Firefox bans free speech commenting plugin Dissenter from its extensions gallery
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Given the rhetoric that is often found in comments from those groups, it's not too hard to imagine that the complaints Mozilla cited as the reasons for removal are legitimate.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gab_(social_network)#Dissenter
It’s not necessary for a bloated non profit to remove access to an extension for political reasons (versus technical deficiencies).
Free speech is useless if you’re not willing to defend that which you find most disagreeable.
For example we do not allow Churches to comment on politics they have to remain neutral or they lose their tax exemption
The same should apply to Mozilla. They need to be politically neutral, up holding Legal Speech, or they need to shutdown the Mozilla Foundation and become a for profit organization
Good thing it is not the government telling Mozilla to remove the plugin then, otherwise there might be an actual problem here.
What makes free speech useless is pretending that someone else has a responsibility to promote your message or provide you with access to a printing press. Neither are true. This does not even appear to be the case that Mozilla is preventing anyone from using the plugin, they are just deciding that they aren't going to make any effort to promote it.
I guess it is not too hard to see who the real snowflakes are...
Note we heavily regulate private companies in many US industries when we deem it necessary.
Uhh, Mozilla didn't outlaw anything. Do you want to force Mozilla to put that extension on their site against their free speech rights? The only thing guaranteed by the first amendment is the federal government cannot prevent you from saying what you want. It says nothing about preventing you from using a 3rd party platform. Feel free to get a literal soapbox and preach your truth wherever you want in the real world, no one is stopping you.
I want to hold Mozilla up to their public advertisements, and commitments they made to the public at large, these are a contract if you will to the public. Both because of their Tax Exempt status, and a truth in advertising issue.
If mozilla wants to exercise their right to free association as censorship platform, then they need to give up their Tax Exempt status, as well as cease all public advertisement around "Our mission: Keep the internet open and accessible to all.", Clearly this is only true to people that share the ideological worldview as Mozilla. AS such this is a false statement.
>If mozilla wants to exercise their right to free association as censorship platform, then they need to give up their Tax Exempt status, as well as cease all public advertisement around "Our mission: Keep the internet open and accessible to all."
Firefox extensions are not the internet.
Your understanding of the first amendment's protections is fundamentally flawed. The first amendment protects individual freedom of speech from prosecution and silencing by the government. It does not preclude private businesses or individuals from choosing to ban or prevent certain thoughts and opinions from a service which they provide. If Mozilla gets enough complaints about the speech that can be found on Dissenter, they have every legal right to choose not to host that app.
Freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequences of said speech. Dissenter users are perfectly free to find another home on the internet to voice their opinions.
>It’s not necessary for a bloated non profit to remove access to an extension for political reasons (versus technical deficiencies).
Mozilla themselves has said that they didn't remove it for political reasons, rather it was the language and vitriol being used on the platform. As an example, it's one thing to use something like Dissenter to calmly and rationally discuss why you might think a nation should close its borders to all immigrants, it's another thing to use that same platform to say stuff like, "Fuck those worthless lazy piece of shit beaners coming to this country and stealing white jobs" (not my opinion, btw).
I'm not going to pretend to know that stuff like that was posted to Dissenter, but you and I both know that language like that is commonplace on alt/far-right platforms. It's by no means a stretch to imagine that those kinds of posts are what got Dissenter banned.
>Free speech is useless if you’re not willing to defend that which you find most disagreeable.
I go back to my point above. It's one thing to have a political opinion, it's another thing to be a horrible human being to other people just because you disagree with them. I still think that people should be able to say whatever they want, but if Mozilla doesn't want them to do it on their platform, then the rest of the internet is literally wide open for them to go and find another place to say whatever they want.
It is protected against government intervention by the exact provision which protects Mozilla’s right to not feature it.
> Free speech is useless if you’re not willing to defend that which you find most disagreeable.
You confuse defending the freedom to speak with actively supporting those speaking it.
Freedom of speech includes the freedom not to amplify speech.
Far-left / Socialist is the only "acceptable" way of thinking
anything Libertarian, (which is labeled "far-right" now) should be shut down, out, and banned
Not just HN. Almost all tech companies are HQ-ed (at least for policy making purposes) in and around San Francisco. And they ALL behave the same way - impose their world view with impunity on the rest of the population, at a scale unheard of in human history. Just ponder for a moment that some overpaid Mozilla censorship committee employee, enjoying his/her/zi $20 soy latte in their $4000/month studio in San Francisco got to shut down an entire community's online presence with a single click, because they found the speech there disagreeable (not illegal)
US Capital-“L” Libertarians tend to be solid-to-far right as well as libertarian, but, no, genuine center- and left-libertarian isn't usually called far-right by anyone.
Also, right-libertarians are a pretty big segment of the HN community, possibly more dominant than anything on the left.
Gab is not a far/alt right specific platform. It's just a place where you can say whatever you want.
Problem is the left calls far right or offensive to anything they disagree with.
Mozilla has made their stance on such a goal clear. I don't believe for a hot second that this wasn't a politically-motivated decision, and it really puts the lie to their claims of protecting "a free and open web".
"Free and open" is diametrically opposed to blocking an addon whose sole purpose is to allow access to a third party web service.
They might not have to host it, but if they make it hard/impossible for others to host and use it then they're certainly violating the first of the four freedoms of free software: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html
Still a pain in the ass.
Were Mozilla to keep it up, they would not be "respect[ing] their users".
So what? I'm not trolling, I'm trying to understand. It's doesn't look like anybody was forced to use the extension, you don't like it - don't use it. If it's ok to use clear-cut ideological censorship for plugins/extensions, then it's ok to block websites. Personally, I find it hard to accept.
The article lists an 8 step process and claims users would have to follow that on each restart of Firefox to enable the addon. I’m not sure if that’s true, as the guidelines I can see on other websites seem to suggest self hosting addons shouldn’t have that problem.
[0]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/Dis...
When they were asked to clarify what exactly was violating their ToS, they replied with the most standard bureaucratic non-answer, the kind you might receive from an auto-response email service, full of corporate-speak.
[0] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/
EDIT: According to this[1], Mozilla supposedly cares enough about this free speech, free platform issue to donate $100,000 to "a coordination platform used by activists across the political spectrum, to improve the security of their email service". Do you still believe it's a stretch to hold them to a much higher standard than a for-profit corporation? Note the "activists across the political spectrum" part in their own words.
[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/10/03/mozilla-awards-half...
>Mozilla themselves has said that they didn't remove it for political reasons [or "ideological censorship" as you put it], rather it was the language and vitriol being used on the platform. As an example, it's one thing to use something like Dissenter to calmly and rationally discuss why you might think a nation should close its borders to all immigrants, it's another thing to use that same platform to say stuff like, "Fuck those worthless lazy piece of shit beaners coming to this country and stealing white jobs" (not my opinion, btw).
>I'm not going to pretend to know that stuff like that was posted to Dissenter, but you and I both know that language like that is commonplace on alt/far-right platforms. It's by no means a stretch to imagine that those kinds of posts are what got Dissenter banned.
Hegemony means never having to admit you have an agenda.
...and we're to conclude that, because Mozilla has "hegemony", and are denying a political agenda, they must actually have a political agenda they're not admitting to?
I mean, hegemony could just as well mean never having to deny you have an agenda, because what can anyone do? The US certainly doesn't hide its agenda regarding its military or nuclear hegemony.
Probably a good idea to provide evidence on a case-by-case basis first, otherwise how is this position different from right-wingers that want to play the numbers game too, and preemptively claim that since blacks commit a disproportionately large amount of crimes per capita, any black person should be kept away?
If it's about politically incorrect speech - it's absolutely ideological.
If it's about obscene language - it's still not Mozilla's business to police someone's lexicon, and Mozilla doesn't do it generally, which means something ideological happens here.
Btw, it's interesting that you yourself agree that the whole thing is political by this stereotyping statement but you and I both know that language like that is commonplace on alt/far-right platforms. And at the same time you disagree.
Try to check your biases: every time Trump tweets, Twitter explodes with left activists using motherfcker, fck, and a lot of derogatory expressions addressed to him, and right-leaning voters which has zero value for any civil discourse. So ask yourself: would you say "we both know it's commonplace on the left to use disparaging, and obscene exoressions"? And would you be fine with Twitter punished for this? (It enables them, gives the platform).
Finally, you are calling dissenter.com alt-right which is not true unless they operate alt-right censorship there. It shows some bias too.
How is that such a hard concept for so many people in this thread to understand?
>Mozilla themselves has said that they didn't remove it for political reasons [or "ideological censorship" as you put it], rather it was the language and vitriol being used on the platform. As an example, it's one thing to use something like Dissenter to calmly and rationally discuss why you might think a nation should close its borders to all immigrants, it's another thing to use that same platform to say stuff like, "Fuck those worthless lazy piece of shit beaners coming to this country and stealing white jobs" (not my opinion, btw).
>I'm not going to pretend to know that stuff like that was posted to Dissenter, but you and I both know that language like that is commonplace on alt/far-right platforms. It's by no means a stretch to imagine that those kinds of posts are what got Dissenter banned.
This is the point: Discuss whatever you want, that's OK. Just don't be surprised if you get banned for being an asshole while discussing it.
So basically you're saying you'd be okay if there's one place you could speak freely and be heard (the internet) owned by one guy (the tech monopolies) and he could shut it down for everybody if one person said a bad word on it?
Btw Dissenter does preemptively censors bad language, and they reached out to Mozilla who failed to provide them with specific examples. The same Mozilla shining champion of civility which funds Antifa, the group that does such nonvitriolic things like beat people with bike locks.
>I'm not going to pretend to know that stuff like that was posted to Dissenter, but you and I both know that language like that is commonplace on alt/far-right platforms. It's by no means a stretch to imagine that those kinds of posts are what got Dissenter banned.
>they have every legal right to choose not to host that app.
Serious question for you, how do you feel about net neutrality and bakers and photographers having to work for SSM weddings?
So wait, Dissenter doesn't support free speech?
And unlike a private, for-profit company though,(for which your argument that they are within their rights to provide platform/deplatform whomever they want, would indeed hold) Mozilla attempts to claim the moral high ground in their manifesto[0], citing their commitment to "an internet that promotes civil discourse, human dignity, and individual expression."
[0] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/
EDIT: clarified the first paragraph slightly.
That's the saving grace of Firefox. That's what makes Firefox better than any of the other currently widely-used browsers. A program's technical problems can be fixed, a program's speed can be improved (Mozilla recently proved this in the most recent versions of Firefox), but software freedom cannot be added to a proprietary program.
Therefore if you don't like how Mozilla treats add-on programmers or Firefox users, you have the software freedom needed to make a free derivative of Firefox which behaves in a better way (where "better" is up to you to define, it's purposefully vague). Perhaps you want your Firefox derivative to let its users easily install whatever add-on they like that will persist across restarts, or get add-on updates without hassles by checking multiple sources for updates, or installing add-ons signed with unfamiliar keys after getting a user's approval. I'm sure there are plenty of other ideas you could come up with to implement.
But with software freedom the limits of what you can implement are limits you impose on yourself.
This doesn't make Mozilla or Firefox evil and distributing free software is respectful of the users. Don't confuse unrewarded labor (complaining that Mozilla doesn't make Firefox do what you want) with respect for the users.
The Dissent add-on, similarly, is really just another single point of censorship forum. We can't evaluate whether it is better at respecting user's free speech until they are challenged in a serious way (such as the implicit threats to big social media firms when they are given vague inactionable requests to 'do better' when their CEOs are brought before Congressional hearings and told to respond favorably to Russiagate lies). Already on this forum we see some posters confusing freedom of speech with reading something that echoes their views. One post, for instance, claimed "[Dissent's] audience is primarily folk on the far/alt-right". As George Orwell said, "Freedom is the right to tell people what they don't want to hear". Or as Noam Chomsky reminds us, "Goebbels was in favor of free speech for views he liked. So was Stalin. If you're really in favor of free speech, then you're in favor of freedom of speech for precisely the views you despise. Otherwise, you're not in favor of free speech.".
So both Firefox's add-on repo and Dissent's forum are singletons that don't liberate users so much as they establish their respective admins as censors. Perhaps you could come up with a way to let users more easily distribute comments from their own comment database so that all comment threads on a website come from multiple servers, and no censor power exists because no single user has admin control over all of the comment servers. Dissent is also free software (licensed under Apache License 2.0) so even if you believe Gab or Dissent aren't to be trusted, you could choose to improve Dissent to make it decentralized.
- Systemically ban and censor conservative speech. Never-mind that 50% of the country and about 70% of the world adheres to the EXACT same, fairly reasonable opinions.
- Launch a massive PR campaign (opening salvo of which is accusations of Nazi adherence) against those crying foul, or pointing out the clear ultra-left bias in censorship and actions
- Claim that private companies hold no MORAL responsibility to uphold constitutionally guaranteed free speech laws
- Claim that the internet be treated as a utility, with free access to everyone, but ignore the fact that massive monopolies controlling the REAL utilitarian aspects of the internet (search, email, payments, hosting, cloud, etc. ) are all in cahoots to kill conservative speech, with cognitive dissonance of how they've combined to de-platform entire philosophies from the internet that they control
- Behave with absolute impunity with political agendas, and claim to be neutral
This is so obviously not an issue of "free speech." Free speech means the government cannot prosecute you for what you say. Any company can tell you to fuck off for any reason though, and that's the free market all the "free speech" advocates love so much.
No, that's the 1st amendment of the US constitution. Free speech is a broader concept, and the 1st amendment defends it only from government interference.
Censorship not necessarily equal government censorship, and its ludicrous that people seem to assume it does.
That only shows that reception to what is being said is overwhelmingly negative. Society has an unfortunate long history of doing that for arbitrary and stupid things. There are legitimate reasons for using something like this.
Granted with the "alt-right" it is a clear case of "They laughed at Einstein but they also laughed at Bozo the Clown".
I can't help but think it is a shame that an overlay messageboard concept like that wound up being used in a double rot13 cryptofascist dumpster fire. Although it would probably always tend toward toxicity given its usefulness for hatedoms of any sort.
I'm imagining a useful fact checker one slapped over news websites and even maintaining "score" of accuracy per author, site, and topic.
Off topic, but I don't think they laughed at Einstein. Special and general relativity were well received by the scientific community, weren't they?
Do you know, personally, if these messages where the "majority" of the content or do you believe if even a single one of these "rot13 cryptofascist dumpster fire" messages where posted anywhere on the network that is justification for a complete ban?
Do believe companies like Mozilla should be uphold legal speech as it pertains to US Laws (as mozilla is a US Company) or should they impose greater censorship over everything that flows through their web browser, picking and choosing what is "acceptable"
Incorrect, very very very incorrect
I am alarmed by the fact that people believe the only censorship by government is a problem or what "free speech" means.
A society can be completely devoid of free speech while not having any government censorship at all. We are seeing the manifestation of such a society today.
Government censorship is only one kind, and only 1 threat to free speech, but it is far far far from the only threat.
> Any company can tell you to fuck off for any reason though,
Yes, yes they can. But if they do they should not be able to advertise, collect money, and promote being "for everyone" or "adovating for the free and open web" or other such statements. That is and should be considered fraud if they do such things.
If Mozilla wants to be a censorship platform, they need to own it in their marketing, mission statement, and public advocacy
> the free market all the "free speech" advocates love so much.
It is always amusing with Authoritarian and socialist promote the "free market" when it comes to censorship when in reality they have not idea what they are talking about
Such was discussing LGBT issues before the 2000s.