Terminating Service for 8Chan
new.blog.cloudflare.com
new.blog.cloudflare.com
But if now they're manually deciding who goes on their network and who doesn't, it seems like they're more responsible for everything else that's on it that they allow.
They're a private company and I support them choosing to do business with whoever they want, but I thought there was some sort of legal distinction if they were totally agnostic to what travels over their wires. Is that not the case?
> I thought there was some sort of legal distinction if they were totally agnostic to what travels over their wires. Is that not the case?
Not as far as I'm aware, no. The closest thing I can think of is if they were discriminating based on people's membership in a protected class, eg, if they announced a strict "no female clients" policy. This is clearly vastly different.
From a PR point of view, yes, every time they kick someone off for being bad, the more their failing to kick someone off will be seen as an implicit endorsement. But again, that ship has sailed.
I think it's unconstitutional and the worst thing to happen to the internet in many years, as well as one of the worst things to happen to civil liberties (which is a pretty high bar!). Unfortunately, it passed senate 97 votes to 2, which suggests legislative fixes will not be coming soon.
For the record, gender isn't a protected class in a place of public accommodation and it's why clubs in Las Vegas can charge Men more than Women.
The opposite is true. CDA 230 makes it clear that companies can moderate their content without becoming responsible for it.
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20190507/16484342160/one-t...
Are you sure you heard the argument correctly?
> If Facebook were to start creating or editing content on its platform, it would risk losing that immunity
and
> If Facebook is going to behave like a media provider, picking and choosing what viewpoints to represent, then it’s hard to argue that the company should still have immunity from the legal constraints that old-media organizations live with.
This is all nonsense. Old-media organizations are protected by CDA 230 just like everyone else: they can host third party content like user comments without being liable for it.
Publishers being able to "censor" is the whole value proposition for having a publisher. You're paying for the NYT because it picks who to publish. Facebook has no special "platform" protections that anyone else doesn't get.
Many, many people seem to think that CDA 230 itself makes a distinction between "platforms" and "publishers". I even replied to someone here in this comment section:
The second one is asking "should they" - its asking a question not positing a fact.
Should they get immunity for what posted if its clear they have the capacity to censor at will? Why should they and not anyone else on the internet?
CDA makes a distinction between publisher and platform and the talk about this whole issue is that many people are saying that these companies can clearly police their content, and should be liable for it and not specially protected.
Where does the CDA make a platform/publisher distinction? What is the definition of the difference, and where is it in the law?
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/230
As Techdirt says, "This "publisher" v. "platform" concept is a totally artificial distinction that has no basis in the law.". Are they wrong?
I just know I'll remember that cloudflare could pull the pulg on my site if one of my users posts something they don't like. I don't think I can recommend their service to any of clients because of that.
On the other hand, we don't live in that world, and I don't know how well it would work in practice if we did. In this world, corporations and governments have enormous power. Cloudflare has made it clear that it will use that power in a fairly limited and restrained way, but it will use it as it sees fit.
Given that, this seems like a reasonable exercise of that power, and that's about the best we can hope for.
Maybe, this event may become the precedent for all future hosting providers of unpopular opinions and where denial of service attacks become used against these hosting providers. Losing protection from anti-ddos service(s) becomes a process to eliminate the unpopular opinions being expressed.
I think this is dangerous recourse and even if there are competitor services like cloudfare. There are limits in services available and state actors can understand this problem. Then make it impossible for unpopular opinions to be expressed by either orchestrating what's needed to get the anti-ddos services to resent their customers or by other means.
Me personally, I'm alright with 8chan being deleted from the internet but I don't think that will even solve the problem. People with poor quality of life will continue being radicalized and do these acts of revenge in their eyes against a system that made them live in pain (somehow unjust to their views). I think we just need to improve quality of life for people equally without leaving some people left behind because of whatever circumstances. Otherwise people feel the need to leave with sometimes a couple bangs.
Maybe it won't!
I feel like every time a controversial site gets shut down message boards are flooded with slippery slope arguments, but by and large I haven't seen it ever transpire.
How many controversial topics can we recall that we lived through and where they became accepted overtime? What medium was used at the time and was it the popular communication method for the time. I'm sure historically there was a similar fight with what mediums were available at the time. Burning books or just killing someone who speaks out.
The internet can be the only method nowadays where people with little finances can make a loud enough voice be heard and there are still unpopular views I'm worried won't ever get accepted if people are not being cautious about throwing away measures. That's why the slippery slope argument is worth me typing. Even if maybe it won't!
Reddit was notoriously infested with white supremacist subs, jailbait subs, pics of dead people subs, and more, and they were all brought up to the admins many times, and the admins never took any action on this hateful content until CNN et al started writing articles about it.
It's not entirely unlike this situation with Cloudflare, really. These companies talk a big game about their principles and morals, but at the end of the day the only principle they strictly adhere to is the principle of public backlash.
Should we ban all pro-abortion subreddits as well because they promote murder of unborn children?
I think the wider demonetization is part of a cynical attempt to sabotage non-publisher media generally, it’s not an accidental side effect. There’s a scorched earth campaign by certain activists at Vox, Media Matters, and even CNN to contact advertisers en masse and essentially threaten that they are considering naming the advertiser in a hit piece about objectionable content. They aren’t dumb - they know the fallout will affect independent journalists and media of all politics.
Btw, the only reason I feel the needs to share my thoughts is because I have an unpopular opinion myself. Assisted death should become available for people that desire it. There are some sites I view that have resources for people that are ending their life and these sites suffer denial of service attacks. They started using cloudflare recently.
It does _not_ mean that a hosting company has to host it or that a CDN has to optimize it or that a search company has to rank it or that an ad-network has to monetize it. Each of those players is free to do what they think is best with their time, resources, etc.; which often includes thinking of what "the public" will think of them doing (or not doing) a thing.
Freedom does not mean that I have the "right" to be heard or the "right" to be amplified—either as much as the next person or at all.
The net, as in a network of computers, is quite close to free. Being a part of a society is not. Ted Kaczynski was not arrested for writing manifestos beyond the pale of normative capitalism from a self-built cabin in Montana. He was arrested for sending bombs. The moment one person freely decides to harmfully affect others, those others can do something about it.
It seems much of the hand-wringing about freedom—when we talk about the internet and corporations—is that extremist speech does not have access to the same megaphone, the same means of monetization (and therefore survival). And that…well that's what living in a society is all about.
Are there bad parts about tech as we see it today? Absolutely! But it hardly seems like the problem is "not enough shit is allowed on the internet." I don't know, maybe I'm wrong.
Should that mean the water company can cut your water off for criticizing them?
Should that mean that a bank can refuse to give you a loan, because you said something bad, even if your credit is more than acceptable?
-------------------------------
Remember this: its the extremist that the law is made around. And soon enough, the law will be wrapped around non-extremists and used as let another tool of influence and control. The worst part is that anyone who speaks against this sort of law is seen to be defending the extremists, and is seen as a despicable person - yet the criticizers never stop to think about the average Joe and Jane.
Banks can absolutely decide not to do business you, for any reason that's not explicitly forbidden (protected classes, etc.)
No. Because they are a public utility and that would be a violation of the first amendment.
> Should that mean that a bank can refuse to give you a loan, because you said something bad, even if your credit is more than acceptable?
Yes. Because they are a private institution and not obligated to do business with you.
There are very simple rules at play here...
If all of the major ISPs launch their own email competitor and then go on to block Google, would you be singing the same tune? "It's okay because AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, and Charter are private institutions and are not obligated to do business with Google"? What if it turns out that the AT&T CEO is a Trump supporter, and he decides that anyone who has AT&T as an ISP will no longer be able to access any news site other than Fox News? "It's okay because AT&T is a private company and has no obligation to do business with the Washington Post"?
The entire argument for net neutrality is based on the premise that sometimes even private companies become so big that they become very similar to 'public utilities' and it is absolutely in the public interest to force those companies to not arbitrarily filter whatever they feel like.
You can argue that Cloudflare, or a bank, or whoever doesn't fit this definition, but you can't both be for something like net neutrality while simultaneously spouting this argument that "private companies can do whatever they want". We have literally centuries of laws that specifically say that no, companies cannot do whatever they want just because they are private.
An example right of way agreement between a municipality and Cable company: https://www.avondalelibrary.org/Home/ShowDocument?id=7086
Summary of right of law statutes in different states:
https://www.ntia.doc.gov/legacy/ntiahome/staterow/rowtable.p...
>but you can't both be for something like net neutrality while simultaneously spouting this argument that "private companies can do whatever they want".
One can definitely pick and choose what you want to support, all those laws did exactly the same. Charities are 'picked and chosen' not to pay taxes, even though they are basically private companies. I don't see a contradiction between supporting net neutrality and supporting Cloudflare's decision.
>We have literally centuries of laws that specifically say that no, companies cannot do whatever they want just because they are private
We have literally centuries of law stating that 'Neo-Nazi White Supremacists' isn't a protected class, hence can be refused service.
If and when this is abused by companies causing real problems which society thinks is unacceptable, new laws will be passed restricting discriminating against neo-Nazis.
Maybe write to your local congressman and senator asking them to pass a law forcing Cloudflare to serve neo-Nazis.
And Cloudflare's business is similarly dependent on these very same rights of way and spectrums. So why shouldn't they be subject to the same restrictions?
Hint: it's because the argument for net neutrality has nothing to do with the ISP's usage of ROW or public spectrum, and everything to do with the effect that it would have on society if ISPs were allowed to arbitrarily filter whatever they want.
What's funny about this is that I actually don't need to make this argument, because Cloudflare's CEO Matthew Prince has already made it for me. The entire blog post that he wrote [1] when Daily Stormer was taken off CF is one big explanation of why companies like Cloudflare having the ability to arbitrarily filter sites is bad. That didn't seem to stop him, I guess.
> Due Process requires that decisions be public and not arbitrary. It's why we've always said that our policy is to follow the guidance of the law in the jurisdictions in which we operate. Law enforcement, legislators, and courts have the political legitimacy and predictability to make decisions on what content should be restricted. Companies should not.
1: https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-we-terminated-daily-stormer/
Did Cloudflare sign a document like this one?
https://www.avondalelibrary.org/Home/ShowDocument?id=7086
Then 8chan should sue them in court and win.
Why didn't Daily Stormer sue them?
In order for them to win, you'll have to ignore the fact that when they created a CloudFlare account, they agreed that CloudFlare had the right to terminate such services for any or no reason.
I'm saying this not because I disagree with your position, but mainly because this confusion was dominating the debate in the US and was to some extent a deliberate strawman pushed by the opponents of net neutrality.
A lot of pro net neutrality people didn’t really understand what they were arguing for, I think, since the same people will turn around and argue that ISPs should be able to censor content they don’t like.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_Open_Internet_Order_2010
“A person engaged in the provision of fixed broadband Internet access service, insofar as such person is so engaged, shall not block lawful content, applications, services, or non-harmful devices, subject to reasonable network management.“
The point remains that the OP mischaracterized net neutrality. What is important is that net neutrality only concerns transport of IP packets. Content providing companies and web site owners can moderate, block, or censor content as they like and as they deem fit. They have done so in the past under net neutrality, do so in countries with net neutrality laws, and are doing it now in the US without net neutrality.
The two issues are frequently mixed up, hence my comment.
On a side note, I've never heard anyone argue that ISPs should block content, that seems like a strawman to me, but I guess if you just search hard enough you can find someone on the Internet who argued for that nonsense.
> lawful content
Good point, that's compatible with restrictions of freedom of speech due to declaring certain kind of content illegal, and clearly illustrates that the two issues are different from each other. Yet people confuse them again and again, and additionally almost always base their arguments on a false dichotomy or on fallacious slippery slope arguments.
The logical end to deplatforming is arguing that ISPs should be able to block or decline customers based on the content they are hosting. Otherwise a customer can buy business-class internet and host their immoral content themselves on a server farm in their home, which takes away the whole point of deplatforming which is to make the content no longer available on the internet.
Not at all. That's an obvious strawman.
You're mischaracterizing what's going on there. If I run a company, it is my right not to make business with radical hate groups and terrorists. They will be someone else's problem then.
That's exactly the reason that Cloudflare has given, not some nebulous talk about "deplatforming".
> which is to make the content no longer available on the internet
LOL. That is decidedly not the purpose of deplatforming, as the word "de-platforming" readily suggests.
> the FBI could already have had them pulled offline just like they do to ISIS websites
It is obvious to me as an outside observer that the FBI applies justice selectively. Domestic terrorism is underrated. Of course, 8chan could be raided and closed for the same reasons as ISIS websites are raided and closed. The laws are there and 8chan could easily be considered aiding and fostering domestic terrorism. The laws are just not applied in this case.
It's also kind of 'reasonable' not to apply them as harshly, since US judges and juries suffer from the same bias. They are unlikely to judge of some deranged gun nut that he was planning or aiding a terrorist attack. They are highly likely to judge of some deranged ISIS sympathizer that he was planning or aiding a terrorist attack. Police authorities make the call on what to pursue and what not to pursue based on the prospects of a successful trial.
This type of thing is possibly one of the hardest ethical issues to tackle. On the one hand, I don't support racists and fascists at all. But on the other hand, I recognize the potential damage in carving out these exceptions in free speech. As social mores change, the ideas of "acceptable" free speech may change, and we need to be cognizant of the ways that these exceptions could be abused long term. Otherwise, we're just setting up future generations for a collapse of the concept of freedom of speech.
I think the answer to solving hate and bigotry goes much, much deeper than preventing people from speaking their hateful and bigoted views. All that's going to do is sweep the problem under the rug, and eventually that problem will come back out some orders of magnitude worse. Perhaps we could do things like make it illegal to teach kids hate and bigotry? But then you've got the entirety of America mad at you because you're "telling people how to raise their kids". Mere advocacy against bullying and hate doesn't really seem to be working.
I think we'll see better gains in this area when we stop trying to find the first thing we can to "blame" these mass shooting on, and arguing endlessly about what that cause is (guns, video games, unrestricted freedom of speech, etc). We need to dig deep. I think if we understood more on the topic of mental health, we'd have a better chance at understanding these situations.
Well, it's been going on for years in the Netherlands, where the Pirate Bay, almost all of its proxies, and a couple of non-TPB torrent sites are being blocked at the ISP level. It used to be a relatively simple to circumvent DNS block (the ISPs didn't really want to, either), but they've gotten better at it and now if it's blocked, the site is either gone, unless a specific proxy for it exist (or you use a VPN).
To tie it back to the US again, the reason this happened is because of a Dutch lobbying group (Brein) that is funded by and works directly for the gigantic US content industry and rightholders (there are maybe a few Dutch artists attached to them , but they are a mere drop in budget).
Incitement to specific violence and planning thereof, against specific individuals, is not lawful content.
> Yes. Because they are a private institution and not obligated to do business with you.
That's some pretty strong dissonance there. Here in Indiana, the utilities AND banks are all private entities. And there's no actual state or federal law that would prevent a utility from cutting utilities for "being and speaking of white nationalism". I chose my examples carefully - all are much more regulated than some Walmart or Target or Amazon.
My larger discussion was that over very corporate autonomy. Who made them arbiters of what language was acceptable? Why should infrastructure companies be decision makers of what is said online? Years ago, we restricted the phone companies from doing that very thing - and they wanted dearly to forbid classes of speech. Yet somehow when it's "on the interwebz" we throw those ideas and rules out, all so that someone can make a bigger pile of dollars.
Don't forget, cloudflare is a US company. There's absolutely 0 reason why they can't be considered an infrastructure company and subject to common carrier rules as well. Or the counter-offer is they can be responsible for speech over their network. I doubt they'd like that either. After all, they're still hosting piles of stressers and ddos merchants.
I don't see a dissonance. If and when banks and utilities start cutting off neo-Nazis, the public and politicians may find that unpalatable and pass laws restricting it. Or may not. The fact that isn't happening right now means no unnecessary laws are required.
If and when society and politicians feel that Cloudflare shouldn't be able to not serve 8chan, it will pass a law doing so. Call your congressman and senator.
>Years ago, we restricted the phone companies from doing that very thing - and they wanted dearly to forbid classes of speech
Sounds interesting, got any references to read?
It's likely there's one (or at most, a small handful) of each utility enjoying a state-supported monopoly, even if it's technically run by a private company. The same is not true for banks - I can sign up for one of hundreds of nationwide or online banks even if all the local ones decide I'm an ass.
Certain banks and their services (e.g. wire transfer), as well as payment providers should be treated like public utilities, especially when they have quasi-monopolies. The same for ISPs in areas in which there is only one or two, and other large companies with quasi-monopolies like Google, Apple and Microsoft. I don't think this applies to companies like Reddit or Cloudflare, though, for which there are easy and widely used substitutes.
Because a big reason why I think this is bad is because I thought there are in fact no realistic alternatives to Cloudflare's protection.
If there are alternatives, then I am also in the camp of "okay they can decide who to do business with or not".
But I was under the impression that, if you are a controversial website, at a certain size (not even that big, depending on your enemies) you are likely to draw DDoS attacks of a severity that only Cloudflare can realistically protect against. The DDoS attacks being relatively cheap for whoever orders them.
Your argument fails to credibly address the situation at hand.
By the way, some states are now recognizing that political affiliation needs to be a protected class as well: https://www.legalmatch.com/law-library/article/political-aff.... It may not be in keeping with modern progressive thought but is certainly in the spirit of classical liberalism as well as an important first step in depolarizing the country.
A person who believes black people should be killed or kicked out of the U.S. can always change their mind, and they should.
Advocating bigotry or violence is not a political affiliation nor is it a protected class.
In practice, nobody cares to protect bigots and a lot of people want to protect gays, immigrants, women, etc. It is troubling that we only protect certain classes of people since maybe the next group that comes along after the current group of bigots will actually deserve protection but the arguments we built to allow the lack of protection for bigots will be used to deny protection to that group.
Bigotry has cloaked itself in the mantle of victim and you've totally fallen for it.
Roman Christians refused to worship the emperor, destabilizing the social order, and therefore needed to be thrown to the lions to protect society.
Atheists couldn’t be trusted because they didn’t believe in hell, and therefore would act immorally, and so should be banned from positions of power (this is actually in a couple of US state constitutions!)
(And of course, the same arguments were used in reverse later on as different groups got power)
I won’t shed any tears for 8chan who are a bunch of immoral scum, but I know these same arguments will be deployed to censor religious minorities and others in the future. Hopefully they are less appealing targets.
These people are real, and actually causing harm. Or do you argue that it is not the case?
The western Roman Empire fell apart a hundred years after Christianity became the state religion. Some historians blame tensions among christian schisms in Egypt/the Middle East for the byzantine empire losing those regions to the Arab invasion.
(All I’m saying with the above is that the justifications seemed plausible and reasonable to the educated people of the time. Read Pliny’s letter to Trajan seeking counsel for what to do about Christians, for example)
I think the answer is more speech, not less. Any exception you carve out will be abused in the future, based on the history of humankind and the behavior of governing entities throughout.
Take these exceptions to freedom of speech, add to them a codified framework for equity (which some are pushing for), and you're laying the groundwork for a society like that seen in Harrison Bergeron.
I suppose you don't find historical things like McCarthyism very worrying, given how easily you are to think your principle of discriminating by choice separates what you judge to be good from what you judge to be bad. But do you really trust every imaginable leader with such a power?
Access means people who WANT this content can get it easily. If you're making it harder for people who voluntarily choose to view 8chan content, you're restricting access.
Amplification means getting content in front of new eyeballs that wouldn't have otherwise seen it. E.g. if Facebook determined that given this user's age, race, zip-code, and favorite TV shows they might be in interested in this racist-meme sharing group that one of their friends joined, and then surfaces that content, that's amplification.
Which a CDN does as well. If a user visits the site during peak demand and the site without a CDN can't handle it, the user doesn't get the site in front of their eyeballs. With a CDN, they might. Analogy also works during DDoS attacks. Both assume that the user doesn't have infinite memory and patience to keep trying (because that's a realistic assumption).
"Amplification" has be overloaded. You are talking about a viral marketing definition, whereas CDNs are a hardware+software force multiplier for performance.
Whether this makes them reasonable, time will tell. Full marks to Cloudflare for so eloquently addressing this and covering themselves with as much grace as they could muster. If one reads between the lines, censorship is coming. This isn't different from what jgrahamc said a few months back in the news [1].
Signals a new era for Cloudflare, going from protector to arbitrator [2], for better or for worse.
[0] for instance, it was and still is a crime to be a minority in some countries.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19774347
[2] Not an expert, but it'd be nice if they allowed 30 to 90 day time period before termination, rather than doing it overnight?
Do you have examples in mind?
I have no doubt that this is the case, but I can't think of any examples.
They kicked off The Daily Stormer 2 years ago. I'm not sure anything changed today.
A government funded Reddit?
Which government would fund it? How would it be run?
If not government funded, a non-profit, like c-span.
Critical thinking skills still seem to be a rarity.
Oh, so you are in favor of shutting down all army related sites? Well, many pacifist would probably agree ..
And governemnts openly advertise for it. On websites, (even in schools). And private enthusiasts maintain forums where army people discuss about the current wars and how to better kill the current enemy. Etc. Etc.
Not necessarily. The purpose of armies is to win wars. If it was possible to win wars without killing people they wouldn't kill people. In fact they are trying to minimize collateral damage. It's different with white supremacists. They have a direct interest in killing people. There is no collateral damage for them, which is also why they do mass shootings and the army usually doesn't.
Some really do want to kill people, but then again would you deny that the army or even the police doesn't get their fair share of these people?
I don't know the answer, but I know that indiscriminate restrictions on freedom of speech aren't the answer.
It saddens me that this paraphrased prose I'm about to write even has to exist.
First they came for the Nazis, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Nazi.
Then they came for the racists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a racist.
Then they came for the bigots, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a bigot.
Then they came for the rich, and I did not speak out— Because I was not rich.
Then they came for the religious, and I did not speak out— Because I was not religious.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
I don't, so I value it very much. There were attrocities in my countries in the name of common sense on the other hand.
Even if intuitive, censorship isn't an answer to anything.
Regardless of the reason people visit these places, the moment they get external pressure, their believes get vindicated. We see a large surge in issues with these communities since we got on our little censorship trip. It is just plainly the wrong move to make.
There have been Nazis on the internet since shortly after its inception. But random people going out and shooting crowds in this frequency is a new phenomenon.
Historically censorship has always been applied for the right reasons of course.
Everyone here wants that perfect idealistic and pure world, unfortunately that's now the world we are given. Problem is many here want to just treat the world we have as the idealistic model world as if there is no difference.
That's a fairly simple metric. So you're saying we can finally shut down Twitter?
It can be checked through lawsuit -- 8chan could conceivably sue Cloudflare under numerous doctrines, starting with breach of promise / breach of contract.
Another service provider could step up, as was the case with Daily Stormer, and is extensively commented upon in Prince's commentary, and provide services.
Regulatory or legal procedures could be established to specifically address this situation or provide redress.
Public outcry, market sanctions, or labour actions might be taken against providers who exercise such power in manners which are seen as morally reprehensible. For similar examples, see Google employees over Dragonfly or Edleman's emplyee backlash over a contract with a border-wall services company.
The question to be asked, the question we all have to ask, is whether or not individuals, groups, companies, or inchoate movements which are themselves dedicated to abolition or denial of civil order and rule of law are themselves deserving of its full protections in pursuing those ends. And a considerable case can be made for "no".
You clearly are okay with it because you are posting on a forum with unchecked, active moderation.
As if "The Net" is a perfect, neutral, self-supporting entity that behaves with mathematic predictability rather than a projection of the chaotic human society on which its existence depends.
There is a widespread habit among futurists and technologists, perhaps arising from an appreciation for semantic economy and the anonymizing instinct to downplay associations between oneself and one's assertions, to use the passive voice when concocting reductive maxims of this sort.
I believe many of the moral blind spots of technocratic thinking are connected to the peculiar tendency - revealed by this passive voice framing habit - to overlook or outright dismiss the role that human inputs play in the complex systems futurists propose as solutions to human problems.
Internet was not designed in an adversarial model.
Look at the graphs reporting on racism and the surge of terror.
They basically revived nationalistic movements for clicks. Not wanting to reverse cause and effect but there is ample evide ce that the call for censorship massivle accelerated occurrences like shootings.
That is interesting, but just saying that it is so doesn't lend any credibility to the conclusion. If there is ample evidence, surely you should be able to present it?
Correct me if I am wrong, but Cloudflare is the only serious option against heavy modern DoS attacks, right?
Cause if you can go somewhere else, then sure Cloudflare do it's thing. But if you can't ... then that is way too much power for a random company to hold the gate over any kind of controversial group, anywhere on the political, cultural or global spectrum. Because we really needed another US corporation with runaway power, that'll balance things.
When they stopped hosting the neo-Nazi website they mentioned in the link, they made a big deal about how it was a one-off decision and they'll never again again stop serving a website because of its content. Clearly they've changed their minds about that.
What kind of tortured logic do you need to employ where one can only claim to have principles if they hold on to them no matter the cost?
To the downvoters: speech cannot be violent, by definition. Using your own private definition of a word—in this case, violence—without making an explicit disclaimer is inherently deceitful.
If these things constitute violence then lots of violence is completely legal. In fact, you commit violence probably every day when you decide who to be friends with and who not to be friends with, who gets hired, etc.
Would you care to offer a different definition?
Edit: Looks like CEO comment to the Guardian earlier today
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/aug/04/mass-shoo...
How do you determine what speech is "good" and what speech is "bad"? I feel like there is no absolute way to determine this. (I am being genuine in asking, I want to know what caused this change and how you see "free speech")
All speech is good in my opinion. Some actions are bad. 8chan is supporting these actions, they've crossed the line.
You don’t know anything about the chans if you think 8chan collectively supports shootings.
It looks like you've just made a determination of what you consider is bad speech.
You got me. ;) I guess I am not as absolutionist as I thought.
"Anything which should be done, if done as it should, to the extent to which it should, in the place where it should, at the time when it should, and in view of the end for which it should, is called good."
Kind of explains why the distinction between good and bad remains a grey area for some.
p.s. Defining 'good' has been a problem for philosophy, see e.g. discussion of Moore's naturalistic fallacy[0]---a problem in trying to define good in terms of something else. Sam Harris' The Moral Landscape has been the most useful book for me on understanding ethics and what good means.
[0] https://www.britannica.com/topic/naturalistic-fallacy Not sure if that's the best link for the topic, but it's a start.
Ultimately the courts determine which speech is "good" or "bad" by interpreting the law, but all property owners can determine what speech is permitted on their property (like what cloudflare is doing).
I accept some limits on free speech. I think you shouldn't be able to start a panic without cause (yelling fire in a crowded theater). I think conspiracy is a crime. I think threats are a crime. I support the idea of copyright laws even if I think our current system is bad.
From an internet freedom standpoint I think this signals we have an over dependence on cloudflare, not that we have a free speech problem.
Does that extend to US presidential candidates? The Democrats and Republicans both have quite a history of that. (And I am certain that if I bothered I could dig up hundreds of other examples)
Free speech curtailment never works out well no matter the motivations. It is just another control used by the powerful to advance their own interests.
Yes Cloudflare has the right as a private company to do what they want etc, etc. The argument is not narrowly about staying within legal bounds, but what _ought_ to be.
https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=902894...
I agree. I dislike the idea of large systems. Being able to throw their weight around is a symptom of the problem.
I would argue this isn't speech any more than saying a phrase to Alexa that causes an API to be called which then detonates a bomb is speech.
I define speech as expression of ideas. Basically, say I maintain a blog. Should there be limits on which ideas I'm allowed to express on that blog? Should I be thrown in jail if I express a "bad" idea?
Aren't Al Quaeda and ISIS websites shutdown all the time? If ISIS was using 8chan to spread Jihadi propaganda that ended up leading to killing on US soil, they'd be shut down quick. But since the extremists belong to a political side, it's called free speech. When Twitter/FB/YT/Reddit remove such speech, it's spun as political bias.
Ironically for your argument, Cloudflare hasn't really shutdown any alleged ISIS sites. This was even noted in their first blog when shutting down the Daily Stormer.
If, say, you're aware that your readers have a tendency towards "exuberance" when it comes to dogpiling / harassing / doxing / etc. people you call out on your blog and your "bad" idea expresses a wish that someone has a very bad time of things, yeah, you should definitely be looking at consequences (perhaps not jail-level, mind) for that idea.
(cf people like Gervais on Twitter who have a consequence-free dogpile mob ready to relentlessly harass anyone criticising them. Or POTUS, in the current instance.)
Both can be true.
Sometimes, there are clear markers. Supporting or promoting acts of violence is a poor fit for civil societies. The same can be said for other forms of harm. Yet I also view the use of speech to suppress speech as being a danger to civil societies since the intent is to discourage discourse.
Other cases are more ambiguous, mostly because I would like to live in a fairy tale world where facts and reason will win the day. This is land where others can say things that I find reprehensible and vice versa so that we can eventually arrive upon the truth. The freedom of speech is necessary in this case because we all have our preconceived notions, some of which will ultimately prove to be wrong. If the preconceived notions of individuals and societies are not challenged, it will be nearly impossible to arrive upon the truth.
The thing is that we don't live in that fairy tale world. The words of some people have more weight. That may be due to social status, connections, wealth, or other factors. Other people intentionally convey falsehoods in order to manipulate outcomes to reflect their motivations. People are also more likely to be swayed by emotion than reason, or to manipulate emotions to override reason.
Where does that leave us? I really don't know. Perhaps the freedom of speech should be regarded as an aspiration rather than as an absolute.
Speech becomes bad when it infringes on the rights of another group or individual. Where that specific line is drawn does vary, but the underlying principle is the same and one that seemingly everyone agrees with. The US happens to be near the absolute extreme to where this line is drawn.
Whether you think hate speech infringes on the rights of the targeted group is up for debate. People don't have an inherent right to not be offended (which is why I am against the few western countries that still have blasphemy laws). However, hate speech on sites like 8chan does often lead to speech that incites violence. There can be no debate that people have a right to safety. Speech that incites violence infringes on that right.
Citation needed.
I'd rather people have the courage to take a moral/ethical stance than to just not care about anything and ignore the negative impacts technology can have on society. If Cloudflare is wrong in this instance, or in any future instance, hopefully there will be enough backlash that they'll learn and walk it back. If they fail at learning, then we have to resort to government regulation, and hope that our governments are up to the task of doing the right thing.
At the end of the day, it's just people making decisions, all the way from the top, down to the bottom. We're all flawed and do the wrong thing sometimes, but my (perhaps naive) hope is that we're slowly converging on more right than wrong.
Everything else is up for debate. But this single exception I hope every human being can agree on.
This phrase suggests that ALL speech that non-absolutists dislike will be categorized as harmful enough to society to be disallowed. That is a view nobody I've ever met holds.
I am not a free speech absolutist. I believe 99.9999% of speech I dislike, even speech I dislike intensely and believe is harmful to society, should still be allowed by society. That I think 0.00001% crosses a line where its harm outweighs the benefit of an zero-tolerance, non-negotiable absolute freedom of speech.
Throwing off a facile "oh, you'll just ban speech you don't like" is just jingoism. It's no different than saying people who favour less immigration are Nazis, or people who favour universal health care are communists.
It avoids thinking by name-calling.
Ordering someone to shoot you? Aka "clear and imminent threat" ?
What you support is the selective suppression of ideas that you don't like. Don't call it moderation. Call it by its name. Censorship.
Cloudflare isn't 'moderating' 8chan. It's deplatforming it and enacting censorship.
Free speech is the equivalent of "utopia". It doesn't exist because even the most ardent endorsers have shown kinks in their armor where they don't want people to use it against them at certain times and certain ways. You argue against the selective suppression of ideas yet you may reply to me and tell me this idea needs suppressed. Most people already see the kinks of hypocrisy in it and have long realized it, like all other freedoms, are best used moderately so as not to infringe on the freedoms of others.
> Would you want me to come up to your kid and cuss him out for no reason? Your mom?
We're talking about an online discussion group that discusses things that some, including myself, find objectionable. We're talking about whether such groups should be allowed to exist, and by extension whether those ideas should be allowed to exist. You're talking about harassment with an example that doesn't even intersect freedom of speech. Terrible strawman.
When I emigrated from the former Soviet Union, freedom of speech was one of the bigger changes in everyday life. It was also something that people were proud of and supported. They understood that it's what allows democracy to function, they understood that by definition it means supporting objectionable speech. Now I'm watching the tide turn and the same people actually supporting censorship in their own nations.
I always thought the censorship and thought-policing started with the oppressive government in the Soviet Union, I didn't believe that people initially welcomed it. But here we are, the cycle is repeating again.
If it were prohibited speech or if the platform was illegal, this article would not exist and neither would this discussion.
A pretty distinct contrast to the prohibited speech in your examples.
And since we're being impartial, we should just ban entire television channels because they have broadcast these direct calls to violence. Just like 8chan is being de-platformed for a handful of posts that were submitted by users. Right?
[1] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/donald-trump-incitement-vi...
[2] https://www.hrw.org/news/2017/04/19/philippines-duterte-inci...
[3] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jul/01/hong-kong-prot...
Perhaps let's talk about the fact that the individual that precipitated this action also shared his views on twitter and facebook. And they were not removed until he became a figure of media attention. He also used facebook livestream. Time to de-platform those too, yes?
That wasn't my point though, and I'm pretty sure you know that.
I understand people's dislike for any kind of censorship, because it's immensely difficult (impossible, perhaps) to trust the people doing the censoring to be free of bias and to always do the right thing. And I agree with that!
But let's not pretend that all ideas are equal and great. That's just a flat-out falsehood. Some ideas don't deserve to see the light of day. And sure, it's difficult to trust any group to make that judgment. But doing nothing isn't a great option, either.
Don't get me wrong: I don't want to see a government making things like 8chan illegal. But I also don't want to see a government requiring that companies like Cloudflare rebroadcast 8chan's content against their will.
Should Visa and Mastercard be allowed to arbitrarily de-platform a business and therefore guarantee it can't operate?
Cloudflare et al are particularly heinous because they'll claim to be a dumb common carrier to protect themselves from legal action for re-hosting illegal material, and then turn around and cherry-pick exactly the kind of content they want to re-host. Can't have it both ways.
The entire topic of this post -- 8chan -- is a fine counterexample to your idea there.
Moderation is the process of keeping a board functional and snr high.
Censorship is the process of suppressing certain types of content from the board. In this case legal content.
You can have high quality discussions on less-moderated boards, e.g. any of 4chan's interest boards. And you can have low-quality discussions on highly moderated boards, e.g. all of Reddit default subs.
That suffers from a selection effect. Since not many sites prioritize free speech and only allow things within some narrower region of the overton window to be discussed it follows that the more extreme positions get pushed to sites that allow more.
If, hypothetically, every site were tolerant then you wouldn't have that association.
Also note that even 8chan is still moderated, each sub-board has its own rules and there also are global rules. What it really enables is a diversity of rules, set by each sub-community. What people seem to want is for sub-communities not to be allowed to exist even though they're not illegal. And that seems pretty dangerous.
Or are you just making a slippery-slope argument that this might be a precedent for some hypothetical future censorship of something worthwhile?
The usual example would be cartoon child pornography. Some want to see it wiped off the face of earth, others argue it provides an outlet for pedophiles.
> Or are you just making a slippery-slope argument that this might be a precedent for some hypothetical future censorship of something worthwhile?
Maybe that too, but it's more about that they are not illegal, which means the judicial system has not found that they shouldn't exist and no attempt has been made to bring about such a decision. If its not the judicial system, who should be the arbiter of communities that are allowed to exist? Do we want facebook, google and cloudflare to be community-shepherds?
I would argue this isn't necessarily true. "I know it when I see it" -- the famous quote in a SCOTUS decision on pornography/indecency is interpreted to give local communities the ability to determine what is decent/legal. In other words, there is no one court/legal standard; it varies based on regional local standards.
In the long-term, without moderation and community standards, the bad drives out the good. If you work in a place with an absolute asshole, and nothing is being done to deal with this person, you're more likely to quietly leave for greener pastures. Meanwhile other assholes might find a kindred spirit, and join up. Repeat these interactions for a while, and you're left with a community of assholes and a toxic culture.
Sure, you'd just have extreme content widely distributed, but it would still cluster within sites. Birds of a feather flock together, as the saying goes.
And at the end of day that's fine, because that opinion is protected under free speech
What about ISPs? Should Cox, Comcast, Frontier, etc be liable for what flows through their pipes? Media companies say yes, but what do you do when your ISP says “bye” because you visit 4chan? Go to another ISP? In most areas of the US, you can’t
LOL. They are not.
Being a messenger doesn't require being amoral.
Why? There is no reason they should be forced to host content they find objectionable.
Please educate yourself on the law here. Most everyone in tech wants the internet to be a utility, but it's not. An individual internet company's product offering is definitely not a utility.
If Cloudflare was the only game in town (or close to it), I might be more sympathetic to this argument, but... they're not. Not even close.
There are lots of providers with massive DDoS protection capacity specializing in hosting illegal or otherwise questionable content, they just charge more than cloudflare.
Botnet C&Cs, cybercrime forums and card shops all need hosting and face massive attacks. Somehow I never hear the operators of those complaining.
Not legally, nor morally.
Morally we can argue that there's virtue (or a lot of global positive utility if we use an utilitarian framework) in making sure that there's an open marketplace for ideas, and every idea has opportunity to be "priced". But there's also virtue in keeping that place healthy, sane and constructive. Hate speech, manifestos, slur memes, and other kinds of low-effort content seems to be rather unhealthy for the place.
While at the same time doing a proper academic study on intelligence, brains, genetics, education, socioeconomic status, social mobility, and group dynamics at large is healthy. Context, style, framing is important. Blurting out that "blacks" have lower IQ in some measure might even be true, but that's not really an idea for that marketplace. Connecting the dots, uncovering the causes, the dynamics (noticing that the main driver is not some inherent genetic/cultural inferiority, but simple socioeconomic status due to historical path dependence) - and raising awareness and offering solutions is healthy.
Yes, of course, it's upon us to make a value judgement about what's a virtue, what's healthy. And no wonder some people think that even adopting the Golden Rule (do only what you want others to do, see also Rawl's reflective equilibrium) just means we have to "purge the weak" and that "civilizations are destined to clash". Of course we can't do much with that, other than trying to persuade them AND trying to minimize these voices so they remain a weak but vocal minority. (Hence our choice of idea policing is not just because we happen to think equality and pacifism are virtuous, but because our survival, way of life and so might depend on it.) [And in that way, yes cultures are destined to clash, and we ought to think a pacifist-equalist is the one that should win - nothing to do about it, another value judgement to make.]
The phone company is required to serve you even if they disagree with you not because of some high-minded ideas about free speech, but because it’s considered really important for people to have phone service.
...according to Title II, yes, they absolutely are.
If you have a monopolistic ISP that refuses to provide service to you because they don't like your content, and they're your only option, then that's a problem.
If you have multiple tens of CDN providers and they all don't want to carry your content, then perhaps you should really take a look at your content and have a hard think about why it isn't wanted.
And regardless, a CDN isn't necessary to host a website. A CDN certainly makes it easier to achieve lower-latency global reach, and is useful in helping you weather certain types of attacks on your infrastructure, but they're by no means required. And there are other ways to achieve those goals.
Hosting a site, on the other hand, has a multitude of very different providers to choose from. Even if you manage to get banned from every hosting provider in the US, ship a server to a colo in Kyrgyzstan or whatever, and keep right on going.
The point is that what 8chan is doing is egregious enough for them to step in and cease doing business with them. This isn't a slippery slope kind of thing.
What really happened: Cloudfare came under PR fire from the Washington Post, made a quick cost/benefit analysis and dropped 8Chan.
Last time I checked, people were discussing how to murder, exchanging nazi manifestos and conspiracy theories. I was looking for anarchist discussions but I actually ended up having these on reddit.
Don't get fooled by the current positioning of IT firms, it only depends on a fistful of people who will transmit their power to their biological offspring, no matter how fucked up they are.
I am actually quite surprised how complicit the media is in not reporting what goes on Reddit. It's the one place on the "mainstream" internet I run into where you can see calls for political assassinations in default subs, sub-reddits devoted to theft, ethno-nationalism, terrorism, and all sorts of content that makes 4chan seem tame in comparison.
Then there is the huge cross-polination of moderators with radical ideas, who just happen to moderate radical sub-reddits and some prominent default/mainstream sub-reddits.
If advertisers only paid attention. If journalists only cared.
And what kind of reward do you expect?
Just browse a left leaning subreddit like LateStageCapitalism or even just /r/politics and you'll see calls to violence from the left.
I found nothing of the things you mention.
(But it was interesting to go there and read.)
This sticky was definitely needed. I've seen among other things, a commenter telling people whose family was killed by the Castro regime that their family deserved to be killed, and others calling for the summary killing of anyone in the top 1% of income.
Look at some of the highest upvoted posts of the year: https://www.reddit.com/r/LateStageCapitalism/comments/9lhjar...
Lots of deleted comments. Several root level comments with hundreds of upvotes. LSC cleaning up it's act is pretty recent.
It only takes $32,000 a year to be in the top 1% worldwide according to a couple or articles I read. I bet a lot of the people saying that fall into the 1%.
It appears from your down votes that HN doesn't like evidence.
/r/incels
/r/fatpeoplehate
/r/jailbait
/r/pizzagate
/r/beatingwomen
/r/watchpeopledie
/r/thefappening
/r/ni----s
How many of those would you consider right wing?
If I'm cherry picking then please offer up some examples of "right-wing" subs that have been banned to compare with my list.
The issue isn't whether or not it's possible for two nutjobs to converse in some way, obviously they can. It's whether or not there is a group of nutjobs all feeding on each others' nutjobbery to the point where someone gets radicalized into dangerous behavior.
Someone is watching, but it's like panning gold from a river, except the gold is "Actionable Intelligence" and the river is high-pressure sewer main -- lots and lots of shit but little actual gold. High effort, but little yield.
So what? Those communities existed underground for decades and have only recently been pushed back into the mainstream. Being underground means it has less visibility to the mainstream and is thus less likely to influence people.
> Being underground means it has less visibility to the mainstream and is thus less likely to influence people.
But you have this backwards, the point of being pushed into the mainstream is to create crises by which to attack these platforms/sites.
They weren't made mainstream by the underground, they were made mainstream by news orgs looking to attack any venue or message their political opponents have as racist/murderous/etc.
They won't be driven underground to not influence people because the point is to make them boogie men for political points. This shooter used 8chan, therefore. He also used twitter and facebook and whatever else, but that isn't good for attacking people on their politics using the bodies of dead innocent people.
These communities were already underground and the news orgs didn't like it. Now there's a spotlight on them and you don't like it. The idea is to create an untenable position for those sites.
I don't get it. The shooter was, in fact, racist and murderous, as was the toxic community on 8chan he was radicalized in.
You're saying these people were only racist and murderous because the "news orgs" called them racist and murderous? They were actually racist and murderous! What should the "news orgs" say?
Again, serious, professional white nationalist terrorists or whatever will always have clandestine means of communication. But potentially violent nutjobs are only likely to become violent when they get egged on by other nutjobs, and by reducing the size of the nutjob community we reduce the threat.
"They are no longer Cloudflare's problem, but they remain the Internet's problem."
These sites are breeding grounds for extremism, more and more I feel this free for all on the internet probably hasn't been a net positive.
The idea behind free speech is that people are allowed to put forward new ideas ( especially ideas about how to organize society, what is good and moral etc ) so that people can consider and accept or reject them. The idea is that no entity has a monopoly on truth and if you want to propagate your ideas, make your arguments persuasive and refute your opponents' arguments.
Free speech is ultimately a bet on human capacity for reason and goodness. The idea is that good ideas should win adherents and bubble to the top while bad ideas sink to the bottom as they lose followers.
Sometimes, governments are the most powerful enemy of free speech while sometimes other entities can be.
I am not saying free speech is a good thing, but there is no "exclusive to government" limiting principle to free speech.
So does free speech. Certain speech that are known to cause violent result/response from its audience should be dealt with carefully. In which case, if 8chan has popularized itself as the platform to announce when and where to kill innocent people, and broadcast such message to its susceptible audience to follow, then to me it feels like indifference or dysfunction of a community to have it slip through under the umbrella of 'free speech'.
When you know you are ill, just take medication, not just set in vain to wait for your immune system to ultimately cure yourself.
Which speech is that, exactly? Do you have a list of all the problem topics we need to ban?
feel free to add more
The often left unsaid basis of free speech is that each member of the audience is capable of rationality evaluating the argument, willing to invest in fact checking and is educated on background material. When these conditions are not satisfied, there will be members of audience who will make suboptimal choices based on misinformation with some probability. When scale of audience becomes large, even small probability can uproot sane society.
All these are very interesting questions and honestly I don't think anyone has answers.
Allowing all ideas a fertile ground to grow and gain followers is important.
Allowing individuals with a small social reach (e.g. live in a small, conservative, remote town) to access a wide range of ideas is important.
Cloudflare has decided that, for the most part, they won't get involved, but that there are some things that do actually cross the line (a line they are perfectly free to define for themselves), and they refuse to rebroadcast.
If you don't like that, don't support CF with your business. Otherwise, I'm not sure what horse you have in this race.
That's not a limitation on property rights. A farmer polluting the water supply is an example of the farmer damaging a shared resource that does not belong to him.
> Cloudflare to pollute public discourse by injecting the biases of its leaders into it.
This has nothing to do with "public discourse". CF is a privately owned business refusing to provide a service to a privately owned website. CF is not obligated to do business with them for any reason, and frankly, it's pretty reasonable for a company to want to have nothing to do with a website where domestic terrorism is regarded as funny at best and actually put into action at worst.
Direct threats to violence though will likely not be protected as it would stifle free speech. But, saying that some speech could "maybe" or "potentially" lead to violence down the line is usually not an argument against allowing it.
Besides, it should ideally be a democratically elected civil government who decides these matters, not for profit private companies and its leaders.
This sounds like the very definition of neutrality. Neutrality in a dispute is about not getting involved.
Neutrality is the store owner who chooses to ignore two customers who are loudly arguing about something. He will sell his wares to either customer, but he doesn't want to alienate either one by stepping in. Maybe one of the customers is obviously at fault, but as a neutral party he stays out of it.
It sounds like what you are implying is that there is no such thing as neutrality, either in this specific case or more broadly. Or you could be saying that neutrality itself is "wrong" in some sense, that's a philosophical argument and you could try to make a convincing argument. But if you accept the existence of neutrality as a concept, claiming that a clearly neutral party is not actually neutral because they are acting neutrally is a hard sell.
OK, but what if the good ideas sink to the bottom and the bad ideas bubble to the top, and people die? Because someone found the psychological triggers and the technical means to turn around the expected functionality of the good idea?
We all get the nice, philosophical, humanistic idea of free speech. But in the moment, it doesn't work so well. When something doesn't work so well, we have to fix it. So, what is the fix, in your opinion?
That's why the best course of action is to not censor at all and allow the system to work itself out.
I should clarify, I'm not advocating complete freedom in this regard. We don't want a society where it's hard to be a gay person because lots of companies deny service to homosexuals. However, we also can't claim that every company should always have to serve everyone. There is certainly some nuance and ambiguity here, but not hosting services for groups which support far-right terror seems to be fairly reasonable.
In the 1700's, when we were having the debate over speech protected from government interference, someone could have easily said "yes well if you don't like the government's policies you should go to another country!"
The existence of alternatives is irrelevant to the fact that freedom of speech is sacred and forums for speech - public or private - must never infringe upon its freedom.
I don't think it's that simple. Taken at face value, you want it to be illegal for someone (say, a game publisher) to have a discussion forum which facilities speech around a particular topic (say, their game) while banning off-topic discussions (say, porn). I'm therefore going to assume you're just thinking of companies which facilitate all kinds of speech, such as forums like Reddit and Twitter and infrastructure like Cloudflare, but excluding Hacker News and lobste.rs and /r/factorio which focus on a particular subject area.
The problem with your approach is that, invariably, a discussion forum which doesn't get rid of despicable content ends up repelling people who dislike that content and attracting people who like that kind of content. A great example is voat.co, which looked like a fairly good Reddit alternative until its free speech absolutism ended up attracting all kinds of hateful people and content.
If a platform isn't allowed to reject legal speech, we would need much stronger laws regarding what counts as hate speech and what doesn't. I don't know if that's what you want.
If you study our jurisprudence you’ll find that no free speech cases were decided by the Supreme Court despite plenty of common law surrounding speech such as civil libel, commercial regulations, etc. for nearly 150 years (!) until the early 1900s. Debs v U.S. (1919) was the first case and it was about - surprise, surprise - an anti-war speech.
I disagree with this sentiment, and upon reflection of why, it seems we've come to a real-life example of the trolly problem. Choosing to be passive and "let the system sort itself out" will almost certainly result in more deaths (edit: specifically in terms of mass shootings), but choosing to be active means the powers that be are forced to make subjective choices. I personally believe that it's worth taking on the responsibility of subjective choice.
Edit: However, I also realize that censorship oftentimes just ostracizes already-radical groups. This has the advantage of making it harder for them to find an audience, but also allows them to radicalize further while under less scrutiny, which also seems like a complicated balance to me.
what if rather than being a viper pit of nefarious hatemongers seeking to brainwash the youth into committing acts of violence, imageboards tend to be popular among a subset of the population more prone to depression & more severe mental illnesses which also happens to the encompass the the kinds of loser psychopath edgelords who commit these sorts of crimes. the whole response around these events simply shows we've learned nothing from columbine and are still in essence trying to eradicate the trenchcoat mafia.
Sure, 8ch is also full of autists who just need a hug (subject to certain terms and conditions) but if I discover that a bunch of people are making plans to kill me I'm not under any obligation to put my enemy's problems ahead of my own survival.
In this case, the idea is to lose a bit of free speech, and gain less hatred and less murder. That is not an arbitrary judgement; admittedly this is also not a clear-cut judgement.
The system never works itself out, successful societies are the ones which have established governing rules. Game theory has given us pretty good indication that systems rather self-destruct without governance than self-stabilize.
Deplatforming 8chan isn't about limiting the ability of these people to kill large numbers (that would require effective gun control) - it's about removing a source of provocation, radicalisation, cheering, etc. for them both before and after.
I'd not say the recent far-right terrorism is just from some individual psychopaths with no value for human life. There's a ton of far-right/alt-right ideas out there, on platforms like 8chan, which actively demonizes certain groups of people. It's not like these shootings are just crazy people who just want to kill people at random; they want to kill the people they see as the "enemy".
Then what’s different about extremist communities?
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/08/how-can...
Further, your definition of terrorism eludes me. What gives you the impression that 8chan conducts, facilitates and organizes terror?
Should private businesses be required to disseminate terrorist recruitment material if it's not specifically outlawed?
There's a big difference between terrorist recruiting and coordination, and the peaceful debate of differing perspectives.
> crystal clear laws
This is an impossible standard.
I reject the implication that anything not explicitly prohibited by law must be perfectly moral and ethical.
It would truly be a dystopia if private individuals and businesses are prevented from making any moral or ethical judgments.
I've always avoid getting involved in (semi-)political discussions but I'm very curious here:
It is fundamentally OK for customers to boycott vendors they do not like (right?), then is it wrong/illegal for the opposite? Are vendors disallow to pick and choose their customers?
We, netizen as a whole, are currently under go the sentiment to boycott Facebook and Google right now: for what we believe to be righteous. If Cloudflare believe it is righteous to boycott 8chan as their customer, are they in the wrong? Is Cloudflare as an organization not allow to have the freedom to pick their customer?
'Speech I don't like' is the kind I can choose to argue with or roll my eyes and ignore. But if people are actively inciting murder, organizing it, and workshopping all aspects of murder technique and how to promote it effectively with the same gusto as any commercial product launch, it's foolish to ignore it.
Comparing the two implicitly accepts the idea that one can choose to be gay (and can thus be changed with the right methods)
Not necessarily, it can also mean that you don't choose ideology or belief either, which I think is hard to argue against: nobody decides "I'm going to be a socialist" and then models their worldview after socialism.
It’s not your role to address the “why”. As a platform you’re only obliged to deal with the “what” and the “how”.
They now have one less platform to choose from, and their ability to do whatever it is they do is reduced. That’s a win, because wins don’t need to be absolute to count.
Further, 8chan is run in the Philippines, which would add a lot of complications to any prosecution
Cloudflare often tries to skirt definitions and would love to be seen as a neutral utility, a simple carrier. They're not though. 8chan was their customer. They hosted their DNS, served their content and potentially took their money (I don't know whether 8chan was on their free plan or not, but again that doesn't matter).
I'd love to see companies actually do the right thing and not talk about it; just like how they don't talk about it when they do the wrong thing. That would be a step forward.
Not a good idea with today's outage society
Well I'm not sure which is worse. Using tragedy for publicity or caving to a mob.
Although 8chan is probably just a sacrificial anode for 4chan and some other sites, the pressure of censors will probably not subside for a while. Even if their chances are slim, it is really bothering how quickly people throw away rights just to have an opportunity to point their fingers on people they believe are worse than themselves.
Someone suggested this was an action not of publicity but of mob action, and I merely remarked that I'm not sure which one I find to be worse. Both possibilities concern me.
Was this being intentionally ironic? If companies do the right thing and don't talk about it, then you won't see it. They could be doing it right now, and you'd have no way to know.
You can kick a customer out because they espouse certain views or whatever, and it's fine to call it discriminatory, but it's not censorship. This isn't usually a relevant distinction, but here it is because Cloudflare hasn't built "a system that is technically possible for someone to censor".
They could, and thank fuck they don't, because that would absolutely be the day I'm getting off Cloudflare.
They have removed at least two portals, and higher up in the thread it is mentioned that they have also axed various sex related sites - and they are providing monitored info to agencies that use courts and guns to force people to do things... that is starting to sound more and more like a censorship system than a dump pipe which prevents overuse (ddos) - to me..
I like to think I'm a pretty talented engineer. I've avoided using Cloudflare and I've avoided applying to them because of their wishy-washy stance on censorship. They are a utility. PG&E doesn't terminate electricity service based on what was said on a property. So too should it be for data services. Otherwise, you get people lying and doing false flags to get their enemies kicked off the internet.
They are not even close to a utility.
> Late Sunday, following hours of public criticism, Cloudflare announced a major reversal, saying 8chan had gone too far and “repeatedly proven itself to be a cesspool of hate.” Its access to Cloudflare services was scheduled to terminate at midnight Pacific time, making it more vulnerable to a potentially crippling cyberattack.
"Late Sunday, following hours of public criticism, Cloudflare announced a major reversal, saying 8chan had gone too far and “repeatedly proven itself to be a cesspool of hate.” Its access to Cloudflare services was scheduled to terminate at midnight Pacific time, making it more vulnerable to a potentially crippling cyberattack."
Imagine if real life utilities did this. If because someone used your property for offensive purposes, the water company cut off the water supply, or the electricity company refused to provide electricity, or your phone provider cut off service or what not. That would be ridiculous, yet it's exactly the situation we're in with internet services. No one wants to just be a utility.
I believe online service providers in at least some markets should be regulated like utilities. Maybe Cloudflare, definitely domain name registrars, perhaps cloud services and CDNs in general. Because at the moment, it seems any controversy at all means losing access to anything internet related.
I think it's key that in this case cloudflare are actively between you and 8chan. The phone provider is the most reasonable comparison, were you able to switch provider. I wouldn't be hugely shocked if one phone company out of several options (which when you call the line occasionally puts their branding in your face) dropped you if you were running a line that read out terrorist manifestos. I'd be surprised if something similar hasn't happened.
> Because at the moment, it seems any controversy at all means losing access to anything internet related.
This is, what, the second time cloudflare have done this? That's a far cry from any controversy.
Sounds like a genius plan.
Don't ban easy access to guns, don't change a crazy individualistic/every man for themselves/violence loving culture.
Just hide the manifestos, that should work.
(Cue the "one doesn't prevent us doing the other" answers).
You gotta start somewhere. This is a nice and easy way to do that's completely within the reach of the tech community. There are no laws requiring that, just a sign of a good will.
If it were up to me, Cloudflare would block at least 30 other websites, starting with Gab. Unfortunately, it takes a shooting or two for them to realize that they have a problem with a client of theirs.
Nowhere, but I already covered that.
I wrote "(Cue the "[doing this] doesn't prevent us doing the other" answers)".
It might make the tiniest bit of sense if we were collectively able to do something preventative about mass murders before they happened by using that “insight”. That certainly does not seem to be happening.
No, I think the time is coming where white supremacist manifestos and the like should be actively stamped out by society.
Yeah, a state that is constantly in war(s), paints the target countries du jour as the enemy building racism against their citizens, tolerates torture and police shootings (letting officers that do that shit free), and is obsessed with violence and gun ownership, suddenly is worried about "spreading extremism".
In light of this, worse than band-aids like "let's close the internet forums they frequent" is the new blaming heavy metal and computer games for mass shootings...
It is entirely possible for one fraction of the population to be concerned about spreading extremism while another fraction does as you describe.
If you assume that the people of a nation stand in line behind those in charge, you will be continually surprised.
What about Stalin?
What about non-white supremacist manifestos? They do exist, you know.
How much history would you erase due to your belief that words are capable of 'infecting' (presumably) lesser minds?
There's no evidence that manifestos spread "extremism and terrorism like a virus". Words are not able to infect people against their will. There are only ideas, and they can only be fought with reflection, more words and more ideas.
In the end, white supremacists and other kinds of supremacists existed before the internet. By supporting China-style censorship you're not actually eliminating those ideas, or even stopping their spread.
... are you kidding?
As an aside, I've defended certain versions of democratic socialism (though I'm not a fan of it) to some of my friends that are recent immigrants from China (having worked grown up there and worked in the corporate world). All of them think capitalism and Western democracy is the greatest thing since sliced bread.
They existed before the internet, but the internet has given them a tool to organize that they didn't have before. And by censoring them online effectively, you take this tool away from them.
Which is exactly what happens in China. I am sure Chinese officials know ideas and philosophies spread on the mainland, but as long as the people who believe in those ideas and philosophies can't organize effectively then they can be controlled.
Edit: in a less sarcastic way, a government can accomplish quite a bit if it has no concern for the rights of its citizens. There is a reason we don't do this kind of thing in the West; it's a good reason and it's one that China will eventually learn the hard way.
That's exactly what China does, for their definition of extremist.
But, of course, that could never happen in the US, right? I mean, it's about as likely as a bombastic demagogue being elected to the presidency. /s
This actually happens in Europe, typically when authorities decide squatters should not be tolerated.
TBH, services like Cloudflare should be free to operate as they please. A publisher is simply not entitled to a CDN. If there is a demand for specific niches, a supply will eventually emerge, like it has for porn.
How often does that happen in countries where squatting itself is not illegal?
On the other hand cutting off utility service to squatters seems like somewhat different case and another thing I'm curious about is how the squatters managed to get the service itself in the first place as that usually requires either consent and active participation of previous user at the same address or proving that you have legal right to use the property.
That's the key. Where I live, it only takes online applications to sign up with power companies and telcos, if infrastructure is already in place (cables laid, power meters installed, etc) and it's not associated with any active contract. After sign-up, services are remotely turned on and kept on as long as bills are being paid.
It's not up to service providers to police property rights. They own or have rights to infrastructure leading up to the final junction box and what happens downstream is not their business.
Most notably, following the two World Wars you had a large number of young men (primarily) that died overseas with corresponding effects like their family might move as a result and so on. So you had a large number of vacant properties with no clear idea if the owner was still alive or not. So squatting became a way of "solving" that problem. A squatter could get the rights to a place if they occupied it for some long period of time (typically over 10 years) if no one showed up earlier to claim ownership.
In the computerized records era, and with no mass casualties from war in developed countries, this is now relegated to an historical anachronism.
If a CDN is necessary to support the site being a public platform that's not a given. This whole "A private company should be able to act like it pleases" that Cloudflare mirrors in their news is an ideological standpoint, not an absolute truth. It's certainly possible to see it differently: If a company becomes a public platform important for the public discourse or for the function of journalism, regulation and laws can limit what a company can do. Like Germany does with Facebook.
Edit: Thinking about this a bit more, I'm really frustrated with Cloudflare about this. With the announcement they are causing the political discourse after the massacre to be about free speech, while the one thing important here is gun control. This stuff happens in the US because the easy access to guns allows murderers to act like this. It does not matter whether 8chan falls now or whether it survives or whether the US limits their extreme stance on free speech as long the US society continues to accept that those massacres happen in favor of having guns available to everyone.
Only if there are good arguments for this to be necessary. You didn't mention any. Just being "big" is no reason to get rid of the "free market". Are they abusing their market dominance? Is this a natural monopoly? Are strong network effects in play, as with Facebook? The best argument for a market failure I can think of is high initial investment. Yeah, I'm not convinced gov needs to write rules for Cloudflare specifically.
> With the announcmenet they are causing the political discourse after the massacre to be about free speech
As it should. Simplified, slaughtering = hate guns*. There is no way to get rid of guns in the US any time soon, so most talk about it is a wasted opportunity cost. The hateful and divisive rhetoric, on the other hand, seems to be sharply on the rise, with even the president making it permissible and using it to his one's ends. This seems like a way more promising attempt to stop the probably upcoming civil war.
Do I need to know Cloudflare’s opinion on gun control, religion, abortion, or any number of other irrelevant topics? Nope. Do I appreciate that they terminated 8chan? 95% yes and 5% reluctant yes. In conjunction with that, so I want to know their policy stance on freedom of content on their platform? 100% yes.
So yes, let's all sit on our hands say there's nothing we can do and now isn't the right time to have this discussion and wonder why these tragedies continue to happen.
If someone does not have access to guns, it's harder to do something like this. It gives time to think again. Organizing different attacks gives law enforcement a chance to catch someone planning it beforehand.
HN is not the right forum to discuss this in detail, so I won't go further into this. But it's better to think about this than to follow Cloudflares lead.
Then why are you doing it? Don't reply to me though, HN isn't the place to discuss it.
But for anything serious like terrorist attacks, it won't make much of a difference. Guns come in through criminal networks anyway (as in Europe). Norway has gun control laws, yet Breivik was still able to kill nearly 80 people regardless. Vehicles have proven to be decent weapons to kill many people with. 9/11 used airplanes and improvised knives to kill thousands.
Gun control will not fix the underlying issues behind mass shootings and while discussing it has to be done, it won't make the problems causing things like this to happen stop.
But reduce the overall deaths.
Now it's happening in a time of rampant depression, polarization, social isolation, 24-hour news, and social media. That can't be a coincidence.
I think it isn't absurd today that poor mental health, social isolation, and digital media consumption is making certain segments of the population more likely to violently lash out, and for the countries which afford these people easy access to firearms, the cost will be orders of magnitude higher.
Even if you don't accept easy access to firearms as the root cause, it's definitely a factor. You don't kill 21 people with rocks and sticks.
More important, as it's not a factor in the current incident, it's irrelevant.
> More important, as it's not a factor in the current incident, it's irrelevant.
Well now that seems like a bad faith kind of argument. Since none of us have a time machine, surely our intent is to solve potential future issues and not go back and change the past?
When we've solved for the current problem, we can address the next worst thing. We won't know what that is until it happens.
We could also solve for knife and sword attacks because there was that one time in Japan where someone murdered a bunch of kids or chainsaws because of that other one time that guy had a chainsaw but we do more by staying focused.
Historically bombings and arsons have always been a major problem, eg the Bath School Bombing. Car attacks are new-ish but rising. Shootings are an American phenomenon, but massacres are not.
We should not solve for shootings, we're just pouring the acid into a different jar. We should solve for massacres.
You're right, we can't restart this service. These people are dead. They were shot. To death. We can never solve their problem but if we don't learn from it and try _something_ then we can't avoid the same thing from happening again. And again. And again. And again. (Repeat a few hundred times.)
But don't let me stop you. Solve for allthethings and let us know when you're done. In the meantime, a bunch of us are going to fight to solve for this current problem.
It's naive and wrong to assume that there would be no mass killings without guns. There would likely be less, but it wouldn't be 0. Before anyone counters me with "we should prohibit all guns because it will prevent some mass killings", we still have 2nd amendment.
Changes to the constitution can and do happen. And it's kind of beside the point anyway because a degree of gun control already exists in the US without being in conflict with the constitution.
> US doesn't pretend to be the same as all the other countries
Clearly. You're also the only one where this is such a problem.
The United States has more individual freedoms than most (if not all) countries. The downside of those freedoms is when individuals use their free will for evil purposes.
But it's usually phrased as "there's nothing we can do" and gun control wouldn't help, which is dishonest.
I think the quarantine is for information in this case. Instead of breathless, stop-the-world coverage of these events, treat them like traffic accidents: “22 people were murdered by a white supremacist terrorist in an El Paso Wal-Mart this afternoon. Now here’s Bob with the weather.”
Gun buyback programs are 1 kind of medicine. Some people won’t take it, but we should try. Maybe we can institute some kind of guns-for-Medicare program (only sorta joking).
Gun control legislation is the inoculation. I don’t think we can get to full-on prohibition in the US without repealing the 2nd amendment, but we can implement licensing and registration requirements and longer waiting periods.
We also need to improve the existing systems. The ATF has a “gun registry”, but it’s not a searchable database. See https://www.thetrace.org/2016/08/atf-non-searchable-database...
4. What good does registration do? Like, awesome, now you have a database with all the gun owners in it.. but for the purpose of stopping mass shooters how does that help you? Likewise, what licensing requirement do you foresee which will help with (1)?
5. Again, how does this help?
I’d argue that 3 is an implementation detail. If we’re serious about getting guns off the streets, then we need to make it worthwhile to trade them in.
As to 4 and 5, I’ll just say that not all shooting are “mass shootings” like we saw in El Paso. Chicago alone has something like 1500 shootings each year, many of which go unsolved. The article I linked says that the ATF gets 1000 gun trace requests per day and it takes an average of 4-7 days to compete one of them. That seems a bit slow to me, but I honestly can’t say what effect speeding that up would have on our ability to prosecute perpetrators of gun violence.
In fact, some states already have licensing and registration laws for guns and they’ve also managed to not tumble down that slippery slope.
I‘ll grant that some people do want to confiscate guns, but that’s not a popular view. See https://news.gallup.com/poll/1645/guns.aspx.
> There is one developed country—and only one—in which it is not only legal, but easy and convenient, to amass a private arsenal of mass slaughter. That country also happens to be the one—and the only one—regularly afflicted by mass slaughters perpetrated by aggrieved individuals.
> You would not think that this is a complicated problem to puzzle out. Yet even as the casualties from gunfire mount, Americans express befuddlement, and compete to devise ever more far-fetched answers.
* https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/08/guns-are-a...
A similar column from a few years ago:
> A village has been built in the deepest gully of a floodplain.
> At regular intervals, flash floods wipe away houses, killing all inside. Less dramatic—but more lethal—is the steady toll as individual villagers slip and drown in the marshes around them.
> After especially deadly events, the villagers solemnly discuss what they might do to protect themselves. Perhaps they might raise their homes on stilts? But a powerful faction among the villagers is always at hand to explain why these ideas won’t work. “No law can keep our village safe! The answer is that our people must learn to be better swimmers - and oh by the way, you said ‘stilts’ when the proper term is ‘piles,’ so why should anybody listen to you?”
* https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/10/the-rea...
And when we make comparisons with Europe, we should remember that violence in Europe is rising, while violence in the US is declining.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/01/03/5-facts-abo...
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-europe-migrants-germany-c...
https://www.politico.eu/article/sweden-bombings-grenade-atta...
The general crime rate in the US is not too different from the crime rate in most other developed countries; see point seven:
* https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/10/2/16399418/u...
However there's a lot more violent crime; see point one (ibid).
> it's about average, and far better than our neighbors to the south.
And yet as someone who lives in Canada, your neighbour to the north, we have a lot less gun crime. The difference is that we have good social services and decent filters on gun ownership. I don't know all the nitty-gritty details, but it seems that Canada's laws are roughly in line with what Massachusetts has:
* https://www.vox.com/2018/11/13/17658028/massachusetts-gun-co...
There will always probably be mass shootings:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Toronto_shooting
But I think adding some filters or speed bumps to ownership (and especially CCW) will weed out the hot heads and incompetents that cause so much low-level carnage:
* https://twitter.com/Well_Regulated_/status/11582078708082647...
* https://twitter.com/Well_Regulated_/status/11575509903437127...
Which is why this is low-hanging fruit to deal with and long past due.
And then there are the mass killers, but since vehicles won't be banned because they have "overwhelmingly more legitimate use", they would remain available for mass killings. As would bombs, though that does require more skill than the other weapons.
And guns would remain available too. Gun control does very little to prevent criminals from obtaining guns, as the gun crime rate in Chicago shows.
Yet curiously, almost all mass murders are committed with guns, not vehicles.
Have you heard about any of these?
The most recent attack listed in my source was in March of this year and killed six.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zaoyang_car_attack
And that's just the last time someone added one to the page. I doubt the list is comprehensive or that was the last attack.
* https://www.gunviolencearchive.org/reports/mass-shooting
Compare the list of Canada which fits on one page (going back to 1689):
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_massacres_in_Canada
to the US, which has page-per-year breakdowns:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_shootings_in_the_...
Canada has the sixth-highest firearm ownership rate, yet has a death rate lower than many EU countries:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimated_number_of_civilian_g...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-r...
So firearms aren't alien to Canadians, and yet the number of blood baths occurring is much, much lower. Incidents do occur:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toronto_van_attack
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Toronto_shooting
but much less frequently.
The amount of low-level carnage that happens daily in the US from either incompetent, negligent, or malicious gun owners is quite impressive:
* https://twitter.com/Well_Regulated_/status/11575509903437127...
* https://twitter.com/Well_Regulated_/status/11578845404777594...
* https://twitter.com/Well_Regulated_/status/11581452335924346...
* https://twitter.com/Well_Regulated_/status/11582078708082647...
A total ban on firearms isn't even necessary; just a filter on the dumb asses and hot heads:
* https://www.vox.com/2018/11/13/17658028/massachusetts-gun-co...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chenpeng_Village_Primary_Schoo...
A little while later, another crazed man entered a second elementary school and also attacked staff and students. He used an XM15 and Glock 20SF; there were 2 injuries and 28 deaths:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandy_Hook_Elementary_School_s...
> It's the violence that matters, not the weapon.
I'm guessing you have never read Marshal McLuhan. The tools (communication or otherwise) that humans have available shape society and our perception of the world. There are daily examples (both negligent and purposeful) of people acting in a way that they probably would not have if they only had knives or just their fists:
* https://twitter.com/well_regulated_
The effects of different tools are... different. The "Garlic shooter" was able to kill 3 people and injure many more before he was taken out in under 60 seconds:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilroy_Garlic_Festival_shootin...
That kind of carnage is difficult to achieve with a baseball bat or a knife.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/07/world/americas/mass-shoot...
[2] https://www.cnn.com/2018/12/13/health/gun-deaths-highest-40-...
* https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/venezuela-...
It is a control on the variables that can confound comparison so we have a more apples-to-applies situation.
But social conditions in America and Europe are very different so it's not an apples-to-apples comparison if we keep talking about gun policy.
There people who are angry enough in other countries:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Toronto_shooting
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toronto_van_attack
The thing is that with easy access to powerful weapons, it is easier to implement such impulses in the US compared to other industrialized countries.
The US is not some hell hole where people have nothing to lose: for the most part it is a nice place to live (though, as with any place, it has better and worse areas). I think a lot of these incidents could be curtailed with better social conditions.
However, having a lot of weapons easily available is like having a lot of dry brush in the country: all it takes is one person's spark for things to catch on fire. Furthering the analogy, it's not that other countries don't have people who can be lit off, it's just the surrounding environment has reduced (though not eliminated) the chances of a large conflagration.
Do you think these numbers are even remotely comparable to US ones, where there have been hundreds of incidents only this year?
Sure, “the unique access to guns is a significant cause of the unique problem” is an obvious conclusion. Others are plausible, however, the most obvious alternative being that the two are effects of a common cause rather than cause and effect: that is, that America is uniquely heavily populated by violent maniacs, which produces the access to guns as a political result (both of the maniacs seeking arms to commit violence and others seeking access in fear to the maniacs) and the mass slaughter as a more direct result.
In that case, cutting off access to the guns might not have as much result as one might hope.
So it's not just easy access to guns. It's the surrounding culture of gun play, gun heroism, gun rhetoric, gun rights, gun "freedom", gun permissiveness, guns-make-you-a-real-person-who-matters - and so on.
Other countries don't have anything like the same culture to anything like the same extent. Which is why you can have equivalent levels of gun ownership without the same problems.
This doesn't fit in the 'a gun is a tool' mindset, it's fetishism, pure and simple.
They aren't, but it's a convenient fiction.
Here's a book that takes a closer look at how guns took on this sort of mythic role -- more special than other tools and appliances -- in American identity:
Only in certain circles.
Then I come back to the States and I'm honestly shocked at how macabre American TV is in comparison. It's non-stop crime shows, murder investigations, action, and militarism, with a shootout key to the resolution of almost any episode.
Is it any surprise that Americans reach for their weapons to solve problems with increasing regularity? I blame American's Puritanical streak.....we can't have nice, pleasant things like topless women on TV like they do in Europe.
Well let's look at just the United States, over time, rather than the US compared to other countries. In the US, a proliferation of firearms has been a constant throughout our history. But it is only recently (really starting with Columbine) that we've had REGULAR outbursts, almost always by men under 30. I would hypothesize that the elephants in the room are a)prescription psychotropic drugs and their side-effects b)constant negative media about males/toxic masculinity c)overall ineffective child-rearing practices and extended adolescence, some of which stems from a reduction in two-parent households.
These are vague partly because so few people will take a deep dive into these subjects when so much money flows from these influences (pharmaceuticals, media, etc...).
But why aren't we looking at the variables, instead of the constant?
>>>it is absolutely progress to have mass murderers be forced to utilize something like a knife than head on down the street and pick up an automatic/semi-automatic weapon.
1. You can't "head on down the street" and pick up an automatic weapon in the US. You need a Federal Firearms License for that. And historically, FFL holders are some of the most law-abiding citizens in the country. Even if there were a ban on semi-auto weapons, the market would adapt. I've already brainstormed on how to optimize a bolt-action rifle for rapid, sustained fire and I'm not even a firearms designer.
2. Tightening the gun proliferation sounds great...in theory. How do you actually accomplish it in practice? There are 300 million+ firearms spread across the country in about 40% of households. This is a land area greater than that occupied by the Germans on the Eastern Front, with a greater number of potential "partisans", and the Germans never even came CLOSE to securing their rear areas. That anyone expects widespread gun confiscations to NOT turn into a bloodbath is naive IMO, and if the objective is saving lives than it would also be counter-productive.
3. Maybe the mass murders will switch to homemade explosives instead of knives, which would be a significantly WORSE outcome? Ever think of that? Maybe they'll get guidance from jihadis. Hell, explosives already gave us one of the worst school massacres in American history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_School_disaster
How would you accomplish this without a firearm? Do you think you could accomplish this with a bat or a knife? The attack happened at a Walmart. They sell hard objects. This couldn't have gotten far. I can't imagine a location or situation where you could be so effective in harming so many without a weapon that gives you so much distance from your victim.
Do you have kids? I have one. Every day I look at my toddler and have to think about how to keep her safe (statistics are in my favor but they were in every parents' favor). Then I have to look at my wife and assure her that our baby will be able to live a long life.
I'll relinquish my second amendment rights, if I never again ahave to live through a year where there are more mass shootings than days. For now, we're just moving out of Texas.
Personally I think there is a link in A-moral violent video games as well as violent music that glorifies killing. Now in saying that please don't construe it with me being an advocate for censorship. I am not, but I think there is a link.
Further if you couple that with young males who have little prospects in this brave new world, fresh out of school or getting ready to graduate, no real direction and probably a hand full of romantic rejections due to being awkward you have a powder keg waiting to happen.
Funny enough in the case of the Texas shooter, after reading his manifesto, I was surprised he did not use explosives. His reasoning where more like Timothy Mcveigh's than many of the other shooters. He does not fit the typical profile.
I don't couple that with young males having little prospects because they still have more than their counterparts. Why aren't young black women shooting up Walmarts? Why not Mexican men? I'm a white male. I didn't graduate from a college. I was awkward. I haven't killed anyone and I know a lot of others that fit that mold. You're ignoring the poison being put into their heads by people using your exact talking points. That creates the powder keg.
Bombs don't get you the praise from the gutter. The alt-right incels like the glory. You're right, we could see a rise in bombings but we also might not. What we'll definitely see (and already do) is nothing changing by doing nothing.
https://www.apa.org/science/about/psa/2003/10/anderson
As well just because someone fit's a profile does not mean they are predisposed to commit acts of violence. That being said, when there is a pattern, there is a pattern. There are many young white males, of similar experience who do not pick up a gun and start killing people. That being said, there is a definitive pattern of behavior and interest among these white males that do, rejection, isolation and immersion in video games (almost always violent) are certainly some of those patterns.
Also please stop trying to pin it on alt-right (or left for that matter), these guys are popping up all over the political spectrum.
There is a pattern of mentally unhinged men being radicalized by the right wing and committing heinous acts of violence with guns.
No it is not. You provided one or two examples that do not eliminate a pattern, and as you yourself said- "A pattern is a pattern."
There are three problems here: mental illness, (far right) radicalization, and guns. I don't have any solutions to propose for this but saying videogames are somehow the cause of this is absurd.
Where I don't waver from the alt-right on is on constitutional rights, so while my talking points may seem to you to come out of a playbook they are my views on the world and I tend to form those views based of my experiences and reasoning.
I do not believe I am making the world a boggy man for anyone. Just calling the numbers as I see them. I believe these young men are cowards as evident in the Texas shooters manifesto where he explicitly states that he targeted Walmart as he would not meet armed resistance.
Do you think Timothy McVeigh was inspired by Doom?
Show a link between games and hate crime fueled mass shooting by sad white boys and we can put it on the list of things to worry about. Until then, perhaps making it harder to get guns could help...
Why do you link these two things, as if no minority is pro-gun rights and active in the media?
Much like mass shootings, violence in videogames might be symptoms of rots within our capitalist society.
Very powerful people are profiting off our rots.
Violent video games don't create violent people necessarily, but video people like to play violent video games.
It is also why I am anti-censorship, as I believe it is the opposite side of the same coin as blaming the gun for mass murders.
Just as guns are linked to these issues as the tool of choice, we find back linking to excessive immersion in violent media.
I just find is strange the cognitive dissonance people make when wanting to ban the one but not the other when they are both clearly linked. They want law abiding people to give up their guns but find all kinds of reasons to deny the link with violent content.
The numbers don't seem to bear this out. There seems to be a fairly proportional relationship between gun ownership and per capita gun deaths; see point two:
* https://www.vox.com/2015/10/3/9444417/gun-violence-united-st...
> It's lazy to just say that "gun control will fix this" because you're ignoring solving the actual problem of why people are doing this.
While the desire to do certain things may remain, it may be possible to limit the practical ways that desire may be implemented. These extreme cases will probably be the hardest to stop, but there's a lot of low-level carnage that could be reduced:
* https://twitter.com/well_regulated_
And it isn't even necessarily about bans, but simply a few filters and speed bumps to reduce the chances of hot heads and whack jobs packing heat:
* https://www.vox.com/2018/11/13/17658028/massachusetts-gun-co...
We do, however, have a variety of same-country data demonstrating it happens. Several examples here:
https://americanhealth.jhu.edu/article/how-do-gun-laws-affec...
IIRC, there's also the factor that attempts with guns tend to be more successful - other methods like pills tend to take longer, be easier to mess up, and offer the ability to renege or have someone intervene in a way guns tend not to.
Unfortunately, laws about the age at which it is legal to purchase or possess a gun show no effect. Basically, if you are allowed to own a gun or not as a child, there's no relationship. The decrease only happens when there is a gun in the home and it is stored properly, where children can't get at it easily.
The message I get from that is make guns more difficult to get in times of mental crisis and it will lower the firearm related suicide rate, but not necessarily the general suicide rate outside of that 14-17 age group.
Also, the relationship with suicide attempts is likewise sticky, because a lot of suicide attempts are not really a driven attempt to die. Many take a number of pills, for example, then purposefully leave out the pill bottle or tell people prior to the attempt. It's a difficult thing to track in terms of metrics.
Which can be reduced by restricting access to guns:
> The use of firearms is a common means of suicide. We examined the effect of a policy change in the Israeli Defense Forces reducing adolescents’ access to firearms on rates of suicide. Following the policy change, suicide rates decreased significantly by 40%. Most of this decrease was due to decrease in suicide using firearms over the weekend. There were no significant changes in rates of suicide during weekdays. Decreasing access to firearms significantly decreases rates of suicide among adolescents. The results of this study illustrate the ability of a rela- tively simple change in policy to have a major impact on suicide rates.
* https://www.gsoa.ch/media/medialibrary/2010/12/Lubin_10.pdf
Also:
> In 1995, Connecticut established a "permit to purchase" law, which required a background check and eight hours of safety training for those seeking to buy a handgun.
> Missouri used to have a law like that, too, but repealed it in 2007.
> New research shows what happened afterward. Firearm suicide rates fell 15.4 percent in Connecticut — but rose 16.1 percent in Missouri. The study, published in the journal Preventive Medicine, only confirms what other papers have found: Making it harder to access guns correlates with fewer suicides.
* https://www.vox.com/2015/9/2/9242147/gun-control-connecticut...
That's a misread of the study - making it harder to access guns does not correlate with fewer suicides - it correlates with fewer Firearm suicides. Further, reading the studies referenced, you will find that they simply show correlation without examining other risk factors. I'm pretty comfortable with the idea that less guns=less shooting, personally, though I know some people disagree with that for some reason. I don't know about less guns=less violence in general, though.
That study of the IDF is interesting, especially how they ignore the fact that there was not actually a 40% drop in gun related suicides; there was a 70% drop in suicide by gun, from 10 to 3, and a more general drop from 28 to 16.5 with another 4.5 per capita coming from non-gun related suicide. Despite this, they claim the entire 40% drop was driven by the gun change. This is interesting because it was not the only significant policy change the IDF put in place between 2005 and 2007 in order to address suicide, so it's pretty difficult to claim a direct causal relationship which is what they did.
Based on that, you would expect countries with lower rates of gun ownership to have lower adolescent suicide rates, and those with higher rates of gun ownership to have higher adolescent suicide rates. According to the WHO, though, that is not the case. The US, for example, had a below average adolescent suicide rate in 2000, whereas New Zealand, Luxembourg, Ireland, norway, Austria and others had higher than average rates.
>The numbers don't seem to bear this out. There seems to be a fairly proportional relationship between gun ownership and per capita gun deaths
The latter does nothing to refute the former. The first is claiming gun control can reduces deaths by gun, but only by shifting deaths to a different category. The latter claims that in the category of people dying by gun, number of guns and deaths is correlated.
Well, not exactly: https://twitter.com/mark_j_perry/status/672946028706996224
> Rates of personal and household gun ownership appear to have declined over the past decades – roughly two-thirds of Americans today say they live in a gun-free household. By contrast, in the late 1970s, the majority of Americans said they lived in a household with guns.
> But America’s gun super-owners, have amassed huge collections. Just 3% of American adults own a collective 133m firearms – half of America’s total gun stock. These owners have collections that range from eight to 140 guns, the 2015 study found. Their average collection: 17 guns each.
(See also the chart showing a couple percent increase in female gun ownership, but a fairly hefty decrease amongst men.)
Another point of interest is the number of CCW issued (estimated to be around 17 million now) and the liberalization of carry in general since the 1980s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitutional_carry#/media/Fi...
The research seems to indicate otherwise:
* https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/jels.12219
* https://www.bmj.com/content/364/bmj.l542
* https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/hicrc/firearms-research/guns-an...
* https://www.nber.org/papers/w7967
* https://www.jhsph.edu/news/news-releases/2018/handgun-purcha...
I think there is a point in diminishing returns--some gun control measure are more effective than others--but many places in the US have not even plucked the low-hanging fruit.
Maybe we as a society need to decide that some things are just beyond the pale. Trying to indoctrinate young people into ideologies of hatred doesn't promote free and open discourse, it shuts it down. Let's just take sites like his off the Internet - nothing of value will be lost.
Cloudflare is a CDN just like many ISP's. And ISP's have had the right to control traffic how they like for decades (within reason of course based on a stipulated contract). They do not provide journalistic services, or speech services, or editorial services. They provide infrastructure. So it's not like Facebook or Twitter which are discussion areas.
see e.g. https://ec.europa.eu/commission/priorities/deeper-and-fairer...
() My personnal definition is a minimum of 4-6 participant in any market with at least 5%-10% share each (Exemple : France has some of the lowest mobile telephony fares in the world, because there are 4 "biggish" providers (one is over 50%), and they are often trying to merge "to regain pricing power", luckilly they have so far failed. 3 can somewhat manage a cartel, 4 seems to be much harder.).
Online services are not utilities, it's not like an ISP without competition in their area was to refuse them service. There are plenty of alternatives to CloudFlare, they're just usually not as cheap or easy to use.
- Voltaire
But in age when white supremacy/fascism/nazism/strongman-leader-ism is rising again, I’m no longer sure I agree with them.
(Voltaire didn't said it exactly, it's a later quote. But he said words to the same effect, and it's by itself a good quote).
There are things you're not allowed to say because they endanger lives, like threatening people, blackmailing people, or slandering people. Spreading intolerance and hatred directed at specific demographic groups has also been shown to endanger those people, so banning that is absolutely defensible.
Voltaire wasn't a youth bullying youth to the point that they killed themselves.
Voltaire wasn't a man sitting in his living room sexually harassing and shaming women in an organized effort after they are selected as a target by some random person online for blocking them after receiving dick pics.
Voltaire wasn't encouraging anonymous strangers on the internet to make death threats to high profile persons.
the problem is that the alternative is, basically, a white-list of approved ideas.
Who makes this white-list? That's the issue with wholesale censorship.
A system like that will get gamed as soon as the political winds change one way or another.
Is nazizm fine if the political winds change a bit? No, of course not.
And I’m not saying “blanket censor an understanding of these things in historical context”. That would be insane. But I am saying - just maybe, consider stopping giving free, entirely unregulated platforms for black-list extremists and terrorists to spread their message.
After every tragedy people look for a scapegoat. I don't see anything worthwhile coming out of it to sanction anyone beside the perpetrators.
Most people accept that you cannot say "how unfortunate it would be for him if Jack ate seafood tonight" to your Mafia henchmen. Nor can you say "we will storm parliament at dawn using these weapons" if you are part of a plot to replace the state with a capitalist anarchy.
And in the same manner, it seems that there are plenty of laws in place already against saying "if white people are to defend ourselves and survive as a race, our immune system must go to work" in an 8chan manifesto.
But that's different than saying "Jack has betrayed me", "representative democracy is defective and must be replaced by capitalist anarchy" or "the white race is superior; non-whites are traitors and should be dealt with harshly; vote for me".
(Whether a text advocates violence cannot necessarily be reduced to a few words, as I hope my first example demonstrates. The context in which the words are uttered and the interpretation the speaker can reasonably intend are relevant. Fortunately, no legal system has been replaced by a computer program, but are generally interpreted by intelligent human beings.)
Free speech absolutism was never intended by the Voltaire or the American founding fathers - as can be seen by their other actions. It is a recent populist view without warrant of careful analysis. I support free speech; but I do not support free speech absolutism.
Blind faith in a political figure from several centuries ago is, to me, as ridiculous as blind faith in an imaginary magic sky deity.
It means the exact opposite of what you think it means.
Voltaire probably wasn't someone that would give up freedoms out of fear of negligent threats.
I don't understand this free speach absolutism. If we can't agree that encouraging people to commit killings should not be allowed then what the fuck
No, no, no. Let's not put this in the box of "any controversy". This is not that.
This is people using an online forum to breed their hatred of a race of human being which led to more than one mass-shooting event and one of the providers who played a part in supporting them said enough was enough.
White supremacists/Nazis are bad. There isn't a subjective measurement of "badness" when it comes to white supremacy. It is bad. They have proven themselves to be bad. Society needs to stop being so tolerant of intolerance.
You don't have to imagine it. Literally all of these things happen. Examples:
- Utilities restricting or even cutting off crypto miners (eg [1])
- Your phone service has prohibited uses that will get your service disconnected (eg see Section 8, Use of the Service in [2]).
- Getting water cut off is more difficult but not impossible, I imagine. Some places will cut you off for not paying your bill. Many don't as it's an essential service. I imagine if you resold a residential water supply for commercial purposes, you may well get cut off.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/19/nyregion/bitcoin-mining-n...
[2] https://legal.hughesnet.com/VoiceServiceAgreement/index.cfm
It's all but verified that the Dayton shooter was a fan of Elizabeth Warren, and active with Antifa. But the media isn't going to talk about how divisive it is declare the opposing side is running concentration camps, and basically modern Nazi. I'm actually glad they don't, but coming from the other direction it's non-stop.
EDIT
The downvote isn't supposed to be for a comment you disagree with, but for something that doesn't add to the conversation. Try writing a response instead.
These are flawed comparisons, because water and electricity flow from the utility towards the consumer. If water worked like the internet, and the utility was just a "dumb pipe" that would mean you could pee in my drinking water - I would hope they would disconnect you. And you can be sure that if you mess with the power coming to your house they will disconnect you, too.
If we use the example of a distributed water supply, Cloudpipe would be the company that said:
> yeah sure someone shit in the drinking water coming from my pipes, but I'm not going to tell them to stop, nor tell you who did it so you can tell them yourself.
Considering that 8chan has a proclivity to be a haven for mass shooters, the site needs to be excessively curtailed regardless of whether they're affecting the businesses services directly or not just for the sole fact that they don't seem to police the people or content that are on the site.
For example, do you think a business shouldn't fire an individual after he committed a murder of some person who isn't affiliated with the company?
I'll bet more mass shooters spend time on facebook than 8chan. When are they getting shut down?
But agreed, I am stretching this example very far now to make "water as a utility" conform to "Internet as a utility" - which maybe goes to show that they are not quite the same and might benefit from not treating them the same.
Instead of making me imagine the entire premise of your argument, maybe reason for why Cloudflare's services should be regulated as a utility, and convince me that it is at all comparable to drinking water and electricity.
Personally, on a list representing my hierarchy of needs, CDNs and clean drinking water end up on the opposite far ends.
> Imagine if real life utilities did this
TV & Radio platforms have declined to provide amplification to numerous fringe ideas / platforms over the years. As a direct "knowledge/information utility" that corollary carries the most weight for me.
But again, DNS is the real "utility" or "road" to me here -- Cloudflare et al are hotels along the road, and private property holders have declined to house people since the inception of private property. There's nothing to prevent 8chan from delivering it's message; but they may have to be careful with their biz. relationships, which is a lesson they should have been learning for years.
Is the internet not a "knowledge/information utility"? Do CDNs not provide critical protection against DDOS attacks? How then does denying service not "prevent 8chan from delivering it's message"?
You could just as easily argue that since DNS blocks can technically be overcome by directing users to a specific IP address, or by using an alternate name server infrastructure like Namecoin, that DNS isn't critical.
In my opinion, the distinction is rather blurry.
Sites like 8chan, Hacker news, etc are publishers, and I think it's reasonable if the service providers that disagree with their content don't want to do business with them.
A proper analogy (IMO), would be if a newspaper was printing hate speech and the company that prints the newspaper refused to do business with them. That would be perfectly acceptable, and has nothing to do with the government protected free speech. People aren't robots (or dumb pipes) after all, and if they don't want to enable/support what they see as a morally reprehensible enterprise with their work that is their right.
> any controversy at all means losing access to anything internet related
Giving a platform for manifestos that are propagating violence and mass shootings should not be dismissed as "any controversy at all." It feels like you are trying to minimize what happened here.
Also, the silencing of dissidents seems like the wrong move in general for all internet companies. The truth can tolerate being harassed, bashed and unliked. What it does not seem to do so well with is a regime that does not tolerate the free flow of ideas.
I'm okay with the very worst people posting on youtube and twitter. Those platforms can require an extra login to determine who is so interested in these videos. The removal of videos on the basis of dislike does not seem to be the solution. I'm not even certain that demonetizing them is the right answer, because even that can create a money trail for police and detectives to follow.
Cloudflare is U.S. corporation providing services to other people and companies. You have to be a member in order to use their services, so you are tied to their terms. This basically a "private" club you are joining
Cloudflare is not beholden to uphold the Constitution of the USA. They are beholden to their shareholders and the laws of the USA in order to operate as a Corporation.
Cloudflare can do what ever it wants. People and Companies do not have to use cloudflare. Boycott them, do not recommend them ever.
Now if the USA had some kind of non-profit, Nationwide Municipal ISP (fibre), for instance, the US Public Library system could be a good choice. They could offer some basic services and at the same time be the location that would protect speech/text (based on the Constitution). It's not perfect, but it's something to consider & you wouldn't be kicked off because somebody doesn't like what you are saying/producing.
Or there should be a law in the USA, stating that companies doing business in the USA cannot refuse service if they find the clients content to be offense and protected under the Constitution of the USA
Peace
You don't expect 1000V from your electricity company. You don't expect arsenic from your water utility. You expect the fcc no-call list to be honored. Very few utilities are truly dumb pipes.
(Not trying to draw the obvious comparison between 8chan & arsenic. Just that I think when we're holding "dumb pipes" up as a holy grail, it'd be worth remembering that the holy grail is a myth.)
Are you implying that ISPs are sending arsenic down my pipes when they service my request to load a web page from 8Chan? In that case, I'd argue that the websites I choose to visit are entirely my decision, and my ISP denying my request to connect to 8Chan would not improve their quality of service to me in any way.
Edit: and when you do fall into that relativist trap, the bad guys win because they don’t care about any of it. They don’t worry about slippery slopes, or unintended consequences. Overthinking and other various mental masturbation by good people let’s bad people win.
In the case of water supply, electricity, phone, internet service, etc... it's not just value-added, you can't function without those, there's no alternative.
Coming soon to a wrongthinker near you.
I would appreciate even more transparency details to be published. When talking about cloudflare following the rule of law - will you all be more specific about which countries and which locales?
There are rules in the UK I have read about that people wanted to bust through cloudflare to get to people.
Will the countries that have anti-gay laws be included in this rule of law thing? What about ones that have laws about sex info? How about religions?
How many people need to be up in arms about something before cloudflare ejects something? If we get enough of religion A to be angry about the lawless killing espoused in Religion B's texts - can we get all of the various religious sites ejected?
To read that this is all going on with cloudflare is terrible - but I am glad you all decided to share that you have also monitoring web site content and sending information to multiple law enforcement agencies as well.
I'm shocked, but not surprised at this point. As soon as stormer was removed you changed from being a dumb pipe infrastructure company into one that can eject and censor at will. It's been rolling down that hill ever since it seems.
Cloudflare has really opened the floodgates to be used for additional censoring by many other groups and gov agencies at this point.
The internet needs more anti-ddos options aside from this has been company.
I have personally suffered months of agony from people using 4chan in the past, but I would not ask internet companies to shut them down. Around that time is when I started looking for a service like cloudflare. It was too easy to dox and ddos - cloudflare helped.
Are you guys also going to pull service for blackhat hacker forums? I've suffered from posts on those as well.
There will likely be an 18chan dot com and a 818chan dot com and a blackerhatter dot net and a... I look forward to an updating listing of sites that are not reachable via the cloudflare internet in various places.
You're defending the Daily Stormer, do I read that correctly?
> I look forward to an updating listing of sites that are not reachable via the cloudflare internet in various places.
Cloudflare is not "the Internet". If Stormer or 8chan get kicked off of them, you can still access them if they find an upstream provider - which Stormer managed to do and 8chan likely will, too.
> Are you guys also going to pull service for blackhat hacker forums? I've suffered from posts on those as well.
I would seriously hope that this happens rather sooner than later.
I don't think that's a fair reading of it - he's attacking CloudFlare's decision to remove it, not defending the Daily Stormer per se (in a "I will defend to the death your right to say it" sort of way was my reading of it).
You're defending the Daily Stormer,
do I read that correctly?
stevenicr is referring to Cloudflare's values of "total content neutrality" [1] where they argued they were similar to a 'common carrier' and should provide services to everyone, like a phone company or mail service would.
Such values have been articulated by Cloudflare's CEO himself [2].
Hence, the DDoS protection service would protect the Taliban, child pornographers, stolen credit card sellers, DDoS-as-a-service providers and, yes, neo-nazis. So this policy had odious consequences, but was at least consistent and clearly articulated.
The new policy seems a lot less clear - drop service to neo-nazis, by all means. But why haven't they dropped the Taliban and paedophiles and DDoS providers and carders at the same time?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Cloudflare&oldid=... [2] https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-and-free-speech/
...in the US
All of these free speech arguments need to be really clear that they're talking about the extremist version of freedom of speech used in the US.
Other countries have postal services and phone companies that place limits on what can be sent over them.
They have done this several times in the past, but don’t talk about it publicly.
>As soon as stormer was removed you changed from being a dumb pipe infrastructure company into one that can eject and censor at will.
So what makes the nazis special to you? Cloudflare had banned many other sites prior to that.
Now I definitely have some idea, what your sites are all about ;-)
What does "lawless by design" mean?
It's a euphemism for sites that are not censored and still allow free speech. Matthew Prince used to support freedom of speech but he's abandoned that concept a while back.
That is pretty obviously 'lawless by design'.
How is this implemented?
Sure I imagine they could go db diving and ban content manually, but they don't want to.
By throwing up their hands and claiming that it's too hard to implement.
8ch is not running a highly sophisticated software stack. (Quite honestly, their code [1] is pretty terrible -- it's a bunch of frameworkless, hacked-together PHP.) Nothing about their setup is especially elaborate or unusual; at best, "we can't ban content" is an admission of their incompetence.
Criminalizing free speech limits our ability to think and arrive at the truth, and that can’t be good for anyone long term.
I haven’t heard of a good rebuttal to the above reasoning.
If you come to believe that the time humanity's brain spends occupied with these pursuits leads to negative real world consequences then I don't think the argument you've presented is very compelling. Put another way, if I were someone's therapist and my patient confided in me that, the more time he spends thinking about shooting up his school, the more he feels like actually doing it - I might advise him to spend less time thinking about shooting up the school. If I had the power, I might forbid him from thinking about it at all.
Really, what, but the amusement of edgy people, does humanity gain from entertaining these dark conversations? Perhaps such conversations play a role in the detection or prevention of bad outcomes. For example, police detectives are sometimes taught to identify with the criminal to understand their behavior, and so maybe having access to dark thoughts would help in that regard.
To me, the question of moderation hinges on whether you think permitting speech will be, on net, positive or negative. I don't have data or solid evidence - but I do have intuitions.
I write short stories, some are EXTREMELY dark. None deal with murder but I have done a rape story... well the two were lovers and he thought she wanted to be raped, so he did it. But still very dark no?
Wait I was wrong, of course I've done murder in shorts, but not for years and years.
As an aside, if someone’s thoughts are ill-intentioned, you should be able to dispel them by forcing an honest examination of everything.
Unfortunately the human brain doesn't work that way. It tends to resist new information -- even if logically presented and supported by hard evidence -- that contradicts its world view.
And I'm not even talking about people who suffer from some sort of mental illness, or who are poorly educated, or anything of that nature. Everyone's brain works this way.
All important philosophy and epistemology has occurred in countries with free speech restrictions.
I think I get your point though: It’s not an absolute game. You can do a lot of useful thinking even under some restrictions, so we’re forced to consider everything with more nuance.
Since ideas are just as viral and as deadly there is nothing inherently wrong with limiting the spread of some.
What then?
But, neither does anyone have a right to an audience. And that’s what this is really about. Cloudflare is not depriving 8chan of their freedom of speech; they are just declining to assist 8chan in finding an audience.
I also disagree that speech is the highest form of thought in humans, but that is a sort of a side topic.
Free speech includes the right to be heard.
That's why the government is allowed to kick you out of political rallies/meetings if you're just there to protest or whatever; you're not allowed to try to shout over someone else to prevent them from talking, rather if you disagree with them then you need to go find your own followers to try to convince.
edit: To all the people downvoting me, do you not realize I'm literally just paraphrasing the relevant supreme court ruling?: https://www.thefire.org/say-it-again-for-the-people-in-the-b...
8chan's hosting isn't even being yanked, only their access to an edge caching CDN. I'm really struggling to see a "free speech" issue here. What if Google Analytics decides not to offer 8chan analytics? Does that also interfere with the right to speech?
The comment I was replying to was about what the constitutional right to free speech entails, not about what CloudFlare is required to do.
Certainly there are forms of restricting someone's ability to be heard that would infringe on their right to free speech, but the former does not necessarily imply or require the latter.
However if I don't want to hear what you say--or I don't want to help you say it--the government is not going to step in and force me to do it.
The distinction is really about depriving vs. providing.
People get it mixed up in their heads when it comes to contractual relationships like Cloudflare. On one hand it is grammatically correct to say that Cloudflare is "depriving" 8chan of their service, since 8chan used to have access to it. Legally, though, 8chan never had any right to Cloudflare's service. It was a privilege that was revoked.
Correct. However, the main/only service CloudFlare provides is preventing DDOS attacks, which fall plainly into the category of unconstitutionally depriving someone of their free speech.
Providing services to 8chan isn't furthering their mission in any way, and the only "advantage" of cutting them off is that it empowers the people who would deprive the 8channers of their constitutional right to free speech.
We can arrive at truth through dialogue, but dialog can also lead to propagation and affirmation of misinformation. One does not necessarily converge on truth.
Though, to entrust any government to control free speech to that end is an entire different point.
Thus, limiting a speech when it first comes out is never good. Any point of view should be discussed, debated, and its truthiness assessed. However, if something has been deemed untrue over and over, it would be pointless to keep bringing it up and trying to assert it as truth. At that point, it deserves to be censored out as to not interfere with the other ongoing legitimate pruning processes.
In the US, we are currently undergoing the Democratic primaries, and consequently are having many televised debates. Almost anyone in this country who has watched one would scoff at the idea that an unmoderated debate would arrive at anything approaching truth. As it is, I've heard many people criticize the moderators in previous debates for not being more heavy handed in what blatant mistruths they allow the candidates to say on stage. You can't arrive at the truth if one member of a dialogue is not interested in getting there.
Mass shootings (generally) don't kill that many people. They are scary, yes, but not that deadly (statistically). Keep it local news, don't publish the name of the killer, basically keep the story away from the front lines.
By turning every mass shooting into a hysterical emotional maelstrom, you signal a green light to all the other potential shooters that this is how you get attention.
The murderers like the idea of their face on TV and their words read to the world. And content that shows chaos.
They don't like stories about the victims portrayed as people with lives, scenes of community comming together, and etc.
NPR did some stories about that research and shortly after you saw more stories about the victims lives.
As pointed out by an ever prescient Charlie Brooker almost ten fucking years ago. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PezlFNTGWv4).
On a similar subject, The Samaritans publish very specific and thorough guidelines as to how to report and publish suicides (https://www.samaritans.org/about-samaritans/media-guidelines...) which are still ignored by many even if unknowingly.
I hate that it has become so common now that I have just stopped clicking to find out more about them. This sort of thing used to horrify me, but nowadays I just feel so numb about it, and that scares me because I feel that I am becoming less empathetic and more cynical.
I'm a US/AU dual citizen and I've visited America quite often over the last few years, and it feels like we hear about the shootings only very slightly less in Australia than in the US. Here they're still front page news, and my co-workers are all talking about them.
Had some friends from San Diego and Houston over in the last few weeks and the commented on how safe Sydney feels, even in the grimy parts. They said that they had a need for situational awareness at all times in the US, but here it feels like it wasn't so necessary. At this point I'm certainly not looking at America as the safe haven of liberal democracy or freedom. I feel freer walking around the streets near public housing here than I do in the financial district in SF. But I guess in America you get to own guns with a high clip capacity, bump stocks, and get to post white nationalist manifestos on message boards? Cool.
I think most people's fears are around unhinged homeless than random shooters.
I had a muslim coworker recently self-radicalize with online ISIS videos and attempt to carry out a truck attack against national harbor. It didn't make it out of local news because the FBI nabbed him a few hours before the attack was to take place.
I think that's a good thing. If the media blew it up, no doubt it would have inspired others to try the same.
I think that definition of 'freedom' has just become so conflated or twisted of late that it really needs to be decoupled from the overall culture and re-examined.
Today I read tweets from pundits and politicians advocating for armed guards to be at every 'peaceful gathering' in order to ensure safety in the US. I grew up in an authoritarian S/E Asian country where there were policemen or soldiers on literally every street corner with an automatic weapon slung around their front and with one hand close to the trigger. This is the very antithesis of 'freedom' to me.
I understand how you might see the tradeoff as worth it - some safety purchased at a cost of freedom. But expanding the list of things that you're not allowed to do doesn't seem like it could possibly be interpreted as expanding freedom. Same argument for drug or alcohol prohibition, religious restrictions, etc.
On the other hand, A whole bunch of civilians in malls would gain the freedom to live.
Freedom would expand.
First, people in America can't own guns that fire '10 rounds a second' without a class 3 firearms license, which is very rare. Such guns are basically never used in mass shootings.
Second, depending on who you need to defend your home from, you may want such a gun. For example, if government or government sanctioned groups are a threat. An example of this is the killings of white farmers in South Africa. Is not just about burglars, it's about gas chambers and political threats. Always has been.
Finally, redefining safety as freedom is a truly absurd abuse of language which wipes out a critical distinction that has been heavily discussed for a long time. If this is what it takes for you to make your point make sense, your point doesn't make sense.
Just admit it. You want more safety. You're willing to give up freedom (or rather, sacrifice the freedom of others) to get it. No need to play ridiculous semantic games to pretend there are no tradeoffs here.
Also very cool and correct of you to support the restriction of high fire rate firearms, like the assault rifles used in all of the mass shootings over the last decade.
You're correct to say safety isn't freedom. However, being alive definitely contributes to freedom. Gun safety and being alive are correlated :) Remember, trigger discipline!
America is definitely an outlier in terms of gun deaths. I don't know much about the situation in South Africa, but it's very interesting you'd consider the death of some white farmers in Africa as pertinent, when the vast majority of political violence in America in the last decade has been perpetrated by white men.
Also interesting that you'd consider government sanctioned groups as a threat. Do you feel like if the brave men and women of the American military were ordered to take your guns, they'd do so? Why do you think so little of our troops?
Do I need to say this? Correlation does not equal causation.
"restriction of high fire rate firearms, like the assault rifles used in all of the mass shootings over the last decade"
I never stated any such support, and that is not the definition of an assault rifle, it's the definition of an automatic weapon.
"it's very interesting you'd consider the death of some white farmers in Africa as pertinent, when the vast majority of political violence in America in the last decade has been perpetrated by white men."
I wasn't talking about 'gun violence', I was talking about political violence; those African killers are not necessarily using guns. You didn't understand me, clearly, but nice to immediately slip in a racism accusation there.
Of course it's perpetrated by whites; they're almost 80% of the population.
"Do you feel like if the brave men and women of the American military were ordered to take your guns, they'd do so?"
The rest of what you're saying seems to be some kind of rhetorical trick; speak plainly if you have a point to make.
I don't have any guns and I never said I was American, but I appreciate the stereotyping and assumptions. Clearly, imagining me as a truck-driving beer-swilling hillbilly, or whatever racist steretotype you prefer, makes it easier to not think about what I'm saying, because you clearly didn't engage with any of it.
It has been backed up by numerous studies which control for that sort of thing.
> I never stated any such support, and that is not the definition of an assault rifle, it's the definition of an automatic weapon.
Awesome, reasonable gun control for all! Don't even need a handgun, really.
You: > I was talking about political violence
Me: > political violence in America
> Of course it's perpetrated by whites; they're almost 80% of the population.
White men are around 35%, so it's weird that this very vocal and pearl-clutching portion of the population commits so many murders per capita.
> speak plainly if you have a point to make
Do you feel like if the brave men and women of the American military were ordered to take your guns, they'd do so?
> makes it easier to not think about what I'm saying
What have you specifically said that you think I'm not thinking about?
Men commit more murders than women (in all places and times).
In America, whites commit less murders than their population percentage. This is true overall, and amongst men only.
You seem to support holding suspicion of entire identity groups on the basis of crime statistics. If so, you must really hate young black men; they're 4% of the population and commit >50% of American murders. Do you? If not, why the obsessive focus on 'white men'?
>Do you feel like if the brave men and women of the American military were ordered to take your guns, they'd do so?
I asked you to make your point and you insist again on rhetorical questions with some kind of implied but unspoken point behind them. But sure, I'll answer: Given that I'm not American and I don't own any guns, it's kind of a bizarre question. If they were ordered to invade my country, I think they would. But that'd be a very different world.
>What have you specifically said that you think I'm not thinking about?
Redefining safety as freedom is absurd.
I know, 90-95% in fact! Which makes it interesting that so often people focus on racial issues, like the plight of white south african farmers, when there's a wayyyy larger correlation with violence of all kinds, and gender. An individual gun owner's reason for owning a gun may focus on some abstract interracial political violence, when they're much more likely to be murderer by a young, poor, man.
> Redefining safety as freedom is absurd.
If some level of safety is required in order to live, freedom is contingent on safety. When you're dead you can't own any guns.
I used to own several (bolt action, 5 shot internal magazine capacity) rifles because I used to competition shoot. I sold them off years ago because I stopped competing and just didn't need them lying around the house, rusting. There you go - freedom to own guns or not.
I could probably also get a handgun if I wanted, but I would need to renew my licence and pass strenuous background checks and prove to the police that I store it safely, AND I have to be a continual member of a gun club and shoot regularly with others so they can assess my gun handling skills (and I guess also my mental state) on a regular basis.
What I absolutely CANNOT do is to go and buy a semi automatic gun with a magazine capacity to slaughter an entire school room full of kids without having to reload. What the heck would _any_ civilian in a peaceful country want/need such a weapon? On the flipside, it also means I am free to enjoy the fact that my kids can go to school every day with a less than .001% chance that some maniac will walk into their classroom and mow them down.
To close off this post, and to end that illusion of "I can protect my family with a gun" hero storyline - About 3 years ago we had someone break into our house in the middle of the night. I was woken up by the sound of my son yelling at someone to get the fk out of his room so I jumped out of bed and grabbed a small wooden baton that I keep under our bed.
When I threw open our bedroom door, I saw a shadowy figure run past it in the dark corridor. To this day, I am glad I grabbed the baton instead of an (imagined, non existent) loaded gun, because my first instinct was let fly at the fleeing figure, only to realise a few seconds later that it was my own son, giving chase to the intruder who was fleeing ahead of him. I could have killed my own son if I had a gun in my hand in that split second of rage and confusion.
Later, we found out that the police nabbed the intruder, who turned out to be a 15 year old boy that lived a couple of streets away. Had I shot HIM, I would have had to live with the thought that I had killed someone's child. I cannot do that. I prefer to live with the _freedom_ of not having the guilt of taking someone else's life on my conscience.
However the more critical problem with what you wrote is that it doesn't actually attempt to disprove anything I said. You simply reiterated a bunch of arguments against gun ownership.
You didn't actually say why adding to the list of things you're not allowed to do here makes you more free. And I think that's because it's definitionally impossible to demonstrate.
Would you say that alcohol prohibition 'expands freedom' because it reduces drunk driving deaths?
The definition of freedom is being allowed to do things. It doesn't mean being allowed to do only good things, or things which are good in some particular person's opinion. It means I can do something that you would rather I did not do. That's freedom. Freedom to do what others want you to do is not freedom.
Are your neighbours free to mine the road outside your house in case insurgents should drive up some day? How about them buying some uranium and building a small detonator in their garage? Or perhaps brewing some toxic cocktail of poison gas in the local primary school science lab?
Any of the above can be classed as a weapon to deter others, never mind the unintended consequence of accidental (or deliberate) discharging of any of them killing multiple innocent people. If you cannot purchase any of the above at a local dealership, then are you really free, when your government can outgun you at any point in time?
I consider myself 'free' when I take steps to minimise the infinitesimally small probability that something bad might happen, and I know that the steps I take will not result in an even worse 'bad thing' happening.
I got rid of my guns when we had kids. The very very tiny chance that I would need to use a gun against an intruder was outweighed by the even larger chance that one of my kids may have found my rifles and thought of them as play toys. Or the even larger chance that someone could burgle our house when we were not there and take them. I was free to choose what I wanted to do, and I still do not feel any less protected or safe in my own home, or while walking down the street, or when sending my kids to school, or when visiting a bar or attending a concert... or doing pretty much anything that a 'free' American is actually dead scared to do in their own country today.
Howver, again, you are slipping sideways off the topic we're discussing. You're discussing what good policy is towards weapons. That's not what we're debating. This thread is about what it means to be free.
If you could buy an RPG launcher, you would undoubtedly be more free than if you could not. This is by definition. It doens't mean you'd be safer, or better, or that this is good policy. It just means you'd be more free.
"I consider myself 'free' when I take steps to minimise the infinitesimally small probability that something bad might happen, and I know that the steps I take will not result in an even worse 'bad thing' happening."
This definition matches the word 'safe', not the word 'free'. (If you disagree, I wonder what your definition of 'safe' would be that differs from this?)
You seem to be conflating "freedom" with "safety". Often they're correlated, but in this case they conflict.
thats all they're doing
>public is not made aware of this very tragic problem
everyone is quite aware of what the problems are, many view the children murdered during Sandy Hook as the end of the conversation. The decisions were made.
most first world countries have solved these problems, the US meanwhile...
‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens
Do you think it would take less than 9 hours to pour some diesel fuel on fertilizer and flatten the entire WalMart?
People will just move on to other weapons: knives, bombs, etc.
Norway has very restrictive gun laws. Breivik managed to get enough fertilizer to make a bomb that was mostly a distraction, but still sent 8 people to grave and injured hundreds.
UK is having a knife problem: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-42749089 https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-48186035
You are at 10x higher chance of death by vehicle.
The -only- reason it is seen as a tragedy because people feel those deaths were somehow avoidable.
Also, knife crime in the UK is not higher than the US.
Yes the deaths were avoidable. We know they were because every other first world country doesn’t have this problem in anywhere the same degree.
How do you explain much lower homicide rates in different US states, many on par or better than "every other first wolrd country?
If you drill down deeper, by county level, or even more granular - the picture becomes much clearer still. You should research it, see what variables drive it, instead of arriving at conclusions without any data.
Why do such discrepancies exist, sometimes literally across the street?
The problem is much more complicated than "guns bad".
Gun control is a "third rail" in many political jurisdictions in the USA. Many Americans will vote against any agent who would disarm them; those voters are unlikely to see disarming to diminish the (very roughly) ~0.000001% chance of death by mass shooting as a sensible--or even Constitutional--trade.
That would pretty much guarantee that people who need mental health services would deliberately avoid getting it to prevent it from showing up on their records, e.g. a security guard who needs to carry a firearm for their job.
Uh, what do you think a psychiatric exam is? There's no crazy-o-meter that they stick into an orifice to objectively determine whether you're mentally ill or not. You simply get asked a series of questions which you can reply to in any way you like.
"socially awkward people aren't allowed to have guns" as a policy would be a flagrant violation of a constitutional right.
The scary thing is that mentally ill people can intentionally mask their illness in order to pass exams.
It's a common founding myth among gun rights people that "The American People" are pro-gun, but it's just not really true. It's a particular driving issue for a particular subset of the republican base, and beyond that opinions aren't as strong, but are broadly pro-gun-control.
It was a flawed list of too-specific rules that were self-contradictory or incomplete in a bunch of places, and indeed that became part of the mythology about it in gun circles.
But it also directly outlawed clones of the Kalashnikov and AR-15 rifles that have been preferentially used (for fairly obvious reasons) in much of the recent violence. It worked, within its domain.
No one likes the ACA either, but you can still buy insurance with a pre-existing condition. Same deal. The gun folks like to conflate "flawed law" with "useless law", but that's not how it works in practice.
As it is, the House is more representative of the population of the US than the Senate, so it's fair to say the biggest barrier to increased gun control right now is the quirky nature of the US political system, not popular sentiment.
That bill would do nothing to combat these mass shooters. I can't think of any offhand that have bought their weapons through private sale. Most don't have a criminal record so they just buy them from random gun shops.
So if it won't solve anything related to these incidents, what's the point?
No, it wouldn't solve everything. But if we wait to pass a law that solves everything, we'll never pass anything.
> have drafted and passed a complete background check law have not considered any of this, or looked at any data
Yes, generally because the people proposing gun laws know nothing about guns.
I have watched national politicians tell townhalls that it's perfectly legal for someone to order a gun online right to their door without a background check, that is a felony.
I have watched them tell people that fully automatic guns are easy to obtain, which they are not.
I have watched them tell people that banning the AR-15 should be our #1 priority, when in reality more people are punched and kicked to death each year than are killed with rifles.
So yes, politicians generally talk out of their @$$ to pander to their bases and get votes. They are not experts on most subject matter so I wouldn't expect them to have any info that isn't widely known.
If you want to viscerally understand their viewpoint, call to mind the reaction that you have when someone in the conservative camp goes "Look, it's snowing, so much for global warming!" -- and then substitute "snowing" for "school shooting" and "global warming" for "politically-induced mass starvation."
I don't buy this argument, but only because I don't think armed resistance would be effective, and there's a lot that I know I don't know on that front. What I don't believe is that this tradeoff has an obvious undebatable answer.
I guess it is the phrase "to disarm them", which is somewhat provocative, since no-one would seriously advocate taking away all guns. Even Japan, with just 5% of the gun violence of the US, allows some citizens to have some guns.
Another issue is with your stated statistic of death via mass shooting. This obviously ignores maimings and other non-deaths, and also deaths from guns in non-mass events, such as burglaries, accidents.
But most of all, it ignores the psychological impact from the threat of gun violence.
What happens to a young child's mind from having to participate in active shooter drills? From having adults explain to them that this is a real threat, and that they better be ready for it? No child should have to carry that burden.
And maybe that leads back to some agreement with your point. If the actual danger from guns is as low as you say, then why have these drills at all?
While I believe this to be true, virtually any sort of "turn in some of your guns" event in the USA would... not be viewed with any nuance at all. Even machine guns were more-or-less exempt from turn-in, provided they were registered by a certain time. Moreover there are already very, very many semi-automatic pistols, revolvers, rifles, and shotguns in circulation--it's not as if a lot of folks have a bolt-action 22 cal rifle and just a few have semi-automatics--the sort of guns that can be fired and reloaded somewhat rapidly, that's what we've got. Setting aside the fact that a rifle is more powerful and aim-able, but harder to conceal, compared to a pistol, I'm not sure what characteristic of a "bad" gun the American government could successfully put forth.
All that said--from whom would you propose to confiscate what guns?
> Another issue is with your stated statistic of death via mass shooting. This obviously ignores maimings and other non-deaths, and also deaths from guns in non-mass events, such as burglaries, accidents.
Well, agreed! Mass shootings and terror attacks inflict many fewer casualties on the American population compared to robberies, gang and drug violence, alcohol and smoking, fatty foods, traffic accidents and DUI, swimming pools, etc. However, it does not seem to me that these other perils are used to buttress the case for banning the instruments of such trouble. I don't mean to be glib, and indeed it is hard to imagine a bad actor using an undoctored swimming pool against innocents, but it does seem to be the case that the electorate lacks the will to stamp out certain risks. And this lack of will is not really related to the measurable impact of the problem.
> What happens to a young child's mind from having to participate in active shooter drills?
We could reflect on the schoolhouse duck-and-cover drills for nuclear war in the 1950s and 1960s--like, isn't contemplating nuclear annihilation and nuclear winter much more terrifying and existentially dreadful than locking the classroom door? Maybe it isn't a good idea to traumatize children with visions of a terrible but statistically very remote fate. On the other hand, local police and school districts must be seen to be doing something, so maybe it is practically unavoidable.
Logic like that is usually applied to forces of nature. Or at least things that provide utility in return for this risk (e.g. cars). Mass shootings don't really fit that mould.
"stop telling people things" strikes me as a strange response. We could have a nationwide epidemic of mass shootings flying under the radar entirely. Sometimes issues need to faced head on.
(and even if the national media didn't say a peep, 8Chan would be all over it, tracking the number of deaths for their high score board. It's a forum for radicalisation that's been ignored for a very long time)
There are published statistics. They suggest that the focus should be on car safety, driving and worrying about bad habits that have health impacts. We'd know if there was a problem and the evidence is that your greatest enemy is you. It'd be interesting to get statistics on how many of these shootings are linked to drug abuse though.
> Logic like that is usually applied to forces of nature.
Good decisions that feel bad will get a better result than bad decisions that feel good. Politics is almost always improved by people taking deep breaths and not focusing too much on what is happening today - ideally using logic although simply sticking to process is good enough for me.
And it has been. Look at the data for car death over time:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...
For decades the government has passed laws and regulations that have forced car manufacturers and owners to prioritise safety over all else: seat belts, air bags, crumple-resistant frames... the list goes on and on. The results have been a massive success. It's an example of effective government.
They could do the same for guns, if they had the political will. The only way they get the political will is if voters demand it. The only way voters demand it is if they are aware of the problem.
But no government data unlike car deaths, because the gun lobby blocks any attempt to actually fund research into gun deaths.
The problem is there is a simmering domestic nationalistic terrorism threat to the country - and that is news.
The killer in TX directly referenced it, as did very many of the prior mass-murders of recent. That is noteworthy, and fundamentally different from people killed in a gas station robbery.
This rising domestic terrorism is fed and incited by nationalistic groups who have explicitly stated this as their plans and goals.
Yes the media could adjust how they report it, but that's not the root problem here. It's an intentionally fostered growing domestic nationalist terrorism.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_shootings_in_the_United_S...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_shootings_in_the_United_S...
0) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oklahoma_City_bombing
1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_traffic_deaths_per_VMT...
And what's your point about traffic deaths? By that logic, heart disease killed more people over that interval, should we stop caring about traffic deaths?
I know that I'm verging on whataboutism. But there is the tendency to amplify outrage based on public sympathies.
I worry lots more about official government violence. Consider deaths of US troops in Iraq during the mid 00s. About 800-900 per year.[0] Or far worse, deaths of Iraqis, which exceeded 20K per year during that period.[1] The same issues that are driving mass shootings will likely result in another major war. That's the thing to worry about.
0) https://www.statista.com/statistics/263798/american-soldiers...
1) https://www.statista.com/statistics/269729/documented-civili...
By many studies Americans overall are far less racist and more tolerant than they ever were. Things are actually improving on that front rather than deteriorating.
Like any form of lone-wolf terrorism, these shootings are being perpetrated by individuals, with individual motivations. There's a compelling case that they're at least partially motivated or inspired by media coverage.
We often hear that suicide is contagious. Some studies and commentators have suggested that murder-suicide might spread like noncriminal suicide. https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2017/11/americas-...
Columbine shooting reporter Dave Cullen has suggested some low-impact changes to media coverage which could have a positive effect. https://www.buzzfeed.com/davecullen/stop-naming-mass-shooter...
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1057610X.2017.1...
Media coverage can make a difference but I think relatively few people just decide to do it based on news coverage. FBI data suggests a median planning time of 1-2 months and a median preparation time of a week.
https://www.fbi.gov/file-repository/pre-attack-behaviors-of-...
There is a community that actively celebrates, studies, and iterates on mass shootings for a variety of ends from political to psychic reasons.
The USA Government is doing nothing to even attempt to prevent the next one.
Correct me if I’m wrong, would definitely like to change that opinion.
In other words, if anyone is aiming for notoriety, shooting up people in Seoul or Tokyo will give you an eternal place in national zeitgeist, while in America you will be famous until the next shooting: A few months? Weeks?
Yet nobody's (thankfully) taking up the opportunity in these other countries. Certainly not every week, or even every year.
It's not the media. It's not attention-seeking. It's not games (duh). Maybe it's a bit about mental health, but other countries also have problems with crazies and they don't just shoot up schools and nightclubs.
Can we stop beating around the bush?
Good luck buying guns in Korea/Japan (or any country[1] for that matter) as a tourist, or smuggling them in. It's significantly easier to get guns where you normally reside.
[1] Except maybe the US. Is the gunshow exemption still around?
Registered FFL holders selling guns at a show have to do the same background checks they’d do anywhere else.
Even Polifact has fact-checked this and found that America is not particularly exceptional [0]. By this study, it's not even in the top 10. [1]
And just off the top of my head, there were two mass killings recently in Japan. A guy burned down an animation studio and killed 35 people. Before that, a guy stabbed a bunch of kids to death near a subway station in Tokyo a few months ago.
[0] https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/jun...
[1a] https://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/sorry-despite-...
[1b] https://crimeresearch.org/2015/06/comparing-death-rates-from...
Yeah, that is what you just posted.
It may not be these things alone. But they do contribute. The number of copy-cat crimes is a pretty clear indication of that.
I don't think this would apply to China and India. Every other country in the world has a lower national population than the US. Yet I doubt that your statement even applies to countries such as Brazil and Nigeria.
You really do have to take population numbers into account when you look at what the media focuses on. No other western country even comes close to the population the US has, so it gives the impression that the US is somehow much worse.
Of course, information out of China isn’t that reliable, you could argue. The EU as a whole is considerably bigger than the US, and every year or so there’s a mass shooting or other mass killing. And it’s huge news for a long time. The UK has about a fifth as many people as the US, and this century has had five mass killings (one of which involved guns). The US rate and attitude really is abnormal.
Edit: It’s also worth noting that the vast majority of European mass killing incidents are terroristic; the “someone just shoots a bunch of people for no particularly discernible reason” thing is really, really rare. The Texas shooting (terroristic) would be extremely shocking in any European country and would dominate the news for a long time. But the Ohio one (looks non-terroristic) would probably have an even bigger impact and would likely lead to tightening of gun laws etc (the Dunblane massacre lead to the banning of almost all handguns in the UK, for instance).
If you trade all of your freedoms for securities, you too can have a totalitarian regime that keeps you safe. It's a "slippery" slope that can take centuries, but you just keep losing a few freedoms here, a few there, and pretty soon your monolithic monstrosity of a government holds all the cards.
> If you trade all of your freedoms for securities, you too can have a totalitarian regime that keeps you safe.
Totalitarian regime usually have worse security because nobody can criticize the supreme leader and they can simply make an inconvenient news item (like an unsolved murder) go away. Your slippery slope isn't even in the correct direction.
No society is perfect, but it's quite possible to have a safe and free society. But you should be willing to make reasonable compromises instead of arguing from centuries-old aphorisms.
The person I directly responded to was talking about China, which is YAGFTR (yet another gun-free totalitarian regime).
> No society is perfect, but it's quite possible to have a safe and free society.
That also lasts a long time without lapsing back into being YAGFTR? Japan was YAGFTR less than 75 years ago, same with a lot of currently "safe and free societies".
I am skeptical that a gun-free society can last hundreds of years without it lapsing back to being YAGFTR but I suppose time will tell
If you read tarrant's manifesto, for example, his motivation is entirely racial/political. He thinks white people is being destroyed, and he lashes out against his enemies.
If people's grievances, real or not, are not addressed. They will lash out. Calling them racist, stupid, xenophobes, losers, mentally ill or whatever else will not stop the tide of blood.
News reports what happened. These days people seem to see news organizations as the enemy or at least the news organizations they don't like.
Although one thing I have noticed about news these days is it tends to voice personal opinion openly much more than years ago. Walter Cronkite, Tom Brokaw, Peter Jennings wouldn't spout their own opinion they'd tell you what happened, and that's it.
Show the bodies, name the attackers, send reports to the NRA, government officials don't take no for an answer hound them day and night for a reply. Make it uncomfortable for everyone so much so that everyone wants to prevent another event from occurring.
There is no way to hide what happened or who did it in this age of information. If information lacking people just make up their own story or create conspiracy theories to fill the void.
selectively reports what happened, and only if it tells the right narrative and/or generates clicks, yes.
Mass shooting where 3 innocents die = clicks and correct narrative and will therefore be reported.
DUI crash where 5 innocents die = boring, wrong narrative; no report
Civilian kills police officer = boring, wrong narrative; no report
Police officer kills civilian (esp. with different color skin) = clicks and correct narrative and will therefore be reported
You're kidding, right?
Cops getting doused in water got national news coverage.
So'd https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_killings_of_NYPD_officers
Equally, if a cop went out purely to kill some black men for reasons of political revenge, that would be newsworthy in a way that a random death at a traffic stop is not.
The status quo, however, is that random traffic stop deaths of white guys are not newsworthy, but random traffic stop deaths of black guys are national news. That racist double standard is what's being called out.
I wish people would stop blaming the news and blame themselves.
I can see that point. There is also something odd about what shootings get publicized and which don't. Some shooters, seem to be getting more media attention than others.
Is it the manifestos or maybe the number of victims? I remember the Congressional baseball shooting, but I think there was no manifesto so it wasn't talked about as much, even though it involved members of Congress. The Christchurch one was publicized and was very visible, and there was a manifesto. The youtube shooter was a strange case. Given what media likes to do, I would have expected that one to be front page news for a long time since it had a manifesto in her videos and it involved a major tech company. However, it disappeared from the news cycle relatively quickly.
Now, I would rather they all not be publicized as much. There needs to be legislative action about guns, what resources, especially mental health, are available, etc. But, it is probably better if that is handled after some time and not in the immediate aftermath of the tragedy.
1. News media decides how long to keep a story active in the news cycle in order to push a narrative.
2. News media reacts to the attention a story received and keeps popular stories active longer to sell more ads.
The media is in the middle of the feedback loop, it can both generate attention and react to it. Given that position they push a narrative if it gets more ad views.
Similarly, if a person or organization in the United States is silenced because they were deplatformed by a corporate oligarchy, it's ridiculous to argue "the US doesn't have any law which prevents that, so Free Speech has not been violated".
Free Speech has absolutely been impinged by this decision.
Cloudflare isn't preventing anyone from saying anything. All that is happening is Cloudflare is using it's freedom of association not to associate with this website. This has nothing to do with 8Chan's ability to publish what they want - only their ability to use Cloudflare's services to do so. As the article mentions - because the US has the principle of Free Speech enshrined in law, 8chan has the ability to go and use other services, or to develop the services that Cloudflare provided. This will not impact 8chan's ability to publish whatever they like.
Now there is a theoretical point of view, that if a company has a monopoly - it is effectively able to police speech, but that's absolutely not the case here, as is demonstrated in the past by companies going elsewhere to exercise their right.
What is being proposed as an understanding of Free Speech is not allowing private individuals from refusing to service to you. This would seem to be mandating someone to act - which is a principle quite far away from any law I've heard of.
Now maybe we're not quite at that point yet (after all, the Daily Stormer did eventually find a CDN that would take them), but we may very well be getting close; there are only so many CDNs big enough to effectively shrug off large-scale DDOS attacks after all.
You also have to consider how difficult it is to match the quality of service provided by Cloudflare, and the hassle involved in switching to a new CDN. Cloudflare's refusal to service some organizations on the basis of ideology might have a chilling effect on Free Speech, even if it's not an insurmountable barrier.
I agree there is a balance between Freedom of Speech and Freedom of Association. The question is: where do we draw the line?
Some of you are so dense. Free speech is about not being dragged off in the middle of the night and sent to a gulag.
There’s no fine line here, no slippery slope. Everyone on 8chan is free to continue publishing whatever they want. It just won’t be published over a high availability CDN. It also won’t show up in Times Square.
If you truly believe that "free speech is about not being dragged off in the middle of the night and sent to a gulag", and that that's all it's about for you, then would you, for example, be okay with a law stating that social media companies in the US are required to automatically filter any content critical of actions taken by the US military, and not display that content to people inside the US?
Yes, that's an extreme example, and yes it'd be illegal under the current US constitution, but it would be consistent with the extremely narrow definition of Free Speech you specified in your previous comment.
So, assuming that's not actually where you draw the line, where do you draw it? How much suppression of speech are you willing to tolerate before you would consider it unacceptable?
I tolerate zero suppression. But that’s not what’s at issue here. We are talking about a CDN company refusing business of someone they don’t like, because it exposes them to bad PR and likely liability as well. No one is required to publish your content. I can post my dick all over Facebook, and that’s fine, because that’s not suppression of free speech. I can’t walk into CNN and demand airtime under a flag of free speech either.
The closest thing we ever had to an issue of free speech on the Internet was when ICANN was handing over domains to the feds over piracy issues. In that case their was a thin line. In that case there was a discussion to be had. Property was being seized by the government and people were being arrested and imprisoned for what some considered speech.
Here there is nothing. Just whiny, uneducated people with no concept of what free speech actually refers to.
That's suppression of free speech; regardless of whether it's a government or a corporation that's doing it.
Say that a law was passed that required Facebook and others to remove posts critical of the US military. In this example, if Facebook fails to comply, people will be arrested.
Facebook would sue the government, saying that the law is unconstitutional as it violates the First Amendment. This would likely become know as something like Facebook et al. vs The United States. Unless we are in a bizarro universe, Facebook would win.
In this example, Facebook’s rights, as a publisher, are the ones being trampled on, not yours. It’s not a people’s case. In this scenario you likely don’t even have standing to sue (debatable, I suppose, but that’s a separate discussion entirely).
It’s worth noting that the closest thing to this scenario was with the ACSS key years ago. Not quite the same, but similar parties involved along a similar line of thinking.
But the issue at hand with Cloudflare isn’t the same. There is no constitutional issue at all. It’s just one business dropping a client.
In fact, the only way this could ever turn into a free speech issue, even in principle, is if a law was passed that forced Cloudflare to continue to host 8chan’s content.
You should really do some reading about what free speech actually means. You are so far off the mark it’s hard to take you seriously.
To repeat my previous point: assume the same law was passed in North Korea instead of the US. Would the law then be "not a violation of Free Speech" because North Korea has no legal protections for Free Speech?
Take a step back, stop being so defensive, and realize you are wrong and you can actually learn something. You seem to care about this, so take it as an opportunity to actually learn what free speech is and what you can do to protect it.
Free speech is not some idea by which all companies much publish all content with an equal hand. That's an absurd standard. That's actually antithetical to free speech ideals, as it FORCES companies endorse speech that they, themselves, don't agree with.
> To repeat my previous point: assume the same law was passed in North Korea instead of the US. Would the law then be "not a violation of Free Speech" because North Korea has no legal protections for Free Speech?
Of course it would. It would be in the US, and it would be in North Korea.
North Korea is a great example, and it's not hypothetical. But in North Korea it is illegal for anyone to be critical of the military—not just asking certain publishers to be more selective about what they publish.
But none of this has anything to do with Cloudflare. Cloudflare is just a business. It's a non-essential, privately owned company that has nothing to do with the government. If someone from 8chan goes into the local Starbucks and starts screaming about killing Hispanics, Starbucks can ask them to leave. That's not a free speech violation.
If this was something like ICANN seizing a domain or the FCC refusing to issue a radio license you could at least make the "slippery slope" case with some kind of loose validity. But we aren't even talking about that. No one has to support your speech. Dell doesn't have to sell you computers for your server farm and Cloudflare doesn't have to sell you CDN services. CNN doesn't have to give you airtime, and Amazon doesn't have to publish your book.
You can build a horrific media empire that endorses and promotes the most disgusting and hateful forms of speech imaginable, but NO ONE has to support you in doing that. And, in fact, no one SHOULD be forced to.
Just look at Alex Jones. No one has arrested him (minus an incident in New York with him literally screaming into someone's face with a megaphone, which was borderline assault) and no one should. But no one has to support him either.
Yes, ICANN is a bit different because ICANN is effectively a monopoly. But again, see my previous comment explaining why you don't need to be a monopoly to effectively police speech: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20614680
The point is, it doesn't matter who's doing the censoring. Once you reach the point where you're actively hindering people from expressing ideas in a public space (such as the internet), you're impinging Free Speech. Now maybe that's acceptable to a certain extent when the only alternative is to impinge upon a company's freedom of association. That's why I say there's a balance between those two principles. But the question remains: where should the line be drawn?
Sure, even without a CDN a sufficiently well-funded organization could spend millions of dollars on the infrastructure necessary to resist a powerful DDOS attack. But if that's enough in your mind to satisfy the principle of free speech, then you're essentially saying that it's okay if it costs millions of dollars to speak freely on the internet. I'm not sure that's a good policy.
> then you're essentially saying that it's okay if it costs millions of dollars to speak freely on the internet.
No. Go buy a RaspberryPi for $35. Now you can host your own site and say whatever you would like on the internet. Again, nobody owes you anything. Nobody is obliged to carry my message. You have a right speak freely. You do not have a right to be heard.
Whether or not a cloud infrastructure company "owes" content-neutral treatment to their customers is a matter which, I think, is up for debate. Particularly in this day and age where the internet has become such an important venue for political speech.
"You have the right to speak freely as long as you can't effectively do it"? Not much of a right then, is it?
I wonder what would have happened to the civil rights movement or the women's right movement if people with that kind of attitude had existed back then? Those were widely opposed movements back then too.
That's a pretty gross misrepresentation of what I said. Think of it another way. Prior to the internet could TV and radio stations be forced to play an ad they disagree with? Could newspapers and magazines be forced to print ads or op-eds they disagree with?
You cannot force someone else to carry your message. If you are unable to broadcast the message yourself and nobody else is willing to broadcast it for you then that is your own issue. No private entity is responsible for giving you a platform.
I also think there's a lot more nuance to this situation than you seem to be implying. I very much doubt there are a significant number of people ("right wingers" or otherwise) who believe property rights are the most important concern in all situations, nor are there many who believe in an absolute right to Free Speech at any cost. (The constitution itself allows for narrow exceptions for both of those rights.)
If anything, it would certainly free those companies from having to act as arbiters of moral truth.
No, it hasn't. No one has a moral, legal, or ethical responsibility to pay for someone else's speech. The government must tread lightly, but private individuals are under no compulsion to listen to others. 8chan is NOT having their speech rights infringed, they are simply having a business agreement terminated. They are still 100% free to create a website somewhere else, write a book, or protest in the streets.
Do not confuse private property (Cloudflare's servers) with the public square.
For some of these entities, such as CDNs with enough infrastructure to stand up against large-scale DDOS attacks, there may only be a small number of viable options. What happens if all of those companies collectively decide to censor someone? You've effectively created a corporate oligarchy with the power to decide what sort of speech is and isn't allowed on the internet.
Now again, maybe we're not quite at that point yet (after all, the Daily Stormer did eventually find a CDN that would take them), but we may very well be getting close. You also have to consider that even without a true oligopoly; there's still a chilling effect created when a large percentage of the internet's major infrastructure providers collectively decide to censor certain speech on the basis of ideology.
At what point do you believe freedom of speech outweighs freedom of association? We've already decided freedom from racial discrimination trumps freedom of association, so it's not like this sort of thing would be entirely without precedent.
A CDN isn't necessary. It's a convenience for end users. You don't need a CDN to prevent DDoS. In fact having a CDN is probably the most expensive way to handle DDoS.
Cloudflare offers all of that as a service: https://www.cloudflare.com/ddos/
You can reduce the effectiveness of DDOS in other ways, but there's only so much you can do when you're limited to a few servers with limited bandwidth. Ultimately the only way to weather a large, brute force DDOS is by having enough capacity to service all incoming requests, which is something a CDN helps provide.
8chan wasn’t exactly designed for distributed architecture. Did you even ever use the site?
I've never used 8Chan, but my understanding is that it's a simple forum site, like 4Chan. That seems at a cursory glance to be feasible to run in a distributed manner; though I guess it depends on how the application itself is architected. That's kinda irrelevant though, since as I just explained a well designed CDN like Cloudflare can remove a lot of the need for the site itself to implement a distributed infrastructure. (At least so long as DDOS is the cause of your scaling issue, and not legitimate traffic.)
There's also no public square in magazines, newspapers, radio, TV, libraries aren't required to stock your book, nor book stores, no one has to lease you space for a store, etc. You have the right to speak, no one has an obligation to listen or pay attention. No one has an obligation to help you speak, etc. That's what I mean when I said, "do not confuse public square with private property." Just because everyone watches TV and uses the internet does not mean anyone has a RIGHT to express themselves there.
Most people who commit mass murders are not "crazy" - they don't have psychosis, they know what they're doing, they plan the attack.
They murdered dozens of innocent people. No one’s saying they were psychotic, necessarily.
Glorification is a matter of free speech, because it is an expression of opinion. That you find it distasteful is fine, using that as a weapon is not.
Either way, Facebook won't be held accountable because it's funded by large investment funds, and HN won't complain because they're in bed together.
The "too big" argument is not a moral argument, that just says "we have money invested in it". If that's acceptable to you you have no morality.
And therein lies the problem. This sort of behavior is tolerated in Facebook and Twitter simply because they are "large" by some random metric. If FB or Twitter decides one day to mass censor a certain type of content, it somehow isn't a big deal because they are "large"
8ch actively caters to white supremacists, by letting /pol/ be the second largest board there and not be actively moderated to combat hate speech. 8ch administrators did nothing to prevent hate speech from becoming a large chunk of their discourse. As such, people were looking towards 8ch's providers to do something about this, as it has been the case on the Internet since forever (ISP not reacting to abuse requests concerning their customers? Okay, we have to contact their upstreams then).
They regularly praise previous mass murderers and goad others into doing the same.
So go look, it would not take you much (site down for now though, for obvious reasons). I did it back with the Christchurch terrorist attack and won't do it again it's so vile and that's a euphemism.
Roger Ebert[1], Tristan Harris[2], and others argue that the way CNN (and others) covers these events incentivises further occurrences.
[1]: https://boingboing.net/2012/12/15/roger-ebert-on-how-the-pre...
[2]: I’m having trouble finding the video amongst the flood of news reports from the recent events.
> To prevent someone from utilizing a platform to express their opinion.
CloudFlare is not a platform for expressing opinions. As such, 8chan was not deplatformed... so what point are you really trying to make, here?
The media also keeps saying 8chan, 8chan, 8chan over and over, when it is really just the one most popular board ("pol") that is being discussed. But there are hundreds of boards on the site for different topics, which are moderated separately and according to their own rules.
It seems like most of the outrageous incitement to violence people have posted on 8chan would be illegal under Brandenburg v. Ohio (speech is illegal if it will lead to imminent lawless action), given the mostly-valid assumption there will be readers of the post who are both radicalized and armed. This seems like the way to take down most of the violent content on 8chan if anyone would think about it for more than 5 seconds.
This seems like a knee-jerk reaction to moral panic and bad PR, not a solution to anything. Cloudflare would have been in a better position to actually change 8chan if they had kept them on and pressured them.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/02/nyregion/crown-heights-ri...
> “If that mural goes down, the restaurant gonna go down next,” read one comment on Ms. Price’s post [ on twitter ] , accompanied by flame emojis.
> turns out that about 10 days before the meeting, Apolinar Severino, the owner of the building housing the mural, had told Mr. Caldwell that he claimed full responsibility for attempting to paint over the image of Mr. Price. Mr. Severino had been advised by a real estate agent to whitewash the entire wall while trying to refinance his mortgage on the property, he said.
It turns out the owner of the building was responsible for painting over part of the graffiti and not the restaurant across the street.
I reported the tweet that called for burning the restaurant across the street down to Twitter, and Twitter did remove that tweet, but didn't ban the user.
There's a better article covering the story with links to the false rumors being spread on Twitter -- many with threats -- in the Brooklyn eagle https://brooklyneagle.com/articles/2019/07/25/sean-price-mur...
Maybe I'll go to Twitter's hosting providers and Cloudflare to get all of twitter removed, or at least made a lot slower.
You already got 99% more than the average Twitter report. Twitter really needs a better "this tweet is verifiably fake, here is the proof" option that is acted upon with relative speed.
All of this rooted in meatspace. The so called "social defeat".
How often do you see successful people that have a fullfilling life go on rampages?
Besides, it's a sort of weird position to take on an a) online forum b) of tech people that the internet does not have a significant role in facilitating communication that would not otherwise happen.
You make it sound it's almost like terrorism didn't exist before the internet.
All of these shooters have manifestos that describe how they came to believe what they believed.
> You make it sound it's almost like terrorism didn't exist before the internet.
No, I don't. I specifically said "uptick." This line of argument makes as much sense as showing up in a comment thread about the Capital One breach and saying "You make it sound it's almost like privacy violations didn't exist before the internet." Of course it did, but not at this scale, and we're talking about scale.
Literature says that the internet does facilitate extremist communication/nucleation, but does not replace the meatspace as the primary radicalization agent. https://academic.oup.com/ia/article-abstract/93/5/1233/40982...
One of the dangers of Internet access to such is people who only know you online may feel more comfortable with encouraging your radicalization than if it was in person because they aren't in immediate danger, nor at high risk of being asked to participate, etc. It can seem inconsequential to agree with extremist statements. People who might hesitate to agree in person may not hesitate to agree on a discussion board.
There are good and bad things that come out of the relative freedom to speak our minds online. Opportunity for radicalization is one of the bad things that comes of it.
The roots are firmly in the meatspace.
The seed was planted well before he know what 8chan was.
There have been studies. Radicalization is generally the product of a social environment that magnifies certain views and actively encourages people to become more extreme.
Broadcast television, and radio to a lesser extent, is very close to a one-to-many media. There might be a small handful of national networks that can disseminate ideas, and they can only do so in ways that are easy to detect and control by authorities. In an authoritarian state like the Soviet Union there might be only state-controlled broadcasting and it really was one-to-many. In a free country like the United States, you might end up with 3-4 broadcast networks. That's not enough to get a broad spectrum of opinion, which is why the midcentury Overton window was so narrow compared to today.
Cable and satellite television went closer to many-to-many. (Print is also closer to many-to-many than radio and television, but radio and television are more popular since they don't require the effort of reading or the skill of literacy in order to consume, so the presence of radio and television reduces the impact of print.) This broadens things a bit because then you can watch Fox News, though the biggest reason for Fox News was probably an unmet market niche. The broadcast networks plus CNN, for various reasons (likely the internal biases of the journalists themselves), had drifted to a noticeable center-left bias by the 1990's. This left a massive opportunity for a right-biased news network to capture a rough half of the market that was "underserved" to some extent. Conservative talk radio was a similar story.
Print was somewhat more broad, but even then, there were usually small numbers of "respectable" opinionated magazines you could buy on either side of the spectrum (e.g. National Review, The Nation, Mother Jones, The Weekly Standard, etc.) but publication was a big enough hurdle that these outlets often served as moderating voices (e.g the National Review effectively excluding the John Birch Society or Ayn Rand from the "respectable right").
The internet is an extremely many-to-many platform. I mean, I'm just some random idiot you've probably never met and now you're hearing all of my thoughts about something of national importance. That's pretty fucking insane when you think about it. And just like cable, talk radio, and publishing slightly widen the bounds of the Overton Window compared to the broadcast television oligopoly, the internet has done something potentially even worse. I don't think there is a single Overton Window at all anymore. And the old media can't handle this. In another era, this National Review cover alone (https://amp.businessinsider.com/images/56a21e51c08a80431d8b8...) would have completely ended a Republican candidate. In today's era, that man is the President. Similar forces have normalized people like Bernie Sanders, someone who actually existed for a long time but would never have become a national figure in an earlier era.
And yeah, I really think this is all part of the same mechanism. People like Timothy McVeigh were radicalized in person. There aren't that many of him. There are a lot of small scale domestic terror attacks and at times even entire mobs of people (Charlottesville for one example, Portland antifa for another example) who commit acts of political violence. And the more these kinds of events happen, and are publicized, the more this type of behavior becomes normalized, becomes something within the realm of things people think about as something that someone might do in a given situation.
I would agree this is a problem if the US Government was trying to suppress speech.
The counterexample is that, when racist/fascist/white supremacist content became easier to access through online unmoderated forums such as 4chan, the level of online & offline activity and recruitment became higher.
Secondly, it's hardly news to these communities that they are disliked by others. Have you met an Edgelord?
I don't think this argument holds when the boards are compartmentalized. Otherwise you could generalize it to the internet as a whole, where things are also compartmentalized into sites.
No. From the Wikipedia description of the case, “The U.S. Supreme Court reversed Brandenburg's conviction, holding that government cannot constitutionally punish abstract advocacy of force or law violation.“
The entire point of the ruling was that the government cannot punish someone for merely advocating against the law. And even dangerous speech is okay if it’s not likely to be acted on. “free speech and free press do not permit a State to forbid or proscribe advocacy of the use of force or of law violation except where such advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action.”
But the primary value of Brandenburg v. Ohio was in rejecting the early 20th century jurisprudence based on the “clear and present danger” status set by Schenck v. United States.
Schenck and the rulings that followed it gave legal cover to imprison people who advocated for draft resistance as well as effectively banning Communist parties (on the theory upheld in Whitney v. California that communism entails the violent overthrow of the US Constitution). Brandenburg and its successor cases effectively overturned that entire line of legal reasoning in favor of an extremely strict standard that only allows the government to prohibit things like inciting mobs or engaging in criminal conspiracies.
Speaking of 4chan if I was Hiro right now I would be batting down the hatches and moving most of the moderation force to the problem boards to snipe any incoherent manifestos until this all blows over.
Everyone must comply with lawful orders—that's the point of the law. Respect is not mandatory (so long as it doesn't interfere with lawful orders); it is earned and can be lost.
If this were not true, the right to avoid self-incrimination would be meaningless.
1. What is "autosaged"? UrbanDictionary was no help… ^__^;
2. By intercept do you mean "notice quickly" or "prevent from arriving/posting"?
2. Notice quickly and take down; 4chan doesn't really have a way to prevent a post from arriving in the first place aside from simplistic text filters
And yet, no one wants to police that. So... Cloudflare did it themselves.
I mean, look, I get the principled point you're making, but it's on really shaky ground. Either the conduct on that site was garbage that should be removed or it wasn't. And if it was... well, good riddance.
After the third (third!) mass murder advertised on the site, I think the time for principled and careful consideration has passed. Shut the garbage down, then we'll figure out if there's a better way to police this stuff going forward.
But I agree with you. After enough incidents of users announcing mass shootings via the website, they should have set up rules and opened moderator/"janitor" applications to police the content. This is exactly what 4chan did when they grew media attention about bad things happening on their site. 8chan didn't do this because it goes against why the site was created in the first place.
It's like we're not even talking about the same thing here. I just don't get your thought process, sorry. You agree that this incitement and radicalization shouldn't have had a forum, I think.
You just... would rather talk about the mechanism by which the forum access was removed than the incitement and radicalization? That's really the hill you're taking your stand on?
Oh please, he gave them two (2) (fucking TWO!) mass murders of leniency before he pulled the plug on their CDN access. This was literally a three strikes policy for hate crime shooting sprees, and it's still "capricious" in your eyes? In your opinion, what should the death toll be before a CDN provider can use it as a justification for terminating service?
Sorry, that's just ridiculous.
And no, /pol/ is not the only hive of extremism on 8ch, although it's the best known and although there are many other boards.
So, this was Cloudflare's position as of earlier today: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/aug/04/mass-shoo...
> "It would be the easiest thing in the world and it would feel incredibly good for us to kick 8chan off our network, but I think it would step away from the obligation that we have and cause that community to still exist and be more lawless over time."
> "For us the question is which is the worse evil? Is the worse evil that we kick the can down the road and don’t take responsibility? Or do we get on the phone with people like you and say we need to own up to the fact that the internet is home to many amazing things and many terrible things and we have an absolute moral obligation to deal with that."
So, the question for you and for Matthew Prince-as-of-a-few-hours-ago is, if Cloudflare was in fact in such a better position to actually change 8chan, why didn't they?
That's not how it works anywhere.
I'd encourage anyone who thinks it's plausible that /pol/ is "moderated" and "lawful" to go read that board for a few minutes. Perhaps then they can comment here on whether there's a problem with the moderation, or the policing, of the board.
What response are you expecting here?
As a subset of 8chan, if /pol/ isn't properly moderated or policed, 8chan isn't properly moderated or policed.
If a subset of a thing does not have a particular quality that must be universal for it to be true for that thing, then that thing does not have that quality.
I'm very happy to help you out with this or any other first year undergraduate philosophical logic problems you may be having.
I call bullshit.
What plan do you have in mind for _Cloudflare_ to create a culture change on _8chan_?
How does this fit into Cloudflare's strategy and competencies as a network provider?
Are you suggesting they have some obligation to provide service and to try and shape the community, or just that they are compelled to provide a commercial service to people who encourage massacres?
You haven't thought through your own suggestion.
I’m not so sure. We “ban” drug markets and terrorist groups by denying them access to infrastructure all the time. Private businesses get to decide which businesses they provide services to. Freedom of assembly doesn’t mean you get to live in a trash strewn public square, nor on private property that is leeching toxic waste into the surroundings.
The community will find a way around this, there's no doubt. But now they're more radical and more threatened than they used to be. The harder it is to get to the community the more insulated and radical it becomes as fewer outside voices come in. Only the most dedicated continue on, and those are the people you want to deradicalize more than anyone.
These boards have been open to everyone, if others wanted to talk to these people and provide counter arguments they're free to do so. It's the only thing that's going to go a long way in dissolving toxicity in these communities.
as such, even taking down the offending material, while possibly legal, will only escalate the situation, requiring ever more force to control. sure, you may successfully thwart this attempt, but what about the next one? rising stakes eventually lead to a police state undergirded by pervasive surveillance.
this is multi-rooted social problem that's certainly bigger than one company, especially a tech company. it's not even certain that online outlets like 8chan don't lessen real violence by allowing members to find consolation among like-minded people rather than stewing in their anger.
They didn't post this on Twitter or FB already but every news media person found his manifesto quickly - just like they always do. There will be another 8chan to fill that void soon enough.
It's not necessary for an action to completely stop something bad from happening to be worth doing. It's OK if it just makes it harder.
Even ISIS seemed to have an extensive social media identity despite countless attempts to prevent them from having any platform. Which included plenty of DDOS'ing too.
I’m sure some level of banning and administration makes sense on content sites (not so sure about DNS/WAF hosts) but I’m curious at what point it becomes “feel good” slacktivism while these guys just hop onto the next forum.
Yep!
And, more importantly, by making it even marginally harder to find this shit online, we can dramatically decrease the number of people who get exposed to, and radicalized by, it.
I’m sure some level of banning and administration makes sense on content sites (not so sure about DNS/WAF hosts) but I’m curious at what point it becomes “feel good” slacktivism while these guys just hop onto the next forum.
They do, but it's not a smooth transition and sudden forced migration presents an infiltration opportunity because there's an avalanche of new user IDs with no way to verify them. Of course there are ways around this, like challenge/response phrases, callbacks to famous threads that people would remember, user IDs that can be checked back against contemporary screenshots etc., but it's pretty leaky.
8chan totally still exists. All CloudFlare did was essentially erase the link between their IP and "8chan.org".
It took them probably 15 minutes to "go back up", if they hadn't already been abandoning CF anyway.
You massively overestimate law enforcement interest and ability, and massively underestimate the technical abilities of teenagers.
Indeed. The scary proposition is that it's competence.
And you really, _really_, don't want it to be.
If you have a place in which the common discourse includes hundreds of people saying "i'm going to murder someone tomorrow" in a mostly anonymous format, it's not really something you can follow up on without opening up an entire can of first amendment issues (I say this as a very pro-big government belief structure).
8chan's very nature prevents it from being useful.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/12/cloudflares-ceo-...
Obviously not supporting these sites, but I think an argument can be made for at least being _consistent_ about whether or not you're going to allow only things you find morally reasonable on your service.
So far he has been a "free speech absolutist" aside from the Daily stormer (economic extremes) and 8chan (public safety extremes). They're just defining what their identity as a cloud provider is. There's nothing morally inconsistent about discovering where your limits and tolerance are.
Both actually share a large cross section of users. The Daily Stormer was named after storm troopers. It is a cesspool of white supremacists. The same problem that 8chan's userbase has. I expect we'll see a continued deplatforming of sites which allow that ideology to fester.
Actually it's named after this publication.
So not a "free speech absolutist"
You and the poster I responded to are picking nits with absolutes. Aside from pedantics, is there a problem with wanting to go as far as you can with an idea until you feel like you can't?
What's really going on is similar to what we saw with radicalization in extremist Islam forums. A large group of young, usually lonely and frustrated men, disconnected socially, often with no hope of financial status advancement, find solace and community in online forums with like people, and then act to self-reinforce some of the community's worse inclinations, blaming their predicament on other types of people, dehumanizing them. The irony with these forums are, some people on those forums are not racist or pedophiles, but edge-lording on purpose, but other people can't discern the difference and are swept up and manipulated by other people who get off on manipulating people.
When I was a teen in the 80s, I nerdy and disconnected from school, but back then, if you used a computer, you were fairly involved in hacking, and a lot of community revolved around constructive activities, so whatever loneliness or ostracism geeks felt, it was often distracted by optimism and excitement over technology.
It seems these days, you have the online community in these forums, but it is mostly consumptive, not constructive, or rather, what is constructive is memes and racist, xenophobic, extremist screeds.
I really worry about what's happening as more and more people are made idle and out of the labor force, rather than seek face to face community activity, will eventually retreat to their online bunkers?
This is something a large number of people don't seem to realize. The parallels between Islamic extremism and this white supremacists extremism should jump out, and both should be approached the same way. It's sick people offering a sort of belonging to disaffected young men.
As the article states, it's very likely 8chan is just going to use a competitors service so it's unlikely to cause them much disruption, but at least Cloudflare isn't going to feel terrible for providing Internet services to the cesspit that formed the mind of the next radical that's going to commit mass murder and announce it there.
That will not, of course, go away even if 8chan were to collapse under LOIC fire later tonight, but it will undermine the infrastructure and hinder recruiting.
Until we collectively acknowledge that it's real humans behind these actions and create modern ways to identify and prevent them, a DDoS/CDN company turning off their service is about the most inconsequential change of all. Making some internet comments go away solves nothing.
Surely this has no downsides at all. For example, you can rest easy because YOUR ideas and YOUR opinions will never stray off the “approved” line.
... how is it people in tech can’t see past their own noses on things like this?
Perhaps they will, but there should still be a line. There will continue to be political mechanisms in place to shift it.
CF needs to stay out of it because they are no setting a precedent to be the gatekeepers of “what is good”.
Politics have little to do with it. Any base ideology can be extrapolated to a violent end and the signs are all the same. Recognizing those signs is where attention should be placed. Unfortunately the media and general consensus will be on political hysteria and surface outrage instead of investigating the root causes.
We don't allow people to drive anyway they like on the roads, we have basic set of rules that allow everyone a lot more freedom to go where they want, violation of those rules tends to cause harm, and if it was total "freedom" then it would be chaos. If we cannot work out what those are for speech( and we already have some )so that everyone gets more effective freedoms, then more harm will keep happening.
I'm not precisely defining what the law is, in NZ we have hate speech laws. Everyone still goes around with their own unique ideas, sometimes shitty ideas..... like when they mistakenly conflate genetic sex and gender identity, or talk about race as a scientific concept when really that's quite an ambiguous term ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_(human_categorization) ). Its not even about the "truth" so much, I'm an atheist, but I believe in religious freedom and peoples right to believe in things I believe to be completely false. It's about making sure groups of people, especially minorities are free to live their lives according to their beliefs (not necessarily without criticism ).
NZ Law society did a pretty good summary recently
https://www.lawsociety.org.nz/practice-resources/practice-ar...
Which is another way to say you do not have free speech.
Really, we should all just reference Popper's Paradox of Tolerance[1].
A just, tolerant society should tolerate anything other than intolerance. Yes, this isn't as simple as "freedom of speech", but it makes a lot of sense.
Popper's words argue this as well as anyone:
Less well known is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. — In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant.
Communications Decency Act of 1996, Section 230 allowed platforms to not be held liable for user generated content. But it did not allow publishers to have the same freedom.
Notice the very important distinction between "platforms" vs "publishers".
A publisher like a newspaper can be sued for content they put out. A platform cannot be sued for the same. When companies like CloudFlare start banning people for political reasons, they are stepping into the "publishers" market and should be stripped off of the protections from the CDA Section 230. We should be allowed to sue them for content they carry.
Right now, they are enjoying the benefits of both - platform and publisher.
> This "publisher" v. "platform" concept is a totally artificial distinction that has no basis in the law. News publishers are also protected by Section 230 of the CDA. All CDA 230 does is protect a website from being held liable for user content or moderation choices. It does not cover content created by the company itself. In short, the distinction is not "platform" or "publisher" it's "content creator" or "content intermediary." Contrary to Coaston's claims, Section 230 equally protects the NY Times and the Washington Post if it chooses to host and/or moderate user comments. It does not protect content produced by those companies itself, but similarly, Section 230 does not protect content produced by Facebook itself.
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20190507/16484342160/one-t...
The section is actually quite clear if you take the time to read it:
"No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be held liable on account of— (A) any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected".
An interactive computer service means anything that smells like a website, and here it says they may block or filter anything at all they find objectionable. It's quite explicit. It does not restrict its protections to "platforms", but to any provider of internet services that host third-party content.
At some level does a person not have the right to say, "I don't like you and won't take your money?"
Sure, the US and others have protected classes that limit the reasons you can refuse to do business with someone but those are more to do with people in those classes being unfairly burdened and facing difficulty living tier day-to-day lives.
No you shouldn't be. But this should also be treated fairly.
Communications Decency Act of 1996, Section 230 allowed platforms to not be held liable for user generated content. But it did not allow publishers to have the same freedom.
Notice the very important distinction between "platforms" vs "publishers".
A publisher like a newspaper can be sued for content they put out. A platform cannot be sued for the same. When companies like CloudFlare start banning people for political reasons, they are stepping into the "publishers" market and should be stripped off of the protections from the CDA Section 230. We should be allowed to sue them for content they carry.
Right now, they are enjoying the benefits of both - platform and publisher.
In many countries, there are specific protected classes and you can't refuse their business just because they are a member of that class. Confusing these concepts does not help the argument.
That's ridiculous. Every single platform, perhaps excluding 8chan, moderates their content. Whatever reasons for that moderation are really dependent on the platform.
What separates a publisher from a platform is authorship; Cloudflare, Facebook, etc claim no authorship over their content. But a newspaper is exactly the opposite, they proudly proclaim their authorship since that's the point.
With cloudflare, it's even less relevant because they aren't moderating content at all -- they're simply choosing their customers -- and that is different again.
“Platform” vs “publisher” is not part of the actual Section 230, which allows platforms to keep the protection while doing all the active censoring and moderating that they want. There’s a good summary on Wikipedia.
This would be an unproductive outcome. There's really no point in allowing CDNs to be sued for the content they distribute except as a mechanism to force them to take unsavory customers to maintain their ability to not be sued. Why is it a problem that in your view, platforms can 'enjoy' the benefits of both?
Why can't a platform not endorse the content of their customers while also not doing business with people they don't like? It doesn't seem to be a contradiction -- a freelancer who refuses an offer to build a neo-nazi site is not suddenly endorsing the content that lives on all the other sites they built.
Ceteris Paribus? Yes, absolutely, this should be a foundational rule of society. And here, Ceteris Paribus means paying your hosting bills on time and obeying the law.
"[...] the measures taken against ISIS were so extreme that, if applied to white supremacy, there would certainly be backlash, because algorithms would obviously flag content that has been tweeted by prominent Republicans—or, at the very least, their supporters."
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/a3xgq5/why-wont-twitter-t...
Just because they have a political title does not mean we have to respect anything that comes out of their mouth. Call a spade a spade and be done with them.
https://twitter.com/auerbachkeller/status/900376181458911232
https://www.tabletmag.com/scroll/241981/googles-new-hate-spe...
> Just because they have a political title does not mean we have to respect anything that
A big company like Google would want to be on the repubs good side because the Republican party is the ones who support mega corporation like them
If it does something illegal, the law can close it down.
If it doesn't, it's should be absolutely no concern of Cloudlfare to police it.
That's more dystopian than a wacko shooter posting their message there. They could have posted it anywhere, or just posted it on their profile, send it to the news, etc.
Scam (lots of phishing and fake webshops), spam, piracy, illegal pornography, it's all chilling on CF's network en masse. When they get notified about this, do you think they terminate that client? No, they will just come up with some dogmatic story [1] and ignore every call to action/cooperation.
"we are rebuilding the Internet, and we don't believe that we or anyone else should have the right to tell people what content they can and cannot publish online."
Yes, ladies and gentleman, he said it. In 2012 Mr Prince was trying to build a proprietary internet. These days he would never say that again. I mean, it's just laughable that you feel zero responsibility over your clients. Hence they publicly deny this now of course.
CloudFlare: it would be great if you start actively participating in abuse prevention, instead of behaving like an offshore/bulletproof provider behind red 'n blue curtains.
CF forwards DMCA complaints to the website host so they can deal with the illegal content. CF already uses Safe browsing (or perhaps another system) to flag domains[0] that might be phishing/malware related. Illegal porn is something the sites themselves have to remove since (as said above) removing the site from CF only saves face for CF and doesn't change the content being on the service[1].
0: https://community.cloudflare.com/t/your-domain-has-been-susp...
1: to add, CF doesn't allow video files to be directly proxied on their network (when the main point of your site/service is serving these video files), you either need to use CF stream or have your video files on a separate non-proxied subdomain. If something illegal is stored on CF stream or Workers KV, they can take it down via the abuse form since they're the host of that content.
Quite the strong and matter-of-fact opinion, stated as accepted fact, about a direct cause here.
What should normally happen if you come across some criminal or reprensible content, is that it's possible to figure out who owns the IP space,and if it's not already a criminal organisation decide to aid the ISP in running a reputable business and send them an abuse notice. This has the effect that bad actors need to move to bad networks, which you can quarantine at your own network boundary - I get to make a decision as private citizen on what is allowed on my network.
That is a process that works.
Cloudflare obfuscates the real IP space, which means that the best outcome I can achieve from them is that they will forward my abuse complaint to possibly the mob, which is not a move I am willing to make.
In this way they are not just a DDOS protection service, they are business protection for criminals. And because of their size and because they allow them to hide behind their IPs it makes it impossible for me to make a private decision about what to not allow on my networks.
If they are so happy about hosting the vomit that the internet has to offer, why not assign an IP block to the easily identifiable garbage that exists.
(Their service terms https://www.cloudflare.com/terms/ allow them to do this, but that doesn't make it a smart idea.)
There is also an effect similar to martyrdom where whenever some subgroup of society is mistreated they gain in power. Many see being cut-off as over-the-top and thus a mistreatment, irrespective of the fact that the group has a clearly evil ideology. There is a risk this action will embolden their cause, as a natural instinct to protect the mistreated and come to the defense of the underdog kicks in. Read some of the other comments and you'll see what I mean. This comment itself is admittedly partially motivated by my instinct to come to the defense of the mistreated (granted the obviousness that the murdered and their families are clearly the most mistreated).
Like I said, this is complicated. The simple ideological answers are simply not good enough.
So the hard question is this: how do you prevent the spread of their ideology without excising them from (online) society? I believe it is possible, but it is going to take a more nuanced approach going forward. We could start by not labelling people as racists or white supremacists. We should reserve these labels for actions, words and ideologies, not people. Attack the ideas, not the people. Deplatform (censor) the posts (if you control the platform), don't ban the accounts. Throttle accounts of repeat abusers as necessary. And always be willing to talk.
BTW I always feel queasy posting things like this to HN because I know some people will utterly reject me and downvote me, but I feel this point is just too important.
[1] Katherine Newman, https://www.livescience.com/21787-predicting-mass-shootings.... [2] James Knoll, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/saving-normal/201405...
Also, they stated that they were "cooperating around monitoring potential hate sites on our network", which makes me wonder what kind of monitoring we're talking about here, and whether and where else they share traffic that they're proxying.
Regardless of what you think about 8chan (I'm not familiar with the site but there seems to be consensus that it's a cesspool), these points are interesting to note.
You can learn from a baby. Silencing people leads nowhere.
Is this because he posted his manifesto on 8chan or other sources point to 8chan as the source of his extremism?
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/12/cloudflares-ceo-...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/05/technology/8chan-cloudfla...
And in its appendix it lists QAnon as one such fringe political conspiracy theories.
https://www.scribd.com/document/420379775/FBI-Conspiracy-The...
(page 8)
So what's Twitter going to do when people tweet or retweet anti-government, identity based, fringe conspiracy theories or theorists, given the FBI considers at the very least that such things are very likely to motivate domestic terrorism? And are only heads of state going to be allowed to do that?
Q and movement followers, having moved to 8chan because 4chan was compromised, surely will consider the FBI memo, Cloudfare's decision, just move evidence of "deep state" fighting back. In the outlook section of the FBI report, it expects these conspiracy theories to spread, and foster more violence, leading up to the 2020 election.
There are other groups listed in the FBI report. 8chan isn't one of them. But the FBI field office in Nevada issued a search warrant for 8chan in Reno regarding the Poway Synagogue shooting.
https://www.bellingcat.com/news/americas/2019/08/04/the-el-p...
I believe Cloudflare's action is necessary to try to stem the tide here. Sometimes ... just sometimes the needs of the few outweigh the needs of the many.
Get a legal definition of well regulated militia, get it to not map to the national guard or some homebred terrorist group via some ritual like the pledge or whatever, and police the crap out of the gun sales to groups outside this definition.
By the Constitution's own legitimacy it's the government's choice to forego this control under those terms, and it musts be the government's choice to tighten this control up.
Why is it legal for me to own an elephant gun but illegal to strap it to a drone? For this exact reason: Definitions were established, and strapping guns to drones was deemed a dick move.
Same here, define legitimate civillian militias and take all the guns off the hands of every other random guy.
Couple years after that maybe we could start having the discussion of why you need armed death squads on your home turf but hey at least the ease of access for the general public is out, and with it a large part of the reason why the US os the only place where this happens day in and day out.
It's not federally illegal to attach firearms to drones, so long as you do so within FAA guidelines for flying self-built vehicles low to the ground on your own property.
What insane nonsense. Whatever motivates mass murderers caused the deaths, not where they posted. They get rewarded with tons of attention from all forms of media, too. Just kill a minimum number of people to get the popularity in the corporate and social media they otherwise wouldn't ever earn. They revel in it. 8chan disappearing doesn't change that.
I've always favored all the mass media agreeing to not even mention the killers names, achievements, etc in favor of just belittling or dismissing them. Focus on everyone else in the tragedy instead. Make sure the abusers or killers get nothing out of it. Meanwhile, they'll get plenty across the media with Cloudfare getting some good PR not supporting one of the sites a few wrote on. My prediction: more people will do mass killings since this wasn't a causal factor or even help stop them.
Good luck thought policing thousands upon thousands of journalists, each of them has an incentive to defect and get more eye balls that competition, and make more money and name for themselves.
Never going to happen, until we have full blown censorship and you only read double-plus good happy time stories.
Is that what you really want?
Except you're ignoring the fact that the corporate media already does that. It seems to work well enough, too. It helps that "journalists" are mostly a thing of the past with today's reporters often just doing the minimum to check things when they're not just repeating whatever the current fad is. That's extremely popular, too. Most stories are whatever people in target demographic are either what people want to say yes to or hate on. We're already there.
It's all about eyeballs.
This is a horrifying and immoral position to take. Governments are the entities that have no legitimacy to restrict speech or "make determinations on what content is good and bad". Man requires free speech because the freedom to think is essential to man's existence. The role of government is to protect man's rights so that he may think, evaluate ideas, and live a productive life.
Disappointingly, the last time an incident like this happened, an FBI agent accidentally revealed himself to be actively fuelling the fire by participating in a smear campaign against Russia (https://ceinquiry.wordpress.com/2019/06/17/fbi-8chan/). Looks like law enforcement are watching, but are just making problems worse? Baffling.
There will be lots of people who are frustrated by this. They may say that Cloudflare shouldn't remove content unless they are legally required. Or that a CDN like Cloudflare is a platform layer, deep in the stack, and that it shouldn't be making decisions based on content. That they are a essentially a utility, and that they should provide the the same service to everyone.
But at the end of the day, companies are run by people. And those people should consider the positive and negative concequences of the services they provide. It is the moral thing to do. It is the right thing to do. It is the courageous thing to do.
That doesn't mean they must block every potentially bad actor. And they don't need to block based explicitly on content. Here, the line was drawn at "platforms that have demonstrated they directly inspire tragic events and are lawless by design." But when situations arise that cause decision makers at an organization to re-consider providing their services to their customers, they should take that opportunity to re-evaluate. They should ask, "Do we want to be hosting this?"
In this case, they said "No."
Maybe some other customers will leave, afraid of being kicked off next. They should take that into account. If you think your service is sufficiently like 8Chan, you should probably leave Cloudflare. Or if you think Cloudflare's decision was arbitrary and that worries you, you should leave.
But maybe others will be happy that their CDN doesn't need to be associated with hosting 8Chan's content. I know I feel that way.
Maybe the goodwill you receive will lead to more financial success. But you'll probably never know. In all likelihood, so long as your customers aren't leaving in droves after you kick someone off your platform, you'll never know if the decision was the right financial decision.
You'll probably never know if it was a net positive or negative on your balance sheet. But you might sleep better at night. And maybe sites that enable the propagate hate will find it a little bit harder to survive. And I think that's great.
Unfortunately obligatory "I don't support 8chan".
I dislike this idea that people can stomp their feet and demand CloudFlare kick off "bad actors".
Who is to say the bad actor of tomorrow won't be the "good actor" of today. CloudFlare and other internet utilities should remain apolitical tools that leave law enforcement to law enforcement (even that is a slippery slope, but I'd much prefer an open internet that isn't open to individual whims of what is right and wrong)
If you want tools that are open for everyone, create a public utility that must comply with the first amendment.
Fair enough. People are lame and should just admit what they actually are (not apolitical) rather than hyping themselves up as such.
Humans suck, hah.
Sad fact is, you can't expect any platform to do anything, assuming that it's not illegal for them to do and cost of doing it is less than the cost of not doing it.
If you're a platform, and your people say we'll lose 100 million if we do thing X or we'll lost 20 million if we do thing Y, the correct choice is do thing Y. You're still losing, but you're losing less.
Welcome to capitalism in the internet outrage era. Burning Nikes and demanding that Chik-fil-a not open on your campus are the decisions megacorps PR departments have to deal with. They don't care about you, singular human, and your views. They care about the net effect on their bottom line.
I am not entirely sure whether this statement carries moral judgment of those who see it as arbitrary or not. Would you mind clarifying if you intend to pass judgment or not?
Edit: It seems I communicated my point poorly. My last sentence is not intended as a swipe at the parent poster. It's simply a request for clarification. I desired to understand parent's point rather than mischaracterize it.
Like how some companies won't service porn-related ventures.
It's fine if a company doesn't want to make their money doing this, but it shouldn't just be, "Oh something bad happened... time to react..." They should take philosophic stances, "I don't want to help with un-moderated user content. Show me your moderation policy and plan, and then we can do business..."
What bugs me is that the Cloudflare CEO flip-flopped on this like 8 times. They have no coherent policy, other than, "Don't give us bad press before our IPO." Shitty.
But I guess that's not what you want.
On one hand, this seems to be a praiseworthy deed, and they took all the credit. On the other hand, it shows corporations are wielding too much power, which probably they can wielding it to other factions they don't like.
Cloudfare aren't a government. They aren't a democracy. I don't know why some people seem to think they should act any differently.
If you own a notice board in the real world, and someone put something horrible on it, you would take it down. This is no different.
They are comparable to a self-storage place you might keep your boat. Or an office you might rent to house your business. But they are not anything like a utility.
And Cloudflare isn't a utility. I agree with Cloudflare's decision. I hope whichever host 8chan runs to will do the same. Free speech is not a suicide pact.
That's kind of the point.
Cloudflare and social media co's naturally want to be protected as a platform. If they start controlling the content in an ad hoc it's a lot harder for them to claim that.
And if your noticeboard is inciting nearly weekly mass homicides, maybe the noticeboard you're trying to support is a shitty noticeboard.
This isn't about "supporting" someone's views. This is about simply allowing one to speak. Otherwise Google should be held liable for every single illegal thing that happens on their platform (and there are ton of those).
Why shouldn’t they have that choice?
Your opening premise isn't even true. CF has nothing near a monopoly on CDNs.
Not everything has to be so black and white.
Making the choice twice now calls into question hundreds of other properties they work with, and may open the floodgates for all that criticism they have shielded against so far.
Broadly speaking, there's (at least) two forms of net neutrality:
1) Different classes of traffic will be treated identically and not throttled indiscriminately (VOIP vs web content vs bittorrent etc.)
2) Content cannot be arbitrarily restricted by a technical provider.
If there was substantial abuse with their platform based upon technical reasons in case 1, I could see that as cause for termination.
Their arguments against denying service to 8chan are based upon case 2. Given where Cloudflare sits in the internet infrastructure layer, their supporting a pro-net neutrality position enforced upon ISPs while not applying that standard to themselves strikes me as more than a tad hypocritical.
I get the mourning about senseless death, but this is basically killing the messenger. And I do indeed believe that people trying to get these platforms shut down don't really care about it too much and have different motives. Maybe just trying to prove a point.
> A lot of not-so-subtle support for 8chan leaking into this thread.
I hope I am not supple about when I say that I think the move is idiotic.
And while I believe you wouldn't do that randomly to other customers, I won't recommend your sevice again. It is just not your decision to make and pretty much the exact opposite that I require from a service like yours.
Do we actually KNOW that banning "hate speech" results in less hateful actions in the short and long term as well?
I'll wait.
http://comp.social.gatech.edu/papers/cscw18-chand-hate.pdf
>We find that the ban worked for Reddit. More accounts than expected discontinued using the site; those that stayed drastically decreased their hate speech usage—by at least 80%. Though many subreddits saw an influx of r/fatpeoplehate andr/CoonTown “migrants,” those subreddits saw no significant changes in hate speech usage. In other words,other subreddits did not inherit the problem. We conclude by reflecting on the apparent success of the ban,discussing implications for online moderation, Reddit and internet communities more broadly
I guess if you ban hate speech on reddit you will be successful on reddit. Do we think people who are banned take up religion and become good samaritans?
[1]: https://www.geekwire.com/2017/seattles-bitmitigate-now-prote...
This would create an incentive for companies to be better.
If you really want to take down 8chan, why not reach out to their colo provider? https://www.digitalrealty.com/data-centers/san-francisco/200...
People inevitably trot out counter examples that they believe will “own” my “libtard” views like the whole bakery thing. Should the bakery have had to make the cake for the gay customers? Nope. Their a business and can refuse service for whatever reason. Turns out there were some legal things involved. Guess what. Consequences.
We have a tenuous and often brittle social contract. The social contract decides what is and what isn’t ok. And once you break the contract there are often consequences. That’s not censorship. That’s existing in a society. Companies and people that don’t like those consequences are free to exit this society and begin their own at any time. But guess what. There’s consequences to that, too. The only real question is if they can be adults about it and accept those consequences. And in most cases they can’t.
Marsh v. Alabama, 326 U.S. 501 (1946), was a case decided by the United States Supreme Court, in which it ruled that a state trespassing statute could not be used to prevent the distribution of religious materials on a town's sidewalk, even though the sidewalk was part of a privately owned company town. The Court based its ruling on the provisions of the First Amendment and Fourteenth Amendment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marsh_v._Alabama
"Ownership does not always mean absolute dominion. The more an owner, for his advantage, opens up his property for use by the public in general, the more do his rights become circumscribed by the statutory and constitutional rights of those who use it."
"sooner than later they will change their definition of morality and we all gonna pay with our freedom"
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/cloudflare-plans-to-ipo-in-s...
Anyway, when it comes to online communities, almost no one does it right, and so not only is the consensus wrong, but so are all known examples.
Trying to understand this from a ethics and philosophical perspective. Appreciate your comments.
I understand why Cloudflare wants to get rid of this hot potato right now, but it comes across as opportunistic and hypocritical.
The other difficult problem is that people think that their country is an exception to all other countries and history with regards to censorship and everything else.
One other issue: corporations that have as much or more centralized power as governments. In line with the rest of my comment, one reason this is problematic is because it is much easier for governments to assert control over individual companies. And those policies (sometimes good or sometimes very bad) affect masses of people.
It really seems to me that we are moving towards a more homogeneous global political system that honestly appears to be modeled after the Chinese one and will probably be controlled from there.
The media and entertainment industries specifically, since they own the eyes and ears of America, want to desperately pin every shooting on white conservatives. Any iota of evidence, verified or not, will get blasted into the aether as a boastful victory dance. Then they blast it 24/7 and glamorize it, and we get more copycats looking for desperate attention being further fueled by it.
Case in point, look how the media handled the shooter that was a Bernie supporter. Violence, compelled by a difference set of hateful ideas and language, but it was given a day or two and buried. No knee jerk reactions, no 24/7 parade of glorification and filth, just buried.
It’s rather perverse and grotesque.
A couple may have posted on 8chan.
Guess which platform is being criticized for allowing hate?
By staying idle the conversation would've moved onto gun control, but now they're going to make this round of shootings all about online community policy which IMHO is a futile scapegoat.
The linked article gives their reason.
I don't think anything is gained from political discussion on *chans. Free speech is important, and no company should be legally punished for providing these spaces, but that doesn't mean discouraging them from existing is wrong.
There is an article in the Washington Post about how they're not taking action, and quotes from activists about how they need to take action. Their general counsel had to answer questions from a journalist (on a weekend!) about whether they were taking action. That constitutes significant pressure.
Further, as the article helpfully mentions, they took action before. After you take action once, a failure to take action a second time stops being a principled "we never take action", and starts being, at least partially, a defence of the target. If you drop the Daily Stormer but not 8chan, you're saying, implicitly, that 8chan is not as bad as the Daily Stormer.
This may or may not be true, but it's absolutely not a discussion a company wants to have in the national media in the context of the aftermath of a mass shooting.
> By staying idle
Arguably that was never an option. Today, it's absolutely not an option.
I seriously doubt this, even amongst people who were aware of 8chan before today's spate of articles. After them, I'm pretty sure that 99% of people aware of 8chan blame it for this stuff. Which is also why Cloudflare needs to take action, because it becomes endangered itself.
The founder is saying that it should shut down in the NYT; if that's not a demand for a response, I don't know what is.
edit: I agree that it's a scapegoat, I read militia newsletters circulating in the early 90s, and I'm a collector of old John Bircher stuff. Angry white people will find and act out this model no matter what; it's part of the fabric of the US (and the rest of the West.)
And I'm not saying this hypothetically, those newsletters were in the air leading to OKC. It's actually a good sign that these remain loner shootings by the socially rejected; race riots and pogroms are basically when this happens, but other people on the verge decide to join in. When one of these mass shootings happens, and two or three other people who don't know the shooter come and help, that will be the scary transition for me.
There were a lot of ISIS inspired attacks until ISIS was destroyed. Which effectively shut down the community.
This entire age of frequent mass shootings coincides with the internet and media coverage in general.
I personally believe that this has more to do with the notoriety and following these attacks inspire than gun laws, which have always been very weak.
A lot of these attacks are similar to streaking imo, which basically stopped when the media coverage stopped.
Probably a good idea, if only to send the message that there is a limit to how much garbage you can allow people to dump on your site before the neighbors decide to do whatever it takes stop the terrible smell.
> The Rule of Law requires policies be transparent and consistent.
That's great! Most tech companies seem to prefer the Rule of Men where they try to fix problems behind the scenes with obscured methods and inconsistent (and often arbitrary) policies.
> Cloudflare is not a government.
While technically true, as your control of infrastructure approaches monopoly, you tend to acquire more and more government-like traits. At a functional level, "is a government" is not a Boolean value.
> that does not give us the political legitimacy to make determinations on what content is good and bad
That's true, but your success in the market ("a result of that, a huge portion of the Internet now sits behind our network") gives you a lot of power to make that kind of determination. If that power isn't managed carefully (e.g. with a consistent and transparent Rule of Law), it is easy to accidentally use that power in dangerous or irresponsible ways. The fact that you're even talking about a Rule of Law means you're already acting far more responsibly than most big tech companies.
> We will ... engage with lawmakers ... as they set the boundaries of what is acceptable ... through [their] due process of law. And we will comply with those boundaries when and where they are set.
(I'm interpreting "[their] due process of law" as referring to the lawmaker's process, not something implemented internal to Cloudflare. If this is incorrect, ignore this section)
Engaging with lawmakers (and other relevant organizations) is incredibly important. I would expect any company that wants to act lawfully to comply with legislated regulations. It is also important to realize that governments are often slow. You cannot simply abdicate responsibility to the government when you de facto have significant power over and involvement with a problem.
> We ... have an obligation to help propose solutions
Yes, proposing solutions is part of that obligation. If you really are concerned with creating Rule of Law, then you also have to act in ways consistent with that goal. If you're going beyond the limits of an uninvolved/neutral "common carrier" and terminating a customer for reasons unrelated to the technical services you provide, you need to make sure you have and follow your own "due process", while the lawmaker's solution is still pending and/or incomplete.
> What's hard is defining the policy that we can enforce transparently and consistently going forward.
I agree that this is very hard. It's also an obligation you accepted when you decided to take responsibility (and profits) for a large piece of infrastructure that many people now rely on. This is where transparency can help a lot; it's a lot easier to ask for forgiveness for a mistake if you have a reputation of openly explaining your reasoning.
Can you tell us when @Cloudflare will be holding its next "How to Protect Nazi Extremists" workshop? You guys seem to be the experts. 10:25 AM - 14 Aug 2017
The recent string of violence has forced their hand here.
https://twitter.com/ncweaver/status/1124091916520497153
https://twitter.com/klarajk/status/1122625367490146304
https://twitter.com/Riverseeker/status/1122612031234945024
https://twitter.com/slpng_giants/status/1123592717341200384
https://twitter.com/NathanBLawrence/status/10562868097418199....
https://twitter.com/NJDemocrat/status/897147112273608705
We continue to feel incredibly uncomfortable about playing the role of content arbiter and do not plan to exercise it often. Some have wrongly speculated this is due to some conception of the United States' First Amendment. That is incorrect. First, we are a private company and not bound by the First Amendment. Second, the vast majority of our customers, and more than 50% of our revenue, comes from outside the United States where the First Amendment and similarly libertarian freedom of speech protections do not apply. The only relevance of the First Amendment in this case and others is that it allows us to choose who we do and do not do business with; it does not obligate us to do business with everyone.
Not a great plan.
This doesn't make a lot of sense. They are suggesting that it's the fact that 8chan is unmoderated that is a problem, and they'll similarly refuse service to any unmoderated discussion platform?
I actually totally approve of them refusing 8chan as a customer.
I don't think this is really the reason, or a good reason. Articulating the real/good reason is hard. I'm not sure I can do it either.
But when they say "The Rule of Law requires policies be transparent and consistent" -- that obligation is actually incumbent upon THEM, cloudflare. What is their own transparent and consistent policy that led to this? The implication is that... any unmoderated discussion forum would be banned, but they don't go out and say it, which isn't quite "transparent".
And I don't think they really mean that (so it's not "consistent" either). An unmoderated discussion forum that wasn't being used to egg on mass murder, they probably wouldn't ban. I think the possible "consistent" approach here would be simply admitting that they dont' want as customers sites whose owners seem to have no problem with them being used to egg on mass murder.
As they said in another statement quoted by media, a site that has "repeatedly proven itself to be a cesspool of hate." This is more honest, and really no less vague, than dancing around talking about "actively thwarting the Rule of Law" (I really don't know what that means; I'm not sure you can really "actively thwart the rule of law" without being in the government). And I personally agree it is a fine reason to refuse someone as a customer, that they've repeatedly proven themselves to be a cesspool of hate.
They are correct that the first ammendment in fact gives them the right to refuse as customers entities whose actions they find abhorent and whose business they don't wish to aid. The principle of "transparent and consistent" requires them to try harder than they are to explain what their standards are in an honest way. (It can be a process, I'm not totally sure what they should be either, even though I totally support refusing 8chan as a customer).
I think calling an unmoderated discussion forum "actively thwarting the Rule of Law" (in all caps nonetheless!), then calling for government discipline of such, is something you gotta back up with more reasoning than they did here, and is not in fact necessary for them to justify denying service to 8chan. They're trying to get out of actually explaining their reasoning/motivation (what is required for THEM to be "consistent and transparent") by hand-waving about all-capitals Rule of Law.
Don't host fascists. Don't do business with nazis.
For the "Free Speech is freedom from government prohibition and this is a private company" brigade. I dont want to live in a world where colored people is being prohibited to enter a night venue, or gay people cannot order a simple cake, or YES, dudes who think their race is more superior being able to blabber their nonsense online as long as it is nothing illegal. After all similar sentiments are expressed (veiled or openly) from many powerful spheres and nobody does nothing.
> Nothing illegal
I think at some point it goes up against the "yelling 'fire' in a crowded movie theater" exemption of free speech.
There are more fundamental fish to fry. 1 Violation of terms of service should categorically be NOT a criminal matter. 2 I strongly believe possession (given we meet safe storage provisions) should never be illegal. ...
I also agree with you that people blabber all the time but when multiple unrelated people take the next step seemingly after reading...
You know where that phrase came from? It was coined in Schenck v. United States[1], where Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr convicted the defendant for publishing pamphlets opposing the draft in the first world war.
I think laws are not absolute. We frequently allow prohibited acts because common sense and decency. If you're at a light and it turns yellow, you should stop but not if there's a car close behind you and you're more likely to get in a wreck by stopping rather than speeding up.
I oppose the draft as it exists. It is wrong and immoral to have a draft of only "able-bodied" people of one gender. The draft, if one exists, should be for everyone. No body gets an exemption regardless of their personal belief or body condition. They don't all have to fight. There are plenty of opportunities (I'd imagine) to serve without ever being in a hand to hand combat. Either have a draft of all adults regardless of any other exemptions or don't have one at all.
I'll try to avoid the phrase going forward.
I would like to point out (not necessarily to parent) that this was an example of speech that was not protected by 1A in a case where a man was prosecuted by the government for trying to tell young Americans that they don't need to join the draft for WW1.
Also important: yelling fire in a crowded theater is entirely protected speech if you don't believe it to be false.
If you find something like 8chan and point it out to Cloudflare, should they ban it? If they say no that’s not as bad, well why is their value judgment worth more than that of other people? If they say okay, then anyone can get anything they judge to be as bad as 8chan ‘banned’ from it.
Does that also work if you can show that it doesn't cause widespread harm in every country with stricter gun regulations?
Seriously if you make statements like that, you ought to acknowledge the elephant in the room.
If they promote violence and racism. Yes.
> Will you manage the API?
If I thought it would help, sure.
There are a thousand religions/sects in the world. Most of them are exclusive (as in the 1st Commandment). You have to make a choice to affiliate yourself with one of them (although not everyone chooses to be specific to one denomination).
I don't think it's reminiscent of "1984" to say that people choose their religion. I think people choose who they want to be around and that tends to be among the largest predictors of religious affiliation.
When your beliefs about objective reality include a bunch of made up delusional shit to satisfy oneself emotionally, it’s pretty straightforward to swap one set of fairy tales that didn’t happen for another set of fairy tales that didn’t happen. No harm, no foul.
You literally can't express any opinions going against the current flow of ideas without being labelled as hostile (alt-right, nazi, white privileged, whatever the word of the day is, &c.), no matter how valid the point you're making is (even here on HN you can’t have serious discussions about issues like the gender pay gap or immigration). It really isn't a surprise that these loners end up on sketchy websites once they're ridiculed/banned/shut off everywhere else. If you're a man feeling like a girl you'll find a community telling you you should chop off your genitals and ingest a truck load of hormones, if you’re a POC feeling unaccepted they'll tell you it's because of how racist society is [0], if you’re a girl and aren’t successful it’s due to the patriarchy [0], but oh boy if you’re a white man feeling empty inside no one gives a flying fuck about what you have to say.
Anyone thinking these shootings are due to 8chan is a fool, plain and simple, the issues are rooted much more deeply, especially in the US culture, and they've been running for a while. I’d even argue that the root cause of modern white supremacy is very close to the root cause of religious terrorism. But see, no one wants to even consider it through that lens, it's much easier to dismiss it entirely and talk about non-issues ("they're mentally ill", "just an angry loner", "if only he was dating", &c.). Now we can spend days talking about cloudflare, but that's mostly a waste of time, you don't put a bandaid on a broken leg and expects it to heal.
https://www.gwern.net/Terrorism-is-not-about-Terror
---
“These young people find themselves at a time in their life when they are looking to the future with the hope of engaging in meaningful behavior that will be satisfying and get them ahead. Their objective circumstances including opportunities for advancement are virtually nonexistent; they find some direction for their religious collective identity but the desperately disadvantaged state of their community leaves them feeling marginalized and lost without a clearly defined collective identity”
for the individuals who become active terrorists, the initial attraction is often to the group, or community of believers, rather than to an abstract ideology or to violence” ---
[0] Just to be clear I'm not implying these things don't exists or that they're non-issues.
Citation needed.
I see Facebook/Twitter/Reddit in the unenviable role as having to police minimum local standards across the world's largest online community. They also have to do it while running a publicly traded company in the USA, which means they need to optimize for minimum moderation costs.
> You literally can't express any opinions going against the current flow of ideas without being labelled as hostile
s/going against the current flow of ideas //
I straddle the line between US liberal/conservative depending on the issue. I've been labeled lot of things by both the majority opinion holders and minority opinion holders. It doesn't matter. People need to put on their big boy/girl/whatever pants and realize it doesn't matter what you are labeled. People call you far worse behind your back... the internet just allows you to hear it and reduces peoples' social filters.
> Anyone thinking these shootings are due to 8chan is a fool, plain and simple
Citation needed.
I treat {4Chan, 8Chan, 9Gag, etc} as a proxy for "long tail opinion holders" who gather in the same place.
I'm sympathetic to the idea that being a social outlier with no outlet for discourse/self-importance/identity/hope is strongly correlated with those extremism/terrorism, but that doesn't preclude 8Chan from being part of that process of extremification.
I listened to a podcast over the weekend about a Philipino guy who worked as a Facebook moderator. He quit for many reasons, but among them PTSD, nightmares, attraction to sexual images of children, attraction to bestiality, etc. He might well have had those same tendencies before he moderated for Facebook, but the exposure to that content was what accelerated his problems.
The Chans are an exposure channel. They probably help in popularizing fringe ideas, but they also attract window shoppers looking for identity and an ideology that social misfits might be willing to try on. Shutting down the window shopping isn't nothing (although I will admit I don't know that it can be done while preserving the intent of the principle of Free Speech).
It's kind of sick, seeing Americans here all ignore the elephant in the room and go "yeah it might be that website" :facepalm:
A whole communications platform just got censored by a private US company (who should NOT have that power), that's pretty big thing. Maybe we should talk about that.
That shooting happened because of America's gun laws and the general way it's been squeezing the life and joy out of its lower and middle class populations. There's some really bleak shit going on there, lives are empty, people are hopeless and fear the future. That's it. The whole world knows it and sees it. Nothing really relevant for HN, either.
> The Chans are an exposure channel. They probably help in popularizing fringe ideas, but they also attract window shoppers looking for identity and an ideology that social misfits might be willing to try on. Shutting down the window shopping isn't nothing (although I will admit I don't know that it can be done while preserving the intent of the principle of Free Speech).
Yeah but no. These "chans" are international places. People outside the US also go ideological window-shopping or hang out around fringes. But somehow the worst we got was, I think years ago .. when a guy (physically) broke into a live news broadcast with a fake gun and then .. nothing much happened and he was taken away. He claimed he was doing it for a hacker collective, or something.
I'm not really sure what site inspired this dude again, but imagine Cloudfare banning it over this.
The difference seems clear as day/night to me, no?
That situation in the live news studio had one glaringly obvious thing missing from it, that saved it from possibly becoming a tragedy and it wasn't a fucking website.
Take away the website, however, and there is a chance this guy would not have gotten inspired by something else, MAYBE--but you still got all those other mass shootings to deal with, USA. I'm totally looking forward reading about the drop in gun violence now that Cloudflare did something about it. I get it, they felt powerless and someone had to do something. But they better hope that the results of their actions were indeed worth the means. It's a pretty brazen act of censorship, that IMHO doesn't weigh up at all to the limited effect it'll have on fringe crazies bouncing hateful ideas off one another.
How do you figure that works? Do we wake up, fully equipped with a developed mind but zero preferences and experiences and then ponder which of the available ideologies we would like to subscribe to?
Each group will have its own ideologues, its own agenda.
Right. Even this assumption is loaded with ideology both ways. I.e. either they choose or do not choose. Neither is correct.
When I was a child I used to think the ideals of freedom of expression were ingrained in this society. But apparently all it takes is the MSM running a few hitpieces and the 'intellectuals' are all 'lol 1st Amendment technically applying to government means it is not only permitted but great that all censorship is now offloaded to megacorporate oligarchies! fuck free speech!'
I'm also not a fan of Twitter, and for similar underlying reasons.
On the chans it feels like everything is a joke of a joke, you're not 100% able to tell if someone is saying something intentionally stupid/rude to elicit a response. Coupled with the anonymous nature of the platform, and you can assume that it's one or two people trolling a thread and put it out of your mind. Because of that, you end up with the contra of mainstream opinion. And, yeah, it might have the ability to galvanise and individual (both for and against the rhetoric, because many people reject, powerfully, that kind of rhetoric and become champions of the other side).
I find the exact opposite is true of twitter. Instead of assuming it's one or two people who are trolling with the extreme of a mainstream opinion, it's -obviously- a mob, many people with verified badges are quick to jump on people for "wrongthink" and are exceedingly happy to extol their virtues and denounce the non-virtuous. Often they get so reinforced by their following that they become cancerous to the cause and have the same effect as the 4channers and 8channers (causing people to be galvanised for, and against their cause).
I see twitter and 4/8chan as two sides of the same coin, causing division in society.
The chans relationship with social media like Twitter is like Agent Smith is to Neo, a balancing of the equation. Twitter for instance has become so emotionally charged and blood hungry that any opposition to the rhetoric has become equally as charged. It's very dangerous when full-time contrarians become martyrs.
Like yourself, I just try and keep my distance from it all and observe from a distance.
At this point, even original 8chan creator called to close 8chan.
PS 8chan for the most part is hardly edgey. There are a few eccentric groups in the subboards like all communities but in away its actually more like how the old internet used to be before, everything right of communism was 'far right'.
Do you have a source for that?
To me this seems like the broader context that's necessary to actually decrease hate and hate related attacks. These are real people online posting things that really express their feelings about society. A ton of trolling too, of course. But these people aren't just going to go away or get healthy.
Maybe censorship is a good measure to reduce attacks, as it's harder for these individuals to organize and promote each other to act. But then again maybe this response is just the obvious thing corporate entities have to do to wipe their hands of it while we further decentralize hate and make it harder to monitor.
I don't know. I don't have the data and I'm certainly not advocating anything nor saying somethings bad. To me the conversation just doesn't intuitively lead me to believe that were attacking the right problem.
You can still have freedom of speech while implementing moderation to make sure that hate speech, bigotry and fake news don't spread - because if those things spread then they leak into the real world as death. 8chan has been shut down not only because it hosted hate communities, but because it refused to apply any moderation there.
However, the problem is not 8chan alone. It's good to shut down websites where hate speech proliferates without constraints, but a couple of days or weeks later new *chan websites are likely to pop up to replace them, or maybe they'd make a Telegram group. The root problem is Americans. And I'm honestly not sure of how to fix the problem with a whole population that has become so irrational, polarized, ignorant and sensitive to hate speech.
It's an oddly pervasive delusion that hate speech is not protected by the first amendment.
I live in China, a textbook totalitarian state.
What you say is awfully similar to what CPC puts as their justification of censorship.
The prevailing narrative among the "dotcom" community in the West, and what you have said wrote is very similar to their position.
The dream of the perfect context free golden rule does not exist. We have to pay attention and make hard decisions. None of this is simple.
You cannot win anything if you position yourself against freedom of speech and fascism. It is just not a winning strategy and the problems will slowly escalate from there.
Any civil right can and will be abused. Be that freedom of speech or just general social security services. That are the disadvantages you have to accept. If you restrict peoples ability to express themselves, you just handed your political opposition exactly what they wanted.
Yes, they are allowed to spread their message because they are allowed to. And that they did. 5 years ago even anime weaboos made fun of them for it. It never spread further than a few bad threads.
Now we have this fucked up situation where liberal political parties argue against civil rights. Worse, they do it in the name of minorities, which is just plain ridiculous. They elevated people nobody would have taken seriously to something more.
Not saying that being the victim of trolls is not embarrassing. But it is time to get over it. There are also parties that have a certain interest in shutting down platforms that are free from governmental control. I still think that is a very bad thing as it would undo a lot of achievements we won with the inception of the net.
There is no such thing as a "natural right of freedom of speech". If one sovereign in the history of mankind decides to allow unrestricted freedom of speech in its constitution, it is just that: an episode in the history of legal systems established by humans. It can turn out as a bad idea, or a milestone for better societies. We will see. In no way is it a "natural right". Not even would it be a natural right, if it was mentioned in the bible as one of the 10 commandments from god (disregarding the FACT, that there are some serious restrictions of freedom of speech in that: "Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour").
In fact, there is no such thing as a natural right at all. Rights are derived from value systems, and the choice of value system is mostly based on aesthetics. There is no way to say whether the Western Christianity-based value system is "better" than, say, the Confucian value system, because the word "better" cannot be defined from first principles (without invoking a particular value system).
The most obvious first principle is that a better value system should keep you alive. Being alive is foundational.
From that you can derive other principles, like value systems should result in the production of food, clean water, protection against wild animals and invaders, disease, etc.
From that you can derive yet more principles, like the value of efficient resource allocation, stable governance and so on.
And judged by basic things like "is this set of cultural values good at keeping people alive and healthy" you can quickly conclude that some are better than others, objectively so.
To deny this is to argue that wishing to be alive rather than dead is merely an aesthetic preference - an absurd starting point, lacking any intellectual merit.
Is it?
There are plenty of people that sacrify their lives for all sorts of principles. There exist quite some value systems that explicitely do not hold "being alive" for their foundational first principle!
What about immortality, if it becomes a medical reality one day? A better value system by definition, just because we are staying alive for longer?
I won't go into your derived principles, because it is not even possible to reach mutual consent about your axiomatic first principle.
But anyway, do you have a better first principle? If you don't care about staying alive why get out of bed at all, why not just starve to death? It's more work for sure.
Furthermore, you present no argument for your particular first principle beyond aesthetics (aka "I prefer this one"). You build on the implicit assumption that human life is valuable (and apparently more so than other forms of life) for which you don't provide justification. Well, you do argue that it keeps people alive. But again, that's a circular argument. "My value system is the best one because it fulfills the goals of my value system."
I'd think the merits of being alive would be unarguable but this is HN after all :)
You're perfectly entitled to feel that certain rights should be universal and inalienable. It's also clear that nobody agrees on what those rights are, and that they get violated all the time.
Yeah, why are you allowed to play tennis but you aren't allowed to kill people? Why can you say John's a good person but you can't say he molests children? Why can you shout "fore" on a golf course but not "fire" in a movie theatre?
There's always a limit. Choosing to stop your for-profit web service from enabling bigotry and murder seems a pretty low bar here. Let me know when it's being used to prevent the discussion of ideas such as Marxism or veganism or solar power or whatever which might upset the current power structure.
Discussion of all of those topics has taken place on cripplechan which MITMflare just terminated business with.
Simple example: if a person wrongly claims, that some local artisan's business is insolvent, and the artisan can prove that a potential customer withdrew an order for that reason, the person who spread the fake news has to pay for the artisan's loss. Entirely.
Talking someone into commiting a crime is never treated as free speech, either.
So, this is the legal construct in Germany:
- you are free to have any opinion you like ("Meinungsfreiheit") and
- you are free to express those opinions to the public ("Redefreiheit")
Free speech, here, is limited to opinion. There is no such thing as "i am free to lie, blame, insult, taunt, threaten, defame, verbally harass, berate, incite etc..." with the excuse of free speech.
In Germany, if you say: "The president of the United States suffers from narcissistic personality disorder", AND you cannot prove this as a fact, and the POTUS goes after you for that statement, you will have to compensate for the damages of that claim (this will become very expensive, if the POTUS can prove that he lost reelections because of that statement). If you say: "To my conviction (in my opinion/I believe), the president of the United States suffers from narcissistic personality disorder", this would be completely legal in Germany.
And yes, the distinction matters!
"Pres. Reagan: Mr. Brezhnev, in the USA we have free speech- anybody can say in public: President Reagan is a fool!"
"Secretary Brezhnev: Pres. Reagan, in the USSR, we also have free speech- anybody can say in public: President Reagan is a fool!"
(Would be interesting to know the details of that lawcase. I investigated some of those incidents in Germany and in most cases they turned out to be quite different from the initial aggregations that I read in public).
https://www.lepoint.fr/societe/eric-zemmour-condamne-pour-pr...
The logical relation between (a) and (b) is the important detail here.
If the majority of drug dealers are either black or arab, this does not logically conclude, that the majority of blacks and arabs are drug dealers!
The only logical reasoning for racial profiling would be, if there was a significantly higher probability to catch a drug dealer if you randomly pick someone from that group.
The math:
Let's assume a population consisting of 20 percent group A and 80 percent group B. 0,1 percent of the population is drug dealers. 60 percent of the drug dealers belong to group A, 40 percent belong to group B. Group A therefore makes the majority of drug dealers.
With the majority of drug dealers in group A and only 20 percent share of the population, there is a six times higher probability that a random pick of group A will be a positive hit. In absolute numbers: the chance to make a positive random hit in group A is 0,3 percent, in group B it is 0,05 percent.
But: the likelihood to make a negative hit in group A is 99,7 percent (99,95 percent in group B), so even with a six times higher probability for a positive hit, the overall change for a positive hit - on a random basis - in both groups is still extremely small.
The small chance to catch a drug dealer on a random pick out of a population (not regarding race) does not qualify for an effective police procedure – to begin with. The small difference in probability of 0,25 percent between the groups does not qualify for racial profiling either. Any other visible attribute of a person that correlates with drug dealing with a higher value than 0,25 percent (clothing, cars, peer groups, haircut, jewelry, behaviour, slang, provenance and and and) is a better qualifier for random picks than racial profiling.
So, back to the case:
- France has good reasons, to forbid racial profiling under its law. It IS discriminatory, because you cannot define 99,7 percent of a group by 0,3 percent of that group.
- (b) does not conlude from (a), as it does not significantly rise the success rate, but at the same time feeds prejudices and harasses innocent people.
- Insisting on (b) clearly shows the will to ignore data and a will to feed prejudices and having innocent people harassed, so government decides to stop this behaviour.
Did they really sentence him for (b), or was he rather obliged not to repeat that statement?
In this case he was sentenced to a suspended fine of €1,000 and to damages of €9,000 to various pressure groups.
I agree with your position on the moral implications of racial profiling and I am not advocating it. But whether one supports racial profiling or not, merely discussing the merits should not constitute an offense, I think this is clearly violating free speech. And if we cannot disagree publicly with existing laws, why do we even bother having a parliament to change those laws?
Whether I have to make 1000 controls for a 39 percent chance to catch one dealer, or 1000 controls for a 95 percent chance to catch one dealer – both are incredibly ineffective. This is exactly the problem.
If I am only capable of random controls with low chances, I have to control very, very many people to make a hit (and each control of an innocent person is something, that should be avoided if possible, because it is a form of harassment). Now by going from one low probability to a somewhat less lower probability by ignoring the group of the lower probability and putting all the burden of unjustified control to the other group you create a huge sense of frustration, stress, injustice and anger. For good reason! You make a 60:40 relation to a 100:0 relation with this approach. The problem is not with the dealers, but with the false positives. 600 innocent people of group A have to be harassed for one true positive, but 0 innocent people of group B get harassed and 0 people of group B get busted, because they are not even controlled anymore (as hits are less likely). And now, by making hits only in group A, the ratio of convicted drug dealers gets pushed even more into the direction of group A, allegedly confirming the efficiency of racial profiling. It is utterly wrong. Morally and mathematically. It is a pseudologic abuse of science to discriminate a group of people. And the desire for discrimination arises from hate. That is, why racial profiling is forbidden in modern democracies and it is not a matter of free speech, in my eyes.
If you wish for a more efficient handling of your police with drug dealers, you really do not want them to perform random controls (whether racially biased or not)!
Though in reality, I mostly hear about racial profiling in France in the context of looking for illegal immigrants where the odds are even more skewed against a population than your example.
The moral argument is orthogonal from the efficiency argument, and I totally agree with the frustration generated by misguided checks (and am reminded of those every time I take a plane).
This is such a double-edged sword. In the first impulse, I would say, of course you can discuss the merits of racial profiling (as we did in this thread) and it should not constitute an offense. But you can wrap anything in a "discussion". We could also "discuss" the merits of eliminating religious minorities in concentration camps and I think this should constitute an offense. Free speech, all to often, is taken as an excuse.
I have no idea how such a differentiation can be put into law in a fair way for everyone.
For me personally, I have very clear criteria. Most importantly, I distinguish between discussion and discourse, in the sense, that discussion is just talking and discourse is a rational, sane exchange of arguments, following common sense and logic. I enjoyed very much the discourse with you about the merits of racial profiling, because it was not driven by prejudice, whinery or political agenda, we sticked to the facts, came to (not so much) contrary conclusions and this is absolutely fine.
In the case of Eric Zemmour I do not like the semantic aggregation in the community:
- he demanded something unconstitutional (racial profiling).
- in his attempt to justify the demanded unconstitutional measurement, he quoted a fact, but failed to prove the causality between the fact and the demand (he did not even try. He mistook the fact as the causality - a common mistake).
- he gets sentenced for demanding something unconstitutional.
- His followers publish their aggregation in the form: although the fact was true, he was sentenced, therefore it is not possible to say the truth in France.
This is not what happened.
His case is not about "telling the truth gets you punished". His case is: "should our society accept, for the ideal of free speech, that someone demands unconstitutional measurements, like racial profiling or putting minorities in concentration camps". I absolutey agree, that this last question is debatable!! I have no final answer for myself! But this is not, how the causa Zemmour was laid on the table in this thread.
It may be that certain groups are pursued more vigorously, less likely to mount a strong defence (therefore more likely to be convicted), or just more narrowly focused on.
The difference is that in Germany, "AlphaGeekZulu is an asshole", while clearly a statement of opinion, will allow you to go after me. Some restrictons to Meinungsfreiheit are right there in the constitution - protecting personal honor or protection the children.
So you are talking to the wrong person. You should reply to user "rlonn" who does not believe that there are (or should be) types A and B in free speech.
[...]"AlphaGeekZulu is an asshole", while clearly a statement of opinion, will allow you to go after me.[...]
Yes - diatribe exception. In that case, unfortunately, it is also not enough to transform it into "In my opinion, AlphaGeekZulu is an asshole". Granted, it is so much more complicated than free hate speech ;-)
This is incorrect. (Its inverse is also incorrect.) There isn't a legal consensus on false statements.
* Shouting fire in a crowded theatre
* False advertisement
* Medical or legal advice (allowed, heavily regulated by the Government)
* Advocacy of force or criminal activity
And I assume, many others that I do not know of.
Unless you are arguing that there is no such thing as free speech in the US, then it must be that you can have "free speech" while still having some limitations.
* threats of violence
* blackmail
These may be entirely verbal, and yet are considered serious crimes.
Everything you just said is essentially untrue when it comes to government censorship of speech in the US. Hate speech is certainly protected by the first amendment, with only a few narrow exceptions. Personally addressed, face-to-face insults, if deemed likely to start an imminent fight is not constitutionally protected.
(This is sometimes called the "fighting words" exception, and it's much narrower than you might think. The law is quite clear that just because the words might yield a violent reaction, they're still protected. Cantwell v. Connecticut involved anti-Catholic "hate speech", as we'd now term it, expressed in public in a neighbourhood that was 90% Catholic, enraged many listeners, and almost started some violence. Still protected.)
> You can still have freedom of speech while implementing moderation to make sure that hate speech, bigotry and fake news don't spread
Only if done, as here, by private organisations. Regulating bigotry on message boards is the precise thing type of things that the first amendment prevents.
There is no hate speech exception in the constitution. Hate speech is generally an example of what is most protected.
I doubt that only Americans are the problem in this case. I think what has happened is that hate speech and other undesirable (subjective word but bear with me) content is a hack into human psychology and a small percent of human beings regardless of nationality will always be influenced by hate speech and caste-ism and what not. The problem is that as the internet has reached the masses, the lone fanatic has a very large soapbox to shout and a very loud speaker to listen from.
The Treason Felony Act 1848 [1] is something that is still technically a part of the law in the United Kingdom even if not actively enforced. In 2001 The Guardian made a legal effort to finally have it officially removed from the books, and failed [2]. The act makes it illegal to call for the abolition of the monarchy within the United Kingdom, even "imagining" such is sufficient to conviction. The max penalty is life imprisonment -- quite progressive as it used to be death. This is a stark reminder of why and where the desire for free free speech came from. Imagine our past without freedom of speech. There undoubtedly would have been numerous states that would have made the mere advocacy for abolition illegal, others that would have made advocating for suffrage of various groups also illegal, and so on.
You may think it simple to demarcate a line between 'reasonable' and 'unreasonable' speech but it's not so easy and ultimately the individuals that get to decide as such are those with the most power in society. The lines end up being drawn as fairly and reasonably as our states draw the lines laying out their voting districts. Laws against free speech invariably end up being exploited to help entrench whatever political ideology happens to get a grip on power within a nation, as the UK laws past and present are a reminder of.
Such laws can even be used to enforced bigoted views. For instance in the UK in 2017 a 19 year old lady was arrested and convicted, forced to wear a ankle monitoring device, abide a curfew, etc for "sending a grossly offensive message by means of a public electronic communications network." Her crime? Quoting lyrics from a Snoop Dog song on Instagram. That conviction was overturned a couple of years later. In another case (again in the UK) a Christian preacher was arrested for stating that, while he was not homophobic, he believed that the Bible taught homosexuality was a sin. Again it was overturned, yet being arrested, let alone convicted, for such "offenses" is hardly a society any should thrive to emulate.
Ultimately, I think people only see things they disagree with as being affected. In reality once free speech goes it will also include some of your views you find in no way unacceptable. In Germany until 2018 it was illegal to publicly insult any head of state. It was revoked only when it became inconvenient to the powers that be. Following a comedian reading an obscene poem about Turkish president Erdoğan, Turkey demanded and lawfully received prosecution which ultimately led to the law's removal. Laws which make it illegal to "defame" the President of the German Federal Republic remain on the books.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treason_Felony_Act_1848
[2] - https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2013/dec/13/calling-abol...
1) In UK law, there is no right to freedom of speech. The only people who are allowed that privilege are MPs in the house of commons.
2) The communications act expressly disallows "grossly offensive, indecent, obscene or false" However, the definition of what grossly offensive is based on precedent, and is therefore not fixed.
3) libel
Libel needs reform. It needs to be modified sensibly to allow for quick, cheap & legally binding judgements, in the same vein as the small claims court.
The point still remains, even in the USA, there is no such thing as freedom of speech. You are not allowed to say whatever, whenever. The problem comes when trying devise a set of rules that allows a society to operate freely, but not get derailed by ne'er-do-wells
So do I, but outside essential utility monopolies, I also believe that no one should be forced to facilitate those opinions. That Cloudflare choose not to do so is ultimately an expression of their own opinions and values.
Oh, and you ever thought that Cloudflare should stop providing their services to 8chan, and that your opinion was worth a damn, guess what—your opinion was worth a damn.
It can have consequences while not being worth anything.
The First Amendment protects three rights: Speech, Religion, and Assembly
Cloudfare used its right of assembly and chose not to associate with 8chan any longer.
Cloudfare is not required to host anything.
Yes. If the speech isn't terrible it doesn't really need advocating for or protecting does it? Arguing for free speech is inextricably linked to arguing for people to be able to say despicable things.
So you are free to send spam. I'm free to refuse it. I'm not required to transport your junk if I don't want to.
That is a baseless and offensive statement. Very unhappily, this kind of irrational hatred (and polarization) is on the rise in many parts of the West. It is not a problem with Americans.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jul/31/facebook-...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/jun/08/it-fe...
That's an incredibly offensive and hateful comment. Fortunately for you, in America the first amendment protects your right to say it. Maybe you can see where allowing the government to decide what is and isn't acceptable speech might be problematic.
The chan boards are some of the last bastions of actual free expression.
Here, if you post something that someone doesn't like, your comment is downvoted into oblivion.
Case in point, I posted "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" and within 2 seconds it reached 0 votes. If you post anything anti-capitalist on this board (I'm pro-socialist) then there are paid trolls who will literally down vote you until your comments and submissions disappear. Hackernews is owned by propagandists literally by design - it has a moderation system that is created to be gamed. Post enough popular click bait content and you get the points necessary to down vote others. I'm sure that there are entire offices purpose built and operated around policing Hackernews for political purposes.
The /pol/ board on 8ch is a disgusting cesspool. Yes, and? Cloudflare is a de-facto monopoly (monopsony?) and they have the ability to control information. Whoever controls the free flow of information controls the world. What happens when a fascist decides to control Cloudflare? What do you do then? And if you think that is unlikely, well Rupert Murdoch exists.
This should be unlawful by regulation. A free press and free speech means that people should have the right to express opinions that you disagree with. And monopolies prevent that.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
Not a particularly insightful comment :/
I post and respond to tons of pro-union, anti-capitalist, socialist stuff on here. Sometimes I get grayed because I'm being a dick and not playing by the rules. Other times I'm rolling in that klout with stacks on stacks of upvotes. I'm sure any communication system with enough users has people who use it professionally for financial gain. That's just the nature of life? If there's money to be lost by something happening, there's in effect money to be gained by preventing it from happening. C'est la vie.
Platforms are always going to have owners. Owners mean an agenda. "The Internet" as we now know it usually consists of layers and layers of platforms, so that means lots of (sometimes conflicting) agendas. You want free speech: it only exists when you control your platform. Anything else is just a rented hall.
- Anti-Defamation League
...
..."
Wikipedia:
"The ADL has faced criticism for its support for Israel, charges of defamation, spying allegations, its former stance on the Armenian Genocide, and possible conflation of opposition to Israel with antisemitism."
Thanks a lot Cloudflare. First you are complaining about hate and online discussion and then you share shit like this. It seems there is nothing but lies ja propaganda these days. Either far-right or far-left or some other far-shit.
The last thing I want is a large, un-elected, tech company moralizing about content hosted on it. Frankly, they are not good at it. If what 8-chan is doing is illegal this can be addressed through the legal system. Also, as needed, laws to address this can go through democratic processes that have checks and balances instead of this. Yes it may be slower, but due process is important.
At some point left un-checked they can and will target other content they disagree with, IE: labeling other fairly main stream right wing stuff as "hate speech". That is ultimately bad for everybody.
-no one
I legitimately get angrier reading this shitty site more than just about anything else.
I wish whatever dopamine hit I got from reading this place would go away.
If they wanted to be virtuous, they'd start working with groups to solve the problem--counteracting radicalization.
Countering radicalisation involves the use of both carrot and stick where services like Cloudflare and others are involved.
How? It does nothing to solve the problem. It simply kicks the can down the road.
I don't get how it's desirable that this shouldn't be called out. Even if cloudflare is clearly looking at its bank balance when doing so.
> I don't get how it's desirable that this shouldn't be called out.
That's not being suggested. It's possible to address the issue without outright cutting off 8chan. This approach is common of more extreme perspectives and does more to breed animosity than solve the problem. There are better ways to approach it, and cutting someone or a group off should be on the end list of possibilities.
> Even if cloudflare is clearly looking at its bank balance when doing so.
It's entirely possible they have two goals in mind, and that would be fine. I simply think it's unlikely because of how they've reacted in this case and the one with Daily Stormer.
I also detect a subtle hint of consequentialism here, but that could be my own reading into your post. (Correct me if I'm wrong.) I simply can't get on border with the idea that the ends justifies the means. While the ends shouldn't be ignore, I don't think it should be seen as the sole arbitrator what determines ethical behavior.
That's more or less it. Silence can be as telling as its absence in cases like these, I think.
> That's not being suggested.
Fair enough, apologies for creating the impression if that happened. How should we address this problem without cutting off things like 8chan, though? I think that once people start advocating against the right of others to exist it's time for society to act. It makes sense that we should focus on the individuals actually contributing to these boards and de-radicalise them where possible. So doing, that reduces demand for things like 8chan. But that doesn't mean that 8chan itself isn't inherently problematic.
To be clear, this is not to say that message boards are all inherently problematic and we need to think before acting. Insofar as you urge caution on this in general, I agree. 8Chan has gone out of its way to eliminate any grey area on this subject, though. The behaviour of its administrators towards law enforcement in the aftermath of the Christchurch attack isn't even that unusual for them.
> I simply think it's unlikely
Totally, lol. I think that's a fair conclusion to draw. I just don't want it to overshadow what I think is a positive action.
> consequentialism
All I'm saying is that if violent radicalism is the enemy of a coherent society that respects everyone's right to exist (which these guys pretty clearly say), society should be prepared to do something to protect itself. And that means shutting down the services that recruit new gunmen, because they're a part of this. The ends don't justify the means, the actions of 8chan participants do.
Edit: Thanks so much for taking the time to write all that, by the way. One of the main reasons I come to this place is for people willing to walk through their arguments like this.
We need to address root causes rather than symptoms.
Radicalization is often the result of in-group/out-group thinking[0]. What causes a person to develop a strong affinity for a particular group? What causes them to feel attack by those outside of the group? When we can answer these questions and others like it, we can start to cut off the problem at the source rather than playing a game of whack-a-mole. (And I fear that game of whack-a-mole because I fear that it may cause great harm to our long-term freedoms.)
I think a good start is fixing our political discourse. It's not radical ideas that are the problem. It's how we interact. It's how we address one another. It's not limited to "the left" or "the right." It's everywhere. We attack groups and people rather than addressing ideas.
In fact, I am first on the list of people who need to change. I started this whole thread by taking an unfair swipe at CloudFlare.
When we change our political discourse, those who value their identity with a particular group will feel less attacked and be less prone to radicalization.
This can be applied to CloudFlare/8chan in how CloudFlare went about it. CloudFlare dumping 8chan so quickly, arbitrarily, and without appeal will likely be seen as an attack on the in-group. This could be mitigated by reaching out to the 8chan leadership first. While CloudFlare might have cut them off in the end, at least there'd be a track record of making an effort to bridge their differences. And I think that would help reduce the impact this action would have.
0. "Mechanisms of Political Radicalization: Pathways Toward Terrorism." Source: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/095465508020733...
Easier said than done
This ain't the internet I was promised when I was 11.
I'm old enough to remember all of the court cases that involved distressed parents blaming hard rock/metal bands for influencing their children's suicides.
These sorts of incidents are starting to remind me of the religious right's censorship crusade in the 90s...this time it's coming from the left.
Banning these sites will only push them underground. They aren't going away. The end result will be absolutely no way of knowing when and where a shooting may occur.
Also it is bad idea to get political. And I feel that a lot of those companies are gonna get punished in the next few years.
And he didn't managed to even make his case. He accused 8 chan of lawlessness while never actually stating which law they broke.
Just say they are too much trouble and be done with it, without sounding fake.
The first comment to the guy on 8ch who posted the manifesto was "hello FBI". Not a 8ch user but they don't appear to support shootings. I'm more familiar with 4chan shenanigans and they definitely don't support it, with any threat of real-life violence being met with something along the lines of "[alphabet agency] fuck off". Not saying they don't have crazies but every "social media" (and 8ch is social media, just an old fashioned version of it) site has crazies.
The origin story of 8chan from what I understand is that it is all of the people who had too extreme of views for 4chan... which created an echo chamber to further radicalize and ferment.
"I am an unswerving advocate of freedom of expression, which is guaranteed under Article 19 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), but it is not absolute. Article 20 of the same covenant says: ‘Any advocacy of national, racial or religious hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence shall be prohibited by law."[0]
As so often, different values are in tension with each other. And different societies draw the line at different places, somewhat favouring one or the other value. I hope we can agree that 8-chan, due to the lack of sensible moderation, is way past that line by all standards.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2015/apr/24/k...
Edit: to clarify, this is not meant to be a strawman. By "some", I don't mean some here or alike, but those in 8-chan , TD, etc., who have brought forward this argument in the past.
> (1) That Article 20 does not authorize or require legislation or other action by the United States that would restrict the right of free speech and association protected by the Constitution and laws of the United States.