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Online censorship's institutional power
- Olesya000 2y ago[dead]
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- csande17 2y agoThe article talks about Hacker News comments "quoted in this article, that I am having trouble finding now on the live version of the site." As far as I can tell, the comment they're referring to is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21053930 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21053930, which appears to have been edited years after it was posted (judging by Wayback Machine snapshots), along with one of the replies, to redact the name of the person involved. Edit: And now this post is marked as a "dupe", even though it doesn't appear to have been posted on Hacker News before. Weird.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- rpmisms 2y agoIt also got flagged four times in a row. Probably due to the subject matter and the person named therein. A friend sent me this and it blew my mind. Infra being this vulnerable to a single angry person is... Bad.
- blueflow 2y agoI have never seen something positive about Liz Fong-Jones but HN shouldn't be the torch & pitchfork store against her. Given the topic and the people part of it, I don't think anything constructive will come from it.
- neonsunset 2y agoWhy shouldn't HN be critical of the damage done to the internet infrastructure as a whole?
- lizthegray 2y ago[flagged]
- johnny22 2y ago[flagged]
- lizthegray 2y ago[flagged]
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- dang 2y agoSoftware incorrectly marked the post as a dupe - I've fixed that now. We redact PII on HN pretty regularly. The basic principles are that we don't want anyone to get in trouble from anything they posted on HN, and we don't want HN commenters to use other people's personal details as ammunition.
- lizthegray 2y agoIs there any public log of redactions anywhere?
- dang 2y agoNo.
- ranger_danger 2y agoonly on lobsters
- moralestapia 2y agoHey @dang, I think I've also found an issue w/ the software. Wrote to hn@... but haven't got a reply (it was a couple days ago, so I imagine you're all busy).
- roarkeful 2y agoNot a dupe, previous post from the same site here: (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38685782 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38685782), talking about an adjacent topic.
- dang 2y agoThat was an error in HN's dupe detector (a failure case of the software). Fixed now.
- amiga386 2y agoIf you'd like it said more succinctly, here's the EFF saying it: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/08/isps-should-not-police-online-speech-no-matter-how-awful-it https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/08/isps-should-not-police... Courts and judges seem slow and fuddy-duddy, but they're conducted in public, and you have legal avenues of appeal. Unregulated private businesses can do whatever the fuck they like, and that includes just fucking with you because of personal vendettas. Private businesses that fuck with arbitrary people aren't worthy of being a nation's internet backbone. That behaviour needs reigned in, and common carrier status needs to apply. That said, Josh is a piece of shit. He's been trying to maintain the PR line that his forum didn't kill Byuu; they didn't, but they double down and claim Byuu isn't even dead. He's had evidence for over a year that Byuu died exactly as claimed, and he didn't bother publishing it and correcting the public record because it made his site look bad. He's normally so eager to publish the truth of awful internet behaviour, but he's silent on his own site's dirty deeds. What else is he hiding?
- rpmisms 2y agoI personally dislike Josh (moreso the ugly parts of the farms, actually), but strongly agree with him on this particular issue. The open Internet is extremely important to civil liberties.
- amiga386 2y agoExactly. People seem so worried about governments controlling public discourse for their own nefarious ends, that they don't even seem to be aware that private individuals are controlling public discourse for their own nefarious ends. And if well-connected geeks can massage their online profiles, call in favours from unelected moderators, hide pertinent facts about themselves... what's to stop all manner of awful behaviour from being covered up? What's to stop petty business owners from destroying their rivals?
- VS1999 2y agoThere's also the issue when private companies just do what the government expects of them, or even pressures them to do. There was a brief controversy (canonized by CBS news) when the current administration ordered social media sites like twitter, youtube, and and facebook to remove posts that they thought were false or painted them in a bad light. What is the point of placing restrictions on government if they can just have a private company do it? I'm also tired of seeing people say "It's a private company, they can do what they want." I don't know why the average person is so enthusiastic about the idea of getting taken for a ride by huge corporations.
- VS1999 2y agoI'm glad this covers the "canonization cycle" that's popular among news sites right now. The path to getting something declared as truth on wikipedia is to convince an unqualified journalist to uncritically repeat your claims, and now you can point to that as an official source. Often it goes even deeper if you try to track down a source on wikipedia and it's a reputable news site citing another, citing another, citing another, all the way down to the original source being some cooking blog. This means that unqualified bloggers and the tech company who host the infrastructure are the final arbiters of truth.
- throwaway48476 2y agoThis is related to citogenesis where Wikipedia moderators end up being the arbiters of truth. https://xkcd.com/978/ https://xkcd.com/978/
- Vt71fcAqt7 2y agoWhat would you propose as an alternative to the current accepted sources system? In my mind there sadly isn't much of a choice. It means that Wikipedia is not so useful for charged political articles, and the number of articles achieving that status has continued to increase, but it also means it is generally good for technical and scientific articles as well as the more niche history articles that are more often written by subject experts than political wariors.
- vintermann 2y agoWikipedia should admit that "verifiability" matters because truth matters, and that they can't get away from making judgments on what's true. in particular, making judgments about which sources are truthy, as they do, is a judgment on what's true. If something true and important can't be written on Wikipedia, that is actually a problem. If something false can be written on Wikipedia because a truthy source has said it, that's a huge problem. Wikipedia should also acknowledge that a source can be trustworthy in some areas and not in others, and that e.g. someone posting evidence of their own statements is more trustworthy than a third party saying what they said. In short, it's not hard imagining better policies. It's maybe hard to imagine getting them implemented in the most socially gamed institution on the internet.
- A1kmm 2y agoMisgendering someone (Liz Fong-Jones pronouns, as documented on her own sites, are she/her) does tend to undermine the credibility that this is a legitimate grievance. Surely given the length at which the author writes on her, they would be aware of this, so it can only be assumed to be a deliberate transphobic act. The defamation case mentioned in Australia appears not to have been responded to (see https://austlii.edu.au/cgi-bin/viewdoc/au/cases/vic/VSC/2023/770.html https://austlii.edu.au/cgi-bin/viewdoc/au/cases/vic/VSC/2023...), but the judge in the case was satisfied that she was actually defamed and doxxed on the site, that she had been harassed as a result of that doxxing, and that the plaintiff had been informed in advance and had done nothing. It seems legitimate that courts in that case should be able to take such things down.
- rlygia 2y ago>It seems legitimate that courts in that case should be able to take such things down. The Kiwi Farms posts that supposedly defamed Fong-Jones were made by American users and the man sued in Australia had absolutely no connection to them other than leasing IPs to Joshua Moon's company. It's absolutely not legitimate. The only reason the man in Australia was sued is because Fong-Jones would not win a lawsuit against Joshua or the users of the site. Joshua specifically talks about the legitimacy of the lawsuit in the article: "In affidavits supplied to Australian court, Liz Fong-Jones has promised under penalty of perjury that these IP addresses are critical to the Kiwi Farms’s operations, uptime, and (most importantly) ability to deliver mean posts about him to the world-wide Internet. We have not used these IP addresses in a year, and only used them publicly for less than a year. How critical these IP addresses are can be easily determined by the fact that the Kiwi Farms remains available to the world-wide Internet, and that we do not use any Flow Chemical IP addresses in doing
- JoshuaMoon 2y agoHello - I am the author of this article. Yes, my choice of pronoun was deliberate. I will allow you to determine why. In regards to the litigation, your interpretation is wrong. The main reason why the default was granted is that LFJ lied in the affidavits to the court. It was stated under penalty of perjury that the IPs were absolutely necessary for the site to be able to stay up. The site is still up and you may access it on the normal Internet with a normal browser. No IPs from Flow Chemical are in use. Therefore, LFJ's claims that the IPs were necessary are a lie. The other claim significant to the litigation is that I am unserviceable. That the need to sue Vincent was that there is no way to sue me. I am currently involved in two, soon three, separate ongoing civil litigations in the United States. My attorney's address can be found by a link present on every single page of the Kiwi Farms. Simply put, LFJ lied that there is no way to service me. Perhaps, if my website was Australian, it would be within the Court's jurisdiction to object to its contents and order it removed. Fortunately, it is American. I hope this helps.
- ta909090 2y ago[flagged]
- lizthegray 2y ago[flagged]
- lizthegray 2y ago[flagged]
- bitwize 2y agoA transphobe is assmad that a transgender person attempted to get his harassment forum taken off the internet for doing shit that violates ISPs' terms of service and, in some cases, the law; and, since transgender people run the internet now, was almost successful. Hackernews is totally at sixes and sevens about whom to believe or support.
- unsignednoop 2y ago[dead]
- thrwaway1234567 2y agoI assume part of the confusion that people have is that kiwifarms harassment is not (always) blatantly obvious. Most of the time, they don't outright say "go harass this person" (unlike other sites). The users claim they have rules against harassment and that they don't engage in it. But as demonstrated by the links I've posted elsewhere in this thread, that is not entirely true. The owner of the site has admitted to allowing harassment, and has even directed it on some occasions
- Khaine 2y agoMore damning @dang why have allegations of inappropriate behaviour of Fong-Jones been silently redacted on hacker news but unfounded allegations against kiwifarms is allowed?
- thrwaway1234567 2y agoWhat unfounded allegations about the site have been allowed?
- Khaine 2y agoWell for starters that Kiwifarms killed Byuu. There is no evidence that it was bullying or harassment from kiwi farms that caused his him to commit suicide. I mean, there is no evidence of claims against Fong-jones apart from the allegations recorded in the hacker news thread (and the admission of a "consent-accident"), and I've never seen actual evidence of kiwifarms being the actual cause of Buy's death, yet it is repeatedly claimed as such.
- vonlong 2y ago[flagged]
- thrwaway1234567 2y ago> Well for starters that Kiwifarms killed Byuu. There is no evidence that it was bullying or harassment from kiwi farms that caused his him to commit suicide. Byuu/Near is the one who blames kiwifarms in their suicide note on twitter. https://twitter.com/near_koukai/status/1408940057235312640 https://twitter.com/near_koukai/status/1408940057235312640 Archived link, since twitter isn't usable without login: https://archive.ph/HmIcA https://archive.ph/HmIcA Here's part of what they said in that thread: >But Kiwi Farms has made the harassment orders of magnitude worse. It's escalated from attacking me for being autistic, to attacking and doxing my friends, and trying to suicide bait another, just to get a reaction from me. I lost one of my best friends to this. I feel responsible >[...] >It's too late for me, but I pray that someone, at some point, will do something about that website. There's too many people suffering, and no one seems to care because we are relative nobodies online, and they know that. Evil triumphs when good men do nothing. >[...] >I would have kept going if Joshua Moon had shown me just the tiniest bit of compassion. But he chose not to. That's not on me, that's on him. That's on every last person who pushed me to this point and didn't let up. I never deserved any of this.