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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 onli

• 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
      For Internet harassment there basically isn't law enforcement. This needs to change but I'm not sure how.
• another_story 3y ago
  In the past the ACLU has defended hate groups right to freedom of speech. Do you have evidence that they'd do something to the contrary?
  • Analemma_ 3y ago
    That was before the ACLU got hollowed out and skinsuited by activist groups. I'd trust the ACLU of 10 years ago to fight this, but not the one of today.
  • drewcoo 3y ago
    The ACLU fought Trump's "Muslim ban." That resulted in lots of funding from the anti-Trump crowd. "Trump derangement syndrome" meant previously unimaginable funding. They needed to do something with the money, so they staffed up, using the new staff to double down on the Trump-fighting. Before 2016, there were a few claims that the ACLU was biased toward liberals. Afterward, you'll find many articles even from outlets like the Atlantic and the New York Times lambasting the ACLU as openly partisan. Just do a search for them! So if this is censorship is intended to keep things safe and liberal, people suppose that the ACLU would support the censorship.
    • pessimizer 3y ago
      This is exactly what happened. They were flooded with money at the same time they were being flooded with new graduates that had strange ideas about what people shouldn't be allowed to do.
  • yanderekko 3y ago
    I mean, to be fair this doesn't really pertain to the sort of Constitutional legal questions that the ACLU famously takes a hardline stance on. I don't think the ACLU endorsing private censorship is clearly at odds with their overall mission. (As opposed to say their going soft on hate speech laws, which clearly has 1A implications.)
    • JamesBarney 3y ago
• lisper 3y ago
  > you can just...walk away from your computer Just say no. Because it worked so well for Nancy Reagan. Oh, wait... (For those too young to remember: https://www.history.com/topics/1980s/just-say-no https://www.history.com/topics/1980s/just-say-no)
  • nickff 3y ago
    I understand that you're being sarcastic, but don't understand exactly what you're implying. Are you saying that Nancy Reagan became a drug addict? Or else are you saying that experimenting with one or more drugs is beneficial?
    • lisper 3y ago
      I am saying that "Just Say No" is not an effective intervention for addiction. A lot of internet content is addictive, and the more addictive it is, the less likely it is to be bound to reality. So relying on individual self-control -- "just walk away from your computer" -- to counter the deleterious effects of misinformation on the internet is no more likely to succeed than it did for drug addiction.
      • pdonis 3y ago
        I disagree. I think the issue is that we don't demand enough individual self-control from people. Individual self-control is supposed to be table stakes for being a mature adult and being treated as such. And teaching that skill (and it is a skill) to kids should be a necessary part of raising them. If "Just Say No" was not effective, I think it's because it didn't get enough traction in society--it didn't become standard operating procedure, to the point where it's just obvious to every adult that yes, you teach your kids to Just Say No to drugs, until it becomes muscle memory.
        • amiga386 3y ago
          We're off on a tangent, but... I think you're thinking about people who don't really have an addiction (to the internet, or to drugs), but merely indulge more than they ought to and a little bit of moral rectitude they're alright again. If you had met hopelessly, chronically addicted people, the people for whom their addiction has utterly destroyed their life and they're pleading with you for help and they just keep getting worse and worse, I don't think you'd be so quick to say that all you need is individual self-control. It is not merely the case that, faced with something potentially addictive, you just recall "Just Say No" and bada-bing, no addiction happens. Humans aren't robots. Humans get addicted to drugs and other activities, not just in social situations but also as a coping mechanism for life failures they can't fix, or see no way to fix. It can take years of psychological work to break the cycle of dependence, and in some cases it might not even be possible. If you have time for a moving speech, listen to Craig Ferguson's monologue on his own alcohol addiction, his path to sobriety, and the constant vigilance needed to maintain it, which he gave rather than joke about Britney Spears' public freakout in 2007: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K46P7loICXY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K46P7loICXY
• anigbrowl 3y ago
  You're thinking solely in terms of private individuals. Other entities exist and have to be internet-connected to function; corporations, nonprofits, government bodies, institutions. They can't very well use pseudonyms because their whole reason for being is to be accessible to the public. So that makes them easy to target for abuse, eg https://oaklandside.org/2023/08/29/chabot-elementary-evacuated-school-canceled-due-to-bomb-threat/ https://oaklandside.org/2023/08/29/chabot-elementary-evacuat... An episode like that costs tens of thousands of dollars in lost productive time, police response and investigation etc. And it's increasingly common. I don't think ISPs can or should proactively try to prevent this (or they'd have to preemptively scan and evaluate every packet request), but I also don't think your dunk on the ACLU has any substance. If an ISP knows that a customer is bad actor because it's brought to their attention in a credible and rigorous way, then it seems quite legitimate to me to cut them off.
  • whatwhaaaaat 3y ago
    The bomb threat is already a crime. Properly prosecute it. Are you trying to say that some opinion posted online that may or may not have been consumed by the offender in this case is somehow directly responsible? My question to those who support big brother any lawful but awful speech is - do you really think it won’t be used to silence any dissent of the ruling powers?
    • paddlepop 3y ago
      >> My question to those who support big brother any lawful but awful speech is - do you really think it won’t be used to silence any dissent of the ruling powers? My question to those that use this line of reasoning is do you really think a ruling power willing to silence dissent would do so whether or not it is supported?
      • whatwhaaaaat 3y ago
        A salient point no doubt. There is ample evidence that some are silenced by a range of methods. I’m simply not going to support codifying that sort of thing in law. I would argue if we have people in positions of power who would make decisions like that then it is our duty to our progeny to relieve those in question.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• wellthen0 3y ago
  [flagged]
• adamrezich 3y ago
  you were on the Internet before it merged with reality and the two became one (in the minds of the people). you still perceive the Internet as being this discrete thing, separate from normal meatspace reality, because that's how it was, for a time, in the now-distant past. smartphones and modern social media bulldozed over our glorious cyber-libertarian future and brought millions of people, all completely unacclimated to the Web and its social customs, online, together, in the name of social progress or something (but, not-so-secretly, it was just to target advertisements and content to people more efficiently), and this is the sad end result—corporate censorship everywhere, with normal people even going out of their way to espouse gratitude for said censorship, complete with all manner of stock memery to disparage anyone who disagrees ("freeze peach", "only the government can censor—if it's not the government, it's not censorship", etc.). pour one out for the Internet of Yore if you must, but those days are long since over—there really isn't any way to put the genie back in the bottle anymore.
  • krapp 3y ago
    The internet was never separate from meatspace reality - that was always a naive cypherpunk delusion.
    • adamrezich 3y ago
      it's hard to remember now, but believe it or not, it used to be such that when you were done using the Internet for a session, you had to get up from your Ethernet or RJ45-connected personal computer and go live in the real world for a time. twenty-five minutes ago, I posted the above comment, then got into my car to drive home from work. on the way home, at an intersection, I checked my phone to see if anyone had responded to my comment, and indeed, you had. I thought about it a bit, then, while waiting in line at drugstore to pick up a prescription, I typed and submitted this reply. this is most certainly not how Things Used To Be. you used to have to jack into the Matrix at a designated jacking-in terminal—you couldn't just wirelessly jack in anywhere, about the town, at any point in your daily life. only a decade ago, the idea that a politician would use the public-facing Internet to directly attack or insult a political opponent was unthinkable—now, it's completely commonplace, as common as anyone arguing over the Internet, with anyone else about anything else. now, it's been successfully integrated into everyday life, completely. in the past, though, there most certainly was a time in which it was a completely separate thing, with completely different social norms than meatspace. I don't know why some are so eager to erase this in-the-greater-scheme-of-things extremely-recent history, and pretend like the Internet was always some sort of sanitized "safe space." there were "safe spaces", to be sure—but you had to make them yourself(!), or seek them out. communities were ideologically-driven, not advertiser/moral guardian-driven.
• dang 3y ago
  We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37314275 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37314275.
• gyropod 3y ago
  [flagged]