“We shut down Richard Spencer's Altright website.” | Hacker News Reader

“We shut down Richard Spencer's Altright website.”

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8 pointsd9h549f34w617 comments

Shutting down other people's websites is the complete opposite of freedom of speech. When their free speech is abridged on their own websites, not just shadow-banned in the major social networks, people may end up deciding that their only option left is to resort to force against those they perceive as the abridgers.

This will not end well.

They should go find a web host that is supportive of their message. Freedom of speech does not mean every platform has to give you a soap box, quite the opposite.

All in all its got nothing to do with freedom of speech.

It has everything to do with the freedom of speech, it's the opposite of it, it's called self-censorship.

So freedom of speech gives you the right to write a racist letter to any and every newspaper and demand that it is published.

Ok. Good luck with that.

You’re proposing that my having the freedom to not be forced to spread another persons message is actually me being censored?

That seems like a pretty convoluted way to say “I want to force this company to continue hosting this site despite their objections”.

How about a bakery that refuses to bake or sell a wedding cake to a gay couple -- will you tell the rejected customers to go find a bakery supportive of their message?

Some thoughts:

1: The WHOIS entry ( https://whois.icann.org/en/lookup?name=altright.com ) seems strange to me:

>This domain name has been suspended due to invalid Whois information.

Is this a normal WHOIS message for sites that get shut down for ToS violations of the sort being described in the Twitter link? Does anyone know if the WHOIS data for the site was actually invalid? Regardless, that rubs me the wrong way as sounding like finding a technicality to shut it down. I wish they'd be more open about what they're doing.

2: Sites like this have had to change webhosts before, that's nothing new. Politically extreme content has always had issues with that (to be honest I'm wondering what Spencer was thinking going with GoDaddy rather than one of the hosting services out there that tends to be more resistant to outside pressure). The real question is what is going to happen to the domain name itself, if these people are going to be able to set up shop again with a different registrar. "Host it on your own server" is different from "start your own domain registrar company" as excuses for censorship, no matter how legitimate it feels.

3: No matter the content, we should be treating these events as canaries in the coal mine. The tech world has rightfully focused on countering censorious efforts by governments, but that's not the only source of censorship. Censorship doesn't just happen by governments; it can be done by private entities as well in the form of 'deplatforming.' This tactic has been proven to be effective, and there will be very little outcry because -- well, look at who's getting shut down. But it's not going to stop there.

I'm a free speech absolutist who thinks it's a culture and not just an 18th-century legal document. Censorship in the 21st century isn't going to look like what it looked like in the 20th century; it will be a new form that is harder to counter, harder to argue against with only outdated definitions as ammunition. I hope that in the future, the tech world finds ways to make "deplatform-resistant" content feasible at all layers of the stack.

I'm a radical in that sense too, and subscribe to the principle attributed to Voltaire: "I disapprove of what you say -- and will defend to the death your right to say it."

Freedom of speech does not give the freedom to violate terms of service. The first paragraph of the complaint states that the site was not compliant and apparently GoDaddy agreed.

Sure, this argument may be valid here. At what point do we explicitly allow a website's ToS to supersede the Constitution though? Denial of rights is a single-edged sword easily flipped.

This is a nonsensical argument- the first amendment doesn’t apply to private corporations, unless your argument is that any random internet company is literally the United States government.

Can you provide something to support your claim? Why would a private corporation not be subject to Constitutional law?

The US Constitution enumerates specific powers granted to the Federal Government, and generally limits its powers. It does not restrict the rights of individuals or of associations thereof (generally both are free to trade, or not, with others). It's a flawed document, intended to be a practical implementation of the limited-government ideals espoused in the Declaration of Independence: that the sole proper purpose of government is to secure our individual rights.

“”” Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. “””

There is no constitutional right to incite violence.

If company A is entitled to discriminate against party B because of the things the latter says and/or does -- how and why do you stop business C from discriminating against party D because of their sexual orientation.

A: hosting company (GoDaddy today) B: anyone (Spencer today) C: bakery D: gay couple

I think a Twitter equivalent of this provocative argument is: now do this for restaurants refusing to serve certain people because of the color of their skin.

When exactly are people going to see that this isn't stopping with the Daily Stormer?

All those tech companies that spent years virtue signaling about a free and open web LIED.

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