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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 C

by 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).
  - danShumway 4y ago
    > I'm skeptical of concentrations of power wherever it is: government, Cloudflare, Facebook, etc. Not to hammer the point to hard, but de-concentrating power is the exact reason why it is better to have moderation decisions across multiple layers of the network stack rather than in level 0 (the government). Forum messes up on moderation? Not a big deal. Web host starts making bad decisions? Tons of options. Clouldflare banning you? Tougher, but there are multiple CDN services, if Cloudflare becomes evil it's not necessarily the end of the world. ISP banning you? Now we start getting pretty dangerous, there are fewer options available to services and if moderation decisions are made poorly, that can have effects across the entire network for everyone. The government prosecuting you? This is level 0 of the network stack. The way that we guard against concentration of power is by de-concentrating it. Cloudflare (and to be fair, other large Internet companies too) are arguing for the opposite of that. In the specific case of Kiwi Farms, maybe this example is so egregious that it does make sense to have some new laws. I kind of agree with that. But no good law will be enough on its own to get rid of Cloudflare's responsibility, the only law responsive enough and fast enough to do that would be one that violated free speech rights.
    - mlyle 4y ago
      > Not to hammer the point to hard, but de-concentrating power is the exact reason why it is better to have moderation decisions across multiple layers of the network stack rather than in level 0 (the government). I'm not disagreeing with your entire argument, just that portion. Multiple layers of moderation are only safer for free speech to the extent that none of them have too central of a role and there's some degree of visibility as to what is happening. One of the things that has made social media so toxic to speech is that it has A) gathered so much of the "share" of being a conduit of speech at scale, and B) creates a false feeling of consensus by creating playing fields that are tilted in various ways without the tampering being obvious.
      - danShumway 4y ago
        I heavily agree with you that centralization on a single layer is problematic for free speech. I suspect where I differ from the CEOs of companies like Cloudflare/Facebook, is that I think the solution to that isn't to get rid of moderation, but rather to enforce antitrust and break up their companies. :) Facebook in particular has this problem; it's constantly asking the government to tell it what to do because it doesn't want to be in charge of speech, and yet it has no problem buying competitors and trying to take over markets. It makes me wonder how concerned about speech these companies actually are, since they had no problem growing their companies to this size and putting themselves into situations where their moderation decisions carry so much weight.
- smsm42 4y ago
  > You do not want the government to be the sole arbitrator of what content should be online. No, we want the government to clandestinely meet every week with representatives of major internet companies and instruct them who to ban and what information to suppress, while pretending it's independent action of the same companies driven by their love of free speech. Or maybe we don't want that, but who cares - it's what we've got.
  - archagon 4y ago
    As far as I’m aware, the government has little to no power to force a company to suppress information.
    - smsm42 4y ago
      If you think US federal government has "little to no power" over the company whose main business, headquarters and most of the workers are all located in the US - you really misunderstand just how vast US federal government powers are.
      - archagon 4y ago
        Be specific. What did the US government tell companies en masse to redact, and what consequences did they threaten them with if they didn't? (Just as a reminder, we do not live in the USSR.)
        smsm42 4y ago
        > What did the US government tell companies en masse to redact https://reclaimthenet.org/emails-facebook-coordinating-with-cdc-censorship-policy/ https://reclaimthenet.org/emails-facebook-coordinating-with-... https://www.zerohedge.com/political/over-50-biden-administration-employees-12-us-agencies-involved-social-media-censorship https://www.zerohedge.com/political/over-50-biden-administra... I trust you can find many more links about this topic. As a side note, this is the part we have just learned. Is that all of it? FBI just told us it routinely instructs social media companies about which content they'd like suppressed. And, as we know, they get their wishes. > what consequences did they threaten them with if they didn't How would I know? I wasn't there. I know which consequences US Federal Government can visit on you if it really hates you, and that's a real lot of bad consequences. How it went on those meetings - I have no idea. Maybe they didn't even need to threaten - though they certainly did in public - the President accused Facebook of "killing people". Do you thing if the Supreme Commander of the US Army and the head of US Federal Executive tells you you're killing people and need to stop it - it's not something you need to think really really hard about? > Just as a reminder, we do not live in the USSR I know, I've been there. We're not. But we're inching closer and closer to there. When it'd become obvious, it'd be too late to complain - by then, any complaint outside of the boundaries of your private kitchen will land you is a big trouble. Better complain while it's still allowed.
- BrainVirus 4y ago
  >Endless reminder that having multiple layers of moderation protects free speech, it doesn't restrict it. Cloudfalre claims to be an infrastructure company. Now we're somehow discussing "multiple layers of moderation". This was fast. No limiting principles in sight either.
  - danShumway 4y ago
    > Cloudfalre claims to be an infrastructure company. Very obviously Cloudflare is operating at a higher level of infrastructure than ISPs or the government. If they actually believe that they are infrastructure that people have a human right to access and that is so fundamental to the Internet that they should be treated as level 0 infrastructure, then they should consider dissolving the company and forming a public org instead. Otherwise, yes, of course Cloudflare should have stricter standards. Even under Net Neutrality (which I support) ISPs have more moderation power than the government does. Banks arguably have far too much moderation power (I do think people should have a right to banking access), but I don't know anyone who would argue that banks should have no moderation powers at all, it would make it impossible for them to prevent fraud or abuse if that was the case. Cloudflare obviously should not have as strict moderation as a web forum, but this isn't a binary choice. The limiting principle here is having multiple layers of infrastructure. It's choosing not to have a single company in charge of DDOS protection for 20% of the web.
- trafficante 4y ago
  >Endless reminder that having multiple layers of moderation protects free speech, it doesn't restrict it. My issue is that the Kiwi post in question - which (to my reading) was a very VERY stupid bomb “joke” obliquely referencing the Belfast Troubles - appears to have been quickly moderated and the user banned. Which is, I thought, how this was all supposed to work. The screenshot going around Twitter of the idiotic post was tweeted out within literal minutes of said post being made. I have no idea how long it took the KF moderators to delete the post and ban the user but, from a perusal of the following pages in that thread, it doesn’t seem like it was up very long. So is moderation an issue? It doesn’t seem to be. Perhaps that post was the final straw, but CloudFlare is framing their action as having to step in and “moderate” specifically because of THAT post - and yet the post in question had already been (correctly) nuked from orbit by the KF mods. Edit: here’s where I do the obligatory “I didn’t vote for Trump, however” mea culpa: I do not have a KiwiFarms account and honestly I find it to be fairly distasteful in a 2004 FYAD sort of way.
  - vintermann 4y ago
    One thing I don't understand: if Kiwifarms is subject to very big, very expensive DDoS attacks - and I've seen no one denying that it is, that's the whole thing Cloudflare is needed for, after all - why would we even think an illegal threat on Kiwifarms originated with a regular Kiwifarms user? It seems a lot cheaper to make an account and post the illegal comment than to run a DDoS operation. No Kiwifarms account here either, but I have read it and I do appreciate that some of the people wanting them shut down are... not very nice people themselves.
    - clove 4y ago
      You might be right. Posted by a KF user regarding the threat: "It's a 2020 account that wasn't active till a month ago with 1 post in the CWC forum and the other 42 in the keffals thread. The post was deletedly nearly instantly, yet within 10 minutes of it being posted Keffals had contacted CF, CF pulled the plug, and articles (which you can find in A&N right now) were being posted. Also it's notable that Keffals removed the quote/reply portion of the post which he accidently revealed before indicating he has an account here. This was so obviously coordinated, it glows more than nuclear blast."
- ianai 4y ago
  Do we still call it “speech” if it’s a threat for physical violence? This seems even more clear when an established past of threats being actualized exists. Edit-Maybe I’ll make this personal. I’ve been a victim of both verbal and physical bullying. At some point words cross a boundary from speech to violence. You could even see this with the audio simulations used to simulate schizophrenia. I’d say speech crosses the boundary into violence when it hurts another person and cannot be “muted” by the other. Ie doxxing someone-once it’s on the internet it’s out there for all time. Etc.
  - HereIGoAgain 4y ago
    Ok but where were the threat for physical violence here and why did they need to take away protections against illegal attacks in order to stop it?
- derangedHorse 4y ago
  “ You do not want the government to be the sole arbitrator of what content should be online” That’s exactly what I think should be the case. The US government is supposed to reflect the will of the people and having a representative democracy is a way to achieve that decentralization. If the power structures that arise from this model threaten this process then the first goal should be fixing it rather than introducing a new process where a smaller ideological group gets to harass those within companies into acquiescing to their moral guidelines.
daniel_iversen 4y ago
- xupybd 4y ago
puppymaster 4y ago
- smsm42 4y ago
  Let's not be coy here - the ultimate goal is to exactly make them cease to exist. And indeed, in any other case such action would be pointless - if they're dangerous hateful bigots that endanger lives, then what changes if they move to another provider? What has been achieved by that? It's like the police would say "we caught this terrible murderer and we forced him to change the store where he shops for groceries and to wear different brand of clothes. Yay us!" What's the point then? The only case where it makes any sense if when the ultimate goal - maybe not immediate, but eventual - is to drive it out of existence. CF alone couldn't likely pull it off, but as multiple prior cases illustrated, they are not alone.
- amachefe 4y ago
  Everyone here has defended the CEO right to make those decision. The disagreement is his argument and justfication. He should just come out and say "I did it because i can and want to" not those long winded excuses
cmurf 4y ago
DanBC 4y ago
> 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. This argument, that if it's legal there's no problem is calling for an over-bearing authoritarian state that micro-manages every interaction of private individuals. We do not want to give more power to the state, which is why there's a bunch of stuff that's legal but is really unpleasant, and why we use "beyond all reasonable doubt" in the criminal courts. For this to work we require citizens to take responsibility.
- autoexec 4y ago
  > This argument, that if it's legal there's no problem is calling for an over-bearing authoritarian state that micro-manages every interaction of private individuals. Is it somehow better for unelected robber barons to micro-manage every interaction of private individuals? If someone else is going to decide what ideas I'm allowed to hear I want to have a vote in who that person is. When CEOs make those choices for you voting with your wallet isn't going to cut it. At least with the state we have the ability to collectively decide what the limits of their power will be and hold them accountable when they overstep.
  - DanBC 4y ago
    > Is it somehow better for unelected robber barons to micro-manage every interaction of private individuals? They can't, because we have laws against monopolies.
ncallaway 4y ago
“promptly and firmly by a justice system” The Justice system is almost never prompt. Despite the fact that some laws have been broken, the police likely won’t take a situation seriously until _after_ there’s a dead body. They aren’t in the business of preventing people from getting killed. They’re in the business of putting the killers in jail. So, yes, maybe a more ideal solution would be a dramatic reform to policing, but, if that’s not going to happen any time soon, what solutions are available?
- Ygg2 4y ago
  > They aren’t in the business of preventing people from getting killed. They’re in the business of putting the killers in jail. If this is true, explain police protection. Or restraining order.
  - threeseed 4y ago
    You should look into the enforcement of restraining orders. Because it is unacceptably lax to say the least. And way too many people have died because of it.
    - Ygg2 4y ago
      I said it is their job. I didn't say they do a good or a bad job.
      - ncallaway 4y ago
        The Supreme Court has ruled very explicitly that the policy *do not* have a duty to protect a citizen. It is, very explicitly according to the SCOTUS, not actually their job.
  - the_why_of_y 4y ago
    In the US, a restraining order issued by a court is merely a suggestion; police can simply ignore it without consequence, even if there is a law on the books that requires police to enforce it. https://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/28/politics/justices-rule-police-do-not-have-a-constitutional-duty-to-protect.html https://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/28/politics/justices-rule-po... https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/04-278 https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/04-278
kitsune_ 4y ago
Every CEO implicitly decides what is morally acceptable or not when they act. Additionally individual people and society as a whole judge those actions within their own frame of reference. Laws aren't about what's moral or not.
SerLava 4y ago
They have been broken, by anonymous or nearly anonymous people, constantly, distributed throughout the world behind multiple proxies. Sorry dude, we're not gonna wait 3 to 50 months for law enforcement to sort gradually through the trail of bodies. Like oh I'm just doing crimes using your delivery service, I'm just doing crimes in your restaurant, I'm just doing crimes in your day care, and if you believe in free speech you have to let me keep doing the crimes it until you petition the US government to compose a task force
- dcow 4y ago
  No. The argument is that there is very little evidence here that crimes were actually committed, rather they were allegedly just discussed. Cloudflare hasn’t brought any evidence to bear.
smazero 4y ago
[flagged]

by xupybd 4y ago

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).
- danShumway 4y ago
  > I'm skeptical of concentrations of power wherever it is: government, Cloudflare, Facebook, etc. Not to hammer the point to hard, but de-concentrating power is the exact reason why it is better to have moderation decisions across multiple layers of the network stack rather than in level 0 (the government). Forum messes up on moderation? Not a big deal. Web host starts making bad decisions? Tons of options. Clouldflare banning you? Tougher, but there are multiple CDN services, if Cloudflare becomes evil it's not necessarily the end of the world. ISP banning you? Now we start getting pretty dangerous, there are fewer options available to services and if moderation decisions are made poorly, that can have effects across the entire network for everyone. The government prosecuting you? This is level 0 of the network stack. The way that we guard against concentration of power is by de-concentrating it. Cloudflare (and to be fair, other large Internet companies too) are arguing for the opposite of that. In the specific case of Kiwi Farms, maybe this example is so egregious that it does make sense to have some new laws. I kind of agree with that. But no good law will be enough on its own to get rid of Cloudflare's responsibility, the only law responsive enough and fast enough to do that would be one that violated free speech rights.
  - mlyle 4y ago
    > Not to hammer the point to hard, but de-concentrating power is the exact reason why it is better to have moderation decisions across multiple layers of the network stack rather than in level 0 (the government). I'm not disagreeing with your entire argument, just that portion. Multiple layers of moderation are only safer for free speech to the extent that none of them have too central of a role and there's some degree of visibility as to what is happening. One of the things that has made social media so toxic to speech is that it has A) gathered so much of the "share" of being a conduit of speech at scale, and B) creates a false feeling of consensus by creating playing fields that are tilted in various ways without the tampering being obvious.
    - danShumway 4y ago
      I heavily agree with you that centralization on a single layer is problematic for free speech. I suspect where I differ from the CEOs of companies like Cloudflare/Facebook, is that I think the solution to that isn't to get rid of moderation, but rather to enforce antitrust and break up their companies. :) Facebook in particular has this problem; it's constantly asking the government to tell it what to do because it doesn't want to be in charge of speech, and yet it has no problem buying competitors and trying to take over markets. It makes me wonder how concerned about speech these companies actually are, since they had no problem growing their companies to this size and putting themselves into situations where their moderation decisions carry so much weight.
smsm42 4y ago
> You do not want the government to be the sole arbitrator of what content should be online. No, we want the government to clandestinely meet every week with representatives of major internet companies and instruct them who to ban and what information to suppress, while pretending it's independent action of the same companies driven by their love of free speech. Or maybe we don't want that, but who cares - it's what we've got.
- archagon 4y ago
  As far as I’m aware, the government has little to no power to force a company to suppress information.
  - smsm42 4y ago
    If you think US federal government has "little to no power" over the company whose main business, headquarters and most of the workers are all located in the US - you really misunderstand just how vast US federal government powers are.
    - archagon 4y ago
      Be specific. What did the US government tell companies en masse to redact, and what consequences did they threaten them with if they didn't? (Just as a reminder, we do not live in the USSR.)
      - smsm42 4y ago
        > What did the US government tell companies en masse to redact https://reclaimthenet.org/emails-facebook-coordinating-with-cdc-censorship-policy/ https://reclaimthenet.org/emails-facebook-coordinating-with-... https://www.zerohedge.com/political/over-50-biden-administration-employees-12-us-agencies-involved-social-media-censorship https://www.zerohedge.com/political/over-50-biden-administra... I trust you can find many more links about this topic. As a side note, this is the part we have just learned. Is that all of it? FBI just told us it routinely instructs social media companies about which content they'd like suppressed. And, as we know, they get their wishes. > what consequences did they threaten them with if they didn't How would I know? I wasn't there. I know which consequences US Federal Government can visit on you if it really hates you, and that's a real lot of bad consequences. How it went on those meetings - I have no idea. Maybe they didn't even need to threaten - though they certainly did in public - the President accused Facebook of "killing people". Do you thing if the Supreme Commander of the US Army and the head of US Federal Executive tells you you're killing people and need to stop it - it's not something you need to think really really hard about? > Just as a reminder, we do not live in the USSR I know, I've been there. We're not. But we're inching closer and closer to there. When it'd become obvious, it'd be too late to complain - by then, any complaint outside of the boundaries of your private kitchen will land you is a big trouble. Better complain while it's still allowed.
BrainVirus 4y ago
>Endless reminder that having multiple layers of moderation protects free speech, it doesn't restrict it. Cloudfalre claims to be an infrastructure company. Now we're somehow discussing "multiple layers of moderation". This was fast. No limiting principles in sight either.
- danShumway 4y ago
  > Cloudfalre claims to be an infrastructure company. Very obviously Cloudflare is operating at a higher level of infrastructure than ISPs or the government. If they actually believe that they are infrastructure that people have a human right to access and that is so fundamental to the Internet that they should be treated as level 0 infrastructure, then they should consider dissolving the company and forming a public org instead. Otherwise, yes, of course Cloudflare should have stricter standards. Even under Net Neutrality (which I support) ISPs have more moderation power than the government does. Banks arguably have far too much moderation power (I do think people should have a right to banking access), but I don't know anyone who would argue that banks should have no moderation powers at all, it would make it impossible for them to prevent fraud or abuse if that was the case. Cloudflare obviously should not have as strict moderation as a web forum, but this isn't a binary choice. The limiting principle here is having multiple layers of infrastructure. It's choosing not to have a single company in charge of DDOS protection for 20% of the web.
trafficante 4y ago
>Endless reminder that having multiple layers of moderation protects free speech, it doesn't restrict it. My issue is that the Kiwi post in question - which (to my reading) was a very VERY stupid bomb “joke” obliquely referencing the Belfast Troubles - appears to have been quickly moderated and the user banned. Which is, I thought, how this was all supposed to work. The screenshot going around Twitter of the idiotic post was tweeted out within literal minutes of said post being made. I have no idea how long it took the KF moderators to delete the post and ban the user but, from a perusal of the following pages in that thread, it doesn’t seem like it was up very long. So is moderation an issue? It doesn’t seem to be. Perhaps that post was the final straw, but CloudFlare is framing their action as having to step in and “moderate” specifically because of THAT post - and yet the post in question had already been (correctly) nuked from orbit by the KF mods. Edit: here’s where I do the obligatory “I didn’t vote for Trump, however” mea culpa: I do not have a KiwiFarms account and honestly I find it to be fairly distasteful in a 2004 FYAD sort of way.
- vintermann 4y ago
  One thing I don't understand: if Kiwifarms is subject to very big, very expensive DDoS attacks - and I've seen no one denying that it is, that's the whole thing Cloudflare is needed for, after all - why would we even think an illegal threat on Kiwifarms originated with a regular Kiwifarms user? It seems a lot cheaper to make an account and post the illegal comment than to run a DDoS operation. No Kiwifarms account here either, but I have read it and I do appreciate that some of the people wanting them shut down are... not very nice people themselves.
  - clove 4y ago
    You might be right. Posted by a KF user regarding the threat: "It's a 2020 account that wasn't active till a month ago with 1 post in the CWC forum and the other 42 in the keffals thread. The post was deletedly nearly instantly, yet within 10 minutes of it being posted Keffals had contacted CF, CF pulled the plug, and articles (which you can find in A&N right now) were being posted. Also it's notable that Keffals removed the quote/reply portion of the post which he accidently revealed before indicating he has an account here. This was so obviously coordinated, it glows more than nuclear blast."
ianai 4y ago
Do we still call it “speech” if it’s a threat for physical violence? This seems even more clear when an established past of threats being actualized exists. Edit-Maybe I’ll make this personal. I’ve been a victim of both verbal and physical bullying. At some point words cross a boundary from speech to violence. You could even see this with the audio simulations used to simulate schizophrenia. I’d say speech crosses the boundary into violence when it hurts another person and cannot be “muted” by the other. Ie doxxing someone-once it’s on the internet it’s out there for all time. Etc.
- HereIGoAgain 4y ago
  Ok but where were the threat for physical violence here and why did they need to take away protections against illegal attacks in order to stop it?
derangedHorse 4y ago
“ You do not want the government to be the sole arbitrator of what content should be online” That’s exactly what I think should be the case. The US government is supposed to reflect the will of the people and having a representative democracy is a way to achieve that decentralization. If the power structures that arise from this model threaten this process then the first goal should be fixing it rather than introducing a new process where a smaller ideological group gets to harass those within companies into acquiescing to their moral guidelines.

daniel_iversen 4y ago

xupybd 4y ago

puppymaster 4y ago

smsm42 4y ago
Let's not be coy here - the ultimate goal is to exactly make them cease to exist. And indeed, in any other case such action would be pointless - if they're dangerous hateful bigots that endanger lives, then what changes if they move to another provider? What has been achieved by that? It's like the police would say "we caught this terrible murderer and we forced him to change the store where he shops for groceries and to wear different brand of clothes. Yay us!" What's the point then? The only case where it makes any sense if when the ultimate goal - maybe not immediate, but eventual - is to drive it out of existence. CF alone couldn't likely pull it off, but as multiple prior cases illustrated, they are not alone.
amachefe 4y ago
Everyone here has defended the CEO right to make those decision. The disagreement is his argument and justfication. He should just come out and say "I did it because i can and want to" not those long winded excuses

cmurf 4y ago

DanBC 4y ago

> 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. This argument, that if it's legal there's no problem is calling for an over-bearing authoritarian state that micro-manages every interaction of private individuals. We do not want to give more power to the state, which is why there's a bunch of stuff that's legal but is really unpleasant, and why we use "beyond all reasonable doubt" in the criminal courts. For this to work we require citizens to take responsibility.

autoexec 4y ago
> This argument, that if it's legal there's no problem is calling for an over-bearing authoritarian state that micro-manages every interaction of private individuals. Is it somehow better for unelected robber barons to micro-manage every interaction of private individuals? If someone else is going to decide what ideas I'm allowed to hear I want to have a vote in who that person is. When CEOs make those choices for you voting with your wallet isn't going to cut it. At least with the state we have the ability to collectively decide what the limits of their power will be and hold them accountable when they overstep.
- DanBC 4y ago
  > Is it somehow better for unelected robber barons to micro-manage every interaction of private individuals? They can't, because we have laws against monopolies.

ncallaway 4y ago

“promptly and firmly by a justice system” The Justice system is almost never prompt. Despite the fact that some laws have been broken, the police likely won’t take a situation seriously until _after_ there’s a dead body. They aren’t in the business of preventing people from getting killed. They’re in the business of putting the killers in jail. So, yes, maybe a more ideal solution would be a dramatic reform to policing, but, if that’s not going to happen any time soon, what solutions are available?

Ygg2 4y ago
> They aren’t in the business of preventing people from getting killed. They’re in the business of putting the killers in jail. If this is true, explain police protection. Or restraining order.
- threeseed 4y ago
  You should look into the enforcement of restraining orders. Because it is unacceptably lax to say the least. And way too many people have died because of it.
  - Ygg2 4y ago
    I said it is their job. I didn't say they do a good or a bad job.
    - ncallaway 4y ago
      The Supreme Court has ruled very explicitly that the policy *do not* have a duty to protect a citizen. It is, very explicitly according to the SCOTUS, not actually their job.
- the_why_of_y 4y ago
  In the US, a restraining order issued by a court is merely a suggestion; police can simply ignore it without consequence, even if there is a law on the books that requires police to enforce it. https://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/28/politics/justices-rule-police-do-not-have-a-constitutional-duty-to-protect.html https://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/28/politics/justices-rule-po... https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/04-278 https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/04-278

kitsune_ 4y ago

Every CEO implicitly decides what is morally acceptable or not when they act. Additionally individual people and society as a whole judge those actions within their own frame of reference. Laws aren't about what's moral or not.

SerLava 4y ago

They have been broken, by anonymous or nearly anonymous people, constantly, distributed throughout the world behind multiple proxies. Sorry dude, we're not gonna wait 3 to 50 months for law enforcement to sort gradually through the trail of bodies. Like oh I'm just doing crimes using your delivery service, I'm just doing crimes in your restaurant, I'm just doing crimes in your day care, and if you believe in free speech you have to let me keep doing the crimes it until you petition the US government to compose a task force

dcow 4y ago
No. The argument is that there is very little evidence here that crimes were actually committed, rather they were allegedly just discussed. Cloudflare hasn’t brought any evidence to bear.

smazero 4y ago

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