Hosteurope.de shut down our servers due to “political incorrectness”
voat.co
voat.co
I find it scary that so many commenters find this to be a natural course of action for a hosting provider to take. A hosting provider caring about what I host, other than whether or not it's legal, is just as absurd as my ISP caring about what packets I send (once again, other than the legality of them). While a hosting provider's role isn't nearly as "utility" as an ISP, it's certainly close and I would be appalled if the majority of hosting providers actually took stances like this. A minority is to be expected, no different than a book publisher only publishing Christian books, but if the average book publisher was expected to publish only Christian books, I would be quite frightened.
(3) The Client may not infringe statutory prohibitions, moral
standards or the rights of third parties (copyright law, trademark
law, rights to the name and data protection law etc.) through his use
of his website or the banners that appear on the website. […] In the
event of any infringement of one of the aforementioned obligations,
the Provider shall be entitled to suspend the provision of his
services with immediate effect or to block access to the Client’s
information.
IANAL, but this may count as moral standards of third parties.
http://observers.france24.com/content/20090601-spot-differen...
Yes, a bit facetious but the point is that such a 'moral' clause is so wide that it can be misused at will. What is moral for one person may not be for another and what's moral in one society may not be in another.
Beyond that, it must be noted that hosteurope.de did not cite this as their reason. They did not use the 'moral' clause but their exact words were 'politically incorrect'.
there is no such thing as a "moral standard".
Personally I suspect hosteurope pulling the plug has more to do with the neo-Nazi forums and borderline child porn. (Voat operates by Swiss laws on legality of porn, which allow stuff Germany doesn't.)
It is possible that Voat is spinning this to make themselves look good. Also, they want more donations.
Given that, it isn't wholly surprising that their hosting service wanted no part of them.
Reddit has become a marketing tool either way, so I that was just another drop in the bucket for me and I left.
What they actually did reeks of incompetence. The reaction they got from banning the subreddit was entirely predictable, and because of this, gives the impression that they're pretty far disconnected from their users. It doesn't bode well for the long-term success of the site.
Not only that, apart from the decision, the way that it was implemented was so tone-deaf and juvenile that it went beyond mere incompetence.
For example, take a look at the announcement where they tried to outline the rationale for the decision and their methods. When they were bombarded with polite and sharp questions about their hypocrisy they avoided any response.
Here is a front-page /r/news post about Ellen Pao: https://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/3a85no/ellen_pao_must...
Read the comments. This is not a "small vocal minority". It's pretty much the entire fucking user base.
That's untrue and I'm not sure how you come to that conclusion.
The whole point of SRS is to highlight "politically incorrect" posts that have many upvotes and few downvotes.
FPH brigades. FPH brigades other subreddits, and also other forums.
I would classify them strongly as "political speech", which /r/fatpeoplehate was not.
1) Magnitudes more users -and-
2) Mods were actively promoting harassment of individuals
Reddit admins had to step in because people were being bullied and receiving violent threats, in part due to actions taken by Mods of these large communities built on prejudice and harassment.
This is why they have no problem simply telling lies about these subreddits (as they are lying about FPH). The entire point of KotakuInAction and GamerGate is to point out how dishonest this movement is... and what is the response? They lie about them!
Expecting dishonest people to respond with anything but more lies is a silly expectation.
The morally repugnant SJW movement is, at its core, a political movement. They succeeded in turning /r/politics into a monoculture around a single thought and the entire purpose of /r/SRS and all their activism on tumblr is to shame and harass anyone who thinks differently into submission.
I switched and don't frequent any of those.
Seems like you have personal beef with voat? Just stop spreading misinformation, or back it up with numbers please.
Please don't misrepresent what happened.
FPH has been bullying, harassing, and abusing individuals for almost a year. Pictures of people out in public, Facebook profiles, other Redditors, the Imgur staff, brigading other subs (inc. weight loss subs), attacking popular bloggers, YouTubers, and people on Twitter. Often this was just for the "crime" of being overweight and the abuse was nasty.
I'm tired of people defending this behaviour as being "distasteful" or "offensive." Even the title of Reddit's announcement was "removing HARASSING subreddits." And if you don't believe that's what FPH was doing then you literally didn't spend even one minute on it.
Key Reddit staff quotes:
> subreddit as a platform to harass individuals
> We’re banning behavior, not ideas.
> based on their harassment of individuals
> When we are using the word "harass", we're not talking about "being annoying" or vote manipulation or anything. We're talking about men and women whose lives are being affected and worry for their safety every day, because people from a certain community on reddit have decided to actually threaten them, online and off, every day. When you've had to talk to as many victims of it as we have, you'd understand that a brigade from one subreddit to another is miles away from the harassment we don't want being generated on our site.
If this is what you support, please leave Reddit. I welcome you gone.
Yes, and /r/shitredditsays has been bullying, harassing and abusing individuals for several years. But that subreddit is allowed to exist because Ellen Pao (reddit CEO) and admins agree with their politics.
Any other subreddit is deathly afraid to directly link to other comments on the site because they don't want to be accused of "brigading" votes which is against the rules and will get the subreddit banned. /r/shitredditsays links directly and openly vote brigades dozens of times per day. Again, because their political speech is favored.
But Reddit mostly does not give a shit about posting pictures of people without their consent. Even on bis subs like /r/pics or /r/funny you will see pictures of people in public, which obviously did not consent to have their images posted there. So that's a pretty big double standard to accuse FPH of that while completely ignoring it on default subs.
And /r/videos time after time results in people harassing and brigarding youtubers.
That IS banning an idea. They have essentially said "We're banning FPH for harassment, but if you participated in that harassment, feel free to browse our other subreddits."
I was reading /r/FPH on regular basis for few weeks before it was closed as I've found it entertaining even if distasteful. I think you have very skewed view of what it was:
-posting identifying personal info was forbidden/removed by the mods
-linking to other parts of Reddit was a no-no
-I can't remember seeing anything threatening on it there was no discussion about threats or doing bad things to specific people; just over the top venting
That is unless you understand "safety" as it is too often interpreted today: hearing not politically correct opinions. If you think the decision has anything to do with removing harassing subreddit try visiting /r/coontown and think why it's still online.
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No SJW reddit were censored.
So, clearly it is a politically motivated censorship and the excuses are not standing up to scrutiny.
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- Were the parents of the deceased ever raided and harassed on facebook?
- Was the husband of the dead wife bullied on twitter because the mods posted their handle?
- Did the black man receive PMs threatening violence?
Reddit admins banned these subreddits because they said they had clearly identifiable instances and patterns of person to person abuse. That's the point you're missing.
Edit: I'm not sure why bhayden deleted their comments
They examples you mention are repulsive, but they stay in those subs. The people don't brigade en-mass to harass people.
And your repeated use of "fat jokes" doesn't change what actually happened.
I remember there was no (at least for a short time I was reading it) calls for brigading and linking to other parts of reddit was prohibited.
For example, I think that health minister shouldn't be fat and fat health minister calling for cigarette ban is comedy in the making and mockery of the position.
With views like that I am likely to read r/fatlogic or r/FPH from time to time and even subscribe to them. I will make comments expressing my views in other subreddits as well and as such views are rare enough it's natural to link me with above mentioned communities or say that I am "coming from them to comment".
The problem is if it's then treated as brigadding. It isn't, there are just many people with politically incorrect views and they tend to gravitate to subreddits where they can express them without being automatically downvoted to death as is the case in popular subreddits. Once such subreddit becomes popular (and FPH was one of the most active subreddit on the whole site during the week it was banned) eveything can be labelled brigadding.
A sub being mentioned (but not linked) in FPH would result in massive traffic spikes. Smaller subs with a couple of hundred subscribers and a couple of thousand visits per week would suddenly get thousands of visits per hour. The increased traffic is fine, but some of those people would comment.
You've mentioned the huge numbers of subs to FPH. Even if it's only a small proportion of those people causing problems it's still a lot of people.
And you use, yet again, trivial examples that no-one (certainly not Reddit) cares about. No-one cares if you call some minister fat and stupid. What they do care about is getting people fired from their jobs; having child protection social workers called; huge amounts of brigading; hate mail to real life addresses.
Reddit would be a much nicer place if everyone who threatened to leave over last weeks bans actually left.
Where they're going I don't know.
I was never a user at Kuro5hin and only checked it infrequently but I thought it was more due to lack of management than over management that led to the initial decline.
Digg changed the way the site worked.
I've been here a fairly long time and it seems busier than ever to me. I think a lot of the shitty pointlessly mean comments are gone now which just improved s2n even if it means less comments in total.
It is very surprising, the hosting company should be concerned with providing hosting... not moderating content. that's the job of the government and the legal system.
The government forcing private companies to host content that they disagree with?
You can't have it both ways.
Private companies should serve their shareholders. They should draft a policy saying that they don't get involved in content moderation issues as a matter of policy. That's good business and good for speech. If disgruntled people want to do something about it, they can take it up with the legal system.
> Is it good business? Or is it better business to have a clear policy over what is and is not allowed, and then enforce that?
It is not possible to have a clear policy when moderating content because the world is a diverse place with diverse opinions. Where would you begin? Are Muhammad cartoons banned?
The conclusion of this issue is anything but obvious. It is hairy, ambiguous, and unclear.
An alternative could be: public shaming, and people taking their money elsewhere. There, no government required.
I feel he is allowed to at least express disapproval...
Usually doesn't do shit. The people voting, just like the people who are disgruntled, are usually a small minority. They have no material impact on anything other than the propaganda value of their actions.
Nobody in his right mind is ever going to knowingly host them for long.
The FPH was a response to the silly "body positive" movement that has been encouraging non-healthy behaviors. (The execution wasn't popular, but the idea of it is well supported)
Additionally: Another big reason for the migration is that the ban came out of nowhere. There was no interaction with the Admins, and there has been a threat that has been expressed by Pao. ["We're going to make it safe" (for who and what political adgenda has scared the users quite a bit)]
Given that the subs which were removed were not removed for offensive speech but rather for encouraging and tolerating criminal harassment off-site, these "people" are either extremely misinformed or are using free speech/political correctness as red herrings to conceal their desire to harass and abuse.
Was it that they posted a picture of the staff of Imgur that hatemail was sent, or was hatemail sent because Imgur just decided to wipe them out?
----
Did FPH cross the line with the pic. Mostly yes... But they didn't put personal information on it. Nor was it an drive to attack them. (It was done in satire [even "the dog is fat"]
Imgur is a private website that can moderate content as it sees fit. They didn't want to be associated with a hateful community, imgur generally tries to encourage positivity from what I've seen.
The appropriate response is not to harass people. It's amazing how difficult that concept is. What might seem like "satire" to you is pretty messed up behavior, and in others contexts would be an outright threat
Seems like strong endorsement to me
Given that, it isn't wholly surprising that their hosting service wanted no part of them.
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https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/39bpam/remov...
Honestly, I think that's just the excuse they used to pull the trigger on removing a popular but undesirable subreddit from the site. They claim it was about "behavior not content" but immediately banned any subreddits that popped up to replace /r/fatpeoplehate.
They should have just been up front about the reasons for the ban "It was a highly visible subreddit with content we don't agree with."
...if that were their intention, they would've wiped out the many other subreddits that have much more controversial content and fewer subscribers
The difference is that /r/fatpeoplehate was growing fast and regularly appearing on /r/all.
Ban evasion is a pretty standard reason for getting banned across just about all social networks/forums.
But if I get banned for harassment on Reddit, make a new account and don't harass anybody would I get banned? Probably not.
In addition they banned /r/thinpeoplehate which obviously was satire and did not result in harassing thin people and neither fat people as that content didn't even exist there.
Probably not since it's easy to fly under the radar due to the size of the user base. But if you do you can't really complain since you were ban evading.
What makes that "ban evasion" though? Specifically I mean. Who is evading what in the case of separate subreddits being created? Is it that anyone that was apart of /r/fatpeoplehate is now never allowed to create a subreddit (because, again, it was claimed the ban was nothing to do with content, only the behavior of the community)?
>Is it that anyone that was apart of /r/fatpeoplehate is now never allowed to create a subreddit
No, but they aren't allowed to try and recreate fatpeoplehate because that would be ban evasion.
- Posts about Ellen Pao's legal problems and rulings are repeatedly deleted
- Subbreddits have been removed from showing up in /r/all so that popular posts (often critical of Pao) are not seen by the wider community
- Brigading and betting are going wild on the side of the "politically correct" factions such as SRS, while reddits that don't do it are demonized.
It's pretty much a civil war as much as a civil war can happen on a discussion forum.
The amount of people banned for 'didndunothin' comments is unbelievable.
The most that you can find is the GitHub source, which says it's "based in Switzerland, no censorship policy as long as content is legal in Switzerland". This may or may not be true. This was certainly not usefully true, if there's a German host with censorship powers.
The user agreement (https://voat.co/help/useragreement) calls itself "a legal agreement between you and us", with no definition of "us". It also has a DMCA response policy, which strikes me as odd for a Switzerland-based company (but maybe this is normal?).
The about page (https://voat.co/about) claims it's a project from two Swedish college students. Even assuming that this is true, this isn't such a best-case scenario: we've seen many examples of sites (4chan, Reddit, etc.) where the founders were in high school or college and were at least somewhat in favor of unrestricted speech, but as their sites grew, and as they themselves grew, they've changed their minds. (Incidentally, parts of the brain that regulate appropriate social behavior, like the prefrontal cortex, only fully develop by age 25.) Even if everything Voat says about themselves is true, we should worry that in a couple of years they'll grow a conscience too.
I agree that the best case scenario for Voat is to inevitably do exactly what reddit is doing now, whether he realizes it or not. That's how it works. Right now Voat is amazing. I'm enjoying it while it lasts.
There's no amount of money Stormfront could pay me to host their vile outpourings; why should a small site hosting hate speech of every type kick up a big fuss about similar treatment?
That's not a good track record to have with your customers.
For example at least one European far-right site is hosted in the US.
You can host US critical stuff in the US, but if you start to attract a lot of traffic and active individuals, move out of the US. (Russia?)
There is no public unowned property on the Internet.
If you downvote this comment it probably means you disagree with the sentiment but still choose to suppress this speech to express that disagreement.
Hosteurope is a German hosting company.
And we Germans have only very limited freedom of speech here!
That's the key difference here. And the fact that the host didn't give them a heads up about the service cancellation.
Personally, I'd rather live in a society where driving down the road screaming "die you fucking niggers" at black people is illegal, not just frowned upon.
Define "hate speech".
Thought experiment: you're running the government, your definition applies. Oops, your opponents just got elected. Now "hate speech" is expanded to include "criticism of the new government".
The term "hate speech" is just a blunt instrument used by people and organizations to attack "speech I/we find distasteful".
See, for example, the case of Mark Steyn, who has been harassed by Islamic extremists deploying "lawfare" techniques to silence his freedom of speech.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_complaints_agains...
Every time I want to go get a fucking brew
I gotta go down to the store with the two
Oriental one-penny-counting motherfuckers;
They make a nigger mad enough to cause a little ruckus.
Thinking every brother in the world’s out to take,
So they watch every damn move that I make.
They hope I don’t pull out a Gat, try to rob
Their funky little store but, bitch, I got a job.
So don’t follow me up and down your market
Or your little chop suey ass will be a target
Of a nationwide boycott.
Juice with the people, that’s what the boy got.
So pay respect to the black fist
Or we’ll burn your store right down to a crisp.
And then we’ll see ya…
‘Cause you can’t turn the ghetto into black Korea.even so, you are still wrong because free speech means exactly that, speech that you or I may not agree with.
if it were limited to speech that only some or the majority aligned with then it wouldn't be called 'free speech' would it?
Saying "free speech only refers to the government censoring you" (at least in the context of America) is like saying that American society and culture consist _solely_ of the official bureaucratic proceedings of its constituent governmental bodies. In other words, its intellectually dishonest.
The company behind is not obligated to host it, but that is not relevant for your comment.