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Comment by DanAndersen | Hacker News Reader

Related: Gab had also posted a public statement [0] on Medium after the shooting in Pittsburgh.

However, Medium has now suspended Gab from their platform, so that the only way to read the statement is to use an archive link [1].

Hopefully the tech community learns from this about the dangers of using centralized external services for your public presence. If you find yourself under distributed political attack your voice will not make its way out there without being filtered by intermediary media outlets unless you own the full stack of your system from top to bottom.

[0] https://medium.com/@getongab/gab-com-statement-on-the-tree-o...

[1] http://archive.is/vysbL

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Medium's actions seem particularly bizarre and insidious. I can understand why people might believe that Gab should be shut down, even though I disagree (not very strongly - Gab, like Voat with Reddit, was capable only of attracting the worst of Twitter). But Medium appears to believe that defending the existence of a free speech platform is so fundamentally indefensible that it should be impermissible!

It also disturbs me how complete and total these lockouts tend to be - if you get put under the wrong spotlight, it's clear how completely and totally the corporate sphere will coordinate to shut you down. You won't even have a platform to defend yourself on, and the situation is getting worse, not better. Short of laying your own fiber cables and creating your own Internet, there's nothing you can do. This makes me very uneasy.

I think the NPR interview with the founder of Gab is worth listening to. [1] It strikes me that just a few years ago, most people would have been in support of their position. The world has changed dramatically in just a few years.

https://www.npr.org/2018/10/29/661676103/after-synagogue-att...

Look through this thread, people have already decided that "free speech" is a dog whistle meaning that you are anti-semetic and support murder. It's a shame that people are willing to throw away their personal freedoms in exchange for fake civility.

Meh. Look at the official PR of gab, and tell me again they're solely concerned with free speech:

https://twitter.com/Popehat/status/1056266704148262912 https://twitter.com/ClenchedFisk/status/1027690034718224384?...

are a good start, but there's lots more (even though they're currently deleting some of it).

They're trolling and not actually concerned with free speech. It's just a way to sow division for them.

One of those tweets satirically calls for "open borders for Israel".

What's wrong with pointing out that Israel is an ethnostate with tightly controlled immigration? It's a useful example for those advocating tighter immigration controls in the US.

Satire isn't trolling. I don't know the context in which Gab made that tweet but I've seen "open borders for Israel" in other contexts, where it was used to advocate adopting policies more like Israel's, not merely to sow division.

Comeon, you're cherry-picking. The comment about inferring a position on free-speech from Krassenstein's name clearly was a play on his name sounding Jewish. [EDIT: WRONG: And the retweet in the other link was just after the shooting (along with a lot of other trolling) - hardly the reaction of an organization horrified about what happened.]

EDIT: The tweet referenced above actually significantly earlier. They deleted many tweets, so it's a bit hard to figure out when what exactly happened.

The retweet by PopeHat was after the shooting, but the tweet from Gab was on August 9th.

Taking that out of context now and claiming it was a response to the shooting is dishonest.

Oh, if that's true, I'm sorry. They did tweet a lot of stuff around that time, but so much of it is deleted, that it's hard to remember exactly what is what. Edited post to note uncertainty.

Not that I think that makes the post any more acceptable.

Edit: leereeves was/is right.

It's one of the tweets in the second link as well, where you can see the date.

No. You're confused.

There are anti-semetics hiding behind the 'free speech' banner, saying they have a right to try and convert more people to anti-semetism, and that nothing should stand in their way. It's not the other way around.

The version of Article 19 in the ICCPR amends the "freedom of expression" by stating that the exercise of these rights carries "special duties and responsibilities" and may "therefore be subject to certain restrictions" when necessary "[f]or respect of the rights or reputation of others" or "[f]or the protection of national security or of public order (order public), or of public health or morals".

https://web.archive.org/web/20080705115024/http://www2.ohchr...

If the government can censor free speech for the "public order" or for "morals", it isn't free speech. Those are the exact justifications tyrants have used for thousands of years to justify repression. Often they were even true: expressing yourself against a repressive or discriminatory regime can certainly be disruptive to the public order. It sounds like the ICCPR is meaningless fluff.

Okay so if I start a Youtube channel with the specific intent of convincing people they should kill your wife, it's all good?

Where do you draw the line?

I think the US's Brandenburg test is a good line. It is much narrower than some nebulous concept of the public order.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/brandenburg_test

As an upper bound, I would certainly draw the line at shutting down all of Youtube on because of the presence of particular offensive videos.

There is a difference between someone convincing people about killing ALL wives vs a particular one.

The first one obviously needs medication, and will be ignored. The second one - depending on the specificity of the threat - a request to take the video down or a police visit.

You say it will be ignored, but here we are after the shooting. And gab was not willing to take it down. Nor did laws help.

I love the idea of free speech to explore the space of possible ideas even against the current flow. But now we have easy filter bubbles and are missing effective mechanism pushing towards consensus. I have a hard seeing how it will not end with violence when hate speech and other surreal propaganda doesn't have consequences. But yes, we haven't found a good solution for that, yet.

The situation here in germany is even more... "funny". Gov decided to ban hate-speech, but the decision per individual case isn't up to some judge, but has to be done by the platform or face fines. Yeah, so far I prefer the current US way of not doing business with assholes.

> You say it will be ignored, but here we are after the shooting. And gab was not willing to take it down. Nor did laws help.

What was the direct/specific threat that Gab refused to take down?

Are you offering the ICCPR as an example of what free speech should mean?

It has been signed by Thailand, where insulting the king is illegal; Pakistan, where blasphemy is illegal; and Israel, where boycotting the state is illegal.

The ICCPR's definition of "freedom of speech" allows almost any restriction the government desires.

If the article was worded differently, would it make any difference when there is no way of holding bad-faith regimes accountable?

There are strict limits on free speech in Germany, showing it can work as intended.

If anything, it shows that free speech can be abused by bigots on both sides.

How is this an issue of free speech? Im not aware medium said they will host anyone

> Hopefully the tech community learns from this about the dangers of using centralized external services for your public presence.

Which means... what? Put your stuff on the dark web? Because if you host your own blog - GoDaddy can shut you down. Use an ISP that doesn't do anything? The domain name can be shut down. The internet is full of centralized services.

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