We Are At War For A Free And Open Internet
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I've conducted some research in the past into how to solve this simple problem: how to reliably host potentially offensive content, given the content is legal in the US. I concluded it's currently infeasible. All US hosts are responsive to mobs, and all hosts that market themselves as "pro free speech" are in jurisdictions with a variety of "hate speech" or "anti insult" laws.
I've concluded that the only way forward is probably a P2P web.
Given this is Hacker News, I wish that people wanted to talk about that sort of thing, rather than, as has happened here, bikeshedding about what those global community standards should be in our personal opinions.
By the way, I am sure that large web sites like Dropbox or Twitter have actually illegal content, but their registrar obviously doesn't threaten them.
PS. Curious what the reason was to downvote this?
It's interesting to watch Anglin continue to force people in his vicinity to choose between compromising on principle and defending the utterly indefensible. One wonders what he hopes to accomplish, and even more what anyone else might hope to achieve by continuing to tolerate his presence - I get that quoting Niemoller is somewhat popular in this connection, but I don't see how the situations are parallel when this one revolves around a person who appears to have no greater aim in his public behavior than simply to bring about whatever ruin he can find a way to produce.
I don't know. Perhaps he has a point to make about the tension between freedom of speech and relative oligopoly over the notionally public forum in which such speech can most productively be published. If so, he's picked the worst way in the world to do it, because by making himself a stench in the nostrils of civilization he only adds strength to the argument that the very concept of freedom of speech is one which has outlived its usefulness and merits deprecation in favor of a restricted realm beyond which suppression is the universally acknowledged default. That's the most charitable interpretation of his actions that I'm capable of constructing - but not one in which I especially confide.
I re-watched American History X last night and I greatly recommend it to anyone who wants a little (dramatic) insight into modern American white supremacy motivations. In particular, the main character, Derek, gives a speech to a group of skinheads which is disturbingly similar to some of Trump's campaign speeches (though more eloquent).
(Warning, the cover has a picture of the Hitler salute, but it's squarely anti-Fascist.)
It details the ideological underpinnings of the above. They say explicitly that they want to replace the current social order. The erosion of human rights is one of the explicit ideological goals of the leadership of both the far extreme right and the far extreme left.
> Is it not clear that free speech as a practical tactic, not only as an abstract principle, demands defense of the rights of all who are attacked in order to obtain the rights of any?
Of course, the early gay movement eventually had the good sense to jettison the pedophilia advocates who attempted to ride its coattails into public legitimacy.
The matter is in any case also, I think primarily, one of pragmatism. Even the most hard-line free speech absolutist can't defend Anglin without being made radioactive by mere association; thus, by his actions, he forces everyone around him to choose between principle and livelihood. It seems to me little wonder that everyone of import chooses the latter.
"First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out--because I was not a Socialist" and so forth. And no, the irony is not lost on me.
Systems-minded people not blinded by ideology have natural sympathies to those causes, because the same mechanisms used to justify punching Nazis and kicking fascists off the internet can just as easily be turned against things that we care about.
The judicial system is pragmatically absolutist in its operation. It's quite complicated, it's not perfect, but it does work. The system of rights it's constructed on is necessary to prevent tyranny. Look up and read the history around the Magna Carta and the founding of the United States.
If only our education system would manage to teach logic. Instead we have generations of people who can't understand how anyone can argue in defense of one part without being part of the whole thing.
It's as if "evil people drink water and you drink water, so you're evil" is an actual argument these days and no one sees why that is fallacious and stupid.
Everyone of us cares.
We all hate poverty, war, and injustice,
Unlike the rest of you squares."
- Tom Lehrer, The Folk Song Army Lyrics
One of the demonstrators from the Bret Weinstein debacle at Evergreen can be seen and heard on the Vice video saying, "...F### your Free Speech!" That is pretty much what the demonstrators and those aligned with them did to Bret Weinstein -- all just for saying, Maybe there's a problem when you demand that certain ethnic groups "absent" themselves? Why would anyone who stands against racism ask that of a Jewish man?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ys2ihv_wSs
Trump and Obama got elected because they knew how to get peoples attention. Anglin is playing the same game. He is not a constitutional scholar or a regulatory expert but he gets propped by the attention economy. The attention economy validates his message nothings else. The route in the attention economy to get propped up is to give people what they want to hear. Obama, Trump, the Kardashians, Games of Thrones or Star Wars its all a mordern day version of what religion did back in the day - an opium for the masses. As Tim Wu the coiner of Net Neutrality in his new book the Attention Merchants says - you can slow the spread of the message, you can remove the monetary incentive of the new class opium sellers(who take adv of the speed and scale of social media) or you can dismantle the attention economy, cause its just going to keep propping the best panderers up.
Incredibly, a primary such idea was censorship itself: those groups who partially defined themselves as absolutely opposed to banning socially intolerable ideas, are now the very same groups calling for vindictive suppression of socially intolerable ideas. Those who celebrated "banned books" are now demanding shutdown of websites (and sometimes even holding book burnings).
I absolutely hold that the Internet should be treated as "common carrier": IP registrars & networking should not address content, leaving those ideas & expressions to survive or dissolve on their own merit. Anything downright criminal should be addressed as criminal, with police handling the matter. Anglin is despicable; let us exercise our right to not associate with him, rather than deny him his right to freedom of the press (so long as he uses his own press).
I'm not debating the merit of any content, only that there is a right to express it (via your own "press") and to associate (or not) with those expressing it.
"First they came for the _____, but I was not a _____ ..."
"I do not support your opinion, but will defend to the death the right to express it."
At the far end of free speech really is the potential for incitement of mass murder. Westerners are perhaps not familiar with the modern, post-Nazi example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_T%C3%A9l%C3%A9vision_Lib...
Several leaders of the pro-genocide radio station were eventually convicted of crimes against humanity.
What's incredible about that? One tends to find that people advance the arguments which serve their turn, and arguments of value in obtaining power tend rarely to be also of value in retaining it. Complaining that there's something hypocritical in this may satisfy in some fashion I don't really understand, but it doesn't strike me as being an especially effective or worthwhile fashion in which to spend one's time.
(And is there really any hypocrisy here? I don't see it - as far as I can tell, the groups of which you speak defined themselves not as opposed to banning socially intolerable ideas period, but rather as opposed to banning those socially intolerable ideas to which they happened to adhere. Anglin's ideas, if we dignify them by that name, don't seem to fall within that range, and so I have a difficult time understanding how I'm meant to take this issue as one of failure to live up to one's claimed principles.)
I wonder which groups you're talking about. I remember the ACLU and its civil libertarian supporters being pretty lonely forty years ago when they fought for the right of neo Nazis to march and it seems to work the same way today. Maybe I'm missing something but, apart from the technical aspects, this feels like a pretty old debate.
Which things, out of curiosity?
If you can't imagine what someone hopes to accomplish by doing that -- then after awhile you should try the hypothesis of that being the goal. (This is a Jordan B. Peterson-ism)
by making himself a stench in the nostrils of civilization he only adds strength to the argument that the very concept of freedom of speech is one which has outlived its usefulness and merits deprecation in favor of a restricted realm
If you go far enough to the right or the left politically, both extremes explicitly announce they want a complete overturn of the current social order. So if Mr. Anglin's actions are going to foster the creation of a free speech destroying banhammer, perhaps that's what he wants. If you study what happened in the rise of Fascism in the Weimar Republic, you'll find that it was the left leaning Weimar Republic that put into place the legal framework for Nazi totalitarianism. In almost every law that had to do with human rights, the Weimar Republic put in a "unless necessary for the public good" or "unless a law is passed to the contrary" clause.
A system of Individual Human Rights is what separates any democracy from becoming the Weimar Republic -- which is to say, a mere incubator for authoritarianism. Lose the structural protection for Individual Human Rights, and the you've lost the safeguard against tyranny. That is precisely what those rights were designed to do!
A good overview of the ideological underpinnings of the Weimar Republic can be found here: (Warning, the cover has a picture of the Hitler salute, but it's squarely anti-Fascist.) http://a.co/5yg6TEC
Taking someone's Tinder picture and sharing it on the internet to mock them is harassment (especially nowadays when software can take a person's face and look up their social media profiles). Say what you will about free speech, but this isn't a hill I particularly care about dying on.
You need to make a better argument here.
Edit: tweaked analogy
You can be upset about this, but please don't confuse it with Freedom of Speech.
Can you be more specific, especially with regards to private property and enterprise? Are you arguing that it's my human right to publish on the front of the NYT, or have my submissions on the front page of HN? Or to give speeches in your living room?
Also, I would oppose censorship in your particular examples. I would think that it is your right to publish in the NYT under the same terms as anyone else (i.e., be interesting or have money), to top HN (if upvoted), or to speak in my home (if invited). And if the NYT blacklisted someone speaking on corrupt reporting, if HN blocked stories because they were right-leaning, or an acquaintance refused to talk to me because they disagree with my politics, I would be rightly upset at them.
But, again this has nothing to do with freedom of speech; just your feelings.
So, next time something like this happens, instead of saying "but this is hurting freedom of speech" you can just say "but this is hurting my feelings; I believe I have a fundamental human right to feel good about things, and things are making me feel bad".
No. But they're free to have terms of service. I don't see how this is relevant.
Decentralization & p2p technologies
Not to mention #36 in the FAQ[0], which pretty clearly states they only disallow outright illegal behavior.
It's also not like AsiaRegistry makes things cheaper. Using whois.ai directly you only spend 100 to renew every 2 years, not 200.
Irony meter rating: off charts
The free and open internet as we know it is under attack.
We will never have a 'free and open internet' until humanity grows up and people like the above evolve into more socially-inclusive human beings.
Unfortunately, I can never see that happening. What will happen is the slow loss of anonymity across the internet, where all new signups require id verification or the use of a 3rd party 'trusted' authentication provider.
On one hand, I think this may be a good thing - regardless of where you do it, you should be liable for any offensive behaviour you do that upsets other people. However on the other hand where do all the whistle blowers and free speech advocates go? It's a tricky balance, but one things for sure, anonymous online trolling is the reason why we can't have nice [internet] things...
Not only those:
http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Who_is_harmed_by_a_%22Rea...
Now people are weak, emotionally weak, so easily offended.
Or, more likely, they play up their "offendedness" and victimhood in order to gain the moral high ground over their opponents. People didn't just suddenly become easier to offend -- it has a payoff for them in political leverage.
That is in its own way bad for free speech; what use is speech if nobody is listening?
Harassment can genuinely make the internet or parts of it unusable for some people. I bet Diane Abbot doesn't open her Twitter Mentions, for example. http://metro.co.uk/2017/09/04/almost-half-of-all-abuse-targe...
> and to not respond with so much emotion
Desensitisation is not the solution either.
I think if you carefully sit down and work out what "free speech" really means, it also comes to encompass the right to not have to listen to things you don't want to listen to, via avoidance. (Not via taking it all down, and there are some intricacies I'm skipping over because this is an HN comment and not a blogspew; for instance in "public spaces" there is a certain element of not necessarily being able to just "turn off" someone on a soap box, but still.) This manifests because of the way some people will insist that you must listen to them and that if their particular content doesn't show up in some feed somewhere, they're being censored.
"Harassment can genuinely make the internet or parts of it unusable for some people. "
True. However, the "boil the ocean" solution that everyone seems to be reaching for of some form of eliminating all the bad behavior on the internet is not feasible, even before we get into the fundamental ambiguity of what "bad behavior" is, and the IMHO observable fact that once you start down this road you get the twin problems of A: people deliberately skewing the definition of "bad behavior" in their favor and B: people deliberately getting more and more theatrically sensitive to "bad behavior" in proportion to its decreasing presence, for several reasons.
I think what we're really looking at here is increasingly undeniable evidence that this form of community does not scale. Twitter is fundamentally unscalable. Tiny little Gab may well have already passed its community scaling event horizon. Facebook shards the world much more carefully and still probably is past its scaling event horizon, too. Reddit shards the world in a different way, but its mega-subreddits also often pass the community event horizon. Basically, I'd say that any company it is whose ambition it is to create "one global community", even one broken up like Facebook's or Reddit's, is doomed to failure at scale.
(HN itself may already be on the large side of what can be sustained. It has, I believe, two full time moderators and curators of the community, so when you look at HN you have to keep in mind that that's where this site is; already at "full time moderator" status. If you put up a new "free speech!" HN-2 and promise not to moderate anything, what you see here on the real HN is probably literally unattainable to you.)
Given the choice between Free Speech and Facebook/Twitter/Gab/etc., I'll take Free Speech. We're going to have to figure out some other mechanism for online communication that doesn't involve trying to pour every single person who speaks a given language into one small room. Many of the people reading this probably have personal experience as to how bad that idea can be if it just includes their direct family or circle of friends, let alone millions of people.
(I've actually believed this sort of thing for a long time, and I live it. HN is probably the largest community I actually participate in. I participate in several subreddits, but pretty much only ones that are cut off from the "main body" of Reddit entirely. Even my blog has been affected; I know what it would have taken to "be successful" in that space over a decade ago, and I found myself reluctant to put the work in to do that, just because I realized I don't actually want to build a community and be responsible for it.)
Back in the day white Americans would throw a goddamn hissy fit if negroes drank out of the same public water fountain. They were so offended by the presence of these folks doing normal human things, and so incapable of handling their emotional responses to it, that beatings and murders and other violence were hardly unheard of.
I encourage you to take your "people these days are so weak and easily offended" hot take and throw it in the garbage, where it belongs.
If we allow people to be liable for who and what they offend then we run the risk of allowing beatings and other violence. There is a real reason why Free Speech in the USA is associated with the Civil Rights movement.
Fascists have been using "free speech" as a shield since the beginning, and similarly liberals were handwringing about the fascists right to "free speech" while fascists beat up and killed Jews and other minorities and burned down synagogs. The liberals were wrong in the 30s to tolerate fascism and they're wrong now.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Cable_Street being the most famous example [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/43_Group [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RRS4NR_BZ1w and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-Ef3WYWJYc for example
Because pride parades and Occupy protests don't benefit from free speech at all, right?
It's more concerning to see the meme of "I don't like what these people say so I'm going to add the 'dogwhistle' tag to it so other Right Thinking people will know to avoid/condemn it without engaging properly".
Free speech is critical to the success (such as it is) of the United States today. Deciding to self-cripple because some small groups we don't like are using it is absurd.
As I say, it's not about speech. Speech is just a dog-whistle for what this is really about.
They do not all fit one same category and we cannot have one-approach-fits-all
* RevengePorners: Clear cut criminal behavior, have the service cooperate with prosecution.
* Spammers: Depends on whether they're leading you into malware. Filters have gone a long way in dealing with that specific thing. In some legislations plain spamming may be criminal too.
* Doxxers: Grey area of law tbh, when paired with threats could easily categorize into criminal behavior.
* Trolls: Take the internet less seriously, be more conservative about sharing your identity online and lurk more. Of all things I don't understand why the current zeitgeist is "take all trolling as seriously as possible and give them stupidly large amounts of power and act surprised when trolling only gets worse".
Surprisingly, this isn't illegal in very many jurisdictions. One of the first to ban it was Scotland, this year.
That's really what this boils down to, as the only "solution" I can think of for this issue is essentially... government regulation. Telling corporations that they have to support things on their platform they necessarily may not want to support, often for business reasons.
For instance, take Twitter. Business reports often mention things like a reputation for harassment and trolling as a big concern towards their growth, because a lot of people aren't going to sign up if their user experience is poor. If they think it would be more profitable to "censor" people engaged in harassment or trolling and try to get rid of that reputation, why would they not do so? No different than other forms of "censorship" they try and do (often poorly, I might add) to improve user experience (eg: kicking off spamming bots, putting up restrictions for pornographic or graphic content, kicking off impersonators, preventing private information from being posted, etc.)
If they want to kick someone off for heated arguments and curse words, that's their choice too. That doesn't seem like something a profit-oriented large company like Twitter would do, but I've been in forums where moderators would indeed ban people for these sort of reasons and/or remove heated posts before things turned into a shitstorm.
As long as there is room for any sort of corporations or organizations with all kinds of content policies, I don't see an issue with this arrangement. If you don't like a place's content policy, you can go elsewhere. To me this certainly is preferred versus a world where a government dictates exactly what content policy everyone should have.
There is, I think, an argument to be made that the consolidation of Internet social media and its overwhelming private corporate nature may have the potential to stifle marginal voices by also consolidating content policy. That's the gist I got from the article, and I would agree with the concern.
I just don't see a great solution for this concern at the moment without potentially causing something worse.
We have more pressing free speech matters at hand right now with authoritarian states and corporate monopolies. Nazis don't get a free ride on the hard work being done just so they can turn the gun around on us when they have power. We recognize racism and sexism for what it is, and don't let it distract us from building a better society for us all.
Do we have to reference the xkcd comic again?
You're confusing the market of free ideas with speech. Governments have militaries and police forces. Societies have public opinion. Are you suggesting that societies shouldn't have the ability to guide themselves by rejecting speech that is harmful to itself (i.e. racist/sexist dogma perpetuated by a majority that wants to get rid of its minorities)?
Honestly, this all sounds like nihilism which I know is all the currently all the rage to wealthy and white Silicon Valley, but I'm sure your perspective will be altered if you should ever be unfortunate to have nazis start targeting you.
I have seen many things which are touted as part of "the marketplace of ideas" that are really attempts to skew speech in civil society through non-governmental bureaucratic power. This is dishonest. It's not a real "marketplace of ideas" when certain things are placed in an inaccessible part of the store. We've seen this "technically not censorship" thing before. Noam Chomsky helped bring it to the world's attention.
Honestly, this all sounds like nihilism which I know is all the currently all the rage to wealthy and white Silicon Valley, but I'm sure your perspective will be altered if you should ever be unfortunate to have nazis start targeting you.
I have been racially targeted by groups of poor whites. My perspective changed when extreme elements on the left started behaving in much the same way. When your "activism" starts depending on the magnitude of horribleness of the enemy for its justification, this is a historical sign that something is out of kilter. No one who says they can do anything, because they're less horrible than some bad guys, gets to wield the special liminal power of activism in my name. Groupthink is groupthink. It feels much the same way, no matter where it is based on the political spectrum. The justified hate of White Supremacists is much the same as hateful ideologues of a different stripe.
I abhor the nihilism of Silicon Valley, however, it's not a white phenomenon, nor is it particular to one ethnic group. Shortly after I moved to the Bay Area, I got to see a drunken self-styled startup nerd spill beer all over the laptop of a cancer-patient female techie who was trying to get her life together, then try to pretend he had nothing to do with it. (Pre-Obamacare, so her life seemed pretty precarious. He thought it was a good idea to dive into his bunk at the hacker hostel I was staying at.) He was proof by counterexample that being white is not at all necessary for entitlement.
The nihilism of Silicon Valley and the Bay Area is mostly derived from the nihilism of the Postmodernist left. We have as much to fear from the radicalism of the left as the radicalism of the extreme Fascist right. Both of those groups have in common collectivist and nihilistic ideologies that reject logic and rationality. You only have to read the writings of the esoteric thought leaders of both groups to see this. Therein lies the real danger. The left-right spectrum is only incidental.
I must comment on this:
> When your "activism" starts depending on the magnitude of horribleness of the enemy for its justification, this is a historical sign that something is out of kilter.
To what activism are you referring to? My activism would be related to moving closer to a society where the starting floor hasn't fallen out for others based on class, race, and gender. Nazism, you know, kinda gets in the way of that.
The free speech loophole has to be left open for everybody. The moment we let someone arbitrate speech, we no longer have free speech.
We don't need to let nazis to empower themselves to guard against groupthink.
A right for everyone has to be a right for everyone. If you study what happened in the rise of Fascism in the Weimar Republic, you'll find that it was the left leaning Weimar Republic that put into place the legal framework for Nazi totalitarianism. In almost every law that had to do with human rights, the Weimar Republic put in a "unless necessary for the public good" or "unless a law is passed to the contrary" clause. All the Nazis had to do was to use those clauses.
Free Speech protects society as a whole against groupthink. Any minority, no matter how small or unpopular, is protected. The moment you introduce Weimar Republic style exceptions to those rights, you lose a society that is protected against authoritarianism. Instead, you get a society that's just an incubator for totalitarianism.
My activism would be related to moving closer to a society where the starting floor hasn't fallen out for others based on class, race, and gender. Nazism, you know, kinda gets in the way of that.
Study the Weimar Republic. Explicit activism of the type you mention above (following an ethos of "By Any Means Necessary") was precisely the kind that set the stage for Nazis to come to power. Also, you should note that the "floor" in the US, even for "groups disadvantaged by class, race, and gender" is quite high in absolute terms. As Dinesh D'Souza's friend once observed, "I want to come to a country where the poor people are fat and own VCRs." There are people whose "floors have fallen out," but I don't think the existence of Neo-Nazis has had much affect on them. Can you give me an example where people demonstrating have made poor neighborhoods poorer? I can give you examples where riots have done that, but those were not sparked by Neo-Nazis.
Groupthink may be groupthink, but you know how we combat that – we fund public education.
The way to combat groupthink in the long term is to advance groups. One interesting thing that Thomas Sowell brings up in his book Race and Culture, is that Russians, Poles, and Italians started out having IQ score disparities as large as those of US black communities, but caught up over the time span of the 1st half of the 20th century. By 1950, the scores had basically equalized. He also notes a study of black children of GIs growing up in Germany, who showed comparable IQs to other children growing up there. Yes, there is clearly systemic racism in the US. It can be seen in the rising crime rates and decay of communities. (As a black man who was born in North Carolina and went to school in Harlem, Thomas Sowell has an interesting personal take on this.) I think it takes the form of incentives that encourage broken homes and abet poverty. (This can be seen in an increase in the IQs of black children in the early 20th century, which ended and reversed after the introduction of perverse incentives in the 1960's and 70's.) I think it takes the form of politics which protects public schools and keeps market buying power out of the hands of parents who want to help their children to advance. If one studies immigrant groups, one finds a pattern of groups that advance themselves in spite of overt oppression codified into law and sometimes enacted as violence. One also finds a pattern of groups, whose leaders keep their people in cultural isolation in order to maintain their power. Such patterns are found all over the world, and repeat themselves across cultures and in different times. I think it should now be obvious such patterns are at play in the US.
You mean, the network created by the US government for the use of military and research institutions? The idea of the Internet as an anarchist state is a far more temporary concept than that of the Internet as a regulated environment where people are supposed to act with a sense of decency. Anyone who argues otherwise is too young, or too ignorant, to know what they're talking about ... And it doesn't surprise me that most of these Internet trolls whining about censorship were born in the 1980s and later.
Internet is no longer a network for the US government and research institutions.