6 ms·

More it was overwhelmed with bad actors spamming everything, and no way to stop that. Free speech is not about letting you post your conspiracy theory in the w

by mavhc 3y ago

More it was overwhelmed with bad actors spamming everything, and no way to stop that. Free speech is not about letting you post your conspiracy theory in the wrong group

phpisthebest 3y ago
I can see you are a "I support free speech but [except]" and then proceed to explain that you do not actually support free speech
- shadowgovt 3y ago
  I, for one, own that label. I support free speech except in some circumstances where curtailing it makes almost everyone's lives better. Where I support it to the most extreme: criticizing the government. Where I want it most throttled: my own living room, so I can have some peace and quiet. I think most functioning adults have a similar spectrum of allow / deny and aren't absolutists on the topic. And, I mean... I don't think we need to look deep into the history of the Internet to see that becoming the dominant pattern. USENET failed. Email without spamblockers failed. Every forum either eventually adopts moderation policies or goes underground where barely any casual user hears of its existence. The user interprets lack of censorship as damaged and routes away from it.
  - amadeuspagel 3y ago
    > Where I support it to the most extreme: criticizing the government. > Where I want it most throttled: my own living room, so I can have some peace and quiet. This is a category error. What if someone wants to criticize the government in your living room?
    - lanstin 3y ago
      They are free to buy a living room and criticize away. My living room, I am allowed to determine whom to allow and whom not to allow in. And I would like to find online spaces where the loser spam (both commercial and ideological) are kept out, so I can find the speech I am interested in. Why is this desire felt as oppressive by so many?
      - Shared404 3y ago
        > Why is this desire felt as oppressive by so many? Because they're the spam being kept out.
  - phpisthebest 3y ago
    Here we have a fundemental problem It is often NOT the users of the platforms that want censorship, it is users of another platform, targeting something they do not like on the internet, and then going after underlying structures be it ISP's, DDOS services, Domain Registrars, Hosting providers, Credit Card Processors, etc etc etc We have plenty of examples of this on the internet, where it is not the users of the sites that want something censored, but 3rd party actors using systemic pressure on critical infrastructure to effect the censorship You have this utopia where someone puts up a gardening forum and the users or even the owner of the forums says "We do not allow talk about Politics here"... Where in reality someone sets up a political forum, someone posts something, then someone on Twitter, Facebook, Insta, etc gets offended and starts a campaign to have CloudFlare, or AWS ban them.
    - shadowgovt 3y ago
      Yep. It's a pretty clever approach, and I for one am in hindsight surprised that it took this long for people to realize that the system is a network and is therefore vulnerable to network dependency attacks. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Nazis, for example, deserve no platform and if companies decide to revoke service when they discover they're serving Nazis that's their prerogative. It can be abused, especially given that the largest players in the space are going to trend sensitive to controversy... But the internet has become embedded deeply enough in our lives that people can no longer enjoy the pretty fantasy of the neutral service provider; IBM got away with it in World War 2 and that's generally pointed to as a moral failing these days. If people are calling for enforced neutrality, they're really calling for government regulation (who else would enforce the neutrality?) which is its own can of worms.
      - phpisthebest 3y ago
        >Nazis, for example, Then you have the problem of labeling everyone that disagrees with you a "nazi" for example just because they favor strong border laws, and immigration controls, or oppose social justice and ESG "capitalism" or other such things Or the true crime of having a difference of opinion with a trans person... >>This is not necessarily a bad thing. yes it is a bad thing, it will always be a bad thing, even if doing to to actual nazi's not the new age defination of "nazi's" which seemly is anyone that happened to vote for Trump, or holds conservative political positions. >>If people are calling for enforced neutrality, they're really calling for government regulation yes and no, depends on what we are talking about Are we talking about an already heavily regulated industry like banking. This yes 100% I am calling for enforced neutrality. JP Morgan Chase, nor MasterCard should be able to refuse business to someone for the protected political speech. Services like AWS, or CloudFlare.... No I would not call for supported regulation but then we come full circle back to loss of cultural support for Free Expression There was a time were the ACLU would defend the KKK's right to speak, We should return to those days, where the axiom was "I disagree with you but I will defends your right to say it" If we at the point was the population is pushing for AWS to de-platform competitors of Twitter because of disagreements over politics we are not far removed from government censorship The reality is you would likely support both, as you clear abhor actual free speech This is also why Elon's purchase of Twitter was so critical and 100% support his efforts.
- mikestew 3y ago
  Before you wrap yourself too tightly in the 1st Amendment to the Constitution of the U. S., perhaps it would be helpful if you defined what “free speech” means to you. Because repeatedly typing “no true Scotsman…” doesn’t do much to move the conversation along, and definitions obviously differ. For example, I feel that you can say what you like, just not in my living room. Free speech does not guarantee an audience.
  - phpisthebest 3y ago
    That is the often cited copout that has no meaning. "I feel that you can say what you like, just not in my living room" is a pointless axiom that provides nothing of value to the conversation. The debate becomes infinitely more complex when you step 1 inch outside of the "living room" context and start talking about Public and Private companies operating platforms on a global scale all under a infinitely complex set of regulations, subsidies, and other factors " I feel that you can say what you like, just not in my living room" seems to me then you want to translate that into "Reddit, twitter, etc can choose what people say in their living room", the problem is they do not have a living room, and attempting to make that analog is ridiculous
    - mavhc 3y ago
      Why should a company be forced to carry anything anyone wants to say? If you want to publish your own speech, buy your own server
- lanstin 3y ago
  What you are calling free speech is boring to the audience. Usenet died because the endless unfiltered spam and shit posting was boring compared to slashdot and then reddit and then here.
- Sohcahtoa82 3y ago
  What if someone followed you around and just kept saying "You're a cunt. You're a cunt. You're a cunt." over and over? Any time you're not on private property. "You're a cunt". Is that free speech? I mean, I'm allowed to be on public property. I'm allowed to say whatever I want. Exercising those two rights means I'm allowed to follow you around and call you a cunt. You'd probably try to say "No, that's harassment". Aye, but now you've agreed there should be limits on speech.
  - phpisthebest 3y ago
    If they have that kind of time, and no life I would find that rather amusing... I am sure they would tire of it long before I would get offended by it. and I can assure you I would could, and have responded far more decisive and penetrating insults...
    - shadowgovt 3y ago
      If there's one thing we've learned from the last two-decades-odd of the Internet being ubiquitous, it's that one cannot, in fact, outlast the harassers. They organize and they take shifts. They can keep the harassment going as long as it takes. They can keep it up until you are dead. And they can do it at scale. That's why cutting off their ability to do it through various channels is so important.
      - mavhc 3y ago
        The internet reduces the cost of being an ass, both in terms of reach and being punched in the face for harassment
  - fluoridation 3y ago
    When people say that there should be no restrictions on speech, it's usually about content, not manner. No free speech absolutist would think it's acceptable to tell someone "you're a wonderful person" through a 600 dB speaker (if it was possible to construct such a device). If I scream at you so loudly that it liquefies your organs, I don't think that the fact the sound happened to form words makes the act any less harmful. Why should it be any different with harassment?
- AnimalMuppet 3y ago
  Billy Joel's rule: "You are free to speak your mind, but not on my time." That is, sure, you can speak to whoever wants to listen. You can't make anyone want to listen, though - including, you can't make a forum want to listen. It wants to talk about gardening, and you want to talk about the latest Covid conspiracy theories? Great, knock yourself out, talk about your conspiracy theories - but not on the gardening forum. See, I support free speech. I support their freedom to talk about gardening without having to wade through a bunch of conspiracy theory posts. "Post anything anywhere" reduces actual communication - willing speakers finding willing listeners - because the listeners give up rather than wade through a bunch of garbage that they don't care about. I support their freedom to talk about gardening without getting drowned out.
  - phpisthebest 3y ago
    But here the question is who is doing the controlling Usenet is a open protocol, not a forum that someone owns. So if you support moderation on open protocol then you support most likely systemic, or worse government censorship. Not someone controlling their own property With Usenet there was plenty of tools (just like with email today) to block spam, content, users etc at the client level if an individual did not want to see certain speech. With time those tools would have improved just like they have with email
    - AnimalMuppet 3y ago
      > So if you support moderation on open protocol then you support most likely systemic, or worse government censorship. Feel free to stop telling me what I support. You're lousy at it. If a protocol is open, that doesn't mean that my servers are. I'm moderating my servers, not the protocol or the traffic carried using the protocol. (In the same way, you don't control who drives by your house, but you control who's allowed in the door.) I don't want systemic censorship of speech (including by ISPs). I don't want government censorship of speech. But I support the right of servers to say "I'm not carrying that". And I support the right of a community to have a space that is public to that community, and yet to keep stuff that they don't want out of it. And I support the right of those who don't agree to go form their own community, and to decide for themselves what the rules are for their community. And all of this can happen on open protocols without systemic or government censorship. Specifically on usenet, you could have, say, alt.hobby.gardening, and have it get overrun by spam, and have alt.hobby.gardening_moderated start up with moderation to keep the spam out. And if you don't like it, and want to post your conspiracy rants, go post them on alt.hobby.gardening with all the spam that nobody reads. Knock yourself out. Or go start alt.hobby.gardening_conspiracy, or whatever. But let the gardening nuts have their space without your rants.

by mavhc 3y ago

More it was overwhelmed with bad actors spamming everything, and no way to stop that. Free speech is not about letting you post your conspiracy theory in the wrong group

phpisthebest 3y ago

I can see you are a "I support free speech but [except]" and then proceed to explain that you do not actually support free speech

shadowgovt 3y ago
I, for one, own that label. I support free speech except in some circumstances where curtailing it makes almost everyone's lives better. Where I support it to the most extreme: criticizing the government. Where I want it most throttled: my own living room, so I can have some peace and quiet. I think most functioning adults have a similar spectrum of allow / deny and aren't absolutists on the topic. And, I mean... I don't think we need to look deep into the history of the Internet to see that becoming the dominant pattern. USENET failed. Email without spamblockers failed. Every forum either eventually adopts moderation policies or goes underground where barely any casual user hears of its existence. The user interprets lack of censorship as damaged and routes away from it.
- amadeuspagel 3y ago
  > Where I support it to the most extreme: criticizing the government. > Where I want it most throttled: my own living room, so I can have some peace and quiet. This is a category error. What if someone wants to criticize the government in your living room?
  - lanstin 3y ago
    They are free to buy a living room and criticize away. My living room, I am allowed to determine whom to allow and whom not to allow in. And I would like to find online spaces where the loser spam (both commercial and ideological) are kept out, so I can find the speech I am interested in. Why is this desire felt as oppressive by so many?
    - Shared404 3y ago
      > Why is this desire felt as oppressive by so many? Because they're the spam being kept out.
- phpisthebest 3y ago
  Here we have a fundemental problem It is often NOT the users of the platforms that want censorship, it is users of another platform, targeting something they do not like on the internet, and then going after underlying structures be it ISP's, DDOS services, Domain Registrars, Hosting providers, Credit Card Processors, etc etc etc We have plenty of examples of this on the internet, where it is not the users of the sites that want something censored, but 3rd party actors using systemic pressure on critical infrastructure to effect the censorship You have this utopia where someone puts up a gardening forum and the users or even the owner of the forums says "We do not allow talk about Politics here"... Where in reality someone sets up a political forum, someone posts something, then someone on Twitter, Facebook, Insta, etc gets offended and starts a campaign to have CloudFlare, or AWS ban them.
  - shadowgovt 3y ago
    Yep. It's a pretty clever approach, and I for one am in hindsight surprised that it took this long for people to realize that the system is a network and is therefore vulnerable to network dependency attacks. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Nazis, for example, deserve no platform and if companies decide to revoke service when they discover they're serving Nazis that's their prerogative. It can be abused, especially given that the largest players in the space are going to trend sensitive to controversy... But the internet has become embedded deeply enough in our lives that people can no longer enjoy the pretty fantasy of the neutral service provider; IBM got away with it in World War 2 and that's generally pointed to as a moral failing these days. If people are calling for enforced neutrality, they're really calling for government regulation (who else would enforce the neutrality?) which is its own can of worms.
    - phpisthebest 3y ago
      >Nazis, for example, Then you have the problem of labeling everyone that disagrees with you a "nazi" for example just because they favor strong border laws, and immigration controls, or oppose social justice and ESG "capitalism" or other such things Or the true crime of having a difference of opinion with a trans person... >>This is not necessarily a bad thing. yes it is a bad thing, it will always be a bad thing, even if doing to to actual nazi's not the new age defination of "nazi's" which seemly is anyone that happened to vote for Trump, or holds conservative political positions. >>If people are calling for enforced neutrality, they're really calling for government regulation yes and no, depends on what we are talking about Are we talking about an already heavily regulated industry like banking. This yes 100% I am calling for enforced neutrality. JP Morgan Chase, nor MasterCard should be able to refuse business to someone for the protected political speech. Services like AWS, or CloudFlare.... No I would not call for supported regulation but then we come full circle back to loss of cultural support for Free Expression There was a time were the ACLU would defend the KKK's right to speak, We should return to those days, where the axiom was "I disagree with you but I will defends your right to say it" If we at the point was the population is pushing for AWS to de-platform competitors of Twitter because of disagreements over politics we are not far removed from government censorship The reality is you would likely support both, as you clear abhor actual free speech This is also why Elon's purchase of Twitter was so critical and 100% support his efforts.
mikestew 3y ago
Before you wrap yourself too tightly in the 1st Amendment to the Constitution of the U. S., perhaps it would be helpful if you defined what “free speech” means to you. Because repeatedly typing “no true Scotsman…” doesn’t do much to move the conversation along, and definitions obviously differ. For example, I feel that you can say what you like, just not in my living room. Free speech does not guarantee an audience.
- phpisthebest 3y ago
  That is the often cited copout that has no meaning. "I feel that you can say what you like, just not in my living room" is a pointless axiom that provides nothing of value to the conversation. The debate becomes infinitely more complex when you step 1 inch outside of the "living room" context and start talking about Public and Private companies operating platforms on a global scale all under a infinitely complex set of regulations, subsidies, and other factors " I feel that you can say what you like, just not in my living room" seems to me then you want to translate that into "Reddit, twitter, etc can choose what people say in their living room", the problem is they do not have a living room, and attempting to make that analog is ridiculous
  - mavhc 3y ago
    Why should a company be forced to carry anything anyone wants to say? If you want to publish your own speech, buy your own server
lanstin 3y ago
What you are calling free speech is boring to the audience. Usenet died because the endless unfiltered spam and shit posting was boring compared to slashdot and then reddit and then here.
Sohcahtoa82 3y ago
What if someone followed you around and just kept saying "You're a cunt. You're a cunt. You're a cunt." over and over? Any time you're not on private property. "You're a cunt". Is that free speech? I mean, I'm allowed to be on public property. I'm allowed to say whatever I want. Exercising those two rights means I'm allowed to follow you around and call you a cunt. You'd probably try to say "No, that's harassment". Aye, but now you've agreed there should be limits on speech.
- phpisthebest 3y ago
  If they have that kind of time, and no life I would find that rather amusing... I am sure they would tire of it long before I would get offended by it. and I can assure you I would could, and have responded far more decisive and penetrating insults...
  - shadowgovt 3y ago
    If there's one thing we've learned from the last two-decades-odd of the Internet being ubiquitous, it's that one cannot, in fact, outlast the harassers. They organize and they take shifts. They can keep the harassment going as long as it takes. They can keep it up until you are dead. And they can do it at scale. That's why cutting off their ability to do it through various channels is so important.
    - mavhc 3y ago
      The internet reduces the cost of being an ass, both in terms of reach and being punched in the face for harassment
- fluoridation 3y ago
  When people say that there should be no restrictions on speech, it's usually about content, not manner. No free speech absolutist would think it's acceptable to tell someone "you're a wonderful person" through a 600 dB speaker (if it was possible to construct such a device). If I scream at you so loudly that it liquefies your organs, I don't think that the fact the sound happened to form words makes the act any less harmful. Why should it be any different with harassment?
AnimalMuppet 3y ago
Billy Joel's rule: "You are free to speak your mind, but not on my time." That is, sure, you can speak to whoever wants to listen. You can't make anyone want to listen, though - including, you can't make a forum want to listen. It wants to talk about gardening, and you want to talk about the latest Covid conspiracy theories? Great, knock yourself out, talk about your conspiracy theories - but not on the gardening forum. See, I support free speech. I support their freedom to talk about gardening without having to wade through a bunch of conspiracy theory posts. "Post anything anywhere" reduces actual communication - willing speakers finding willing listeners - because the listeners give up rather than wade through a bunch of garbage that they don't care about. I support their freedom to talk about gardening without getting drowned out.
- phpisthebest 3y ago
  But here the question is who is doing the controlling Usenet is a open protocol, not a forum that someone owns. So if you support moderation on open protocol then you support most likely systemic, or worse government censorship. Not someone controlling their own property With Usenet there was plenty of tools (just like with email today) to block spam, content, users etc at the client level if an individual did not want to see certain speech. With time those tools would have improved just like they have with email
  - AnimalMuppet 3y ago
    > So if you support moderation on open protocol then you support most likely systemic, or worse government censorship. Feel free to stop telling me what I support. You're lousy at it. If a protocol is open, that doesn't mean that my servers are. I'm moderating my servers, not the protocol or the traffic carried using the protocol. (In the same way, you don't control who drives by your house, but you control who's allowed in the door.) I don't want systemic censorship of speech (including by ISPs). I don't want government censorship of speech. But I support the right of servers to say "I'm not carrying that". And I support the right of a community to have a space that is public to that community, and yet to keep stuff that they don't want out of it. And I support the right of those who don't agree to go form their own community, and to decide for themselves what the rules are for their community. And all of this can happen on open protocols without systemic or government censorship. Specifically on usenet, you could have, say, alt.hobby.gardening, and have it get overrun by spam, and have alt.hobby.gardening_moderated start up with moderation to keep the spam out. And if you don't like it, and want to post your conspiracy rants, go post them on alt.hobby.gardening with all the spam that nobody reads. Knock yourself out. Or go start alt.hobby.gardening_conspiracy, or whatever. But let the gardening nuts have their space without your rants.