Before the internet, they’d mostly be unable to find each other. With the internet, they can build self-reinforcing “communities” on the basis of hate, intolerance, or really anything. If they just stayed in that bubble it’d be fine, but unfortunately sometimes they bring machine guns to department stores.
As you say, such "communities" existed before the Internet. It's just that now, they can better organize to affect the real world. I think Forrest Gump's observation applies here. Even 8chan had some sort of ideology justifying what they said and did. Even the worst scoundrels of history used words like "love" and justice." (And yes, Godwin's Law comes into play if we go down that rabbit hole! So let's not.) If we are to gauge how toxic a group is, I think we need to go to first principles and measure how driven by viral outrage an online group is.
It's natural for people to come together because they are outraged. However, when continuing the cycle of outrage, driving more attention, driving group membership, driving more outrage continues for its own sake, there is a problem. It shouldn't be outrage and attention driving a group. It should be higher principles.
Unfortunately, outrage is a fundamental fuel of virality in 2019. Today, we need to be skeptical of actors who lean too heavily on the cycle of outrage, whether they're openly reprehensible, or if they merely dress their movement in high language.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc
In 2019, the world has long known to be skeptical of religions gone wrong, which we call cults. We need to develop the same kind of skepticism to groups actually ruled by outrage, not principle.
Edit: removed comments on US “ag gag” laws cited in the linked article, after I read a little more and learned that they may not be so similar as was implied in this piece.
Neither viewpoint absolutely is true, but "As ever, if it can be abused, it will be abused" is the better heuristic. The people pushing the abusive laws are doing so as their day jobs, while their victims necessarily have other livelihoods that constrain their efforts. They don't simply propose the topic once, see that it has no support, and go home. Whomever they're working for has longstanding goals, and each win they get is a step normalizing a bit more of their desired regime.
This is why even when the Internet community strongly rebukes new Internet censorship laws (SOPA being a recent example), the same bullshit just comes back again - maybe tweaked to be a little less aggressive, maybe just using a better outrage-event as justifications. And every time it passes, it's a tooth in the ratchet - heads they win, tails we play again. Capitulating a round just accelerates the process.
'If this were a normal circumstance we would say "Yes, it’s really horrendous content, but we’re not in a position to decide what content is bad or not." But in this case, we saw repeated consistent harm where you had three mass shootings that were directly inspired by and gave credit to this platform. You saw the platform not act on any of that and in fact promote it internally.'
Okay, so you ban 8chan. Now they move to another chan... there's about 5 different "bunkers" running the same or similar software to what powered 8chan and with many of the same users that various boards have moved to right now. Some of the larger of those bunker chans are actually on distributed networks.
So now what? You have to ban distributed networks? You shrug your shoulders and say "oh well, we tried"? This is where the slope comes in. There's no good ending to it. Worse, as we've seen with 8chan, the farther you push people from the mainstream, the more extreme they seem to become.
This simply isn't true, it's trivial to set up clearnet proxies into such services and they can be easily treated as disposable.
The message you send them seems more to be that they need to hunt and hide more for "the truth". The need for that further contributes to extremeified views. It turns out pushing people into deeper and darker recesses doesn't improve their sociability. You can see this difference from communities that used to exist for the content that spawned these on reddit, Twitter to 4chan leading to the spawning of Voat, Gab, 8chan and others. The farther down the line you go the more extreme you get.
It's entirely analogous to the religion <--> cult spectrum. The former is found beneficial by many and has much to do with community. The latter is really about exploitation and control. In 2019, we need to be skeptical of groups that use outrage to spread, much as we're skeptical of cults. (And this, despite how flowery or "good" their language sounds.)
Regardless of how much I hate 8chan, I'm still pretty worried about the precendent these kinds of actions set.
I don't think the internet is fundamentally different here. You could have made the same argument when the printing press came out.
Can I steal other's content and sell it, no, but I would call existing regulations almost non-existent for original content.
Publishers. There are documented cases of writers and genres being blacklisted and suppressed. (Though in fairness, you might find more than a few of them unsavory.)
I can buy a high end typesetting laser printer and print anything I want on it- if it isn't child porn/top secret/libelous I can print anything I want that I've originated.
Sure, but good luck with the promotion and distribution.
It may be 'moderated' in the sense of an optical cable vs a copper one- by its nature there is impedance in the copper one limiting its potential carrying capacity. In that sense the internet vs traditional publishing have a different ability to scale. But Hitler's rise didn't need the internet- Mein Kampf found fertile soil due to economic depression and already extant racist attitudes latent in the populace.
China finds ideas contained in books by Locke/Milton/Paine or the Magna Carta to be extremely dangerous- and that they are and I'm sure they're be ingested wholesale in Hong Kong right now, where the Great Firewall isn't in full effect.
We need to counter evil thought with the only available agent that will actually work- better argued thought that seizes on vigorous ideas that instill a deep abiding respect for their fellow men/women and the potential of civil society to overcome the divisions we've placed among ourselves.
You could spread your message further by printing lots of posters and putting them up in your city, but it would obviously not be comparable in reach to the Internet. Newspapers that do have reach comparable to the Internet all choose to exercise their legal right to decide for themselves what is too hateful to spread. Cloudflare has now chosen to exercise that same right, to a tiny extent.
I think attacking this from the access to guns angle seems far preferable than access to information.
But the person you're responding to does. They may not admit it to themselves but that's what they want.
When I see this kind of discussion and how "Internet helps terrorists" I imagine them in a military uniform doing the same speech about the Résistance.
There is no law that says you have to use Cloudflare and if they ban you, you're not allowed to be on the Internet. It just costs you time and effort, possibly money, hopefully reach.
What leads you to believe that the person they're responding to doesn't simply wish more private entities would exercise their legal right to listen to their conscience on who is too hateful to do business with? That's not censorship of important information, that's the free market of ideas at work.
The Stratechery article explicitly discusses this phenomenon and endorses it. What leads you to believe that the person they're responding to disagrees with the article on this point?