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Comment by sytelus | Hacker News Reader

This is the same argument cake shops make against taking order from gay people. I do believe that so-called manifesto is mind-numbingly dumb, fact-free and it is dangerous in the sense it will inspire more violence against innocent people. But that precisely what makes it a good test case for asking some fundamental questions. Can commercial businesses with deep reach, pricing power and critical function deny services based on their ideology and beliefs? The legal answer is yes and that only looks troublesome when you think of how tables could turn in future. As someone has mentioned what if Comcast started permanently black listed you if you visited a website that didn't aligned with their ideology? What if airlines refused to fly you because you said something on Twitter that didn't aligned with their beliefs?

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Taking orders from gay people and hosting services for sites which support far-right terrorism aren't exactly the same though. We can be against suppressing gay people and for suppressing far-right terrorism even if the means by which the suppression happens is similar.

and what about the the communities for queers and autistics on 8ch that will be lost in order to cater to your particular sense of indignation while in effect doing virtually nothing to limit the ability of psychopathic losers to kill large numbers of people? as an aside assigning any credibility to the motives of crazy person with no value for human life makes no more sense in the case of mass killings than it does to treat those of ted bundy or john wayne gacy or mark david chapman as credible.

What about those communities? I'm sure they can stay on 8chan, or find somewhere else?

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".

>What about those communities? I'm sure they can stay on 8chan, or find somewhere else?

Then what’s different about extremist communities?

I don't understand what you mean. Presumably, they will also either continue using 8chan or find somewhere else?

Exactly.

You're saying that as if you have made a point, but I still don't understand what you mean. Could you explain what your actual point is?

Well, if far right terrorists can just stay or find another place, then how is Cloudflare’s action suppressing them? You seem to be defending their action but at the same time implying it has no effect.

> doing virtually nothing to limit the ability of psychopathic losers to kill large numbers of people

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.

A message board is not a source of any of those things. 8chan does not have a super-god who removes comments they don't like, there is no inherent leaning in the structure of the website. Any platform is liable to this kind of behavior, so what exactly does this achieve? If it isn't Cloudflare, it's self-hosted. If it isn't 8chan, it's Twitter, it's Facebook. There is no shortage of places where radicals could go to let their beliefs fester. What about removing hosting for 8chan resolves anything that you've mentioned?

What about them? They can move to other chans, plenty of which survive and thrive without heaps of nazis. If the owners of 8ch wanted to get rid of the nazis, then they wouldn't be coming under DDOS attack in about 5 minutes.

They are. Taking infrastructure away from gay people to buy coffee is exactly the same thing as taking infrastructure away from random people on the internet. The only circumstance in which either of these should be tolerated is when there is a direct threat to US national security (imminent terrorism) or a crime has been committed. Neither of these has happened.

There's very much a threat of terrorism. If 8chan was an ISIS forum with the same content as now I'm sure people would be singing a very different tune.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/08/how-can...

It's a good thing then, that it isn't an ISIS forum.

Further, your definition of terrorism eludes me. What gives you the impression that 8chan conducts, facilitates and organizes terror?

But don't you see how the lines blue very quickly? It's not always as clear where morality lies as when some lunatic posts terroristic threats. Arbitrary value judgements must be made when enforcing censorship so censorship always leads to conflict between groups that disagree on what should be censored.

That's why the best course of action is to not censor at all and allow the system to work itself out.

What system are you talking about if not the system where people and companies can choose who they wish to associate with?

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.

I'll be very clear about what I want. I want companies that facilitate speech to be forced to tolerate all legal speech on their platforms. It's that simple.

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’m afraid the basis on which your argument is made is shaky. The First Amendment was not rooted in concerns about the government controlling speech in general. It was rooted in concerns about criminal liability for contra-government speech as reflected in the seditious libel laws in England that had been in place since the 1500s. Like, you could go to jail for criticizing the government.

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 want companies that facilitate speech to be forced to tolerate all legal speech on their platforms. It's that simple.

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.

The rules of society are always a trade-off.

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.

Hatred and murder has always existed! The idea that online discussion forums create or foment hatred is laughable. That hatred has always been out there. Now people just have a place to vent. The good part about it being out in the open is that we can actually see it and be aware of it.

> That's why the best course of action is to not censor at all and allow the system to work itself out.

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.

the problem here is that in one case you're sending the trolley into a tunnel where the potential harm or prevention thereof is largely based on your preexisting (and likely incomplete) assumptions.

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.

It's not helpful to palm this off on mental illness - that does a disservice to people with such issues and doesn't address the fact that virulent ideologies exist in the real world and have proponents that are capable of planning, organizing, and recruiting.

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.

I am perfectly OK with discriminating against people who enthusiastically plot the death of others just because of ethnic prejudice.

'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.

> This is the same argument cake shops make against taking order from gay people.

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?

I guess that comes down to what is a person and what is a business. Do businesses have rights? I would say no they do not. A person exists until death. Their rights are fundamental. A business exists or does not exist at the whims of the owner(s), government, or law. It's rights are fungible. It is allowed to exist at all because the government says it can. And one of the requirements can be it is not allowed to discriminate based on sexuality, or it can only do business with certain individuals and businesses.

Refusing service to people based on their ideology or sexuality is vastly different to refusing service to people who threaten harm to others.

No, it is not. Most ideologies have inherent basis that not following that ideology would harms the people. Vast majority of ideologies are ironically created with belief that it ultimately benefits more to the human race overall compared to all other ideologies.

To you. Many others don't see it that way. So your truth isn't the same as theirs, even if you are backed by current science.

Just wanted to point out that being gay is not an “ideology or belief” in the same way that being straight is not.

Comparing the two implicitly accepts the idea that one can choose to be gay (and can thus be changed with the right methods)

> 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.

Great example of the slippery-slope fallacy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slippery_slope

I would disagree a bit. The concern here is that we are leaving doors wide open for businesses to deny service based on their beliefs. We are accepting that people have no right of due process of the law and businesses can just decide to act as judge and jury to punish anyone they desire based on their beliefs. It is likely that businesses will be never exploit the extreme and be benevolent in exercising this power. However its troublesome that it can happen and that they have this power. One of the core foundation of civilized society is to remove this unpredictability, however small it may be, by establishing crystal clear laws.

> wide open for businesses to deny service based on their beliefs

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.

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