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Comment by shp0ngle | Hacker News Reader

Yeah for example 8chan and kiwifarms are usually censored. I'm not that mad about it, some censorship is always necessary (you don't want links to child porn), but it's weird that Wikipedia pretends there is no censorship. And it's kind of arbitrary.

Why is stormfront - an openly nazi forum (a really old one at that) - allowed, but kiwifarms - an anti-trans doxxing forum - isn't? It's both bad

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Do they pretend there's no censorship? I don't see that. They block spam and I'm certain no one objects to that, so the bare fact that they exclude some information clearly does not constitute the status "censored"

I'd imagine the reason kiwifarms gets different treatment is because the site is a lot worse than the descriptor "anti-trans doxxing forum" might make you believe — it's a website designed specifically to facilitate long term stalking and harassment campaigns. Trans people are their flavour of the month right now but a few years ago it was anyone disabled.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_...

https://foundation.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/Resolution:Controver...

If there is some official policy which links are allowed and which are not, I'll shut up.

Why are some links allowed and some not, what is the policy, if there is some.

I see

> Wikimedia projects are not censored. Some kinds of content, particularly that of a sexual, violent or religious nature, may be offensive to some viewers; and some viewers may feel such content is disrespectful or inappropriate for themselves, their families or their students, while others may find it acceptable.

which seems to me against link censorship.

> Do they pretend there's no censorship?

Yes, they do. Censorship of official links is against explicit Wikipedia policy[1], but it doesn't matter because every policy can be overridden by consensus. In practice this means that a handful of professional activists can (and do) censor it as they see fit, since they can determine for themselves whether such a "consensus" exists.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:External_links#Offic...

The Mediawiki environment became increasingly hostile to "the external world" though.

I am making a research project on grammatical gender in French, that I host on Wikiversity (there is a dedicated research space there). Lately I get an increasingly large number of rejection of saving my contributions, because some sites are considered "unreliable sources". But in my project, I am looking to document what people use in practice in their written exchanges. That they express lies or try to spread disinformation is irrelevant from the linguistic perspective I’m conducting this project. But due to this software enforced policy, I get prevented from documenting my sources from time to time.

If they're spreading disinformation, obviously they also aren't accurately representing their own speech patterns. That's just common sense.

> If they're spreading disinformation, obviously they also aren't accurately representing their own speech patterns.

But GP is not documenting the 'true' speech patterns of the people spreading the disinformation, but rather the speech patterns they use when they are spreading disinformation (which, as you pointed out, might be different from their normal speech pattern). So the sources are still good enough for that.

Is it really true that Wikipedia doesn’t have a formal, credible, method of determining whether a “consensus” exists?

It’s true that there is nothing which should work in theory, and yet mostly does in practice.

I'm a bit annoyed by it. Censoring "lawful but awful" speech is the thin edge of the wedge. An existing precedent of censoring legal websites reduces my confidence that Wikipedia will be able to stand up to censorship pressure (including from its own editors) in the future.

So called "lawful and fine" speech don't need free speech protections, nor any protections for that matter. It's precisely the so called "lawful but awful" speech that do.

The category of speech most in need of free speech protection is "unlawful but fine".

Let me put it this way: Nobody is going to censor fine speech, FSVO fine.

I think the argument in this case is that it may cross the line into unlawful behavior. Kiwifarms has been linked to suicides, and encouraging suicide is a crime. 8chan has similarly been linked to violent crimes.

There are cases where speech is illegal, even in the USA, which probably has the strictest standards for protecting speech in the world.

If you think a website is doing something illegal, you can report it to the police or the FBI, depending on what type of crime it is. Kiwifarms has a US corporate entity controlled by a US citizen, it isn't like this is some tor darknet market hosted in Moldova or something.

Generally though sites aren't responsible for their users' speech, so if someone does cross the line, that would be on the user, not the site. As long as the site responds to any lawful subpoenas, they would stay in the clear.

So if a person advocates (for example) murder on an American site, this is fine until the police say it isn't? That is not a standard that 99% of the internet follows, and for good reasons.

The US legal system is 100% wholly incapable of keeping up with the pace of internet content for this sort of thing, so embracing the spirit of the laws on speech and applying them within user-content-based-sites is an appropriate minimum.

Even Musk who wanted to turn Twitter into a site dedicated to free speech specifically said he wanted to focus primarily on moderating content based on US laws (something that he has apparently walked back since then since Twitter still aggressively moderates legal content).

That's the whole point of Section 230. Service providers generally have immunity with respect to third-party content posted by their users. If a user posts something, it's their speech, and the user is therefore held responsible for it, not the website. Section 230 is what makes an internet of user-generated content possible.

https://www.eff.org/issues/cda230

> an anti-trans doxxing forum

That is reductive. Kiwifarms is a shit hole for sure, but it has more than just anti-trans doxxing. It's like classifying 4Chan based on /b/

It’s unclear how you meant this, but it reads as

> Sure, the Klan has some bad hombres, but we also run Checkers Tuesdays, maths tutoring for underprivileged youths Friday mornings, and Bible study Sundays.

That is, at some point, the bad overwhelms any good.

And sometimes the good is used to spread the bad, or the whole. Cults sometimes recruit like this, abusive people can be nice at first, narcissistic traited particularly, violent fringe groups offer camaraderie, yakuza doing charity and relief supplies. So I agree 100% that it really matters where the good is coming from.

>That is reductive

I agree, Kiwifarms is much more shitty than that. To quote from Wikipedia "It now hosts threads targeting many individuals, including minorities, women, LGBT people, neurodivergent people, people considered by Kiwi Farms users to be mentally ill or sexually deviant, feminists, journalists, Internet celebrities, and video game or comics hobbyists."

Do you see the irony in quoting Wikipedia's view of a site to show that Wikipedia's stance on not linking that site is OK, in a discussion about how Wikipedia is censored? Have you actually looked for yourself instead of just trusting the propaganda?

Stormfront pushes white supremacism in a generic way, Kiwifarms targets individuals by name (and address and date of birth and…).

I find it very disturbing that the Wikipedia thread posted in the post above discusses the topic like it's about CP. It's clearly not. It's completely about the political implications of 8ch, especially in the aftermath of the connection between the Christchurch shooting by Brenton Tarrant.

I have browsed 8ch extensively in the past, and continue to browse 4chan. You'll be exposed to disgusting imagery from time to time, no doubt, but the idea that 8ch is censored because of illegal and disgusting imagery is so incredibly disingenuous, this is clearly about political censorship of right wing extremism.

If I had a bit less faith in humanity I would even go as far as to suggest that the Wikipedia thread is crafted to be about CP and not politics for the sake of justifying censorship and rewriting history. 8ch was not controversial because of CP, it was controversial because of extremist politics, and attempting to rewrite history like this is just so typical of Wikipedians these days.

This is an extremely dishonest and factually untrue comment.

No, it is not.

the guy who made it said that he found it reprehensible but wouldn't remove it, so yes promoted pedohilia by turning a blind eye in the name of "free speech"

And the reason why they're even having the discussion is not because the site might contain CP. The reason they're having the discussion is because the board was host to a political discussion board which hosted right wing extremists, and various kind of censors in the west don't think these people should be able to act freely on the internet.

CSAM is literally what got it delisted from Google search results in summer 2015

And this is why the website even has a Wikipedia article? No, ofcourse not. The site is known because of it's political board: /pol/.

Its Wikipedia article actually exists due to to both gamergate and CSAM as evidenced by the first actual commits. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=8chan&diff=634741...

>8ch was not controversial because of CP

Huh?

>Google appears to have taken an unprecedented step in filtering its search results by banning an entire domain—and adding a warning about __"suspected child abuse content"__ to a search for the domain itself.

Emphasis mine.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/08/8chan-hosted-con...

It is controversial because of the history of CSAM and the history of extremism.

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