[HN Gopher] ISPs Should Not Police Online Speech - No Matter How...
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ISPs Should Not Police Online Speech - No Matter How Awful It Is
Author : mantiq
Score : 160 points
Date : 2023-08-29 20:17 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.eff.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.eff.org)
| psychphysic wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Free speech has never existed. We've always been pushing and
| pulling against what's acceptable.
| depereo wrote:
| 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.
| cmh89 wrote:
| It's part of the American creation myth that's drilled into
| our heads as children.
|
| The Alien and Sedition Act was passed in 1798 which made it
| illegal to critique the government. Eugene Debs went to
| prison for advocating for draft dodging in World War 1.
|
| Part of is a lot of folks either can't or wont see the
| difference between "free speech" and "consequences for your
| actions".
|
| As Americans, we've never had more free speech than we have
| today. Most of our history is filled with censorship from
| media to actual human beings being arrested for wearing the
| wrong clothes. Of course, a lot of those free speech
| absolutist cheer censorship laws when they are targeted at
| LGBTQ individuals.
| jadamson wrote:
| NZ has literal racists in government, they're just the
| right kind - see Marama Davidson.
| vore wrote:
| So does every country, whatever "kind" they might be -
| what's your point?
| jadamson wrote:
| 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.
| wellthen0 wrote:
| [flagged]
| wellthen0 wrote:
| [flagged]
| explanatorygap wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| If it's truly the first time Tier 1 blocking happens, I don't
| see how the EFF can be at odds with history.
| [deleted]
| vuavu wrote:
| Doesn't seem similar to this. You receive spam unwillingly, but
| you have to enter that forum and participate on purpose.
| wmf wrote:
| Not if they're organizing attacks on you.
| toast0 wrote:
| There's two issues here:
|
| a) should online speech be policed
|
| b) if so, who should do it?
|
| We don't let phone companies police the content of phone calls,
| and we don't let delivery services police the content of
| letters/packages, so why would we let ISPs police the content
| of network packets?
|
| Exceptions exist: you can't send most live animals by mail,
| packages are subject to inspection at customs borders, etc. But
| any sort of monitoring of content would need either clear
| evidence of danger, signs of abusing the network, or court
| involvement.
|
| If this content is so terrible that it deserves to be removed
| from the internet by any means necessary, shouldn't the process
| be that a court of competent jurisdiction should be able to
| issue an order requiring the site to be taken down. If the
| proprietors of the site bring it up through another ISP, not a
| party to the original order, a new order could be issued as
| well as holding the proprietors in contempt, presumably.
|
| Jurisdiction issues on content are hairy, but jurisdiction
| issues on ISP connections are easy, the connections happen in
| specific locations, and you can order the connection severed at
| either end of the connection (as well as in between the ends).
| gorwell wrote:
| 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 history of this issue.
| cmh89 wrote:
| Do you think child pornography should be legal then?
| r3trohack3r wrote:
| Renditions of extreme violence are legal, and common in
| cinema. I find them repulsive, but I support people's right
| to free speech; they should be allowed to produce
| renditions of extreme violence and distribute them. The
| movie Texas Chainsaw Massacre is legal, and I support that.
|
| Doing a real life Texas Chainsaw Massacre is not legal.
| Recording a real life Texas Chainsaw Massacre and
| distributing the recordings should not be legal. I do not
| support that.
|
| I do not believe the speech part of Texas Chainsaw Massacre
| should be illegal, no matter how repulsive I find that
| genre of entertainment to be. I do believe the non-speech
| parts of those acts should absolutely be illegal - for
| obvious reasons.
|
| I personally do not believe I have to yield my
| absolutionist stance on free speech to say that content
| downstream of those actions can't be distributed and
| possessed. There is no way for that content to have been
| legally produced, therefor there is no way for that content
| to be legally possessed and distributed.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| Child pornography, where real children are involved in any
| way, is/should be illegal because of the crime that has to
| occur to produce it.
|
| Any CSAM which is fully divorced from real children (or any
| sort of crime in general) in all ways should be legal, as
| gross as it is.
| drewcoo wrote:
| 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."
| cmh89 wrote:
| That's not really the question I asked, and I'm not sure
| how your response is relevant.
| frabbit wrote:
| 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
|
| If you care about there being genuinely independent news media
| then funding these guys is something you can do right now.
| thfuran wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| thfuran wrote:
| And we also can't sue the electric company whenever someone
| uses the electricity they provide to post a scam on
| Craigslist, which is the sort of liability I'm saying the ISP
| should assume before they're allowed to start mucking about
| with their customers' traffic.
| cmh89 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| The landlord, yes. The electric company directly, bypassing
| the landlord, probably not.
| fallingknife wrote:
| 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.
| gravitate wrote:
| 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-
| inf...
| yanderekko wrote:
| Net neutrality stopped being a concern when activists decided
| that it was to their overall advantage to ally with powerful,
| censorious corporations in order to combat right-wing speech .
| torstenvl wrote:
| 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/o...
| shortformblog wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| >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."
| jauer wrote:
| 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.
| IncogNET wrote:
| [dead]
| pseudo0 wrote:
| 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
| unsui wrote:
| 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.
| 3np wrote:
| The argument isn't that everyone should have "full, unfettered
| free speech" but that ISPs should not be enforcers.
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| The US supreme court has narrowed down the few necessary
| exceptions to freedom of speech over 230 years. It's not
| perfect, but it's better then having ISPs make these decisions.
| Gartent wrote:
| Quintessential midwit take.
|
| It never was absolute. We prescribed limits with laws.
|
| Utility companies should be the last to declare them.
|
| "Slippery slope" is you denying the causality of a
| relationship. But, it does. Heard of Cloudflare?
| alexb_ wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| > 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.
| dmix wrote:
| > Why does it necessarily need to be one-sided, where
| giving in to one iota entails giving in to the whole
| enchilada?
|
| Because every single time this is what happens. Your
| argument basically comes down to creating some speedbumps
| to slow down how long it will take, not whether it will or
| not create the same predictable outcome.
|
| I'd rather not live in a place like the UK where SWAT teams
| do over-night raids of peoples houses because they tweeted
| something mean. The sort of situation I'm sure people said
| would never happen when the ball got rolling decades ago.
| wnevets wrote:
| 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-
| re...
| yanderekko wrote:
| 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.
| jmyeet wrote:
| [flagged]
| sbuttgereit wrote:
| I think you left out, "Think of the children."
| lemoncookiechip wrote:
| [flagged]
| ibizaman wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| fentanyl_peyotl wrote:
| "Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of
| tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who
| are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant
| society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the
| tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them..."
|
| "... In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we
| should always suppress the utterance of intolerant
| philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational
| argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression
| would certainly be unwise. But we should claim the right to
| suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily
| turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of
| rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they
| may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument,
| because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by
| the use of their fists or pistols."
|
| Karl Popper was a free speech absolutist. His point was that
| every form of speech should be countered with speech, not
| "deplatforming" or laws criminalizing it. I wish he was alive
| to see people mangle his thoughts into "He actually was against
| tolerance and said to jail your political enemies."
| jmyeet wrote:
| He most definitely was not a free speech absolutist. The very
| quote you include makes that clear:
|
| > But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary
| even by force
|
| The quote says rational argument and discourse is the
| preferred option but there will be times when all rational
| argument will be rejected and that may require suppression.
|
| How do you get free speech absolutism from that?
| wmf wrote:
| Are there any lawsuits pending against KiwiFarms? If not, why
| not?
| arp242 wrote:
| 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.
| mvncleaninst wrote:
| 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?
| CM30 wrote:
| 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.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > 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.
| yanderekko wrote:
| 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.
| jqpabc123 wrote:
| 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.
| mortenjorck wrote:
| 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.
| zer8k wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| The ACLU are pretty useless these days
| pessimizer wrote:
| Actively harmful.
| TRiG_Ireland wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| For Internet harassment there basically isn't law
| enforcement. This needs to change but I'm not sure how.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| 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-
| 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.
| pessimizer wrote:
| In order to prevent bomb threats, we should run algos on
| every phone call. If they try to make a bomb threat, we can
| just break the connection and refer the caller to police.
| Why even wait for phone calls? We can just make the phones
| emit a high pitched alarm and send cops whenever the algos
| hear any sort of hate crime within range of the microphone.
| whatwhaaaaat wrote:
| 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?
| lisper wrote:
| > 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)
| nickff wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| another_story wrote:
| 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?
| drewcoo wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| Analemma_ wrote:
| 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.
| amiga386 wrote:
| Their national director's statement in the immediate
| aftermath of the Charlottesville riots:
|
| https://www.vox.com/2017/8/20/16167870/aclu-hate-speech-
| nazi...
|
| > The backlash has already spurred other ACLU chapters to
| declare that they don't believe free-speech protections
| apply to events like the one in Charlottesville, and led
| the ACLU's national director, Anthony Romero, to declare
| the group will no longer defend the right to protest when
| the protesters want to carry guns.
|
| > "Until now," lawyer and blogger Scott Greenfield wrote,
| the ACLU has "never quite come out and announced that they
| will refuse to defend a constitutional right. This
| announcement says that when someone seeks to exercise two
| rights at the same time, the ACLU is outta there."
|
| And their internal policy document listing out things that
| might stay their hand in an otherwise vigourous defense of
| free speech:
|
| https://www.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/20180621ACLU
| ....
|
| > Considerations Specific to Speech Cases
|
| > * Whether the speaker seeks to engage in or promote
| violence
|
| > * Whether the speakers seek to carry weapons
|
| > * The impact of the proposed speech and the impact of its
| suppression
|
| > * The extent to which we are able to make clear that even
| as we defend a speaker's right to say what they want, we
| reserve our right to condemn the views themselves
|
| > * The extent to which we are able to mitigate any harm to
| our mission, values, priorities, and/or relationships
| droptablemain wrote:
| The ACLU changed quite dramatically around 2016.
| yanderekko wrote:
| 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.)
| adamrezich wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| The internet was never separate from meatspace reality -
| that was always a naive cypherpunk delusion.
| wellthen0 wrote:
| [flagged]
| [deleted]
| amiga386 wrote:
| Indeed, the ACLU have lost their way.
|
| 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...
|
| > 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.
| freedomben wrote:
| > _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.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| "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 wrote:
| *"...we must go and kill Wales"
| bewaretheirs wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| umvi wrote:
| The politician's syllogism
| (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politician%27s_syllogism)
| jfengel wrote:
| 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.
| zamadatix wrote:
| 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.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| 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.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| >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?
| local_person wrote:
| [dead]
| Gartent wrote:
| "The system is broken, we need vigilantes"
| rolph wrote:
| 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.
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