Inciting Violence vs Freedom of Speech
blog.namecheap.com
blog.namecheap.com
If they were just the domain registrar I think this is a dangerous precedent. If anything, it is just going to cause people to sympathise with the Daily Stormer, which is presumably the opposite of the intended effect.
EDIT: For anyone who wants to read their site, I think this is it: (onion.casa is a Tor gateway) https://dstormer6em3i4km.onion.casa/
From having a browse around, the site appears to be basically a joke. It's pretty distasteful but I personally don't think it warrants being taken down.
I think that people who are willing to sympathize with neo-Nazis because a domain registrar refused to process their registration should be considered as just a subset of "Nazi sympathizers," and their views treated accordingly.
> From having a browse around, the site appears to be basically a joke. It's pretty distasteful but I personally don't think it warrants being taken down.
The site certainly presents itself as a joke to avoid substantive criticism or engagement with the viewpoints it's promoting from detractors. But, say, altright.com takes them seriously, and lists them alongside clearly-not-joking Neo-Nazi organization Identity Evropa:
https://altright.com/2017/08/05/the-unite-the-right-rally-is...
The Daily Stormer has been promoting the event heavily and it looks like they are going to bring a lot of young new cadres to the rally. Identity Evropa will be there as well as several Southern Nationalist groups. There will be no Alt-Lite co-rally, it will be just us, the proverbial and literal White Guard out there defending the statue of General Lee. This is a good development. They are quickly becoming irrelevant and losing their street presence as we continue to grow and take up space.
No one knows how many of us will show up there just yet. A conservative estimate would put us at about 500, although if the Daily Stormer book clubs, frog twitter, and affiliated groups come through, we can top 1000.
They mention themselves that 4chan was the place where ironic appreciation of Hitler grew into earnest appreciation of Hitler:
https://dstormer6em3i4km.onion.casa/a-normies-guide-to-the-a...
Anti-Semitic and racist jokes had been a key feature of /b/, but on /pol/ the sentiments behind the jokes slowly became serious, as people realized they were based on fact. /pol/ became a haven for virulent anti-Semites and aggressive racists, and tone of the Alt-Right is drawn directly from these roots on 4chan.
On 4chan, the Jewish problem was analyzed by news junkies and history buffs, feminism was deconstructred by sexually frustrated young men, and race was considered based on the actual data on the issue. The rehabilitation of Adolf Hitler and the NSDAP largely took place on 4chan.
Anti-Semitic and racist jokes had been a key feature of /b/, but on /pol/ the sentiments behind the jokes slowly became serious, as people realized they were based on fact. /pol/ became a haven for virulent anti-Semites and aggressive racists, and tone of the Alt-Right is drawn directly from these roots on 4chan.
[...] This made promoting the right-wing agenda not only meaningful, but also extremely fun. The Alt-Right carries with it that spirit of fun.
So, sure, maybe they are a distasteful joke. They are also earnestly advocating Hitler's ideology and Nazi ideology by name. The joke is a front, to push the Overton window far enough in their direction that the non-joking version of their ideology becomes tenable.
And there it is. If you disagree with me, you're a Nazi (subset). Predictable.
I think you can perfectly well disagree with Namecheap's decision without being a Nazi sympathizer (let alone a Nazi, which I accused nobody of being other than The Daily Stormer, who claim alignment with NSDAP policy). That is not what I was replying to. I was replying to the specific claim that people will sympathize with Nazis because of Namecheap's action.
The only predictable thing here is your strawman response, and even so, I would have hoped we'd have a higher quality of discourse on HN.
> I said, if you're sympathize with Nazis, you're a Nazi sympathizer.
If a human is wounded, I will render aid. This has nothing to do with ideological sympathy. There can be, and are, other motives. Making blanket statements, like you continue to make, are irresponsible, at best.
> The only predictable thing here is your strawman response,
It's not a strawman to point out your conceptual failings. Good luck with whatever.
Being unironically called a "Nazi sympathizer" is by far the most chilling thing to me that has happened of all the political events that have occurred in the last few years. It is also sad that I have to add a disclaimer that I have voted Democrat in the last decade of elections, am not a bigot, etc, etc, (not that someone using this sort of language would believe me).
Do people who say these sorts of things not realize the massive irony of accusing people who defend basic rights of a generally detested group of being "Nazi sympathizers"?
> If anything, it is just going to cause people to sympathise with the Daily Stormer, which is presumably the opposite of the intended effect.
There are two different things you can sympathize with here: the merits of the Daily Stormer's position / ideology, and their desire to have a platform.
The domain registrar is shutting them down because they don't agree with the merits of their ideology. I am reading the criticism above as saying, "If the domain registrar shuts them down, more people will be sympathetic to their ideology, which is counterproductive." I think it is fair to label people inclined to sympathy with Nazi ideas as Nazi sympathizers.
I suppose it could be an argument that the domain registrar's action will cause people to be sympathetic to the fact that they should have a domain name, but that makes less sense to me.
OK, fair enough, but that's not what you originally said, nor is it what people are doing when they throw that term at me. They're (sometimes intentionally) conflating advocacy of free speech for repugnant ideas with advocacy of those ideas themselves. But I appreciate your openness to try to see my position.
The police officers were flying the surveillance helicopter over the crowds downtown when their helicopter crashed, so I'd agree with Vice that their deaths are related to the events.
Let's focus our upset feelings on the things that actually matter, like neo-Nazis in our streets, rather than on nit-picking journalistic investigations into them.
It's way worse than a bunch of people walking around espousing racist views. Real-time subtle manipulation of large amounts of individuals is what actually matters. Democracy/society breaks down when you have large-scale brainwashing and suppression of dissenting opinions/views past a certain tipping point. Ironically, I'd argue that's a large component of how the Nazis in Germany rose to power.
A lot of the "First Amendment" vs "private companies aren't obligated to provide service" arguments could be sidestepped by the acknowledgment that we do have a history of certain companies becoming public utilities. Would it be acceptable (or even legal) for a phone company to deny phone service to Nazis? Could an electric company turn off power to the homes of KKK members because of their membership? Does the water company have a right to cut off the tap to Richard Spencer's house/offices because they don't want to quench hate's thirst? Maybe such things should or shouldn't apply to the world of the Internet, but I do wish that a lot of the arguments didn't assume that we live in some sort of anarcho-capitalist society of purely voluntary contracts.
Sure they have. Many domains have been revoked for association with "piracy". For example, a famous hip-hop fan site, whose name I forget now. It took them years to get unblocked. But I do agree that the Culture Wars aspect is troubling.
The Namecheap post argues in favor of revoking the domain by saying that it is inciting violence, and not just exercising free speech. As a domain registrar, there's nothing stopping you from having a policy that doesn't allow the incitement of violence.
But, I wonder: how many domains has Namecheap revoked in the name of this ideal? If you're going to have a policy of what is and what is not allowed, the reason why it will be so difficult is because you need to enforce the policy on every website equally. You cannot cherry-pick one website, cite the policy, and then forget that it exists.
Even if this policy is applied to every website, who is deciding what counts as incitement of violence? Can I make a violent post on a website, and then report them to Namecheap for inciting violence, or does it need to be a website administrator that makes it? How direct does the incitement need to be, given that the example provided in the blog post seems relatively indirect? I'm sure you can think of a myriad of other questions and inconsistencies with this, because there's so much room left to interpretation and bias, when it's obvious the reason the domain was revoked was due to political pressure.
Given the amount of companies that have dropped the website, it's starting to set a pretty bad precedent. There's plenty of equally bad content on very large websites (Reddit, 4chan, etc), and if the standard for this content becomes to wipe it from the face of the Internet at all costs, things won't be pretty.
Taking down a Nazi website creates no onerous obligation to police the entirety of the web. Addressing only those sites which rise to prominence admirably moves us towards a better internet and society.
Of course, it's only one high-profile incident and it should be possible to successfully argue that you (namecheap) only act on this policy when information about the violation actively reaches you as a passive observer. But you are then playing from behind so it's still not as if this action carries no potential future liabilities.
If a website that incites violence can be taken down because of a single violence-inciting remark, then people will just post violent remarks on their enemies websites and proceed to get them taken down. As an administrator, whether of a domain, social network, forum, or services on other layers of the Internet, it's unreasonable to be held responsible for every single thing done by your users. That doesn't mean you have to let them do anything, but when a problem occurs, the first step should not be to start taking down websites and servers, instead of looking for a more reasonable solution.
They need to find a registrar whose market position is built on taking a stance. Namecheap ain't it.
"At Namecheap, we believe having a free and open Internet is the only option that will continue the legacy of innovation and openess that stands for everything we all value in our modern society." --Namecheap CEO Richard Kendall, 2011
I'm curious what changed.
Not to mention the Holocaust denial laws. But you can deny Armenian genocide just fine. Convenient, eh?
"To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize." -- Voltaire.
Is perfect enforcement necessary? Of course you need to be _consistent_, but only acting when the content becomes known to you doesn't seem wholely unworkable.
That said, I much prefer it if registrars remained neutral on content (with the possible exception of the domain itself being the problem - consider, e.g., assassinateUSPrez2018[.]com).
e: typo fix "prefer registrars remain" -> "prefer it if registrars remained"
In practice they will act when content becomes known to them, but a problem with this is that it will lead to them taking down content when the Internet mobs demand it (as they will spam support tickets, emails, twitter accounts, and so on, demanding the offending website be taken down), instead of focusing on the real problems.
Just like people love getting their political enemies fired from work, now they will start to realize maybe they can do even better, and can get them wiped off of the Internet as well. Every time an attack like this is made, it will further radicalize the other side, giving them further resolve to attack back and with more strength. I just can't see this ending with anything good.
You absolutely can do complaint-based rather than pro-active enforcement, and prioritize enforcement based on the volume and nature of the complaints.
Does anyone have a link to this site?
I heard it had moved to Russia.
How can their ideas/speech be more dangerous than limitations of speech on the web?
Is there any speech you'd consider more dangerous than limiting freedom of speech on the web?
Can you? If you can, I will give a fair effort to CMV.
But ask yourself, if you're that sure, what's your evidence? I 'd need some strong evidence I was on the right side to hold that absolutist of a belief.
The reason that "free speech" is limited is that limiting it does almost no harm, and allowing it can result in human death.
This actually follows well into the specific example of racist nazi propaganda. The argument is fairly similar; allowing that speech has the chance to, in a more roundabout way, result in human oppression and death. Limiting it isn't great (especially since it often draws some amount of attention to it), but it does seem plausible that by stopping that speech from getting out there, there's less chance of such a movement forming.
It's an example from dicta illustrating the logic of a case since overruled as stating an improperly narrow view of free speech.
There should not be limitations on speech. By your logic we should limit speech on engineering and communism as they also have potential for harming people.
Engineering and communism typically don't, though where they do it should be shut down.
I can see there would be a big difference though in yelping a word in that situation and being directly responsible for the harm it caused (mischief maybe?) and expressing a person's ideas and beliefs.
The analogy you put doesn't work out, unfortunately, because ANY idea can result in human oppression and death. For example, the speech that civil rights leaders spoke and wrote that in a roundabout way caused injuries and deaths at protests motivated by them, the speech that fired up the American Revolution and other revolutions.
> It may be worth stressing, however, that even if one has an extremely strong intellectual commitment to truthseeking and public education, one can still legitimately and in good conscience explore the question of how some knowledge might be harmful. In fact, this very commitment demands that one does not shy away from such an exploration or from reporting openly on the findings.
Another one that's extremely common is use of a trademark. I do not have a free speech right to say "I provide Microsoft-certified computer repair services." We believe there's more harm to society from me going around causing people to believe that than from me being unable to say that.
Another one is unauthorized practice of law. I do not have a free speech right to say "I know how the GPL works and I can represent you in court." We believe it's more important to a free society that when someone says that, they're actually a trained and licensed lawyer who can competently represent you, and that the harm to you from me going in front of a judge and spouting nonsense on your behalf outweighs the harm from me being unable to speak freely about the GPL.
Do you think that these restrictions on free speech are more harmful than the cases they seek to prevent?
If you're an American who didn't think about the scope of the first amendment until now, well, that's gotta be embarrassing.
There are a couple of protected categories, as stated both by the Constitution and by society's norms. Being a neo-Nazi is not one of them.
The site's perfectly available. There are multiple links to it in the thread. No one's right to speech is being infringed.
You're probably the 5th person who has said this. Why do you think that's the only other option? Why give such an important issue so little consideration to alternatives?
I am personally, as you might guess, not a First Amendment absolutist, and I don't actually think that reasonable inconveniences on free speech cause us to lose the ideal of free speech, nor that reasonable inconveniences on free assembly cause us to lose the ideal of free assembly. I agree that there's room between the two extremes for free assembly - but I believe that because I also believe there's room between the two extremes for free speech.
I said once on here and got down voted that, "I wish we had someone like the NRA to fight for all our other rights." It's discouraging that people didn't seem to appreciate that.
There may be no good answer other than to keep fighting for what's right and against what's wrong and hope that the arc of the universe is bent in the correct direction.
Via a Tor gateway: https://dstormer6em3i4km.onion.casa/
...
>Ru-Center spokesman Yegor Timofeyev told RFE/RL in an e-mail that Roskomnadzor's letter asked the company "to look into [the] possibility of register suspension due to extremist content of this domain."
>"So we decided to suspend [the] domain Dailystormer.ru," he said.
https://www.rferl.org/a/u-s-neo-nazi-website-russian-domain-...
I assume Namecheap circumvented that by terminating their registration?
Source: https://www.geekwire.com/2017/seattles-bitmitigate-now-prote...
As someone who is facinated by what is happening I spend a decent amount of time spelunking in the dark web.
The Neo-Nazis are not that upset by this. They want to use the same tools to boycott the Zionist and Jews. It's actually one of the many things the Alt-Left and the Alt-Right agree on.
In addition we're making them into martyrs. Banning and suppression was counter productive on the original Nazis and it is counter productive here.
This should be we'll know by those who read civics. It is even codified in the book Rules For Radicals by Saul Alinsky. It makes me wonder what books Antifa are reading as they are doing all of the wrong things.
I get that it feels like we're (non nazis) are winning but we're not and this is isn't helping.
There's literally nothing we can do to stop these disgusting examples of humanity. Rational discourse is predicated on the idea that your opponent isn't purposefully lying. They are.
So leaving them in the sunlight accomplishes nothing, while driving them out of the public sphere while not destroying them, at least helps us as a society set a 'this is where tolerance ends' boundary. That has to exist somewhere, and Nazism is clearly beyond that.
As for making them martyrs, they already cast themselves in that light, and their supporters already see them as that. I don't think losing a web domain will drive the common man into their arms unless they were looking for an excuse.
What do you think the entire african american gangsta rap culture is?
Most people who buy their content aren't african american either.
“alt-left” is a label created by defenders of the alt-right to refer generically to it's opponents. They aren't really parallel terms.
(Antifascism itself dates back to early 20th century opposition action against fascist tides in Italy, Germany, and Spain; the comparison to the modern phenomenon of the Alt-Right feels historically inappropriate.)
It substantially overlaps with the mainstream of the left; note that in the US, the dominant (though decreasingly so) faction of the Democratic Party is center-right, not left at all.
Turns out, most companies don't want to be associated with Nazis; shocking I know. And, as Nazis are not a protected class in the United States, it's fully within their rights not to do business with them.
It's easy to say "let's all support a version of free speech that's never existed because we believe in the ideology" when these groups aren't targeting you. It's a bitter pill to swallow if you happen to be Jewish, Black, etc.
The rationale is the theory that having a diversity of viewpoints, including some that are dangerous or repugnant, is the best approach towards a robust civil society and intellectual growth. If you disagree with something you hear or read, you can ignore it, or you can criticize it, but banning speech causes two undesirable outcomes:
1) The speech will continue anyway, but not in the public eye, where it can be criticized
2) The popularity of an idea is different from the correctness of an idea. It has happened many times that an unpopular or even heretical idea has turned out to be right.
Almost certainly these people are no Galileo. But this approach to free speech is intended to protect the Galileos of the world. It should be kept in mind that talk of revolution in the U.S. during the late 1700s would have been considered extremely dangerous and repugnant by many as well.
Private businesses and lay people not wanting to do business with you is fundamentally different from official prosecution. I will gladly fight for any group's protection from governmental over reach; I can't even begin to understand the rational behind choosing "private businesses can't have moderation" as the hill you choose to die on.
This philosophy is as old as the university and modern science. It is certainly no younger than the "free speech, but not consequences" argument, which I read as a thinly-veiled way to threaten unpopular views with unspecified "consequences".
> "private businesses can't have moderation"
I wasn't arguing that they can't. Only that it can be unwise and a net negative for our society for them to choose to do so. I would draw a distinction between trolling/spam and someone honestly espousing an unpopular view.
It is true, some kind of filtering is needed, because there's too much information for any individual to absorb. The question is, who (if not me myself) is doing the filtering and what are their incentives? dang's incentives are aligned with mine: good-quality technical discussion, and people aren't blacklisted purely for espousing unpopular views.
The incentives of corporations are not. Google, Facebook, and in this instance, Namecheap, are presumably taking these actions to safeguard their image and maximize profit, not to actually make their users maximally informed. There is a conflict of interest here.
Finally, I think all this becomes much more important when it comes to political speech, because people have a marked tendency to want to shout down, ignore, misrepresent, or otherwise not engage with political views that make them uncomfortable. Look how the media misrepresented the Damore memo. I take no position on the memo itself, but do assert that people are better off knowing actual arguments from all sides, rather than side A blacklisting side B and then giving strawman representations of what B thinks.
It's impossible to rationally debate ideas with no rational foundation; extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence not calls to physical violence or pronouncements of superiority. A world in which "whites are the master race" is just an unpopular view that we should welcome as opposed to an unfounded assertion backed by no evidence is not a world in which any "net positive" has been added to society. When the burden is put on rational people to offer counter arguments as opposed to the extremists to offer evidence rationality loses every time; just look to vaccines and climate change.
I'm in medical research. Do I think antivaxxers should be able to publish in medical journals? No (unless they performed an experiment that passes peer review, etc).
Do I think they should be able to run their own websites, have nonviolent meetings or rallies without losing their jobs? Yes, I do. Even though antivaxxers are doing far more harm than neo-Nazis are.
Also, "scientific/academic consensus" and "rationality" are not synonyms.
That is literally what OP is about.
Now if it were the ISPs handing this ruling we'd be on the same page, but it isn't. There's no freedom of speech argument for "right to demand services without restriction". Same way a restaurant will turn you away if you show up with "no shirt, no shoes". Namecheap is using the freedom of speech of it's leadership in saying "Nazis and other groups that incite violence are not groups we want to host".
Right for service totally without restrictions, no, but "viewpoint-based discrimination" or other types of discrimination are a separate legal category for a reason. "Shirts and shoes required" is different from "whites only" (or, for that matter, "liberals only") on a restaurant door. We allow the former but not the latter, and I think that's reasonable.
See, even calling them Nazis is stupid. They are nowhere as dangerous as Nazis. Nazis conquered Europe in what? A year? Killed 6 million Jews, etc. 12 million Russians. These people are pissed off at life and where they are, and are looking for an excuse that doesn't involve self examination of their own choices. But they sure as hell ain't Nazis.
They are lucky that their "concerns" match the current status quo. Otherwise, what would they do?
1) Isn't it the case that the free speech amendment protects censorship only from the government, and not from anyone else, including private or public companies? If so, why do we even bring up the amendment?
2) Isn't it also the case that even from the government, hate speech is not a protected speech?
3) Do we have any evidence that protecting free speech is actually beneficial and desired? What were the reasons for the amendment? And do we have data showing it worked for what it was intended for?
4) How difficult is it to establish a guideline for what is and isn't hate speech? I mean, personally, I don't see a slipery slope. If you're suggesting to physically harm an individual or a group of individuals, I can not see how that's so hard to recognise as hate speech. If your speech holds any value, you should be able to explain it without inciting violence, unless your argument is to incite violence.
4) The point is not a concrete guideline, because as written above governments will just abuse this to their advantage. They can always arrest you, seize everything your own, destroy your newspaper ect ect and then years later you prove you did not violate hate speech, but you're still ruined financially and they were able to silence you for a few years. Nation states have endless resources to tie up the courts with phony hate speech cases against their detractors. Imagine if Donald Trump had access to these laws, who has a history of litigating his critics. Be careful what you wish for.
Inciting violence and making threats falls under criminal code, I don't know why you'd want additional laws to just enable the state to do even more damage. It seems much easier to just not give these people the attention seeking platform they desire by turning them into martyrs. They don't want you to rationally dispute their racist views, they want you to try and suppress them so they can 'prove' their conspiracy theories.
Daily Stormer is the far-right version of The Onion. It's extreme racist satire, with outright comedy articles about Pokemon Go, Silicon Valley groupthink, ect. It is odd the media has singled them out as the most dangerous site in the world elevating them to mainstream status from their previous fringe existence. I don't agree with recreating third-reich tabloid newspapers like they have done, but the overwhelming attacks they are receiving for just writing articles is not accomplishing what their detractors think it is, it's just making them more popular and sympathetic to the masses.
This site has absolutely nothing to do with genuinely disseminating white power ideas, and everything to do with doing exactly what its doing right now, getting thrown off of every popular hosting service it can so it can generate more articles, and more drama. You can be positive its going to make its rounds on pretty much every hosting service there is.
That is the express goal of his actions and I can not beleive nobody is calling that out.
Of course, the writers of that article are a part of that.
I feel you're letting them off the hook too easily here. The Daily Stormer absolutely served the function of disseminating white power ideas. They had 120,000 daily visitors at one point, which reportedly included Dylan Roof for example.
"CEO of CloudFlare, Matthew Prince, said that his company would not be blocking its service to websites listed, as it would mean submitting to "mob rule"." [1]
double standard much?
[1] http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/anonymous-opisis-cloudflare-refuses...
edit: typo
https://blog.namecheap.com/inciting-violence-vs-freedom-spee...