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And with that, they've moved from being a dumb pipe to being a force for censorship. This has nothing to do with censorship. It doesn't attempt to make harassm

by JackC 12y ago

And with that, they've moved from being a dumb pipe to being a force for censorship. This has nothing to do with censorship. It doesn't attempt to make harassment impossible or illegal. It's a social strategy: you can choose to harass people online, or you can choose to be friends with the Tor developers, but you can't do both. For that matter, harassment is also a social strategy to discourage unwanted activity: you can choose to be a high-profile woman online, or you can choose not to have tons of strangers hate you, but you can't do both. So if this Tor statement somehow was censorship, harassment would be censorship as well. And so would lots of other things people do every day. We're social animals; we do things to encourage or discourage social participation that we like or don't like. If you have stinky shoes, we stand farther away. If you say shitty things to women, you can't be friends with the Tor developers. It's not censorship, it's freedom of choice. people need to come to terms with the fact that others may say terrible and hurtful things to them, and they need to have the fortitude to deal with it or ignore it If you need people to do that, you have a problem, because it is not going to happen. No snark here: if your plan for encouraging freedom depends on people not walking away from harassment, it is an unworkable plan. If you walk into a bar and everyone shouts terrible things at you, you are not going to "deal with it or ignore it"; you are going to leave. Right now big parts of the internet are like that for (e.g.) women: a bar they walk into, get terrible things shouted at them, and leave. The Tor devs here are saying, metaphorically, "hey, cut it out, man. You're making this bar suck for everyone." To me, that's a responsible way to encourage freedom in today's world, and more people should do the same.

angersock 12y ago
The Tor devs are saying "Hey, somebody has been harassing one of our members, and we're going to do something about it, concretely, and we write tools, but that's not enough." So, a casual reading suggests that they are intending to do something beyond mere blogging to help their friend. Such an action, unless it's just counter-harassment, could well be censorship. That's how I read their post. And no, it's not a good thing that their friend is being harassed. Basically, as I read it, their post was either feel-good me-too blog support, or it was a declaration of intent to do something, the nature of the problem in turn suggesting censorship or mechanisms for censorship. The whole "If you need people to have thick skins, well, that's a problem" attitude just isn't supported by the tech we're working with. Fact: It is possible to send a direct message from one person to another without any significant intermediary (via email, twitter, etc.). This is freakin' awesome. Fact: Some percentage of communications sent will be negative or offensive. Fact: We can either stop offensive communications in transit, or we can ignore them at receipt. We can't stop them being transmitted without creating a mechanism for immediate de facto censorship (hell, consider shadowbans in HN for an example of this). Fact: If we choose to stop offensive communications in transit, we are enabling the stopping of any communications in transit. The same software that lets us drop messages that say "kill all women"--or some other ghastly comment--is the same software that lets us drop messages that say "save all women". To pretend otherwise is willfully ignorant. So, it follows (to me, at any rate) that the only way to prevent the installation of such apparatus is to handle discarding messages at the point of reception--and that means being able to ignore or filter out things we disagree with without calling for some central authority to protect us. I even suggested a nice area of exploration for decentralized handling of that kind of spamming, but nobody cares about that--they just disagree with something else and flag to the bottom of the page. There's your system in action, by the way.

by JackC 12y ago

angersock 12y ago

The Tor devs are saying "Hey, somebody has been harassing one of our members, and we're going to do something about it, concretely, and we write tools, but that's not enough." So, a casual reading suggests that they are intending to do something beyond mere blogging to help their friend. Such an action, unless it's just counter-harassment, could well be censorship. That's how I read their post. And no, it's not a good thing that their friend is being harassed. Basically, as I read it, their post was either feel-good me-too blog support, or it was a declaration of intent to do something, the nature of the problem in turn suggesting censorship or mechanisms for censorship. The whole "If you need people to have thick skins, well, that's a problem" attitude just isn't supported by the tech we're working with. Fact: It is possible to send a direct message from one person to another without any significant intermediary (via email, twitter, etc.). This is freakin' awesome. Fact: Some percentage of communications sent will be negative or offensive. Fact: We can either stop offensive communications in transit, or we can ignore them at receipt. We can't stop them being transmitted without creating a mechanism for immediate de facto censorship (hell, consider shadowbans in HN for an example of this). Fact: If we choose to stop offensive communications in transit, we are enabling the stopping of any communications in transit. The same software that lets us drop messages that say "kill all women"--or some other ghastly comment--is the same software that lets us drop messages that say "save all women". To pretend otherwise is willfully ignorant. So, it follows (to me, at any rate) that the only way to prevent the installation of such apparatus is to handle discarding messages at the point of reception--and that means being able to ignore or filter out things we disagree with without calling for some central authority to protect us. I even suggested a nice area of exploration for decentralized handling of that kind of spamming, but nobody cares about that--they just disagree with something else and flag to the bottom of the page. There's your system in action, by the way.