How the Netherlands facilitate the most hated websites in the world

> most hated

There's something about this word that makes me a bit cautious when it comes to media. I remember "the most hated man in America" that every news agency was telling us to hate without ever having heard of him. Dozens of CEO's have done the exact same thing as he did since then, and no one can name a single one of them because they are large companies who pay huge amounts of advertising dollars to the people who decide what is "most hated"

It put the pharma industry and their completely legal practices in an uncomfortable spotlight, and the media which happily takes their money came in running defense to find a martyr. Thankfully he was jailed for nearly a decade after making a joke on twitter so the problem is completely solved now :/

> In 2019, in the span of a few months, three gunmen posted their ‘manifesto’ on the site in advance of their terrorist attacks.

Think it is fair to note that the horrendous one in New Zealand was livestreamed in full on Facebook.

So there's an article in Dutch reiterating all the expected slightly “simplified” talking points for the laymen, an article in Finnish doing the same, and I have even seen a decently sized article in Russian that also copied all the descriptions of that supposed battle between good and evil verbatim. Who coordinates all of that? Please don't tell me that some Twitter drama queen has such abilities, even small local media outlets know there's always a steady supply of internet users demanding something, and it's best to ignore them.

Last time such internet lynch mobs with a touching story and progressive slogans appeared with such support from the media, the whole thing happened to be staged by porn studios to remove all the competing content from porn streaming sites, which they now have all to themselves because only they happen to have papers to prove the legality (or “legality”) of materials.

Most hated website in America or Democratic run areas of America, certainly not the world.

Most non Americans don't even know about their existence let alone hating them.

Alternative title:

"How the Netherlands facilitates free speech on the internet, and how that's a bad thing!"

Good on the Netherlands' datacenter for having the spine to run through controversy. If it doesn't violate local law, it should stay up, regardless of how yuppies want to pearl clutch.

I’m sure if you put together a representative sample of Internet users from around the world, you’ll find that more of them hate cia.gov than have heard of any of the websites mentioned in TFA. Most of them either don’t give a shit about the storming of U.S. Capitol or look at it with amusement like any other drama.

For context, NRC is a Dutch quality newspaper, and this is a translation of a Dutch article with a target audience of Dutch people.

... that nobody knows about, until this article reminded us of their existence. Good for the netherlands, i 'd rather they be the host of terrible things

I'd love to know how many suicides had been linked to large mainstream social media sites. Just for context.

Interseting/informative article! I feel like I haven't read actual journalism in a while! It has a strong point of view, and might be itself part of a campaign, but it's still telling me about the matter.

I find it interesting that the risk curve around how permissive a host is. If they're not permissive, they're possibly going to take your server down at the slightest external pressure. If they're too permissive, they're probably hopelessly embattled and might themselves go bust. But what's the sweet spot? For me, I mostly buy nearlyfreespeech.net's shtick (though less so nowadays) and have used them for about 20 years now, but am always keeping an eye out for other tolerant/stable hosts.

I understand that the general audience may need an explanation of the relation between QAnon, the attempted coup, and 8kun, but it's not as if the people who tried to intervene with democracy were all on 8kun reading their "secret messages". Some people go to "the source" but many find the reprehensible behaviour tolerated on those websites to be off-putting. Instead, the rambling and keyboard mashing gets filtered and forwarded to Facebook and other general purpose social media.

Someone larping as a deep state agent isn't doing anything wrong necessarily, the QAnon folks are interpreting literal gibberish as a call to action. Like astrology or animal sacrifice, people are looking for patterns to confirm their preconceptions or to try to make sense of the world around them. 8kun didn't create the Qult, years of corruption, lack of education and a festering, though not necessarily misplaced, hatred for politicians did.

8kun is an easy target because it lets politicians and news agencies point at something bad. The claims of terrorist content, racism, and child porn are not necessarily wrong, but the same content is also posted all over other social media if you go looking for it. The biggest difference is the scale at which the websites operate and big tech's automated moderation (versus 8kun's human moderation). The Qultists gather in "normal" social media like Facebook but because normal people use that it's difficult to point at it and say "this is bad and should be banned".

It's funny how the USA so strongly enforces freedom of speech by law but at the same time drives away websites like 8kun because of the terrible things people say online when they're allowed to express themselves anonymously.

Debating > Deplatforming

Aside from being an endless game of whack-a-mole, I feel the race to deplatform undermines ideological diveristy and other key civic values.

Has there been any reduction in the number of misthinkers? Anecdotally, no.

Maybe it's best to step back and look at the bigger picture:

- Why are people seeking out this type of content?

- Why has there been an increase in the fragmentation of American (and Western) society?

- Why do so many of us feel so alone, despite being more connected?

Society is ill. I am unsure of the underlying problem but think it may be related to a lack of civic education and governments needing to reevaluate their end of the social contract.

Belastingdienst.nl ?

This seems related, maybe someone has access to share?

https://www.hs.fi/visio/art-2000009056356.html

Why do the people here have so much skepticism towards this sort of reporting?

Like do you have any idea what kind of content is hosted on these sites? The main headline on the news site they allude to is this: "Big Tech to Increase Surveillance and Censorship of White People Following Biden Speech"

Are you seriously trying to justify this? Do you seriously think that the people hosting this shouldn't be held accountable by the press and public?

I'm all for free speech, which includes the freedom of the press to bring disgusting shit like this to light so that it can be publicly disgraced

There are many thoughts that inhabit the position of heresy, haraam, etc. in the new secular religious fundamentalism.

At the extreme end of the haraam spectrum is outright bigotry where conceptually it is suggested that some groups are fundamentally superior to others based on biology, and, importantly, therefore society ought to be structured in a way that takes this alleged "fact" into account.

Over time, this religion has expanded the scope of what is considered haraam. There are secret hand gestures, "dog whistles" and, my favourite - unconscious thoughts, that can be used to identify blasphemers. Today, mostly in the west, it is suggested that one must spend time interrogating one's biases, in an L. Ron Hubbard audit kind of way (minus the E-Meters), where seminars and workshops are held to confront one's deep rooted and hidden evils, just as they did in medieval times, when many were thought to have been possessed by the devil, or by evil spirits.

Over the millennia that human civilization has blossomed around the world, many of the forms it has taken are unique and beautiful. As the years passed, many cultural traditions in the fine arts, music, theatre and culinary arts have been lost to time. These practices were not immune to the free market of ideas. If something new comes along which elicits more currency in some form or another, the market tends to be driven towards it. Preserving one's way of life is not necessarily rooted in xenophobia or hatred. To me, this is an important distinction that is often lost in these conversations. This feeling is born out of honoring many of those who came before you, not out of hatred for someone else's way of life. This religion makes no room for this type of distinction. It is devoid of nuance, like all fundamentalism is.

The modern argument against this type of thinking is that there are groups of people whose ancestors are so heinous (or, as the saying goes "deplorable and irredeemable"), with nothing in their legacy that is worthy of preservation. Not even a statue of their likeness deserves to be seen by others. An enforced good and evil binary must come into play by applying a contemporary hierarchy of sin and virtue over historical figures. The enforced narrative is that these people must have necessarily been wholly evil to the core, there is no other explanation that ought to be accepted for their behavior, and, importantly, "therefore" it should follow that their descendants and supporters should atone.

This religion has the hallmarks of all previous religious movements such as witch-hunting, mob justice, inquisition, etc. Religion can be a wonderful inward and spiritual journey that adds balance, structure, community and harmony to people's lives. These aspects of religion which veer into organized political movements that seek to impose change on the rest of society to shape the world in their chosen image, are diabolical. They ought to be universally opposed.

The histories of western countries seem to have transformed into mythological religious epic status. He died on the cross for us, therefore. They enslaved, therefore. They conquered, therefore.

If I am someday killed by a white supremacist for my ethnicity, and it so happens that the white supremacist posts on one of these websites, I would hope that this is not used as an excuse to restrict their speech. I would objectively consider this to be a far worse act. Destroying a good idea like freedom of thought, even to save my own life is absolutely not worth it.

Ironic that I can't access the website (possibly geoblocked).

I've noticed a difference in tone:

> The site is openly racist and antisemitic and it regularly advocates a second genocide of Jews.

> „Right now, Nick Lim is like a wounded elk”, says internet researcher Guilmette, who monitors the websites’ every move. „It is time to move in quickly for the kill, before he gets away again.”

If I didn't know better, I'd assume these people don't want others to be able to advocate for certain ideas. It's funny how that works. One side gets to use the freedom of speech excuse when, say, targeting children, but merely disagreeing with that magically becomes hate speech, which totally isn't free speech, and must be mercilessly destroyed.

Oh well, people can go into the streets if they want to speak and, hey, once it really comes to that point there will be more than strong words now won't there be?

eh most people never heard of 8kun or Daily Stormer

The two important questions of our age are still:

1. Who gets to decide what is "true" and what is "misinformation"?

2. Who gets to decide what can and cannot be published on the internet?