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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

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.

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.