Comment by smcl | Hacker News Reader

Comment by smcl | Hacker News Reader

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GitHub will have removed this because they don't want to be seen hosting racist shit on their platform. They don't want that because as it turns out the vast majority of the population isn't on board with racism, so not doing so would empower their competitors, hurt their brand and affect their bottom line. It's the same with Disney (the "oh a black little mermaid!?" stuff) and all the other the other ultimately banal things that get people frothing at the mouth about corporations going "woke" - it's not a conspiracy, it's not about politics, it's simply bad business to appear welcoming to hateful or bigoted people.

That said, I personally think it should be difficult to be racist, homophobic, transphobic and the like online. I'm not engaging in debates, posting outraged tweetstorms or trying to get anyone doxxed/fired/cancelled when I see some anonymous edgelord throwing the n-bomb around or calling for LGBTQ+ friends to be killed. I'm just going to quietly report the post and move on.

Ye I don't see anyone quitting github over some random rimworld mod. I claim bullshit on that

People still buy Nestle and they do far worse shit.

People have no problem supporting corporations that do business with racist regimes.

Claiming somehow people (other than some virtue signalling) would start migrating in droves to gitlab because there is a mod for rimworld is insane.

No you're right, there's not going to be a mass exodus because of one mod. However if GitHub became known as the 8chan of git where anything goes, that would likely cause a slow decline that would be difficult to turn around. The way you prevent that is by drawing a line and saying that if someone crosses that line they're gone. I guess they've deemed this user to have crossed the line.

Whenever I see "virtue signalling" or "free speech" mentioned regarding tech companies like GitHub, Facebook, Twitter etc it's usually someone pretending they don't understand how companies work (and ironically doing their own little form of virtue signalling). Companies want to make money. You don't make money by pissing off the population. GitHub seem to have decided that allowing a user they've deemed as questionable is going to piss off more people than kicking that user off. If you don't like it and want to exercise your freedom of speech and/or signal that you're more virtuous than the rest of us then you are welcome to self-host or try out GitLab, BitBucket, sr.ht or CodeBerg.

Right but proper reaction to that is sending a message of "hey this repo breaks TOS because X Y and Z". You get the author chance to explain (if it is genuine misunderstanding, which will happen just due to culture differences and some moderators being, well, utterly incompetent) or fix their attitude, or remove their stuff.

And in case of someone discussing it, like here, there is no need to guess and dig if the reason is given plainly by the moderator and points directly to the offense. Instead of speculation you get people look at it and just go "oh, yeah, that's fair" and move on.

Yeetus deletus of everything, including unrelated things, because you broke TOS point which we don't even tell you how did you break it (which is pretty fucking common with any big tech, regardless of the reason, even if reason is just "triggered some heuristics in our system") is not okay.

I agree with what you're saying. I don't like racist/homophobic/transphobic behavior but I find it hard to reconcile that with free speech. And I think they only way you can change someone's mind is by allowing free speech and engaging in conversations with them to try to change their minds. Banning them would just make them look for other channels to communicate and find like minded people and their bad ideas will never be challenged.

You mentioned the "black little mermaid" and it's hard not to draw a parallel between a mod in a game that allows you to change the skin color of a character and the "woke" media race swapping well known characters like the little mermaid, Triss from the Witcher, Achilles, etc.

> I find it hard to reconcile that with free speech

I don't know what to say - if you're expecting "free speech" somewhere that has a big TOS you agreed to which doesn't say "hey this is the free speech zone, go nuts!" then you are in for a shock.

The Little Mermaid is an film for kids. Kids aren't "woke" - the only people who care about the skin colour of a fictional character in an animated film are adults. If someone's upset because they see a black person, they might want to take a deep breath and think really hard about what's really bothering them.

> And I think they only way you can change someone's mind is by allowing free speech and engaging in conversations with them to try to change their minds

... if the person you are engaging with is open to having their mind changed. If you ever tried that with online trolls, you would quickly find out that's not really going to happen when person on the other side doesn't want that and can just decide to waste as much of your time as they can.

Github has the right to remove any account it wants because terms of service generally allow that kind of stuff without repercussions (though they need to explain why in certain legislations by law).

However, if Github is actively curating content, that means they're also responsible for the stuff they do leave up. The argument that a company isn't legally responsible for its users content relies heavily on the company having little control over said content.

This direct influence is what got the thepiratebay guys and the megaupload guys arrested, or at least what made the case persuable enough to put effort into it.

Id it's true that Github is actively removing account that post things they deem as racist, then I will judge Github on any older content on the platform not taken down. There is a lot of weird shit on Github that's apparently okay if a stupid mod for a video game is considered as a reason to refuse service to someone.

Companies are free to choose what they do and do not host, but that freedom is a double edged sword.

> However, if Github is actively curating content, that means they're also responsible for the stuff they do leave up.

This is an entirely incorrect reading of Section 230.

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