When you use someone else's platform you are completely dependent on the owner of the platform, and being dependent on something you don't control is a huge business risk.
It seems to me that hosting and payment processing companies ultimately present the greater service denial risk for uploaders with an established audience, though YouTube can definitely hamper new viewer discovery, and there is more competition (and therefore more alternatives) in hosting and payments.
Owning cable doesn't help much as this cable sooner or later needs to be connected to some router that doesn't belong to you. A better solution is to host in a country where political correctness is much weaker than in the West.
Being off of YouTube doesn’t make you immune to this. You can still be deplatformed by your host, domain registrar, payment processor, etc.
Registrars won't take away your domain just because they don't like your site. Companies will delete your personal account on their platforms without even talking to you. I can't think of any case where a domain was seized without a court order.
Circumventing payment processor censorship is one of the many purposes of cryptocurrency technology. All you have to do is accept Monero as payment. The more people that do this, the more legitimate and popular and well supported it will be.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21671579
Apparently an organization called Shadowserver (a nonprofit security organization) claimed that the blog was part of the control system for a botnet, and the domain was transferred out of the registrant's control with no due process. They got it back, but the fact that such a thing is even possible in the first place was infuriating to me. I don't know if this is a decision that the .in TLD makes, to place trust in groups like Shadowserver (one could argue it's India's TLD and their country gets to run it how they want) but I hope to god that these kinds of "no due process" seizures are not possible with other TLDs like .com. and .dev.
Domain names ought to be property, and like any other property should be protected against arbitrary seizure by courts of law. I understand it's important to fight cybercrime and botnets and the like but there's got to be a solution that involves due process.
> Domain names ought to be property, and like any other property should be protected against arbitrary seizure by courts of law.
I completely agree. Some group saying the domain is associated with malware shouldn't be enough to cause it to be seized. They should have to actually prove it in court.
Yea? Or must mean those “alt right hosts”. Because the second someone ACTUALLY practices this, they’re themselves labeled as AltRight. See the problem?
> Registrars won't take away your domain just because they don't like your site. Has a domain ever been seized without a court order?
Ar15.com went down without warning, provocation, or cause because one day around the election GoDaddy made a decision to cancel them.
> Circumventing payment processor censorship is one of the many purposes of cryptocurrency technology.
That’s one option... OR... we give equal protections to anyone not breaking the law?
No, I mean hosts like Nearly Free Speech which has been operating since 2002. I've seen this one posted many times on HN and it seems great.
https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/
I understand what you mean though. Since they are usually smaller hosts, they aren't used by big name companies and eventually acquire a reputation for hosting only offensive content.
> one day around the election GoDaddy made a decision to cancel them
Huh. How could they just do that? It eventually went back up right?
Do you have more examples?
> we give equal protections to anyone not breaking the law?
What do you mean?
> Huh. How could they just do that? It eventually went back up right?
> Do you have more examples?
The first big deplatforming case was probably Cloudflare pulling The Daily Stormer. This is what Cloudflare CEO said:
> "Literally, I woke up in a bad mood and decided someone shouldn't be allowed on the Internet. No one should have that power."
Seems like even he agrees that they shouldn't be allowed to do that.
I agree. We should make the government use its monopoly on force to take freedoms away from people we disagree with. How dare a company decide with whom it does business and under what terms?
I am fine if the government takes away the freedom of corporations to grow arbitrarily large.
I am also fine with the government making corporations choose between the ability to grow arbitrarily large and the ability to kick off users without due process.
There's no need to take any freedoms away from normal-size companies.
It also helps that many other companies offer the benefit of being able to reach an actual human in case something goes wrong, which is something that is basically impossible with anything Google.
From Amazon sellers to YouTubers to high ranking apps to prominent social media profiles, I’m in awe of how much value sits at the whim of some platform which usually won’t even have a person to talk with on the other end.
Generally speaking, any industry where your revenue relies on marketing, promotion, or access to exclusive collaboration and distribution networks is going to have this property.
If you've made it really big, you can try to mitigate risk by doing your own marketing, or owning your own share of the distribution channel. For all the B-list actors, though, the economics of that aren't very favourable.
The alternatives are either a return to syndication, or a transition to some kind of non-market public cultural utility for distributing and promoting my cat videos. Or, we remain in what currently seems to be a local maximum, where distribution and marketing is cheap, but not so cheap that most content creators are doing it themselves.
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Parler was removed for being under-moderated, sure, but with that aside, it was also a huge censorship platform.
https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/pa...
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200627/23551144803/as-pr...
Regardless, they signed a contract detailing what they could and could not host on aws. They broke it. Its not like they were unaware of the requirements. Moral of the story, if you promise X, dont promise someone else Y if X and Y conflict. You are going to be breaking your word ine way or another.
No, it wa, IIRC, that Parler wasn't meeting obligations under the ToS for dealing with content prohibited under the ToS when they were notified of that content, and were failing to do so for an extended period of time demonstrating either persistent unwillingness or fundamental incapacity to fulfill their obligations.
Some of the content banned by the ToSay may also have been illegal, but that wasn't the issue, and neither was the simple fact of hosting the problem content.
They just didn't. There's a difference between being slow and just not doing it at all.
https://www.techradar.com/news/twitter-signs-up-aws-for-its-...
Regardless, from the sound of it Twitter was working with Amazon on this integration. This means Amazon knew Twitter was at least planning on migrating. If Amazon was serious about being consistent they should have told Twitter right there and then that they would not be allowed on AWS since they violate AWS' terms of services in the same way Parler does.
Btw, is "OK" still OK??!
In fact sales are through the roof thanks to people being dumb about the story.
With so many potentially offensible groups, and with offense definition shifting so often, are you sure that something totally ok now won't deplatform you in 5 years?
And to the latter part - no. No one ever thinks their views will be the wrong ones. This lack of foresight seems to be a recent thing in my opinion.
Yes it is a slippery slope argument, however it is almost unique to the United States due to free speech being enshrined in the constitution. Elsewhere free speech come with the caveat "don't be a dick", so you can say what you want e.g trans women should not compete in women's sport, but abusing trans women athletes is not acceptable.and yes societies views could change and even your inoccous statement could become a problem, but if social views have changed shouldn't you reasses your own views?
Also good internet hygiene would resolve this issue. delete your tweets every so often, comments etc. Nothing good ever came from resurrecting a 5year old tweet.
So if for instance in France I wanted to say "it's important to discuss the possibility the holocaust was an american manipulation", I m not a dick, maybe it s true it s important to discuss it, but you still have to shut the fuck up and think very deeply abt why you think that has to be said.
Most places free speech is defended, just challenged more. For instance the guy who dared say "for me, Islam is a stupid religion", got challenged in court for years but eventually prevailed: you can express your opinion of a religion. Just be sure that had to be said, cause it s gonna get expensive.
What I _have_ seen people get (correctly) called a transphobe for is the opinion "Transgender women should not be in women's sports because they are men."
So should a human born as a woman who happens to naturally have higher testosterone than is typical in other women, be excluded from women's sport? Of course not.
> "Transgender women should not be in women's sports because they are men."
Really? That's offensive? The reason they have higher testosterone is because they are men. That doesn't mean we should stand in their way of living however they want, or demean them in any way. But we should not have to lie about their biological constitution as being the reason we deem it unfair. It's not their level of testosterone that makes it unfair, it's because they come by that level of testosterone by way of being a man... if a woman naturally has the same level of testosterone, it would be fair and she shouldn't be excluded.
Maybe the answer is just doing away with all gender based distinctions, have no sports leagues separated on the basis of gender at all. Of course, that has its own problems.
Yes, intentionally misgendering a trans person is offensive and transphobic???
> The reason they have higher testosterone is because they are men.
This is needlessyly pedantic. My comment doesn't include the detail of _why_ they have increased testortorone because it is obvious.
Really, what I meant to express was something like "because their biological sex is male" but writing that is awkward and the most obvious/common interpretation of "because they are men" is transphobic.
This is needlessyly pedantic.
When writing my comment I don't want to have to insert several sentences explaining the nuance that I understand and respect the gender of trans women, but that this is one of those rare cases where we might need to treat them as their biological sex, because that is what determines things about their physical body, and their physical body is what matters right now. As such, I intentionally avoid vague phrases commonly used by transphobes today.
It may be a bit clumsy to refer to them as men, but that is actually the basis of why they are being excluded, because of their "man-ness". That's the underlying reason. I don't think it's transphobic to discuss that openly or to invent an explanation relying on "testosterone".
No we don't. If the criteria to compete is "you can have high testosterone or testicles but not both", that's not drawing a line between transgender women and cis women.
That's because the actual dividing line is a biological advantage. For cisgendered people this line is relatively cleanly drawn along gender, which leads to the names "men's sports" and "women's sports". However, there are groups of people for which this doesn't apply. Using it as an opportunity to call trans women men is needlessly insensitive in my opinion.
As for being insensitive to call someone a "man", i think you're conflating gender and biological sex. When someone is excluded from women's sport because they are not a woman, it's because of their biological background, not because of their avowed gender.
Sorry, I shouldn't have used a bad hypothetical about muscles and should have just explicitly said "intersex people". Regardless, here's a page that documents examples of what I mean, including in high-profile events like the Olympics:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_verification_in_sports
I would like to especially draw attention to this case:
> In 1986, Spanish hurdler Maria José Martínez-Patiño was dismissed and publicly shamed after failing a chromosomal test. She fought the ruling against her, arguing that she could not have a competitive advantage because her intersex variation resulted in her having no functional testosterone. Two years later, the IAAF gave Martínez-Patiño the green light to compete again.
Note how although she has traits unambiguously associated with the male biological sex, she was still allowed to compete as a women, and as a matter of fact the argument she made was that those traits did not give her an advantage.
The point I am trying to make is that the lines in sports are not as cleanly drawn between "men" and "women" as commonly assumed. There are people who are almost universally accepted as cis women banned from women's sports for reasons similar to arguments made about trans athletes. Humans just generally do not fit easily into binary categories when looked at as a whole.
EDIT: Actually, I think this page makes my point even cleaner, without the associated baggage of "well intersex people are partially men":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperandrogenism
> In 2011 the International Association of Athletics Federations (now World Athletics), and IOC released statements restricting the eligibility of female athletes with high testosterone, whether through hyperandrogenism, or as a result of a disorder of sex development (DSD).
These people are unambiguously women, both by gender and biological sex, and are excluded from women's sports.
</EDIT>
> As for being insensitive to call someone a "man", i think you're conflating gender and biological sex.
That is basically exactly my point. I understand, at this point, that you are referring to biological sex. However, the word "man" can refer to either, and _usually_ refers to gender. Therefore, using the term with no clarification can easily accidentally mislead people into thinking you intend the opposite interpretation that you do. It's not a big deal, but it's worth avoiding in my opinion.
There is no shame in being of non-binary biology, so why do we only have competitive divisions for men and women when that doesn't properly accommodate the spectrum of people who actually exist?
While some provisions have previously been made for people who are not biologically female to compete in woman's sport, it is not particularly scalable. There will be continual difficulty deciding when it is appropriate to admit someone or not -- deciding biological sex in the vast majority of cases is much simpler. And if a person who isn't clearly biologically-female does dominate in a woman's division, the natural response will be to say that they have an unfair advantage and don't really belong; it's not obvious how to avoid that catch-22.
Re-read my above edit about hyperandrogenous women. These are biological women who simply have a medical condition that makes their body produce more hormones than normal, and major sports organizations like the IOC have banned them.
My point is that insisting we draw the lines across biological sex results in special cases like that, because the actual group of people we are trying to exclude is those with a certain biological advantage, and that group does not match up exactly with "biological men".
> And if a person who isn't clearly biologically-female does dominate in a woman's division, the natural response will be to say that they have an unfair advantage and don't really belong; it's not obvious how to avoid that catch-22.
Here's my answer: stop pretending they are "(biological) women's sports" and actually define the rules in relation to what you are trying to prevent (ex: set a max testosterone level). This instantly closes all loopholes because it directly addresses the problem rather than attempts to indirectly address it via the imprecise measurement of bio sex.
At least at the top level, this entirely solves the problem in my opinion. A bigger problem I don't have an immediate solution for is lower level of competition - it is obviously unrealistic to expect someone to get a testosterone test to play intermural basketball at their local high school.
Should women who inject testosterone be banned from sports?
There are arguments for and against.
Arguing that women should be excluded from women's sport is untenable. The respectful position isn't "trans women are a special type of women where they get the pronoun but none of the privileges". It is "you're a woman".
My point with the example is that there are rare cases where treating everyone (including trans people) as their biological sex is warranted because we are talking about situations where their sex explicitly matters (i.e. usually something related to their physical body).
As to whether or not it makes sense in sports? I don't know, I haven't put much thought into it. But I don't think arguing either perspective is inherently transphobic or disrespectful.
"Transgender women should not be in women's sports" is transphobic no matter what logic follows it. It is society not treating women as women. Adding a "because they are men" or not on the end doesn't change the level of transphobia much, the meaty part is the "no, I've decided you can't be treated as a women and you get no say" part.
If we start from the premise that it is transphobic to say "Transgender women should not be in women's sports because they are men." then it is pretty clear that "Transgender women should not be in women's sports because they are biological men." is also transphobic. Otherwise we could end online transphobia with a couple of sed scripts in a chrome extension.
The words male/female can refer to either gender or biological sex.
Gender means what you likely already think it does.
Biological sex is what genitalia someone has (or more generally for animals as a whole whether you produce sperm or eggs). I'm not a huge fan of this term because it kinda seems to imply transgenderism is "non-biological" but it's the most commonly understood term so I use it begrudgingly.
"Trans women are men" is most obviously interpreted as a transphobic statement about gender.
"Trans women are biological men" is just a fact and is in no way transphobic.
> Otherwise we could end online transphobia with a couple of sed scripts in a chrome extension.
Words have meaning outside of analyzing their dictionary definitions or a single sentence at a time. Sed scripts cannot account for context, intent, etc. Similarly, whether or not some speech is transphobic is dependent on these factors too.
I don't think I'm the one getting tripped up here. That is just a lot of pretend complexity to justify transphobic beliefs. It just being "facts" that determine your personal social beliefs is exactly the same sort of scientific appeal to justify bigotry that inclusive movements have been fighting for a generation.
If you believe someone's genitals determine how they should be treated socially, you are being transphobic. I personally think that is a stupid standard, but that is the standard that has been set for transphobia.
I cannot tell if you're trolling or just intentionally ignoring all the related nuance. You must understand there are some circumstances when it is acceptable to acknowledge that a trans women has a bio male body.
According to this "trans women should always be treated as women in ANY context" opinion what is a doctor to do when a trans women gets prostate cancer? "Sorry, that's a man-only disease, and you're a woman, so it's impossible you have it"???
Someone with a prostate having prostate cancer and needing treatment has an obvious, involuntary, cause and the person is presumably voluntarily cooperative in being treated.
Thinking that it is even possibly reasonable to exclude a woman from playing womans sport because you don't believe they are womanly enough, regardless of their beliefs, is blatant transphobia. And the long pseudo-science "not men but kinda men" justification is the sort of thing bigots tried to deploy against gays, religious minorities and women in the past. That should stop. If someone is a women, and we can treat them like women, we should treat them like a woman. Ditto how humans should be treated like humans.
> What about a situation where a cisgendered man prefers having sex with people that also have dicks? Typically, we would call this person gay, which we interpret as "men who have sex with men". However, this person would want to have sex with cis men and trans women, not because they're transphobic, but because their preference is based on the person's physical body.
What are you going to say when this person declines sex with a trans women? Is that transphobia? Should they be forced to lie about why they're declining the sex? Is wanting to have sex with people with the same genitalia as you transphobic?
> Thinking that it is even possibly reasonable to exclude a woman from playing womans sport because you don't believe they are womanly enough, regardless of their beliefs, is blatant transphobia.
This is just projecting reasoning onto me that I've never espoused. I never made the claim it's because I "don't believe they are womanly enough". The reason is that certain people have a biological advantage that others do not. The name "women's sports" is somewhat unfortunate because the goal is not to separate women from men, but actually to separate the people with that advantage from those who without.
> And the long pseudo-science "not men but kinda men" justification is the sort of thing bigots tried to deploy against gays, religious minorities and women in the past.
Again, this is refuting a point I never made. Trans men are men with a bio woman body, and vice versa for trans women. That isn't pseudo-science, it's the literal dictionary definition of what a trans person is.
https://www.deseret.com/indepth/2020/10/19/21523754/chris-pr...