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