> But just because there’s a serious problem doesn’t mean that every response is a good one.
This is a fantastic line, one that I'm tucking away for future use.
This is a fantastic line, one that I'm tucking away for future use.
"We must do something; this is something; therefore we must do this."
I've seen that thing rephrased so many ways, it's not even funny anymore. People always fall for that bias. I'm sure if you make some loud proclamations that "Global Warming will destroy everything, we must go and kill the wales", you will get followers.
"1. We must do something.
2. This is something.
3. Therefore, we must do this."
1. Nothing is going to happen
2. Something maybe is going to happen, but we should do nothing about it
3. Maybe we should do something about it, but there's nothing we can do
4. Maybe there's something we could have done, but it's too late now
1] doing something, even if it proves to be wrong, is better than doing nothing.
2] asking forgiveness is better than asking permission.
these [1,2] support each other in a circular discourse.
if you do nothing, you hesitate in want for confirmation of the right thing, you are ineffective.
asking permission, you hesitate in lieu of risking the wrong thing, you are ineffective rather than acting, and later apologizing for doing the wrong thing.
"We fully support criminal and civil liability for those who abuse and harass others."
That's not sufficient. These are extremely slow mechanisms, when they work at all. The harassed individual can suffer for years, and the EFF isn't rushing out to aid them. As their post says, "law enforcement and legislators have failed".
The Internet is different from the physical world. It's much easier for people to cross legal jurisdictions and hide from law enforcement. Law enforcement and legislators haven't merely failed. They will continue to fail for a long time, during which there are real consequences to human beings.
The Internet is going to have to develop its own ways of dealing with people who use it to harm others. The EFF could help lead that. But they haven't yet, and so others are going to take action when they feel it's appropriate. They'll take the EFF's injunction to "resist the temptation to step in" as being worth the paper it's written on.
So far, every "way" that's been developed of dealing with people who harm others has itself been used to harm others in more extreme ways than the harm they were supposed to mitigate.
Has it?
Some of the people Kiwifarms harassed were driven to suicide. Your argument is that having a forum taken offline is a more extreme form of harm than literal death?
Instead it is that this precedent can be used by much more authoritarian groups to target groups that you support.
Now its KF, and after that other countries are telling these tech services to take down gay and lesbian support groups, or even a state in the US could force abortion services offline.
Its a loophole that could be used as an end run around the 1st amendment, to take out groups that you support just as much as it can be used against things that you want taken down.
Are you OK with sacrificing those groups for your cause? What would you tell them? That they are just worthwhile collateral damage?
Those things have and are happening, and kiwifarms is not the reason any of that occur.
Yes they are, and when other websites get taken down this gives leverage to authoritarian groups to target them even more.
It directly increases the amount of requires and pressure that is put on them, even though, yes, pressure is already on these groups.
The pressure increases every time a provider caves to demands.
Malware and phishing are illegal.
Fascist genocidal maniacs want to kill everyone that disagrees with them, including the gays.
Neat slippery slope you’ve crafted, but it doesn’t logically follow.
You also can’t walk in to a crowded space and yell “FIRE”, I guess that means the gubment is coming for your houses heating?
This is repeated often but there's no proof for these claims. There's more evidence that Reddit has a greater kill count than KF.
Who?
If they want to be the Electronic Frontier Foundation, they can take inspiration from the self-organization that occurs on other frontiers. When there are no rules, you get vigilantes. Well managed, the vigilantes establish the rules, by popular consent. Poorly managed, the most violent ones impose their own rules.
The EFF is well positioned to help establish rules. So merely saying "There shouldn't be any rules", they'll simply be brushed aside one way or the other.
This perfectly describes Democracy as well, however.
Are you anti-democratic?