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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

• deleted 3y ago
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• 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"?
  • krapp 3y ago
    Never. In fact, the reason the First Amendment limits the government, exclusively, is that the ability to abridge free speech (to choose which forms of speech you support, spread, or disassociate from) is implicitly a part of individual liberty, held by the people. Free speech has never guaranteed anyone a platform. That's not a bug, it's a feature. Yes, it can be messy. Yes, it can be abused. Yes, it means social media companies are allowed to ban you for any reason they like, just as restaurants are allowed to refuse you service. Yes it means ISPs don't have to do business with nazis and assholes. The alternative is that the government - that controls the monopoly on violence - controls all speech, at all levels, and any business that engages in any form of speech. That it forces you to publish speech against your will, against your interests, even against your safety. The great thing about ISPs being private is that you can always find another ISP. Kiwifarms did. Being banned from social media isn't the end of the world. But I can't as easily find another government if mine reads my social media posts and decides I'm too "woke" to live.
    • zeroCalories 3y ago
      You're not free to not associate with people in the U.S. Businesses are not allowed to discriminate against protected classes. This is because businesses are foundational to modern life, so being excluded from them greatly hurts a person. I don't think it's unreasonable to think that we should look to expand such protections to all people for certain services, especially those which are more like infrastructure for modern life. Not saying sites can't have a TOS, but an ISP should have a really good business reason for blocking you(illegal activity, spam).
      • deleted 3y ago
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      • krapp 3y ago
• akira2501 3y ago
  > 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. This is why monopoly power is dangerous as without it you could just move to a more tolerant competitor and be on with your business. The courts almost never consider the "secondary markets" that exist around these behemoths, and how all of our interests and independence are significantly damaged by allowing these monopolies to merge into existence. Of course, even this feels like the conversation they would _like_ you to have, because the other side I never see considered is what does it take to buy an "indulgence" from these companies? Is it easy? Is it often done? How often are these "scions of social justice" actually just "turning a blind eye?"
  • imadierich 3y ago
    blame the WEF and 16 UN STG
    • yrro 3y ago
      > Promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all and build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels oh no how _terrible_
      • agentgumshoe 3y ago
        It's not that bit you need to check, it's the 'how' behind it. 'Inclusive' is also incredibly easy to abuse.
        • digging 3y ago
          > 'Inclusive' is also incredibly easy to abuse. How? Seems to me that, like with corporate accountability, you're either doing it and it's good or you're not doing it but lying and saying you are.
          • 3y ago
• gorwell 3y ago
  That's right. Authoritarian censors found an exploit. They couldn't use the government to clamp down on civil liberties because of the pesky constitution, so they invaded the administrative layer of big tech. It's not the engineers who built the web and these companies with Silicon Valley ideals. They were never intended to be used this way and are secretly horrified. > play moral police at the moment Moral fashion police
  • version_five 3y ago
    From what I understand re twitter and others, it's the government that found a loophole. They used big tech to censor according to their agenda. The administrative class, while I agree probably has been invaded in some sense, is really just risk aversion run amok, like it always it, and will self organize to do what it can to minimize controversy.
    • momirlan 3y ago
      i think it's rather the political establishment has allowed big tech to set the agenda for what it considers to be "the truth"
      • ddingus 3y ago
        Big Tech was told they can either see regulation they don't like, or get with the program and ignore corruption like old media has done for decades.
        • hellojesus 3y ago
          They should have taken the regulation. At least that forces it into the public eye and allows for accountability via voting. This way only generates a shadow government. Apart from the obvious 1a violation.
          • ddingus 3y ago
            Yup.
• TheBlight 3y ago
  Amen to that.
• aaomidi 3y ago
  When I was at let’s encrypt, there were so many people outside that expected us to be the morality police of the internet. Like, no. Certificate Authorities exist because the web fucking sucks. Not because they want to be gate keepers.
  • didntcheck 3y ago
    I'd be interested to hear more about that. What sort of groups did you get making these requests, and what sort of reasons did they usually give?
    • aaomidi 3y ago
      It was mostly twitter folk. Let's Encrypt has a post about phishing websites: https://letsencrypt.org/2015/10/29/phishing-and-malware.html https://letsencrypt.org/2015/10/29/phishing-and-malware.html
• rhelz 3y ago
  // private companies a re de facto writing the laws // We can certainly discuss whether these services should be publicly or privately owned. I'm a pretty liberal guy, and wouldn't mind seeing publically-owned versions of Twitter, ChatGPT, or Google, as a guard against corporations dominating the information age. But calling for more government regulation of privately-owned services? Forcing private companies to do what you want them to do, even when they would prefer not to? The whole point of private property is that it carves out a space of freedom for you, the owner of the private property, to use it as you wish!!! I really wonder how I became the radical conservative here......
  • nonethewiser 3y ago
    Freedom of speech is a pretty fundamental value. It's not surprising to expect it beyond where it's legally required.
    • bluescrn 3y ago
      Freedom of speech was a pretty fundamental value. A couple of generations ago.
      • goodpoint 3y ago
        Freedom of speech is being distorted by some actors in bad faith that want the freedom to be racist etc.
        • bluescrn 3y ago
          If you want to preserve free speech, you need to defend hateful speech. This is not a new problem: https://www.aclu.org/report/1978-aclu-pamphlet-why-american-civil-liberties-union-defends-free-speech-racists-and https://www.aclu.org/report/1978-aclu-pamphlet-why-american-...
          • goodpoint 3y ago
            No you don't, not even close.
• nonethewiser 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 This is one of the positives of capitalism. The only color that matters is green. More competition please.
  • chonkerz 3y ago
    It's because the police have really failed to enforce existing laws that people have to resort to leaning on ISPs and payment processors to do it.
    • aydyn 3y ago
      Why dont you talk concretely? what is a specific case involving an individual where specific laws have been broken?
    • matheusmoreira 3y ago
      Which is why society needs to turn ISPs into non-discriminating common carriers of information. Now nobody will be able to "resort" to leaning on them anymore.
      • chonkerz 3y ago
        [flagged]
    • zirgs 3y ago
      As far as I know - no laws prohibit adult pornography. Payment processors just decided to enforce their own laws.
  • digging 3y ago
    Competition isn't really a feature of capitalism.
• jquery 3y ago
  IMO, practically speaking, payment processors are a much bigger headache than anything else. It's hard to end-run around them and run any kind of successful business. It's really weird how much power they have to play moral police, even deciding what kind of porn is "ok" and what isn't.
  • didntcheck 3y ago
    Yep. It's especially concerning when clients are cut off for political reasons. Being able to effectively financially sanction people for having the wrong views is truly dangerous to democracy. Like with a lot of things, I suspect the reason they haven't faced more regulation is just that governments largely support these actions, and enjoy having a backdoor that they can ask to hamper undesirables without going through pesky courts
• oliwarner 3y ago
  > private companies are de facto writing the laws about what's allowed online It's hard when it's your line people are using to put their brand of ugliness "online". Cloudflare comes up so regularly because so many legally problematic websites use their free service to evade even judicial blocks that ISPs are ordered to implement at national level. CF are used as a free proxy that's very hard to block unless Cloudflare takes a stand. When they don't take a stand, when they try to stay impartial, they're attacked for enabling terrorism, child abuse, human trafficking, etc, etc, etc. So they do something, and they're attacked for being moral arbiters. They're here to do business, not please everyone. Perhaps letting them pick isn't so bad. You can decide whether or not you want to do business with them then based on their actions and everybody can not use them if they're that much of a moral problem for them. I think many people would benefit from knowing they don't always get their way. "Oh but I have no choice of ISPs" is absolutely a problem, but it's not this problem. Your ISP having a monopoly can be fixed separately.
  • Levitz 3y ago
    >When they don't take a stand, when they try to stay impartial, they're attacked for enabling terrorism, child abuse, human trafficking, etc, etc, etc. Imo the problem lies here. On the idea that servicing someone implies support for their actions or ideology. For all the talk about acceptance and tolerance it would seem a good deal of society is ok with the idea that those doing reprehensible stuff ought to be completely ostracized from society, laws be damned.
    • dcow 3y ago
      Yeah, this is where things are so immature. Where language has been twisted into “silence is violence”. People that think this way either have an intense moral agenda and they’re intolerant of real diversity, or they can’t actually mentally separate the concept of basic human respect (as in servicing someone you disagree with because they’re human) and political support a la providing internet to Kiwi farms perpetuates violence you’re part of the problem. If you let authoritarians kafka trap you or you peers into thought terminating cliches left and right, and you don’t call the BS, this is the society you end up in.
• cyanydeez 3y ago
  The lack of government regulations will make businesses "regulate" themselves What you're seeing is how government is born. Corporatoctacy is just another form of authoritarianism and the more government pulls up stakes, they get replaced. The global strain of far right ethno isolationist politics is creating the public void these corporations are filling.
  • pauldenton 3y ago
    Please. We can see how much regulation matters when they're not enforced. If you went to San Fransisco you would be surprised to know it's against the rules to break into people's cars or shoplift hundreds of dollars of stuff, considering how many people guilty of doing those things are tried convicted and serve time
• ddingus 3y ago
  Lessig wrote about this in the 90's. His book "CODE" was more predictive than I prefer. :(
• lynx23 3y ago
  Gibson (Neuromancer) and Stephenson (Snow Crash) have already predicted this corporate-power-future. And it is becoming a reality.
• tomrod 3y ago
  Typically dumb pipe companies get involved in this side of things due to legal requirements. Less often, though often justified as such, it is due to sincere concerns by the provider. For example, banks don't typically want to service car dealerships simply because they are a prime target for money laundering. Same for legal cannabis firms due to being unbanked previously or because the whole industry isn't traceable. Frankly, while I understand the historical reasons for having a "big brother" watch financial transactions, it's way to convoluted to satisfy and represents a big cost in the economy.
  • hiatus 3y ago
    > Same for legal cannabis firms due to being unbanked previously or because the whole industry isn't traceable. My understanding is that banks are federally chartered and thus cannot provide services to weed firms as it remains illegal federally.
    • tomrod 3y ago
      Precisely.
• bastardoperator 3y ago
  Corporations are essentially citizens, and citizens have the right to free speech. We can agree or disagree, but this where we've allowed ourselves to get. HE is within their rights to say no, we will not host or route to KF, to stop us would violate our constitutional rights to freedom of speech and expression. They would then point to a litany of issues surrounding KF, how it would impact their business, and then win their case with ease. I'm kind of shocked EFF went to bat for KF If I'm being honest. When your speech is unaliving people, or responsible for wide scale harassment of minors, guess what, I'm not interested in doing business with you, and that's perfectly fine. The fact that they use such a weak argument like utilities, and mail service as a comparison to commercial internet service is wild.
  • a-priori 3y ago
    The idea of corporations being legal people is questionable in the first place, but now you’re going to argue that they’re not only people but citizens?!
    • bastardoperator 3y ago
      I don't disagree. If a corporation has civil rights, they're akin to being a person/entity in which those rights are guaranteed aka citizenship. Some might argue that America is a "corporatocracy" for this very reason.
      • a-priori 3y ago
        No, you’ve got weird ideas about citizenship and civil rights if you think that’s the case. Plenty of rights are conferred by merely being within the borders of a country, regardless of citizenship status. You can be a tourist or even an illegal immigrant in the US and have the right to habeas corpus or the right of non-self-incrimination, for example. Talking about elevating corporations to be on par with citizens is a fascist idea, which is absolutely adjacent to corporatism.
        • bastardoperator 3y ago