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Comment by AriaSalvatrice | Hacker News Reader

Do you have any news about your fight against websites dedicated to the targeted harassment of minorities?

How are so many people on this forum of all places advocating for unaccountable opaque private entities to almost cut off access to the internet for organizations that have not been convicted of any crime?

The old programmers had a left leaning liberterian trend, but today's programmers are a product of institutions that teach and support censorship for their cause etc and will happily support that sort of thing against their political enemies.

It shouldn't surprise you. The companies involved aren't doing censorship from the top down, it's censorship being demanded by their employees.

It's partially what turned me off of getting into certain industries which heavily involve programming.

My own willingness to learn the skills was a large part, don't get me wrong lol - but I'm happier making little scripts and tools/toys for me and a few others to use to make their day to day lives easier.

I would never want to work for a larger company like a FAANG outlet, nor any other media-based tech company like game developers. Too many politics have been injected into the identity of a typical programmer, when it should just be about the code.

While I’ll agree that things have gotten too political for my tastes, don’t you want a say in how your company operates, what products it builds, and how the products you build are used? For me it’s definitely not just about the code.

I would advise you to join and continue to be apathetic toward political issues. The vast majority of us don’t care. We just want a massive paycheck. Don’t let political activists prevent you from pursuing your career goals.

Lol. I know, right? But there aren't many of us old-school "The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it" types left anymore. And sometimes it feels like we're getting run outta town. We always knew this day would come, and Kiwi Farms is kind of a perfect litmus test for whether legal controversial speech can actually persist on the Internet. It's almost the only one left. 8chan is pretty dead. 4chan sold out years ago.

It's honestly pretty scary to me. Feels like a corporate <-> academic <-> government synthesis around an ideology that's extremely unpopular to purge any dissent. That's a big deal, even if you despise (like I do) the 8chan crowd.

I know. I see it. And I don't know anymore how to tell people the emperor has no clothes. On odd numbered days I think the culture is going in a dangerous direction that will lead to unintended consequences. On even numbered days I think I'm just an old man yelling about the cloud, and if Gen Z really thinks all this is good and normal then fuck it. It's your world.

Because speech has real consequences, especially misinformation?

If I go through your post history I am sure I could find misinformation. Should you be cut off from various services?

It's easy to support the creation of a monster when you're absolutely sure the monster will love you and tear your enemies to bits. But monsters aren't known for their loyalty.

Targeted harassment of minorities sounds like a crime to me. Shouldn't the police be investigating and prosecuting this crime instead of some random internet CDN company?

Yeah, they really should! And the fact that they are not and never do implies that perhaps we should be looking into alternative solutions to the problem!

I agree. If harassment laws haven’t been updated to better reflect the digital age, then folks should be demanding their lawmakers to do their job and change the law. And, you know, enforce it. That is the purpose of the Executive branch of government (in the US, at least).

The current flavor of exerting social pressure on companies to, in effect, enforce their version of what the law should be, won’t end well for anyone.

What’s righteous today will become the evil of tomorrow. Political winds shift all the time.

We shouldn’t box ourselves into a corner where corporations enforce the rule of the people. There’s a threshold that once reached will be very hard to undo. I certainly don’t want to live in that version of the future.

We should all be working to fix the broken system we’ve got, not throw it away and start from scratch.

Oh, the harassment laws are perfectly up to date. The problem is that we then have to rely on...

1. that being the case literally everywhere; otherwise, it's just a matter of moving the harassment sources to a friendly jurisdiction

2. the police to enforce them, although the police are known to often be complicit in similar conduct (harassment of minorities)

3. this enforcement to actually cause positive changes in people's behavior, which, given the current state of the US "criminal justice" system, won't happen

The legal system is ill-equipped to handle this not because of a lack of laws, but because the legal system is full of humans who often don't treat the safety of vulnerable people as a priority.

Blasphemy is a crime in many countries. Let's burn all of the books and block all of the websites that are guilty of it (without going through courts because that is too slow) so that the people, who we do not trust to make judgements for themselves, are not exposed to it!

The fact that a tool can be used immorally does not make all uses of the tool immoral.

If you own a store somewhere that shoplifting doesn't get prosecuted, should you look into alternative solutions like kidnapping the shoplifters and locking them in your basement?

It is not in the US

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32592487.

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