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Comment by MrMember | Hacker News Reader

It is kind of scary how someone can be "blackballed" from the internet.

All of your social media accounts get deleted so you move to your own website. Until the hosting company decides they don't want to do business with you so you start hosting it yourself. Until the domain registrar you used decides they don't like you so now you have to give people an IP address to reach your site. Until your ISP terminates your contract because they don't like people hosting websites on their network.

So many services controlled by private companies that can choose to not do business with someone.

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Great point, also I would add payment processors to the list.

Not being American, and living somewhere where freedom of speech is not guaranteed, I don’t understand the problem.

Surely freedom of speech is different to freedom from consequence.

If I want I can legally (in the US) go about spreading hateful lies, but I better be prepared for the consequences of my actions. I can say what I want, but it doesn’t mean what I say is acceptable or that others have to like it.

If platform owners decide they don’t want me using their systems to promote my particular brand of racist demagoguery, well, fair enough.

There must be some sort of social responsibility. The Internet gives anyone with a bit of determination the reach and influence previously only available to large organisations, but with great power etc...

Yes it’s legal to say anything, but surely for those who do say things, especially to a large (and largely uncritical) audience there is an obligation to do so responsibly. By poisoning our shared information well with their vicious lies, Mr Jones and his ilk are being highly irresponsible and should be held to account.

> If platform owners decide they don’t want me using their systems to promote my particular brand of racist demagoguery, well, fair enough.

Would you like this thesis as much as it was framed in the other direction? Assume that all platform owners are just fine with that 'particular brand of racist demagoguery' but really can not stand the utterings of the last Nobel peace prize winner (just to give an example) and decide to kick him to the curb. Would that be 'fair enough' or would it cause an outcry? Other than a shift in political bias there is no difference so it should be the former but I expect it to cause the latter.

Those platform owners would come with the same ratification: 'There must be some sort of social responsibility. The Internet gives anyone with a bit of determination the reach and influence previously only available to large organisations'.

>So many services controlled by private companies that can choose to not do business with someone.

Yes. Freedom of speech and freedom of association exist.

That's a feature, not a bug.

When the four largest protests in US history can happen over the course of 24 months without most of the general public even knowing, then it's time to seriously start reconsidering whether the right to freedom of speech is effective under its current legal interpretation.

Pardon my ignorance (though apparently I’m in good company), what protests are you talking about?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_protests_in_the_United...

I am not sure why you think the general public doesn't know about these protests. They had popular acclaim on news channels while they were happening.

Sure, perhaps people have forgotten about a particular march especially if they do not consider it relevant to their lives, or a wider movement but at the time people heard about what was going on.

Everyone knows that they happened; no one knows their scale, no one remembers them for that reason.

(In contrast, consider the infamous Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam, which was smaller.)

It is possible to start your own hosting company. It is possible to start your own domain registrar. It is possible to start your own ISP.

>it is possible to start your own ISP

And where do you suppose ISPs get internet from?

From a blended mixture of peers and transit providers, such that a termination of service from any one peer does not take the network offline.

We have already supposed that all hosting providers have terminated you, and all DNS providers have terminated you, why shouldn't all ISPs terminate you?

Well great! People with enough time, money, and know-how to start their own ISP don't have to worry about Facebook and Google censoring them.

Not looking to good for the rest of us, though.

Or, those with the time, money, and know-how can do these things today, so that others that they are sympathetic to will have more options available to them when they are shut off tomorrow.

And the result is Gab. A site full of people who were banned from Twitter. About half of the "popular" tab is ranting about how the Holocaust never happened, diversity is a weakness, and (((they're))) going to kill all the white people soon. The other half is about how awful Twitter is to ban people. The now-defunct Talk.Tor, and 4chan's /pol/, are the same way.

Most of the users that Twitter and Facebook deletes are actually people (or spambots, but even Gab blocks those) who ought to be deleted, so any service that's primarily filled with expats from them gets filled with slightly-oblique calls to violence and general quackery.

So when a poor user who isn't a skinhead gets banned because someone who happens to have the admin bit has a personal beef with them, they're supposed to switch to Gab? That's not an okay alternative.

I'd offer Mastodon as a healthier example of somewhere Twitter/Facebook refugees can turn. I'm sure there are some federated instances that harbor the type of toxic behavior you describe, but on a well-moderated instance, they'll get depeered pretty quickly. And there are lots of instances to choose from, so a bad admin just means you need to find a new instance -- you're not cut off from the entire platform.

There are no signs of that being a risk for anyone. Stop with the FUD.

Didn't all of this happen with that website "The Daily Stormer"? Cloudflare removed them: https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-we-terminated-daily-stormer/

That's ok though because they are Nazis.

How can you say something like that? Like, how many people have they killed? Less that any of the last 5 US government administrations I suppose...

You're engaging in intellectual dishonesty here.

"Nazi" is closely associated to the Holocaust, but you don't have to have killed someone to be a Nazi.

From Wikipedia:

Nazism is a form of fascism and showed that ideology's disdain for liberal democracy and the parliamentary system, but also incorporated fervent antisemitism, scientific racism, and eugenics into its creed.

From that definition, Daily Stormer certainly was home to Nazi's, perhaps more appropriately "Neo-Nazi"

Nazis or not: CEOs, who are not legitimated by any democratic election, have no right to decide what other people publish.

Nobody is arguing that they do. The question is whether CEOs can decide what their own companies host. Since being a Nazi is not a legally protected category they’re free to not help Nazis.

That the CEOs' censorship does not work perfectly does not mean it does not exist.

> Since being a Nazi is not a legally protected category they’re free to not help Nazis.

What currently is legal is obviously irrelevant when the question is what should be legal.

Again, this is not a hard problem once you shake the poor framing you’re stuck in. It’s not a question of legality because this isn’t the government preventing them from speaking and it doesn’t involve a legally protected class. It’s also not a question of some CEO preventing someone else from speaking. The only thing going on is a CEO saying they won’t help promote that speech, which is a basic right.

Of course it is a question of legality. It is a question of whether a CEO -- who has no democratic legitimacy -- should be allowed to decide what can be (in a manner that other people will actually read) published. And as I said, that their censorship is not perfect does not make a difference.

> and it doesn’t involve a legally protected class.

All your saying is that the CEOs' censorship is legal because it's legal.

Again, no CEO is preventing people from publishing things. You can setup your own server and publish anything you want unless it’s in a few illegal categories. Your position seems to be that your desire not to pay for hosting confers some sort of right to compel other people to pay for it but that’s simply not true.

I'm not going to continue a discussion with someone that seems to guess instead of read what I write.

When you say it’s ok to censor something because it is [hateful | racist | sexist | obscene | dangerous], then you’re opening a pretty bad door. You’ve declared it ok to censor—now we’re just arguing over the list of adjectives worthy of censorship. It doesn’t take much to add things like “embarrassing to politicians,” “profit-destroying,” or “against popular opinion” to that list. Who knows, you may hold what you think are benign beliefs and opinions today that someone deems censorable tomorrow and there will be nothing you can do about it. No internet for you, round-earther!

This but unironically.

Societies have used shunning as a way to regulate themselves for thousands of years. There's no reason why we can't do the same thing on the Internet.

The only problem is that the power to shun is being concentrated into too few hands. A group that blames the Jews for literally everything[1] should be shunned, but it shouldn't just be up to one guy to decide that.

The Daily Stormer deserves everything they got. The fact that they've bounced from provider to provider means that the free market is operating correctly; they're being shunned. But as CDN's buy each other out, that gets to be less of a solution.

[1]: https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/4325810/Writers.p... [subhead Morals and Dogma]

Cloudfare is very different from an ISP.

That's true, but it's a different thing. Blocking a site on ISP level prevents users from viewing the site as opposed to blocking creators from presenting the site. It's a subtle but important difference.

Also, according to Wikipedia over a few days the site had its domain registration revoked by several providers, its Youtube channel, Discord, and Twitter accounts were banned, its links were censored on Facebook, and it was DDOSed by Anonymous.[1] If you look at the Wikipedia link it's actually nuts how much effort was put into silencing the site.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Daily_Stormer#Site_hosting...

so? that's only one company. I'm sure if they shopped around they could find more sympathetic businesses (eg. people who host spammers)

If you read this[1] Wikipedia link, you can see that they had quite a lot of difficulty in finding sympathetic businesses.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Daily_Stormer#Site_hosting...

Yes, I'm aware of their various attempts, but their poor choice of companies (mainly from the west) makes me think they either didn't know about about shadier hosting options, or they wanted to keep up the victimization narrative. Why didn't they go for a .su or .ru subdomain and a russian hosting company? I'm sure putin would welcome them with open arms.

> So many services controlled by private companies that can choose to not do business with someone.

That discrimination is not based on intrinsic qualities, though. You can't discriminate on skin color, sexual orientation, etc. because society-at-large has decided those are qualities that you're born with.

But it's perfectly within everyone's right to discriminate against assholes, if that's what they judge you to be.

You can try to change their minds, but there is no right or law that forces them to listen.

Furthermore, a person can't change their genetics. But they can change their attitude, personality, etc. so those are not intrinsic qualities.

> You can't discriminate on skin color, sexual orientation, etc. because society-at-large has decided those are qualities that you're born with.

No, you can't because society has decided you can't. Being something you are born with may or may not be part of the reason some in society support that designation, but its mostly beside the point. Religious or politocal affiliation is not widely viewed an immutable condition of birth and one is protected in the US and the other in at least some US jurisdictions.

Sure, I'm not saying these private companies should be forced to do business with someone like Alex Jones. But maybe some of these services shouldn't just be controlled by private companies. I'm kind of surprised that a government owned domain registrar doesn't exist, for example. If I want to register a domain name I have to go through a private company who can choose not to serve me as long as it isn't because I'm a member of a protected class.

There are plenty government owned registrars. Heck the gTLD .gov is pretty much a goverment entity. They even have policy regarding FOIA requests: https://home.dotgov.gov/foia/ which is they are exempt. However, good luck getting .gov domain. It probably is not happening unless your an actual government entity.

In many western countries you're also not allowed to discriminate against pregnant women, or because of religion, both of which are under an individual's control (except if rape).

Because those are decisions we've collectively decided we should support people's right to make. There's not much support for the right to decide to be an asshole.

but there is - that's what the right to free speech is. As the old saying goes, popular speech doesn't need to be protected. Being "an asshole" is not an objective measure, so you need to draw a line in the sand between legal and illegal speech. Free speech is the line that says "you can say anything" except for a few specific cases that are liable to put people in direct fear for their lives/wellbeing.

Not sure I agree. In the history of humanity, religion has done much more damage than e.g. white nationalism.

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