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Comment by cambalache | Hacker News Reader

Who is going to deplatform Facebook and Twitter? After all plenty of shooters have used them too. Before the usual: " But 8chan is a cesspool of bla bla" Probably it is, but, either the users are doing something ilegal in the site and you close it if the owners refuse to comply with a legal request, or they are not doing anything illegal so they have to be left alone.

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.

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People of color, and LGBT are demographics. White supremacy is an ideology (a reprehensible one at that). People choose their ideology, not their race, or sexuality. They are not the same thing. Third party businesses should not feel any obligation to do business with "dudes who blabber" about the murdering and hate of others.

What about communists, anarchists, marxists, mormons, people who believe there are genetically based cognitive differences based on sex/race. What about people who are against abortion, against weed legalization, what about people who consider cops to be a civilian death squad used by the rich to oppress the poor. What about people who think the US Army is an occupation force in every place but America. Is OK to discriminate some of them? All of them? None? Are you going to manage the API so the apps can be built to see who is worthy or not?

I think it's okay to discriminate or moderate against a set of beliefs if you can show that the spread beliefs lead to the widespread harm of others.

Doesn't almost every religious group fall under it then?

No, I wouldn't equate the teachings of ISIS with my neighborhood mosque. Religions have many variations under the larger umbrella.

The point is, who’s gonna be the arbiter of what’s absolute good and what’s absolute bad? What happens if people disagree? Where is the line?

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.

> I think it's okay to discriminate or moderate against a set of beliefs if you can show that the spread beliefs lead to the widespread harm of others.

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.

> Is OK to discriminate some of them?

If they promote violence and racism. Yes.

> Will you manage the API?

If I thought it would help, sure.

People choose their religion, too.

Religious groups have a loooooong history of persecution, discrimination, and genocide.

So have ideological groups. The Nazis murdered plenty of communists, too. The communists murdered plenty of critics.

Do they? A key aspect of religion is believing that your beliefs reflect objective reality, e.g. there really is a God that did all this stuff, there really were prophets that performed these specific miracles and said these specific things etcetera. Saying that believing in what you think is objective reality is a choice gives off some strong 1984 vibes.

I think it depends on how you categorize the act of "choosing". It could be cognitive and evidence (more traditional idea of "choosing") based or it could be faith and/or feelings-based (it's not clear if this is "choosing").

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.

This is a good argument, but it falls apart when you confront the fact that religious beliefs have no basis in objective reality and are thus entirely unbound from it. People convert all the time, religious beliefs are frequently inherently contradictory, et c.

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.

lgbt fanatics aren't much more sane than any other extremists yet they don't have any issues with being on twitter, facebook or reddit. (emphasis on _fanatics_). Widespread propaganda about kids sexualization/abuse and genitalia mutilation on these platform is A-ok and a cause for celebration.

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.

> Widespread propaganda about kids sexualization/abuse and genitalia mutilation on these platform is A-ok and a cause for celebration.

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).

You are literally comparing "the chans" to the vile shit Facebook moderators have to endure?? The latter is about an order of magnitude worse, it's literally the worst of Facebook, a constant pressure hose of horrors. People don't need fucking black and white filters to be able to browse 4chan and you don't get PTSD from it. That Facebook moderation feed does.

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.

> People choose their ideology

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?

Yes naturally people of color, and LGBT folk can't ascribe to an ideology. Naah .. that's nonsense. They're immune.

Each group will have its own ideologues, its own agenda.

I think this is shaky ground. Plenty of people think LGBT "choose" their sexuality (though I do not). White supremacists, religious people etc think their beliefs reflect objective reality, which is clearly not something they can choose. I think making "you chose this" a valid reason to censor/attack/etc. something opens the door to some pretty dangerous things, since it's not difficult to accuse things of being a choice that aren't.

> Plenty of people think LGBT "choose" their sexuality

Right. Even this assumption is loaded with ideology both ways. I.e. either they choose or do not choose. Neither is correct.

Except there is an objective reality that LGBT people don't choose their sexuality.

That is not "an objective reality", it's an opinion.

No one chooses anything since their is no free will and people are biological automatons.

Uhhh, *there.

Can you explain why you're taking conservative bigots seriously?

> 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 color people is being prohibited to enter a night venue, or gay people cannot order a simple cake, or YES, dude 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...

I see your point, but violation of TOS has to be a very clearly defined situation and it is rarely is, at the end it can be ambiguously interpreted to kick anyone if you have the right lawyers, so we are back to step 1.

I suspect GP was referring to Computer Fraud & Abuse Act where 1 ToS violation is a federal crime.

Ah OK, My bad then, thanks!

> I think at some point it goes up against the "yelling 'fire' in a crowded movie theater" exemption of free speech.

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.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schenck_v._United_States

I'll admit. I didn't know the origin. I don't know whether I'd have supported or opposed this verdict but I can't support the administration's supposed vigorous enforcement.

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 think at some point it goes up against the "yelling 'fire' in a crowded movie theater" exemption of free speech.

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.

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