Frustrated with Parler deplatforming, I am building a service no one can silence
1b677b8f8bb20100.github.io
1b677b8f8bb20100.github.io
I’m pretty sure giving every moron on earth a globally-accessible soapbox is about the stupidest idea humankind has ever had.
I'm also not sure why your worldview seems to be that given access to all opinions, the stupidest ones too, people will not and cannot learn to make informed judgements for themselves. You will see some stupidity but it's a very bleak and arrogant worldview to presume that people are incapable of making rational decisions given information and time.
"Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past." -- Jean-Paul Sartre
Look at Twitter and reddit, two sites where it's impossible to have a serious discussion because those who hold platform-approved opinions "like to play with discourse" and "seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert."
"They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly" for fear of the moderators.
Skilled, professional, human moderation might counter that, but doesn't scale.
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/02/11/darwin-day/
But no I'm sure it would be far better if we banned such heretic thoughts and enforced our worldview.
"It's just evolution" did change noticeably, but it's still only 22%. That's up from 9% in 1983.
So presumably the "i dunnos" are decreasing. But nothing seems to alter the misinformation very much.
One could make the argument that the eras in which only those who had money or political power had a real voice resulted in a more stable society. Allow everyone to have a voice (full freedom of speech) but outlaw platforms that truly try to give a voice to everyone. If someone really wants to put out a message they can go to the street corner and shout whatever they like, no matter how bad it is, unrestricted.
It's all about the context, and having the requisite creativity to see the drawbacks on the horizon.
I think social media and surveillance marketing are good examples of what he was probably talking about. (Actually, IIRC, the quote was in relation to dating strippers, but you get the idea.)
There are a few “thought leaders” (without much diversity), each followed by a tedious and repetitive peanut gallery.
I’m getting far more from reading on Substack.
Until they have to deal with the realities of what true free speech means: child pornography, child exploitation, rape, ultra violence, terrorism, organised crime, drug dealing, doxxing innocent people etc.
My Reddit account is 13 years old so I've seen personally seen communities of all of the above grow and flourish and the true levels of depravity that humans can reach. Ultimately it got to the point where Reddit simply couldn't take it.
But hey good luck. I do love the fact that you're using Github to host this.
Freedom of speech is the only thing making the US remotely competitive at this point.
Sometimes people get into a position where they have to defend the indefensible, and in the process end up rhetorically fighting a rear-guard action against the truth. There was the question of a particularly horrific death video of a 7 year old girl being disemboweled (among other things) a while back. Instead of simply conceding that there is some filth that has no place in civilized societies, these absolutists stubbornly stuck to their talking points. This makes all of us look bad. People start looking at all free speech advocates as being this same level of unreasonable.
I always try go out of my way to separate my ideas of privacy protection, anti-surveillance, and free speech from those of these absolutists. I do not believe little girls should be able to be publicly raped and disemboweled, even virtually and digitally created, simply because there exists a market of sickos for it. But I do believe that unpopular opinions should be countenanced and the right to express unpopular opinions should be supported.
If you're against entirely fictional depictions of child abuse, then how do you feel about other fictional depictions of a crime? (That's a lot of films and books to ban). Or pictures of actual real crimes? Would you remove photos of Auschwitz from text books? Or from a far right meme?
Not saying I have any better answers, just I get slightly niggles when others think they've solved the issue, by everybody else agreeing with them.
As for an intial starting point, it makes sense that you are looking to capture users that have been kicked off places like Reddit, FB, or can't participate on Parler any longer and I'm sure you will have success within that target group if you are able to get this off the ground. However, I'm not sure where you're going to get new users from after that - and without a more diverse user base, you are not only limiting the spread of ideas from your platform to elsewhere but are also creating an echo chamber where people who self-select for "my views are not tolerable in the mainstream" are the only ones who are talking. This problem will get worse over time, and make it even harder to attract new users.
Like you say in your blog post, a major source of frustration with existing technology is that "They prefer purity to practicality". It seems an awful lot like you are trying to do the same thing here, and while this project will certainly be entertaining, I'm not sure how viable this will end up being - I'm having a hard time seeing this as anything other than another Voat/Ruqqus.
Any decentralized unauthenticated or federated social network faces the same issues around reputation, moderation and sybil attacks. Matrix, for example, has the same.
I imagine over time we'll get a growing economy of curation markets - users choose their own maintainers for allow/deny-lists and content discovery, effectively allowing them to use these networks in a way that is meaningful to them.
Some of these mechanisms are explored quite heavily by people in the Ethereum space - not necessarily with social networks in mind, but I think these kinds of mechanisms are going to play a more important role in our world in the coming decades (lest we go deeper into centralized control)
Too late to edit but meant to write "content curation"
Not a big fan of the whole mod election approach though. Seems like it might just turn into a constant scramble for power. Still, the front page does seem to imply mods can only sorta block content so it might not be too bad.
Thank you for suggesting this.
As for the political side... just remember that amoral selfish people with reprehensible values are entitled to the same rights as the rest of us, and we should be applauding their desire to build tools that benefit everyone.
And I don't believe it's impossible to have a platform that these people can be on without them subsequently destroying the platform. I've personally got a design for a network I think that can accomplish these objectives. I'm sure there are many strategies that can work.
But if a new social network makes a pitch and it doesn't go way out of its way to say how they're going to contain the massive influx of toxic runoff from the mainline social networks, then I can assume that if I join, that will be the environment. I can assume the only people on that board are the people too extreme for 4chan. I'll pass.
In particular, I think the magic sauce Pepe has is every user having his / her own moderation filter.
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An example: I'm gay and I have had friends that didn't agree with me in supporting gay marriage. One was an ultra-orthodox Jew that was my coworker, and we would disagree on just about everything politically, but we still managed to tolerate each other and even become friends. This is what should happen in a tolerant society.
Should we ban guys like him from Twitter if he decides to tweet against gay marriage? No, we shouldn't. We should tolerate his intolerance and have an open and honest debate.
You meet somebody that is adamantly homophobic. They use their speech to rally others and take political action against gay people. They make same-sex marriage illegal (or block it from becoming legal). Maybe, they're extra successful, and can even manage to make gay sex or just being gay illegal, forcing you to pretend to be straight.
Oh, this person also is your boss. They know you're gay, and they fire you from your job in the height of a pandemic where people are already having trouble finding work. When you get home, you find out their friend is your landlord and you're being evicted from your apartment in 30 days.
Admittedly, this is somewhat of an extreme example, at least in my country in modern times, but go back 100 years and this is close to reality - and there's no strong evidence I'm aware of that suggests progress in these types of social justice causes can only be made forwards.
You may argue that free speech may lead to intolerant laws and actions - but history suggests the direct opposite: free speech has mostly expanded tolerance.
And it makes sense: we have gay rights as a result of free expression. For the longest time the “offensive” idea being censored was that being gay was ok and not a result of mental illness. Without free speech we wouldn’t have gay marriage.
Also, again, what about speech that only indirectly affects you?
What if my speech is "I do not think gay people deserve the same human rights as straight people, and I want the government to deny them those rights"? I'm not saying it to you, I'm saying it to my elected representative(s) in the government. Should we tolerate that speech?
Additionally, I believe that history supports my position. Generally, increased tolerance seems to correlate with when society stops accepting and starts shaming people with 'bad opinions' (racism, sexism, etc).
If not you individually, maybe should select certain group of people to represent the people and create rules to enforce bad behavior is stopped?
Maybe we can call this body a government and call the rules laws.
In my opinion, society is more tolerant when we do not let the intolerant people hijack it to spread intolerance. In other words, intolerance is some of that "bad behavior" that should at least be softly prevented. I am expressing this opinion on this discussion board in the hope that other people will agree with me and maybe even change their minds slightly (or maybe I'll have my mind changed instead!).
For ideas - remove ideas by banning / censorship, or add ideas by promoting 'better' ideas - this seems like a possible avenue to improving society's mental health. The main objection is whoever controls what to ban / allow is given a lot of power, so how do we decide these things.
For people - I think it's fine to be intolerant individually, however our institutions should not be intolerant. For example I can hire a cleaner for my house and refuse certain people. However it should not be possible for a company to refuse certain people as cleaners. I'm not sure how to formalize this into a law though.
Physical or mental violence because of intolerance of people and ideas are bad because I don't want violence on me. However I am not certain how to define mental violence.
Maybe the problem is the media (and social media) which is the vast vast majority of where ideas are promoted, and neither is where positive ideas get promoted. I’m not quite sure why that is - must have something to do with human nature.
Today its hard to distinguish these people from scientists at the top of their fields. Maybe the issue isn't that we need to scilence people but rather we need different tools to distinguish who's worth listening to.
Censorship fails because its an impossible judgement to make and its impossible to find a fair judge. Modern social networks amplify the outrageous, not the thoughtful. The needs for clicks has ruined discourse more then freedom of speech. I think there is a lot of work that could be done to build systems that encourage dialog and promote thoughtfulness online that isn't done today because everyone focuses on banning.
No individual can be knowledgeable in all the areas of science, economics, medicine, technology, etc, that would be necessary to understand and filter even a tiny slice of the daily news. Any tool will necessarily be making judgment calls for it's users in some way, and once the tool becomes the standard, those judgments will (effectively if perhaps not literally) determine who gets banned.
Science isn't controlled by one body, but by a network of peers that reaffirms or disproves prior work. Over time consensus is built, without the need to silence.
Right now we use clicks as proxy for value. What if we structured it differently like, give people a limited pot of recommendation tokens they could use to show others what they value. If someone gives 3 months of tokens to a 10 page article, maybe that's worth reading?
I dont know if these are the right metrics but we need to experiment.
YouTube did the opposit when they wanted to reach 1 billion hours a day: they promoted anyone who had a channel that produced 1h of content a day. That meant that all the alternative news/facts talk-shows got a huge boost and that lead to a lot of bad things.
Stripping away all real-world specifics, take this as a thought experiment:
You have a community (of whatever size) that starts out containing (among others) groups A and B. Group B is defined by their desire to remove group A from the community, and their outspoken proclamation of such and attempts to persuade others to their point of view.
If the community remains "tolerant" of all, that will, over time, almost inevitably result in the size of group A within the community shrinking, due to group B's efforts being both successful and tolerated, and due to group A not wishing to remain in a place where their very right to existence is constantly questioned.
In effect, what this means is that a community that claims to tolerate both groups is actually intolerant of group A. Tolerating any group-directed intolerance is, in effect, espousing it.
Thus, in order to be tolerant to the greatest number, any community must not tolerate intolerance.
It is also well worth noting that the types of intolerance we are generally discussing whether or not to tolerate are intolerances of intrinsic characteristics, while being intolerant of them is intolerance of a behavior.
People can change their behavior. They cannot change their intrinsic characteristics. Thus, in the thought experiment above, if the community refuses to tolerate Group B's intolerance, no member of group B needs to leave. They only need to stop expressing their intolerance.
Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.—In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal ...
Similarly, would you tolerate hate speech that could put your life in jeopardy just because you believe in free speech?
The point I believe is not taking the ideal to its maximum blindly, but clearly defining boundaries you can't cross, even if it meant behaving intolerantly.
I don't think it's desirable to prohibit individuals from gathering in private and exchanging intolerant thought, though. Something like this falls under that IMO.
What if in a society once tolerant to gaybashing, and other things (not so long ago), should one not tolerate "intolerance" to this? I think your question needs re-phrased.
That is just not being tolerant to intolerance. The question stands
Which explains why you should probably re-phrase. And also because not all societies on this planet are the same in terms of "tolerance".
This is what you meant. It fits in the question. You are just phrasing it differently and calling it fundamentally different, when it is just a rearrangement and expansion of words. You can do this indefinitely, but the meaning won't change.
Allowing people to manifest mistaken, stupid or repulsive opinions is a basic tenet of free society.
And that raises an absurd but still interesting thought experiment: if by some process, someone is able to create a statement that is intolerable to every single person on Earth, would it be okay to censor it?
Surely you agree we have to draw the line _somewhere_, even if you disagree with where we currently draw it?
It seems bizarre to include in this list.
(3) obviously requires very different technical solutions (like: no private encryption, ever) than (1).
It's amusing how frequently this comes up. If someone distributes child pornography, arrest them using the existing laws of the land.
"But what if it spreads from there?" I hear someone saying. Well, they're still posting illegal content, so arrest them too.
It's silly to assume that the freedom of speech implies some kind of inherent free pass from consequences of your speech.
It's not that "there are laws against child pornography, which are completely separate from the debate about free speech."
Laws against the production of (actual) child pornography are irrelevant to the debate about free speech.
Laws against its distribution are absolutely relevant, because "distribution of child pornography" is just a kind of speech.
(To be clear, I oppose free-speech maximalism in general, and have no trouble with the idea of laws criminalizing the distribution of child pornography.)
I was merely pointing out that, if we want to have a discussion about what types of speech should and shouldn't be allowed, we need to be clear with ourselves and each other about what actually constitutes speech, and restrictions thereupon.
I'm having a hard time telling where you're reading in my post a suggestion that (e.g.), because criticism of the Thai monarchy is strictly prohibited in Thailand, we should technologically restrict such speech in the US.
I believe that just because some forms of speech has consequences, that doesn't inherently restrict speech.
What I'm reading of your stance is that since there are consequences for some forms of speech, this forms an implied and mandatory restriction on speech.
The difference is subtle, but it's leading to us talking past each other, particularly when it comes to discussing technology that enables free speech.
Unfortunately, this difference is not something I feel I can resolve on this forum.
Good luck!
Natural consequences are things like if I say "I hate people who wear hats," and I get an internet mob coming after me to defend hats.
Legal consequences would be if I happen to wander into a jurisdiction that has outlawed badmouthing hat-wearers, and I get arrested.
Legal consequences of speech are restrictions on free speech, because they are something humans specifically and deliberately chose and could un-choose. Natural consequences are just that: natural.
As in "we (as a tolerant society) can tolerate free speech up and to the point that someone else is harmed."
I suppose databases would be hard to implement with both, but you could just save everything as updating flat files and the database could be a progressive enhancement.
seems like an interesting technical problem to solve. if you're willing to trade off speed for resilience it seems possible with today's technology with very little modification.
Edit: I believe that free speech being absolute is problematic, but I also see issues with the changing contours of what’s allowed or forbidden in the “not absolute” classification that’s commonly used.
This seems already close enough to what the author is proposing. Even the language choice is the same.
Your project will still require the users to download a 3rd party software to run it, which I believe to be the main problem with the current approaches. Therefore I don't see anything new this is bringing to the table. It's no different than downloading and running the imageboard above or downloading IPFS/ZeroNet and using one of the imageboards there.
To answer the question in your comment: yes, you can install and configure I2P, you can install iMule on top of it to exchange files and some distributed forum to post on. But the usability of all that is really low even for a pro-user. The performance is also not great because those systems were not designed to be used with each other from scratch.
One stumbling block would be addressability without TURN.
I was thinking about Starlink and how if Musk wanted to they could make it resistant to censorship, but theoretically speaking, it would still be possible in the extreme to bring that platform down. So that raised the question in my mind: What would it take to make a platform bullet proof from censorship?
The free.* hierarchicy is available.
You use your own encryption
Which server providers will be hosting that Usenet newsgroups and be willing to be legal responsible for said content ?
What happens then if I want to delete something I posted previously?
Is it free speech if I want to retract something posted by myself but I'm not able to do so?
Is it really free speech if a comment can't be altered/deleted by the owner of it?
This is a property of the internet and information in general. If data was served to clients at some point, then it's possible for the clients to have saved a copy (if nothing else then by taking a picture of the screen). Even if it happens that no one saved a copy, it's not generally possible to be sure of that. Any "deletion" feature would therefore be unreliable at best.
Being able to "edit" posts, to submit a new version of a post and have clients by convention normally show the newest version, sounds like a decent feature. (The older versions would, of course, be available too.)
If you want to post offensive material to some people/governments you need to work hard to stay anonymous, like the reporter example where they recommend using a public eg library place to connect.
Spam/bots are a common, tough, problem for existing imageboards that can exert central control. I don't think light/dark comes close to solving this type of issue, it assumes the majority of interactions are benevolent.
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I'm floored at how many commenters here are expressing their doubts about this project because the author clearly has a distasteful political affiliation. Yes, it being named after Pepe (and use of dogwhistle terms like "SJW") is a clear sign that the author is a person who I would probably be thrilled to see get a kick in the teeth.
But I'm really quite disappointed in the overtly authoritarian attitude being expressed here. Somehow we're all champions of Tor and Bitcoin although they clearly can be (and are) used to serve the needs of drug cartels, sex traffickers, terrorists (other than the ones too stupid to plan their insurrection on Parler), et alia. But as soon as someone happens to associate the thing with the alt-right, we are all anti-freedom?
It is an interesting project technically, but I do not think it will replace the *chan model for edgy people to be edgy on the internet. If your opinions are so extreme that you feel that you must be anonymous and free from repercussions, they may be terrible opinions in the eyes of society.
This person is advocating for a non-governmental website that is for enabling free speech since they see some voices as being silenced. But with that comes the ability for people you disagree with the speak as well. No government censored Parler, it was people who disagreed. What if this new service is overrun with people who disagree, will it be swept away in shadow posts or will people who say disagreeable things actually see that.
It's why I'm fairly certain giving bad actors "free" access to the best technology is nonsense, you wouldn't give enemies your plans to your latest technological advances in weaponry - and the same goes now for the digital age.
The deplatforming done recently of Trump et al by multiple technology layers of private owned companies, was good overall to at least slow down their rallying and organization. Yes, it possibly inflamed some - but they quickly learned if you don't behave within the bounds of what's considered civilized behaviour that allows society to thrive and that these free companies of people, organized people, understand and have a solid foundation that they're holding the line for; contrast this to countries where there's a tyranny as a government that has their hands in all important companies to understand the importance of the ability for private companies to have this power to decide as a failsafe against government becoming a tyranny.
For instance, foremost in my thoughts is the question: to what extent do makers of effective open-source tools have any control over how they're used? Popularity for Pepe might mean use by progressives in Iran, racists in America, and regular Chinese who just want to chat without minders. Much more likely it'll be all sorts of folks who use such a tool.
I encourage you to remember that you aren't on the wrong side of cancel culture now, but you could be soon.
That's incredibly presumptuous of you to the point of being very rude.
Voltair would not approve of "I might agree with what you're saying but you drew a pepe so you need to be shut down".
By creating a project whos intention is entirely focused on that mission?
As far as I can tell, serious conservatives haven't been touched.
Watch as Trump supporters use every logical fallacy in the book to avoid this fact.
Are you familiar with former american president Donald J. Trump?
EDIT: And now I'm banned from posting. Thanks HN. Sorry I don't agree with your hive mind.
Did you read the parent comment?
This is a very ignorant take on freedom of speech and a terrible foundation for your project.
― Frederick Douglass
Presumably society would eventually get over itself and evolving into something more tolerant of personal opinions, and questioning internet-sourced information.
Or, from another perspective, the only alternative is that only some people can do that. (E.g. politicians, security services, etc)
I'm not sure that would be preferable.
EDIT: I mean “in addition to the government”.
If you believe this then you must believe the US is poor at censorship given the amount of chaos in the past year.
All this really means is China will guaranteed to be the next superpower, they have perfected censorship. Freedom of speech is the only thing giving the US a competitive edge at this point.
Either the US becomes a mediocre censorship state or freedom of speech stays.
But it's still a very important guidepost around which to orient your principles.
"Freedom of most OK speech is absolute" is a useless principle. Which is why we should not frame the freedom of speech as such.
This is actually my entire point. It's a principle broken on many occasions, but nobody walks around saying "Oh, we shouldn't even TALK about not killing — that's IGNORANT — because there are so many exceptions where it's okay to kill people."
You can still guide around important principles, even if reality imposes exceptions!
News for hackers, indeed.
If that seems fine to you (speaking royally here), you're in the right place.
That's pretty extreme. First, freedom of speech is not freedom from consequence of speech.
And second, freedom of speech only applies to public forums. Why would a private enterprise need to put up with someone spreading vitriol and fake news?
Let's say I own a mall, and you rent a store in that mall. You suddenly decide that you are going to start selling Nazi merch and incite people to riot in my mall.
Why am I a "cancel culture SJW" if I kick you out of my mall?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pruneyard_Shopping_Center_v....
Also, at least 13 other US states with similarly worded rights to free speech in their constitutions have ruled that this does not include a right of free speech in private shopping centers, as has the European Court of Human Rights.
> freedom of speech is not freedom from consequence of speech.
It's a fundamental failing of comprehension to not know that. Speech is free and so are repercussions. Say what you want but know that a response is possible and also just as free.
No, that is not true. It was never true. Nothing is absolute. But maybe you are OK if I publicly put a bounty on your life.
The Pepe stuff just reeks like this is going to become yet another toxic cesspool of undesirable content if not outright illegal smut.
We don’t need another platform where people can be openly racist. Where people can say hideous things and call for hatred and violence.
It’s not a symbol of resistance. It’s a glum-looking frog. That’s it.
Also this forum doesn’t seem to allow for identifying oneself which precludes it from competing with Parler/Twitter. At best, it can compete with 4ch/8kun but those serve their (admittedly limited) purpose quite well with few complaints these days.
A lot of Pepe memes also ended up becoming Twitch emotes through BetterTwitchTV and FrankerFaceZ. And a lot of those emotes found their way into Discord chatrooms. In Discord, you can usually tell whether someone is an alt-right person or not by what Pepe emotes they use.