[HN Gopher] Online censorship's institutional power
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Online censorship's institutional power
Author : rpmisms
Score : 65 points
Date : 2024-05-16 19:48 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (madattheinternet.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (madattheinternet.substack.com)
| csande17 wrote:
| The 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, 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.
| rpmisms wrote:
| It 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 wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| Why shouldn't HN be critical of the damage done to the
| internet infrastructure as a whole?
| dang wrote:
| Software 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.
| roarkeful wrote:
| Not a dupe, previous post from the same site here:
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38685782), talking about an
| adjacent topic.
| dang wrote:
| That was an error in HN's dupe detector (a failure case of the
| software). Fixed now.
| amiga386 wrote:
| If you'd like it said more succinctly, here's the EFF saying 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 wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| Exactly. 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 wrote:
| There'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.
| busterarm wrote:
| > 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.
|
| It's especially humorous when you see those same people
| claiming that talking out the other side of their mouth
| about the danger of fascists.
| mistermann wrote:
| > What is the point of placing restrictions on government
| if they can just have a private company do it?
|
| "Perception is reality".
|
| - Lee Atwater (GOP Consultant)
|
| > I'm also tired of seeing people say "It's a private
| company, they can do what they want."
|
| A lot of people (many of them smart) don't realize that
| there is a distinction between the first amendment and
| the general principle of free speech, which precedes the
| first amendment.
| busterarm wrote:
| Not your average private individuals either, but incredibly
| wealthy and well-connected private individuals.
|
| Keffals, mentioned in the article, is close associates with
| and supported by Deviant Ollam and his wife Tarah, who was
| a senior director at Splunk and Symantec and is a fellow at
| Council on Foreign Relations.
| DaSHacka wrote:
| > Keffals, mentioned in the article, is close associates
| with and supported by Deviant Ollam and his wife Tarah,
| who was a senior director at Splunk and Symantec and is a
| fellow at Council on Foreign Relations.
|
| As someone familiar with all three, this is _extremely_
| disappointing to hear about.
|
| I have a lot of respect for Deviant, I can only hope he
| isn't very close to Keffals, or at the least isn't aware
| of the sheer number of scummy things they have done.
| busterarm wrote:
| Folks in the hacker community have a long history of
| being too forgiving of what should be hard-avoid
| character flaws.
|
| That's a big part of why these reputation-erasing,
| behind-closed-door censorship networks exist to begin
| with.
|
| One of infosec's biggest twitter cancel-brigade queens
| was also the most prolific troll in GNAA and had a long,
| public history of grooming underage males but everyone
| looks the other way and celebrates her accomplishments.
| She literally got a job on Biden's campaign and yet
| barely anyone talks about it.
| ImJamal wrote:
| I don't know the veracity of the claim, but Josh basically
| claims the EFF has been useless on this topic.
|
| > At the time the Kiwi Farms deplatforming was starting to show
| cracks in the Internet backbones, the EFF even launched a
| petititon website called "Protect the Stack", dedicated to
| trying to preserve the neutrality of the Internet. They have
| never contacted the Kiwi Farms directly to learn about where
| the stack is in danger, and as a result they have accomplished
| nothing! Despite the size, prestige, and financial support of
| the EFF, Protect the Stack has accomplished nothing!
| commandlinefan wrote:
| I remember the FCC well enough to be very, very wary of a
| government-regulated internet. I'd personally rather see the
| internet become ungovernable - if everybody ran Freenet, Tor
| and I2P, there'd be nothing to censor, but too many people
| prefer the illusion of selective censorability for me to
| believe that will ever happen. What the government _can_ do
| without nationalizing the internet infrastructure is provide
| legal support for entities that want to do so in an open way by
| indemnifying them from "harm". I'd like to see section 230 not
| repealed, but made more explicit - "no forum can be held
| legally liable in any way for any content hosted, only the
| original poster".
| leetcrew wrote:
| idk, this is all appealing in an abstract way, but I don't
| think it results in a world most people want to live in.
|
| we all draw the line in different places, but I think most
| would agree that some subset of user-submitted content is
| purely abusive. if the only recourse available to the victim
| requires identifying every individual poster, it's
| effectively impossible to stop.
|
| imo some sort of safe harbor mechanism is a reasonable
| compromise. we can't expect the host to prevent every single
| instance of abusive content, but we should require them to
| make some kind of reasonable effort.
| ClangMan wrote:
| He did correct the record on Byuu with a featured post on his
| forum and he talked about it in his podcast.
|
| It was relatively recently, in the last few weeks if I recall.
| mistermann wrote:
| > Courts and judges seem slow and fuddy-duddy, but they're
| conducted in public...
|
| How things are supposed to be and how they actually are are not
| always the same thing. This person is speculating, perhaps
| without knowing it.
| VS1999 wrote:
| I'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 wrote:
| This is related to citogenesis where Wikipedia moderators end
| up being the arbiters of truth. https://xkcd.com/978/
| A1kmm wrote:
| Misgendering 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...), 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 wrote:
| >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 wrote:
| Hello - 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.
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(page generated 2024-05-16 23:01 UTC)