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Free speech is about giving people the freedom to say things I find disgusting. It's about giving each individual the choice to listen to what ever influence th

by xupybd 4y ago

Free speech is about giving people the freedom to say things I find disgusting. It's about giving each individual the choice to listen to what ever influence they wish. It takes the the power of ideas and elevates them above physical force.

more_corn 4y ago
But it doesn’t extend to advocating for violence. We can rightly enact limits on inciting violence.
hackerlight 4y ago
This ideological purism doesn't grapple with real world corner cases where one person's freedoms infringe on another person's freedoms.
danShumway 4y ago
> It takes the the power of ideas and elevates them above physical force. This is exactly why dropping Kiwi Farms was the right decision. There is a difference between saying hateful things and doxing and harassing people with threats of violence. We don't even need to dip into the endless debate about tolerating hate -- there's no level of ideological indirection here, Kiwi Farms was just very straightforwardly driving people offline with threats of physical harm and real-world harassment.
- kybernetyk 4y ago
  So what's the difference between Kiwifarms doxxing some poor soul and the New York Times or Washington Post doing the same to some other sucker? Why hasn't the NYT been taken down yet?
  - cowtools 4y ago
    Is this referring to the "slate star codex" incident a couple years back?
    - atdrummond 4y ago
      That and likely how Taylor Lorenz handled the Libs of Tik Tok unmasking.
      - _vvaw 4y ago
        ”Unmasking” is merely code for “doxing someone we don’t like.” Someone’s full legal name is all you really need to look them up on people-finder websites, which IMO are the real problem and in urgent need of regulation.
        atdrummond 4y ago
        I think the issue was mainly that (from the viewpoint of those complaining) she harassed the LoTT’s family at their homes and then went live with the article before giving anyone connected to LoTT (including LoTT herself) sufficient time to address her questions and statements. I have not done enough research to take a stance personally on what happened.
        _vvaw 4y ago
        She published LoTT’s full legal name and enough of a description to positively locate her on Spokeo/White Pages/etc. That is a common cop-out for Twitter mobs; posting the ready-made parts for such a search but not the actual home address, so in the poster’s eyes it technically isn’t “doxing.”
        tedivm 4y ago
        There's a huge difference between pointing out someone's real name (especially if that person is a public figure of some sort) and organizing a full harassment campaign, complete with the address of them, their family, and their job. Even more so when you're maintaining a counter of how many of your targets have committed suicide.
        atdrummond 4y ago
        There is no such counter on Kiwifarms - at most they’ve front paged claims (totally unsourced and totally unfounded) by Keffals and others that KF has caused three or more suicides. A reminder, by the way, that Keffals has used her platform to promote the use of DIY HRT by minors. (https://t.co/4dnauozhuS https://t.co/4dnauozhuS) KF was the first to find evidence of Keffals flirting with underage trans children in her discord (known as her Femboy Ranch) and, despite my dislike of KF, her campaign seems mostly committed to memory holing these events.
  - danShumway 4y ago
    If the NYT ever launched a campaign or started targeting a people in a way that actually was the equivalent to Kiwi Farms, then in that scenario it absolutely should be taken offline. But the short answer is that the NYT is not a dedicated doxing forum. It's made decisions I disagree with, but no, it's not even close to equivalent to Kiwi Farms.
    - flkiwi 4y ago
      There's an important US Supreme Court case from 1964 (NYT v. Sullivan) that indirectly addresses this, noting that defamation claims by public figures against a news publication are subject to a heightened standard (and, conversely, that defamation claims against non-public individuals are not). If the NYT engaged in defamatory activities against a general member of the public, that member of the public could sue and have the same chance, in principle, of winning against the NYT as it would against anyone else. The odd part about this debate is that platform companies very, very often have contract provisions prohibiting dangerous and even merely objectionable activities that could harm the reputation of the platform (or damage it or its customers). Platform companies having the power to yank controversial content isn't new.
    - tomjen3 4y ago
      Their cover up of Stalins holocaust in Ukraine probably killed more people than there are transpeople in the US. Their support of the Iraq war caused an unknowable amount of damage. From other peoples comments, the extreme emergency was a poorly made bomb joke.
- xupybd 4y ago
  No that's why this issue should have been dealt with promptly and firmly by a justice system not by a corporate choice. We can't have a society that requires CEO to decide who is morally acceptable and who is not. If law's have been broken we need law enforcement.
  - dragonwriter 4y ago
    > We can't have a society that requires CEO to decide who is morally acceptable and who is not. Yes, we can. And we do. Even if the decision you would have the is “everything law enforcement doesn't act on is acceptable”.
  - danShumway 4y ago
    Endless reminder that having multiple layers of moderation protects free speech, it doesn't restrict it. You do not want the government to be the sole arbitrator of what content should be online. That is exactly how you end up with laws like SESTA/FOSTA. Our government exists to set a baseline of unacceptable speech that private services can build on top of. As we move futher up the stack to the network level, and then the hosting level, and then the forum level, we allow more moderation -- each level refines its definition of acceptable content a little, and then the next level builds on top of that. In this case, I actually do agree that Kiwi Farms probably crossed that government baseline; it was such an egregious case that it probably should be addressed in law in some way. But in general it is a bad idea to say that we're going to solve every decision about what content is and isn't acceptable by hauling someone in front of a judge. That's a recipe for chilling speech, not expanding it.
    - mlyle 4y ago
      > Endless reminder that having multiple layers of moderation protects free speech, it doesn't restrict it. Perhaps. I'm skeptical of concentrations of power wherever it is: government, Cloudflare, Facebook, etc. At least the former is theoretically accountable for choices. Also, Cloudflare asserts their position is that they largely do not want to restrict speech beyond that government baseline and they won't act themselves against speech. Here they claim they are forced to (and they probably were).
- stale2002 4y ago
  Although this is an interesting argument, the issue in this context is that the US legal system, has yet to declare what it is that KF is doing to be illegal. Maybe they would have lost in court. But as of yet, even though there has been multiple lawsuits against KFs, KF farms has won every thing lawsuit. That is the issue you have to grapple with. That, for all known knowledge that we have, from the legal system, nobody has proven their actions to be illegal.
  - danShumway 4y ago
    > nobody has proven their actions to be illegal It's an excuse for Cloudflare to argue that its moderation decisions should be only based on legality, and that excuse shouldn't be accepted unquestionably. I mention this in a few other places, but regardless of whether or not Kiwi Farms in specific should be illegal, there is a lot of other speech that is legal and ought to be legal that Cloudflare still shouldn't be platforming. It is a mistake to have all of all moderation decisions made by the government. I mean, heck, automated requests and automated scraping are not illegal in the US, in fact they've been ruled legal even when that scraping was happening against the wishes of websites -- and I personally think that was a good decision. Where's the line between automated scraping and abuse? We're not sure, but Cloudflare doesn't wait for a court order before it stops what it deems to be malicious traffic, and it's not running around complaining that the government hasn't given it a precise definition of a DDoS attack. Many things that can reasonably be characterized as direct attacks on people and public infrastructure are legal, and it's not clear to me at all that the correct response to that is to criminalize all of them. I personally think that Kiwi Farms crossed even a legal line (or at least what should be a legal line), but if people want to argue with me about that, fine. My position is not that Cloudflare should have dropped Kiwi Farms because it was illegal, they should have dropped it because it was suppressing their customers' speech with real-world threats and violence. The legality is kind of a separate discussion.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - swat535 4y ago
- zackees 4y ago
  Right and the only ones that should be able to ruthlessly defame anyone is the New York Times, MSNBC and Fox News. The ramifications of this are dire. This is about a power grab of total control of what we say online. We already saw the abuse of what a small cabal of insiders can determine is real: they determined that the Hunter Biden laptop was fake when in reality that was a political position that was wrong. The "lets protect the trans" is just a trojan horse to take down disfavorable political speech everywhere.
- LawTalkingGuy 4y ago
  The hate and doxxing is generally from the trans activists to the women who are resisting losing their sex-segregated spaces. Women are being called TERFs and beaten at women's events and pride parades for female activism. Calling lesbianism female, etc. The problem with censorship is that as soon as it happens there's nothing to argue against the lies with. Now that KF is gone people come out of the woodwork who would have maintained some control if it still existed and had their receipts.
  - UmbertoNoEco 4y ago
    the modern western liberal view is to protect all basic freedoms (of speech;of privacy; of representation; of free trade; of presumption of innocence) as long as they belong to the 'correct people'; as for the ideological enemies no right is needed and no tactic used to curtail those same rights is deemed too low or too hypocritical
  - howinteresting 4y ago
- AllegedAlec 4y ago
  > doxing Doxxing isn't illegal. > harassing people with threats of violence How do you know that A: the person whose name I won't say isn't lying, because that person's a professional victim. And B: if that person isn't lying, that those threats came from Kiwi Farms users.
- StillLrning123 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - HereIGoAgain 4y ago
    Is bullshit.. That's why it's a paradox. Intolerance of "intolerance" is intolerance! And as a matter of logic, the first person who argues that someone just shouldn't have a right to speak, is the very FIRST person who should lose the right to speak in such a case. As the are LITERALLY the threat to freedom that they claim to worry about.
    - danShumway 4y ago
      [flagged]
- herbst 4y ago
  Kiwifarms also serves a weird specific role. Many of the people people discussed there do propagate harmful things. Like normalizing cutting, starving, violence and much more. There is no control instance for things like this. Normalizing harmful things ok YouTube in front of children is not cool, we all know YouTube barely cares either. For a concrete example look into Chris Chan and how Kiwifarms was literally the only instance out there protecting Chris from way more evil groups. My point is even if Kiwifarms is a hateful environment, I think they serve a purpose in our society.
- HereIGoAgain 4y ago
  Where are these so-called threats of physical harm and real-world harassment? People keep saying this but never even attempt to back it up with anything more than the allegation.
chris_wot 4y ago
Free speech is not completely unfettered. Under Brandenburg v. Ohio, speech that incites imminent lawless action - and that would likely cause such action - can be punished under the law. In all likelihood this appears to be what is happening with kiwi farms. Of course, the issue is that Cloudflare can’t undertake legal enforcement, but they have a terms of use and so contractually are duly within their rights to end service to kiwifarms.
- notch656a 4y ago
  Don't forget the ending: Brandenburg's incitements to non-imminent violence were upheld as legal. And the person recording/distributing the incitements (the cincinnati reporters [ i.e. Kiwifarms in this case]) was not charged at all.
  - chris_wot 4y ago
    It sounds like Kiwifarms is inciting imminent violence that will likely occur.
    - notch656a 4y ago
      Are you sure the incitement that provoked this response wasn't someone illegally (and against ToS) using the services of Kiwifarms, rather than the owners and operator of kiwifarms? It's my understanding Kiwifarms removed the Belfast post quite quickly. Indeed imgur is still hosting the image of the post, shall imgur also be charged?
    - dmatech 4y ago
      Posting someone's address can obviously facilitate a swatting. In some cases, it might even make someone an accomplice to one. But just recklessly posting someone's address doesn't make one an accomplice. There's no implied request for someone to SWAT or even harass the person. I get that this provides no comfort to the victims, but this isn't Brandenburg incitement.
notatoad 4y ago
but "giving the individual the choice to listen to whatever influence they wish" means that when somebody uses the threat of physical violence to silence one of those influences, anybody who stands up for free speech must push back against that. everybody deserves to have their say, except those who would seek to silence others. defending the silencers is incompatible with free speech.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
ThomW 4y ago
Free speech isn't speech without consequences. All that the first amendment protects is government making laws restricting free speech, but if you're a customer and you're doing shit that I don't agree with, I have every right to boot you from my platform. I don't have to stand idly by and not take action.
- HideousKojima 4y ago
  The 1st Amendment and Freedom of Speech aren't the same thing. Freedom of Speech is a philosophical concept and is, in fact, "freedom from consequences."
  - ric2b 4y ago
    By that definition Freedom of Speech is a ridiculous idea. Are you saying I should be able to spend my entire day advocating for your rights to be removed, insulting you or whatever else and you still need to treat me like any other person and can't get annoyed at me? Or the opposite, if someone treats me really well I can't be friends with them because that would be a positive consequence of their speech? We all need to act like emotionless machines that completely ignore all speech so that free speech can exist?
  - vineyardmike 4y ago
    There is consequences to everything. It’s the philosophical right to talk. Not the right to an audience or the right that people won’t be mad at you for disagreeing. If I call your fiance ugly you may not invite me to your wedding even though I have freedom of speech. If I tell the waiter they’re ugly, they may not serve me food even though I have the freedom of speech. Everything has consequences.
    - overl0rd11 4y ago
      What if you criticize Amazon? Should you be banned from using all their services? What if you criticize private enterprise in general? Banned from everything except services provided by the state then? Your interpersonal examples where both people/groups have very little and similar amounts of power. 'Consequences' to speech become dangerous when corporations or even larger groups of people get involved.
DanBC 4y ago
MisterBastahrd 4y ago
boudin 4y ago
Free speech doesn't mean not being held reponsible for what is said.
atoav 4y ago
> Free speech is about giving people the freedom to say things I find disgusting. Yes, but it is not only that. It is also being part of an relgious, cultural or otherwise marginalized group and not having to fear for your life because you have been a little too vocal. The truth is that freedom of speech (like most other freedoms) must comstantly be balanced between the different actors. E.g. in 1930s Germany the members of the nationalist socialist party of Germany have been quite free to utter their disgusting voices while as a jewish citizen you would have had a hard time if you did so. And the reason for this was that the speech of the Nazis ended up being more than just opinions, but threats. And those threats turned into violence and genocide. Today, we are again at a point where speech turns into threats turns into violence. Karl Popper's paradoxon of intolerance and all that. Any free society has to be intolerant towards the intolerant, otherwise you cease to be a free society at one point or another. Because the intolarent will not fight for free speech once they are in power, they will abolish it for everybody but themselves. The actual Nazis back then were quite happy painting themselves as victims only to later remove the very rights they claimed. Once people get beaten, lynched and killed by fascist mobs and loose their rights to bodily autonomy discussing freedom of speech seems naive. People who have to fear violence and incarceration cannot speak freely. And if you look at the statistics for right wing violence the point I raise here is anything but academic.
- atoav 4y ago
  Update, as I read more on the topic: In the case of KiwiFarms this is not even close to being about free speech. On that platform coordinated attacks on specific people have been planned, driving a few into suicide. To all those downvoting: How would you think if the target of these attack was your mother, sister, daughter? Should there be a legal way to make them stop? Or should it just be legal to coordinate harassing and threaten people whose appearance, opinion, political opinion, sexual preferences, etc you don't like? And before someone comes with the slippery slope argument: I live in Germany, we have certain Nazi symbols banned for decades here and it hasn't harmed the discourse one bit. You just can't walk around and go like "Heil Hitler" in public without having to fear some sort of retaliation. You can still talk about Nazis, you can learn about them, you can still be a Nazi. But if there was a slippery slope, why didn't it slip – for decades? Btw.: Most Europeans would regard the censorship of female nipples, swear words and anything remotely sexual like it is so commonplace in the US as an impediment on free speech. But if it is ingrained in the prude traditionalism, it is suddenly okay censorship, right?

by xupybd 4y ago

more_corn 4y ago

But it doesn’t extend to advocating for violence. We can rightly enact limits on inciting violence.

hackerlight 4y ago

This ideological purism doesn't grapple with real world corner cases where one person's freedoms infringe on another person's freedoms.

danShumway 4y ago

> It takes the the power of ideas and elevates them above physical force. This is exactly why dropping Kiwi Farms was the right decision. There is a difference between saying hateful things and doxing and harassing people with threats of violence. We don't even need to dip into the endless debate about tolerating hate -- there's no level of ideological indirection here, Kiwi Farms was just very straightforwardly driving people offline with threats of physical harm and real-world harassment.

kybernetyk 4y ago
So what's the difference between Kiwifarms doxxing some poor soul and the New York Times or Washington Post doing the same to some other sucker? Why hasn't the NYT been taken down yet?
- cowtools 4y ago
  Is this referring to the "slate star codex" incident a couple years back?
  - atdrummond 4y ago
    That and likely how Taylor Lorenz handled the Libs of Tik Tok unmasking.
    - _vvaw 4y ago
      ”Unmasking” is merely code for “doxing someone we don’t like.” Someone’s full legal name is all you really need to look them up on people-finder websites, which IMO are the real problem and in urgent need of regulation.
      - atdrummond 4y ago
        I think the issue was mainly that (from the viewpoint of those complaining) she harassed the LoTT’s family at their homes and then went live with the article before giving anyone connected to LoTT (including LoTT herself) sufficient time to address her questions and statements. I have not done enough research to take a stance personally on what happened.
        _vvaw 4y ago
        She published LoTT’s full legal name and enough of a description to positively locate her on Spokeo/White Pages/etc. That is a common cop-out for Twitter mobs; posting the ready-made parts for such a search but not the actual home address, so in the poster’s eyes it technically isn’t “doxing.”
      - tedivm 4y ago
        There's a huge difference between pointing out someone's real name (especially if that person is a public figure of some sort) and organizing a full harassment campaign, complete with the address of them, their family, and their job. Even more so when you're maintaining a counter of how many of your targets have committed suicide.
        atdrummond 4y ago
        There is no such counter on Kiwifarms - at most they’ve front paged claims (totally unsourced and totally unfounded) by Keffals and others that KF has caused three or more suicides. A reminder, by the way, that Keffals has used her platform to promote the use of DIY HRT by minors. (https://t.co/4dnauozhuS https://t.co/4dnauozhuS) KF was the first to find evidence of Keffals flirting with underage trans children in her discord (known as her Femboy Ranch) and, despite my dislike of KF, her campaign seems mostly committed to memory holing these events.
- danShumway 4y ago
  If the NYT ever launched a campaign or started targeting a people in a way that actually was the equivalent to Kiwi Farms, then in that scenario it absolutely should be taken offline. But the short answer is that the NYT is not a dedicated doxing forum. It's made decisions I disagree with, but no, it's not even close to equivalent to Kiwi Farms.
  - flkiwi 4y ago
    There's an important US Supreme Court case from 1964 (NYT v. Sullivan) that indirectly addresses this, noting that defamation claims by public figures against a news publication are subject to a heightened standard (and, conversely, that defamation claims against non-public individuals are not). If the NYT engaged in defamatory activities against a general member of the public, that member of the public could sue and have the same chance, in principle, of winning against the NYT as it would against anyone else. The odd part about this debate is that platform companies very, very often have contract provisions prohibiting dangerous and even merely objectionable activities that could harm the reputation of the platform (or damage it or its customers). Platform companies having the power to yank controversial content isn't new.
  - tomjen3 4y ago
    Their cover up of Stalins holocaust in Ukraine probably killed more people than there are transpeople in the US. Their support of the Iraq war caused an unknowable amount of damage. From other peoples comments, the extreme emergency was a poorly made bomb joke.
xupybd 4y ago
No that's why this issue should have been dealt with promptly and firmly by a justice system not by a corporate choice. We can't have a society that requires CEO to decide who is morally acceptable and who is not. If law's have been broken we need law enforcement.
- dragonwriter 4y ago
  > We can't have a society that requires CEO to decide who is morally acceptable and who is not. Yes, we can. And we do. Even if the decision you would have the is “everything law enforcement doesn't act on is acceptable”.
- danShumway 4y ago
  Endless reminder that having multiple layers of moderation protects free speech, it doesn't restrict it. You do not want the government to be the sole arbitrator of what content should be online. That is exactly how you end up with laws like SESTA/FOSTA. Our government exists to set a baseline of unacceptable speech that private services can build on top of. As we move futher up the stack to the network level, and then the hosting level, and then the forum level, we allow more moderation -- each level refines its definition of acceptable content a little, and then the next level builds on top of that. In this case, I actually do agree that Kiwi Farms probably crossed that government baseline; it was such an egregious case that it probably should be addressed in law in some way. But in general it is a bad idea to say that we're going to solve every decision about what content is and isn't acceptable by hauling someone in front of a judge. That's a recipe for chilling speech, not expanding it.
  - mlyle 4y ago
    > Endless reminder that having multiple layers of moderation protects free speech, it doesn't restrict it. Perhaps. I'm skeptical of concentrations of power wherever it is: government, Cloudflare, Facebook, etc. At least the former is theoretically accountable for choices. Also, Cloudflare asserts their position is that they largely do not want to restrict speech beyond that government baseline and they won't act themselves against speech. Here they claim they are forced to (and they probably were).
stale2002 4y ago
Although this is an interesting argument, the issue in this context is that the US legal system, has yet to declare what it is that KF is doing to be illegal. Maybe they would have lost in court. But as of yet, even though there has been multiple lawsuits against KFs, KF farms has won every thing lawsuit. That is the issue you have to grapple with. That, for all known knowledge that we have, from the legal system, nobody has proven their actions to be illegal.
- danShumway 4y ago
  > nobody has proven their actions to be illegal It's an excuse for Cloudflare to argue that its moderation decisions should be only based on legality, and that excuse shouldn't be accepted unquestionably. I mention this in a few other places, but regardless of whether or not Kiwi Farms in specific should be illegal, there is a lot of other speech that is legal and ought to be legal that Cloudflare still shouldn't be platforming. It is a mistake to have all of all moderation decisions made by the government. I mean, heck, automated requests and automated scraping are not illegal in the US, in fact they've been ruled legal even when that scraping was happening against the wishes of websites -- and I personally think that was a good decision. Where's the line between automated scraping and abuse? We're not sure, but Cloudflare doesn't wait for a court order before it stops what it deems to be malicious traffic, and it's not running around complaining that the government hasn't given it a precise definition of a DDoS attack. Many things that can reasonably be characterized as direct attacks on people and public infrastructure are legal, and it's not clear to me at all that the correct response to that is to criminalize all of them. I personally think that Kiwi Farms crossed even a legal line (or at least what should be a legal line), but if people want to argue with me about that, fine. My position is not that Cloudflare should have dropped Kiwi Farms because it was illegal, they should have dropped it because it was suppressing their customers' speech with real-world threats and violence. The legality is kind of a separate discussion.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - swat535 4y ago
zackees 4y ago
Right and the only ones that should be able to ruthlessly defame anyone is the New York Times, MSNBC and Fox News. The ramifications of this are dire. This is about a power grab of total control of what we say online. We already saw the abuse of what a small cabal of insiders can determine is real: they determined that the Hunter Biden laptop was fake when in reality that was a political position that was wrong. The "lets protect the trans" is just a trojan horse to take down disfavorable political speech everywhere.
LawTalkingGuy 4y ago
The hate and doxxing is generally from the trans activists to the women who are resisting losing their sex-segregated spaces. Women are being called TERFs and beaten at women's events and pride parades for female activism. Calling lesbianism female, etc. The problem with censorship is that as soon as it happens there's nothing to argue against the lies with. Now that KF is gone people come out of the woodwork who would have maintained some control if it still existed and had their receipts.
- UmbertoNoEco 4y ago
  the modern western liberal view is to protect all basic freedoms (of speech;of privacy; of representation; of free trade; of presumption of innocence) as long as they belong to the 'correct people'; as for the ideological enemies no right is needed and no tactic used to curtail those same rights is deemed too low or too hypocritical
- howinteresting 4y ago
AllegedAlec 4y ago
> doxing Doxxing isn't illegal. > harassing people with threats of violence How do you know that A: the person whose name I won't say isn't lying, because that person's a professional victim. And B: if that person isn't lying, that those threats came from Kiwi Farms users.
StillLrning123 4y ago
[flagged]
- HereIGoAgain 4y ago
  Is bullshit.. That's why it's a paradox. Intolerance of "intolerance" is intolerance! And as a matter of logic, the first person who argues that someone just shouldn't have a right to speak, is the very FIRST person who should lose the right to speak in such a case. As the are LITERALLY the threat to freedom that they claim to worry about.
  - danShumway 4y ago
    [flagged]
herbst 4y ago
Kiwifarms also serves a weird specific role. Many of the people people discussed there do propagate harmful things. Like normalizing cutting, starving, violence and much more. There is no control instance for things like this. Normalizing harmful things ok YouTube in front of children is not cool, we all know YouTube barely cares either. For a concrete example look into Chris Chan and how Kiwifarms was literally the only instance out there protecting Chris from way more evil groups. My point is even if Kiwifarms is a hateful environment, I think they serve a purpose in our society.
HereIGoAgain 4y ago
Where are these so-called threats of physical harm and real-world harassment? People keep saying this but never even attempt to back it up with anything more than the allegation.

chris_wot 4y ago

Free speech is not completely unfettered. Under Brandenburg v. Ohio, speech that incites imminent lawless action - and that would likely cause such action - can be punished under the law. In all likelihood this appears to be what is happening with kiwi farms. Of course, the issue is that Cloudflare can’t undertake legal enforcement, but they have a terms of use and so contractually are duly within their rights to end service to kiwifarms.

notch656a 4y ago
Don't forget the ending: Brandenburg's incitements to non-imminent violence were upheld as legal. And the person recording/distributing the incitements (the cincinnati reporters [ i.e. Kiwifarms in this case]) was not charged at all.
- chris_wot 4y ago
  It sounds like Kiwifarms is inciting imminent violence that will likely occur.
  - notch656a 4y ago
    Are you sure the incitement that provoked this response wasn't someone illegally (and against ToS) using the services of Kiwifarms, rather than the owners and operator of kiwifarms? It's my understanding Kiwifarms removed the Belfast post quite quickly. Indeed imgur is still hosting the image of the post, shall imgur also be charged?
  - dmatech 4y ago
    Posting someone's address can obviously facilitate a swatting. In some cases, it might even make someone an accomplice to one. But just recklessly posting someone's address doesn't make one an accomplice. There's no implied request for someone to SWAT or even harass the person. I get that this provides no comfort to the victims, but this isn't Brandenburg incitement.

notatoad 4y ago

but "giving the individual the choice to listen to whatever influence they wish" means that when somebody uses the threat of physical violence to silence one of those influences, anybody who stands up for free speech must push back against that. everybody deserves to have their say, except those who would seek to silence others. defending the silencers is incompatible with free speech.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

ThomW 4y ago

Free speech isn't speech without consequences. All that the first amendment protects is government making laws restricting free speech, but if you're a customer and you're doing shit that I don't agree with, I have every right to boot you from my platform. I don't have to stand idly by and not take action.

HideousKojima 4y ago
The 1st Amendment and Freedom of Speech aren't the same thing. Freedom of Speech is a philosophical concept and is, in fact, "freedom from consequences."
- ric2b 4y ago
  By that definition Freedom of Speech is a ridiculous idea. Are you saying I should be able to spend my entire day advocating for your rights to be removed, insulting you or whatever else and you still need to treat me like any other person and can't get annoyed at me? Or the opposite, if someone treats me really well I can't be friends with them because that would be a positive consequence of their speech? We all need to act like emotionless machines that completely ignore all speech so that free speech can exist?
- vineyardmike 4y ago
  There is consequences to everything. It’s the philosophical right to talk. Not the right to an audience or the right that people won’t be mad at you for disagreeing. If I call your fiance ugly you may not invite me to your wedding even though I have freedom of speech. If I tell the waiter they’re ugly, they may not serve me food even though I have the freedom of speech. Everything has consequences.
  - overl0rd11 4y ago
    What if you criticize Amazon? Should you be banned from using all their services? What if you criticize private enterprise in general? Banned from everything except services provided by the state then? Your interpersonal examples where both people/groups have very little and similar amounts of power. 'Consequences' to speech become dangerous when corporations or even larger groups of people get involved.

DanBC 4y ago

MisterBastahrd 4y ago

boudin 4y ago

Free speech doesn't mean not being held reponsible for what is said.

atoav 4y ago

> Free speech is about giving people the freedom to say things I find disgusting. Yes, but it is not only that. It is also being part of an relgious, cultural or otherwise marginalized group and not having to fear for your life because you have been a little too vocal. The truth is that freedom of speech (like most other freedoms) must comstantly be balanced between the different actors. E.g. in 1930s Germany the members of the nationalist socialist party of Germany have been quite free to utter their disgusting voices while as a jewish citizen you would have had a hard time if you did so. And the reason for this was that the speech of the Nazis ended up being more than just opinions, but threats. And those threats turned into violence and genocide. Today, we are again at a point where speech turns into threats turns into violence. Karl Popper's paradoxon of intolerance and all that. Any free society has to be intolerant towards the intolerant, otherwise you cease to be a free society at one point or another. Because the intolarent will not fight for free speech once they are in power, they will abolish it for everybody but themselves. The actual Nazis back then were quite happy painting themselves as victims only to later remove the very rights they claimed. Once people get beaten, lynched and killed by fascist mobs and loose their rights to bodily autonomy discussing freedom of speech seems naive. People who have to fear violence and incarceration cannot speak freely. And if you look at the statistics for right wing violence the point I raise here is anything but academic.

atoav 4y ago
Update, as I read more on the topic: In the case of KiwiFarms this is not even close to being about free speech. On that platform coordinated attacks on specific people have been planned, driving a few into suicide. To all those downvoting: How would you think if the target of these attack was your mother, sister, daughter? Should there be a legal way to make them stop? Or should it just be legal to coordinate harassing and threaten people whose appearance, opinion, political opinion, sexual preferences, etc you don't like? And before someone comes with the slippery slope argument: I live in Germany, we have certain Nazi symbols banned for decades here and it hasn't harmed the discourse one bit. You just can't walk around and go like "Heil Hitler" in public without having to fear some sort of retaliation. You can still talk about Nazis, you can learn about them, you can still be a Nazi. But if there was a slippery slope, why didn't it slip – for decades? Btw.: Most Europeans would regard the censorship of female nipples, swear words and anything remotely sexual like it is so commonplace in the US as an impediment on free speech. But if it is ingrained in the prude traditionalism, it is suddenly okay censorship, right?