University of Wisconsin hospitals have blocked the Gab social media platform | Hacker News Reader

University of Wisconsin hospitals have blocked the Gab social media platform

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I'm at the hospital today for an appointment and tried to access a link to a Gab post that a friend sent to me. After making a few attempts to access the post with the different browsers on my phone, I turned on my VPN and et voila, the post loaded.

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I'd be more surprised if the internet didn't have some sort of restrictions. However, since the university is public, there's probably a free speech argument somewhere, to be made.

Are other social media sites blocked? Other categories of sites blocked? Or just the edgy sites?

So? What's wrong with not wanting hate speech and white supremacy on your network? They can do what they like, their network, their rules.

Where do you draw the line between this and dishonest & dangerous people taking power and then blocking what they dislike on the entire country's network? How do you define what constitutes bannable illicit speech without injecting a political or ideological bent into that attempt?

I draw the line at "its a private organization, their network, and they can do whatever they want".

You don't understand though. This was something they really, really agreed with.

So your ISP is private organization thus they can do whatever they want.

Like blocking Gab for hate and Like blocking hackerNews due to "computer crime". Like blocking WashingtonPost due to writing a mean article about them.

Would this bother you?

Taking it a step up to the trunk lines, A lot of those are private now. Do they have the same ability?

Being downvoted, but that is the problem. Good thing we didn’t get into phone or SMS monitoring like this… yet.

Bit of a minefield here. We see Russia intercepting ISP traffic, and of course the Great Firewall means that China doesn’t see the full internet.

Should UW also block cell phone traffic with suspected extremists? Should UW prevent research? For example, of course a hospital should block all search results that have images of genitals because of sex, right? Wait, doctors need to see these things.

I don’t caucus with the Gabbers, but this seems overreaching.

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