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Comment by catiopatio | Hacker News Reader

I am such a free speech advocate.

Why is a belief in the common carrier model ridiculous?

That's not the ridiculous bit, the ridiculous bit is the advocating that the government crack down on people saying mean things about third parties to each other on the Internet.

And make no mistake, that's 99% of what KiwiFarms does, the last time this came up on hackernews I browsed through hundreds of posts in a bunch of threads to see if there was anything other than that going on, so if its there it's in the DMs (and policing person-to-person communication is utterly insane) or very rare.

What they're really saying is the the bar for ISP intervention in speech should be higher than the bar for prosecution. Which is not particularly ridiculous.

It's not so much about the particular site.

If kiwifarms was just about being a jerk and not about doxing I do not think people would have as big a problem.

Having accessed that disgusting site for the third time, it definitely looks like it's 80% being a jerk and 20% doxxing.

They want to be common carriers, but also be able to discriminate users.

Start by banning racists and bigoted users, then slowly start discriminating against other groups while offering new "private connection" for only $9.99/mo extra.

I find it baffling that so much of the public is content with ostracizing despicable people when it's precisely "racists and bigoted users".

The only reason that those are despicable nowadays is precisely because minorities and their supporters, which were considered despicable at the time, exercised their freedom of speech.

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