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Comment by dexen | Hacker News Reader

>Seems these days the second option is always the preferred one.

Not on the internet, no. The 2/4/8/whatever-chans are alive and kicking. Ditto the good old IRC. There's plenty of other services that are more rough-and-tumble than milktoasty. Any of the new social media like Mastodon, Minds, BitChute have rather hands-off moderation - any lawfull content has rather good chances of staying there undisturbed.

The difference is one of perception - namely, which ones get favorable opinions in the media as family safe, and which ones get condemned as the seedy, scary underbelly.

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> The 2/4/8/whatever-chans are alive and kicking

I feel it's only a matter of time before they get blocked at the router or at least DNS level in a western European country. They were blocked in New Zealand for a while after the chan-radicalized mass murder there.

The Christchurch shooting was Facebook, yet unrelated sites get blocked, makes it really look like a racket.

That's so stupid, though. A whole service gets blocked for 1 person?

I assume this person could have gotten radicalized by talking to other radicals on the phone, so you ban phones?

Could have, but didn't, because phones are a 1-1 medium and people don't go around cold-calling others to see if they're into white supremacy and conspiracy theories.

Not only that, it wasn't one person, or rather it was not one person alone. He was fed, indoctrinated and enabled by his co-conspirators who egged him on with anti-Islam material. In some sense they got off lightly: if the situation had been reversed and we were talking about an Islamic supremacist board promoting violence against Christians which resulted in a massacre, they might have been candidates for an airstrike. "We kill people based on metadata", remember? https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2014/05/10/we-kill-people-base...

The ban would most likely be for refusal to comply with rules regarding extremist or crime-promoting material. For example the UK has a unit pointed at the major social networks making binding takedown requests against (primarily) Daesh material: https://wiki.openrightsgroup.org/wiki/Counter-Terrorism_Inte...

There are proposals to make the terrorist takedown regime mandatory across Europe: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-45495544

At the moment the authorities are surprisingly un-worried about white supremacist terrorism compared to Islamist terrorism, of which there is very little on the chans. So they largely escape takedown requirements. But if the extremism escalates that may not stay that way.

> could have

But they didn't, that's a detail you can't just conveniently drop to argue in the abstract.

Handing the responsibility for the mass murder on a platform is not much different than blaming books, rock music or TV. There are good things and bad things on the chans. Blocking it would just be a sign of losing control and having no explanation for the deed.

But yes, increasing the pressure on these kind of online spaces seems to have had a overall negative effect. If you don't know the demographic and how gripers react to pressure, you should not preach about the source of radicalization.

And yes, you also will net the ire of people that like their freedom and haven't done anything.

The point remains that crime/radicalization can occur over any site/medium. Banning a site or medium seems heavy-handed unless it exists expressly to facilitate crime/radicalization, in my opinion. TOR, for example, has been a known avenue for the spread of child pornography, yet we don't shut it down.

there's more CP on twitter than TOR but nice meme

edit: nice meme bc who actually uses TOR? theres so much more cp on surface web liek chans, tumblr used to be a pedos dream, twitter etc.

no one uses tor zzz

Got any proof to back up that statement? There have been numerous FBI busts of Onion sites. For example: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/11/fbi-operated-23-...

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/aug/13/twitte...

https://sputniknews.com/science/201905091074866833-Twitter-3...

you can literally google twitter child porn

theres hundreds of threads exposing how these people start group dms baiting kids

https://twitter.com/xcutesannex/status/1147456947727282177 shit in a similar format to this

This is a weird quibble. Is your argument simply to let me know I could've used an example with more child porn? Unless you're arguing there's no CP on TOR, my point in the context of the original comment stands.

> But they didn't

Because there was a more convenient option. I think they'll just run their own alternative, especially as domains are cheap. Also, what about that namecoin thing? Seems like a workaround.

Who says it's done for 1 person? 4chan, 8chan and the like have a long history of radicalising people and fostering all sorts of hate and abuse. That mass murderer was not the first one.

> Not on the internet, no. The 2/4/8/whatever-chans are alive and kicking.

These places are almost like art. Fully dependent on the goodwill of a handful of patrons that regard them as valuable while many would prefer to see them dissapear.

> many would prefer to see them dissapear.

I don't think it's as many as some think. A lot of this censorship banter comes from a very vocal minority who appear to be a majority only in their own minds.

While the actual majority is mostly busy with their jobs and lives. ....and probably blowing off steam on some image board or news / link aggregator website after work.

Free speech has the same issue as data security or privacy have. For most people it does not feel to be a problem in their daily lifes so the active players can push for whatever is the most profitable option.

Chans are seen as integration tests for censorship.

I doubt media has that much influence on platform choice today.

The difference is actually that Facebook/Instagram, Google/Youtube dwarf anything else by a wide margin. So when they choose to do something it's representative and certainly relevant "on the internet". The chans or IRC are a spec in this picture.

The point was placing profits over the protection makes sense from their perspective. They take a big risk whatever option they choose, might as well make money doing it. And they will certainly be forgiven because on the internet memory is very short. Or perhaps many people just don't care. Facebook's user numbers have been steadily increasing for years.

You say "no" but that is the second option the GP was talking about.

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