8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service

For example, I don't think my freedom of speech should trump Cloudflare's or Voxility's right to freedom of association. They should generally be able to decide who to do business with. However, that freedom also isn't absolute; it was used for decades as part of race and gender discrimination, which impinges upon other people's freedoms. Thus the US theory of protected classes. [1]

Or to pick another example, employers should generally be able to hire who they want. But that has been used for religious discrimination, so we protect those people. However, that also isn't absolute; if for religious reasons I won't handle pig products, I'm not entitled to a job at a pork BBQ restaurant. To get reasonable outcomes, we need to welcome nuance and compromise.

I encourage everybody to be suspicious of anybody who thinks there's a single clear answer in situations like this. Fundamentalist positions are both appealing and dangerous.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_group

These boards do more than allow this hate to fester. They allow hate to grow as they become a recruiting ground that can radicalize people who never would have fallen into this mindset without these boards. 8chan might be compartmentalized in a way that allows it to become an echo chamber of hate, but it also is highly connect to boards about general topics like video games, TV, and movies. This normalizes the hate and it becomes just another thing to talk about.

I would bet a small minority of people who spew hateful things on 8chan sought the site out because of their own hate. Maybe they went there to talk about the new Call of Duty game. Before too long they are ingrained in the whole Gamergate mindset. Then they eventual start hanging out on /pol and before you know it they are a full fledged white nationalist. (A similar thing has been reported about Youtube's recommendation algorithm [1]) This wouldn't happen if the hateful sections of 8chan were sectioned off into their own site. No one accidentally stumbles upon The Daily Stormer and becomes a white nationalist. Just visiting that site genuinely requires a predilection towards hate and a sympathetic ear to white nationalism.

[1] - https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/06/08/technology/yo...

What a bunch of horse crap. Being told what to think, what to buy, who to vote for, how to feel.

If you claim to believe in a liberal democracy but want "education" or limited-speech then you don't have must faith in the system.

Democracy has been broken since the rise of technology and mass media. If you control the narrative, you control the people, and the power. The outrage over a shooting and some mean speech is ridiculous compared to the big corporation killing people with opiates or junk food. People have gone soft. It why Aristotle thought democracy was a bad system of government.

I don't agree with most hate speech you would see on these forums, but I enjoy seeing it because its an indicator that we haven't become completely neutered by large corporation yet, which is happening.

It should be noted that the United States at the time of the drafting of the Constitution had way way lower rates of education than today. Even as recently as 1945, the median American only had a 10th grade education. No matter how you measure it, literacy, primary school completion, even intelligence tests, there's no question that the Americans today are significantly more educated than a hundred years ago let alone two hundred.

Yes, I know you explicitly said not to focus on "technical" education. But there's no reasonable definition of the term, whereby you can honestly make a case that the America of 1789 was somehow more educated than the the America of 2019.

All of which means that you have to bite a bullet. Either the Founding Fathers were wrong to enshrine such strong protections of free speech in our Constitution. OR admit that our citizenry more than meets the threshold you posit regarding minimum level of education.

The line of thought you put forward, by contrast, rubs me in a very wrong way. It was used to justify, depending on the period and country, not allowing people to vote on the basis that they didn't have enough revenue, didn't own enough land, couldn't read and write well enough, etc. Allowing to disenfranchise voters on some arbitrary sophistication basis can and, if history is anything to go by, unfortunately will get abused. It breaks down to: who decides what's sophisticated enough?

Popper's tolerance criteria, by contrast, seems clearcut in a you know it when you see it kind of way.

I don't think communities that turn a blind eye to hatespeech are wholly innocent, especially in light of how many threads downright enourage people thinking of taking violent action, but if we take a step back this doesn't seem wholly different from blaming violent video games for glamorizing gun violence or blaming rap music for gang culture. There's a reason that most people, including racists/bigots/etc. don't go on shooting sprees or run people over with cars. Handwaving the problem as a free speech issue ignores the long spans of time we weren't seeing these trends in spite of having the same rights to speech we have now. I don't know what the right answer is, but censorship affects everybody so it seems like it should be the last solution considered imo.

Does anyone know how law enforcement engages with places like 8chan?

Instead of curtailing free speech and pushing for censorship (which will have anti-humanitarian effects soon enough), why not enforce the laws already on the books and investigate people who threaten violence online?

I get that this is an unpopular opinion, but bad things will happen if people are to be free.

The dog and pony show from Google and Cloudflare of only stepping in after multiple mass shootings and tons of press coverage tells you all you really need to know about these companies' ethics. They react to sufficiently bad PR, not out of any set of principles, be they either freedom of speech (keeping these sites online) or reducing harm (deplatforming.)

The alternatives, where we have gatekeepers like Google and Facebook entirely deciding what is permissible speech, is too far to the other extreme.

you either believe in rights or you don't.

Ultimately this isn't very relevant because right to free speech does not mean a right to web hosting infrastructure. But I agree with the Founders; regardless of whether it builds a more/less optimal society, government cannot and should not infringe upon our natural right to free speech. In particular, it protects us from jumping from your hypothesis (that unchecked free speech motivated a mass killing that would have not otherwise happened, which I give a 60-70% probability of being true) to an ironclad law forever removing some liberties from the citizenry.

Part of me wonders if we should be taking better advantage of this opportunity to reach out the people posting. Mental illness is clearly in play, but can't we as a society do better? We should be reaching out to these people and at least trying to wrestle them back to sanity.

I think if anyone really believes shutting down a bunch of open forums will reduce the number of mass shootings they are delusional. This is a mental health issue AND a gun control issue and that's where we should focus efforts.

https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/copenhagen-speech-v...

As a moderate I am not repulsed by the repulsive, I'm interested in understanding it, and I think all moderates are.

People have a fascination with what repulses us look at documentaries about murders, ww2 etc.

Todays problem is that moderates can not openly debate the extremists without themselves being labled as an extremist so their arguments can be dismissed, deplatformed and then used as justification for a personal attack.

Having them there, and allowing such extremes to be questioned, and with that, kept in check. The whole recruit aspect is a mixed one, shut them down, then their words can not spread. But equally they can't be questioned and raises the mystik and that means anybody who is curious will be forced to engage in a phsyical meeting with such people, allowing them to be swayed more easily than somebody engaging with them online, open for all to show the errors.

I always thought it is better for such extremes to make themselves known in public, rather than hiding in the shadows. Makes it easier to keep track of them and their state of mind.

So however much I disagree a mindset, I'd rather have them in the open and kept in check.

What would the solution be. Well, sadly the web really does need some universal age content control that is imposed upon such extreme websites. After all, a young mind should be nurtured for rational debate and not indoctrinated into a fixed mindset. We should at least get that right upon the web now, whilst we can. With that, a safer control of such extreme content is maintained. When history has shown that pushing underground, has more negative outcomes than positive ones.

Digital prohibition is not the solution we want happening here.

China and Russia are often saying that western societies are vulnerable because freedom of speech, but it becomes true only if the internet exists.

I personally think that online hate will force society to work on the cause of hate, so in the end society will be more cautious about hateful ideologies, but we might also work on poverty, lack of education and mental illness which are often the cause of hate speech. The population will naturally become more aware of the implication of their extreme opinions, and learn to moderate their speech to let other answers happen.

In the end I think we're already benefiting a lot from the internet, it's just that the problems it create are more visible.

The problem is malignant anonymity and online trust. Once the internet is more focused on local problems, people will stop behaving like invisible ghosts and will be polite again.

Lots of people are afraid of blood and spiders, but we still have doctors and exterminators.

Actually changing other people's opinions doesn't always look like having your friends Like your Facebook posts.

The first amendment says "Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech". It's a limit on government. CloudFlare has no duty to provide 8chan hosting, and their denial of services is very unlikely to be considered discrimination against a protected class.

System working as intended.

Yes, this is the problem. There is no challenge to their ideas and thoughts because the conversation/debate has been completely stigmatized that there's no other way to talk about it but anonymously on the far reaches of the internet. Soon it'll be on Tor instead and a terror network will truly form (because they've already gone "so far", why not go further?).

The El Paso mass shooting as well as the anonymous chan hatespeech is nothing but a result of a very poorly moderated debateenvironment in the western world.

Imagine if these young men had someone to talk to 4 years before they found *chan? Someone who listened and validated their thoughts and fears then, before they grew into these sorts of monsters.

The things you find reprehensible have existed long before 4chan or the 1st Amendment. Allowing a precedence for society to completely ostricize people at every conceivable level is a dark road to go down, especially today when there is no escape from technology. If we put an end to free speech, we may never get an ounce of it back.

Whether you choose to believe in God or not, many of the framers of our Constitution and those who penned the Declaration of Independence believed in the Supreme Judge of the World, the Creator etc. and based their morals upon that belief.

When those morals become less than the norm for society, many problems arise.

Furthermore, the chans are about as technologically receptive to challenging ideas as is possible:

Anyone can post from anywhere through any connection, without fear of harm or censorship.

But TFA is about the Internet. And that's a very different thing. It's hugely unstable, and vulnerable to compromise by nation states and commercial interests.

So given that, I remain convinced that freedom of speech on the Internet depends fundamentally on technology that resists censorship. That's been the official US position regarding censorship in China etc. The US promotes Tor, and has also funded VPN services, such as Anonymizer. So I see no reason to carve exceptions.

Edit: spelling

That word doesn't mean what you think it means.

If it did, censorship wouldn't be relevant. The content you don't like isn't a naturally or accidentally occurring substance. Someone wanted it to exist.

The simplest view is that these safe spaces mostly exist because some larger platforms have been turned into safe spaces. However, even on larger platforms, these types form insular groups that are effectively walled gardens within a larger ecosystem (see T_D). The mode of operation appears to be to rally behind safe spaces, then brigade larger platforms when something catches their attention. No real discussion, just bombarding text.

It's exceedingly difficult to have honest discussion with those of opposing views because people reward themselves with safe spaces and tend to expect them. Ideally, we could rely on rational discourse to assuage the extremism issue and inoculate. If we shout them down in a given arena, they'll scurry away but never disappear.

As I see it, it's a problem of scale. On smaller vbulletin forums you'll more likely see heated, but honest, debate there without any brigades nor bans (depending on modship). A rainbow of opinions. With platforms as large as reddit, censorship is holding all out shit shows at bay.

IMO providers like cell phone, internet and all should be forced not to cut off service based on speech. Thanks to the same Amendment they have the right to choose who they associate with, and 8Chan has the right to broadcast abhorrent (but legal, at least in USA) views. If we allow them to ban 8chan next they'll move to ban even less controversial views as time goes by.

A middle ground would be to kinda force them not to ban sites based on content that is legal but controversial. If internet providers ban you for your views, do you exist? Internet providers are as essential as electricity these days. Can PSEG cut power to KKK's headquarters? I doubt it and no one would say that PSEG agrees with their views because they provide electricity to them in exchange for money. Freedom from slaves and women voting was controversial at one point...

I think it’s a very USA centric view, that’s focusing on effects rather than causes. It seems natural that everyone with any strongly held interests will take to the internet to talk about it. Be that extremist views or gardening. But gardening forums don’t cause gardeners.

Where you plan to get such people from? I'm pretty sure nobody is able to "fully parse" implications of anything, for detailed enough definition of "fully", because nobody knows everything now or in the future, and without this it's impossible to "fully" understand implications of anything. Most benign speech could, in certain circumstances, cause huge effects. You can tell an aspiring artist and a war veteran his paintings are mediocre, and he decides to go into politics instead and you've got next Adolf Hitler (yes, I know that's not what actually happened, it's just a theoretical example). Nobody can "fully" know anything.

> to actively push back against ideals which are universally understood to be reprehensible.

You must be under impression there are a lot of things that are universally understood to be something. What if I told you there aren't and people actually can disagree on pretty much anything?

> The concept of freedom of speech falls apart if universally reprehensible speech is allowed to be publicaly espoused without being firmly challenged.

No it does not. Somebody speaking something that you don't like does not mean freedom of speech failed, because preserving your personal tranquility and serving your personal preferences has never been a purpose of the freedom of speech. And there's no "universally" reprehensible speech - somebody would always find this speech not reprehensible. The only way you can have a workable definition is by massaging "universally" by excluding more and more people from consideration because their opinion is obviously stupid and doesn't matter - until you find yourself in a bubble that agrees with your opinions and define that as "universal".

Censorship is driven by pressure from the public against advertisers. If the public accepted free speech, platforms wouldn't censor, echo chambers would choke out, and the best ideas shine.

Bad ideas can only be challenged by tyranny and free discourse. Which would you rather have?

But then, how does free speech apply to the internet? Unless you have servers in your closet, your site will always be hosted on someone else's servers, and even then it will be delivered through networks owned by private companies, etc...

Anyway, Cloudflare's blog post on this (which is really worth reading in full) is what made me think of this:

> 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. https://blog.cloudflare.com/terminating-service-for-8chan/

This is the crux of liberal (classical, libertarian, and contemporary) ideology as a whole. The idea that if only people were enlightened we could have nice things. All in all, it is kind of useless, or utopian. You can't enlighten people, and merely giving them education doesn't do the trick on its own.

Liberalism (classical, libertarian, and contemporary) ignores material conditions as a base for which all things are formed, leaving it ill-equipped to handle any real issues. We can hem and haw all day about how "if only the plebs were enlightened" but nothing will change until we make real efforts to change people's material existence. It's easy to turn to fascism and extremism if you have literally nothing going for you in life.

I'm not excusing individuals actions, but don't try to solve a systemic problem with individualism if you want anything to actually change.

1. https://datasociety.net/output/media-manipulation-and-disinf... 2. https://datasociety.net/output/alternative-influence/

Isn’t that what 8chan did?

duty of thinking prior

Also, users are driven to these sites from other social media where even moderate views are often considered "fascist" and can get you banned.

I even think that 8chan was a great idea on paper. It's basically 4chan with Reddit's ability to create sub-communities on a whim instead of having to beg the admins to create a new board. I created a few of those myself.

But then of course the fascists took over. Admittedly on 8chan is happened almost immediately but on 4chan it was more gradual. Now 8chan is (rightfully IMO) dead and frankly I wouldn't be too sad to see 4chan, or at least some of its more popular boards, go the same way. The /pol/ cancer spreads everywhere, the big boards are 50% shitposting and 50% hate speech. And not in a fun "let's make ironic memes about Hitler to push people's buttons" way but in a rather depressing "I seriously hate women and minorities" way.

The more moderate people gets driven away. Actually any sane people would be driven away from this terrible and constant negativity and all you have left are the zealots who feed on each other's extremism. It's not free speech, it's a circular feedback-loop of radicalization. I've genuinely read a (supposedly videogame related) thread yesterday on 4chan where somebody was trying somewhat successfully to appear moderate by saying "I support white nationalists but I don't think we should be killing brown people". How nice.

Note that Reddit isn't a whole lot better at handling this, they're just better at hiding it under the rug while posturing in their PR releases.

There is no such thing as universally reprehensible speech and, frankly, this is a dangerous line of thought. What is and is not acceptable is fundamentally tied to localized social norms.

Further, there is plenty of challenge on these forums, in fact arguably more so than forums like Reddit, because their very nature is antagonistic and contrarian.

>Unchecked extremism compounded by more unchecked extremism inevitably leads to scenarios like the ones we’re witnessing more and more often.

Terrorism of all flavors existed long before the internet and it's frequency has waxed and waned over the years. The drivers of this very recent trend have far more behind them than simple incubation on forums - like the dismissal of legitimate concerns by demonizing, blanket epithets like "racist" and "xenophobic". The recent growth of populism cannot be explained by the tiny minority of posters on the chans.

While the extreme actions of these recent attacks are reprehensible, if you read these manifestos, they highlight genuine problems which are deliberately ignored by "left" leaning politicians and media, although because of today's growing polarization of society, the only discussions of such issues that surface publically are mixed heavily with extreme views and extreme solutions, and the average person begins to equate, say, immigration control, with extremist racism, which is neither rational nor good for society.

sounds like blaming free speech when basically a child can get AR-15.

Freedom of speech is not some ideal in isolation. We don't have freedom of food and shelter. Without food and shelter, you die. If receiving food and shelter requires you to censor your speech, you don't have freedom of speech.

Almost nobody has freedom of speech, and it's not at all clear why anyone'd want it anyway. I honestly am not interested in most things people say - I want the freedom to be away from people's speech, if anything.

Freedom of speech seems to be some ideological distraction in American society - when in reality everyone's interested in freedom of food, shelter and being away from most other people's ability to influence their lives.

It's not just that they inspire a few shooters and mass murders. They inspire a hell of a lot of other once-reasonable people to be deeply and irredeemably terrible in many other ways.

I mean, it literally radicalized white supremacist terrorists. There's no "had the potential" anymore, it's a fact.

It also sounds like it held plenty of child porn, so I don't understand why it took until now for anyone to do anything about the site.

I thought the idea expressed by NearlyFreeSpeech.net in the following link was nice:

https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/about/faq#TheLongGame

That creates a powder keg waiting on a fight/flight trigger. Without a tribe to back someone, such a trigger will cause a flight response, but with that tribe they’ll feel emboldened and choose a fight strategy. Sites that encourage the formation of communities that promote violence will inevitably lead to actual violence once they’re past a certain size. It doesn’t even really matter what the ideology is, it just matters that they preach violence.

You can't stop the signal. ThePirateBay proved it many many times.

We need to address the sources of the problem, not the symptoms.

> With 8chan, I legitimately don't know what my opinion is.

You can support free speech and still condemn 8chan, by considering Karl Popper’s Paradox of Tolerance[1]. If a person or group enacts violence on another person or group because of their ideas, the elements of the latter will curb their speech out of fear.

Violent groups use “free speech” as an excuse because it works. They’re only interested in free speech for themselves, not others. In fact, they’re so incapable of tolerating the free speech of others that they resort to killing them.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

the free speech argument is that racist assholes should be allowed to say whatever they want, but cloudflare or voxility or any other service provider should also be allowed to tell 8chan to STFU and go away. that's part of free speech too. 8chan doesn't and shouldn't have any more rights here than cloudflare does.

It's very easy to shout the mantra of "Free speech!!! OMG!!!" but we gain nothing by acting like there aren't natural consequences to it. By having a liberal free-speech system, you are going to expose glitches in the "marketplace of ideas", and demagogues and radicals are going to be able to exploit it.

It might still be worth it (I haven't made up my mind yet on where we draw the line in censorship).

Of course that's dangerous thinking in itself, because there's always potential for abuse when you let someone decide what people aren't allowed to say. But there has to be a balance somewhere. I hope we can find it.

What was it you read there that convinced you that websites are capable of turning people into murderers any more than video games are?

If printing, a supplier has no obligation to provide paper or ink or typesetting.

The same is true for music producers. Make all the Nazi Punk garage band cassettes you want, but don't expect Jack FM to give you airplay.

Good data providers don't want Federal heat or the drag on the public perception.

It has also not prevented the US to go into a de-facto oligarchy state if anything the NRA and others have manipulated the "free speech cult" to promote private interest over a public one.

Same as with gun ownership, that sad illusion that owning guns will prevent tyranny is beyond hilarious at this point.

So framing an event and pushing a narrative when one neither likes the frame nor the narrative is now an offence requiring the sacking of media?

When mass-media is busy framing and legitimizting the next War On Something it's in the cards again!

Hypocrisy.

If people can't handle reality, you should accept that not shut it out.

We used to, until quite recently. You could read Dabiq, the well-produced magazine of ISIL/ISIS.[1] They definitely glorified their terrorist incidents. With color pictures of their operations. All with religious justification. "Islam is the religion of the sword, not pacifism". (Dabiq, issue 7.)

Dabiq probably inspired enemies more than supporters. Dabiq says that there can be no compromise until the followers of Allah rule the earth. So ISIS could never have a peaceful border with anybody. On March 23, 2019, the last territory controlled by ISIS was captured.

8Chan is a minor annoyance in comparison. I'd let them blither and look foolish.

[1] https://clarionproject.org/islamic-state-isis-isil-propagand...

Speak for yourself, I would. I've downloaded and distributed ISIS propaganda videos before out of sheer intrigue.

Just because someone says something you don't like doesn't mean you should ban it. Of course, this will be downvoted to hell because this is a hot topic at the moment, but we shouldn't let that too-near emotion influence out policies. We've seen that lead to stuff like the PATRIOT act in the past and we surely don't need another one of those.

I certainly would tolerate those sites. Free speech arguments aside, you can't kill the hydra, but you can severely degrade intelligence operations watching that hydra. Best case the bad guys all end up on sites already being surveilled, worst case they slip under the radar.

We had this problem years ago, hacktivists targeting ISIS channels. They scatter to the winds, intelligence ends up doing more work for less rewards.

Feel good outrage made things worse.

Yet sometimes in a mosque some evil islamic imam or something preaches radicalisation.

Yet we tolerate and welcome mosques. Then why shouldn’t we tolerate and welcome sites like 8chan?

Also please keep in mind that now that 8chan has been basically shut down, we have no way of make an opinion of our own.

I completely disagree. I've read Dabiq[1] and similar publications because I want to know why people believe the things they believe. It is a good thing that such horrible ideas are available to the public, and for the same reason that it's good that flat earth sites are available to the public. JS Mill puts it best[2]:

> But the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it.

> If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.

It is for these same reasons that I also read /pol/ and /leftypol/ on 8chan.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dabiq_(magazine)

2. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/On_Liberty/Chapter_2

These aren't exactly organized bands of people funneling in millions of dollars for carrying out actual training and misson planning/execution. They're watering holes where disaffected elements of society hyperbolically play up various happenings.

Just take a step back for a moment. We have an increasing population and increasing saturation of that population with streams of data. When something happens, we know with a speed that is uncommon in human history (to be euphemistic about it).

More population = more happenings = more things to emotionally charge people in the same 24 hour frame. Even if population increases by a bajillion, we still only have 24 hours in a media cycle.

Even if the per capita incidence of violence decreases, a rising population means more slices of highly charged emotional manipulation within the same media cycle.

Edit: So instead of increasing population, resultant increasing pop density, increasing information density, and a myriad of clusterf* systems running haywire (even in an era where we're safer than even 20 years ago)...4chan and 8chan are the devil and satan for allowing people to shitpost in a hyperbolic hyperironic manner?

Why? Think about what you're saying. Imagine equivalents:

1. We wouldn't allow cell phones that let terrorists communicate

2. We wouldn't allow roads that allow anyone to carry whatever contra-ban they want down them.

3. We wouldn't allow trains that allow just anyone to carry books on whatever topic they want.

4. We can't allow for air that allows two willing participants to communicate using sound waves.

The hubris to imagine that we dare have a say in whether a group of adults date to communicate with each other.

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html

The original JSON license is even deemed not free because it limits the ability to use it for Evil.

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#JSON

There is a reason for this decision and it applies to speech as much as it does to software.

Should Cloudflare be forced to host 8chan?

Even more than YouTube/Twitter, this seems like a clear case of business owners deciding that 8chan is too much of a liability to do business with.

But the size of the platform is commensurate with the tolerability of the speech, right? No one is preventing you from standing in a public place making whatever objectionable claims you want. But reddit/facebook/cloudflare/whoever don't have an obligation to let you use their platform to publish it if they don't like it.

This is certainly not a meaningless distinction.

In the age of print media, some random guy's fringe opinions were not "required to be published" -- you couldn't even buy a classified ad espousing objectionable content in large publications. No "ban" required.

> We now live in a society where it is acceptable for private companies to essentially completely ban individuals from exercising their free speech

We have always lived in such a society. And it's not "private companies" it's people. Some person makes this decision.

cloudfront is not really a platform. It's more like a CDN, or WAF. I think your point is worth discussing, just seems to link less to the context of 8chan.

> We need to allow people on the edges of the spectrum to say what they want even if it is without merit. Extreme speech is what prevents normal speech from being censored.

I wonder if the anonymous portion of these boards is what makes them so toxic?

Plenty of fringe forums for example have account names. Frequent posters are known and have reputations, if a known person says something controversial, they can be challenged by others, known or not. I think it really just allows for discussions to happen in good faith. Half the time I think some of the most toxic discussions are not even between any two people but are actually between tens of different unique trolls who may not even be following the thread at all. Maybe bots, who knows.

Of course people look for something to blame, and there’s nothing quite a satisfying as shooting the messenger.

It’s also convenient when a site is small enough, there’s not quite such a backlash when companies fall into PR ass-covering mode and terminate their service.

Now, there’s no forcing CloudFlare to keep hosting any particular site, and there’s no convincing the mob that bowing to their demands is a really piss poor long term strategy for everyone involved.

It takes very strong leadership to stand up against the mob and say “that’s no how we do things” and these days most people would rather just pile on, than risk the guilt by association.

It’s reasonable to cut support to players that relentlessly fail to comply with the rules.

The platforms are not turning against them, they are constantly abusing the ToS of these platforms .

Now some people disagree with the ToS in the first place, but it’s another discussion to be done at another plane. There has always been a filtering of what goes to a super wide audience, movies airing on public broadcast have always been filtered, the same logic applies to platforms as wide as reddit.

I'd rephrase the first: "it's okay for 8chan to be kicked off the internet, if there is no one who is willing to host it".

> It's like saying "you can say anything you want, but we won't let you use the atmosphere to propagate the sound waves".

And what you are saying is more like "I have the right to say anything I want but I'm too lazy to move the muscles of my face, so everyone (those who I point at, actually, by calling them EVIL MONOPOLIES) MUST help me in this noble mission of spreading the truth".

"Free speech on the internet" is not something found in law.

> The canary in the coalmine was The Daily Stormer

Because The Daily Stormer was just a site to share ideas, right?

> The Daily Stormer, which has established 31 physical chapters in the United States and more in Canada

> Some of its readers do more than issue threats. Dylann Roof, who massacred nine African Americans in Charleston in 2015, posted on the site. Thomas Mair, the neo-Nazi assassin who last year killed Jo Cox, a British member of Parliament, was a regular reader. And just last month, another Daily Stormer reader, James Jackson, was charged with murder and terrorism after carrying out a plan to go to New York City to kill a black man at random.

How ever will the Nazis share their hateful and violent ideas without the private internet companies? Oh no, the poor racists!

> One message included an image of Gersh being sprayed with a green gas, along with the words: Hickory dickory dock, the kike ran up the clock. The clock struck three and the Internet Nazis trolls gassed the rest of them.

https://www.splcenter.org/news/2017/04/18/splc-sues-neo-nazi...

How so? They're welcome to come here anytime.

It's toxic and intolerable.

That happened because they repeatedly violated rules on Reddit, not because of their extremist views. Reddit was lenient with them for a looong time.

> We need to allow people on the edges of the spectrum to say what they want even if it is without merit

/r/jailbait was banned, but it was technically "free speech" and technically legal, so according to your standards Reddit should have allowed the community to continue to exist, right? (Even though it existing probably led to some deviant / reprehensible / illegal behavior)

But to me, it's obvious that that doesn't need to be allowed to exist on the platform. So to me, that means there is some line that we as a society draw between allowed speech and not. It's not codified in law, but it does exist. That line can move based on the whims of society.

Right now, at least in the tech world, that line seems to be moving in such a way so as to not allow right-wing extremist speech. And that's totally fine in my book - in the same way that /r/jailbait is rightfully considered unacceptable "free speech" now, so is right-wing extremist "free speech".

There are still places to congregate online for that sort of speech if you want. Or you could spin up your own server. It's not disallowed by law. But it's just not as accessible as it was before.

Those people can say whatever they want, but no other individual or company needs to allow them the soapbox to do it.

This is phrased as something to be fearful of here, but I think I'm actually fine with this precedent.

There's nothing to stop people with extreme right-wing ideologies from marshaling the resources required to stand up all the pieces of web infrastructure they find themselves blocked from. If they can't amass those resources, that's ultimately a market decision, no?

And if they were able to stand up that infrastructure, it would indicate a high level of financial support for their agenda, which would be the real thing to be afraid of, in my own opinion.

The slopes are not that slippery. Germany isn't a dystopian hell-hole because they banned Nazism.

At the same time, if someone points a finger at you and shouts "I'm going to kill you", then we're getting outside of speech and into actions, and certainly actions can be prohibited. The question we have, really, is whether the content of 8chan was just speech (and therefore should be protected unless you buy into censorship) or crosses into actions (convincing someone to massacre immigrants). From what I've seen, 8chan certainly seems to be in the action category.

Moreover 8chan posts, though vile, arguably do not fit the narrow free speech exemptions of the US such as true threat or incitement. The law and judicial precedent would require a reasonable reader to take it seriously. All that is moot though as the government has taken no action here.

Those motivated by animus towards a minority group do generally target areas frequented by members of that group, like in the Texas shooting where the gunman targeted a Walmart in a largely Hispanic community. As a non-Hispanic white person (who lives in the US), that does put me at less risk of being a victim of that type of shooting. Also, to the extent that terrorism’s impact is emotional rather than purely rational, I’m less impacted simply because I don’t feel targeted in the same way.

Nevertheless, I wouldn’t say the risk is zero; it’s not impossible that I could be in a place like that when the next shooting happens. So I have at least a bit of skin in the game.

Edit: Also, while perhaps not 8chan specifically, Internet forums have been implicated in shootings that weren’t targeting ethnic groups and thus would put me at more risk. An example would be Elliot Rodger’s shooting, which was driven by a hatred of women, but ended up killing an equal number of men and women (not too surprising, since people don’t self-segregate by gender to the same extent they do by race and religion).

Be extremely careful about drawing conclusions about people based on the books they read or the websites they visit.

This wasn’t a blow against 8chan or 8channers, this was a blow against everyone who reads things on the internet.

If ethno-nationalists are not allowed to make their political case with speech, what alternative would they have but violence? You obviously can't change their minds with censorship, only harden them.

I do think though that the internet is kind of a different game though. I don't think anything can be banned altogether. People will always find a way.

Ultimately we'll just end up creating new anonymous and distributed services where we can talk freely and corporations (lol) and governments can't dictate what is acceptable.

What a sad time

How about the free speech rights of the 22 people who died in El Paso?

The idea that the government should force companies to host extremist content against their will is anti-free speech, not pro-free speech. It’s equivalent to forcing people to put up political yard signs on their lawn without their consent.

Say the major tech companies get fed up with Elizabeth Warren's calls to regulate them.

Facebook removes all her groups. Cloudflare shuts down her websites. Youtube removes her videos. Google only leaves anti-Elizabeth Warren search results up, etc. Basically a major presidential candidate is completely locked out of having any presence on the Internet whatsoever.

Would your reaction be the same? "This has nothing to do with free speech. These are merely private companies deciding they don't want to associate with Elizabeth Warren."

Where's the line between "political ideology" and "religion"? Is it your assertion that "kill all the jews because we're nazis and our leaders say jews are evil" is something that you should be able to ban while "kill all the jews because islam says jews are evil" is protected?

Since religion is almost always a protected class.

Everyone realizes that. We're past relying on the First Amendment argument.

Are they also free to only do business with people of certain races? The "private enterprises" line lost its punch about 50 years ago.

On the other side, as long 8chan did nothing illegal, they shouldn't shutdown 8chan. If 8chan did something illegal, then for this we have the whole justice system.

If people think 8chan does something bad, but is not illegal .. then people should vote to change the law.

If private company's start to play the police .. it does end in a disaster. Special since today's web is a winner takes it all model. If you felt out of Youtube .. yeah, just bad for you. Apple credit card .. yeah, you can buy just almost everything .. yeah, bright future ..

I think there's a lesson in that: when we tolerate any censorship, it will inevitably be used by the powerful to oppress the powerless. If the powerful need to compare the targeted speech to "fire in a crowded theater" or "Nazism" or whatever, they'll do it whether it makes sense or not.

I'm not sure if that's the kind of history you want to align yourself with.

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

There are already limits to free speech that most people don't complain about. The most frequent example is defamation.

I do like how Canada handles hate speed -- like defamation, it is illegal. There's really no benefit to protecting hate speech. If you argue it is a slippery slope, we're already on a slope with defamation so the benefits of adding hate speech out weight the risks of slipping further.

widely known and not really legally disputed.

> You know you can't yell fire in a crowded room and not get litigation and charges brought against you.

this seems like empty rhetoric; we already know that there are classes of speech that aren't 1A protected. this isn't controversial.

> If 8Chan was a breeding ground for Islamic Extremists would people be okay with still existing?

whether or not people "are okay" with something isn't relevant when discussing the legality of said thing, which seems to be what the rest of your post is focused on. so this seems like a red herring, or alternatively, the rest of your post was a red herring.

if your line of reasoning about the closure is legally oriented, then i'm sure you can find lots of things people aren't okay with, e.g. campaign finance.

More importantly, his talk is worth watching for a strong understanding of why free speech is so vital.

Depends on whether those people support free speech or not.

You can say anything. But if the thing you say carries consequences beyond the utterance, the freedom of speech does not immunize that sayer from assuming responsibility for those consequences.

It's not about what happens afterward. It's about not removing someone's voice, for fear of what they might say with it.

8chan is not required to support freedom of speech; it's not the government. It is itself free to pick and choose who is allowed to use its platform. My opinion is that it should not engage in content-based censorship, because no one should. Once you start doing that, there's no ethically clear place where the line between acceptable and unacceptable should lie. If you can make a case for banning neo-Nazis and Boko Haram and Sinaloa Cartel and such, you can also make a case for banning people who put pineapple on pizza or ketchup on hot dogs, with the argument variables set to different values.

Information is not the dangerous thing, nor misinformation. When someone is recruited and turned into a soldier via online image boards, using the exact same psychology as state-based militaries around the world--dehumanizing the xeno, and propagandizing them as an existential threat to the in-group identity tribe--that isn't the fault of the medium. It is the responsibility of the recruiter, the propagandist.

The rightful answer to speech with undesired consequences is not censorship, but counter-propaganda, and to some extent psychological hardening of the whole populace, by encouraging skepticism, critical thought, and formation of individual identity and self-image over group identities.

The former is a more active measure that unfortunately requires a bloody-minded relentlessness combined with unending tolerance for nonsense. Imagine a Bill Nye vs. Ken Ham debate that lasts literally forever, and the toll that would surely take on Nye. Now sub in a pants-on-head flat-earther time-cube woo-woo troll for Ham. No one person could take it. And that's why when these fools show up, the thought-terminating cliches have to be countered with thought-provoking dissent. If you see bullshit, call bullshit.

And the latter is something that probably has to happen in young people, coming with a side effect of making them less governable, and harder to convince of anything. Resistance to radicalization over the Internet would directly translate to more difficult military recruiting, drops in the strength of religious affiliations, and harder political campaigns. Not exactly popular among those loving god and country.

It's probably easier to just censor the things the state doesn't want people to say, and just trust that they will stop with the threshold line in the correct place.

Of course you can yell 'fire' in a crowded room and not have any charges that stick brought against you. Are you arguing the point it is not allowed to yell to a large audience? Or there is something else here you are not mentioning, like for example whether or not the statement is true is the actual crux of the matter? Of course you can yell 'fire' in a crowded room - if there is a fire!

Strangely enough, most people who find censorship ideologically palatable consider Jihadists a more sympathetic group than Incels. Note that ISIS beheadings have been subject to far less censorship than the Christchurch shooter's propaganda, for example.

Radicalizing terrorists to such an extent that they actually go through with it -- multiple times -- is extreme enough to make me wonder.

The El Paso shooter's manifesto was posted on 8chan for a reason. The manifesto was written specifically for other potential shooters. It contains tips and advice. It explains the shooter's choice of gear and that he needed to use heat-resistant gloves because one of the guns he used was prone to overheating if fired rapidly. It encourages potential shooters to avoid heavily guarded areas and to avoid engaging with security personnel regardless of how confident they are.

Throughout 8chan, I saw many posts subscribing to the general theory that racial violence has been accepted throughout most of human history and the only people who disapprove constitute a tiny little blip on the grand tapestry. The whole point of this ideology was to encourage people to commit acts of violence by indoctrinating them into the belief system that all their ancestors would not only have approved but would have done it themselves.

Leftypol is not devoted to "leftist politics", it's a counterpart to /pol which stands for "politically incorrect". /leftypol by extension is politically incorrect that curved to the left. In reality /leftypol and /pol are not that dissimilar. Both attract off-the-rocker crazy conspiracy-theory types the likes of QAnon. If you looked at /leftypol during say attempted coup in Venezuela the content you would have encountered would have been just as offensive as /pol.

That's true for almost every other board, but /pol/ isn't individually run. It was seized by the site administration, and they make its rules.

Feel free to make whatever argument you want about whether platforms should be forced to provide service to websites that radicalize terrorists, but please don't make this about something it's not.

I think laws should be fair and consistent. Censorship is inconsistent with freedom and justice. Additionally, the interpretation of messages is subjective.

If laws are inconsistent and arbitrary (and consequently, unfair), then you might as well throw moral principles out the window altogether and become a fascist, a white supremacist, etc.

The only way to have a just society, in my opinion, is when freedom of the individual is the base of all laws, and those laws are logical and consistent with each other.

What irked me is that CloudFlare was the one who makes the decision to do censorship.

It's not really a due process. No one argue for the defendant's side. It would seem better coming from US court through a due process or something like two lawyers arguing for both sides and etc.

I dislike the rationale of "CloudFlare is a private company. They can do whatever they want" ... like wut?

Also, if what those people do is illegal, should we arrest them, instead of merely banning the site?

This is the same thing with Trump's speech on Twitter. People yelling at Twitter to ban Trump because what Trump said is very very bad. If it's so bad, he should be arrested, not simply banned from Twitter.

------------

Edit: to address the main concern in my replies.

So, we think the speech is so bad that CloudFlare should ban it. But it is not bad enough to be banned by every CDN. That sounds contradictory.

For me, the speech is bad and it should be banned by every CDN. But government should make the judgement on the speech through a due process, ban it, and arrest someone if there's illegal activity involved.

So here is a formula for you to use in case you want to send us back to the dark ages:

> Can any free speech absolutists explain to me the legitimate public interest that is served by allowing terrorist breeding grounds like _INSERT ANY OF THE PRODUCTS FROM THE LIST ABOVE_to continue to operate?

It's the ability to chip away at free speech. First 8chan, then something else that's bad, then something slightly intolerant, then what? Is it really worth censoring when something else will pop up to take it's place? Monitor and move on.

[Edit: Why would you down-vote? That's the legitimate interest on the other side of the balance. It's not an opinion on the merit of shutting down 8chan. In this case, the benefit in permitting this speech may be grossly outweighed by the benefit of stopping it, but the benefit in allowing 8chan to continue to exist is non-zero. In its most nefarious use, subjective elimination of speech to subvert the speech's goal is commonly known as "censorship".]

However, the practical side of this is pretty clear.. hate speech is hate speech. It's not a debate. The people who are for being racist/bigots are wrong- plain and simple. So removing their forum of speech is OK in my book.

Still even after saying that- it's never that simple.. I think collectively the US does not want to turn into what parts of even europe has in which you can literally get in trouble just for saying things. And trying to "ban" even the clearest of wrong views is one step closer to getting somewhere we don't want to be.

It's on average not any worse than it ever was, but showing us how bad its always been right now serves a useful political goal in division and diversion.

Its not a conspiracy, just stupidity and greed. Outrage generates views and votes, no cartel required.

https://www.splcenter.org/issues/hate-and-extremism

There was a study done where people were primed by reading news articles about America becoming a "majority minority" country (e.g. white people as a group will no longer represent > 50% of the full population). Reading these articles causes white people to hold more favorable opinions of conservative policies across the board. However, if the articles included statements along the lines of, "But white people will remain as powerful", those conservative shifts go away. Further studies show this same effect across ethnic groups (e.g. Black people reading about growing Hispanic populations). The central takeaway is: when people feel like the status of their identity group is under threat, they become more conservative.

While racial anxiety can be assuaged, popular conservative media in America, like Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, et al, do all that's in their power to inflame these anxieties. And while these anxieties all existed before Trump, Trump was the first major presidential candidate in recent memory to stoke these fires so directly (John McCain and Mitt Romney both famously refused to do so, John McCain by shutting down the "Barack is a Muslim" rhetoric at a town hall, and Mitt Romney refusing to campaign using racial anxiety even though he was showed polling that it would be effective). Trump getting elected has subsequently emboldened a lot of racially anxious people who finally have someone they can rally behind. You know, "someone who isn't afraid" to make the claim that people immigrating from Mexico are rapists and murderers.

And so here we are.

There's a whole other dimension about how damaging spending all day in internet communities can be for emotional health, how lonely a lot of young people are, and how groups like ISIS and white supremacists take advantage of these people by offering them community and subsequently radicalizing them. I'd expand but I'm lazy and I'm just another dumbass on the internet anyway.

They would never dare to write "black man" and most importantly, the expression "white man" was never used before in Italy, in such a context.

There is an international anti-white culture and I'm tired to pretend there isn't a problem.

99% of "alt-righters" who got interested in politics, have done so since gamergate, and before just wanted to play videogames and live a decent life and unlike progressives were truly color blind. I know this is difficult to understand for many, but that's the truth and I hope one day you'll see how much suffering you've caused to whites only because of the color of their skin.

I wrote this for a place of love of all the people of the world and a desire of peace. I'm really tired of this nonsense. Please wake up.

Edit: gonna specify that I don't endorse violence or even coercion through the State, I just want anti-white culture to go away

I'm critical of censorship, but not because I think it's ineffective.

The idea that "the answer to bad speech is more speech" breaks down in such a situation. There is no amount of "more speech" that can fix what's wrong with 8chan, because there's no way for mass condemnation to have any effect on it. It only serves to feed the trolls. And when the trolls are fed, the killings become more likely.

If you've got a better solution than deplatforming, I'd like to hear it. I'm certainly a free speech advocate in the abstract. But it's increasingly difficult to ignore that anonymous online communities are threatening to undercut the basic premises on which free speech as an ideal stands.

However, for better or worse, pandoras box of decentralized uncensurable internet for the masses is now officially open.

Really? I guess I can believe this. I wish I didn't, but I have overheard plenty of bullshit over the years myself.

Hell, there was a thread on HN awhile back with posters essentially advocating for eugenics and the mods here didn't blink an eye.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20542738

ITT: "Eugenics were crushed with violence, they weren't actually disproved."

A ton of thinly veiled arguments for Social Darwinism and selective breeding in that thread. Disgusting. Yet the mods let it go.