very confusing.

jaywalk 5y ago
> once parler was taken down, I purchased several servers off ebay, rented colocation space, and set up my own services. But I have the technical know-how to actually 'own' part of the internet without depending on anyone else. You said you rented colocation space. You (I assume) are paying a monthly fee for an Internet connection for your servers. You are absolutely depending on others who can be pressured just like AWS was with Parler. Don't kid yourself.
- iammisc 5y ago
  Sure, but the difference is that... if that happens, I own the computers. They can take down my internet connection (although I have multiple colocation centers owned by different people... I guess I could go international if I really want to add extra redundancy), but the computer is mine. The data on the drive is mine. They cannot touch this stuff. If they did, I can accuse them of larceny, and sue for damages. It's written in the contract that they can take me offline, but they cannot touch my stuff. They can take it off the shelf for non-payment, but there's a period in which they have to retain it and offer it for pick-up. This is wholly different than Amazon not only taking parler down, but also deleting the data, forcing them to download terabytes in three days, over a weekend. And you're still right though. i don't actually own any IP space. In fact, IP space 'ownership' is handled by an NGO with little regulation. That's terrible. It ought to be governmental, because owning parts of the internet is an extremely important part of society. Too important to be left in any non-governmental organization's hands. There are blockchain like systems that could solve this problem in a distributed fashion. There's also urbit. Or we could have proper governmental authority.

TeeMassive 5y ago

> The issue is that we know from experience, after 20+ years of the modern Internet, that if you make a 'free speech' drive/repository place that's widely available, it will host the absolute worst of the human race. Then, let's say you personally were in charge of said Free Speech Drive- every day you'd get up and hear about people using it for (legal) jailbait photos, Islamic State recruiting, collaboration between extremist militia groups in various countries (including your own), actual illegal content, and so on. Pretty soon the FBI & CIA start contacting you about some of the actual or borderline illegal content being hosted on Free Speech Drive. Do you want to deal with that? Imagine if there was some kind of website or network that existed for years with barely no rules or enforcement, like image boards that only remove CP or a decentralized anonymizing network with even decentralized payment systems. That would be the end of the world.

hash872 5y ago
Right, and I left this out of my already-lengthy comment just so it wasn't a total wall of text. If you can easily host your 'censored' ideas on some other corner of the Internet- what exactly is the problem? Why are you entitled to Google's private property, specifically? You've been asked to leave one establishment, and are free to simply go elsewhere. We've entered a Golden Age for radical/controversial content- totally unthinkable freedom to say or read anything that would've been technically impossible even in the 80s. It's actually the opposite of censorship- never have people been so free to express any view, thanks to the Internet. I'm not really clear the level of hysteria over Google Drive's policies, specifically- 4chan or another site just like 4chan will always be there

jdasdf 5y ago

robbrown451 5y ago
And it's your right to think that. But it's my right to think that containing the degree that people can be assholes makes for a better internet and a better world. In the physical world, if people act badly enough, there will tend to be physical consequences. If someone goes up to a grandmother or little girl or whoever, and starts berating them with vile or threatening speech, they do so at the risk of finding themselves bloodied or worse. Everyone knows this can happen, and unless they are mentally ill, tend to learn at an early age to curtail such behavior behavior before something bad happens to them. All this has had thousands of years to evolve to the current state, where in most places (at least in the first world), interacting with people in public places is generally pleasant and non-confrontational. But online, it isn't that way. When there are zero repercussions, things become very unpleasant for all but... well, those assholes. I get that you prefer such a world, but I don't. How do we work that out? Do we all adopt your way, simply because.... I dunno, I guess because that's what you want?
nobody_at_all 5y ago
Oddly enough, there is not a strong business case in allowing the dregs of society to post their garbage all over your servers. If Twitter adopted 4chan policies, it would be destroyed financially in short order. Twitter is pretty loose compared to many of the big social sites. They allow nudity and porn, for example, but of course have rules such as marking it as sensitive. Try that on FB. It is almost like they adopt polices that help their business. Just like brick and mortar businesses have policies on customer conduct and will ban trouble makers that impact their bottom line. People have a right to be assholes but everyone else has the right to shun them from polite society. There is no right to be heard, just to speak and not have the government stomp on you for it. No one else is required to listen or host it.

inlikealamb 5y ago

If you want to know what a "free speech zone" is on the internet go spend time on 4chan. I can't imagine anyone spending long periods of time there without harming their mental health... and that's even with some moderation. I'm convinced the only way to effectively create free speech on the internet is to tie whatever you say online with personal identification. Not because it will prevent people from saying bad things, but because you could use it to ban people from the internet. (for the record, I think that's a horrible idea... but so is free speech on privately owned servers)

kyle_martin1 5y ago

The very worst things in history were actually censored. Ever considered this? Your argument about "worst of humanity" could equally apply to the best of humanity with free speech. In fact...who are you to decide what is good speech and bad speech?

nobody_at_all 5y ago
On my property, I have the final say on what is and is not allowed. Why should a company not have the same right on their property? Stores do. Go to a store and cause a ruckus and watch the ban hammer come down on you after the cops drag you away. How is Google different from Ma and Pa's Widget Store? At least law enforcement is not involved after most types of bannings from social media.
- kyle_martin1 5y ago
  You're saying Google is the same as a small family business? If that's the case then there's no reasonable discussion to be had here...
  - nobody_at_all 5y ago
    It is irrelevant. A private business is a private business and they can set their rules as they please as long as it doesn't run afoul of laws (ADA in the states for example). That you think there is some important distinction where Google loses rights that Ma and Pa's store has shows that you have nothing reasonable to offer.

j0ba 5y ago

> Jailbait or non-nude pics of someone's teenage daughter, hosted in the thousands Even worse, imagine there was a technology that allowed you to print those jailbait photos by the thousands and drop them in Times Square. That would be far too dangerous. Imagine if that technology was used to spread misinformation about the Catholic church. Ban the printing press! It's too dangerous. It should be controlled by the church and the state! Even better, get rid of religion and intertwine religious righteousness with politics. Then the state can control it all!