ISPs should not police online speech no matter how awful it is

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/08/isps-should-not-police-online-speech-no-matter-how-awful-it

by mantiq • 3 years ago

1460 913 3 years ago

eff.org

freedomben• 3 years ago

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.

jfengel2• 3 years ago

The EFF's response is not a good one, either. The previous sentence is:

"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.

commandlinefan2• 3 years ago

develop its own ways of dealing with people who use it to harm others

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.

zamadatix• 3 years ago

The EFF can defend its mission in multiple ways. One, as you point out, is offering an alternative solution all agree is better. This is fantastic if you can find a feasible solution everyone actually agrees is better but there is no guarantee such a solution is going to be found until after you've managed to find it. Another way for the EFF to defend its mission, as this article aims for, is to make an argument the loss of what the mission is trying to protect is not worth the gains made by tossing it to the side. You can be unpersuaded and disagree with the balance but the lack of alternative solution alone isn't proof of a bad response.

Gartent2• 3 years ago

"The system is broken, we need vigilantes"

dotnet00• 3 years ago

The faster you make a mechanism, the more likely it is to be abused. We've already seen several times where bad actors have coopted movements like metoo and taken advantage of the speed of the response to ruin an innocent person and then get off relatively unscathed because almost no one cares once the initial outrage has passed.

ThrowawayR23• 3 years ago

Even if you are not a believer in liberalism as a philosophy, you should at least understand that the instant we agree let infrastructure businesses start pruning speech they don't like without any accountability is also the instant that the wealthy and powerful start thinking about how to gain influence over or outright control those businesses. One would have to be absolutely bonkers to think that's going to have a good outcome in the long run.

jdthedisciple3• 3 years ago

These are extremely slow mechanisms, when they work at all.

This perfectly describes Democracy as well, however.

Are you anti-democratic?

rolph• 3 years ago

let me tell you about a military 'headset'

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.

marcosdumay• 3 years ago

"Being on the border of the precipice, they decided to act and step ahead."

"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.

MiguelX413• 3 years ago

*“…we must go and kill Wales”

bewaretheirs• 3 years ago

The contrary belief was once mocked on "Yes, Prime Minister" as:

"1. We must do something.

2. This is something.

3. Therefore, we must do this."

fallingknife4• 3 years ago

And to cover the opposite case:

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

umvi• 3 years ago

The politician's syllogism (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politician%27s_syllogism)

jqpabc123• 3 years ago

Maybe Hurricane needs to police it's own network first.

My web server constantly receives malicious probes and invalid requests from Hurricane owned IPs.

How does a malicious actor get direct access to a Tier 1 address? The only way I can see is by being inside their facilities.

remram2• 3 years ago

Hurricane Electric operates tunnelbroker.net, a free SIT tunnel to provide IPv6 connectivity. All those clients (like me) will be using a HE-owned IPv6 address.

They also offer dedicated servers and colocation services: http://he.net/colocation.html

They are not only a transit provider, in fact they wouldn't need to own IPs at all if they were.

NoZebra120vClip2• 3 years ago

They are not only a transit provider, in fact they wouldn't need to own IPs at all if they were.

Inconvenient fact: Layer 3 routers use IP addresses for each of their network interfaces. This is actually how they provide transit.

dumpsterdiver2• 3 years ago

Oh wow, I didn't realize which "hurricane" we were talking about until you said that. Years ago I wrote a script that automatically updated firewall rules to block apparently malicious IP blocks (based upon observable behavior as well as IP reputation), and Hurricane was consistently near the top of the offender list. I recall finding it interesting at the time how the various Hurricane servers showing up in our logs reminded of an actual hurricane.

mortenjorck• 3 years ago

It's heartening to see the EFF come out sticking to principles on this in a time when other organizations of their stature have not.

I hate to say it, but I could easily imagine something like the ACLU opposing the EFF on this.

amiga3865• 3 years ago

Indeed, the ACLU have lost their way.

https://web.archive.org/web/20210608004853/https://www.nytim...

the organization finds itself riven with internal tensions over whether it has stepped away from a founding principle — unwavering devotion to the First Amendment.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Civil_Liberties_Union...

Beginning in 2017, some individuals claimed the ACLU was reducing its support of unpopular free speech (specifically by declining to defend speech made by conservatives) in favor of identity politics, political correctness, and progressivism.

_lvbh• 3 years ago

Meanwhile in the rest of the world, we don’t even have free speech.

If only America could export their constitution like they do their weapons

jasonlotito2• 3 years ago

Indeed, the ACLU have lost their way.

Indeed, they haven't.

The memo listed several factors to consider, including "the extent to which the speech may assist in advancing the goals of white supremacists or others whose views are contrary to our values."

i.e. Consider whether we'd be arguing against our own goals.

How anyone reasonable could consider this a bad thing, I don't know.

https://www.aclu.org/news/civil-liberties/defending-speech-w...

They've defended people and organizations I oppose, but their reasoning has always been sound.

That the ACLU debates and reflects is admirable.

chonkerz48• 3 years ago

The EFF is arguing here that companies should not take anything down and instead rely on the government to dictate what shouldn't be allowed. This is absolutely ridiculous. Imagine being such a free speech advocate that you say something like this.

catiopatio• 3 years ago

I am such a free speech advocate.

Why is a belief in the common carrier model ridiculous?

goodluckchuck• 3 years ago

Allowing speech is not an endorsement of the restrictions others may try to impose.

ocdtrekkie• 3 years ago

Yeah the EFF has gotten ridiculously radical into pro-corporate and pro-free speech positions. Generally anything that protects a company's ability to willfully harm society for money is worth protecting for the EFF.

The EFF is so detached from humanity it doesn't mind innocent people dying for it's radical free speech cause. And that's really pretty sad.

metalspot7• 3 years ago

I don't have to imagine.

Instead on censoring speech why not provide tools that lead to better speech? This is perfectly possible from a tech stand point but companies would rather have the power that comes from censorship.

1. Get rid of anonymity/pseudonymity. Free speech is a right. Anonymity is not. If people had to post everything in their real name you would get rid of all of the fake b.s. and people would be much more civilized in their speech.

2. Provide content filtering tools based on user voting with a public record of user votes and the option for people to turn off the filters so that they can see what is filtered.

With these 2 mechanisms you can create a public square with absolute free speech where hate speech is filtered and suppressed, if people choose that, but the records are clear and people who want to audit the filtering can do so as they please.

Levitz4• 3 years ago

The corporation is either responsible for its content or it's not.

If they can pick and choose whatever message they like with absolute discretion, then that's effectively the corporation's speech and should be treated as such, with full responsibility over it.

If they don't want to bear the responsibility for what they publish, then it's easy, don't pretend to have the legitimacy to choose.

That the same social media platform can have as big of a change in views as Twitter/X did is insane to me. That's not "the public changing opinion". That's a corporation exercising speech. Full stop.

hnbad3• 3 years ago

I think you misunderstand the EFF's position here if you think this is some kind of enlightened centrist "I may not agree with what you say but I will fight to death for your right to say it": the EFF is opposed to ISPs filtering content because that is not the job of an ISP and not a level of analysis an ISP should be allowed (much less required) to do.

The EFF very much promotes progressive values, more consistently so than the ACLU which has supported "free speech" cases by undesirable folks before and which seems to have led to this supposed "betrayal" when it turned out not to go out of its way to do so in every case.

The problem with "free speech" absolutist organizations is the same as with "free speech" absolutist social media platforms: if your distinguishing feature is to allow everyone to say almost anything, you'll primarily attract those people who want to say things they can't say elsewhere. And this inevitably means you get an overrepresentation of open white supremacists, CSAM enjoyers, teenage edgelords and trolls. And most people don't want to be associated with these kinds of people, so having enough of them around drives out everyone else.

It's the Nazi Bar problem: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Nazi_bar Either you put in effort to make your organization unattractive to nazis, or you become a nazi organization.

leetcrew• 3 years ago

the "nazi bar" concept does accurately describe the problem with sites like parlor today, but I'd argue it's only true now because heavy moderation has become the default.

most of the internet was not like this 10-15 years ago. forums and even large social media platforms were moderated lightly, if at all. you would commonly see edgelords dropping slurs, but it did not dominate the discussion. I don't think the entire internet would turn into kiwifarms if everyone just decided to relax a bit.

Dan_Sylveste11• 3 years ago

And this inevitably means you get an overrepresentation of

Why do you assume this very consistent pattern of 'new forum overrun by [the material you've mentioned]' is anything other than a transparent attack on free discourse?

I mean, it's very consistent, isn't it? Everyone knows it happens, and it's a good way to scare people off even thinking about visiting those forums if they think that any day they could go there and have their browser history full of ick.

gameman1443• 3 years ago

And this inevitably means you get an overrepresentation of open white supremacists, CSAM enjoyers, teenage edgelords and trolls.

This is not a problem for free speech organizations, though, since they have the ability to choose which cases they represent.

They can (and do, I'm sure) often weigh the perception of bias in which cases they take on next.

nvm0n27• 3 years ago

The Nazi Bar "problem" is just a way to justify imposing censorship universally:

1. We ban people we don't like. They aren't actually Nazis, but we don't like them so we pretend they are.

2. They go to some other place where we don't yet dominate.

3. Now we assert that everyone in that other place is also a Nazi, because they aren't doing the same thing we're doing.

If the Nazi Bar was really a real concept then every left wing political party in the world would be a Bar and therefore everyone voting for them would be a Nazi. Because, recall, they were the National Socialists, and every left wing party has a whole lot of committed socialists.

Luckily for political harmony, other people don't use this type of reasoning to eliminate their enemies so left and right parties can compete fairly for votes. Which is why it needs to be stamped out amongst those who do use it.

johnnyanmac5• 3 years ago

I'd normally agree, but a large public organization is a bit different from a small local bar. the Nazi bar problem usually "works" because of an "apple poisons the barrel" deal. But when we're talking about a lake, it just dissipates.

It's the physical analouge to how Twitter can still be the most used social media website despite also having years of accusations about every kind of bad content under the sun. So if a group is large enough, I wouldn't be worried about that kind of inflitration.

karaterobot• 3 years ago

I don't even mentally file the ACLU as "the good guys" anymore. Rationally, I know they continue to do a lot of good work today, but that bit has been flipped, and it's hard to go back. When you're an organization like that, you kind of have to be absolute in your stance, and write things like "history requires us to look at the bigger picture, and sound the alarm about the risks even when the facts are horrific".

Dan_Sylveste11• 3 years ago

Well said, the ACLU have gone severely astray.

kiitos4• 3 years ago

I also oppose this position. It's uninformed, even naive.

gravitate• 3 years ago

I hit CTRL+F to find the word 'neutral' in this article, but no such word appeared. But it did appear in another EFF article titled 'We Need to Talk About Infrastructure'[0], which is the crux of the issue here. My only question is; what is regarded 'internet infrastructure' these days? Is Cloudflare really just an ISP? Is VPN infra considered an ISP? Are mixer nets like Tor/Hyphanet an ISP?

'Essential internet infrastructure should be content-neutral':

[0] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/12/we-need-talk-about-inf...

torstenvl• 3 years ago

Essential internet infrastructure should not be content-neutral.

Content neutrality is a higher bar than you think it is. Content-neutral means the rules cannot take content into account at all.

If the content is millions of ssh login requests on thousands of servers with ec2-user and the top 10000 most used passwords, the infrastructure should be able to block that.

Content-neutrality would probably make it illegal to prevent DDoS attacks. At some levels of infrastructure, sure, but broadly speaking, content-neutrality seems like a bad requirement.

Viewpoint-neutral, however, is a better goal.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution-conan/amendment-1/o...

carbotaniuman• 3 years ago

Viewpoint neutrality is debatable though, in this situation, HE could argue that they aren't banning based on viewpoint but rather the nature of the content, and point to other websites sharing similar viewpoints that they carry. It just seems like a half-step that pleases no one and does nothing. Let private companies be private companies, we don't need the unelected bureaucrats to tell us how to run DDOS protection or route traffic.

ehhthing2• 3 years ago

I don't think this is true. Phone companies (which are legislated to be utilities) can block malicious/spam calls without legal issues.

unethical_ban2• 3 years ago

I suspect carveouts for overtly, technically malicious behavior can be applied while still saying "content neutral".

ThrowawayTestr6• 3 years ago

Performing a DDoS attack is already illegal. Content neutral for legal content shouldn't be a high bar.

pbhjpbhj• 3 years ago

This seems a very poor argument.

Your examples are people forcing packets to a network node, content neutrality is about receiving what you wish from a server whose operator has chosen to serve that content.

Stopping people who are actively committing crimes is not preventing free movement on a right of way. Or rather, it is in layman's terms, but free movement does not include the commission of crimes. In the same way stopping brute force attempts is not the same as inhibiting net neutrality.

planede• 3 years ago

DDoS generally has little to do about the content of the traffic. It's more about volume and traffic pattern.

Anyway, I think the details are in intent and the nature of the communication. Service providers shouldn't actively block communications where the only intent of the communication is consensual exchange of information between two or more parties (such as visiting a website) regardless of the content of the exchanged information.

SPAM would qualify as non-consensual from one party, so it would be exempt.

The intent of DDoS isn't to exchange information, so it would also be exempt.

I'm sure that it would need pages legalese to make this work, like ironing out the circumstances when ISPs can assume intent or consent. SPAM block lists should be reasonable.

yanderekko12• 3 years ago

Net neutrality stopped being a concern when activists decided that it was to their overall advantage to ally with powerful, censorious corporations in order to combat right-wing speech .

chonkerz48• 3 years ago

No company, ever, is going to accept being forced to sell their services to a customer who will use it for obnoxiously illegal purposes. No government is ever going to mandate the use of resources for illegal purposes.

zer8k3• 3 years ago

The ACLU will absolutely oppose this. If not for the reason they stand to make a lot of money suing ISPs for "not doing enough" to stop the big-ole-meanies online.

I see ISPs blocking "mean speech" to "protect people" as another symptom of the enshittification of the internet. I legitimately cannot understand problems in this arena because you can just...walk away from your computer. Or turn off the website. Or hey, maybe don't TIE YOUR ENTIRE LIFE AND REAL IDENTITY TO THE INTERNET. I suspect the prominent use of pseudonyms 30 years ago prevented most forms of ongoing harassment. Narcissists need the validation and so now big brother needs to step in to protect them.

I think society is getting a little too comfortable with the idea of big brother and it's making me really, really uncomfortable. As an old man yelling at a cloud the internet really was better 20 or 30 years ago.

psychphysic2• 3 years ago

The ACLU are pretty useless these days

pessimizer7• 3 years ago

Actively harmful.

TRiG_Ireland• 3 years ago

you can just...walk away from your computer

I take it that (a) your income doesn't depend on your internet presence, and (b) you're reasonably well off. KiwiFarms has done massive damage to people in "the real world", and some people concerned for their safety cannot afford to ignore it. It is a genuine danger.

brailsafe2• 3 years ago

and people who engage in that sort of activity have in some cases been prosecuted, which is just, but those people didn't do it because the internet exists, they did it because they're monsters.

Dalewyn• 3 years ago

There are laws and law enforcement already in place to address bad actors, particularly those who would pose tangible harm upon an individual.

Violating the principle and right of free speech is nothing more than grabbing and abusing power.

anigbrowl2• 3 years ago

You're thinking solely in terms of private individuals. Other entities exist and have to be internet-connected to function; corporations, nonprofits, government bodies, institutions. They can't very well use pseudonyms because their whole reason for being is to be accessible to the public.

So that makes them easy to target for abuse, eg https://oaklandside.org/2023/08/29/chabot-elementary-evacuat...

An episode like that costs tens of thousands of dollars in lost productive time, police response and investigation etc. And it's increasingly common.

I don't think ISPs can or should proactively try to prevent this (or they'd have to preemptively scan and evaluate every packet request), but I also don't think your dunk on the ACLU has any substance. If an ISP knows that a customer is bad actor because it's brought to their attention in a credible and rigorous way, then it seems quite legitimate to me to cut them off.

whatwhaaaaat2• 3 years ago

The bomb threat is already a crime. Properly prosecute it.

Are you trying to say that some opinion posted online that may or may not have been consumed by the offender in this case is somehow directly responsible?

My question to those who support big brother any lawful but awful speech is - do you really think it won’t be used to silence any dissent of the ruling powers?

pessimizer7• 3 years ago

In order to prevent bomb threats, we should run algos on every phone call. If they try to make a bomb threat, we can just break the connection and refer the caller to police. Why even wait for phone calls? We can just make the phones emit a high pitched alarm and send cops whenever the algos hear any sort of hate crime within range of the microphone.

JamesBarney3• 3 years ago

Do you agree with everyone's idea of what a bad actor is?

Because Mississippi and New York have very different ideas about who are bad actors.

jstarfish3• 3 years ago

If an ISP knows that a customer is bad actor because it's brought to their attention in a credible and rigorous way, then it seems quite legitimate to me to cut them off.

This would invite false-flag attacks to get others kicked off the internet, especially if you run a public-facing service. If you can find any way to attribute something to someone, it doesn't even have to rise to the level of preponderance of evidence.

This changes the venue for addressing allegedly-criminal behavior of owners/operators from courtrooms with established procedures to arbitrary decisions by nameless individuals accountable to nobody. This certainly works to someone's advantage, especially in cases where the allegations have been fabricated or exaggerated. Let's move things to a kangaroo court where a doctored screenshot is sufficient evidence for us to ban someone/something and there is no formal procedure or record for anyone to review. The accused isn't even entitled to an appeal; the accusation is the conviction.

ISPs were really rigorous in their diligence when the RIAA started suing their customers. DMCA takedowns have never been abused either. ISPs have notably not been quick to do anything about the DDoS attacks Kiwi Farms' detractors have brought to bear against them.

For some reason, of all those people "victimized" by Kiwi Farms, not one can muster a defamation suit? Apparently they organize raids or something on a public forum inclusive to all, but no screenshots or archived copies of these pages exist? For all the claims against KF, apparently none can survive scrutiny from either civil or criminal litigation. The one untrained guy that runs it can only be tried in secret tribunals, in absentia, and must not be allowed to have a platform on which to defend himself. This is the cliquish behavior of spoiled children crying to their gullible grandparents as an end-run around their parents-- not a means of justice.

People claim a lot of things about the Kiwis but the one thing nobody ever calls them is liars.

So that makes them easy to target for abuse, eg https://oaklandside.org/2023/08/29/chabot-elementary-evacuat...

It's unfortunate that a school that went out of its way to host events only for children of color received a bomb threat. That terrorist should go to jail, and by the rules of this New Woke Order someone should send a letter to the school's upstream hosting providers to get that racist school kicked off the internet.

The people pushing for ISP-level policing aren't going to like living under the rules they're creating. It's going to make it completely fucking unusable for everyone. Like the HOA board members who want to run speed traps and install speed bumps to stop all the speeders, they always end up being among the first ones caught speeding. They'll create all these bypasses to make things intolerable, and then start up with "this place sucks now" and try to rally everyone into leaving.

lisper2• 3 years ago

you can just...walk away from your computer

Just say no. Because it worked so well for Nancy Reagan.

Oh, wait...

(For those too young to remember: https://www.history.com/topics/1980s/just-say-no)

nickff• 3 years ago

I understand that you're being sarcastic, but don't understand exactly what you're implying. Are you saying that Nancy Reagan became a drug addict? Or else are you saying that experimenting with one or more drugs is beneficial?

another_story2• 3 years ago

In the past the ACLU has defended hate groups right to freedom of speech. Do you have evidence that they'd do something to the contrary?

Analemma_• 3 years ago

That was before the ACLU got hollowed out and skinsuited by activist groups. I'd trust the ACLU of 10 years ago to fight this, but not the one of today.

drewcoo• 3 years ago

The ACLU fought Trump's "Muslim ban."

That resulted in lots of funding from the anti-Trump crowd. "Trump derangement syndrome" meant previously unimaginable funding.

They needed to do something with the money, so they staffed up, using the new staff to double down on the Trump-fighting.

Before 2016, there were a few claims that the ACLU was biased toward liberals. Afterward, you'll find many articles even from outlets like the Atlantic and the New York Times lambasting the ACLU as openly partisan. Just do a search for them!

So if this is censorship is intended to keep things safe and liberal, people suppose that the ACLU would support the censorship.

yanderekko12• 3 years ago

I mean, to be fair this doesn't really pertain to the sort of Constitutional legal questions that the ACLU famously takes a hardline stance on. I don't think the ACLU endorsing private censorship is clearly at odds with their overall mission. (As opposed to say their going soft on hate speech laws, which clearly has 1A implications.)

amiga3865• 3 years ago

Their national director's statement in the immediate aftermath of the Charlottesville riots:

https://www.vox.com/2017/8/20/16167870/aclu-hate-speech-nazi...

The backlash has already spurred other ACLU chapters to declare that they don’t believe free-speech protections apply to events like the one in Charlottesville, and led the ACLU’s national director, Anthony Romero, to declare the group will no longer defend the right to protest when the protesters want to carry guns.
“Until now,” lawyer and blogger Scott Greenfield wrote, the ACLU has “never quite come out and announced that they will refuse to defend a constitutional right. This announcement says that when someone seeks to exercise two rights at the same time, the ACLU is outta there.”

And their internal policy document listing out things that might stay their hand in an otherwise vigourous defense of free speech:

https://www.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/20180621ACLU....

Considerations Specific to Speech Cases
* Whether the speaker seeks to engage in or promote violence
* Whether the speakers seek to carry weapons
* The impact of the proposed speech and the impact of its suppression
* The extent to which we are able to make clear that even as we defend a speaker’s right to say what they want, we reserve our right to condemn the views themselves
* The extent to which we are able to mitigate any harm to our mission, values, priorities, and/or relationships

droptablemain• 3 years ago

The ACLU changed quite dramatically around 2016.

adamrezich2• 3 years ago

you were on the Internet before it merged with reality and the two became one (in the minds of the people). you still perceive the Internet as being this discrete thing, separate from normal meatspace reality, because that's how it was, for a time, in the now-distant past.

smartphones and modern social media bulldozed over our glorious cyber-libertarian future and brought millions of people, all completely unacclimated to the Web and its social customs, online, together, in the name of social progress or something (but, not-so-secretly, it was just to target advertisements and content to people more efficiently), and this is the sad end result—corporate censorship everywhere, with normal people even going out of their way to espouse gratitude for said censorship, complete with all manner of stock memery to disparage anyone who disagrees ("freeze peach", "only the government can censor—if it's not the government, it's not censorship", etc.).

pour one out for the Internet of Yore if you must, but those days are long since over—there really isn't any way to put the genie back in the bottle anymore.

krapp6• 3 years ago

The internet was never separate from meatspace reality - that was always a naive cypherpunk delusion.

dang4• 3 years ago

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37314275.

wmf3• 3 years ago

Are there any lawsuits pending against KiwiFarms? If not, why not?

arp2423• 3 years ago

Not as far as I know. I think any criminal action will be extremely hard, at least under US law, as they haven't really done anything outright illegal. There are all sorts of claims about "KiwiFarms has done this or that" (same with 4chan), but often there's no direct connection to KiwiFarms or 4chan, and some claims seem to just made up of whole cloth.

A civil might have a higher chance of succeeding, but I suspect this will also be very hard. "People say mean things" is neither illegal nor harassment, and outright organisation of harassment doesn't really happen on KiwiFarms, at least not in public. Trying to get damages from doxing (in a civil suit, because in most jurisdictions it's not illegal AFAIK) might be the best shot, especially for people who are otherwise non-public figures, but I'm not sure what chance that will have.

tjpnz2• 3 years ago

There have been numerous civil suits against KF, not one of them has succeeded.

chonkerz48• 3 years ago

An increasing number of jurisdictions are passing laws against doxing so the site you're defending will be harder and harder to defend.

clove• 3 years ago

Multiple people have brought lawsuits against KiwiFarms. I believe Russell Greer's lawsuit is still ongoing, to answer your question. None have succeeded thus far.

cypress66• 3 years ago

Side note, but Wikipedia editors decided to censor KiwiFarms url, which I think is very interesting.

TazeTSchnitzel• 3 years ago

Police and prosecutors don't seem to take much interest in online harassment cases (they're probably expensive to investigate, and it's difficult to even convince them to care at all), so criminal cases are unlikely. Meanwhile the site tends to pick victims that don't have money to hire lawyers for a civil suit (their victims are average people, not rich).

There's also the problem that their mode of operation may make it difficult to hold any single person liable. They basically engage in crowdsourced stalking, so there's many small contributions of different people whose connections would be hard to prove. As a collective, they obviously know what they're doing, but many individuals have plausible deniability. You can't try them with conspiracy. And that's if you can even track down who your pseudonymous stalkers are.

totetsu• 3 years ago

I first heard of kiwi-farms when it was blocked at the DNS level by New Zealand ISPs for hosting the censored video of the face book live stream of the 51 people being killed in the Mosque Terrorist attack. They also had a whole section called lol-cow where they crowd sourced doxing and ridiculing female youtubers if i recall correctly.

joenot443• 3 years ago

My understanding is that neither Null nor KF never hosted any content which wasn’t protected by the first amendment.

One has to remember Americans have a unique perspective on speech which isn’t shared around the world. “Sue them so they shut up” works here in Canada, it doesn’t necessarily work in the States.

psychphysic2• 3 years ago

It feels like it's pretty much gameover for free speech in any context.

Too much of the population of the world wants rid and it doesn't matter much that they disagree on precisely which opinions are unacceptable.

cmh894• 3 years ago

Free speech has never existed. We've always been pushing and pulling against what's acceptable.

depereo• 3 years ago

Absolutely. Causing a stampede or crush being the obvious example.

I do get baffled by the absolutionist statements about the freedom of speech. Speech is a side-channel into violence.

My country has a censor's office, for example. Some 'speech' is literally illegal to possess. Government ministers aren't free to speak state secrets in public. It's not legal to disclose the names of persons with judicial name suppression. Even parliament representatives can't speak just anything into the parliamentary record.

I live in New Zealand. It's not that bad to have limits and structures that enable the majority of real freedoms for people.

pessimizer7• 3 years ago

It feels like it's pretty much gameover for free speech in any context.

And it's going to go the opposite way that people are expecting. For some reason, the Democratic base has been trained to think that it will be possible for them to impose an authoritarian meritocracy of kind middle-class people using a police force and army largely made up of working-class reactionary quasi-theocrats. When the shit goes down, the neocons will forget that they spent a year or two pretending to care about misgendering while liberals helped them build the Stasi's dream. Instead we'll end up with dictatorship run by a mashup of Reagan, Trump, and Thiel.

_0ffh• 3 years ago

One Charles Haywood is apparently applying for that job.

Rapzid• 3 years ago

I feel like in the USA at least free speech(as in the constraint placed on the government; aka 1st amendment free speech) is as strong as it's ever been. The government was way up in everyone's business and bedroom just 50 years ago.

kiitos4• 3 years ago

Free speech doesn't mean unrestricted speech.

If you say some garbage bullshit, and a platform deletes your garbage bullshit, that's fine.

explanatorygap• 3 years ago

EFF is on the wrong side of this, just as they were on the wrong side of the debates about what to do about spam email back in the day. They're committed to the view that the only acceptable place to block any flow of information (which they define very broadly) is at the receiving user's end and that the end user must personally opt-in. This is completely at odds with the last 30 years of experience on the internet and shows that they've learned very little about how bad actors will abuse systems of that sort and degrade the experience for everyone else.

brailsafe2• 3 years ago

In what way is it at odds with the last 30 years of the internet? You seem to accept that as a fact, but I'd definitely agree with the eff.

ibizaman3• 3 years ago

If it’s truly the first time Tier 1 blocking happens, I don’t see how the EFF can be at odds with history.

gorwell6• 3 years ago

Censors made the same argument with the Printing Press and since time immemorial. Censorship has always been on the wrong side of history and it still is.

Speaking of abusing systems, censors end up being the worst bad guys who imagine themselves as the good guys protecting you from the bad guys.

EFF understands the long history of this issue.

vuavu• 3 years ago

Doesn't seem similar to this. You receive spam unwillingly, but you have to enter that forum and participate on purpose.

wmf3• 3 years ago

Not if they're organizing attacks on you.

toast03• 3 years ago

There's two issues here:

a) should online speech be policed

b) if so, who should do it?

We don't let phone companies police the content of phone calls, and we don't let delivery services police the content of letters/packages, so why would we let ISPs police the content of network packets?

Exceptions exist: you can't send most live animals by mail, packages are subject to inspection at customs borders, etc. But any sort of monitoring of content would need either clear evidence of danger, signs of abusing the network, or court involvement.

If this content is so terrible that it deserves to be removed from the internet by any means necessary, shouldn't the process be that a court of competent jurisdiction should be able to issue an order requiring the site to be taken down. If the proprietors of the site bring it up through another ISP, not a party to the original order, a new order could be issued as well as holding the proprietors in contempt, presumably.

Jurisdiction issues on content are hairy, but jurisdiction issues on ISP connections are easy, the connections happen in specific locations, and you can order the connection severed at either end of the connection (as well as in between the ends).

Barrin922• 3 years ago

shouldn't the process be that a court of competent jurisdiction should be able to issue an order

the same people who decry this will also decry the government taking charge of internet moderation at the ISP level, probably even louder.

This entire discussion is bizarre and academic. The site in question has engaged in doxxing and other activities that has led to real world harm, including suicides, and content on there is already probably illegal. If I run a business, and I know a customer is doing something like that, I have an ethical obligation to not facilitate it. I don't start some ideological discussion about whether some hypothetical court can prevent it given that nobody apparently can be bothered to actually make that a reality.

Imagine I have an axe shop and a known axe murderer walks through the door, and instead of not selling him an axe I propose we have a year long debate about the proper formal process of axe murder prevention supported by the Axe Rights Foundation. Granted this is how America actually (does not) deal with gun violence so I'm not surprised we are now in the pro-doxxer rights debate

commandlinefan2• 3 years ago

how bad actors will abuse systems

I’ve seen both ends of the spectrum - I remember Usenet, that had no moderation at all, and having to wade through a sea of spam, wishing somebody would get rid of it. But then I saw what reddit moderation turned into… I’ll take the spam, thanks. The spammers are bad actors, but moderators actually become evil actors.

xmprt• 3 years ago

But then I saw what reddit moderation turned into

People like the harp on how bad reddit moderation is but I personally haven't seen it. Maybe I'm just in smaller communities or I choose the subreddits I follow more carefully, but I haven't seen cases of moderator abuse and if I ever do (usually as an outside observer to some drama in a different community) then I take a mental note to not follow that subreddit in the future.

frabbit• 3 years ago

It is not just ISPs. It is crowdfunding and payment processing companies. See for example this apparent seizure of funding to independent journalists happening right now: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37314499

If you care about there being genuinely independent news media then funding these guys is something you can do right now.

sneak4• 3 years ago

There is a new internet payments technology that is 100% effective against abuses like this, even when the state decides it shouldn't be possible.

Censorship-resistant payments are an essential prerequisite to a free society, something I have been asserting in public for a dozen+ years.

Unfortunately as of late they have been vilified. If I were a paranoid man, I might point out that this happened right around the time they became known to the mainstream.

pixl97• 3 years ago

It turns out that censorship-resistant payments also attract the worst type of people along with scammers first. If you had paid attention then you would have realized that is exactly what was going to happen long before it did. There is no need for paranoia here, people tend to dislike and go after hives of scum and villainy (unless they are wrapped in pretty corporate words).

chonkerz48• 3 years ago

That affected party looks like more than just an "independent journalist". They look like a kook that probably did something to deserve it. Can we please have some actual "free speech" that isn't another boring fig leaf for crime?

thfuran2• 3 years ago

I think it's fine for the ISP to police online speech over their network as long as it's clearly stated in their service agreement that they can cancel/interfere with your service if they think you're too mean and as long as they also lose all safe harbor and assume liability for everything transmitted over their network.

ibizaman3• 3 years ago

Quoted from the article:

When a person uses a room in a house to engage in illegal or just terrible activity, we don’t call on the electric company to cut off the light and heat to the entire house, or the post office to stop delivering mail. We know that this will backfire in the long run. Instead, we go after the bad guys themselves and hold them accountable.

Although I see your point, the quote above made me switch to thinking it’s not okay.

cmh894• 3 years ago

If you lived next door to a house that had become a drug spot, would you find it acceptable to call the landlord, tell them what's happening, and then ask them to investigate and evict? I sure would.

thfuran2• 3 years ago

And we also can't sue the electric company whenever someone uses the electricity they provide to post a scam on Craigslist, which is the sort of liability I'm saying the ISP should assume before they're allowed to start mucking about with their customers' traffic.

dumpsterdiver2• 3 years ago

I think perhaps your comment was misunderstood (hence the downvotes), but I think it was a fair take. If a company wants to engage in arbitrary (and especially partisan) censorship then they should not be afforded safe harbor. Why should safe harbor be granted to a company which allows hate speech from one group, but actively censors identical speech from another group? By doing so they create an actively hostile atmosphere toward one group or another, and they are no longer "simple carriers", but active participants.

fallingknife4• 3 years ago

And that doesn't go far enough. On the modern Internet access to an ISP connection and nothing else is fairly useless.

Without access to a large email provider you won't be able to send to anyone. And, no, you can't just set up an SMTP server. Not if you expect anyone to get your emails.

If you don't have access to messenger apps you basically can't communicate with people outside of the US which is the only country which still uses SMS.

If you don't have access to hosting services and something like cloudflare, you basically can't build a website.

If you don't have access to payment processors, you can't run any form of online business.

pseudo03• 3 years ago

Too bad they didn't touch on the net neutrality issues at play here. Washington passed a state level net neutrality law, and KF might end up being the test case. They have filed a complaint with the AG and are waiting for a response.

https://archive.is/Je241

habinero5• 3 years ago

Yeah, that's not going to happen. KF is not a Washington state LLC.

chonkerz48• 3 years ago

The authorities already said they didn't care and kiwifarms should work it out directly with HE

unsui2• 3 years ago

Why does it have to be absolute/binary?

If I can't have full, unfettered free speech, then it's the end of the world.

Let's put aside the slippery-slope arguments. The real world is messy, with ridiculously obscure corner cases that make blanket statements and policies practically impossible to operationalize without significant collateral damage.

Shouldn't a more realistic approach be something like "give me speech as free as is possible", with considerations that are negotiable, such as, "does this speech promote destroying the institutions on which the speech itself is based on", etc...

As an extension of the Spolky-ism that all non-trivial abstractions are leaky, all production systems have edge and corner cases that can't (or shouldn't) be contained within a blanket uniform policy.

Yeah, it's messy. But, as with many regulations written in blood, there are legitimate use cases where exceptions to blanket policies and statements are better to include than not include.

alexb_• 3 years ago

considerations that are negotiable, such as, "does this speech promote destroying the institutions on which the speech itself is based on"

That's not a considerable negotiation. Give people power and they will use literally every single bit of it and then some. ISPs should have absolutely no say, in any way, of what people do. They shouldn't even be able to know anything about what I'm doing past what is needed for the ISP to function.

unsui2• 3 years ago

Give people power and they will use literally every single bit of it and then some

This is going back to slippery slope argument issue.

What makes you think there isn't pushback to create an equilibrium of policies?

Why does it necessarily need to be one-sided, where giving in to one iota entails giving in to the whole enchilada?

Complex systems entail dialogue and pushback across competing incentives and motivations. Yes, each side works on the basis of self-interest, but what is to say that giving one inch necessarily entials giving up entirely, unless the original premise is that one cannot give up anything (i.e., uncompromising by definition). That doesn't seem to scale in any real-world system, only ideal systems.

Avamander2• 3 years ago

ISPs should have absolutely no say, in any way, of what people do. They shouldn't even be able to know anything about what I'm doing past what is needed for the ISP to function.

Up until the point you become disruptive to the service, other customers or third parties for ex. DDoS attacks.

Absolute statements like these are silly. Making comparisons with houses is quite silly if you can figuratively "take your house somewhere else", people don't have to just turn the other cheek.

Though it would indeed be better if law(makers) would target malicious activity, but providing a billboard for it should not be mandatory.

3np• 3 years ago

The argument isn't that everyone should have "full, unfettered free speech" but that ISPs should not be enforcers.

amadeuspagel• 3 years ago

The US supreme court has narrowed down the few necessary exceptions to freedom of speech over 230 years. It's not perfect, but it's better then having ISPs make these decisions.

Gartent2• 3 years ago

Quintessential midwit take.

It never was absolute. We prescribed limits with laws.

Utility companies should be the last to declare them.

"Slippery slope" is you denying the causality of a relationship. But, it does. Heard of Cloudflare?

lr4444lr5• 3 years ago

I don't think you deserve to be downvoted, but you're missing the point: we need guiding principles to help us work through tough cases so that we can best avoid setting bad precedent. The EFF made a good move today.

CM30• 3 years ago

I agree, we've got far too many entities that should just be 'dumb pipes' trying to play moral police at the moment, and it's a very worrying situation when it comes to free speech on the internet. Cloudflare is an often brought up example, as are payment processors like Visa and Mastercard and app stores like the iOS and Play Stores, but ISPs trying to block traffic for a site that's not actually illegal feels like a step even further than that.

It feels like private companies are de facto writing the laws about what's allowed online and in society right now, and that it's almost become a loophole for censoring free speech on a whim.

And while the site in question here is ethically bankrupt in basically every way, it doesn't seem too far fetched to assume the same thing could (and potentially will) happen for sites many more people agree with because someone/some group at an ISP doesn't like them or think they should be accessible.

yanderekko12• 3 years ago

At least payment providers can plausibly point to financial risks and legal concerns as why they engage in what comes off as moral policing. It's pretty clear that any similar claim on HE's part would be pretextual.

It feels like private companies are de facto writing the laws about what's allowed online and in society right now, and that it's almost become a loophole for censoring free speech on a whim.

"Feels like"? This is clearly embraced as a necessary step to preserve democracy by a small-but-powerful segment of population.

pfisch5• 3 years ago

When in all of US history were private companies not controlling the public discourse and "censoring free speech"?

krapp6• 3 years ago

Never.

In fact, the reason the First Amendment limits the government, exclusively, is that the ability to abridge free speech (to choose which forms of speech you support, spread, or disassociate from) is implicitly a part of individual liberty, held by the people. Free speech has never guaranteed anyone a platform.

That's not a bug, it's a feature. Yes, it can be messy. Yes, it can be abused. Yes, it means social media companies are allowed to ban you for any reason they like, just as restaurants are allowed to refuse you service. Yes it means ISPs don't have to do business with nazis and assholes.

The alternative is that the government - that controls the monopoly on violence - controls all speech, at all levels, and any business that engages in any form of speech. That it forces you to publish speech against your will, against your interests, even against your safety.

The great thing about ISPs being private is that you can always find another ISP. Kiwifarms did. Being banned from social media isn't the end of the world. But I can't as easily find another government if mine reads my social media posts and decides I'm too "woke" to live.

lmm2• 3 years ago

We didn't used to let private companies control the public discourse. The mail is government-run and there are mail privacy protections as deep as the constitution. In the age of radio and TV we at least had the equal time rule and some level of public oversight.

stale20027• 3 years ago

When we made laws to prevent them from doing so.

In the US, related to this specific situation, the laws are called "Net Neutrality" and "Common Carrier" laws.

Such laws are well established and uncontroversial. Pretty much everyone agrees that it is a good thing that the power company can't shut off your electricity just because you said something that it didn't like.

bluescrn6• 3 years ago

When 'the public square' was a physical location rather than a social media feed.

didntcheck5• 3 years ago

Probably never, but the past being bad is hardly a justification for present inaction

akira2501• 3 years ago

It feels like private companies are de facto writing the laws about what's allowed online and in society right now, and that it's almost become a loophole for censoring free speech on a whim.

This is why monopoly power is dangerous as without it you could just move to a more tolerant competitor and be on with your business. The courts almost never consider the "secondary markets" that exist around these behemoths, and how all of our interests and independence are significantly damaged by allowing these monopolies to merge into existence.

Of course, even this feels like the conversation they would _like_ you to have, because the other side I never see considered is what does it take to buy an "indulgence" from these companies? Is it easy? Is it often done? How often are these "scions of social justice" actually just "turning a blind eye?"

imadierich• 3 years ago

blame the WEF and 16 UN STG

4bpp• 3 years ago

Monopoly power seems secondary here, with the real problem being that there are sufficiently many people now with a totalitarian impulse to forbid others from engaging in speech they dislike that overrides almost any other principle, and no equally obstinate opposition. I am not engaged in and have no interest in any KF-like activity, but merely wanting to choose an ISP, domain registrar, Mastodon instance or email provider that would not filter them as a matter of principle would expose me to the risk of becoming collateral damage, as the armchair censors pressure the closest amenable nodes to participate in what they see as "cutting out the rot" - excise DNS records, range-ban, defederate from your node and recursively any node that would not participate in defederating you, thus forcing the whole world to pick a side.

gorwell6• 3 years ago

That's right. Authoritarian censors found an exploit. They couldn't use the government to clamp down on civil liberties because of the pesky constitution, so they invaded the administrative layer of big tech. It's not the engineers who built the web and these companies with Silicon Valley ideals. They were never intended to be used this way and are secretly horrified.

play moral police at the moment

Moral fashion police

version_five• 3 years ago

From what I understand re twitter and others, it's the government that found a loophole. They used big tech to censor according to their agenda. The administrative class, while I agree probably has been invaded in some sense, is really just risk aversion run amok, like it always it, and will self organize to do what it can to minimize controversy.

kelseyfrog2• 3 years ago

In an interesting way it is also an exploitable facet of small government. If the private sector is susceptible to moral policing then then government downsizing implies a larger attack surface.

chonkerz48• 3 years ago

From the article, the EFF explicitly calls out the government for failing to enforce existing laws which would have shut down Kiwifarms

That’s what must happen here. The cops and the courts should be working to protect the victims of KF and go after the perpetrators with every legal tool at their disposal. We should be giving them the resources and societal mandate to do so. Solid enforcement of existing laws is something that has been sorely lacking for harassment and abuse online, and it’s one of the reasons people turn to censorship strategies. Finally, we should enact strong data privacy laws that target, among others, the data brokers whose services help enable doxxing.

nullifidian• 3 years ago

so they invaded the administrative layer of big tech.

Not exactly. While there are certainly people who espouse anti-free-speech views in the big tech, I'm pretty sure the companies themselves are pressured/threatened with increased regulatory scrutiny, anti-thrust action and anything else that is at congress/government's disposal. These congress/senate hearings about misinformation are exactly that.

phpisthebest9• 3 years ago

>It's not the engineers who built the web and these companies

I 100% disagree with this, the engineering level of silicon valley left the old "libertarian" hacker ethos behind a long time ago, at the engineering layer there is idea about using technology to build a "better society" where "better society" is ensuring people with "wrong opinions" isolated so they can not "harm" others with their "violence" and violence is now words on the internet.

In fact recent activism coming from the engineer levels at Big Tech (google, Amazon, FB, etc) has me believe that that administrative layer is not really in control, and the policy changes are a reflection coming from the activism in the engineering layer

We also see this through out Open Source with the raise of the CoC to implement systemic changes with in open source to ensure only those with "correct opinions" are allowed to contribute moving from just caring about code, to then caring about code and conduct with in a project and project related events, to now even more expansive monitoring of developers entire lives, and activities completely removed and unrelated to any development activities.

moomin3• 3 years ago

You need to decide if these are private companies or public utilities. If they’re public utilities, the government should provide them. Restricting company’s freedom to choose a business model is not the answer.

You might not like it, but that’s kind of the point, either let the market decide or take the market out of it.

l3mure• 3 years ago

It's not the engineers who built the web and these companies with Silicon Valley ideals. They were never intended to be used this way and are secretly horrified.

Such a laughable statement given that Silicon Valley was from the beginning a military project, with social control as an explicit aim. Milquetoast lamentations about a lost libertarian dream are no different than old cries about the closing of the Western frontier or Jeffersonian myths about a pastoralist capitalism corrupted by industry.

TheBlight• 3 years ago

Amen to that.

aaomidi2• 3 years ago

When I was at let’s encrypt, there were so many people outside that expected us to be the morality police of the internet.

Like, no. Certificate Authorities exist because the web fucking sucks. Not because they want to be gate keepers.

didntcheck5• 3 years ago

I'd be interested to hear more about that. What sort of groups did you get making these requests, and what sort of reasons did they usually give?

rhelz10• 3 years ago

// private companies a re de facto writing the laws //

We can certainly discuss whether these services should be publicly or privately owned. I'm a pretty liberal guy, and wouldn't mind seeing publically-owned versions of Twitter, ChatGPT, or Google, as a guard against corporations dominating the information age.

But calling for more government regulation of privately-owned services? Forcing private companies to do what you want them to do, even when they would prefer not to? The whole point of private property is that it carves out a space of freedom for you, the owner of the private property, to use it as you wish!!!

I really wonder how I became the radical conservative here......

nonethewiser5• 3 years ago

Freedom of speech is a pretty fundamental value. It's not surprising to expect it beyond where it's legally required.

stale20027• 3 years ago

You are not understanding.

We already have many laws that effect companies.

For example, power companies cannot just turn off your electricity because they don't like what you say.

These are called common carrier laws and they are completely uncontroversial.

We live in a society, and it is perfectly OK for us to put limits on what major monopoly type companies can do.

ThrowawayR23• 3 years ago

"Forcing private companies to do what you want them to do, even when they would prefer not to?"

That's exactly the argument that bigots who owned businesses used to refuse service to PoC and oppressed people before the civil rights legislations of the '50s and '60s were passed. Funny to hear old discredited arguments used by far-right conservatives decades ago coming out of the mouths of the left these days. It's almost enough to make one start taking the horseshoe theory seriously.

wvenable3• 3 years ago

But calling for more government regulation of privately-owned services? Forcing private companies to do what you want them to do, even when they would prefer not to?

Yes! That's what it's going to take. If you want checks and balances, this is how you get them. Ultimately capitalism is supposed to benefit society as a whole and when it doesn't it needs a kick in the ass.

The whole point of private property is that it carves out a space of freedom for you, the owner of the private property, to use it as you wish!!!

That's correct but as soon as you're "open to the public" the rules, necessarily, change.

loup-vaillant• 3 years ago

* The whole point of private property is that it carves out a space of freedom for you, the owner of the private property, to use it as you wish!!!*

Be careful here not to conflate personal property and lucrative property. The first (like a home) is what you say. The second (like a factory) is a way to tell others what to do on your turf, for your benefit rather than theirs.

Private companies are of the second kind: more freedom for shareholders, fewer freedoms for employees… and if they’re big and inevitable enough (like YouTube), that’s fewer freedoms for users as well.

Even if we didn’t distinguish the two kinds of property, I could easily twist your sentence into meaning that the whole point of property is to make sure rich owners have more freedom than the poor. Which is probably not the point you were trying to make.

Freedom is a tricky thing to balance.

nonethewiser5• 3 years ago

I agree, we've got far too many entities that should just be 'dumb pipes' trying to play moral police at the moment

This is one of the positives of capitalism. The only color that matters is green. More competition please.

chonkerz48• 3 years ago

It's because the police have really failed to enforce existing laws that people have to resort to leaning on ISPs and payment processors to do it.

digging9• 3 years ago

Competition isn't really a feature of capitalism.

jquery2• 3 years ago

IMO, practically speaking, payment processors are a much bigger headache than anything else. It's hard to end-run around them and run any kind of successful business. It's really weird how much power they have to play moral police, even deciding what kind of porn is "ok" and what isn't.

didntcheck5• 3 years ago

Yep. It's especially concerning when clients are cut off for political reasons. Being able to effectively financially sanction people for having the wrong views is truly dangerous to democracy. Like with a lot of things, I suspect the reason they haven't faced more regulation is just that governments largely support these actions, and enjoy having a backdoor that they can ask to hamper undesirables without going through pesky courts

oliwarner• 3 years ago

private companies are de facto writing the laws about what's allowed online

It's hard when it's your line people are using to put their brand of ugliness "online".

Cloudflare comes up so regularly because so many legally problematic websites use their free service to evade even judicial blocks that ISPs are ordered to implement at national level. CF are used as a free proxy that's very hard to block unless Cloudflare takes a stand.

When they don't take a stand, when they try to stay impartial, they're attacked for enabling terrorism, child abuse, human trafficking, etc, etc, etc. So they do something, and they're attacked for being moral arbiters.

They're here to do business, not please everyone. Perhaps letting them pick isn't so bad. You can decide whether or not you want to do business with them then based on their actions and everybody can not use them if they're that much of a moral problem for them. I think many people would benefit from knowing they don't always get their way.

"Oh but I have no choice of ISPs" is absolutely a problem, but it's not this problem. Your ISP having a monopoly can be fixed separately.

Levitz4• 3 years ago

When they don't take a stand, when they try to stay impartial, they're attacked for enabling terrorism, child abuse, human trafficking, etc, etc, etc.

Imo the problem lies here. On the idea that servicing someone implies support for their actions or ideology. For all the talk about acceptance and tolerance it would seem a good deal of society is ok with the idea that those doing reprehensible stuff ought to be completely ostracized from society, laws be damned.

cyanydeez• 3 years ago

The lack of government regulations will make businesses "regulate" themselves

What you're seeing is how government is born. Corporatoctacy is just another form of authoritarianism and the more government pulls up stakes, they get replaced.

The global strain of far right ethno isolationist politics is creating the public void these corporations are filling.

pauldenton7• 3 years ago

Please. We can see how much regulation matters when they're not enforced. If you went to San Fransisco you would be surprised to know it's against the rules to break into people's cars or shoplift hundreds of dollars of stuff, considering how many people guilty of doing those things are tried convicted and serve time

ddingus3• 3 years ago

Lessig wrote about this in the 90's. His book "CODE" was more predictive than I prefer. :(

lynx232• 3 years ago

Gibson (Neuromancer) and Stephenson (Snow Crash) have already predicted this corporate-power-future. And it is becoming a reality.

tomrod2• 3 years ago

Typically dumb pipe companies get involved in this side of things due to legal requirements. Less often, though often justified as such, it is due to sincere concerns by the provider.

For example, banks don't typically want to service car dealerships simply because they are a prime target for money laundering. Same for legal cannabis firms due to being unbanked previously or because the whole industry isn't traceable.

Frankly, while I understand the historical reasons for having a "big brother" watch financial transactions, it's way to convoluted to satisfy and represents a big cost in the economy.

hiatus• 3 years ago

Same for legal cannabis firms due to being unbanked previously or because the whole industry isn't traceable.

My understanding is that banks are federally chartered and thus cannot provide services to weed firms as it remains illegal federally.

bastardoperator3• 3 years ago

Corporations are essentially citizens, and citizens have the right to free speech. We can agree or disagree, but this where we've allowed ourselves to get.

HE is within their rights to say no, we will not host or route to KF, to stop us would violate our constitutional rights to freedom of speech and expression. They would then point to a litany of issues surrounding KF, how it would impact their business, and then win their case with ease.

I'm kind of shocked EFF went to bat for KF If I'm being honest. When your speech is unaliving people, or responsible for wide scale harassment of minors, guess what, I'm not interested in doing business with you, and that's perfectly fine. The fact that they use such a weak argument like utilities, and mail service as a comparison to commercial internet service is wild.

a-priori2• 3 years ago

The idea of corporations being legal people is questionable in the first place, but now you’re going to argue that they’re not only people but citizens?!

username332211• 3 years ago

Is that some sort of subtle trolling? I mean, with that Newspeak verb randomly thrown in, it must be, but then again it wouldn't surprise me if there exist communities on the internet who'd develop slang that ends up being basically Newspeak.

jussaying2• 3 years ago

My biggest pet peeve and oft-cited example of US puritanism being imposed upon the entire world is the closed captioning system on YouTube that censors out words like s**t, f**k..

I have nothing whatsoever to do with the US, my Google account is based in a jurisdiction where I'm well past the legal age for adults and where hearing such words (and "worse") is quite normal at 14.

And yet I can't get this multinational behemoth to stop nannying me.

shortformblog2• 3 years ago

I'd argue that there are legitimate safety concerns that trump speech in this particular case.

But I think EFF would have a stronger case if we had common carriers following net neutrality laws. Content decisions are in the hands of upstream ISPs because we don't have the right regulations in place.

EFF has clearly tried here. The case is strong. But it's the edge cases where we need the net neutrality regulations most.

yanderekko12• 3 years ago

I'd argue that there are legitimate safety concerns that trump speech in this particular case.

What makes HE well-positioned to be able to determine what constitutes a "legitimate safety concern"? What happens when a pro-life organization or a corrupt politician starts leaning on ISPs to enforce their own views of what constitutes a "legitimate safety concern"?

Cloudflare denied service to KF on an imminent threat to people's lives, which could have been justified on a short term basis. Their refusal to reinstate service months later strains the credulity of this rationale, and shows that it was never really the goal.

I'm going to guess that if we ever get a post-mortem on what really is happening inside HE, what we'll find is not "a well-reasoned, dispassionate debate occurred and a consensus was reached in favor of censorship". Instead it will be like "someone powerful in the company made a unilateral decision and dissent was absent because everyone understood that it would have negative career consequences."

shortformblog2• 3 years ago

I don’t think HE should be making that decision, especially in an upstream role—and the fact that they’re in that position points at a need for regulation.

However, I would argue that KF is a long-term threat whose imminent dangers were honestly a very narrow lens that barely appeased a company that shouldn’t have been making the call in the first place. Their position in last year’s debate created a very volatile atmosphere for a solid month—a situation which would be volatile once again if brought back.

wnevets2• 3 years ago

The irony of course is a large segment of the people who are against net neutrality are exactly the people[1] who would have their online speech censored then complain about it.

[1] https://theintercept.com/2018/08/06/net-neutrality-repeal-re...

yanderekko12• 3 years ago

It's easy to have a principled stance against both net neutrality and private online censorship. Note that the EFF statement is not calling for legislation to stop HE's behavior.

wnevets2• 3 years ago

It's easy to have a principled stance against both net neutrality and private online censorship.

Then why did these people call for government action against Twitter for "censoring" right wing "voices"?

pessimizer7• 3 years ago

Cloudflare is an often brought up example

And Cloudflare are nearly as well behaved as they could possibly be. The simple fact of them being everywhere makes them a major target of government pressure to censor. This is purely an end run around the constitution, not the desire of companies to control speech.

It feels like private companies are de facto writing the laws about what's allowed online and in society right now, and that it's almost become a loophole for censoring free speech on a whim.

And I don't think that the companies have any particular desire to censor. Zuckerberg would only censor speech about Facebook and himself personally. Dorsey seemed entirely blindsided by the pressures from the administration, three-letter agencies, and individual Congressmen based on the Twitter Files, and pushed back plenty. The three-letter agencies just placed dozens and dozens of people (who decided to quit the CIA, NSA, and FBI in their 30s for some reason and change careers) in the executive suites of every social network.

It's being done in the open, and they're simply daring us to see corruption there. Hell, they've become conspiracy and foreign propaganda scientists, and they can detect the influence of the evil Russian and Chinese enemies of the state even in people who have no connections to Russians or Chinese people. It's their Russian and Chinese ideas that need to be eradicated, and all good communications channels and payments processors should be happy to help unless they are also secretly Russian.

Wow did they go from coordinating banning Alex Jones to banning the last President in record time. Let's see how long it takes them to get from Kiwi Farms to The Grayzone or Rumble, or any newspaper that contradicts a government press release.

mptest2• 3 years ago

This is purely an end run around the constitution, not the desire of companies to control speech. Want an example of this type of end run being used in practice? Nearly a decade ago? Obama used banking access to do a similar end run around businesses deemed political enemies. Some to the good, weapons/ammunition sellers with uncertain scruples, payday lenders...[0] but for some reason I'm not super confident about its consistent use for the better..

[0] https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/op-eds/obamas-ope...

ratsmack2• 3 years ago

Your link goes to a 404, unfortunately.

boppo1• 3 years ago

The three-letter agencies just placed dozens and dozens of people (who decided to quit the CIA, NSA, and FBI in their 30s for some reason and change careers) in the executive suites of every social network.

Where can I find more about this?

pseudo03• 3 years ago

There was some good reporting on this issue in the Twitter Files. For example, Jim Baker, the general counsel at Twitter, used to work for the FBI. Musk fired Baker for his role in suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop story.

https://jonathanturley.org/2022/12/04/six-degrees-from-james...

puglr2• 3 years ago

Found the source[1]. It includes names and LinkedIn profiles, so ought to be verifiable.

[1] https://www.mintpressnews.com/twitter-hiring-alarming-number...

zeroCalories5• 3 years ago

And Cloudflare are nearly as well behaved as they could possibly be.

This is not true. There has been at least two high profile cases where Cloudflare dropped their commitment to free speech when under no real legal pressure(kiwifarms and stormfromt). Maybe you think they did the right thing, but it's clear that they are not a neutral party.

ratsmack2• 3 years ago

They also dropped the Daily Stormer from what I remember.

judge2020• 3 years ago

It’s clear that it’s only an action they take if there is enough immense pressure from everyone who’s not that site.

So while Cloudflare isn’t a diamond in the rough, you could say they’re a.. topaz in the rough.

Cthulhu_2• 3 years ago

Kiwifarms is not just a site about "opinions", they organize destroying people's lives and celebrating when someone kills themselves.

There's a clear moral distinction between "I believe trans women do not belong in women's bathrooms" and "Here's their address, do your thing until they are gone!".

superchroma2• 3 years ago

Kiwifarms isn't some kind of free voice of resistance or gazette, it's just a loose collection of volatile assholes who were banned from 4chan and reddit.

bb8810• 3 years ago

It might also be a meeting place for conspirators to plan crimes.

yanderekko12• 3 years ago

The "good tribe" will always characterize the dissenters of the "bad tribe" in this way.

ExoticPearTree• 3 years ago

Zuckerberg would only censor speech about Facebook and himself personally.

Facebook is the mother of all censorship. Nudity, speech, political views just to name the top most. They only want people to post fluffy stuff on their website.

dang4• 3 years ago

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37314778.

jauer• 3 years ago

Yawn. Non-telco(*1) Tier 1 provider declines to carry routes for an entity they don't like. Happens all the time. This is why you buy from a Tier 2 instead and bypass DFZ(*2) politics.

Drop routes from spammers: Spamhaus DROP list. Drop routes from DDoS sources? All the time.

Even Google wasn't reachable from Cogent over IPv6 for years because of a business dispute. For all we know someone working at HE was targeted by KF and this is a security response (also generally allowed even if you are a regulated provider).

*1: Cogent & HE thread the needle around being a common carrier (they don't sell voice or TDM service) or a broadband provider, which is why KF's WA state complaint will fail (WA's law only applies to mass-market retail providers, which HE is not).

*2: Tier 1 does not mean "best carrier" it means "carrier that doesn't pay another carrier for routes." DFZ literally means default-free zone as in they don't have a default route to another provider.

mid-kid• 3 years ago

Happens all the time.

As this is the first time I hear of this, I'm curious. Do you have any examples?

5424582• 3 years ago

The comment you’re replying to lists several examples already, like the use of the Spamhaus DROP list.

https://www.spamhaus.org/drop/

ehhthing2• 3 years ago

I'm not entirely sure about this but I believe that HE may have been null routing rather than just dropping routes.

tortue0• 3 years ago

Didn't someone actually get the configs that showed it was a bgp prefix filter denying accepting the bgp announcement from a customer? Isn't that a far cry from null routing? They're just choosing not to learn it from a customer. And if you buy the "HE is a tier 1" then whatever other peers were announcing the prefix would have been accepted by HE.

IncogNET3• 3 years ago

Glad to see this. Hurricane Electric has behaved in such an incredibly unprofessional manner regarding this entire ordeal. It began here: https://twitter.com/IncogNetLLC/status/1685359845505957888

We filed a complaint with the Washington state AG over their actions. HE's response was more or less technically obtuse garbage and, "You're not our direct customer" (paraphrasing, of course).

So what they did, was take it upon themselves to prevent access to an entire /36 subnet of IPv6 that our customer had announced downstream of us. Not once did an abuse report get sent to us, or our upstream from HE. Nor did we receive any credible abuse reports sent to us directly from those upset that the site exists. Meanwhile, this actually has no direct impact on the website in question's existence as their opposition has learned by now, it's never been truly offline. Just temporarily blocked from certain ISPs.

From an ISP point of view, it's worrying that a transit provider like HE can arbitrarily cancel a customer of yours, or a customer of a customer (, etc) over legal, protected speech. So, from a business standpoint, what does HE have to gain? The people complaining about the site aren't their target market, they're mostly Twitch streamers, Twitter personalities and folks who have a following on popular platforms that already exist. They're not the types to be self-hosting a streaming service who'll need rackspace and transit. So, what is there to gain by bending the knee to them? The safest business decision would be to remain neutral, respond to law enforcement requests if presented with one, and otherwise do the job you're paid to do. The worst business decision is moderating the content of downstream customers, which is what we're seeing now.

itsnotabtmoney• 3 years ago

The safest business decision would be to remain neutral, respond to law enforcement requests if presented with one, and otherwise do the job you're paid to do.

Have you considered that it might not be about money? What if the decision-makers and operators of Hurricane Electric just have certain people they just want to censor, and use their position to do it at the expense of money. Money is just a means to the end, and if they're getting to that end by foregoing money in business rather than spending it, that seems logical enough to me.

And if the government is ideologically aligned with the operators of the company, you won't find any protection from them. And in many cases it's just the government and large companies working hand-in-glove to get to their ends. Some political outsiders threatening your political monopoly? Pull some strings and have their social media accounts removed and banking taken away; but there's no recourse since "muh private company" even though they're getting direct orders from government officials.

So a good reason to be on the side of "free political speech" is that we don't want the people with the most money controlling what we can and can't say, and we don't want the government to have free reign to shut down criticism or challenges.

f38zf5vdt• 3 years ago

If they choose not to host a platform that they don't like, isn't that free speech? Ironically, appealing to authority to enforce an internet service provider to provide speech they don't want to transmit seems like an imposition on a private entity operating freely.

SV_BubbleTime• 3 years ago

I want to propose a way it can be both money and ideology.

Let’s say you were the governor of a very large state. You have a ton of influence if not sold discredtion on how your state’s $500 billion pension fund is invested. You are an ideologue puppet put in place by people desperately trying to reset the world in their image.

Now… let’s the banks and companies don’t care about your cause - but you have disproportionate sway over them. It can be about money if that is your leverage.

throwaway2037• 3 years ago

    We filed a complaint with the Washington state AG over their actions.

When? Did anything happen? I don't expect this would be a priority for the attorney general.

IncogNET3• 3 years ago

It was later in July. To be clear, filing a complaint is simply an online form. This does not involve or require lawyers or any expense.

The TLDR version is: We filed it as a violation of HB2282, Washignton State's Net Neutrality / Open Internet laws, the AG thought it was an appropriate complaint and forwarded it to HE. This gives them 21 days to respond. They (HE) responded relatively quickly, basically saying, "Nah, no we didn't and no we don't block access to it". At this point it'd be up to us to fight it further. We're not their direct customer, nor will we ever be (now). With that said, they very much WERE blocking access to the subnet as seen here ( https://images2.imgbox.com/b2/ed/Nc8NLQl2_o.png ) and here ( https://images2.imgbox.com/58/e1/1ZIn3YbZ_o.png ).

mrweasel• 3 years ago

So not knowing either company, is IncogNet and CrunchBits related companies in some way? I ask because the article just talks about Crunchbits, which I didn't know about. I tried to look looking up CrunchBits, but that's not really possible on Bing based search engines.

There are a few links to reviews, but the Crunchbits website seems to have scrubbed from Bing.

IncogNET3• 3 years ago

They're the direct customer of Hurricane Electric, and our server provider in that region of the US.

We have our ASN and IPs announced on their network.

minerva233• 3 years ago

"Free speech is for everyone, even the people planning and orchestrating your murder."

FTFY

johnnyanmac5• 3 years ago

To be clear: death threats are not protected free speech.

But yes, it's inevitable due to the global and gargantuan nature of the internet that enforcing consequences against hate speech and harassment for any single govy. is extremely hard, even for countries that unequivocally outlaw it.

mvncleaninst• 3 years ago

Why is trust the default here? If governments, ISPs, and other tech entities behave this way in a single instance, why assume that it's the only instance? Why not just migrate the infrastructure to a country like Belarus and strip away the leverage of whatever shitty jurisdiction you're living under?

downWidOutaFite• 3 years ago

All the people that fought against Net Neutrality, this is what you were fighting for, the ISPs have no requirement to be neutral.

philippejara2• 3 years ago

It appears this is the source of the complaint adding context to what is being discussed by the EFF, no reason it should be dead.

dang4• 3 years ago

We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37315195 so as not to take discussion off topic.

New accounts are subject to additional restrictions because of past abuse by spammers and trolls. Obviously that comment was legit, but as we don't have software smart enough to distinguish legit comments from bad one, some human intervention is often required to rescue the legit ones. You did this yourself by vouching for the comment, which unkilled it.

colinsane• 3 years ago

surely, the attacks from KF against public persons serves to restrict those persons’ freedom of speech.

The so-called “dark web” has plenty of deserved ill repute, however, so although it is resistant to censorship by Tier 1 ISPs, it is not a meaningful option for many, much less an accessible one.

that’s a way too casual dismissal. consider the type of person who posts on KF for just a minute (go there yourself if you haven’t), and think if they might be way more likely than your average person to know how to use tor, a VPN, or something to obfuscate their traffic before posting to a forum where they themselves might be harassed.

HideousKojima2• 3 years ago

surely, the attacks from KF against public persons serves to restrict those persons’ freedom of speech.

How, exactly?

_cenw5• 3 years ago

It's called the paradox of tolerance. ISPs aren't the right layer to police this, but every other layer has failed or isn't designed to deal with a death threat generation machine that keeps a proud count of how many people they drove to suicide on their website.

plagiarist3• 3 years ago

What I'd like to figure out is how there are still so many Nazis despite readily-available facts that Naziism is racist delusions?

And how are countries like Germany still doing kinda okay despite making it illegal to do Nazi stuff? Isn't it a slippery slope directly from banning Naziism direct to North Korean-style authoritarianism?

bb8810• 3 years ago

despite readily-available facts that Naziism is racist delusions?

A lot of people on the right are talking about the US having a mental health crises when it comes to mass shootings. If that's really true, then yeah, that's how we get natsies.

Isn't it a slippery slope directly from banning Naziism direct to North Korean-style authoritarianism?

Well I mean if there's a mental health crisis then yeah, people are going to say that. I personally don't think the founding fathers of the US understood the future gullibility of their citizens.

lr4444lr5• 3 years ago

I personally don't think the founding fathers of the US understood the future gullibility of their citizens.

They absolutely did. When only white, male, decently educated property owners could vote, they had decent reassurance that a constitutional republic with state-specific voter management could work.

I think they'd be horrified to see that today we don't even demand a basic proof of civics education. And I hate that Ramaswamy made that suggestion in such an embarrassing, conversation-poisoning way.

HideousKojima2• 3 years ago

And how are countries like Germany still doing kinda okay

Only for certain definitions of okay

plagiarist3• 3 years ago

Okay, share your definition.

yanderekko12• 3 years ago

I recall reading the other day about Germany making deadnaming a crime..

peterashford• 3 years ago

From an outsider's perspective (NZ) Germany's democracy looks a lot healthier than the US's.

Sohcahtoa826• 3 years ago

It sure seems strange to want to fight for your right to be deliberately rude to someone. If someone says they want to be Stephen instead of Stephanie, choosing to continue calling them Stephanie is just being a dick for no reason. It's one thing if you've known them for years and so breaking the habit of calling them Stephanie is hard, but when that happens, you apologize and call them Stephen.

While I agree that making it a crime is a bit over the top, it's just not a good look to complain about it.

zimpenfish7• 3 years ago

Do you have a handy link, btw? I did some searching and all I can find is their new "self-determination" law reported by AP[1], and their report doesn't mention deadnaming. The only places I can find saying that deadnaming will be fined are your standard right-wing transphobic nutjobs.

[2] (with an NSFW header image) explains that it only covers "[deadnaming] with the aim of harming the person" which is completely different from "deadnaming [is] a crime", right?

[1] https://apnews.com/article/germany-transgender-legal-registr...

[2] https://euro.dayfr.com/trends/756176.html

autoexec6• 3 years ago

What I'd like to figure out is how there are still so many Nazis

There are always going to be people who are fearful and ignorant and looking for a convenient external something to blame their problems on. There are also the people who are raised with those views and others who feel excluded and find a place to belong with a group of "outsiders". I don't think we can ever get rid of racist ideologies. We've evolved to be tribal and distrustful of outsiders and some will struggle with those feelings more than others. We're always going to struggle with racism and that's going to include Nazis. That doesn't mean we're powerless against them, but censorship and oppression certainly isn't the solution.

And how are countries like Germany still doing kinda okay

Germany is not okay. Personally, I think Germany takes things way too far and that state censorship really is dangerous, but I also recognize that they've been in a very difficult position since the end of the war. I can't really fault them for over-correcting, but I do feel for the German people who have to live under unjust laws.

To their credit they've also relaxed a bit over the years. For example, they lifted the ban on Mein Kampf and it flew off the shelves (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-38495456) not because the country was full of secret Nazis this whole time just waiting for it, but because the German people strongly desire freedom.

It's worth noting that even in Germany and other EU counties that gave up basic freedoms in an effort to oppose racism there are still racists. Innocent people get hurt by oppressive laws and racists gain a talking point for recruiting that resonates with a lot of people. It's a lot easier to feed into a person's victim complex when they're actually being oppressed.

raxxorraxor5• 3 years ago

Pretty much sums it up. Also of note is that Germany already had and still has laws against numerous forms of speech, most notably anything that could threaten the public order, which you could mold into a justification to basically stop any speech. The only thing preventing that isn't a law, it is the overall political culture. But with polarization rising, it can quickly become more serious.

Most of these laws stems from a time where monarchy wanted to suppress unsanctioned speech.

The Nazis made a lot of political capital because people wanted them banned and censored. Of course that was just political play and they set new standards for suppression of information and propaganda, but that came after they got into power.

indigo9455• 3 years ago

    > To their credit they've also relaxed a bit over the years. For example, they 
    > lifted the ban on Mein Kampf and it flew off the shelves (https://www.bbc.com
    > /news/world-europe-38495456) not because the country was full of secret Nazis 
    > this whole time just waiting for it, but because the German people strongly 
    > desire freedom.

Factually wrong take. Mein Kampf was never "banned", in fact, there is no such thing as book bans under German law, as there is no censorship - article 5 of the Basic Law explicitly says so. The state can make it illegal to sell and advertise media to minors if it is considered dangerous, and Mein Kampf is and always was on that list.

The reason Mein Kampf could not be distributed until a few years ago is because after Hitler's death, the copyright on Mein Kampf fell to the state of Bavaria (for convoluted reasons), and Bavaria just never reprinted it, nor gave license to reprint it. Therefore, any copying of the book was piracy and was prosecuted under piracy laws. Because German copyright ends 70 years after the death of the author, this no longer applies, and the book can be printed and distributed again.

Note that public distribution of the book for nazi propaganda purposes is still banned under German hate speech laws ("Volksverhetzung") - not because it is this particular book, but because all nazi propaganda in public is blanket banned. This is why the now-released official Bavarian-government-approved copy of Mein Kampf contains additional commentary by historians to situate Hitler's remarks in historic context.

watwut• 3 years ago

Mein Kampf was not banned, it was an intellectual property like any other. It became public domain, because copyright expired.

hattmall2• 3 years ago

For one thing the "Nazis" in the US aren't actual Nazis no matter how much they desire to be. German has banned things that deal with the ACTUAL, real Nazis which were a part of Germany. Germany hasn't banned racism and the reality is that Germany is quite racist. If judging by US standards Germany would be off the charts racist. Even Berlin, Germany's most diverse city is still > 80% white.

daelon• 3 years ago

Are you saying that a city having a large majority of one ethnicity is racism?

concordDance15• 3 years ago

Even Berlin, Germany's most diverse city is still > 80% white.

I am confused as to what this last sentence has to do with anything.

refurb14• 3 years ago

What do you mean “do Nazi stuff”?

Germany treads very lightly when it comes to limiting speech, even for Nazi things.

They have plenty of far-right racist groups that model themselves after the Nazis.

As long as you don’t display the swastika gratuitously (there is no blanket ban), you’re quite free to organize a racist political party and takes seats in the government.

Hell, there are still SS alumni groups in Germany. They arent banned.

Jiro5• 3 years ago

As long as you don’t display the swastika gratuitously (there is no blanket ban), you’re quite free to organize a racist political party and takes seats in the government.

No.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/08/13/afd-party-ban-ge...

nvm0n27• 3 years ago

Germany treads very lightly when it comes to limiting speech, even for Nazi things.

This is the image it projects, and maybe it was even true in the past. But not any more.

https://www.racket.news/p/madness-american-satirist-cj-hopki...

American playwright and humorist C.J. Hopkins, profiled in this space on numerous occasions, has been sent a “punishment order” by a German judge, offering him a Sophie’s Choice of 60 days in jail or 3,600 euros.

His crime? Essentially, insulting the German health minister in a tweet, and using a scarcely-visible image of a Swastika on a mask in a book critical of the global pandemic response, The Rise of the New Normal Reich.

They're literally punishing a guy for calling someone else a Nazi due to their political policies, under anti-Nazi laws. It's the wrong way around but they don't seem to care, the victim in this case was protesting against their COVID laws so down with those sorts.

Also remember the EU just handed itself the power to force tech firms to globally censor anything the EU decides is misinformation, which in practice appears to be anything that disagrees with their policies or ideology.

concordDance15• 3 years ago

What I'd like to figure out is how there are still so many Nazis despite readily-available facts that Naziism is racist delusions?

You're equivocating between two different meanings of "Nazi" in this sentence.

And how are countries like Germany still doing kinda okay despite making it illegal to do Nazi stuff?

They aren't, they moved the Overton window so far via a ratchet effect that they're unable to calmly discuss immigration policy.

momirlan3• 3 years ago

"nazi" is a name people call those they don't like: mother in laws, their bosses, the school principal, political opponents... it is used so often, it lost a real meaning.

bratgpttamer• 3 years ago

It retains that meaning in 99.98% of political discourse: "[topic] is something I dislike and/or reminds me of something/someone I dislike, and it's the only way for me to express that my enemy is subhuman without sounding like a psycho fascist myself"

dang4• 3 years ago

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37314997.

lr4444lr5• 3 years ago

Will they take a similar stand for VPS providers and CDNs as well?

autoexec6• 3 years ago

Once again the EFF is proving that they'll stand behind their principles and defend freedom even for those they disagree with. They are one of the few remaining organizations that I feel I can support without reservation. Taking this difficult position isn't easy, but it is the right thing to do and I'm so glad to see that the EFF has the strength to do it in the face of growing opposition to free speech ideals.

dee-bee2• 3 years ago

Once again the EFF is proving that they'll stand behind their principles and defend freedom even for those they disagree with. They are one of the few remaining organizations that I feel I can support without reservation.

I find this attitude very odd. Surely some disagreements indicate a violation of their principles. What would the principles be worth otherwise? Surely this is the paradox of tolerance in a different package. Why not instead model communication as a bilateral contract?

drak0n1c2• 3 years ago

What would the principles be worth otherwise? Surely this is the paradox of tolerance in a different package. Why not instead model communication as a bilateral contract?

If it was justifiable for speech infrastructure to ban the speech of any ideology based on if its implementation societally would probabilistically/historically lead to mass speech suppression and/or other atrocities, then a massive array of political and religious speech would technically qualify for a ban. Including Marxist-Leninist writing, or religious proselytizing to name a few.

chonkerz48• 3 years ago

The EFF is arguing that companies should lose their right to withdraw service due to TOS violation, unless the government says it's ok. This is as anti-freedom as it gets. What is wrong with them

sebzim4500• 3 years ago

Do you think your phone company should be able to deny you service if they don't like the things you say on the phone?

b2158264• 3 years ago

Lol. EFF are now a bunch of virtue signalling hacks pretending to care about Internet free speech. They outed themselves as total hypocrites when they joined the "RMS is an <X>ist" bandwagon and removed Gilmore from their board.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/03/statement-re-election-...

http://techrights.org/2021/11/05/not-the-frontier-anymore/

https://www.theregister.com/2021/10/25/john_gilmore_removed_...

teachrdan4• 3 years ago

They outed themselves as total hypocrites when they joined the "RMS is an <X>ist" bandwagon

Are you suggesting that, because of his work writing and promoting open source software, that EFF should never be allowed to criticize RMS? Is that what makes them "total hypocrites"?

minerva233• 3 years ago

This is a weird one though. They're defending the freedom of criminals to commit crimes while simultaneously calling for the criminals to be prosecuted.

OrangeMusic• 3 years ago

I don't understand why this seems hard to understand. Their reasons are very clear and explained in the post.

Tier 1 ISP censoring internet has worse long term consequences than this website existing.

shadowgovt3• 3 years ago

Counterpoint: the Internet is a network of peers, and if KF can't become a peer and can't find a private company to serve their needs, then forget them.

No support for the activity of abusers.

menacingly• 3 years ago

the majority of the overhead of civilization for the last few thousand years or so is scalable mechanisms to arrive at shared definitions for words like "evil", "wrong", "abuse"

it's a really hard problem, and every time someone comes in and treats it as a simple issue they do dangerous and naive stuff.

shadowgovt3• 3 years ago

I don't disagree. But I'll point out that "ISPs should just be dumb pipes" and "In the meantime, Tier 1 ISPs like Hurricane should resist the temptation to step in where law enforcement and legislators have failed" are treating it as a simple issue, only in the other direction.

eightysixfour• 3 years ago

Agreed. ISPs are the part of the network that we need to demand be free to any speech, other than the explicitly illegal, and even then we need to ask if it should be handled in a different manner.

unethical_ban2• 3 years ago

Shameless plug, I wrote an essay on this topic years ago:

https://wannabewonk.com/gab-and-free-speech-on-the-internet/

The crux being what EFF is saying now. ISPs and DNS and CAs are too fundamental to free speech for blockage at that layer to occur without legal cause.

10g1k• 3 years ago

Few things are more inhumane, abhorrent, vile, digusting, and sickening as war. Yet every ISP permits news businesses to spread content about, and even promote, wars. Clearly they do not actually object to "offensive" content, but are cherry-picking to suit their own ideology.

tjpnz2• 3 years ago

I would encourage those interested to read up on the individual behind the ISP harassment campaign and what might actually be motivating them to do it. That it's being done to protect trans people is highly disingenuous.

cf141q53255• 3 years ago

Here the Glenn Greenwald post from the time of the Kiwifarms debacle is worth referencing.

https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1567292900312064000

But the worst is watching people whose job title in corporate HR Departments is "journalist" take the lead in agitating for censorship. They exploit the platforms of corporate giants to pioneer increasingly dangerous means of banning dissenters. These are the authoritarians.

Its especially despicable if it happens consciously as a means to an end. Signaling towards a common enemy is highly profitable in a tribalism ridden society. Doing this despite an understanding of the risk it entails can hardly be described as anything but malice.

I can only think of imploring people to read Meerloos "Rape of the mind" about the existential risk totalitarian systems pose. And even if someone already went full Stalinist thinking the ends justify the means, its worth mentioning that its a self destructive delusion. It cant work and the revolution eats its children reliably. Be it the SA or the red guard, they always end as the victims of the monster they created. Unfortunately the rest of society is then stuck in the dystopian nightmare these delusional maniacs created.

edit: On this note, Arte recently had a documentary about the Chinese gulag system https://www.arte.tv/en/videos/106702-001-A/china-s-concentra...

edit1: The only one saving you from this fate is yourself. So maybe dont put it off till you are in prison.

In the same text, Martsinkevich said he’d finally read Alexander Solzhenitsyn's “The Gulag Archipelago” for the first time. “If I’d read ‘Gulag Archipelago’ before I sat down to write ‘Restrukt,’ I wouldn’t have even started it!” he confessed.

https://meduza.io/en/feature/2020/09/17/in-the-end-it-doesn-...

vintermann5• 3 years ago

Linking to Twitter doesn't work very well these days. Users who aren't logged in don't see the thread, only the single tweet you link to.

chonkerz48• 3 years ago

Their personal information is plastered all over Kiwifarms so it's pretty easy to find.

rascul2• 3 years ago

I'm confused because the issue seems to be about Crunchbits but most of the article seems to cover Kiwi Farms and only mentions Crunchbits once.

ryan-c• 3 years ago

Where was the EFF when ISPs were null routing everything on Spamhaus's DROP list?

https://www.spamhaus.org/drop/

chonkerz48• 3 years ago

Probably realizing that it's reasonable for ISPs to not want to get buried in email spam.

vintermann5• 3 years ago

When you remove content because you think the recipient doesn't want to see it, that's moderation.

When you remove content because you think the recipient shouldn't see it, regardless of what they might want, that's censorship.

Whether it's a good idea to use T1-ISPs to moderate your inbox is another question.

ApolloFortyNine• 3 years ago

To put it even more simply: When a person uses a room in a house to engage in illegal or just terrible activity, we don’t call on the electric company to cut off the light and heat to the entire house, or the post office to stop delivering mail.

LA actually did this during covid to shut off water for homes being accused of holding parties during covid.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/08/06/us/los-angeles-shuts-off-powe...

I don't agree with it, but just showing that some people have decided the ends justify the means essentially.

koolba• 3 years ago

I don't agree with it, but just showing that some people have decided the ends justify the means essentially.

I’m convinced they never truly cared about the ends.

It’s the more basic rule that power corrupts. Those actions were all for show and it wasn’t to protect anybody. It was purely to showcase power.

Nathanba2• 3 years ago

Power does not corrupt, it's just that these people were always bad people and power gives them the tools to do some bad things.

dietr1ch3• 3 years ago

What an awful example from the third world. What's next? The IRS forces doctors not to treat some patients in ER because they may owe taxes?

Access to water and medical attention are human rights, no matter how awful the humans may be according to the acting officers.

nonethewiser5• 3 years ago

Or if the IRS investigates the President's political opponents.

Cthulhu_2• 3 years ago

What do you mean by "the third world" in this case? It's a geographic descriptor (non-Nato / Warsaw Pact countries), not one about how a country treats its people or its developmental state.

EarlKing• 3 years ago

some people have decided the ends justify the means essentially

...and it's long past time they were told in no uncertain terms that the proletariat has had enough of this bourgeoisie nonsense. Laws exists for a reason. No one should be subject to the whims of bourgeoisie overlords. Just because some imbecile believes they have a great idea and thinks it should be forced upon others does not make it so. This is such an important point that there are entire religions built around it.

I didn't think I'd live to see it, but I'm proud, delighted, and amused to see that people are finally starting to wake up to the notion that maybe the rule of law is a good idea and should apply to everybody.

est2• 3 years ago

ISP is a no-go, but are there any successful online speech moderation mechanism?

ThrowawayTestr6• 3 years ago

Laws and the justice system.

est2• 3 years ago

ISP regulating online speech is the result of some law and the justice system.

cookiengineer6• 3 years ago

As a victim that has been doxxed and attacked in real life, over a rumor that some idiots spread about me on the other side of the planet (that I am trans?!?), I wholeheartedly disagree and I now know what all the feminist movement is talking about when they write or talk about that they don't feel safe, be it online or offline (due to the technological "upper hand" being on the side of the doxxers).

This incident changed my life, and I changed my pacifistic views because I cannot stand by and do nothing anymore.

Why is it that people have the right to decide what their standpoint is over this, especially in regards to legal actions...but victims don't even have the right to change their names in order to feel safe again?

I thought long whether or not I should write about this, because honestly, I'm in Europe and I don't give a damn about your shit-smearing American radicalization tactics in political campaigns. But I realized that it's over here nowadays, too, and it's a lot bigger than anyone not involved might assume.

Team Jorge, AIMS, Killnet/Xaknet/Legion's psyops, troll factories with fake education foundations as a cover story, etc. if you want to know more about it. Aleph from the occrp if you want to do more research on the legal structures and how their money flows.

The right-wing ("alt rights") are the fools of modern warfare, and they don't even know who it is that is playing them because they are blind of hatred and despair. And that's what's wrong with our society.

Autocracies on the planet realized that the weakness of democracy is that it tries to find a compromise. "Divide and conquer" is literally what they're doing, and we are too busy discussing our moral stand points over this while they infect our societies with hatred to make it impossible to govern.

hotdogscout2• 3 years ago

Thank you for this post. I'm sorry you went through this.

I don't exactly understand what you mean by feminism (GC/radfem or the average suffrage feminism).

cookiengineer6• 3 years ago

I don't exactly understand what you mean by feminism (GC/radfem or the average suffrage feminism).

I think that the dissonance in the feminism movement versus their counterparts is that there's a different level of expectations in the topics that they as a movement want to discuss.

When women (or LGBTQA+) are talking about these issues, they're looking for allies, they're looking for compassion and comfort on their journey; and are not interested in the rational solution in the first place.

The obvious topics that nobody talks about in similar topics like child abuse is ridiculous from their perspective. They see the world as "all men are talking about protecting children, but none of them talk about that they need to protect children from men" and that's something that hits the ego on the other side. Men usually have problems putting their egos aside from the topic, and that's what causes the "defending arguments" game; because they project those accusations on themselves directly.

Hence, incels exist, and why kiwifarms, /pol/ and others have huge overlaps in their communities because of it. They simply cannot differ between personal accusations, and comfort themselves with generalizations out of anger and hate.

And everything that was said in a state of anger wasn't true anyways, because it was either an excessive statement to make a point or some over-stylized hearsay. But that's the blame game that worked in school until the more rational side gave up, and hence why nobody is able to put their egos aside later in life to actually try to find a compromise.

_cenw5• 3 years ago

Did you ever do a full writeup of this incident?

I'd hope something came of the criminal complaint you filed regarding the assault, but i'm not holding my breath here.

cookiengineer6• 3 years ago

I didn't publish my writeup(s) yet because it would put me at a strategical disadvantage for the time being. I'm not ready, and still need some time for preparing my tech stack. If you're curious, it's gonna be released on the Tholian Network website.

There have been a couple of investigations that I helped with in the German media though, in case you're interested. They mostly focus on bigger topics though, like the fact that AIMS was used for vote manipulations, or about the troll factories in middle/west Africa etc.

They didn't talk about the hacker groups in detail because I think there's some missing expertise in that sector (also in regards of being able to defend themselves), but everything around those groups on telegram can be dug up pretty quickly. It's not like they care about their secrecy.

[1] https://www.zdf.de/nachrichten/politik/team-jorge-israel-des...

[2] https://www.ardmediathek.de/video/wdr-dok/propagandaschlacht...

jeroenhd• 3 years ago

Edit: you know what, debating this here isn't worth the effort. Sad to see the state of this place.

ThrowawayTestr6• 3 years ago

Anti doxing laws should've shut that place down long ago.

Reposting publically available information should never be illegal.

habinero5• 3 years ago

It is, however, also legal for private companies to decide stalking is bad and kick them off their systems.

chonkerz48• 3 years ago

And tormenting mentally vulnerable people. You forgot to mention that.

richbell20• 3 years ago

I'm all for freedom of speech, but forums dedicated to driving people to commit suicide go far beyond that.

The claim that Kiwi Farms is a forum "dedicated to driving people to suicide" is patently false. It is rhetoric created by people campaigning to get it removed without due process by painting its owner and users as cartoonish villains.

Kiwi Farms has thousands of threads discussing people from all ends of the spectrum, including apolitical figures. You can go there yourself and see how diverse the users and their interests are.

creata• 3 years ago

The site is literally about stalking people and documenting their personal lives for the sake of mockery. The users are cartoonish villains, and I'm not sure how you'd get any other impression after spending a few minutes there.

laputan_machine• 3 years ago

"You don't agree with me so I'll throw my toys out of the pram"

Come off it, debate is debate, you're trying to come to a conclusion, but for that to happen your mind needs to be open to the possibility that you are wrong, can you do that? If not, then yes, debating is not worth the effort.

mamborambo• 3 years ago

There is an old joke about the difference between a service provider and a "service preventer". Often the difference is the type of power we allow them to have over the users.

There are many domains of modern society that serve specific service roles, that should never have been given over-reaching power to also monitor and judge outside of a court order, but they do.

Finance used to have secrecy but no anymore, tax is now open book. Transportation and mobility is checked and prechecked. Free speech is being eroded both by snowflakes and copyright trolls. The slippery slope has no boundary and rolls into an avalanche.

p1mrx• 3 years ago

Interesting, so there actually was a story behind this unusual HN thread a few weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37060597

goldinfra• 3 years ago

Those of us purchasing bandwidth should boycott HE. I know I will be and I'm a potentially significant customer of theirs. They're completely off the list of providers unless they completely change their tune.

SamoyedFurFluff5• 3 years ago

Is this situation like, say I own some commercial property like a mall, someone rents from me, I realize the person who is renting from me is allowing one of the storefronts to advertise the ritualistic sacrifice of kittens. Shouldn’t I be allowed to 1) tell the guy renting from me to boot out the kitten killers; 2) boot out the guy renting from me for letting one of the storefronts of my commercial space be kitten killing?

Am I not understanding something here

zer8k3• 3 years ago

Yes. You're not understanding that

Banning someone from your private establishment is within your rights. If they want to run their own business they can elsewhere.

Banning someone via an ISP is different because ISPs have so much infrastructure they can in some sense be considered a "public utility". Nothing would stop someone from advertising ritualistic kitten killing in a public park (except maybe indecency laws but those vary). Likening an ISP to a public park is more accurate. If someone posted a sign saying "no one convicted of smoking weed can walk through this area" you'd rightfully be accused of some civil rights violation in your park. Similarly, ISPs are a conduit no different than a park path.

Everyone chooses KF or whatever as an example of "bad people that should be stopped". That's great. No one disagrees. Anyone with more than a room temperature IQ sees where it goes though. Suddenly you won't be able to access things that don't conform to the government issued public opinion. Don't believe me? The Great Firewall is exactly the same technology.

It is legitimately not my problem, nor the ISPs, who is doing what on the big internet. We have existing laws. Use those to prosecute people posting kitten killing videos or whatever. We do not need to have ISPs using AI and shit as precognitiion to censor what they deem to be "unsafe speech" or whatever.

SamoyedFurFluff5• 3 years ago

Okay so like, what if I own the only mall in a large area. Like a rural suburb where there is often only one shopping space/public commercial space. Is there an upper limit where your private property is considered public utility?

hellgas00• 3 years ago

Your analogy is poor, what you described contravene US laws. Your misunderstanding was seemingly addressed in the article. Tier 1 providers, in some regions, operate as quazi-monopolies. A more apt analogy; you dislike renters that openly promote their religious affiliation, but you also own all of the rental properties in the western United States. This leaves them with nowhere to setup shop for running foul of your delicate sensibilities as they relate to religious matters.

SamoyedFurFluff5• 3 years ago

Right, does this mean that at some point your private property is a public utility? What line is that? What if my mall is the only commercial space available in a small town?

lopkeny12ko• 3 years ago

Surprised by the huge outpouring of support here, yet when X puts forward the exact same values of "freedom of speech but not freedom of speech," it's met entirely with criticism.

lnxg33k1• 3 years ago

Have you checked if it was the same people? I usually read about "Here last week someone said this, but now someone said that" as HN or communities in general are one single organism, what your post wants to say? Have the people in this thread forgotten to go through education camps?

Do you hope that Musk is going to throw some peanuts at you for defending him like a good boy?

cycomanic3• 3 years ago

I think the question is not quite so easy as many here (and even the EFF) are making it seem.

It's easy to talk about free-speech that needs to be protected at any cost when it comes to political speech, but if we look at e.g. spam nobody argues that spam and spammers should be blocked. Now is spam less speech, because it is not political?

On a similar note, if I own a large piece of land should I allow a demonstration that I disagree with cross the land because of free-speech? If no, why does a company who carries data, need to provide their "pipes" to the same people?

I understand the argument that restricting speech is a slippery slope, on the other hand I agree with Popper, not restricting all speech and enabling the "intolerant" is also a slippery slope (I say that as a German, we have quite a bit of experience with this).

I'm not sure how to draw easy boundaries, but making this into an argument of "easy it's free-speech that needs to be defended at all costs" seems much too simplistic.

ThrowawayR23• 3 years ago

Spam is speech that the recipient does not want to receive; deplatforming spammers is aligned with the recipient's desires. Deplatforming speech that the recipient does want to receive is not aligned with the recipient's desires and infringes on their ability to communicate freely. Therefore, the spam analogy is not valid.

cycomanic3• 3 years ago

That's not a very good argument. Clearly there are some people who do want to see spam otherwise spam would be uneconomical because nobody would buy. On the same note there are plenty of people who don't want to see KF material. I don't think arguing by some sort of majority works. And yes lots of spam, phishing and other material gets filtered out by ISPs (somebody further up was talking about that some ISPs were blocking the full spam house list). A

gruez• 3 years ago

but if we look at e.g. spam nobody argues that spam and spammers should be blocked. Now is spam less speech, because it is not political?

Because the blocking is consensual. You're actively choosing to block out the spam, and if you so choose you can still see the spam. The same can't be said for deplatforming. Even if you want to read kwifarms you can't, because others have presented you from being able to access their site.

its_ethan• 3 years ago

Isn't a decent amount of spam blocked without our knowing? Telecom companies work to prevent spam phone calls, YT/Twitter/FB try to block bots or spam accounts - all that happens without users consensually blocking each account. Most people don't even realize how much "speech" has been blocked that they don't even see?

chonkerz48• 3 years ago

Spammers have filed free speech lawsuits to try to get blocks taken down.

quickthrower22• 3 years ago

To put it even more simply: When a person uses a room in a house to engage in illegal or just terrible activity, we don’t call on the electric company to cut off the light and heat to the entire house, or the post office to stop delivering mail. We know that this will backfire in the long run. Instead, we go after the bad guys themselves and hold them accountable.

I like this analogy it hits it home.

It really should take a court order to block sites based on a legal reason, and you probably don’t need to get the backbone to do it, it could be done by the ISP then escalate up if needed.

millzlane• 3 years ago

This analogy doesn't hold up, if you were using a room in a house for illegal activity and you didn't come out, they would absolutely cut your power to come after you.

quickthrower22• 3 years ago

With a warrant, maybe. But would the power company unilaterally cut you because you, say had a neon sign that said ${something you might find on 4chan} on the front lawn?

wrp2• 3 years ago

Serious legal question...What is the difference between an online venue and telephones? Is it simply that implementation of censoring is practicable? Could the telephone companies start "moderating" all phone communications to prevent unsavory communication?

chonkerz48• 3 years ago

Phone companies already ban spam customers that make thousands of phone calls

wrp2• 3 years ago

That's according to volume of calls, not content, so I would assume it's covered by different legal theory.

metalspot7• 3 years ago

censorship is all about power so the focus is on controlling any mechanism of broadcast communication that could result in political organization. traditional voice communication over phones is very inefficient compared to internet based text communication so it would probably be a low priority by comparison.

yashap• 3 years ago

I agree, and I’m extremely far from a free speech absolutist - to a level that I’m sure most at HN would disagree with. I completely believe in limits to free speech on a case by case basis, online and otherwise. For example, I think HN would be a worse place without moderation, same with Reddit, I think my home country Canada would be a worse place without hate speech laws, etc.

Not against limits to free speech online, but I think ISPs are the wrong layer for them. Governments can go after specific sites carrying out illegal activities, online communities can moderate themselves to avoid devolving into 4chan, but ISPs shouldn’t make censorship decisions, it’s just too broad a reach/impact for a private company.

chonkerz48• 3 years ago

Kiwifarms makes shell companies so the hosting provider is a confederate and the only way to terminate service is to go over their head and complain to the upstream. You can even see "their hosting provider" posting weird political astroturfing in this thread.

Spammers do this trick all the time to buy some plausible deniability.

richbell20• 3 years ago

Kiwifarms makes shell companies

Can you provide examples of shell companies they've used? As far as I'm aware, Kiwi Farms only had a single LLC which is based in the US.

raxxorraxor5• 3 years ago

HN is moderated, but I cannot imagine many opinions that really would be outright banned or suppressed. It has strong requirements to the form, but not necessarily the content of the message itself. That is in essence not the topic people complain about, otherwise they probably wouldn't post.

I am a free speech absolutist though, I tend to like the term too because I believe its intended derisiveness is mostly impotent. Overall I believe trying to enforce hate speech laws is fundamentally flawed. I think people should be free to express acceptance as they should be able to express rejections.

kredd• 3 years ago

Quite a lot of opinions get suppressed over here, and rightly so. You can see a lot of flagged comments in hot threads.

I grew up with unrestricted access to internet as a child, browsed a lot of forums, and most of them were always heavily moderated as well. The thing is, the majority of audience (read-only people) don’t want to see extremely stupid content (subjective). Thus the mods, host and etc. have to play the balancing game. HN is one of those places, and they’re doing a terrific job, in my opinion.

I’m not sure how to put it into words, but Internet is not the same as public free speech. Anonymity, physical distance, not seeing others’ faces contribute to the way people talk. I completely support the former kind, but not the latter. It just becomes a breeding ground for a lot of naive people who start thinking that’s tolerable to act that way in real world too (can’t cite any sources, just observations from my nephews and others kids I know). We like to tout how everyone forms their own opinions, but I’m a heavy believer of the “nurture” side of the debate. If you get sucked into one corner of the Internet, you will start hating the other corner, and that’s basically your nurturing. I guess, the major question is, should we keep fostering this behaviour or not? And I don’t know the answer, as there isn’t “one right corner” most of the time. The best I can do is to support the crackdown on extremely obvious shitty behaviour knowing that’s against the free speech ethos.

oblio• 3 years ago

It has strong requirements to the form, but not necessarily the content of the message itself.

This is provably false.

If I write a very formal and polite message asking for some horrible thing to be done to group X, the message will be removed as soon as HN mods see it.

Andrew_nenakhov• 3 years ago

Moderation and censorship are two very different things.

Also, trusting the government is silly. It has a lot of opportunities to call any speech harmful to state policies as 'hate speech', 'misinformation', etc. - and before long you could find your country turned into a authoritarian failed state like Russia.

vintermann5• 3 years ago

Right. To make it explicit: Moderation is when you take down material because the recipient doesn't want to see it.

Censorship is when you take down content because you don't want the recipient to see it, regardless of how the recipient feels about it.

If people think censorship is sometimes justified, they should argue that, and not muddle the picture with moderation.

lifthrasiir• 3 years ago

I'm on the same page, and I think the title could have been better because it overlooks the following sentence, which is in my opinion the most effective argument against HE:

Tier 1 ISPs don’t have the ability or the incentive to build content evaluation teams that are even as effective as those of the giant platforms who know far more about their end users and yet still engage in harmful censorship.

HE should not do the "moderation" not because those sites are okay, but because HE can't do the effective moderation. The current title doesn't suggest that the subject ("ISPs") is very important.

polski-g• 3 years ago

Wouldn't this action eliminate section 230 protections for Hurricane?

slikrick2• 3 years ago

do people here consider comment moderation to be online speech policing? Seems pretty clear that there are certain things hosts don't want on their platform

there's an economic bottom line where advertisers drive a lot of the need as well. users themselves aren't paying for the service.

bluescrn6• 3 years ago

Moderation can be good, but only in moderation.

lynx232• 3 years ago

Tell that to Google. You could almost feel how sexy the censoring people felt during 2020 at Google. Must have been a blast of a time.

greyface-5• 3 years ago

Doesn't Hurricane still buy v4 transit from Telia? It's strange that everyone is uncritically calling them a Tier 1 here; I'm used to endless bickering over whether they're a Tier 1 or a Tier 2.

mritun• 3 years ago

Huh, so what’s EFF’s stance on spamming and phishing block lists? If ISPs are going to deplatform spammers and DDoSers where are they going to go?

ikiris• 3 years ago

what is missing from everything visible so far is this is people trying to force HE to carry traffic for kiwifarms when they don't want to.

I add this so people don't have to do extra googling like I did to understand a story.

meroes• 3 years ago

Why should an individual’s speech limit a business to being a dumb pipe?

I’ve never gelled with this aspect of “tech” (startup?) culture.

Why shouldn’t an ISP or any company be able to limit for any lawful reason?

jdthedisciple3• 3 years ago

Sounds like you are not disagreeing, the question is just what is a lawful reason.

throwaway584802• 3 years ago

Further the intent of a system based on law, at least since the Magna Carta, is that the people (definitions vary) have to be consulted democratically.

mnd9992• 3 years ago

More nativity from the EFF, I dont think they live in the real world. It’s never worked that at and never will. Why? Because the systems become unusable for everyone.

A simple and very very old example is email. Even back in the 1990s days of the Internet, we had spam on email and if your reputable isp caught you spamming you’d be in trouble. Same with shitposting on usenet.

Sure there are nuances to consider as to what providers should do and what they should not, but like a lot of things this is a hard problem. The ‘simple’ solutions presented here and in other places will not solve it.

cf141q53255• 3 years ago

Alleging nativity when at the same time championing just simply banning stuff you dont like, the consequences be dammed, might be funny, but this discussion has too high stakes for undisclosed satire. Still made me chuckle though.

edit: Apparently not satire. Quite sorry to hear, that was me giving the benefit of the doubt. That leaves either stupidity (not realizing the consequences), malice (not caring) or me overlooking something.

So, how do checks and balances for mob justice look like? Other then just meaning well and being the good guys? Pretty sure somebody could elaborate if it was really just me overlooking something.

mnd9992• 3 years ago

The same way they’ve always worked - mostly alright. If you’re looking for a perfect solution you’re not going to find it.

charcircuit• 3 years ago

Because the systems become unusable for everyone.

In this case there is no spam or resource exhaustion going on in this case. People are visiting a forum, posting things, and viewing text / images / video files posted by other users.

What makes things unusable is when you want to follow links on the web you need to use VPNs in order to route your traffic through the correct ISPs that will properly route your traffic. There could be a future where different T1 ISPs block different sites so there is no way to browse the entire internet using a single ISP, but instead you have to cleverly pick a different ISP for each destination IP to get it properly routed.

xigoi2• 3 years ago

How exactly does the existence of KiwiFarms make the internet unusable for everyone?

t435622• 3 years ago

I think it might be impossible to avoid having to make moral judgements.

You might wish to believe that you free society can exist without any morality but I don't think it can really.

So what is "ok" and what is "not ok" - would you censor the NAZI party in the 1930s or do you think that letting theim air their views fully would convince Germans not to accept them? 10s of millions of lives depend on your choice.

cf141q53255• 3 years ago

Any moral judgement that ignores the direct practical implications of that judgement is deeply immoral. You cant have meant well when you could have known better but didnt want to.

So what is "ok" and what is "not ok" - would you censor the NAZI party in the 1930s or do you think that letting theim air their views fully would convince Germans not to accept them? 10s of millions of lives depend on your choice.

The rise to power of the NSDAP was aided by being able to frame themselves as the lesser evil in comparison to the KPD representing the totalitarian soviet system. Censoring stuff and combating people creates reactions, once you go down the path of opinion control you end up with the choice between totalitarian systems that are dysfunctional by nature and represent the worst and most extreme versions of a tribalistic conflict. Having a common enemy becomes an end in itself and at that point anyone will do.

This is not an abstract risk, its visible across many western democracies right now. The naive assumption that intention alone will be enough and allows you ignore the consequences, might become the death of the current form of democracies. Its arguably how we got to the point where there are far right parties across Europe in and about to become governments. With at the same time a historic high in population and opinion control measures.

In the end, during the most horrific phases of humanity that were intentionally created there is always a desperate demand for two things. The ability to challenge genocidal narratives (See Romeo Dalaires pleas to just be allowed to broadcast) and having as many rifles as you can get once that fails (See the incredible risk people (including children) took when smuggling weapons into Jewish ghettos. I dont see how attempts to make the first harder, let alone impossible, are anything but evil. Especially with a blatant disregard for the risks this entails. Humanity payed the price for this insight already multiple times over.

t435622• 3 years ago

I don't think the Germans now accept your reasoning and your specific story doesn't really provide support for it.

Countries have laws againt hate speech and libel because we realise that these are evil forms of "free speech".

We have laws about every action that we can do because those actions can harm other people and speech is another action which can harm others.

kiitos4• 3 years ago

Of course it is impossible to avoid moral judgment. Moral judgment is an obligation of every society.

ryzvonusef• 3 years ago

This is an old-school leftist approach that is no longer welcome, imho.

28304283409234• 3 years ago

Indeed. Companies should be able to just rake in profits regardless of social, cultural or environmental impact without taking any responsibility.

kristjank• 3 years ago

I hate how Kiwi Farms has become the benchmark for so many important concepts relating to internet freedom. As much as I think the world would be a better place with them being forever banished to the onion realm, I can't really defend HE and other service providers drafting their own visions of internet code of ethics, then enforcing them on other people's traffic. A smaller ISP would probably start losing business over such concerns, but HE is so large, almost all of internet traffic touches them at some point, so their ability to moderate is not even impacted by their business decisions.

Defending a company's AUP/ToS is reasonable when the company is reasonably sized, but HE is clearly over that limit. When a company gets too big to fail (banking also comes to mind) due to providing crucial societal function, there should be very strict restrictions on what they're allowed to moderate. This also applies to big industry conglomerates (oil, pharmaceuticals).

Another part of the problem seem to be various lazy officials not prosecuting these sites on the basis of obvious crimes involved in their operation.

I really appreciate EFF defending the obviously neutral approach here.

dmatech2• 3 years ago

It's an interesting edge case. It's pretty clearly completely legal in the USA, though the content is grossly offensive. Some of the individual posts are almost certainly defamatory, but §230 shields the site itself from that liability (though not the posters).

This brings us back to the real question: should extreme unpopularity alone be enough for deplatforming in a free society? Or should actual laws need to be broken?

johnnyanmac5• 3 years ago

I think it's much simpler: make sure the content isn't legal to begin with. doxxing seems to broach on 4th amendment rights and we're no longer in a day and age where we will freely give out our address in newspapers. I don't know the fine legal details, but make a DMCA equivalent of private information. If you request a takedown of your identity and they don't comply, throw the book at them.

Likewise, death threats and that kind of harassment isn't protected by 1st amendment rights. I don't think sites should be sued by consumers over user submitted posts, but they should be held accountable for at the bare minimum removing that harassment in a timely matter when asked. If it doesn't happen often enough, fine them.

puuush• 3 years ago

Interesting link, thanks!

gsky• 3 years ago

These days everyone is a story teller and witch hunter. I sometimes think the rotten people's mindset what made me afraid leave my house

bjourne3• 3 years ago

Case in point, www.rt.com is blocked by all major ISPs in all EU countries. That's not the right way to deal with Russian propaganda.

suslik• 3 years ago

I just tried that and it opened without issues.

RecycledEle2• 3 years ago

What if we allowed all speech online, no matter how vile?

The problem would be that people want to avoid seeing some things, and they really want to avoid their kids seeing things.

So what if we define a group of flags that can be set to say "This content does contain X" or "This content does not contain X." If the flag is not set, we don't know. Then web filters can just block content that lacks a flag saying "This content does not contain X."

krapp6• 3 years ago

You're making the mistake many people make in assuming all communication on the web is strictly two way, and that the only possible outcome of speech online is hurt feelings.

If I post your real name, address and bank account credentials online, or photos of you in the bathroom, or start a forum to plan acts of genocide against your race or religion, or maybe spread plausible slander about you on every social media platform I can, that's perfectly acceptable under your terms. But it doesn't help you if all you're allowed to do is set a filter flag on it. It's still there, having an effect.

The web isn't just teenage edgelords shitposting at each other for lulz anymore, there are actual real world consequences at play.

metalspot7• 3 years ago

if people are doing something illegal than allowing them to freely post about it online makes it much easier to detect and prosecute.

RecycledEle2• 3 years ago

I will accept the slander because (1) anonymous slander lacks credibility and (2) being slandered is a small price to pay for my free speech rights and (3) when all limits are removed on speech my big mouth will get me in far more trouble than any slander.

bArray3• 3 years ago

That’s why EFF has long argued that we must “protect the stack” by saying no to infrastructure providers policing internet content.

I agree with this, but you need to understand what you agree to. It's not just the content you want to see - it's also the content you don't want to see. It's the freedom of the most extreme content imaginable - CP, snuff, murder, doxxing, drugs, etc, etc.

People will experience severe issues as a result, but there are other things that can be done:

1. Individuals can do more to protect themselves. We have AI now that can quite accurately detect what is in an image or video, it's entirely feasible to do live content filtering.

2. We need to protect the most vulnerable in our societies. We don't give whiskey to a 5 year old, and we shouldn't give unfiltered internet to a 5 year old. This also extends to vulnerable adults. If you receive government assistance (money/drugs) for a mental disability, a filtered version of the internet should be available to you.

3. The punishment for filtering without permission should be severe enough that it's not just a tax. People really need to be held accountable, otherwise they will just pay the toll and be done with it.

newsclues3• 3 years ago

"If you receive government assistance (money/drugs) for a mental disability, a filtered version of the internet should be available to you."

Not every mental disability makes people stupid enough to make them need a filtered internet.

As someone in that category, but still able to think, if people like you nerf my internet, the amount of rage and anger that I will unleash upon society is going to be endless.

bArray3• 3 years ago

Not every mental disability makes people stupid enough to make them need a filtered internet.

It's not about being stupid, it's about being vulnerable. Also it may not be appropriate in every case. I am also weary of removing the ability to access the internet from otherwise functioning adults. I've not quite happy to have a solid stance on it just yet.

As I said: "[..] a filtered version of the internet should be available to you." - That's to say that they can choose to use it. It's not ideal, but it would be opt-in at least for example on a doctor's recommendation.

[..] people like you [..]

I'm making the case for an unfiltered internet, and I want as many people as reasonable to be able to access it. My suggestion was a compromise.

As someone in that category, but still able to think, if people like you nerf my internet, the amount of rage and anger that I will unleash upon society is going to be endless.

I don't know your your specific scenario, but despite your fundamental rights, it may for example be prudent not to give you access to a gun, despite your want for one, or claims of rage and anger unleashed upon society.

Also we haven't really discussed (for good reason) what such filtering would look like, or who would control it. That's a difficult situation in itself. There's not really a person or group I would trust with such power.

Edit: Spelling/grammar.

birracerveza• 3 years ago

I would extend this to include everyone that isn't actual law enforcement agencies.

While it's perfectly reasonable for websites to decide what content is shown, it should also be possible to decide to show ALL content, except very obviously illegal content like CSAM and actual threats (which can be notified by LE and even automated).

I am aware that this line gets blurry very quickly, but we're leaning way too much on the side of censorship. We are just sweeping the ugly under the rug and hoping it goes away, while instead it festers, until it goes viral.

throwa836373• 3 years ago

“ The cops and the courts should be working to protect the victims of KF and go after the perpetrators with every legal tool at their disposal.”

It seems ridiculous to me to float this as something that is going to happen.

aa_is_op• 3 years ago

...except when it's copyright infringement.... because that's literally how they operate right now.

jacquesm2• 3 years ago

They don't have to police it, but they don't have to facilitate it either. ISPs should be just as free as any other company to decide who they want to do business with.

iteria• 3 years ago

For that to be a reasonable stand people should have reasonable ways to avoid doing business with various ISPs and that's not thr case for many. Their options are one company, maybe two and then they're out of luck. At least if ISP were a real utility in the US they're be able to apply pressure with their votes.

jacquesm2• 3 years ago

True but that's a different problem. As long as companies are allowed to consolidate just this short of obtaining a monopoly that kind of problem will remain. You'd have to address that separately for it to be effective. That's why you always see a lot of competition in a new field which eventually crystalizes out to two, sometimes three main competitors that all have double digit marketshare. It's why we still have Apple and Mozilla. But from the point of view of the would-be monopolists those are optional.

I far preferred it when we had a more diversified eco-system and long run I think we will come to regret this monoculture. But it is hard to spell out exactly what could be done to resolve all this without having the various negative side effects as well as a method of dealing with the now entrenched and very powerful players.

We need 500 search engines, not three, and 500 browser manufacturers, not four. And open, well published and not-dominated-by-a-single-entity standards.

jl6• 3 years ago

I think it’s kind of incredible that Kiwifarms has become the poster-boy for abhorrent content, when Stormfront has been right there for decades and seems to still be going strong. Somehow they are perceived as worse than literal Nazis.

CP3f6kMA• 3 years ago

KF are literal Nazis too.

knorker• 3 years ago

The ACLU has changed to only defend speech they agree with. Will the EFF take over the role that ACLU had?

dcow4• 3 years ago

I see ye ol’ “but HE is a private company they can do what they want” argument surfacing again. Something that is easily missed: internet providers benefit from government protected monopolies because you can’t just dig up cities and lay cable wherever you want. They’re seen as privately run public infrastructure. Therefore there’s an expectation that they indiscriminately carry traffic, because their position as an ISP is too powerful to allow them to be short circuiting the courts and making value judgements. This isn’t just a hypothetical concern, it’s real.

I don’t know HE’s specific situation with regards to being a common carrier, but I’m surprised there isn’t a conversation about the expectations we have of utility providers who receive privileged operational power over necessary public services.

greyface-5• 3 years ago

Do you really think HE owns most of the fiber they use? It's mostly leased from much larger behemoths that own the physical cables, who treat it as a private conduit for photons, and lack the ability to even know what's being transmitted over it, so can't censor.

Source: https://he.net/about_network.html - you see them talk about "negotiating with the top fiber carriers" and even "long haul wavelengths", which means they don't always lease a whole fiber, sometimes just a small slice of the EM spectrum on one.

IP transit is a value-add on top of an underlying physical asset which already has the properties that you want.

dcow4• 3 years ago

I don’t see a functional difference, do you?

In other words, if I have been granted conditional protected exclusive ownership of physical fiber lines and that requires me to be a common carrier, I can launder the common carrier responsibility by leasing guaranteed bandwidth downstream? That does not check out…

evantbyrne• 3 years ago

Being able to choose which private entities your business materially supports is a natural consequence of freedom. As long as ISPs are private businesses, their operators will and should have basic freedoms. The fact that _people_ are dropping KF left and right is just normal and healthy socialization at work. Lack of competition with American ISPs and whether they should be public utilities are real concerns, but fundamentally has nothing to do with KF being widely regarded as a flaming turd.

Dr_ReD• 3 years ago

In the meantime both EU and Italy play fast and loose with censorship normatives: https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2023/08/25/online-platfor... - https://www.wired.it/article/pirateria-online-legge-anti-pez... (italian)

exabrial• 3 years ago

Unfortunately, the media demands censorship and incites people to demand it as well.

The ultimate solution if something bothers you online is to locate the power button on the device, press it, then proceed outdoors to hang out with your friends.

sequoia3• 3 years ago

I heard a podcast interviewing the site owner[0], hearing his perspective was interesting though I don't know how much of what he says is true either. He raised one very salient point, however, which was that ISPs probably didn't start dropping him out of nowhere. He asserts that there is a highly persistent and technically knowledgeable party threatening ISPs & other providers by going after the provider's other customers to pressure the provider to drop kiwifarms. I don't know what the truth is but it is odd that kiwifarms keeps getting knocked offline as neonazi forums etc. stay online.

I don't know much about kiwifarms, never visited it, but given the claims in this post (that it's "uniquely awful," that the site itself is victimizing people) I think it would be helpful if the authors would link to some context/evidence. Maybe it's all true in this case, but I've been on the internet long enough to know that believing grave accusations without evidence is a very bad rookie mistake.

0: https://www.heterodorx.com/podcast/episode-107-how-the-inter...

chonkerz48• 3 years ago

ISPs get threatened all the time and don't take content down just because some rando is mad. Kiwifarms needs to provide proof that ISPs are being threatened, as opposed to the more likely scenario that the harassment victims are filing normal abuse complaints and alerting the ISP to the TOS violations taking place all over the site.

sequoia3• 3 years ago

If this were the case, I wonder how 4chan, stormfront, etc. stay online. Surely 4chan's providers get floods of complaints about doxxing etc. Or pastebin for that matter.

The fact that the EFF is writing about this case and that they're forced to use KF as their one example (clearly they find this distasteful & would prefer to use any other example if they could) indicates that something is unique or at least peculiar about this case.

minerva233• 3 years ago

They're one of the few sites bad enough that even Cloudflare blocked them, which made big news at the time

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiwi_Farms

johnny99k• 3 years ago

Tell that to the Amazon engineers that conspired to shutdown Parlor during the height of its popularity.

kiitos4• 3 years ago

Parlor is bad, and should be shut down.

X6S1x6Okd1st• 3 years ago

Do ISPs block spam? Spam is clearly legal speech

HDPDV• 3 years ago

The EFF is absolutely in the wrong on this. ISPs are private businesses, and they have every right (and responsibility!) to enforce their own Acceptable Use Policies/Terms of Service. Anyone who cries "Freedom of Speech" either hasn't thought this through, or else has no idea what they're talking about... Hurricane Electric is not a government entity.

We are living in Popper's "Paradox of Tolerance". Nazis need to be punched, but de-platforming them is pretty good, too.

chonkerz48• 3 years ago

This thread was linked to on the Kiwifarms website and people are coming in here astroturfing for Kiwifarms. That's why this thread is such a garbage pile.

richbell20• 3 years ago

A lot of the "people here" are from Kiwifarms because this thread got linked to from their site. So a lot of untrue claims are being made about the facts of the situation.

I went looking for this out of curiosity. It seems to be a thread from 2022 with only 10 pages, and only about 10 total replies this year. Is this really your basis for claiming that "a lot" of people are coming from Kiwi Farms?

How did you even find that thread anyway?

HereIGoAgain• 3 years ago

This has been a clear danger for a while now. Beyond just mere danger at this point in fact. You guys are late to the party but it is nice to see you guys catching.

This is the literal death of the internet if nothing is done to stop it.

ISPs should not police online speech no matter how awful it is

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