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ISPs should not police online speech no matter how awful it is

• freedomben 3y ago
  > But just because there’s a serious problem doesn’t mean that every response is a good one. This is a fantastic line, one that I'm tucking away for future use.
  • jfengel 3y ago
    The EFF's response is not a good one, either. The previous sentence is: "We fully support criminal and civil liability for those who abuse and harass others." That's not sufficient. These are extremely slow mechanisms, when they work at all. The harassed individual can suffer for years, and the EFF isn't rushing out to aid them. As their post says, "law enforcement and legislators have failed". The Internet is different from the physical world. It's much easier for people to cross legal jurisdictions and hide from law enforcement. Law enforcement and legislators haven't merely failed. They will continue to fail for a long time, during which there are real consequences to human beings. The Internet is going to have to develop its own ways of dealing with people who use it to harm others. The EFF could help lead that. But they haven't yet, and so others are going to take action when they feel it's appropriate. They'll take the EFF's injunction to "resist the temptation to step in" as being worth the paper it's written on.
    • commandlinefan 3y ago
      > develop its own ways of dealing with people who use it to harm others So far, every "way" that's been developed of dealing with people who harm others has itself been used to harm others in more extreme ways than the harm they were supposed to mitigate.
      • krapp 3y ago
        >So far, every "way" that's been developed of dealing with people who harm others has itself been used to harm others in more extreme ways than the harm they were supposed to mitigate. Has it? Some of the people Kiwifarms harassed were driven to suicide. Your argument is that having a forum taken offline is a more extreme form of harm than literal death?
        • shrimp_emoji 3y ago
          [flagged]
        • stale2002 3y ago
          It is not that the forum going down in and of itself is the harm. Instead it is that this precedent can be used by much more authoritarian groups to target groups that you support. Now its KF, and after that other countries are telling these tech services to take down gay and lesbian support groups, or even a state in the US could force abortion services offline. Its a loophole that could be used as an end run around the 1st amendment, to take out groups that you support just as much as it can be used against things that you want taken down. Are you OK with sacrificing those groups for your cause? What would you tell them? That they are just worthwhile collateral damage?
          • sillystate2023 3y ago
            [flagged]
          • hobs 3y ago
            Authoritarian groups are already targeting groups "you support", states and countries are telling tech services to take down lesbian and gay support groups, and states in the US have effectively forced abortion services offline. Those things have and are happening, and kiwifarms is not the reason any of that occur.
            • stale2002 3y ago
              > Those things have and are happening Yes they are, and when other websites get taken down this gives leverage to authoritarian groups to target them even more. It directly increases the amount of requires and pressure that is put on them, even though, yes, pressure is already on these groups. The pressure increases every time a provider caves to demands.
    • local_person 3y ago
      [dead]
    • zamadatix 3y ago
      The EFF can defend its mission in multiple ways. One, as you point out, is offering an alternative solution all agree is better. This is fantastic if you can find a feasible solution everyone actually agrees is better but there is no guarantee such a solution is going to be found until after you've managed to find it. Another way for the EFF to defend its mission, as this article aims for, is to make an argument the loss of what the mission is trying to protect is not worth the gains made by tossing it to the side. You can be unpersuaded and disagree with the balance but the lack of alternative solution alone isn't proof of a bad response.
    • Gartent 3y ago
      "The system is broken, we need vigilantes"
      • jfengel 3y ago
        The system is broken, we need the EFF to do more than just clutch their pearls about somebody trying to do something. If they want to be the Electronic Frontier Foundation, they can take inspiration from the self-organization that occurs on other frontiers. When there are no rules, you get vigilantes. Well managed, the vigilantes establish the rules, by popular consent. Poorly managed, the most violent ones impose their own rules. The EFF is well positioned to help establish rules. So merely saying "There shouldn't be any rules", they'll simply be brushed aside one way or the other.
    • dotnet00 3y ago
      The faster you make a mechanism, the more likely it is to be abused. We've already seen several times where bad actors have coopted movements like metoo and taken advantage of the speed of the response to ruin an innocent person and then get off relatively unscathed because almost no one cares once the initial outrage has passed.
    • ThrowawayR2 3y ago
      Even if you are not a believer in liberalism as a philosophy, you should at least understand that the instant we agree let infrastructure businesses start pruning speech they don't like without any accountability is also the instant that the wealthy and powerful start thinking about how to gain influence over or outright control those businesses. One would have to be absolutely bonkers to think that's going to have a good outcome in the long run.
    • jdthedisciple 3y ago
      > These are extremely slow mechanisms, when they work at all. This perfectly describes Democracy as well, however. Are you anti-democratic?
  • rolph 3y ago
    let me tell you about a military 'headset' 1] doing something, even if it proves to be wrong, is better than doing nothing. 2] asking forgiveness is better than asking permission. these [1,2] support each other in a circular discourse. if you do nothing, you hesitate in want for confirmation of the right thing, you are ineffective. asking permission, you hesitate in lieu of risking the wrong thing, you are ineffective rather than acting, and later apologizing for doing the wrong thing.
  • marcosdumay 3y ago
    "Being on the border of the precipice, they decided to act and step ahead." "We must do something; this is something; therefore we must do this." I've seen that thing rephrased so many ways, it's not even funny anymore. People always fall for that bias. I'm sure if you make some loud proclamations that "Global Warming will destroy everything, we must go and kill the wales", you will get followers.
    • MiguelX413 3y ago
      *“…we must go and kill Wales”
      • Akronymus 3y ago
        It seems that people really dislike that place in particular.
  • bewaretheirs 3y ago
    The contrary belief was once mocked on "Yes, Prime Minister" as: "1. We must do something. 2. This is something. 3. Therefore, we must do this."
    • fallingknife 3y ago
      And to cover the opposite case: 1. Nothing is going to happen 2. Something maybe is going to happen, but we should do nothing about it 3. Maybe we should do something about it, but there's nothing we can do 4. Maybe there's something we could have done, but it's too late now
      • sassy_quat 3y ago
        [dead]
      • jdthedisciple 3y ago
        You may want to revisit how syllogisms work. Thanks for your input.
        • fallingknife 3y ago
          You might want to watch Yes Minister so you have the context to comment here. Thanks for the input.
  • umvi 3y ago
    The politician's syllogism (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politician%27s_syllogism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politician%27s_syllogism)
• jqpabc123 3y ago
  Maybe Hurricane needs to police it's own network first. My web server constantly receives malicious probes and invalid requests from Hurricane owned IPs. How does a malicious actor get direct access to a Tier 1 address? The only way I can see is by being inside their facilities.
  • remram 3y ago
    Hurricane Electric operates tunnelbroker.net, a free SIT tunnel to provide IPv6 connectivity. All those clients (like me) will be using a HE-owned IPv6 address. They also offer dedicated servers and colocation services: http://he.net/colocation.html http://he.net/colocation.html They are not only a transit provider, in fact they wouldn't need to own IPs at all if they were.
    • NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
      > They are not only a transit provider, in fact they wouldn't need to own IPs at all if they were. Inconvenient fact: Layer 3 routers use IP addresses for each of their network interfaces. This is actually how they provide transit.
      • 0x0000000 3y ago
        RFC 6598? Interfaces needing an address does not mean the business needs to own IP address space.
        • NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
          I am not sure what you're trying to tell me with an RFC pertaining only to CGNAT. We're talking about transit providers running core and backbone routers here. Such routers aren't running NAT of any kind, and they aren't customer-facing appliances. The transit provider needs to own some IP space to assign addresses to router interfaces. This is how internetwork routing works. It goes from one network to another, and the router must be a member of the source and destination network in order to participate in each hop. A transit provider doesn't need many IP addresses in total; if all they're running is core routers then they need sparse allocations: a point-to-point link only needs a /30 or /31 to function correctly. They'll still need to own a variety of netblocks, though, because if they offer transit and backbone services then these will be geographically disparate, and they will necessarily transit a large amount of logical address space.
• mortenjorck 3y ago
  It's heartening to see the EFF come out sticking to principles on this in a time when other organizations of their stature have not. I hate to say it, but I could easily imagine something like the ACLU opposing the EFF on this.
  • amiga386 3y ago
    Indeed, the ACLU have lost their way. https://web.archive.org/web/20210608004853/https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/06/us/aclu-free-speech.html https://web.archive.org/web/20210608004853/https://www.nytim... > the organization finds itself riven with internal tensions over whether it has stepped away from a founding principle — unwavering devotion to the First Amendment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Civil_Liberties_Union#Waning_interest_in_defending_white_supremacists.27_first_amendment_rights https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Civil_Liberties_Union... > Beginning in 2017, some individuals claimed the ACLU was reducing its support of unpopular free speech (specifically by declining to defend speech made by conservatives) in favor of identity politics, political correctness, and progressivism.
    • _lvbh 3y ago
      Meanwhile in the rest of the world, we don’t even have free speech. If only America could export their constitution like they do their weapons
      • justrealist 3y ago
        I mean that's basically this history of the US in Latin America, but everyone complains anyway.
        • ForgottenPwd 3y ago
          What? I don't recall ever having heard the US spread democracy in Latin America. The US destabilized democratically elected governments and propped up violent regimes in Latin America to benefit private industry and "combat Communism". The US Army School of the Americas was a finishing school for Latin American dictators and strongmen, as well as other murderers. https://irp.fas.org/crs/soa.htm https://irp.fas.org/crs/soa.htm
• gravitate 3y ago
  I hit CTRL+F to find the word 'neutral' in this article, but no such word appeared. But it did appear in another EFF article titled 'We Need to Talk About Infrastructure'[0], which is the crux of the issue here. My only question is; what is regarded 'internet infrastructure' these days? Is Cloudflare really just an ISP? Is VPN infra considered an ISP? Are mixer nets like Tor/Hyphanet an ISP? 'Essential internet infrastructure should be content-neutral': [0] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/12/we-need-talk-about-infrastructure https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/12/we-need-talk-about-inf...
  • torstenvl 3y ago
    Essential internet infrastructure should not be content-neutral. Content neutrality is a higher bar than you think it is. Content-neutral means the rules cannot take content into account at all. If the content is millions of ssh login requests on thousands of servers with ec2-user and the top 10000 most used passwords, the infrastructure should be able to block that. Content-neutrality would probably make it illegal to prevent DDoS attacks. At some levels of infrastructure, sure, but broadly speaking, content-neutrality seems like a bad requirement. Viewpoint-neutral, however, is a better goal. https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution-conan/amendment-1/overview-of-viewpoint-based-regulation-of-speech https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution-conan/amendment-1/o...
    • carbotaniuman 3y ago
      Viewpoint neutrality is debatable though, in this situation, HE could argue that they aren't banning based on viewpoint but rather the nature of the content, and point to other websites sharing similar viewpoints that they carry. It just seems like a half-step that pleases no one and does nothing. Let private companies be private companies, we don't need the unelected bureaucrats to tell us how to run DDOS protection or route traffic.
    • ehhthing 3y ago
      I don't think this is true. Phone companies (which are legislated to be utilities) can block malicious/spam calls without legal issues.
• jmyeet 3y ago
  [flagged]
  • sbuttgereit 3y ago
    [flagged]
    • lemoncookiechip 3y ago
      [flagged]
  • ibizaman 3y ago
    Quoting the article: > When a person uses a room in a house to engage in illegal or just terrible activity, we don’t call on the electric company to cut off the light and heat to the entire house, or the post office to stop delivering mail. We know that this will backfire in the long run. Instead, we go after the bad guys themselves and hold them accountable. Although your points are valid in some sense, I don’t see how they respond to any claims of the article.
    • jmyeet 3y ago
      That's fine when you have the jurisdiction for doing that. In your example, there is a house with people in it doing something illegal. That's within the realm of law enforcements and courts. A better example is robocall spam. Most of it comes from overseas. That is incredibly difficult to do about directly. The only effective way to go after it is with the exchanges that transmit and essentially "launder" the spam traffic, cutting them off if necessary. KiwiFarms openly engages in and faciclitates harassment and doxxing. It's absolutely the right thing to do to limit its reach and availability.
      • ibizaman 3y ago
        Actually robocalls are a good example too where we don’t need to remove our privacy for less scam calls. Admittedly, allowing others to listen in to all calls is a solution, but what a trade off it is to allow that. I learned recently about SnorCall [1] which is IMO a pretty ingenious solution to the problem. The idea is to have a bunch a phone numbers allocated to listening on incoming calls. They record what they listen to and an algorithm will do some speech to text translation then another categorises the call as spam or not. These calls have a huge amount of variation and anyway the incoming number can be spoofed so that number is not interesting. The ingenious part is that often scams will have a call to action and then will give a number to call back. And that number is not spoofed since a real person must answer. And the tests show that a lot of scams actually use the same call back number, making it it easier on law enforcements to act upon those registering that phone number. Anyway, my point is just that we should try to think outside the box before accepting to decrease our privacy. We usually have a very hard time to get it back. https://www.gadgetany.com/news/snorcall-ai-powered-tool-to-protect-you-from-robocall-scams/?amp=1 https://www.gadgetany.com/news/snorcall-ai-powered-tool-to-p... (not a very good link but I can’t find my origins link anymore)
• zer8k 3y ago
  The ACLU will absolutely oppose this. If not for the reason they stand to make a lot of money suing ISPs for "not doing enough" to stop the big-ole-meanies online. I see ISPs blocking "mean speech" to "protect people" as another symptom of the enshittification of the internet. I legitimately cannot understand problems in this arena because you can just...walk away from your computer. Or turn off the website. Or hey, maybe don't TIE YOUR ENTIRE LIFE AND REAL IDENTITY TO THE INTERNET. I suspect the prominent use of pseudonyms 30 years ago prevented most forms of ongoing harassment. Narcissists need the validation and so now big brother needs to step in to protect them. I think society is getting a little too comfortable with the idea of big brother and it's making me really, really uncomfortable. As an old man yelling at a cloud the internet really was better 20 or 30 years ago.
  • psychphysic 3y ago
    The ACLU are pretty useless these days
    • pessimizer 3y ago
      Actively harmful.
  • TRiG_Ireland 3y ago
    > you can just...walk away from your computer I take it that (a) your income doesn't depend on your internet presence, and (b) you're reasonably well off. KiwiFarms has done massive damage to people in "the real world", and some people concerned for their safety cannot afford to ignore it. It is a genuine danger.
    • brailsafe 3y ago
      and people who engage in that sort of activity have in some cases been prosecuted, which is just, but those people didn't do it because the internet exists, they did it because they're monsters.
    • Dalewyn 3y ago
      There are laws and law enforcement already in place to address bad actors, particularly those who would pose tangible harm upon an individual. Violating the principle and right of free speech is nothing more than grabbing and abusing power.
• wmf 3y ago
  Are there any lawsuits pending against KiwiFarms? If not, why not?
  • arp242 3y ago
    Not as far as I know. I think any criminal action will be extremely hard, at least under US law, as they haven't really done anything outright illegal. There are all sorts of claims about "KiwiFarms has done this or that" (same with 4chan), but often there's no direct connection to KiwiFarms or 4chan, and some claims seem to just made up of whole cloth. A civil might have a higher chance of succeeding, but I suspect this will also be very hard. "People say mean things" is neither illegal nor harassment, and outright organisation of harassment doesn't really happen on KiwiFarms, at least not in public. Trying to get damages from doxing (in a civil suit, because in most jurisdictions it's not illegal AFAIK) might be the best shot, especially for people who are otherwise non-public figures, but I'm not sure what chance that will have.
    • tjpnz 3y ago
      There have been numerous civil suits against KF, not one of them has succeeded.
      • habinero 3y ago
        Mostly because they tend to pick on people who can only file pro se, not because of any inherent merit.
        • chonkerz 3y ago
          I guess that's a neat legal perk for someone seeking to victimize severely autistic and vulnerable people. One's victims can't afford lawsuits.
        • vintermann 3y ago
          If they only went for powerless people, why are they suddenly dropped by services that almost never drop sites? There's no way I would even be allowed to talk to a human at these companies, much less convince them to change their politics.
• psychphysic 3y ago
  It feels like it's pretty much gameover for free speech in any context. Too much of the population of the world wants rid and it doesn't matter much that they disagree on precisely which opinions are unacceptable.
  • cmh89 3y ago
    Free speech has never existed. We've always been pushing and pulling against what's acceptable.
    • depereo 3y ago
      Absolutely. Causing a stampede or crush being the obvious example. I do get baffled by the absolutionist statements about the freedom of speech. Speech is a side-channel into violence. My country has a censor's office, for example. Some 'speech' is literally illegal to possess. Government ministers aren't free to speak state secrets in public. It's not legal to disclose the names of persons with judicial name suppression. Even parliament representatives can't speak just anything into the parliamentary record. I live in New Zealand. It's not that bad to have limits and structures that enable the majority of real freedoms for people.
      • jadamson 3y ago
        [flagged]
        • vore 3y ago
          [flagged]
          • jadamson 3y ago
            I'm not sure that every country is run by morons who can't understand the concept of per capita, NZ seems pretty special in that regard. I certainly wouldn't want such people having a finger on the censorship button, and for that reason it was very heartening to hear of Ardern's resignation. > "After all, how do you successfully end a war if people are led to believe the reason for its existence is not only legal but noble? How do you tackle climate change if people do not believe it exists? How do you ensure the human rights of others are upheld, when they are subjected to hateful and dangerous rhetoric and ideology?" While antipodean advocates of censorship like to reference violence, it's clear that's not actually where they draw the line. Even if they did, their hatred of violence seems to be very selective: Davidson's comments were meant as a distraction from violence against someone she sees as a valid target [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kellie-Jay_Keen-Minshull#New_Zealand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kellie-Jay_Keen-Minshull#New_Z...
• explanatorygap 3y ago
  EFF is on the wrong side of this, just as they were on the wrong side of the debates about what to do about spam email back in the day. They're committed to the view that the only acceptable place to block any flow of information (which they define very broadly) is at the receiving user's end and that the end user must personally opt-in. This is completely at odds with the last 30 years of experience on the internet and shows that they've learned very little about how bad actors will abuse systems of that sort and degrade the experience for everyone else.
  • brailsafe 3y ago
    In what way is it at odds with the last 30 years of the internet? You seem to accept that as a fact, but I'd definitely agree with the eff.
  • ibizaman 3y ago
    If it’s truly the first time Tier 1 blocking happens, I don’t see how the EFF can be at odds with history.
  • gorwell 3y ago
    Censors made the same argument with the Printing Press and since time immemorial. Censorship has always been on the wrong side of history and it still is. Speaking of abusing systems, censors end up being the worst bad guys who imagine themselves as the good guys protecting you from the bad guys. EFF understands the long history of this issue.
    • cmh89 3y ago
      [flagged]
      • drewcoo 3y ago
        I actually hope that AI can allow people to have "child" pornography without children being exploited. If anything, that should be encouraged and made legal. As the kiddie porn crusaders like to say, "think of the children."
• frabbit 3y ago
  It is not just ISPs. It is crowdfunding and payment processing companies. See for example this apparent seizure of funding to independent journalists happening right now: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37314499 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37314499 If you care about there being genuinely independent news media then funding these guys is something you can do right now.
  • sneak 3y ago
    There is a new internet payments technology that is 100% effective against abuses like this, even when the state decides it shouldn't be possible. Censorship-resistant payments are an essential prerequisite to a free society, something I have been asserting in public for a dozen+ years. Unfortunately as of late they have been vilified. If I were a paranoid man, I might point out that this happened right around the time they became known to the mainstream.
    • pixl97 3y ago
      It turns out that censorship-resistant payments also attract the worst type of people along with scammers first. If you had paid attention then you would have realized that is exactly what was going to happen long before it did. There is no need for paranoia here, people tend to dislike and go after hives of scum and villainy (unless they are wrapped in pretty corporate words).
      • nonethewiser 3y ago
        To be fair you are vilifying crypto here. You’re just saying it’s justified. Which proves its vilified. Im not even into crypto but it’s value proposition starts to look better in this context.
        • slikrick 3y ago
          it's value proposition looks exactly the same as it did before because literally nothing has changed
• thfuran 3y ago
  I think it's fine for the ISP to police online speech over their network as long as it's clearly stated in their service agreement that they can cancel/interfere with your service if they think you're too mean and as long as they also lose all safe harbor and assume liability for everything transmitted over their network.
  • ibizaman 3y ago
    Quoted from the article: > When a person uses a room in a house to engage in illegal or just terrible activity, we don’t call on the electric company to cut off the light and heat to the entire house, or the post office to stop delivering mail. We know that this will backfire in the long run. Instead, we go after the bad guys themselves and hold them accountable. Although I see your point, the quote above made me switch to thinking it’s not okay.
    • cmh89 3y ago
      If you lived next door to a house that had become a drug spot, would you find it acceptable to call the landlord, tell them what's happening, and then ask them to investigate and evict? I sure would.
      • ibizaman 3y ago
        The landlord, yes. The electric company directly, bypassing the landlord, probably not.
      • pessimizer 3y ago
        Why would you call the landlord instead of the police? I'll tell you why you needed to do it for this metaphor - because Kiwi Farms doesn't break any laws and "drug spots" do. Now, we're deputizing landlords. If that isn't the perfect public-private partnership, I don't know what is.
        • deleted 3y ago
          [deleted]
• fallingknife 3y ago
  And that doesn't go far enough. On the modern Internet access to an ISP connection and nothing else is fairly useless. Without access to a large email provider you won't be able to send to anyone. And, no, you can't just set up an SMTP server. Not if you expect anyone to get your emails. If you don't have access to messenger apps you basically can't communicate with people outside of the US which is the only country which still uses SMS. If you don't have access to hosting services and something like cloudflare, you basically can't build a website. If you don't have access to payment processors, you can't run any form of online business.
• pseudo0 3y ago
  Too bad they didn't touch on the net neutrality issues at play here. Washington passed a state level net neutrality law, and KF might end up being the test case. They have filed a complaint with the AG and are waiting for a response. https://archive.is/Je241 https://archive.is/Je241
  • habinero 3y ago
    Yeah, that's not going to happen. KF is not a Washington state LLC.
  • chonkerz 3y ago
    The authorities already said they didn't care and kiwifarms should work it out directly with HE
• unsui 3y ago
  Why does it have to be absolute/binary? If I can't have full, unfettered free speech, then it's the end of the world. Let's put aside the slippery-slope arguments. The real world is messy, with ridiculously obscure corner cases that make blanket statements and policies practically impossible to operationalize without significant collateral damage. Shouldn't a more realistic approach be something like "give me speech as free as is possible", with considerations that are negotiable, such as, "does this speech promote destroying the institutions on which the speech itself is based on", etc... As an extension of the Spolky-ism that all non-trivial abstractions are leaky, all production systems have edge and corner cases that can't (or shouldn't) be contained within a blanket uniform policy. Yeah, it's messy. But, as with many regulations written in blood, there are legitimate use cases where exceptions to blanket policies and statements are better to include than not include.
  • alexb_ 3y ago
    > considerations that are negotiable, such as, "does this speech promote destroying the institutions on which the speech itself is based on" That's not a considerable negotiation. Give people power and they will use literally every single bit of it and then some. ISPs should have absolutely no say, in any way, of what people do. They shouldn't even be able to know anything about what I'm doing past what is needed for the ISP to function.
    • unsui 3y ago
      > Give people power and they will use literally every single bit of it and then some This is going back to slippery slope argument issue. What makes you think there isn't pushback to create an equilibrium of policies? Why does it necessarily need to be one-sided, where giving in to one iota entails giving in to the whole enchilada? Complex systems entail dialogue and pushback across competing incentives and motivations. Yes, each side works on the basis of self-interest, but what is to say that giving one inch necessarily entials giving up entirely, unless the original premise is that one cannot give up anything (i.e., uncompromising by definition). That doesn't seem to scale in any real-world system, only ideal systems.
• CM30 3y ago
  I agree, we've got far too many entities that should just be 'dumb pipes' trying to play moral police at the moment, and it's a very worrying situation when it comes to free speech on the internet. Cloudflare is an often brought up example, as are payment processors like Visa and Mastercard and app stores like the iOS and Play Stores, but ISPs trying to block traffic for a site that's not actually illegal feels like a step even further than that. It feels like private companies are de facto writing the laws about what's allowed online and in society right now, and that it's almost become a loophole for censoring free speech on a whim. And while the site in question here is ethically bankrupt in basically every way, it doesn't seem too far fetched to assume the same thing could (and potentially will) happen for sites many more people agree with because someone/some group at an ISP doesn't like them or think they should be accessible.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • jussaying2 3y ago
    My biggest pet peeve and oft-cited example of US puritanism being imposed upon the entire world is the closed captioning system on YouTube that censors out words like s**t, f**k.. I have nothing whatsoever to do with the US, my Google account is based in a jurisdiction where I'm well past the legal age for adults and where hearing such words (and "worse") is quite normal at 14. And yet I can't get this multinational behemoth to stop nannying me.
  • yanderekko 3y ago
    At least payment providers can plausibly point to financial risks and legal concerns as why they engage in what comes off as moral policing. It's pretty clear that any similar claim on HE's part would be pretextual. >It feels like private companies are de facto writing the laws about what's allowed online and in society right now, and that it's almost become a loophole for censoring free speech on a whim. "Feels like"? This is clearly embraced as a necessary step to preserve democracy by a small-but-powerful segment of population.
  • pfisch 3y ago
    When in all of US history were private companies not controlling the public discourse and "censoring free speech"?
• shortformblog 3y ago
  I'd argue that there are legitimate safety concerns that trump speech in this particular case. But I think EFF would have a stronger case if we had common carriers following net neutrality laws. Content decisions are in the hands of upstream ISPs because we don't have the right regulations in place. EFF has clearly tried here. The case is strong. But it's the edge cases where we need the net neutrality regulations most.
  • yanderekko 3y ago
    >I'd argue that there are legitimate safety concerns that trump speech in this particular case. What makes HE well-positioned to be able to determine what constitutes a "legitimate safety concern"? What happens when a pro-life organization or a corrupt politician starts leaning on ISPs to enforce their own views of what constitutes a "legitimate safety concern"? Cloudflare denied service to KF on an imminent threat to people's lives, which could have been justified on a short term basis. Their refusal to reinstate service months later strains the credulity of this rationale, and shows that it was never really the goal. I'm going to guess that if we ever get a post-mortem on what really is happening inside HE, what we'll find is not "a well-reasoned, dispassionate debate occurred and a consensus was reached in favor of censorship". Instead it will be like "someone powerful in the company made a unilateral decision and dissent was absent because everyone understood that it would have negative career consequences."
    • shortformblog 3y ago
      I don’t think HE should be making that decision, especially in an upstream role—and the fact that they’re in that position points at a need for regulation. However, I would argue that KF is a long-term threat whose imminent dangers were honestly a very narrow lens that barely appeased a company that shouldn’t have been making the call in the first place. Their position in last year’s debate created a very volatile atmosphere for a solid month—a situation which would be volatile once again if brought back.
      • yanderekko 3y ago
• wnevets 3y ago
  The irony of course is a large segment of the people who are against net neutrality are exactly the people[1] who would have their online speech censored then complain about it. [1] https://theintercept.com/2018/08/06/net-neutrality-repeal-republican-districts/ https://theintercept.com/2018/08/06/net-neutrality-repeal-re...
  • yanderekko 3y ago
    It's easy to have a principled stance against both net neutrality and private online censorship. Note that the EFF statement is not calling for legislation to stop HE's behavior.
    • wnevets 3y ago
      > It's easy to have a principled stance against both net neutrality and private online censorship. Then why did these people call for government action against Twitter for "censoring" right wing "voices"?
• pessimizer 3y ago
  > Cloudflare is an often brought up example And Cloudflare are nearly as well behaved as they could possibly be. The simple fact of them being everywhere makes them a major target of government pressure to censor. This is purely an end run around the constitution, not the desire of companies to control speech. > It feels like private companies are de facto writing the laws about what's allowed online and in society right now, and that it's almost become a loophole for censoring free speech on a whim. And I don't think that the companies have any particular desire to censor. Zuckerberg would only censor speech about Facebook and himself personally. Dorsey seemed entirely blindsided by the pressures from the administration, three-letter agencies, and individual Congressmen based on the Twitter Files, and pushed back plenty. The three-letter agencies just placed dozens and dozens of people (who decided to quit the CIA, NSA, and FBI in their 30s for some reason and change careers) in the executive suites of every social network. It's being done in the open, and they're simply daring us to see corruption there. Hell, they've become conspiracy and foreign propaganda scientists, and they can detect the influence of the evil Russian and Chinese enemies of the state even in people who have no connections to Russians or Chinese people. It's their Russian and Chinese ideas that need to be eradicated, and all good communications channels and payments processors should be happy to help unless they are also secretly Russian. Wow did they go from coordinating banning Alex Jones to banning the last President in record time. Let's see how long it takes them to get from Kiwi Farms to The Grayzone or Rumble, or any newspaper that contradicts a government press release.
  • mptest 3y ago
    >This is purely an end run around the constitution, not the desire of companies to control speech. Want an example of this type of end run being used in practice? Nearly a decade ago? Obama used banking access to do a similar end run around businesses deemed political enemies. Some to the good, weapons/ammunition sellers with uncertain scruples, payday lenders...[0] but for some reason I'm not super confident about its consistent use for the better.. [0] https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/op-eds/obamas-ope https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/op-eds/obamas-ope...
    • ratsmack 3y ago
• jauer 3y ago
  Yawn. Non-telco(*1) Tier 1 provider declines to carry routes for an entity they don't like. Happens all the time. This is why you buy from a Tier 2 instead and bypass DFZ(*2) politics. Drop routes from spammers: Spamhaus DROP list. Drop routes from DDoS sources? All the time. Even Google wasn't reachable from Cogent over IPv6 for years because of a business dispute. For all we know someone working at HE was targeted by KF and this is a security response (also generally allowed even if you are a regulated provider). *1: Cogent & HE thread the needle around being a common carrier (they don't sell voice or TDM service) or a broadband provider, which is why KF's WA state complaint will fail (WA's law only applies to mass-market retail providers, which HE is not). *2: Tier 1 does not mean "best carrier" it means "carrier that doesn't pay another carrier for routes." DFZ literally means default-free zone as in they don't have a default route to another provider.
  • mid-kid 3y ago
    > Happens all the time. As this is the first time I hear of this, I'm curious. Do you have any examples?
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    • 542458 3y ago
      The comment you’re replying to lists several examples already, like the use of the Spamhaus DROP list. https://www.spamhaus.org/drop/ https://www.spamhaus.org/drop/
      • huggingmouth 3y ago
        What tier-1 provider is irresponsible enough to use this?
        • 3y ago
• IncogNET 3y ago
  Glad to see this. Hurricane Electric has behaved in such an incredibly unprofessional manner regarding this entire ordeal. It began here: https://twitter.com/IncogNetLLC/status/1685359845505957888 https://twitter.com/IncogNetLLC/status/1685359845505957888 We filed a complaint with the Washington state AG over their actions. HE's response was more or less technically obtuse garbage and, "You're not our direct customer" (paraphrasing, of course). So what they did, was take it upon themselves to prevent access to an entire /36 subnet of IPv6 that our customer had announced downstream of us. Not once did an abuse report get sent to us, or our upstream from HE. Nor did we receive any credible abuse reports sent to us directly from those upset that the site exists. Meanwhile, this actually has no direct impact on the website in question's existence as their opposition has learned by now, it's never been truly offline. Just temporarily blocked from certain ISPs. From an ISP point of view, it's worrying that a transit provider like HE can arbitrarily cancel a customer of yours, or a customer of a customer (, etc) over legal, protected speech. So, from a business standpoint, what does HE have to gain? The people complaining about the site aren't their target market, they're mostly Twitch streamers, Twitter personalities and folks who have a following on popular platforms that already exist. They're not the types to be self-hosting a streaming service who'll need rackspace and transit. So, what is there to gain by bending the knee to them? The safest business decision would be to remain neutral, respond to law enforcement requests if presented with one, and otherwise do the job you're paid to do. The worst business decision is moderating the content of downstream customers, which is what we're seeing now.
  • shadowgovt 3y ago
    [flagged]
    • f38zf5vdt 3y ago
      Yeah, sheesh. KF is a website that gleefully reposts terrorist murder videos treated with the same legal penalties as CSAM in other countries, and during the reign of ISIS and the Taliban I don't recall people sitting around defending the need for that particular free speech. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiwi_Farms#Christchurch_mosque_shootings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiwi_Farms#Christchurch_mosque... edit: By the way, for all those people ripping on the ACLU and saying "they lost their way" below, they're actively defending 230 against claims of online-terrorism-by-proxy. https://www.aclu.org/news/free-speech/section-230-is-this-the-end-of-the-internet-as-we-know-it https://www.aclu.org/news/free-speech/section-230-is-this-th...
• mvncleaninst 3y ago
  Why is trust the default here? If governments, ISPs, and other tech entities behave this way in a single instance, why assume that it's the only instance? Why not just migrate the infrastructure to a country like Belarus and strip away the leverage of whatever shitty jurisdiction you're living under?
• downWidOutaFite 3y ago
  All the people that fought against Net Neutrality, this is what you were fighting for, the ISPs have no requirement to be neutral.
• philippejara 3y ago
  It appears this is the source of the complaint adding context to what is being discussed by the EFF, no reason it should be dead.
  • dang 3y ago
    We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37315195 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37315195 so as not to take discussion off topic. New accounts are subject to additional restrictions because of past abuse by spammers and trolls. Obviously that comment was legit, but as we don't have software smart enough to distinguish legit comments from bad one, some human intervention is often required to rescue the legit ones. You did this yourself by vouching for the comment, which unkilled it.
• colinsane 3y ago
  surely, the attacks from KF against public persons serves to restrict those persons’ freedom of speech. > The so-called “dark web” has plenty of deserved ill repute, however, so although it is resistant to censorship by Tier 1 ISPs, it is not a meaningful option for many, much less an accessible one. that’s a way too casual dismissal. consider the type of person who posts on KF for just a minute (go there yourself if you haven’t), and think if they might be way more likely than your average person to know how to use tor, a VPN, or something to obfuscate their traffic before posting to a forum where they themselves might be harassed.
  • HideousKojima 3y ago
    >surely, the attacks from KF against public persons serves to restrict those persons’ freedom of speech. How, exactly?
    • _cenw 3y ago
      It's called the paradox of tolerance. ISPs aren't the right layer to police this, but every other layer has failed or isn't designed to deal with a death threat generation machine that keeps a proud count of how many people they drove to suicide on their website.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• plagiarist 3y ago
  What I'd like to figure out is how there are still so many Nazis despite readily-available facts that Naziism is racist delusions? And how are countries like Germany still doing kinda okay despite making it illegal to do Nazi stuff? Isn't it a slippery slope directly from banning Naziism direct to North Korean-style authoritarianism?
  • bb88 3y ago
    > despite readily-available facts that Naziism is racist delusions? A lot of people on the right are talking about the US having a mental health crises when it comes to mass shootings. If that's really true, then yeah, that's how we get natsies. > Isn't it a slippery slope directly from banning Naziism direct to North Korean-style authoritarianism? Well I mean if there's a mental health crisis then yeah, people are going to say that. I personally don't think the founding fathers of the US understood the future gullibility of their citizens.
    • lr4444lr 3y ago
      > I personally don't think the founding fathers of the US understood the future gullibility of their citizens. They absolutely did. When only white, male, decently educated property owners could vote, they had decent reassurance that a constitutional republic with state-specific voter management could work. I think they'd be horrified to see that today we don't even demand a basic proof of civics education. And I hate that Ramaswamy made that suggestion in such an embarrassing, conversation-poisoning way.
      • plagiarist 3y ago
        We need score voting. Being able to express a preference for a third candidate without danger of flipping the election would fix quite a bit. Unfortunately doing so currently is more useless than using the ballot as toilet paper.
        • TedGetschman 3y ago
          Actually, implementing score voting (or approval or STAR or Majority Judgement) should incentivize all the candidates to move toward the majority opinion. The problem isn't the candidates, it is what platforms the current system pushes them to adopt. If we changed to any of these MaxVoting methods today, you would see majority opinion platforms emerge as the lead platforms within a year.
• throwawayyy10 3y ago
  [dead]
  • Dylan16807 3y ago
    What a pretty response, with an extra bad black-and-white-thinking last paragraph. Is this supposed to be real? If so please back that up in some way.
• lr4444lr 3y ago
  Will they take a similar stand for VPS providers and CDNs as well?
• autoexec 3y ago
  Once again the EFF is proving that they'll stand behind their principles and defend freedom even for those they disagree with. They are one of the few remaining organizations that I feel I can support without reservation. Taking this difficult position isn't easy, but it is the right thing to do and I'm so glad to see that the EFF has the strength to do it in the face of growing opposition to free speech ideals.
  • dee-bee 3y ago
    > Once again the EFF is proving that they'll stand behind their principles and defend freedom even for those they disagree with. They are one of the few remaining organizations that I feel I can support without reservation. I find this attitude very odd. Surely some disagreements indicate a violation of their principles. What would the principles be worth otherwise? Surely this is the paradox of tolerance in a different package. Why not instead model communication as a bilateral contract?
    • drak0n1c 3y ago
      > What would the principles be worth otherwise? Surely this is the paradox of tolerance in a different package. Why not instead model communication as a bilateral contract? If it was justifiable for speech infrastructure to ban the speech of any ideology based on if its implementation societally would probabilistically/historically lead to mass speech suppression and/or other atrocities, then a massive array of political and religious speech would technically qualify for a ban. Including Marxist-Leninist writing, or religious proselytizing to name a few.
      • dee-bee 3y ago
        Why ban by ideology? Just do it by behavior of the route/node.
  • chonkerz 3y ago
    The EFF is arguing that companies should lose their right to withdraw service due to TOS violation, unless the government says it's ok. This is as anti-freedom as it gets. What is wrong with them
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• shadowgovt 3y ago
  Counterpoint: the Internet is a network of peers, and if KF can't become a peer and can't find a private company to serve their needs, then forget them. No support for the activity of abusers.
  • menacingly 3y ago
    the majority of the overhead of civilization for the last few thousand years or so is scalable mechanisms to arrive at shared definitions for words like "evil", "wrong", "abuse" it's a really hard problem, and every time someone comes in and treats it as a simple issue they do dangerous and naive stuff.
    • shadowgovt 3y ago
      I don't disagree. But I'll point out that "ISPs should just be dumb pipes" and "In the meantime, Tier 1 ISPs like Hurricane should resist the temptation to step in where law enforcement and legislators have failed" are treating it as a simple issue, only in the other direction.
• eightysixfour 3y ago
  Agreed. ISPs are the part of the network that we need to demand be free to any speech, other than the explicitly illegal, and even then we need to ask if it should be handled in a different manner.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• unethical_ban 3y ago
  Shameless plug, I wrote an essay on this topic years ago: https://wannabewonk.com/gab-and-free-speech-on-the-internet/ https://wannabewonk.com/gab-and-free-speech-on-the-internet/ The crux being what EFF is saying now. ISPs and DNS and CAs are too fundamental to free speech for blockage at that layer to occur without legal cause.
• 10g1k 3y ago
  Few things are more inhumane, abhorrent, vile, digusting, and sickening as war. Yet every ISP permits news businesses to spread content about, and even promote, wars. Clearly they do not actually object to "offensive" content, but are cherry-picking to suit their own ideology.
• tjpnz 3y ago
  I would encourage those interested to read up on the individual behind the ISP harassment campaign and what might actually be motivating them to do it. That it's being done to protect trans people is highly disingenuous.
  • gyropod 3y ago
    [flagged]
  • richbell 3y ago
    [flagged]
    • neonsunset 3y ago
      [flagged]
      • longham 3y ago
        [flagged]
    • habinero 3y ago
      [flagged]
      • chonkerz 3y ago
        kiwifarms admin admitted to this too. he says that he seeks out mentally vulnerable people to harass because they make funny reactions when tormented. he calls them "lolcows". the first victim of the site was a severely autistic person. kiwifarms was originally called "CWCki Forums" after the first victim's initials
        • Akronymus 3y ago
          > kiwifarms admin admitted to this too. I have a hard time finding that, could you link me to it/a screenshot of it?
• gyropod 3y ago
  [flagged]
• rascul 3y ago
  I'm confused because the issue seems to be about Crunchbits but most of the article seems to cover Kiwi Farms and only mentions Crunchbits once.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• ryan-c 3y ago
  Where was the EFF when ISPs were null routing everything on Spamhaus's DROP list? https://www.spamhaus.org/drop/ https://www.spamhaus.org/drop/
  • chonkerz 3y ago
    Probably realizing that it's reasonable for ISPs to not want to get buried in email spam.
  • vintermann 3y ago
    When you remove content because you think the recipient doesn't want to see it, that's moderation. When you remove content because you think the recipient shouldn't see it, regardless of what they might want, that's censorship. Whether it's a good idea to use T1-ISPs to moderate your inbox is another question.
• ApolloFortyNine 3y ago
  >To put it even more simply: When a person uses a room in a house to engage in illegal or just terrible activity, we don’t call on the electric company to cut off the light and heat to the entire house, or the post office to stop delivering mail. LA actually did this during covid to shut off water for homes being accused of holding parties during covid. https://www.cnn.com/2020/08/06/us/los-angeles-shuts-off-power-parties-coronavirus-trnd/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2020/08/06/us/los-angeles-shuts-off-powe... I don't agree with it, but just showing that some people have decided the ends justify the means essentially.
  • koolba 3y ago
    > I don't agree with it, but just showing that some people have decided the ends justify the means essentially. I’m convinced they never truly cared about the ends. It’s the more basic rule that power corrupts. Those actions were all for show and it wasn’t to protect anybody. It was purely to showcase power.
    • dools 3y ago
      [flagged]
    • Nathanba 3y ago
      Power does not corrupt, it's just that these people were always bad people and power gives them the tools to do some bad things.
      • somenameforme 3y ago
        I read an interesting article the other day. It was about the Freedom of Information Act. We now take this for granted, but getting it passed was a huge ordeal. It dramatically strengthened the accountability of government and gave citizens one of their strongest tools available. It was, unsurprisingly, vehemently opposed by both major parties and nearly every form of the US political establishment. It would eventually go on to be passed in 1966 after an extensive campaign in support of it. Anyhow, the point. Check out this [1] snippet, which was published as part of said campaign. More important than the snippet is who it's written by. A young exceptionally popular congressman from Illinois by the name of Donald Rumsfeld, who was also critical about the senseless US involvement in Vietnam. His is a name, which if happens to be before your time, would later come to be synonymous with the Iraq War, US ABC agencies torturing people, and of course the complete fabrication of evidence to justify the invasion Iraq. And he's not especially unique. I think it all comes down to a simple problem. Imagine you happen to be pro-choice. If I paid you $10,000,000 would you become an advocate for pro-life? For the overwhelming majority of people, the answer there is going to be yes. But of course you and I are relatively irrelevant, so nobody's ever going to really try to change our values. But if you or I gained power, such hypotheticals suddenly become entirely real. For a man to be surrounded by such possibilities, yet remain true to his own values - he's going to need to be rich enough that people can't afford to bribe him, or some once in a millennium Aurelius like man of true character. [1] - https://acsc.lib.udel.edu/files/original/edbab7cd2d0e82f8e198e772f5f57729.jpg https://acsc.lib.udel.edu/files/original/edbab7cd2d0e82f8e19...
• causality0 3y ago
  [flagged]
  • habinero 3y ago
    [flagged]
• est 3y ago
  ISP is a no-go, but are there any successful online speech moderation mechanism?
  • ThrowawayTestr 3y ago
    Laws and the justice system.
    • _cenw 3y ago
      [flagged]
    • est 3y ago
      ISP regulating online speech is the result of some law and the justice system.
    • chonkerz 3y ago
      [flagged]
• cookiengineer 3y ago
  As a victim that has been doxxed and attacked in real life, over a rumor that some idiots spread about me on the other side of the planet (that I am trans?!?), I wholeheartedly disagree and I now know what all the feminist movement is talking about when they write or talk about that they don't feel safe, be it online or offline (due to the technological "upper hand" being on the side of the doxxers). This incident changed my life, and I changed my pacifistic views because I cannot stand by and do nothing anymore. Why is it that people have the right to decide what their standpoint is over this, especially in regards to legal actions...but victims don't even have the right to change their names in order to feel safe again? I thought long whether or not I should write about this, because honestly, I'm in Europe and I don't give a damn about your shit-smearing American radicalization tactics in political campaigns. But I realized that it's over here nowadays, too, and it's a lot bigger than anyone not involved might assume. Team Jorge, AIMS, Killnet/Xaknet/Legion's psyops, troll factories with fake education foundations as a cover story, etc. if you want to know more about it. Aleph from the occrp if you want to do more research on the legal structures and how their money flows. The right-wing ("alt rights") are the fools of modern warfare, and they don't even know who it is that is playing them because they are blind of hatred and despair. And that's what's wrong with our society. Autocracies on the planet realized that the weakness of democracy is that it tries to find a compromise. "Divide and conquer" is literally what they're doing, and we are too busy discussing our moral stand points over this while they infect our societies with hatred to make it impossible to govern.
  • hotdogscout 3y ago
    Thank you for this post. I'm sorry you went through this. I don't exactly understand what you mean by feminism (GC/radfem or the average suffrage feminism).
    • cookiengineer 3y ago
      > I don't exactly understand what you mean by feminism (GC/radfem or the average suffrage feminism). I think that the dissonance in the feminism movement versus their counterparts is that there's a different level of expectations in the topics that they as a movement want to discuss. When women (or LGBTQA+) are talking about these issues, they're looking for allies, they're looking for compassion and comfort on their journey; and are not interested in the rational solution in the first place. The obvious topics that nobody talks about in similar topics like child abuse is ridiculous from their perspective. They see the world as "all men are talking about protecting children, but none of them talk about that they need to protect children from men" and that's something that hits the ego on the other side. Men usually have problems putting their egos aside from the topic, and that's what causes the "defending arguments" game; because they project those accusations on themselves directly. Hence, incels exist, and why kiwifarms, /pol/ and others have huge overlaps in their communities because of it. They simply cannot differ between personal accusations, and comfort themselves with generalizations out of anger and hate. And everything that was said in a state of anger wasn't true anyways, because it was either an excessive statement to make a point or some over-stylized hearsay. But that's the blame game that worked in school until the more rational side gave up, and hence why nobody is able to put their egos aside later in life to actually try to find a compromise.
• anony505 3y ago
  [flagged]
• jeroenhd 3y ago
  Edit: you know what, debating this here isn't worth the effort. Sad to see the state of this place.
  • ThrowawayTestr 3y ago
    >Anti doxing laws should've shut that place down long ago. Reposting publically available information should never be illegal.
    • habinero 3y ago
      It is, however, also legal for private companies to decide stalking is bad and kick them off their systems.
      • ThrowawayTestr 3y ago
        In the state that KF operates in, it actually isn't legal. ISPs like Hurricane are obligated to serve all legal traffic the same. KF's owner has already served complaints to the state authorities.
        • chonkerz 3y ago
          The state authorities already dumped the complaint. What HE did was legal
    • chonkerz 3y ago
      And tormenting mentally vulnerable people. You forgot to mention that.
      • ThrowawayTestr 3y ago
        If people saying mean things about you online bothers you that much don't read it.
        • 3y ago
• mamborambo 3y ago
  There is an old joke about the difference between a service provider and a "service preventer". Often the difference is the type of power we allow them to have over the users. There are many domains of modern society that serve specific service roles, that should never have been given over-reaching power to also monitor and judge outside of a court order, but they do. Finance used to have secrecy but no anymore, tax is now open book. Transportation and mobility is checked and prechecked. Free speech is being eroded both by snowflakes and copyright trolls. The slippery slope has no boundary and rolls into an avalanche.
• p1mrx 3y ago
  Interesting, so there actually was a story behind this unusual HN thread a few weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37060597 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37060597
• goldinfra 3y ago
  Those of us purchasing bandwidth should boycott HE. I know I will be and I'm a potentially significant customer of theirs. They're completely off the list of providers unless they completely change their tune.
• SamoyedFurFluff 3y ago
  Is this situation like, say I own some commercial property like a mall, someone rents from me, I realize the person who is renting from me is allowing one of the storefronts to advertise the ritualistic sacrifice of kittens. Shouldn’t I be allowed to 1) tell the guy renting from me to boot out the kitten killers; 2) boot out the guy renting from me for letting one of the storefronts of my commercial space be kitten killing? Am I not understanding something here
  • zer8k 3y ago
    Yes. You're not understanding that Banning someone from your private establishment is within your rights. If they want to run their own business they can elsewhere. Banning someone via an ISP is different because ISPs have so much infrastructure they can in some sense be considered a "public utility". Nothing would stop someone from advertising ritualistic kitten killing in a public park (except maybe indecency laws but those vary). Likening an ISP to a public park is more accurate. If someone posted a sign saying "no one convicted of smoking weed can walk through this area" you'd rightfully be accused of some civil rights violation in your park. Similarly, ISPs are a conduit no different than a park path. Everyone chooses KF or whatever as an example of "bad people that should be stopped". That's great. No one disagrees. Anyone with more than a room temperature IQ sees where it goes though. Suddenly you won't be able to access things that don't conform to the government issued public opinion. Don't believe me? The Great Firewall is exactly the same technology. It is legitimately not my problem, nor the ISPs, who is doing what on the big internet. We have existing laws. Use those to prosecute people posting kitten killing videos or whatever. We do not need to have ISPs using AI and shit as precognitiion to censor what they deem to be "unsafe speech" or whatever.
    • SamoyedFurFluff 3y ago
      Okay so like, what if I own the only mall in a large area. Like a rural suburb where there is often only one shopping space/public commercial space. Is there an upper limit where your private property is considered public utility?
      • 3y ago
• lopkeny12ko 3y ago
  Surprised by the huge outpouring of support here, yet when X puts forward the exact same values of "freedom of speech but not freedom of speech," it's met entirely with criticism.
  • lnxg33k1 3y ago
    Have you checked if it was the same people? I usually read about "Here last week someone said this, but now someone said that" as HN or communities in general are one single organism, what your post wants to say? Have the people in this thread forgotten to go through education camps? Do you hope that Musk is going to throw some peanuts at you for defending him like a good boy?
• cycomanic 3y ago
  I think the question is not quite so easy as many here (and even the EFF) are making it seem. It's easy to talk about free-speech that needs to be protected at any cost when it comes to political speech, but if we look at e.g. spam nobody argues that spam and spammers should be blocked. Now is spam less speech, because it is not political? On a similar note, if I own a large piece of land should I allow a demonstration that I disagree with cross the land because of free-speech? If no, why does a company who carries data, need to provide their "pipes" to the same people? I understand the argument that restricting speech is a slippery slope, on the other hand I agree with Popper, not restricting all speech and enabling the "intolerant" is also a slippery slope (I say that as a German, we have quite a bit of experience with this). I'm not sure how to draw easy boundaries, but making this into an argument of "easy it's free-speech that needs to be defended at all costs" seems much too simplistic.
  • ThrowawayR2 3y ago
    Spam is speech that the recipient does not want to receive; deplatforming spammers is aligned with the recipient's desires. Deplatforming speech that the recipient does want to receive is not aligned with the recipient's desires and infringes on their ability to communicate freely. Therefore, the spam analogy is not valid.
    • cycomanic 3y ago
      That's not a very good argument. Clearly there are some people who do want to see spam otherwise spam would be uneconomical because nobody would buy. On the same note there are plenty of people who don't want to see KF material. I don't think arguing by some sort of majority works. And yes lots of spam, phishing and other material gets filtered out by ISPs (somebody further up was talking about that some ISPs were blocking the full spam house list). A
  • gruez 3y ago
    >but if we look at e.g. spam nobody argues that spam and spammers should be blocked. Now is spam less speech, because it is not political? Because the blocking is consensual. You're actively choosing to block out the spam, and if you so choose you can still see the spam. The same can't be said for deplatforming. Even if you want to read kwifarms you can't, because others have presented you from being able to access their site.
• quickthrower2 3y ago
  > To put it even more simply: When a person uses a room in a house to engage in illegal or just terrible activity, we don’t call on the electric company to cut off the light and heat to the entire house, or the post office to stop delivering mail. We know that this will backfire in the long run. Instead, we go after the bad guys themselves and hold them accountable. I like this analogy it hits it home. It really should take a court order to block sites based on a legal reason, and you probably don’t need to get the backbone to do it, it could be done by the ISP then escalate up if needed.
  • millzlane 3y ago
    This analogy doesn't hold up, if you were using a room in a house for illegal activity and you didn't come out, they would absolutely cut your power to come after you.
    • quickthrower2 3y ago
      With a warrant, maybe. But would the power company unilaterally cut you because you, say had a neon sign that said ${something you might find on 4chan} on the front lawn?
• wrp 3y ago
  Serious legal question...What is the difference between an online venue and telephones? Is it simply that implementation of censoring is practicable? Could the telephone companies start "moderating" all phone communications to prevent unsavory communication?
  • chonkerz 3y ago
    Phone companies already ban spam customers that make thousands of phone calls
    • wrp 3y ago
      That's according to volume of calls, not content, so I would assume it's covered by different legal theory.
      • chonkerz 3y ago
        Banning based on complaints by recipients of the calls is also different from banning based on some sort of automated monitoring without any complaints. Kiwifarms generated complaints.
  • metalspot 3y ago
    censorship is all about power so the focus is on controlling any mechanism of broadcast communication that could result in political organization. traditional voice communication over phones is very inefficient compared to internet based text communication so it would probably be a low priority by comparison.
• deleted 3y ago
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• yashap 3y ago
  I agree, and I’m extremely far from a free speech absolutist - to a level that I’m sure most at HN would disagree with. I completely believe in limits to free speech on a case by case basis, online and otherwise. For example, I think HN would be a worse place without moderation, same with Reddit, I think my home country Canada would be a worse place without hate speech laws, etc. Not against limits to free speech online, but I think ISPs are the wrong layer for them. Governments can go after specific sites carrying out illegal activities, online communities can moderate themselves to avoid devolving into 4chan, but ISPs shouldn’t make censorship decisions, it’s just too broad a reach/impact for a private company.
  • chonkerz 3y ago
    Kiwifarms makes shell companies so the hosting provider is a confederate and the only way to terminate service is to go over their head and complain to the upstream. You can even see "their hosting provider" posting weird political astroturfing in this thread. Spammers do this trick all the time to buy some plausible deniability.
    • richbell 3y ago
      > Kiwifarms makes shell companies Can you provide examples of shell companies they've used? As far as I'm aware, Kiwi Farms only had a single LLC which is based in the US.
      • chonkerz 3y ago
        [flagged]
        • richbell 3y ago
          > You know full well the series of companies Kiwifarms has gone through, because you are an obvious Kiwifarms user astroturfing this thread. I won't waste time on your bad faith questions. I am not, nor have I ever been, a member of the Kiwi Farms. I simply do not believe it is just that public pressure basic on dubious or false claims can completely kick a website off the Internet. Regardless, it's clear by your response that you are operating in bad faith.
• polski-g 3y ago
  Wouldn't this action eliminate section 230 protections for Hurricane?
• slikrick 3y ago
  do people here consider comment moderation to be online speech policing? Seems pretty clear that there are certain things hosts don't want on their platform there's an economic bottom line where advertisers drive a lot of the need as well. users themselves aren't paying for the service.
  • bluescrn 3y ago
    Moderation can be good, but only in moderation.
• lynx23 3y ago
  Tell that to Google. You could almost feel how sexy the censoring people felt during 2020 at Google. Must have been a blast of a time.
• greyface- 3y ago
  Doesn't Hurricane still buy v4 transit from Telia? It's strange that everyone is uncritically calling them a Tier 1 here; I'm used to endless bickering over whether they're a Tier 1 or a Tier 2.
• mritun 3y ago
  Huh, so what’s EFF’s stance on spamming and phishing block lists? If ISPs are going to deplatform spammers and DDoSers where are they going to go?
• deleted 3y ago
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• _cenw 3y ago
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• ikiris 3y ago
  what is missing from everything visible so far is this is people trying to force HE to carry traffic for kiwifarms when they don't want to. I add this so people don't have to do extra googling like I did to understand a story.
• meroes 3y ago
  Why should an individual’s speech limit a business to being a dumb pipe? I’ve never gelled with this aspect of “tech” (startup?) culture. Why shouldn’t an ISP or any company be able to limit for any lawful reason?
  • jdthedisciple 3y ago
    Sounds like you are not disagreeing, the question is just what is a lawful reason.
    • throwaway58480 3y ago
      Further the intent of a system based on law, at least since the Magna Carta, is that the people (definitions vary) have to be consulted democratically.
• mnd999 3y ago
  More nativity from the EFF, I dont think they live in the real world. It’s never worked that at and never will. Why? Because the systems become unusable for everyone. A simple and very very old example is email. Even back in the 1990s days of the Internet, we had spam on email and if your reputable isp caught you spamming you’d be in trouble. Same with shitposting on usenet. Sure there are nuances to consider as to what providers should do and what they should not, but like a lot of things this is a hard problem. The ‘simple’ solutions presented here and in other places will not solve it.
  • cf141q5325 3y ago
    Alleging nativity when at the same time championing just simply banning stuff you dont like, the consequences be dammed, might be funny, but this discussion has too high stakes for undisclosed satire. Still made me chuckle though. edit: Apparently not satire. Quite sorry to hear, that was me giving the benefit of the doubt. That leaves either stupidity (not realizing the consequences), malice (not caring) or me overlooking something. So, how do checks and balances for mob justice look like? Other then just meaning well and being the good guys? Pretty sure somebody could elaborate if it was really just me overlooking something.
    • mnd999 3y ago
      The same way they’ve always worked - mostly alright. If you’re looking for a perfect solution you’re not going to find it.
  • charcircuit 3y ago
    >Because the systems become unusable for everyone. In this case there is no spam or resource exhaustion going on in this case. People are visiting a forum, posting things, and viewing text / images / video files posted by other users. What makes things unusable is when you want to follow links on the web you need to use VPNs in order to route your traffic through the correct ISPs that will properly route your traffic. There could be a future where different T1 ISPs block different sites so there is no way to browse the entire internet using a single ISP, but instead you have to cleverly pick a different ISP for each destination IP to get it properly routed.
• shzwith 3y ago
  [flagged]
• t43562 3y ago
  I think it might be impossible to avoid having to make moral judgements. You might wish to believe that you free society can exist without any morality but I don't think it can really. So what is "ok" and what is "not ok" - would you censor the NAZI party in the 1930s or do you think that letting theim air their views fully would convince Germans not to accept them? 10s of millions of lives depend on your choice.
  • cf141q5325 3y ago
    Any moral judgement that ignores the direct practical implications of that judgement is deeply immoral. You cant have meant well when you could have known better but didnt want to. >So what is "ok" and what is "not ok" - would you censor the NAZI party in the 1930s or do you think that letting theim air their views fully would convince Germans not to accept them? 10s of millions of lives depend on your choice. The rise to power of the NSDAP was aided by being able to frame themselves as the lesser evil in comparison to the KPD representing the totalitarian soviet system. Censoring stuff and combating people creates reactions, once you go down the path of opinion control you end up with the choice between totalitarian systems that are dysfunctional by nature and represent the worst and most extreme versions of a tribalistic conflict. Having a common enemy becomes an end in itself and at that point anyone will do. This is not an abstract risk, its visible across many western democracies right now. The naive assumption that intention alone will be enough and allows you ignore the consequences, might become the death of the current form of democracies. Its arguably how we got to the point where there are far right parties across Europe in and about to become governments. With at the same time a historic high in population and opinion control measures. In the end, during the most horrific phases of humanity that were intentionally created there is always a desperate demand for two things. The ability to challenge genocidal narratives (See Romeo Dalaires pleas to just be allowed to broadcast) and having as many rifles as you can get once that fails (See the incredible risk people (including children) took when smuggling weapons into Jewish ghettos. I dont see how attempts to make the first harder, let alone impossible, are anything but evil. Especially with a blatant disregard for the risks this entails. Humanity payed the price for this insight already multiple times over.
    • 3y ago
• ryzvonusef 3y ago
  This is an old-school leftist approach that is no longer welcome, imho.
• deleted 3y ago
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• deleted 3y ago
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  • imadierich 3y ago
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• 28304283409234 3y ago
  Indeed. Companies should be able to just rake in profits regardless of social, cultural or environmental impact without taking any responsibility.
• kristjank 3y ago
  I hate how Kiwi Farms has become the benchmark for so many important concepts relating to internet freedom. As much as I think the world would be a better place with them being forever banished to the onion realm, I can't really defend HE and other service providers drafting their own visions of internet code of ethics, then enforcing them on other people's traffic. A smaller ISP would probably start losing business over such concerns, but HE is so large, almost all of internet traffic touches them at some point, so their ability to moderate is not even impacted by their business decisions. Defending a company's AUP/ToS is reasonable when the company is reasonably sized, but HE is clearly over that limit. When a company gets too big to fail (banking also comes to mind) due to providing crucial societal function, there should be very strict restrictions on what they're allowed to moderate. This also applies to big industry conglomerates (oil, pharmaceuticals). Another part of the problem seem to be various lazy officials not prosecuting these sites on the basis of obvious crimes involved in their operation. I really appreciate EFF defending the obviously neutral approach here.
  • dmatech 3y ago
    It's an interesting edge case. It's pretty clearly completely legal in the USA, though the content is grossly offensive. Some of the individual posts are almost certainly defamatory, but §230 shields the site itself from that liability (though not the posters). This brings us back to the real question: should extreme unpopularity alone be enough for deplatforming in a free society? Or should actual laws need to be broken?
    • johnnyanmac 3y ago
      I think it's much simpler: make sure the content isn't legal to begin with. doxxing seems to broach on 4th amendment rights and we're no longer in a day and age where we will freely give out our address in newspapers. I don't know the fine legal details, but make a DMCA equivalent of private information. If you request a takedown of your identity and they don't comply, throw the book at them. Likewise, death threats and that kind of harassment isn't protected by 1st amendment rights. I don't think sites should be sued by consumers over user submitted posts, but they should be held accountable for at the bare minimum removing that harassment in a timely matter when asked. If it doesn't happen often enough, fine them.
• puuush 3y ago
  Interesting link, thanks!
• facia 3y ago
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• gsky 3y ago
  These days everyone is a story teller and witch hunter. I sometimes think the rotten people's mindset what made me afraid leave my house
• bjourne 3y ago
  Case in point, www.rt.com is blocked by all major ISPs in all EU countries. That's not the right way to deal with Russian propaganda.
  • suslik 3y ago
    I just tried that and it opened without issues.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
• RecycledEle 3y ago
  What if we allowed all speech online, no matter how vile? The problem would be that people want to avoid seeing some things, and they really want to avoid their kids seeing things. So what if we define a group of flags that can be set to say "This content does contain X" or "This content does not contain X." If the flag is not set, we don't know. Then web filters can just block content that lacks a flag saying "This content does not contain X."
  • krapp 3y ago
    You're making the mistake many people make in assuming all communication on the web is strictly two way, and that the only possible outcome of speech online is hurt feelings. If I post your real name, address and bank account credentials online, or photos of you in the bathroom, or start a forum to plan acts of genocide against your race or religion, or maybe spread plausible slander about you on every social media platform I can, that's perfectly acceptable under your terms. But it doesn't help you if all you're allowed to do is set a filter flag on it. It's still there, having an effect. The web isn't just teenage edgelords shitposting at each other for lulz anymore, there are actual real world consequences at play.
    • RecycledEle 3y ago
      I will accept the slander because (1) anonymous slander lacks credibility and (2) being slandered is a small price to pay for my free speech rights and (3) when all limits are removed on speech my big mouth will get me in far more trouble than any slander.
    • metalspot 3y ago
      if people are doing something illegal than allowing them to freely post about it online makes it much easier to detect and prosecute.
      • krapp 3y ago
        You'd be surprised how much damage can be done to a person within the technical limits of legality.
• bArray 3y ago
  > That’s why EFF has long argued that we must “protect the stack” by saying no to infrastructure providers policing internet content. I agree with this, but you need to understand what you agree to. It's not just the content you want to see - it's also the content you don't want to see. It's the freedom of the most extreme content imaginable - CP, snuff, murder, doxxing, drugs, etc, etc. People will experience severe issues as a result, but there are other things that can be done: 1. Individuals can do more to protect themselves. We have AI now that can quite accurately detect what is in an image or video, it's entirely feasible to do live content filtering. 2. We need to protect the most vulnerable in our societies. We don't give whiskey to a 5 year old, and we shouldn't give unfiltered internet to a 5 year old. This also extends to vulnerable adults. If you receive government assistance (money/drugs) for a mental disability, a filtered version of the internet should be available to you. 3. The punishment for filtering without permission should be severe enough that it's not just a tax. People really need to be held accountable, otherwise they will just pay the toll and be done with it.
  • newsclues 3y ago
    "If you receive government assistance (money/drugs) for a mental disability, a filtered version of the internet should be available to you." Not every mental disability makes people stupid enough to make them need a filtered internet. As someone in that category, but still able to think, if people like you nerf my internet, the amount of rage and anger that I will unleash upon society is going to be endless.
    • bArray 3y ago
      > Not every mental disability makes people stupid enough to make them need a filtered internet. It's not about being stupid, it's about being vulnerable. Also it may not be appropriate in every case. I am also weary of removing the ability to access the internet from otherwise functioning adults. I've not quite happy to have a solid stance on it just yet. As I said: "[..] a filtered version of the internet should be available to you." - That's to say that they can choose to use it. It's not ideal, but it would be opt-in at least for example on a doctor's recommendation. > [..] people like you [..] I'm making the case for an unfiltered internet, and I want as many people as reasonable to be able to access it. My suggestion was a compromise. > As someone in that category, but still able to think, if people like you nerf my internet, the amount of rage and anger that I will unleash upon society is going to be endless. I don't know your your specific scenario, but despite your fundamental rights, it may for example be prudent not to give you access to a gun, despite your want for one, or claims of rage and anger unleashed upon society. Also we haven't really discussed (for good reason) what such filtering would look like, or who would control it. That's a difficult situation in itself. There's not really a person or group I would trust with such power. Edit: Spelling/grammar.
• birracerveza 3y ago
  I would extend this to include everyone that isn't actual law enforcement agencies. While it's perfectly reasonable for websites to decide what content is shown, it should also be possible to decide to show ALL content, except very obviously illegal content like CSAM and actual threats (which can be notified by LE and even automated). I am aware that this line gets blurry very quickly, but we're leaning way too much on the side of censorship. We are just sweeping the ugly under the rug and hoping it goes away, while instead it festers, until it goes viral.
• throwa836373 3y ago
  “ The cops and the courts should be working to protect the victims of KF and go after the perpetrators with every legal tool at their disposal.” It seems ridiculous to me to float this as something that is going to happen.
• aa_is_op 3y ago
  ...except when it's copyright infringement.... because that's literally how they operate right now.
• jacquesm 3y ago
  They don't have to police it, but they don't have to facilitate it either. ISPs should be just as free as any other company to decide who they want to do business with.
  • iteria 3y ago
    For that to be a reasonable stand people should have reasonable ways to avoid doing business with various ISPs and that's not thr case for many. Their options are one company, maybe two and then they're out of luck. At least if ISP were a real utility in the US they're be able to apply pressure with their votes.
    • jacquesm 3y ago
      True but that's a different problem. As long as companies are allowed to consolidate just this short of obtaining a monopoly that kind of problem will remain. You'd have to address that separately for it to be effective. That's why you always see a lot of competition in a new field which eventually crystalizes out to two, sometimes three main competitors that all have double digit marketshare. It's why we still have Apple and Mozilla. But from the point of view of the would-be monopolists those are optional. I far preferred it when we had a more diversified eco-system and long run I think we will come to regret this monoculture. But it is hard to spell out exactly what could be done to resolve all this without having the various negative side effects as well as a method of dealing with the now entrenched and very powerful players. We need 500 search engines, not three, and 500 browser manufacturers, not four. And open, well published and not-dominated-by-a-single-entity standards.
• getarofilter 3y ago
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• jl6 3y ago
  I think it’s kind of incredible that Kiwifarms has become the poster-boy for abhorrent content, when Stormfront has been right there for decades and seems to still be going strong. Somehow they are perceived as worse than literal Nazis.
  • CP3f6kMA 3y ago
    KF are literal Nazis too.
• knorker 3y ago
  The ACLU has changed to only defend speech they agree with. Will the EFF take over the role that ACLU had?
• dcow 3y ago
  I see ye ol’ “but HE is a private company they can do what they want” argument surfacing again. Something that is easily missed: internet providers benefit from government protected monopolies because you can’t just dig up cities and lay cable wherever you want. They’re seen as privately run public infrastructure. Therefore there’s an expectation that they indiscriminately carry traffic, because their position as an ISP is too powerful to allow them to be short circuiting the courts and making value judgements. This isn’t just a hypothetical concern, it’s real. I don’t know HE’s specific situation with regards to being a common carrier, but I’m surprised there isn’t a conversation about the expectations we have of utility providers who receive privileged operational power over necessary public services.
  • greyface- 3y ago
    Do you really think HE owns most of the fiber they use? It's mostly leased from much larger behemoths that own the physical cables, who treat it as a private conduit for photons, and lack the ability to even know what's being transmitted over it, so can't censor. Source: https://he.net/about_network.html https://he.net/about_network.html - you see them talk about "negotiating with the top fiber carriers" and even "long haul wavelengths", which means they don't always lease a whole fiber, sometimes just a small slice of the EM spectrum on one. IP transit is a value-add on top of an underlying physical asset which already has the properties that you want.
    • dcow 3y ago
      I don’t see a functional difference, do you? In other words, if I have been granted conditional protected exclusive ownership of physical fiber lines and that requires me to be a common carrier, I can launder the common carrier responsibility by leasing guaranteed bandwidth downstream? That does not check out…
      • gwright 3y ago
        I'm not sure if this transitive common carrier approach makes sense. Wouldn't that mean that every company that used telephony, railroads, airlines, or shipping would have to be behave like a common carrier? I'm not sure what the correct balance is but I don't think it makes sense to force common carrier status to propagate in the way you seem to be suggesting.
• evantbyrne 3y ago
  Being able to choose which private entities your business materially supports is a natural consequence of freedom. As long as ISPs are private businesses, their operators will and should have basic freedoms. The fact that _people_ are dropping KF left and right is just normal and healthy socialization at work. Lack of competition with American ISPs and whether they should be public utilities are real concerns, but fundamentally has nothing to do with KF being widely regarded as a flaming turd.
• Dr_ReD 3y ago
  In the meantime both EU and Italy play fast and loose with censorship normatives: https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2023/08/25/online-platforms-targeted-as-the-eus-biggest-ever-shake-up-of-digital-rules-kicks-in https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2023/08/25/online-platfor... - https://www.wired.it/article/pirateria-online-legge-anti-pezzotto-senato-errori/ https://www.wired.it/article/pirateria-online-legge-anti-pez... (italian)
• Yournothed 3y ago
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• exabrial 3y ago
  Unfortunately, the media demands censorship and incites people to demand it as well. The ultimate solution if something bothers you online is to locate the power button on the device, press it, then proceed outdoors to hang out with your friends.
• sequoia 3y ago
  I heard a podcast interviewing the site owner[0], hearing his perspective was interesting though I don't know how much of what he says is true either. He raised one very salient point, however, which was that ISPs probably didn't start dropping him out of nowhere. He asserts that there is a highly persistent and technically knowledgeable party threatening ISPs & other providers by going after the provider's other customers to pressure the provider to drop kiwifarms. I don't know what the truth is but it is odd that kiwifarms keeps getting knocked offline as neonazi forums etc. stay online. I don't know much about kiwifarms, never visited it, but given the claims in this post (that it's "uniquely awful," that the site itself is victimizing people) I think it would be helpful if the authors would link to some context/evidence. Maybe it's all true in this case, but I've been on the internet long enough to know that believing grave accusations without evidence is a very bad rookie mistake. 0: https://www.heterodorx.com/podcast/episode-107-how-the-internet-lost-its-backbone-with-joshua-moon/ https://www.heterodorx.com/podcast/episode-107-how-the-inter...
  • chonkerz 3y ago
    ISPs get threatened all the time and don't take content down just because some rando is mad. Kiwifarms needs to provide proof that ISPs are being threatened, as opposed to the more likely scenario that the harassment victims are filing normal abuse complaints and alerting the ISP to the TOS violations taking place all over the site.
    • sequoia 3y ago
      If this were the case, I wonder how 4chan, stormfront, etc. stay online. Surely 4chan's providers get floods of complaints about doxxing etc. Or pastebin for that matter. The fact that the EFF is writing about this case and that they're forced to use KF as their one example (clearly they find this distasteful & would prefer to use any other example if they could) indicates that something is unique or at least peculiar about this case.
      • chonkerz 3y ago
        Compared to 4chan, kiwifarms admins take a more active role in directing and encouraging harassment towards specific targets. it's a lot easier to tie the illegal activity to the site's owner. and the cops don't do shit because internet harassment is a seriously under-prosecuted crime. even the EFF admits that. the only route for victims is to follow the chain of upstreams till they get one that isn't in league with kiwifarms. (kiwifarms' hosting provider is even posting in this thread spreading the same untruths the kiwifarms admin says)
• johnny99k 3y ago
  Tell that to the Amazon engineers that conspired to shutdown Parlor during the height of its popularity.
  • kiitos 3y ago
    Parlor is bad, and should be shut down.
• X6S1x6Okd1st 3y ago
  Do ISPs block spam? Spam is clearly legal speech
• kiitos 3y ago
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• HDPDV 3y ago
  The EFF is absolutely in the wrong on this. ISPs are private businesses, and they have every right (and responsibility!) to enforce their own Acceptable Use Policies/Terms of Service. Anyone who cries "Freedom of Speech" either hasn't thought this through, or else has no idea what they're talking about... Hurricane Electric is not a government entity. We are living in Popper's "Paradox of Tolerance". Nazis need to be punched, but de-platforming them is pretty good, too.
• chonkerz 3y ago
  This thread was linked to on the Kiwifarms website and people are coming in here astroturfing for Kiwifarms. That's why this thread is such a garbage pile.
  • richbell 3y ago
    > A lot of the "people here" are from Kiwifarms because this thread got linked to from their site. So a lot of untrue claims are being made about the facts of the situation. I went looking for this out of curiosity. It seems to be a thread from 2022 with only 10 pages, and only about 10 total replies this year. Is this really your basis for claiming that "a lot" of people are coming from Kiwi Farms? How did you even find that thread anyway?
    • chonkerz 3y ago
      [flagged]
• HereIGoAgain 3y ago
  This has been a clear danger for a while now. Beyond just mere danger at this point in fact. You guys are late to the party but it is nice to see you guys catching. This is the literal death of the internet if nothing is done to stop it.
• PappGaborSandor 3y ago
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