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Comment by Overtonwindow | Hacker News Reader

"[W]e strongly believe that what GoDaddy, Google, and Cloudflare did here was dangerous. That’s because, even when the facts are the most vile, we must remain vigilant when platforms exercise these rights. Because Internet intermediaries, especially those with few competitors, control so much online speech, the consequences of their decisions have far-reaching impacts on speech around the world."

Well said. I'm glad EFF is not burrying their heads in the sand and hiding behind the "but they're nazis!" Excuse.

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Indeed. It seems as though the entire West has lost its collective mind about the importance of free speech and free expression as bedrock principles which ensure peace, stability and prosperity.

Additionally, I view these acts of censorship as a great opportunity for blockchain and other nascent decentralized web technologies to take off. It's a classic case of the innovator's dilemma - when a company or industry seems ascendant, it becomes complacent to new threats, and the seeds of its destruction are sown right underneath it. Sometimes it even assists in the process. (Microsoft's neglect of IE, allowing Mozilla to flourish in the mid-2000s, is one of my favorite examples.) With their suppression of speech, these centralized services are quite possibly hastening their own demise.

Someone needs to invent a Godwin-like rule about the word "blockchain" being used in Internet conversations...

I don't understand how Godwin's rule is useful. Its only effect on arguments is that on top of the inevitable "Hitler" comment you now also get an inevitable "Godwin" follow-up, usually delivered with the air of having somehow won the argument. It's beyond redundant IMO.

There's no such thing as "Godwin's Rule" - it's "Godwin's Law" and it said nothing about winning arguments; only that as the length of an argument increased, the probability that a comparison with the Nazis would appear approached 1.

You can't invoke it either. It's a statistical observation.

How is that a useful observation, though?

As the length of any internet argument grows, the probability of anything being said would approach 1.

I don't know about anyone else, but unless the discussion is actually historical in nature, then the point at which I find a discussion ceases to be interesting and reverts to name-calling is about the point that Godwin's Law appears.

That's because people abuse Godwin's law (or what they think it is) to shut down discussion.

Taken from Wikipedia;

Godwin's law itself can be abused as a distraction, diversion or even as censorship, fallaciously miscasting an opponent's argument as hyperbole when the comparisons made by the argument are actually appropriate. Similar criticisms of the "law" (or "at least the distorted version which purports to prohibit all comparisons to German crimes") have been made by American lawyer, journalist and author Glenn Greenwald.

Godwin's law does not claim to articulate a fallacy; it is instead framed as a memetic tool to reduce the incidence of inappropriate hyperbolic comparisons. "Although deliberately framed as if it were a law of nature or of mathematics, its purpose has always been rhetorical and pedagogical: I wanted folks who glibly compared someone else to Hitler to think a bit harder about the Holocaust", Godwin has written. In December 2015, Godwin commented on the Nazi and fascist comparisons being made by several articles on Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, saying: "If you're thoughtful about it and show some real awareness of history, go ahead and refer to Hitler when you talk about Trump.

Godwin's Law has been repealed: https://mobile.twitter.com/sfmnemonic/status/896898183246303...

"Any internet conversation of unbounded size will inevitably attempt to solve social problems with a blockchain."

Hardly. America is just finally catching up to Europe on banning hate speech.

...which isn't a good thing in my opinion.

One more quote because I think it sums things up very well:

"Protecting free speech is not something we do because we agree with all of the speech that gets protected. We do it because we believe that no one—not the government and not private commercial enterprises—should decide who gets to speak and who doesn’t."

Although the only thing actually protected by the First Amendment is protection against censorship of speech by the government. Private commercial enterprises can do what they want (since technically you should be able to move to a competitor).

1. Even if the First Amendment is only limited to the government, the concept of free speech predates and extends far beyond the First Amendment.

2. Does the Constitution apply if the government allows private entities to take over roles of the government? There is the concept of utilities and common carriers that extend upon this logic.

3. Even without the above points, one should still be able to see a double standard being applied to violent/extremist speech. Saying a company can do whatever it wants doesn't explain what the company actually wants. If the company is applying a double standard to what speech it allows, then the true wants of the company is something we need to discuss and decide do we want to tolerate.

An interesting example for your comment might be the use of private prisons, and probation companies.

This is also dangerous for clear reasons. If speech deemed bad is censored we may have no examples with which to contrast good ideas. Think of free speech as natural selection for ideas.

John Stuart Mill thought free speech should extend into the private world:

Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practises a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself. Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough: there needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling; against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them.

This is precisely true. The Constitution does not offer protection from the vagaries of capital, but capital realizes that certain ideologies, like brands, are toxic. Thus the New Yorker and Economist covers this week depicting the President' relationship to extremism.

Why not? If I own a bar I shouldn't be allowed to decide what entertainment I hire based on their content? We can't have a society where all speech is protected, even from private actors.

It can't be phrased clearer while still distancing themselves from the cause clearly and coherently... unlike other people.

On that same note: Good riddance. Policy and processes are probably in no case ever too slow to take effect. Thanks to Google and GoDaddy for Pavlov'ing me towards reasonable human understanding, and thanks for EFF for making me aware that that there's a problem with "learning" things that way.

because it takes balls to stick up for freedom these days and let's be honest, most people just don't have the balls these days. fear is winning.

It was dangerous, but also their right to do. The CEO of Cloudflare called out his own action as capricious and not good practice, but he still did it. Because hey, they're literally nazis. And anyways, one of Cloudflare's major services is filtering out spam, noise, and malicious traffic...

The situation was called out clearly for what it was. It was his right to do it, and it was understandable that he did it, and he should be able to do it.

The problem is that the centralization of these services gives them so much power that it's problematic for free speech that they do it.

The latter is the problem.

except they are.

They say "we agree with the ban" but then say "it's dangerous!"

of course it's dangerous, and yes, the speech is vile. but freedom of speech doesn't stop when we are insulted.

Can't agree more. Today it's Nazis, tomorrow it's not showing enough support for the chosen candidate. This is the one slippery slope. It's evident in PC-speech. Today's PC speech is not the PC speech from the 90s.

And it's not that I don't like Pc speech. I prefer it. But I also don't want it to be the only kind of speech one can use for discussion. Try and have any good philosophical argument without breaking PC boundaries.

It's a scary thing when one group controls the narrative of what is acceptable and unacceptable speech.

I don't see one group controlling that narrative. I see a wide variety of groups uniting to reject one particular narrative/ideology that is widely agreed to be toxic on its own terms; its loudest proponents explicitly call for genocide and war, and that is literally an incitement to violence against the many and various targets of their dislike.

I'd encourage you to check out material from groups like Life after Hate that specialize in deradicalization of former white nationalists to get their first-hand perspective on the psychology of fascism.

I can't reply to dead comments and can't link to the original page (because it's no longer accessible by DNS) but this article reports on examples of explicit calls for violence by far right commentators: https://itsgoingdown.org/unite-right-organizers-encourage-gu...

I understand the argument that such determinations should be 'left up to the law' but the corollary of that is asserting that regular people should not have any political agency to express their own opposition to movements they find threatening or inimical to their values.

I'm sticking to a very narrow interpretation of what counts as threats/incitement here.

No, there is no slippery slope. This is a group that advocates an ideology that, when it was put in place, resulted in catastrophe for mankind.

In other words, what they advocate is what exists at the bottom of the slope. You know, Godwin's Law and all that?

>This is a group that advocates an ideology that, when it was put in place, resulted in catastrophe for mankind.

And what about other ideologies which have had similar results? How many has died under communist? What about religious extremist whose beliefs have led to mass murder?

Are we being consistent with the reasoning? If not, then the reasoning given isn't the actual reasoning, so what is the actual reasoning?

Ideologies that inadvertently caused many deaths are different from one where mass murder is the stated goal.

What happens if the deaths are a direct result, but not openly stated in the 10 minute summary?

Take for example, a group that wants to remove undesirables from the US (I'll leave which group open for imagination, it doesn't really matter). They advocate non-violent removal through legal means. This sounds nice in practice, but many, especially libertarians, will quickly realize that any police enforcement of such laws would result in threats of violence. Namely, either the group leave willingly or police will begin to physically attack them to arrest them, and any resistance would be met with tasers on a good day or bullets on a bad day.

Even though they advocate non-violent methods, I think it is reasonable to say they are actually advocating violence (unless they can purpose some truly non-violent method that I'm unaware of).

So, what next, the communists or Marxists because the ideology they espouse caused even more deaths?

I agree they are a hateful group. An odious group of people possibly only superseded in their vileness by extremist religious fanatics who won't hesitate to kill, but we're not shutting their speech down, are we?

In my view, this is one of those things that is binary. Either you have free speech, or you don't. There is no in between, finessing it. You end up with lese majeste and other nonsense bullshit.

This post is wrong on so many levels.

Those ideologies did not have the hatred and violence at their core that Nazism did. That's why there is no "Godwins Law" when it comes to Marxism. That's my point: This is the most reviled philosophy that currently exists, and people are complaining about "free speech" when previously they would shriek "Godwins Law" whenever comparisons are made. That's how far we've fallen.

Saying that free speech is binary is incredibly misguided and a root cause of the problem. It's overly simplistic and absolutist and quite frankly, is complete and total nonsense. At some point something will be uttered that you or some other "free speech absolutist" will object to.

Are you kidding? Have you not read up on what they did during the Great Leap Forward? Innocent people, their own people, were pulled out of their dwellings charges made up on the spot and killed in the squares. What Stalin did in Ukraine was pretty much pure hate for them.

Yes, I object because your cause will be coopted to further a specific ideology at the expense of all others.

I did. I also read up on the use of racial slavery and genocide of native Americans as the basis of Americas rise to power.

Unlike you though I am able to understand that one of them(Nazism) has racial superiority and oppression as a core feature of their ideology while the others do not.

Again, there is no "Godwins Law" for Marxism/American Capitalism. I wonder why that is???

I think you are putting far too much into this "Godwins Law" thing. Just because Hitler is viewed as one of the worst people in history, doesn't mean he was the worst. Attila the Hun or Nero would have a good chance at the title if they were more recent.

But at the core of this argument is who has the right to decide what beliefs are allowed and what ones are not? For example I'm against ISIS, but think I have no right to suppress their speech. But I'll happily try to convince someone that the ISIS ideology is evil.

> as a core feature of their ideology while the others do not.

They seem to be exceptional, but if we curtail their speech that means it leaves other, undoubtedly less offensive, speech to be up for negotiation. For instance I'd be pleased to see some of your authoritarianism curtailed if it wasn't for ideals of freedom of speech.

Actually, racial and moral superiority were a big factor in the ideology for enslaving and killing native americans.

They probably do in places which suffered from it (Ukraine).

America was not the first or last European colony. Mexico was a colony, Brazil was a colony with even worse racism -bad things happened and continue to happen everywhere. Slave trade continues in the middle east. Today. Read up on what Latin American colonies did to the native populations. It's not different. They didn't have confederates.

I don't see how any of that should subjugate free speech.

Murderers have free speech --I'll wager more than a few victim's families wish they did not. I believe they should still have that right.

Should we go to Japan and also try to shut down the speech of those still in support of the imperial campaign in China, one of the most atrocious incidents of all of WWii?

You are right about the countries that suffered from Communism. East European countries, or Poland at least treat Nazism and communism as equally evil. There even is a passage in Polish Constitution (Article 13) that makes both Nazism and Communism exceptions from the free speech rule.

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