It's sad to me how successful people have been sanitizing the internet.
The whole point was to be decentralized, and now we have Visa, Mastercard, Apple, Google, Amazon and Cloudflare deciding what we are and are not allowed to see, read and buy. And virtually in lockstep, they are becoming increasingly prudish.
I'm curious if this could be addressed with laws that force companies to either be utilities or publishers. If you're a publisher, you take liability for your content and can edit it at will. If you're a utility, you do not take liability for your services, but you cannot pick and choose which customers you service so long as it's legal.
> It's sad to me how successful people have been sanitizing the internet.
Not just sanitizing, but sanitizing to US social mores. Showing a naked boob is considered porn and banned on most of these platform while public toplessness is perfectly legal in many jurisdictions worldwide. I guess it's lucky that at least these companies are not based in an even more restrictive society like China or we would see further restrictions become commonplace.
Having grown up in an authoritarian country, then having the internet basically force it to liberalize was a great feeling.
Ironically some liberties offered even less than a decade ago are eroding away because of the new internet overlords, often under the guise of some trumped up reason like "security" or "social" cause.
These day they don't even try to hide their true greedy objectives anymore, as seen in the removal of the YouTube dislike button or manifestv3.
And having grown up in a liberal country, then having the internet and Hollywood dominance basically force it to implement US copyright laws and prudish censorship has been really sad.
I couldn't agree more. It is disturbing how quickly things change in regards to the freedom and the liberal way we see naked bodies.
While my example gas nothing to do with the internet it might still be interesting.
When I grew up nudism wasn't uncommon in the GDR, but after being unified with western Germany not one generation later it is more than fringe.
We only see unified filtered body types and the normality of seeing many different bodies in a non sexual way. While on the other hand even non nude bodies on Instagram often are sexualized beyond belief to maximize engagement.
We denormalized nudity, the regular body but commoditized the stereotypical filtered body.
I don't really know if it supports or opposes you point here, but pornography in the GDR was illegal while in unified Germany it is generally legal. I guess it kind of supports your claims that peoples bodies have become more commoditized, that porn is more acceptable than simple nakedness. On the other hand it kind of shows how the previous regime had its own hangups about human sexuality.
Yes, when growing up watching Hollywood movies my parents always joked that showing a naked body was not done, but insane aggression (eg beheadings / limbs falling off / etc) was perfectly fine. I think that was while watching Total Recall somewhere in the 90s.
> showing a naked body was not done, but insane aggression was perfectly fine.
[1] is a decent documentary about the weird and inconsistent standards applied by the MPAA. But yeah, violence is fine, man-focused sex is passable, woman-focused sex is bad, homosexual sex is RIGHT OUT, etc.
Um, there are a lot more (often gratuitous) sex scenes in US-made TV/ movies than Japanese ones, from what I've observed. And while there's generally far less glorified violence, you only need to watch something like Alice in Borderland to see some pretty explicitly violent stuff.
For the folks downvoting the above comment, it doesn’t necessarily reflect a viewpoint (that you could disagree with) but could simply be a heads up for people at a workplace with policies against viewing that content at work. (A policy that you might also disagree with… but the warning itself is still useful to some.)
I did not and can't downvote, no I have no stake in this.
That said, in my opinion people working in such a workplace reading a post "Why “go nuts, show nuts” doesn’t work in 2022" should be savvy enough to not click links, or read the post in the first place.
Also, ironically, the fact that we have to mark such links (to Wikipedia!) as NSFW is exactly what this particular comment chain is about, no?
You're overthinking it. Well, it's in the name right? Its not safe for work. I'm in a semi-full conference room currently, and opening the link would be a bit awkward, as it would be really out of context for osmeone who have a view onto my screen.
It was definitely a valid remark, and in this case, it was useful at least for me.
I disagree that they're overthinking it, and you haven't addressed (or perhaps you overlooked?) their main point, that if this is true then you should have thought about that before opening _this_ link, instead of the links on this page.
This is more to say that this is a disagreement between you two at the object level, not someone overthinking a simple matter.
Ah, the ol' Hacker News "being a contrarian just to be a contrarian" thing.
Boobs on the screen isn't the greatest look at work or any public location, and I don't really think it requires going any deeper than that. I can appreciate the pointless debate here and there, but this isn't some great philosophical question we have here lol.
Yeah. It's not just a prudish workplace policy thing. There is definitely stuff I wouldn't want on a screen in an office workplace policies notwithstanding because someone could take offense whether reasonably IMO or not. For that matter, there are almost certainly (non-porn) films I wouldn't go out of my way to watch on a plane especially if there were children nearby.
Decency laws prohibiting toplessness were challenged back in the day under Equal Protection and Due Process. Both sexes have nipples, some men have larger moobs than women. There's just not much biological difference, and thus no basis to legislate on other than the sex of the person bearing their breasts - nipples are nipples, basically.
This was all back in the day, long before trans awareness even hit the mainstream.
> I honestly had no idea it was legal anywhere outside of private or 'cordoned off' places.
It generally isn't. The map image in the article colors a state blue for "legal at the State/Territory level". But that's not where the laws banning nudity come from anyway, so it's almost purely uninformative.
"Public toplessness is also legal in most of the United States."
Sort of. Many states don't have laws specifically against it, but some of the ones listed as legal on that map may not actually be (PA should be marked yellow at best). Most of these states also do not appear to restrict localities from enacting their own ordinances (obviously excluding under the jurisdictions where the courts have ruled).
This but much broader. One of the things that really bothers me is the suppression of non-US use of language (or, from the opposite perspective, the incentivisation of US-like language & conformance to US cultural norms).
Take Youtube "content-creators" as an example making a living from ad revenue: Aussie / Scottish other native-English-speaking contributors face "de-monetisation" for presenting their natural selves and instead are asked to present according to US cultural norms in order to use the platform. And this isn't unique to Google/Youtube - the same applies to content-moderation across the internet.
It's a problem in the spanish speaking world. It's a recurring theme saying that you have to conform to your ad-revenue overlord, and that certain topics can't be discussed.
Some people does the content anyway but publish in non-US platforms, or at least somewhere small that can't curate content.
It's a problem in the English-speaking world too. IIRC the reason why YouTubers always say 'the pandemic' instead of 'COVID-19' or 'the coronavirus' is because of the risk of demonetization.
Some channels (e.g. RealLifeLore) even gate their videos on more controversial topics (e.g. war) behind a Nebula or Patreon subscription, with the rationale that they would get demonetized on YouTube.
I remember a guy who got his xbox account permabanned because his username was "kike8572", and the support wouldn't give him his account back even after explaining that kike in Spanish is just a shorthand for the name "Enrique" (his name).
I'm not sure what you mean and imagining people in AU going through accent training to sound like they're from the US... please tell me it's not that bad
One notable difference is the c-word, which is a gendered slur in the US, but not in Scotland or Australia.
I'm self censoring here because this is a US-run site and I'm afraid I'll get shadowbanned if I use it in full. I am not from the US and this word does not carry the same weight for me.
Also, I find it funny that "cunt" is considered a gendered slew in the US (according to one of the parent comments). Being a cunt has nothing to do with gender, and everything with a character.
I see this argument as similar to the idea that 'bitch' doesn't have to do with gender. If that were true, wouldn't calling someone a 'dog' carry the same weight?
There's a bit that comedian Bill Burr does where he observes that referring to someone as "that fucking $XXX" is considered racist while "that $XXX motherfucker" isn't and it has to do with the former talking about the group $XXX as a whole and the latter very explicitly (uh, no pun intended) referring to an attribute of an individual.
Yeah as sibling commenters here allude to, I wasn't referring to accents; that's more about content accessibility and your target audience. You won't get your content taken down because of your accent.
It's more about cultural norms of acceptability - curse words are the obvious example but there's broader & more subtle cultural considerations w.r.t. what's acceptable to discuss and how it should be approached.
Depends on whether you're trying to get a large number of viewers, it's always been the case that you conform to a middle ground to get a large audience, if not many people can understand you you're not going to get millions of subscribers
Yeah that's a "problem" but imo that's more of a life problem (appeal to masses) than one emergent from how man-made online systems have been designed (conformance to arbitrary rules applied by a minority of controlling forces).
Rumble is an "anti-cancel-culture" initiative and cancel culture is really a very separate phenomenon: cancel culture pertains to deplatforming based on political beliefs and impact, rather than based on where you're from or the way you speak.
I have no evidence to support the following, but looking at what causes this problem on mainstream platforms I would strongly suspect Rumble to be even worse. The cause of this problem is socially conservative US advertisers: Youtube's demonetisation algorithms are tuned to language that their advertisers feel it's acceptable to be associated with. My instinct would be that the subset of these advertisers who use Rumble would be more, not less, socially conservative.
If I'm wrong in my guess above, it's likely a result of scale. Rumble being smaller might simply not have reached the scale whereby algorithmic demonetisation is a thing. In which case it's only a matter of time.
> Showing a naked boob is considered porn and banned on most of these platform while public toplessness is perfectly legal in many jurisdictions worldwide
Yep. Im wondering when will countries start preventing US tech platforms from enforcing US laws and US morals on the people of those countries.
What are you even asking for here? Sites like Reddit, Twitter and Tumblr cater to "American laws" (most of these aren't even laws, the US is generally quite liberal on sexual content and nudity; thus producing a significant chunk of the global supply of pornography) is due to their primary target or largest slice of ad revenue coming from Americans[1][2][3]. There's no law forcing themselves to self-censor, they generally do it for financial/accessibility (American traffic) reasons.
What it sounds like you're proposing is, if Denmark has carte blanche topless legality, that websites that want to operate in Denmark must respect their liberalism and allow said content. Which is far more draconian and intrusive. If a site wants owner wants to err on the side of conservative social values, that's their prerogative; create an alternative to fill the niche if you feel it's lacking. OnlyFans filled an entire void in that manner.
3 - "While Tumblr is used worldwide, the vast majority of its users are based in the U.S. Domestic visitors alone account for 42% of its overall traffic." - https://cloudincome.com/tumblr-statistics/
I’m not a libertarian, and straw-manning will get you no where.
There’s also a reason we don’t dictate platforms and content.
We don’t force people to attend or partake in topless/nude beaches despite allowing them to exist. We don’t force people to join political protests despite them being a protected activity.
In the same manner, we don’t force newspapers to publish content against their goal or audience. There’s no difference for a site platform. There’s no reason “ChristianGram” should be forced to host nudity for Danish (and other) Christians, simply because Danes are allowed to be naked if they like.
The fact that you don’t see how that’s equally tyrannical and intrusive is, honestly, terrifying.
> What it sounds like you're proposing is, if Denmark has carte blanche topless legality, that websites that want to operate in Denmark must respect their liberalism and allow said content
That's precisely what I'm saying.
> Americans
The platforms will need to apply a different set of filters and moderation tools to anyone connecting from within inside the US. Just like they will do for those who connect from within Denmark.
What your proposing is forcing a site owner to host nudity/sexual content, obscene speech, etc. Despite their own personal beliefs, due to a random nation. And you literally don’t see how that’s the same as limited content for a nation such as China.
Your entire basic argument is fallacious. If tumblr stopped showing nipples due to US censorship, that’s one thing. There’s no law barring this and no one is bending to the US legal system, the site owner themselves made this choice to appeal to the largest, most valuable chunk of their demographic. And you, as another person, can make an equally capable site minus that restriction. If people demand it (as they did OnlyFans, Twitch, VK, etc), they will switch.
> What your proposing is forcing a site owner to host nudity/sexual content, obscene speech, etc. Despite their own personal beliefs, due to a random nation
Its not a random nation. Its that nation in which that site owner wants to operate. If he or she wants to operate there, s/he has to obey that country's laws when reaching out to that country's people. Its as simple as that.
> And you literally don’t see how that’s the same as limited content for a nation such as China.
I see it. Every country will limit their content per their own laws to the extent they want to do. That's what law is.
> There’s no law barring this and no one is bending to the US legal system, the site owner themselves made this choice to appeal to the largest, most valuable chunk of their demographic.
That means that basically those corporations just complied with the existing social sentiment and laws 'willingly' to avoid persecution. They can do the same, 'willingly' for other countries for 'appealing' to the users in those countries.
...
If you already 'willingly' comply by the legal and social paradigm of your country without the specter of the law coming down on you, you are not 'willingly' doing it in reality. You are doing it because you have to do it. 'Wording it differently' does not change the reality.
> Im wondering when will countries start preventing US tech platforms from enforcing US laws and US morals on the people of those countries.
This makes zero sense. How do you force anyone to not follow a law? Do you, say, force anyone to post nude pics just because a jurisdiction does not allow anyone to post them? How would that even work?
I'd imagine it be an ultimatum - if you enforce another country's laws on our citizens then you're also in violation of our local laws and will be fined, unable to operate in our country, etc
> if you enforce another country's laws on our citizens then you're also in violation of our local laws and will be fined
This makes no sense at all. Unless you're violating your own laws, which is not what you're arguing, then you're just complying with your own jurisdiction. Yo can't possibly be advocating punishing anyone for not violating laws in multiple jurisdictions.
Simple. The platforms would have to enact different filtering and moderation mechanisms for different countries based on the law in those countries. That would make them compliant everywhere.
I don't really think this is about laws, but even in that arena, companies already do their best to avoid those within the US, nevermind internationally. See e.g. recent Patreon controversy for an example of this. There's man others. So I don't really think law is the problem here.
> US morals
This is the real issue and unfortunately these are finely weaved deep inside US corporate culture itself - they're part of culture fit for hiring in US multinationals and are thus highly unlikely to ever be disrupted from within the workforce of those companies.
If companies 'willingly' comply with the existing social and regulatory landscape proactively, that's not something that happens 'willingly'. Its mental gymnastics to claim that they are doing it freely and not out of being obliged to.
That seems... inverse. "Your service is not allowed in the US because there's not enough boobies in it"?
Anyway the opposite is already true, all US based companies that want to operate within the EU all follow the GDPR. It, and a lot of US online moral codes, are IMO good for society as a whole.
If you still want to look at NSFW content, there's plenty of sources for that everywhere.
> "Your service is not allowed in the US because there's not enough boobies in it"?
No, the service will apply the filters and moderation tools to users from any given country separately. If the law in the US allows enough boobs and the US users post boob pictures, that's totally that legal ecosystem and userbase's thing.
And it seems these days, all nudity is automatically treated as pornographic. When I was a child, my parents took photos of me - clothed or not, I might be doing something silly or endearing and those photos were created, whether in the backyard or the bathtub, given to some guy in a kiosk to print, and placed in the family photo album.
I wonder if parents do the same these days, and if they share them online like how they used to pass around the family photo album?
I think quite a lot still do. If not exposing in albums, at least taking a shots. At least I do. It was what parents did when I've been toddler and I'm not going to bend under someone's pointing finger today. Just look at the Totoro movie - a great piece of animation for whole family - and you'll see father taking bath with their children and no one's complaining about it. It's perfectly fine. I'm taking bath with my child as well. Our child saw us naked on multiple occasions and, for us, it's normal. I wish it would be a common sense.
Just be careful not to sync those pictures to Google Photos or some other cloud provider that scans your files, otherwise your account might get blocked forever (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32560361).
Tumblr had an issue with pedos on the platform and was on the verge of getting kicked off the App Store. For some reason they decided banning porn in general was easier than just removing pedos.
Only Fans was about to be kicked off the banking system entirely and would have been ruined but the publicity caused the bank to back down so OF could continue as normal.
> or some reason they decided banning porn in general
Worth noting that the Tumblr "porn ban" was already well into the planning stages months before the AppStore kerfuffle. That just brought it forward, not into existence.
But it doesn't make money for them. No-one's actually losing consumer sales by allowing porn. It's all 50+ CEOs worrying about what other 50+ CEOs will think.
>But it doesn't make money for them. No-one's actually losing consumer sales by allowing porn.
Theory goes like this:
Some platform, be it payment or social allows something unacceptable to people, let's say racism, full nudity for the sake of argument.
People who really, really, do not want anyone to see this, start phone and email botting the companies that place ads using these networks, or take payment using these networks about the issue
The companies that place ads, do not need this headache and ask the platform, wtf? We will move our advertising dollars if you don't do something about this.
Platform, who's sole purpose in life is to make money, says ok!
Now, include very heavy hitters like Blackrock, Vandguard, etc. that control members on boards of 1,000s of companies and a relatively small group of people only need to persuade another relatively small group of people ... that may not even be the people running the platforms!
I think most consumer preference is against co-mingling porn and other content. Porn tends to drive away other content and makes things just kind of weird. Partially, I think, because porn is still one of the moneymakers on the internet so astroturfing/paid upvotes become lucrative and flood anyplace that allows sexual content.
>I think most consumer preference is against co-mingling porn and other content.
I agree, but even with that preference where does it stop? If I make my money via porn (I don't, but as an example) do customers not want to have bank accounts at banks where pornstars bank? How about sharing electricity from the same company that a porn company uses to power shoots? How about using that same kind of iPhone that a pornstar uses?
Of course all of those are absurd, but you get my point. There is clearly a line where commingling is acceptable. Reddit, for example, has some pretty hard NSFW content, yet people still place ads on other boards (or maybe those too, idk). And there is no widespread hue and cry from "consumers".
It is very, very specific people, companies, and groups that seem to be targeted and those tend to be whatever the current popular social-think flavor of the month is or just ones that certain people don't like in general (racism, drugs, bigots, etc). And you will note, that only one of those groups is actually illegal, the others are just distasteful.
> If I make my money via porn (I don't, but as an example) do customers not want to have bank accounts at banks where pornstars bank?
It can be quite difficult for sex workers of all stripes to maintain their bank accounts. They regularly have accounts frozen because they receive payments from porn-friendly payment processors. This is not just "porn stars" but people that do things like OnlyFans.
So yes, sex workers have trouble accessing banking even if all they do is show their titties on camera because prudes go pitch a fit to banks.
Do you want to know the real answer? It's game theory again.
In a world where no one allows smut (or drugs or semi-racist content), the first one who relaxes these rules will attract anyone and everyone with an interest in that particular content. And before you know it, smut is all you have.
It's a self reinforcing process, and the only way to stay out of it is to align with everyone else. The only way to break the process is if everyone relaxes the rules simultaneously.
Absolutely. You saw this in the early days of legalized gambling in the US.
And there was recently an editorial in the Chicago Tribune saying Chicago should shut down its remaining bars licensed to stay open till 4AM (most must close at 2, all get an extra hour on the weekends), because they're too wild. Yet NYC has probably hundreds of neighborhood bars open till 4 without a problem, since 4AM licenses are basically the default there.
This. It's more about avoiding bad PR. And it doesn't have to be porn. It could be guns, vaping, violent movies, gambling, whatever.
If you're selling baby shampoo the last thing you need is some parent posting on Twitter about "Why is this baby shampoo brand advertising on a sight that promote horror movies about human centipedes?"
And they all think about the law, and how hard they will be impacted if it turns out there's too much non-consentual or illegal / underage content on their website.
Pornhub did a panic delete when the credit card companies withdrew because they realized three quarters of the content on their website may have been uploaded non-consentually - or at least, they didn't know there was consent involved. Revenge porn is a big issue, and will be even more now that everyone has an internet connected camera phone from a young age.
And this is the public internet; on top of that is the peer-to-peer internet of whatsapp, telegram etc, and the dark web of tor and co.
There are entire departments devoted to future problem solving. As a near monopoly multinational, are you more likely to be unseated by a competitor that approves of porn when you don't or by a competitor that prohibits porn when you allow it?
The former. Doing the embarrassing thing would be better for your company. But you're a near-monopoly anyway and unlikely to go bankrupt, so why make yourself uncomfortable?
It isn't really morals anyway. Not even those absurd morons would panic at the news "everybody is naked under their clothes, worse yet sex common among majority". Unlike say "majority torture small animals for recreation" or "majority are literally rapists". As usual the puritanism is so incredibly stupid on every level.
Regular-person morals? No, of course not. But the kind of morals that would affect their personal reputation among their social set? That they care quite a lot about.
Of course they are. There is a lot of money in family friendly entertainment. Take movies for example. On average, the more family friendly rating, the more popular. G rated movies are the most profitable while R rated movies are the least profitable.
Have you checked that assertion? Because it didn’t ring true to me based on what I remember (which was that PG-13 tends to be the sweet spot), and it doesn’t match the data I can find, e.g.:
PG-13 is far and away the leader in terms of both highest-grossing films and percentage of box office revenue; R-rated films are actually the second in terms of highest-grossing and, depending on the year, bounce around between second and third. G-rated films, by contrast, are at the bottom across the board.
There is a difference between “family entertainment” and “adults-only” which matters in terms of the discussion around Tumblr’s content. If we’re using MPAA ratings as an analogy, Tumblr’s “no porn” position isn’t “everything must be G-rated,” it’s “nothing can be NC-17.” One can argue about whether the latter is a good stance to take, but it’s important to be arguing about the actual restriction.
You could both ne right. G rated films generally use no-name or d-list actors and aren’t trying to impress for awards in almost any category. They tend to be low-budget/high-profit. If we are talking revenue, PG-13 for sure. Profit? I would put my money on G.
Disney has released something like 5 G-rated movies to the theaters (excepting nature films) in the past 15 years. PG is plenty family friendly enough.
> Not just sanitizing, but sanitizing to US social mores. Showing a naked boob is considered porn and banned on most of these platform while public toplessness is perfectly legal in many jurisdictions worldwide.
The disturbing thing is that the hives of scum and villainy you find there are for the most part no more subversive than reddit in 2010. And they are actually fun which is more than I can say for _anything_ on the regular web.
I find 4chan to be reminiscent of early Internet and makes me feel nostalgic for how the internet used to be before various mega corps scrubbed it clean.
"Not just sanitizing, but sanitizing to US social mores."
I somewhat agree, but might characterize it as meeting the tightest western restrictions. I have tons of cookie pop-ups now that GDPR happened, but that doesn't really apply to the US. So the influence isn't fully unilateral. Considering the companies started in and are headquartered in the US, it makes sense they follow US regulations more closely.
>Not just sanitizing, but sanitizing to US social mores.
Not to US social mores, to some weird averaged out amalgamation of Western social mores. In the US, firearms are very normal and a regular part of life, but try doing a YouTube stream or channel about them and you'll quickly find yourself "sanitized" anyway.
How could you even ask such a question? Never, in the history of human civilization, have babies ever been exposed to the sight of a naked female breast </s>.
I remember a Louis CK bit about a crime serial he was watching where the (albeit fake) ejaculate on a dead woman could be shown but the breasts had to be censored. Of course, he turned out to be a creep and good luck ever finding one bit on that topic considering the massive news coverage of his bad behavior.
But ad hominems aside, he had a point. It's really disturbed when you think about it: the degree to which an influential subculture in America elevates and defends violence while censoring and degrading women's bodies exposes a sick preference for death over life. Even if portions of it claim to be "pro-life" they are, to all intents and purposes, a death cult.
I guess breastfeeding is scarring these poor kids at an early age. I think it’s safe to say adults are the ones with the twisted sensibilities and kids are going to be just fine,
I've actually seen that argument made against breastfeeding in public. Like someone actually said "You can't do that here! There are children present!" without any clue of how absolutely dumb that was.
It seems like the ones who are most concerned about nudity are the ones we should be the most concerned about. I don't know whats going on in their heads, but it must be pretty sick stuff from the way they overreact. I just don't feel like it should be our burden to keep their demons at bay.
I was banned on reddit for sexualizing children. I said that the fact you can show murdered children but not bathing children on US television is a sign of cultural mental illness.
I guess parents in the US make their children wear a swimsuit when bathing them?
I was banned on Reddit for simply calling out a Reddit admin on my own profile. I keep trying to appeal it, but they don't care about my 12 years of good faith contributions to dozens of communities, hundreds of dollars given to their company through premium and awards, no the final straw was me simply calling out an admin who was on a power trip, who is also responsible for a PR blunder relatively recently with their place event.
I've lost so much respect for this company and it's actually made me also take a step back from social media in general. All of these companies can abuse you at any point without any transparency, and I'm not willing to take the risk anymore.
It's a bit more complicated. Murder on TV is pretend, but nudity is real. Even if you think nudity is ok, showing it needs all parties to consent and we decided that children can't give consent to such things.
>It seems like the ones who are most concerned about nudity are the ones we should be the most concerned about.
Moral puritanism in any form seems to be an extremely harmful to any society it shows up in to those who aren't fellow moral puritans. I think most of the post-enlightenment democratic machinery exists to keep moral puritan types in check more than anything else.
A zit-faced lifeguard admonished my wife for publically feeding our child once and she told him off. At a pool! Heaven forbid we expose those last couple inches.
For some reason I wasn't there, and it's a good thing because I'd probably still be lecturing the kid for it.
Idk I'm not an expert in this matters but people talk about exposing kids to anything including nudity is harmful to them. I really don't know but I think there is consensus that kids shouldn't be exposed to nudity.
Evidence means scientific studies, not 'people talking'. A hundred years ago people would have told you that corporal punishment is good for kids, whereas studies now clearly show the opposite. [0]
When dealing with laws and culture, it seems the onus would be on the side wanting to change the status quo. Without a reason, why would they use political capital/effort on this (or anything else)?
There are multiple onuses, determining whether a status quo should change is only one of them. But where status quo is also an expression of power, there can also be an onus to justify its existence. If that scenario arises, generally those demanding change have already met the criteria (at least those available to them). At which point the status quo thing is in the same philosophical position of making a claim and has the logical burden of proof that the status quo itself is justified.
This reasoning is sometimes used hastily in radical-left politics, eg in some forms of anarchism where any power relationship is subject to justifying its existence. But, and I’m saying this no longer an anarchist, you don’t need to be a radical or revolutionary to see it play out.
This is essentially exactly how many cannabis legalization efforts have worked. After decades of dedicated effort to establish plurality support for questioning the status quo of prohibition, the question of whether prohibition is justified becomes scrutinized at a policy level and it the justification isn’t there. The only remaining barriers are weak pluralities and successful counter-marketing. If either of those are absent, the unjustified status quo has been changed.
Which is all to say, the onus isn’t on anyone to unjustify something that’s wrong, the onus is to motivate people to know and care that it’s wrong, and to agree that it matters. From there, the onus is the same as GP said: you’re making the claim, you defend it. Otherwise the assumption is just, like, your opinion man.
"But where status quo is also an expression of power, there can also be an onus to justify its existence."
That's literally every law.
"Which is all to say, the onus isn’t on anyone to unjustify something that’s wrong"
The onus would be to show that "something" is wrong for that logic to even apply. As you said "you’re making the claim, you defend it.". Society already decided that it was wrong and formed a law, so now it's time to hear why it shouldn't be (I'm interested in research on either side).
I disagree. You're essentially claiming that the need to prove an effect is removed once something is enshrined into law and that's not only illogical but dangerous to boot.
"You're essentially claiming that the need to prove an effect is removed once something is enshrined into law"
This is a gross misinterpretation bordering on trolling. I'm not sure how you could even come to this position.
Please show me how what I've actually said is illogical and dangerous. Please remember that in the scenario we are talking about neither side has provided evidence one way or the other. Somebody would need to provide evidence one way or the other to shift the status quo, as shifting that requires flipping the convictions of the population, or at least the leaders.
Jesus H Christ. Stop sowing this absolute garbage. Proof? How about the fact that we didn't go extinct prior to the invention of clothing? How about the necessity of it for procreation, birth, rearing, washing? If you think the very sight of a naked body is harmful, you are a sick fuck, and that's the nicest way I can put that while getting my meaning across. Please get therapy before your anxieties boil over and make you harm others or vote for like-minded idiots.
I'm a little shocked that anybody could claim that viewing a naked body at any age could be considered harmful. There are many cases where children would benefit from seeing a range of naked bodies, and realise that there are many people out there that look just like them. they don't have to look like the photoshop models who do get exposed. Body shame is a real thing, and the only way around it is for people to realise that bodies come in a wide range of shapes and colours, and they have no reason to be ashamed of theirs.
I don't think there is a consensus. Actually I've never heard anyone cite any specific harm at all. There is certainly an appeal to social norms and probably some ingrained racism: "we wear clothes unlike those primitive savages," but real benefit to shielding kids from nudity - what's the hypothesis to test against?
Which is very misguided! My ultimate parenting hack that I have discovered is to answer my kids honestly and in detail. This was born out of frustration when, as a toddler, one of my kids would become distraught when confronting the fact that she wasn't in our wedding pictures because she did not exist. Eventually I said "look, the egg that would become you was in your mother". A few how & whys later and she was fine before we even got into the mechanics of it.
Now I've honed this to the point where my kids just hear me go into that tone of voice and realize that they should drop the subject before the old man goes on another one of his 45 minute lectures. They've got more fun things to do.
I mean legally they shouldn't be with COPPA and all that, otherwise there are far more regulations in relation to their privacy, the two ideas of toning it down for children and not following children's privacy standards would visibly contradict each other. Doesn't stop children though since the most blocking then from registering for most web sites prematurely like that is a text box that might as well say "I am above 13 or willing to claim I am". A more cynical person would say that's by design but there really is no unintrusive to verify that either otherwise such a thing probably would be enforced for legal reasons.
> If you're a utility, you do not take liability for your services, but you cannot pick and choose which customers you service so long as it's legal.
Unless you have an ironclad way to verify the identity of every poster, you'll get a bunch of illegal stuff anyway. And if you're a "utility", then who is responsible for removing that from your service?
What you're really suggesting is "common carrier", but the difference is most common carriers carry the content in a point to point way, not publicly (FedEx, UPS, your telephone provider). For the common carriers that do have public broadcast (radio, TV, cable) they either have to moderate all their content and are responsible for it (TV, radio) or they have to provide an unmoderated but public access section where they know exactly who the content provider is (cable TV, who gets to choose which channels to carry as long as they have a public access channel).
Payment processors have never been classed as even kind of a common carrier. Pretty much the moment you deal with money the government will more or less be your "partner".
Cloudflare notably has not been legally forced to take the positions it has. You can be a common carrier as much as you want
Regarding the money sensitivity issue, I do understand KYC, etc. However, once they determine that you are not doing anything illegal, they are simply moving money from one person to another and in that respect that are a "kind" of common carrier. Porn is not illegal. So they are specifically stepping in and making a socially acceptable (to them) judgement call to stop something that is perfectly legal when they should be just making sure you are not a terrorist or drug-dealer and minding their own business.
>Cloudflare notably has not been legally forced to take the positions it has.
True they flip-flop depending on how the winds of Twitter are blowing, but they are quickly positioning themselves in such a way that someone could earnestly claim there is not reasonable alternative and that they are "required" to run a business. Then what?
That's the part people forget about "utilities" and "carriers". The reason they were indemnified, is precisely because they know the exact identities, (and even locations), of all of their users. The cops can handle things themselves, they just ask the "utility" or "carrier" who X is? And who is X connected, (or even connecting), to.
We have to think up an entirely different model for the newer technologies we are using.
This is not entirely true for at least the postal service - someone can address a bomb or drugs with some stamps and a fake sender address quite easily. Only the recipient address is known, but again people sometimes have mail sent to a known empty house to pick up.
This is very important to not forget. We might also note, though, that that same indemnification exists in a context where e.g. the postal service is under no obligation to keep people from sending things in code to each other, even if police would prefer all communications to be in cleartext.
> The whole point was to be decentralized, and now we have Visa, Mastercard, Apple, Google, Amazon and Cloudflare deciding what we are and are not allowed to see, read and buy. And virtually in lockstep, they are becoming increasingly prudish.
You can be as independent as you want if you don't care about getting paid. If you want to run a small web site with handwritten HTML hosted on a server in your house that gets a few hundred visitors a month, you can still do that. (I'd be willing to bet it's easier now than it was in the 90s!) If you want to have ten million customers and a staff of full-time employees, then you'll be integrating with the rest of society whether you like it or not. I'm not sure that's unreasonable in and of itself, although I do agree that the way we treat porn (and sex in general) in the US is pretty bizarre.
Perhaps this is true, but this is all the more reason why giving social media sites the right to police free speech/expression is too much. Public discourse today happens online. The "uhhhh, this is a private venue, they don't owe you a soapbox" rhetoric rings increasingly hollow when we just went through a multiyear period when society collectively forced millions of people to work or go to school over the internet, often through big tech platforms. Telling people who don't like the current state of the mainstream web to find their own platform is like telling people who are unhappy with food prices to simply farm their own crops; it's not technically impossible, but there's more likely to be civil unrest before people start sowing seeds.
It is also very telling that when independent discussion platforms do start to reach critical mass (4chan, voat, wherever else) there is often collusion or pressure to take down their hosting or stop payment processors from working with them.
The issue I think is the sheer scale of the "soapbox" and level of access to it, which is unprecedented.
It used to be that fringe opinions were expressed on street corners on literal soapboxes and never got much further unless they had a certain level of credence. Now with the likes of Twitter and Facebook, these individuals have a global stage to broadcast to where they'll find a massive audience regardless of how bizzare and unfounded they may be, thanks to the legitimizing effect of the "communities" around these ideas. In the hands of someone charismatic this can be dangerously destablizing to society, because it's the perfect recipe for cultivating a following that believes almost anything imaginable, including ideas which directly conflict with demonstrable reality.
I don't agree with some of the things the internet has collectively decided to clamp down on but I do think it makes sense to not give just anybody the grand stage and spotlight.
>these individuals have a global stage to broadcast to where they'll find a massive audience regardless of how bizzare and unfounded they may be
This is a common fear. But nobody is really worried that some charismatic guy who believes that aliens are secretly draining humans of their precious bodily fluids is going to take over the world.
Those in power are always concerned about maintaining their power. Somebody who shows up and says, "hey, these people in power are saying things that are not true and are engaging in damaging and dangerous practices," well, it's quite easy to cast that person as a Dangerous Individual Who Is Secretly A Lunatic. Everybody has some nutty idea, so you focus on that nutty idea, and presto, you have a bona fide nutcase who can be shut down for "misinformation".
I get the argument. But the practical working aspect of it is it puts great power into the hands of already powerful people. That's fine, if you want to have a technocratic/political aristocracy. If you do not, then there isn't many other options other than open discourse.
> This is a common fear. But nobody is really worried that some charismatic guy who believes that aliens are secretly draining humans of their precious bodily fluids is going to take over the world.
I think reasonable people are worried about exactly that. Enraged violent people managed to get a few meters away from a room full of Congresspeople validating an election, in support of their charismatic guy who believes much worse.
Q-Anon has believers currently sitting in Congress, and is predicted to gain more seats this year[1].
Can you name some specific people cheering the riots and destruction?
FYI, there were literally millions of protesters across the US and only a tint fraction caused damage.
The two are not at all equal. A sitting congressperson supporting BLM protests is not the same thing as a sitting congressperson openly encouraging and even participating in overthrowing a free election.
No matter how much the right wants it, the two situations are not even close to being equal.
Both things can be true. I was narrowly addressing your comment that "nobody is really worried" about something that almost actually happened. Indeed, many people are now acutely worried about unhinged conspiracy theorists taking power through a charismatic guy.
It is new, there hasn’t been this much access to free unfiltered information ever. Now, not only can the town crazy rant on a literal soapbox, but they can rant to millions more as well. Your assertion that things are that exact same is laughable.
You're basically advocating government control of social media sites here. At least, that's my only reasonable interpretation for your statement regarding "giving social media sites the right to police free speech / expression". There is no way to accomplish this, unless an enforcement mechanism is put in place where the government tells social media sites exactly what they can and can't police.
Sorry, that is a far more uncomfortable situation, whether you know it or not. Perhaps you are hoping that mainstream social media sites can be forced to allow the type of content found in voat or 4chan. It is equally more likely that a government will, at some point, disallow the content found in voat or 4chan everywhere, if that angle is opened, IMHO. It, of course, will depend on who is in charge.
China, for instance, currently has heavy influence on exactly what kind of content is allowed within social media, complete with a Great Firewall and large armies of censors to enforce this policy. Their social media has been shaped many times based on the whims of Xi Jinping. China heavily moderates gaming and politics, and outright bans things like porn. I doubt a 4chan or voat in Jinping's China would get very far. In the Western Internet, there are big social media sites with various content moderation policies that some people may not like. But alternative sites exist.
At present, social media sites are relatively free to moderate how they wish. A few social media sites have semi-monopoly power, and that is a big issue. The payments processing duopoly is even more of a problem. But don't confuse monopoly power issues with "censorship". The government is not telling what the social media companies to do, in general.
The "uhhhh, this is a private venue, they don't owe you a soapbox" rhetoric rings increasingly hollow when we just went through a multiyear period when society collectively forced millions of people to work or go to school over the internet, often through big tech platforms.
That feels like a non-sequitur. People can both use mainstream platforms for work/school and create/find their own platforms for other parts of their life.
Unless you have enough money to build your own CDN infrastructure instead of using cloudfare and do your own advertising.
Sure, that's $$$$$, but I'm uncomfortable with the idea that operating "at substantial scale" is any sort of entitlement. Or that "investing to build the systems and services that tens of millions of people have chosen to use" is "illegitimate." You think "legitimate", political-backed power is would be better? Of the "Shut the internet down when people are protesting something the government does?" variety?
There's negative vs positive spin you could put on this, you know. Things like Twitter let people be heard to a much larger extent than they would've been in the past. Good or bad, it definitely has consequences, and one of them is that some powerful people listen to people who would normally be outside their circle.
Getting paid is more interesting, this is probably easier than it was in the past - there were always pretty limited options, but crypto is a new interesting one.
> You think "legitimate", political-backed power is would be better?
No, but that's not an argument against the thing you're arguing against. It's a false dichotomy. "Three or four unelected rich white dudes should not have this power" does not mean three or four elected rich white dudes should either.
> If Cloudflare doesn't like you, you can't have a website.
There are a number of other CDN vendors. Akamai, AWS, GCP, Azure come to mind. Besides, Cloudflare doesn't have any problem with porn anyway, the only thing they do not want is CSAM or explicitly illegal stuff such as material violating copyright or unauthorized releases ("revenge porn").
Sure we did. We voted with our wallets. I'm not sure why you believe it would be any different if we _had_ elected these companies with votes.
In the current policital landscape in much of the western hemisphere has lots of people arguing for restrictive policies around speech or access to healthcare.
At least with the megacorps there is the potential to build a competitor. If they were heavily regulated good luck getting your account reactivated when the government sanctioned monopoly decides it doesn't like you.
Give an equal alternative to Google or cloudflare? If I can't get a comparable product from someone else whose views align more with my own, than I can't exactly "vote" with my wallet can I? They are essentially "running" unopposed.
It's also very convenient that the voting system is "whoever can spend the most money wins" when we're dealing with corporations who have more money than entire nations. We need something a lot better than "deposit cash to cast vote" when it comes to choosing who controls what we're allowed to see and hear.
Yes, he has trouble getting his message out. Obviously - that was the whole point.
Rallies? Trump had like a hundred million Twitter followers. The total number of people who even can go to a rally is like 30,000 at extreme scale. Even if he had a massive rally daily (impossible) with no repeat visitors (absurd) in a year he still wouldn't get to 1/10 of the people he could reach via Twitter. And he'd be able to reach them each once. Plus he'd never get any casuals or outsiders like me - people who go to rallies are already committed. Rallies are not a substitute for the entire edifice of modern social media.
A hundred million twitter followers isn't worthless or meaningless. If someone you liked was ever silenced like that, you'd be up in arms and rightly so.
Trump is still the hands on favorite to be the nominee of one of the two major parties. Truth Social is not facing any of the issues that Gab was facing as far as being deplatformed.
Conservatives love the free market until it’s not working for them. If the situation had been reversed, they would be the first ones screaming how regulation prevents innovation.
Trump is listed as one of the 400 richest people in the US, he really can’t get his message out there? I live in the South, I assure you that if he did some advertising and started heavily promoting Truth Social it would be successful.
They can always go to web. Android browsers supports push notifications what’s magical about an app?
Trump supporters: we are being treated unfairly and we can’t get our message out because of Twitter and Facebook, how will we ever Make America Great Again? Life is so unfair.
The civil rights movement: we are being beaten, we are being lynched, attacked by police, jailed, spit on just for trying to send our children to school, etc. Let’s start a grass roots organization.
There are definitely more MAGAs in proportion to the population and they are better funded than there were people working toward civil rights during the 60s. Maybe it’s not a matter of being persecuted it’s just incompetence when it comes to leadership?
Trump supporters overwhelmingly consider themselves Christians. If they really want to organize, they can do the same thing MLK did - go into the churches.
> You can be as independent as you want if you don't care about getting paid. If you want to run a small web site with handwritten HTML hosted on a server in your house that gets a few hundred visitors a month, you can still do that.
I used to agree with you, but watching Kiwi Farms get cut off from the internet has been pretty sobering.
It's not big news anymore but Kiwi Farms is back online
> On September 6, 2022, The Daily Dot confirmed that VanwaTech was providing content delivery network services to the site, hence bringing it back online.[60][61] Other websites running on VanwaTech infrastructure experienced availability problems as a result, including The Daily Stormer and 8chan.[62]
Also keep in mind that Kiwi Farms was only blocked because of the massive backlash Cloudflare received. If your site only gets a few hundred visitors a month, you're not going to get this backlash.
(Not to mention, porn is considered much more acceptable than doxxing and targeted threats, relatively speaking)
The owner had their domain name, CDN/ddos protection, post box, personal phone number, legal aid, and likely other services canceled. All within a week.
They now are struggling against a constant stream of DDoS and targeted hacks due to a lack of protection previously provided by CloudFlare.
They got taken down again a few days after that, although they've occasionally been back up since. I don't think of them as a big site, although I could be wrong.
A site for organizing harassment campaigns to drive innocent people to suicide is an obvious exception, no? If you go around making trouble, you shouldn’t be surprised when trouble finds you.
they've also never been found in violation of united states law and they've never lost any out of several civil cases. you would think that if the newspapers were telling the truth about what happens on there they would have been in trouble by now.
You can sell whatever the heck you want for cash IRL regardless of how legal it is. But you have to interact with the banking system somehow regardless of whichever payment option you choose for your website. And that system wants to police what you sell. That's the problem.
> It's sad to me how successful people have been sanitizing the internet.
Not just in a porn way. Looking back at archives of the old internet just seem way more risque. For example, take the hacker magazine phrack. Maybe its a bad example because a hacker mag is always going to be out there, but the early issues included all sorts of stuff around making improvised bombs. Its hard to imagine anything like that on the semi-mainstream internet now a days.
to take a less extreme example, if you search for “shop-lifting techniques” on google, or any other modern content provider, you’ll - exclusively - find moral anodised stuff about catching criminals. if you go on old internet portals or archives, you’ll find edgy indie websites telling you naughty secrets
But was it actually not mainstream back in the day? Or even if not mainstream, your average user was still highly likely to encounter it, well going about their mainstream day which isn't true anymore.
First, it was not mainstream. Second, I run into literal nazi propaganda randomly and into literal behading videos with one search (after random find suggested it exists).
I also randomly run into write up a out how to steal cars and how to put spyware into someone else's phone.
None of that stuff is hard to find. It is just that mainstreami mainstream is not interested and it would be absurd to blame them.
I believe you're right. In part, I blame the shift of the internet's target audience. It had a serious pull of that fringe of society in the early days.
Nonetheless, content sanitization has become more and more prevalent. It's disturbing to think, of the influence of social bubbles, and algorithmic driven content proliferation. How much of this mix of content moderation + appealing to a bigger audience affects our own thoughts/opinions.
I understand that a lot of it should be sanitized. But this thought is terrifying.
Look to Hackers (1995) for an proxy of how well hacker culture was understood at the time. Pretty sure the sports in Space Jam (1996) got a more accurate representation than hacking got in Hackers.
The curious thing about Hackers is that, while the technical side of hacking was obviously not even wrong, the culture and ethos got a much better exposure. I mean, it actually had the Hacker Manifesto read out loud:
I would even argue the technical side was better than most modern movies/tv shows (not counting mr robot). Anything looks realistic compared to ncis style 2 people 1 keyboard, lets unplug the monitor when things get hairy.
phrack was definitely not mainstream. It felt like getting let in on a secret when you found out about it and figured out where to get it. Back in the day. This was before the web (or the web before google searchability of it), and before most people had heard about the internet.
There was a brief period at the dawn of the web when things were both more accessible and wilder, it's true. It was in retrospect a transitionary period.
I struggle to see how it is a problem, a free and fair society should have no qualms with people having such information. And anyone dangerous would have no problem finding it out anyways. Its not like we can scrub chemistry knowledge out from public access. Not to mention most "bomb making" knowledge is also applicable to many other fields and uses.
I find the mechanics of guns and firearms fun and interesting, that doesn't make me any more dangerous than someone who has no idea how guns work.
But what’s being discussed here isn’t blocking that information, but sadness over the fact that it’s not something you’re likely to stumble upon today inadvertently. GP is very specific in talking about coming across this info while doing normal day to day things on the internet, I.e. not looking for bomb-making instructions.
Ahh.. and this is where it gets fun. You are automatically assuming that you know better how a given person should spend their time. Person might be fascinated by how a given formation absolutely hates being squeezed. You see a bomb, but he sees a rare material property. How do you decide ( and who does decide ) what information is 'sanitary' enough for the public to handle? I thought we were supposed to be our own arbiters? Or is it just imaginary freedom on increasingly more restrictive guardrails?
I genuinely dislike the current trend. I personally played with all sorts of chemicals in my dad's garage ( he was a mechanic ) and these days my interest would be at best seen with suspicion.
<<I struggle to see how that's a bad thing. Most people don't need to be coincidentally picking up bomb-making information.
I might be misreading this, but to me this sentence reads as 'this information does not belong anywhere where normal people roam'. It is possible that "shoulnd't be available" is making me read it this way.
It means 'by chance' and no worries. I am not a native speaker so it is a reasonable question to ask.
"<<I struggle to see how that's a bad thing. Most people don't need to be coincidentally picking up bomb-making information.
I might be misreading this, but to me this sentence reads as 'this information does not belong anywhere where normal people roam'. It is possible that "shoulnd't be available" is making me read it this way. "
I will attempt to translate your argument and hopefully clarify mine. Please correct me as needed.
You seem to be arguing that while no one is arguing that the information should not be 'somewhere', one should not be able to simply stumble on it. To that my obvious question is 'why not', because we sure seem to have a lot of otherwise offensive items that one could stumble upon by chance ( for example, some would object to a tattoo magazine being readily available in public view ). Why is personal mutilation ok and applied chemistry is taboo? Why one can be picked up coincidentally and the other not? Can you give me the line that allows for that decision to take place?
And although the question is qualified with "most" and "coincidentally", the verb 'need' clearly indicates that you do not believe it is information that should be available. The previous sentence indicating struggle how this could be a bad thing only reinforces that impression. This forces me to interpret this message as "I do not believe it is a valid need that should be available, say, at a local kiosk."
Hence my real question: who gets to decide what is kosher ( and if it is not kosher )?
I would not dream of suggesting it is me, because my tastes are not that of the general population.
I’m not even arguing one shouldn’t be able to stumble upon it. Certainly no one should be the arbiter of such a decision. I’m saying it’s not a problem that they don’t. In the same way that it’s not a problem people don’t come across, say, pictures of baby Pygmy hippos (specifically) in their day to day life.
And honestly the lack of serendipitous baby Pygmy hippos is a much bigger problem than the absence of bomb making instructions.
Literally unrelated to the conversation. This is about whether one is likely to inadvertently come across this info, not whether it’s available to find.
I actually think it’s an imperative to know how chemistry works. In a free society, knowing how to do things should not be off limits.
Unfortunately, we don’t live in a free society any more. Much of this information has been suppressed and is hard to find. That said… for those curious, here’s a whole book on making explosives:
It's fairly easy to find instructions on how to make guns, bombs etc online. For example, if you search for "improvised munitions", you will find many copies of this floating around:
Or for something more oldschool, search for "expedient homemade firearms". I got my paperback a few years ago from Amazon, as well (sadly gone now, but some derivative works are still around if you look).
> now we have Visa, Mastercard, Apple, Google, Amazon and Cloudflare deciding what we are and are not allowed to see, read and buy.
I think the blame is displaced. It’s not these nice companies that decide what you are and what you are allowed to see. It’s you. Or more generally - we, the People, ourselves.
Indeed: Gab is not using Amazon or Google cloud services, Visa and Mastercard do not serve Gab - it has to rely on checks, money orders and crypto. Gab does not have an app… actually it has, in a way of a web link, copied to your home page - btw I have never seen an app that was better than a web page for the same company, have you? Gab has even launched GabPay, its own payment processor open to others. Gab explicitly promise not to delete anything unless it is found illegal by a court.
Still, you the People are not using Gab, you are using Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr. Why are you not using Gab? Last time I’ve checked it was because Gab… does not delete the content that you the People find objectionable!
A cherry on this cake was the decision of some state GOP party committee to delete their Gab account because Gab refuses to censor anti-Semitic content.
So, please - do not blame this nice long list of the evil companies. You have at least one alternative. You, the freest people in the world, are not using it. Not enough censorship there.
The reason I don't use Gab isn't "not enough censorship", it's because none of the people I want to talk to are on there.
I use Twitter because the people I like are on there. They often get banned for dumb reasons, and I'd prefer they didn't, but the general network effect of Twitter is strong enough that people will just make new accounts and/or avoid posting stufff that trips the censors.
Plus, as some other comments mention, Gab does not in fact "not delete anything unless it is found illegal by a court", their TOS[0] says they can ban you for posting obscenity. Why would I want to go on a website full of white-christian-nationalists if I can't send them goatse?
My (main) point was not that Gab is perfect. The main point was: Gab is banned by all these evil app stores, cloud services and financial processors, still it survives and functions. That means - you can have your ideal Gab without relying on these nice monopolists too.
My wish list for such an ideal Gab would be:
- only illegal content should be banned and by legal process only;
- the moderation should be decentralized and placed in each user’s hands. My blocking you should mean I won’t see you, but all others will.
That way you may post all goatses you like, but the “suprematists” (and me) wouldn’t see them. Unless you’ll post some clever things from time to time, not only goatsees, then I would rather read you. But my decision to see or not your posts should not affect other readers.
"When you vote in favour of a person, you are making that person a moderator for yourself, regardless of whether they win the vote or not.
There is no such thing as becoming a candidate. You just flip the mod switch on from Preferences. This will enable the mod UI in your client, and you can start modding. This will generate moderation graph entities originating from you. These will only be valid for you, and the people who chose you as a mod (i.e. voted for you) in that community. This will also make your name appear on the elections list. From there, people can check your past actions without applying it onto their own client first, and your reasonings for them (Mod actions provide an optional ‘reason’ field to be filled in). If they like what they see, they will vote for you, and for the person voting, you will become a mod. That means your mod actions from that point on will start to affect what that user sees.
Election makes it so that the people who come into a community, who have not chosen or disabled that particular mod by themselves, will use the mod list shaped by the elections. If a user has explicitly chosen a particular person to be a mod in that community, that takes precedence. Likewise, if a user has disabled a mod, that person will never be a mod for that user, regardless of the results.
That is all being a mod is: some people liking your curation enough that they decide to apply your curation to their own view as well."
That was ... kind of the idea behind Google Plus. But I imagine that there would still be loud constituencies who couldn't rest at censoring their own feed.
>Why are you not using Gab? Last time I’ve checked it was because Gab… does not delete the content that you the People find objectionable!
I don't think this is the reason. I've never used Gab but Reddit 10-15 years ago was a lot more free than it is today and it was great. I'm sure there were some people who were displeased with moderation, but in general, most users enjoyed the freedom and diverse(in the real sense) communities that existed there. The change on Reddit and similar websites came from the top. There is no way to be sure about how they did it, but I'm certain it wasn't freely chosen by the users.
Reddit's censorship usually comes in waves following bad press (most users don't care, and the ones that do don't have to go to offensive subreddits, but the press can't resist clickbaity headlines!) and the fear that the bad press will scare away advertisers and whatever new messed up scheme the site is thinking about to make money off the content the internet provides for them at no cost.
Fewer advertisers than users? I think they know they'll lose users, but new users are coming in all the time and so every time they push the site father into restrictive censorship a group comes in who never knew it was anything else.
You cannot "show nuts" on Gab, from their ToS you may not:
Be obscene, sexually explicit or pornographic. Note that mere nudity e.g. as a form of protest or for educational/medical reasons will not fall foul of this rule.
My point was: there exists a platform that is banned by app stores, cloud services and financial processors. It’s demonstrates not just a theoretical possibility to survive without them, it survives and functions… and is shunned by the people.
So it does not censor the sort of thing that reasonable people do want censored on their social media, and does censor the sort of things that people don't want arbitrarily censored.
And in exchange for that, you get to deal with inconvenient access.
Yeah, of course it's shunned. Based on what you've said, it doesn't represent any kind of practical improvement over the status quo, so the question of whether or not it's associated with / frequented by distasteful people doesn't even factor into this.
Classic martyr. You're making it sound like Gab is "shunned by the people" because it's uncensored. In reality it's an issue of content. The people just aren't interested in Gab's content. And that will never change because that shit content also happens to be the reason for Gab's existence.
Gab created a shit platform for shit people to post shit content and you're blaming everyone else for its failure.
In contrast, Reddit was plenty successful long before they started censoring to appease their corpo-overlords. The difference was that A) shit wasn't the only content available and B) average users weren't automatically subjected to the shit content that they were hosting.
> Gab created a shit platform for shit people to post shit content
I absolutely loved your hate speech. I do not agree with it but will always defend your right to say it.
Let me clarify just a couple of points.
1. Here’s what Gab’s founder tells about the purpose of Gab: Gab’s mission is to be the home of free speech online. It seeks to export American values and freedom to the maximum extent permitted by American law to Internet users around the world. Gab concurs with the Committee’s view that these values protect offensive and unpopular speech, but not illegal speech, such as threats. Unlawful speech is not and has never been allowed on Gab.
2. I am pointing at Gab as an example of definite *success*. It survives and functions despite being no-platformed and banned by 25+ service providers over the years including both App Stores, multiple payment processors, and hosting providers. The example of *failure* in this context is another free-speech platform… forgot it’s name - it was deplatformed in 2020 and stopped functioning for a long period of time. Very unprofessional.
(Edit: Parler of cause. Parler was deplatformed by Amazon and both app stores - and immediately went down. That’s what failure looks like)
So, you may think that they are shit people. Ok. But you’ve failed to silence them, despite trying heavily. Doesn’t it provoke your professional interest - how they managed to do it?
Maybe I was a little too flowery with my speech. But I think my points are still valid. Regardless of what Gab's founder writes, Gab (like Parler) was created in direct response to the deplatforming of white supremacists. That kind of content is just not going to attract mainstream attention.
In that sense, that makes Gab a failed platform. But you're right; the fact that it is up and running, in spite of getting blacklisted by big corpo, could be seen as a sort of success. I'm all for technology that can't be taken down by overzealous governments.
You kinda got me wrong too. I'm not for silencing anyone. I'm just explaining why no one is using Gab. Again, its not because its uncensored (as you bemoan). It's because Gab doesn't offer anything people want. Time and time again its been proven that users simply don't care about privacy / censorship / decentralization / some-other-high-minded-ideal. They care about convenience and content.
Are you being sarcastic? Because that Buzzfeed article very much supports my statements about Gab and doesn't mention Parler at all. To quote sabergirl278 (the only commenter on that page), "So basically, its a platform for hate speech?"
The article used a picture of Pepe the frog as Captain America and says things like:
"...but Gab.ai is attracting conservatives as an alternate social platform."
"At the moment, Gab feels like a conservative chatroom..."
"It also appears that Milo Yiannopoulos, a conservative writer who was permanently suspended from Twitter in July after his attack on actress Leslie Jones, has joined Gab."
"... Gab’s early, ideologically-narrow success plays into a larger trend in social media..."
This was the point you made and I quoted in my response to you:
> Gab (like Parler) was created in direct response to the deplatforming of white supremacists.
and you say that the article backs that up. Now you have provided quotes, let's see.
> The article used a picture of Pepe the frog as Captain America
Not a good start, as this is utterly irrelevant, for many reasons which I would think are as blindingly obvious as why using a comment beneath the article is irrelevant.
> ...but Gab.ai is attracting conservatives as an alternate social platform.
conservative is not a synonym for white supremacist, hence, it does not support your claim.
> At the moment, Gab feels like a conservative chatroom...
conservative is not a synonym for white supremacist, hence, it does not support your claim.
> It also appears that Milo Yiannopoulos, a conservative writer who was permanently suspended from Twitter in July after his attack on actress Leslie Jones, has joined Gab.
- conservative is not a synonym for white supremacist, hence, it does not support your claim.
- Even if Yiannopoulos is or was a white supremacist, Gab was launched *before* he was kicked off of Twitter and was no doubt in development beforehand.
> ... Gab’s early, ideologically-narrow success plays into a larger trend in social media...
ideologically-narrow here meaning conservative. Drum roll, please…
conservative is not a synonym for white supremacist, hence, it does not support your claim.
What I'd like to see from you is something that evidences your claim. For example, one of the founders saying they set it up to help white supremacists, or they had a secret meeting with white supremacists about setting up Gab for them and it was leaked… not some specious nonsense that conflates conservative with white supremacist, or points to the choice of image that some sub-editor chose to go along with the article. Is that too much to ask? Just a crumb of factually accurate, relevant, evidence that isn't based on redefining basic terms or smearing entire groups of people - massive groups - as being something they are clearly not.
Can you manage that? Because this is HN, not Twitter, so I'd appreciate that you put in the effort.
> Doesn’t it provoke your professional interest - how they managed to do it?
No, because that's not the hard part. Anyone can host a niche community "off grid" and make it profitable. It being niche is what enables that. It's not hard to get 2000 dedicated people to fuck around with crypto and side loading apps. It's basically impossible to get a critical mass of average people to do it.
Visa and Apple control their platforms by "offering" usability to the average person (mostly by taking away other easy options or out competing them with a moat). The only way the current crop of sites can fail now is if it becomes so bad that the censorship itself is more inconvenient than the difficult steps to work around mainstream infrastructure.
If something like Gab got to like 20-30% the size of Reddit and 99% of it's userbase was normal people doing normal people stuff then I'd be interested. Because before that point we're not going to see any real effort from the incumbents to stop them.
>I am pointing at Gab as an example of definite success
As far as I can tell, Gab is still losing money and not gaining users (100,000 estimated active as of now, despite 6 years of existence), so it's hard to call it a success. It, like previous alt-right responses to mainstream platforms such as Parler, will likely die the same death for the same reasons: not enough money or users to be sustainable.
>I absolutely loved your hate speech.
It's the opinion shared by a significant part of the population, and the content is crap. I tried each of the "alternative" platforms, and on each one am bombarded by the stupidest scams, "buy gold" idiots, and such ignorance and stupidity I dropped each one.
The userbase trends far-right so most people will never join unless the userbase is more central, which will not happen. The CEO has engaged in the most nonsensical anti-semitic screeds on Twitter and elsewhere, having to repeatedly delete his own content. It's no wonder people don't like the platform or it's content.
Researchers, analyzing random samples of millions of posts on the site, find many multiples of hate speech more than other platforms, find the majority of posts are political (and right leaning), that people moving to this site after being banned elsewhere increase in toxicity because Gab lets them (as long as they have the "right" viewpoint), and on and on. The academic literature on the platform content and behaviors is spot on in my opinion. These are empirical reasons that most people will not join. Want some good reading on what the site actually has? Look no further than Google Scholar [1]
If most people did not share the opinion that the content is bad, more people would use those platforms.
Right, what do you mean by that? That Americans aren't using it because they prefer censorship, or that they aren't using it because they're dumb, or some third or fourth points? I'm not sure what you mean.
Uhm. I can only guess why we Americans are not using Gab. But I thought I’ve made my guess pretty explicit: yes, I can clearly see and with great uneasiness that Americans prefer censorship. May be I was wrong - what is your thought, what Gab should do with these suprematists?
And my guess is based on some observations. I named one - GOP branch deleting their account.
Here’s the second observation, if you wish. Even more bothering to me. Not so long a go there was a mass protest at SF medical center. About a thousand of hospital workers were demanding that Zuckerberg’s name (paid by him at $25 mln) was removed from the plates. Reason - he is not doing enough to censor Facebook posts.
I was born and grown up and have a nice “living experience” in a totalitarian country. This popular demand for more censorship looks to me like people asking authorities to hang them - and bringing their own ropes and soap to the execution site. Not a nice picture to watch.
Gab should do whatever they are legally required to do under the law and no more. If they want to provide a safe space for white supremacists/conspiracy theorists/whatever, I don’t care. I won’t use it. Me not using their service is not me condoning “censorship” or whatever you think is happening, it’s just me not wanting to use a shitty platform full of shitty people. I don’t like the fact that Visa won’t let sex workers use them as a payment processor either. Just because I am against one thing does not mean I am automatically for another thing.
Well apparently they won’t let me use it. They censored me for not having views that aligned with theirs.
But also yes, I’m not a fan of white supremacists and I won’t voluntarily use a platform that caters to them. Just like I wouldn’t eat at a “Hitler was great”-themed cafe.
Isn't the point that MikePlacid is making that if a platform does not engage in censorship then it will:
a) have some users who've been censored elsewhere
b) be accused of catering to them, as you have done
c) meanwhile, the majority continues to use censored platforms
Whereas if you and the majority used an uncensored-yet-legal platform:
1) White supremacists would be a tiny minority
2) Everyone could speak freely
3) That would not be catering to white supremacists
Or would it? Based on what you've written above it seems you might claim it would be catering to them by not censoring them.
You've created a circular argument and a vicious cycle on top of it. That does support censorship and it shows that the majority does prefer censorship. Freedom of speech will necessarily entail having speech the majority don't like being around. That's the price of it but it's better than the alternatives.
Did you not see where I said they censored me? I disagreed with a prominent Gab user and posted something that was, by their criteria, “left wing” and I was banned. That is 100% censorship by the criteria he established. How are they not catering to white supremacists etc. if they are banning people for disagreeing? Weren’t they started in order to cater to that demographic as well?
I was also banned from Twitter, and I’m not out crying about it as nothing of value was really lost there either.
Assuming what you say is true (no slight intended, it only means I can't confirm it and haven't seen the exchange), being censored for making a left wing comment does not necessarily imply white supremacists doing it. Left wing comments occasionally get censored on Twitter, too, as you point out.
I've no idea if Gab censors or not as I don't use it but that's different to your argument holding water. I also wonder that if you're banned from Twitter and Gab then you're the one with the problem, and this thread might be a clue as to why.
If you want to call me an asshole, call me an asshole directly instead of “this thread might be a clue why.”
I never said white supremacists were censoring me. I said Gab is full of them and that as a platform, they too censor views that dissent from their majority. So it’s not some free speech wonderland like OP implied. He suggested it as an alternative. I said it’s not really an alternative. The content of what I said to get banned from Twitter or from Gab is irrelevant to my point.
> If you want to call me an asshole, call me an asshole directly instead of “this thread might be a clue why.”
I wasn't suggesting anything of the sort, but your belligerence and unwillingness to accept any other point of view is what I was suggesting, along with the bannings you've brought up.
> I never said white supremacists were censoring me.
Really?
> Did you not see where I said they censored me?
> How are they not catering to white supremacists
If you didn't write it then you suggested it to the point where to now claim anything else undermines your argument, as does the goalpost moving.
So, which is it? They're catering to white supremacists or Gab isn't really a free speech paradise. Once you've picked one then perhaps you can form a cogent argument for it. Let me know.
It’s both. I don’t think actual white supremacists are “censoring” me. I think people who saw a way to make money by catering to that demographic are not practicing the “free speech paradise” that they preach. What’s so hard to understand about that?
Also, if I’m belligerent for disagreeing with you, then clearly you are also belligerent for disagreeing with me. You can accuse me of moving goalposts or whatever makes you feel better about it, but i am not meaning to. English is not my first language and it sometimes my point does not shine through the way I would like.
> if I’m belligerent for disagreeing with you, then clearly you are also belligerent for disagreeing with me
Let's get this out of the way, I wasn't suggesting you're belligerent for disagreeing with me, there's plenty of belligerence from you in this thread long before I commented.
> English is not my first language and it sometimes my point does not shine through the way I would like.
As an immigrant who struggles with the local language where I am, I sympathise, I genuinely do. Still, I'd be amazed if I could reach the level you have. Shall we resume disagreeing now?
> I think people who saw a way to make money by catering to that demographic are not practicing the “free speech paradise” that they preach
I'm not sure who censored you now, I've heard talk of community moderators on Gab, was it them? It was not white supremacists that censored you but they're catering to white supremacists? Wouldn't that just cater to conservatives? It's strange because research (from Pew) shows that those on the American left, at least, are less likely to tolerate opposing viewpoints on social media[1].
You also seem to conflate banning with censoring, which it can, but to go straight to a ban seems strange to me - does Gab ban people straight away for left wing comments? I'm almost tempted to post one there and see what happens.
This Forbes article[2] mentions Parler (which is also being accused of catering to white supremacists elsewhere on this page):
> One reason that conservatives may feel at home is because the service has been quick to ban those who joined just to "troll" or otherwise harass those with right-leaning views.
At the moment, regardless of language skill, that would appear to explain your anecdote very well.
[2] One reason that conservatives may feel at home is because the service has been quick to ban those who joined just to "troll" or otherwise harass those with right-leaning views.
It's literally not censorship to voluntarily refuse to associate with white supremacists (or to simply have no interest in doing so). I'd assume this is the reason we Americans are not using Gab.
That would hold more water if people were using services that are not heavily censored, or not censored at all. The white supremacists (apparently, I've not used Gab) all used to be on Twitter - were Twitter users associating with them back then? Did everyone stop using Twitter?
The key difference between being banned from Facebook and being hanged by the government is that in one case you die and in the other case you are mildly inconvenienced.
Facebook operates in California. It’s users are - by Facebook provided user agreement- bound in their relationship with Facebook by California laws.
Now, the constitution of California provides positive right of speech to it’s citizens: Every person may freely speak, write and publish his or her sentiments on all subjects, being responsible for the abuse of this right. See this dot here? no exception for Zuckerbergs. Or your car.
Then, there is courts’ interpretation of this right. It was as following (by memory): if you created a public forum, then you can’t remove people from it for their speech contents only . That’s why California malls can’t remove beggars soliciting money (you car is ok, it’s not a public forum).
Now, as in now, California becomes a one-party state (feels like home, sometimes). The same Supreme Court (but with nowadays judges) decides: is Facebook a public forum? You can guess the answer.
So you agree. I can carve a message into the side your car, and there’s nothing you can do about it.
Nice. I’ve got my knife. Let’s meet up! Afterwards, we’ll swing by the television station and make them broadcast us live, free of charge or control, a six hour lecture about our novel interpretation constitutional law.
So your argument on why facebook with 4 billion users should ban whatever it likes on its platform is that a car that can fit more a dozen people shouldn't be vandalized.
I prefer sanitized spaces too. I just want to have a sanitizing tool in my own hands - sanitizing what I personally read. But my tool should have no influence on what you will see and read.
Moderation is probably needed. But it should be decentralized.
Decentralized moderation is a fantasy. Do you want to clean every public bathroom before you enter it ? Uncover every troll personally on Twitter every time you log on?
Malign activity (bots and trolls) are organized and at scale, the only way to fight back is at the same scale. Individual users would be helpless.
Fair points, but I would argue you aren't describing decentralized moderation so much as centralized moderation tools being made available to users in a transparent way. Which sounds good to me.
> Right, what do you mean by that? That Americans aren't using it because they prefer censorship, or that they aren't using it because they're dumb, or some third or fourth points? I'm not sure what you mean.
This is pretty obtuse as a response to the comment above you:
>>>>>> You have at least one alternative. You, the freest people in the world, are not using it. Not enough censorship there.
What could "Not enough censorship there" mean other than that people want more censorship than Gab provides?
There's a shitload of black/white/muslim supremacists on Twitter too. Twitter is almost exclusively toxicity.
There's normal people on Gab as well. It's nice if you want to talk about taboo topics during controversial times like lockdowns, certain laptops, certain vaccines, etc..
Basically if you want to escape western propaganda.
There are other issues such as criticism of lockdowns, vaccine safety, anthropogenic global warming, central bank digital currencies, investigation of certain incidents like the Las Vegas mass shooting, supporting the Russian side of the Ukraine war, etc that will get you banned on other platforms.
They are all lumped together in the mind of your average CNN viewer as "white supremacy" unfortunately. Sometimes there are weird glitches in the issue lumping, like when people say that Trump is anti-vax even though Trump has been an advocate of the vaccines.
I have a black friend that was almost, sorta, called racist because he said he thinks his house rent in the Berkeley was high because tons of illegal aliens are renting too and driving up demand.
He tried to argue that without the millions of illegals in California, taking atleast a million housing units, rent would be cheaper. But everyone was shocked he could even say that.
Things are getting comical. As if the actual race or color of the millions of people taking up housing is the actual issue.... Not their legal status. If they were a different color or race he's be ok with it?
Also Mexican is not even a race.
Same with Muslim.
Etc.
The skin color thing was always a strawman.
There's slightly different physiology, behavioral tendencies like cultures, which may simply be different (intelligent adaptations by group from their geographical origins).
Nobody thinks an albino African is "White". And when the Tanzanian albino gets chopped into a potion by his non-Albino brothers -- an actual crime predicated upon skin color alone -- would we call it a racial hate crime? We barely even talk about that issue internationally.
I would rather they didn't but the post I replied to was about one alternative to things - not any of the other alternatives, like federated systems (Mastodon, etc) or even something like IRC that I love dearly. They picked one of the things that is notorious for being full of white supremacists (and also banning people for being "left wing", as was my experience of disagreeing with a prominent Gab user, on Gab, for which my account was banned. So much for "freedom of speech".)
I think you're misunderstanding. The problem is that payment processors will not do business with "unsavory" customers. It's not about curation or moderation, it's that any porn-adjacent business is locked out of the economy.
Me scrolling through gab won't make visa more accepting.
I mean at the end of the day payment processors are private businesses, they can do business with who they want. If you don't like the alternative, then you're free to give your business to the entrenched power.
Falsely equating showing a harmless boob and hate speech, so typically intellectually dishonest.
This is the most disturbing about US's entendre of free speech...
Hate speech is not speech, banning it is not censorship.
What does sex have in common with the actively and directly harmful Garbage that people go on Gab for? Nothing if you're not a troll.
You're welcome to argue that not all speech is good and some deserved to be banned by censoring it. But please at least be honest about what you're trying to do.
Do you think that incitement to violence should be protected speech? If not, you agree that some speech deserves to be banned; you're just drawing the line at a slightly different place than GP.
Blasphemy/heresy isn’t speech and banning it isn’t censorship.
Now, I want to be clear. While many people when they give the examples of blasphemy and heresy, they mean those as things that they think are actually good, but which people in power in the past thought were bad and therefore censored/punished.
That’s not how I’m thinking about these.
Blasphemy and heresy are things I view as actually bad.
As such, what I’m not saying is not “you supporting restrictions on hate speech is just enforcing your own dead dogma over an actual critical eye!” . No, that’s not what I’m saying.
So when I oppose censoring blasphemy/heresy, I am opposing censoring some things which I think are actually bad.
Likewise, even though e.g. racism is bad, I don’t conclude that expressing racist fact-claims is “not speech”. It is clearly speech, just bad speech. And as speech, it should be permitted(in some senses of the term “permitted”) in some venues.
(Whether the use of slurs needs to be permitted, when there are ways to express whatever claims without using slurs, may be a different question, due to it being a restriction on how something is expressed rather than on what is expressed. However, on the other hand, I do find the definition of “slur” to be, hm, something to ponder? Something that can be initially confusing.)
Though, of course, there should also be venues where it is not allowed, just as there are venues where spouting heresies can get one banned.
Thank you for your question. It is another nice illustration of my main point.
I disapprove of what you say, but will defend to the death your right to say it. That was said in 1750s. My “living experience” of growing up in a totalitarian society tells me that it is not only true, but vital - vital for having a free and prosperous society.
American Fathers agreed with Voltaire. But my feeling (which I do not like) is that an easily observable slice of native Americans have forgotten what exactly makes their country so nice to live in. “The lubricant oil is stinky and greasy - let’s get rid of it, car rides will be much more pleasant”.
Let me ask you a question in my turn. Why presence of racists on Gab bothers you so? No one forces you to read them or talk with them.
But Gab's purpose is racist speech so why go there? They don't allow free speech because if you go there to argue with the racists they ban you. In fact, Gab has even more censorship than Twitter.
Unfortunately your "main point" misses the reality of the world.
> Why presence of racists on Gab bothers you so? No one forces you to read them or talk with them
Glad you asked. The presence of racists on Gab makes me unwilling to be "guilty by association" (in the eyes of others) for being on the same site as them. Simple as that. This is a reality in the world, and until you find a way to stop people from instinctively applying the "guilty by association" principle, I'm unwilling to be on the same site as Nazis. Sorry.
That is also false. It is a majority that chooses. The majority , also called a mob , has figured out that it's more profitable to weaponize their votes rather than increase human dignity.
Unless you're a Judeo-Bolshevik, of course. If I wanted the Gab experience I could just browse /pol/ (I don't), but at least 4chan has other interesting boards.
I think you are failing to distinguish between three possibilities.
1. Most people like censorship, or at least certain kinds of censorship. They don't use Gab because Gab doesn't censor the things they want censored.
2. Most people don't want to be in a forum that's all crazy evil people all the time. They don't use Gab because they think most of the people on Gab are crazy and/or evil.
3. Most people just want to use whatever social network their friends and family use. Maybe also other people they admire or find interesting and want to follow despite not knowing them. They don't use Gab because hardly anyone they know or admire is on Gab and everyone they know is on Facebook or Instagram or TikTok or Twitter or whatever.
You are claiming it's all about #1. I actually suspect #3 is much the most important effect. The other two may look alike but they are different and I think #2 is much bigger than #1.
A hypothetical version of Gab that didn't censor white supremacists, QAnon groupies, people who think the COVID-19 vaccines will enable Bill Gates to control you with 5G networking, etc., but that somehow wasn't (perceived to be) dominated by those people might actually be pretty attractive. It probably still wouldn't get much use because everyone's on other social networks and no one is on Gab, but it would be in with a chance of success.
But, of course, if everyone else is running full-scale witch hunts and you make a space that doesn't do that, then all the witches will go there, whether or not that was your goal. I think in Gab's case it was actually their goal, though. They may say that they're all about freedom of speech, and maybe they believe that, but I'm pretty sure that what motivated the creation of Gab was wanting freedom for certain particular kinds of speech.
(Note: wanting a space not dominated by X is the same thing as wanting X to be censored, even if it turns out that not censoring X inevitably leads to the space being dominated by X. Someone who leaps off a tall building because he delusionally thinks he can fly doesn't want to fall to the ground and die. Someone who tries to avoid accidental death and fatal diseases doesn't want to suffer gradual decay as a result of aging. Etc.)
Anyway: if you want to argue that Gab's lack of success shows that people want censorship, you need to show some actual evidence that it's #1 rather than #2 and #3 that causes it, and so far you haven't.
The worrying thing is that these companies are not just applying the law but going beyond that and dictating additional rules and decisions that are theirs. Apple does not like adult content. It does not want to be associated with it not because it is illegal but because it makes them look dirty by association, which is bad for business; or so they seem to believe. So, they are being much stricter than is legally necessary.
They've effectively become the highest authority on what is "legal". The worrying thing here is that of course they don't implement any form of democracy (other than share holder voting). They are deciding for us but we don't get to be involved in that decision process.
Credit card companies are doing the same. They are telling people what they can and cannot spend on and they are telling businesses what they can and cannot use their payment systems for. Effectively they are discriminating between businesses they like and businesses they don't like based on criteria that they define. Discriminating people is illegal. But discriminating against companies (which in a legal sense are regarded as persons) is fine. Maybe it shouldn't be?
The solution is breaking monopolies like that and forcing competition to happen. Apple and Google own app stores. That's fine; good for them. But banning other people's app stores isn't. If they don't want to sell something, somebody else will happily take that business.
In the same way you can use any credit card you want as long as it is Visa or Mastercard. None of the other ones matter anymore, which is weird. Effectively Visa and Mastercard monopolized online payments and are re-enforcing their position through anti-competitive moves. And of course Apple and Google have payment solutions too that are actually based on those. So, we're talking about an oligarchy that controls payments and online distribution of content that only consists of a handful of companies. They decide what's legal and isn't legal. And they profit from all transactions that happen. And they are fiercely defensive of their exclusive control as it is highly profitable. So, competing with them is one of the things that they've simply decided is illegal.
No it isn't. Discriminating against certain classes of people is illegal. It's perfectly legal to discriminate against individuals based on their behavior.
Would it be ok if a company didn't care that a user is gay or not, but they hated that he celebrated gay activities? Even straight people celebrate gay pride and rights. Can we discriminate against them? Seems pretty similar.
> It's sad to me how successful people have been sanitizing the internet.
It's far more complicated than that and looking at the complicated details is useful to understand the bigger picture.
Here are some examples...
1. It's now that far more things are on the Internet than there used to be. Some things that used to be huge are now a smaller percentage in an immensely larger space. In some cases they are bigger now than they used to be.
2. Sex slaves and porn are a thing and a problem. There's both more of it and more awareness of it. In many places there are laws about this that companies who process money have to take in to account.
3. Kids and the Internet. About half the 10 year olds I know (which is more than a few) have phones with no filters on them. Kids running wild. If more things were more easily accessible than the culture around screens and handling that with kids will need to change. Kids are ready for different things at different ages and the way they view things during their formative years impacts the way they view and treat others.
I use these to just illustrate that it's more than money, power, and control by the wealthy. Sometimes (like in the case of #2) it's about the most vulnerable.
> "About half the 10 year olds I know (which is more than a few) have phones with no filters on them."
This is on parents (and how they are educated around parenthood) IMO. Notice the comment about Reddit, even with all the sanitization it's ridiculously easy to find very hardcore (in every sense of the word) stuff.
In the same way that you hold hands when you walk past a busy street, you cannot expect the internet to be a safe place. As a parent you have the responsibility here.
I felt it was better to teach them that 'there's stuff out there you can't unsee', because I realized they were one sleepover away from getting around any filter I could put in front of them.
This is how it worked for us. Parents did what they could to block PC access, but me and my brother managed to break them all to do what kids do online. At certain point, you have to actually talk with your kids even if it is the kind of 'smoke that cigar until you are sick' approach. Naturally, my dad being my dad, took a different tack. He just picked the PC and took it to his shop.
Different times. Needless to say, I don't think I will be able to try the same approach.
Yes, great, this is in line with my point. I'm not saying you should take control of the internet but you are responsible for how they interact with it.
Growing up my father believed playing the GTA would be detrimental to my development. He banned them from our home and told the parents of my friends not to let me play those games at their house, if they said they wouldn't enforce that rule I wasn't allowed over.
Didn't matter, I played the games to completion at friend's houses because their parents didn't really give a crap.
Looking back, I think the only way my father could have reasonably stopped me from playing these games would have been to isolate me from my friends and wreck our relationship. Now luckily, we're pretty sure no harm was done in this case, but the point is that there's not actually that much parents can do to limit access to content if other parents aren't similarly vigilant.
>Growing up my father believed playing the GTA would be detrimental to my development.
Almost all parents think that, COD included. But I think recent studies said that video game violence does not influence kids and teens to commit real life violence. At least kids and teens today play Minecraft and Roblox which are to lesser extent violent than GTA and COD.
I rather have my kids playing GTA than stuff like Candycrush or whatever mobile game is popular now. At least GTA requires some amount of brain activity.
It’s crazy to me that “just exercise complete control over what your kids do and see” is touted like it’s not the start of a black mirror episode.
> In the same way that you hold hands when you walk past a busy street
This logic isn’t scale dependent and I know you have a line somewhere before “it totally fine to have landmines in random patches of grass — parents responsibility!” Where is it?
Seems to me that most black mirror episodes are about the loss or restriction of freedom. I can't imagine a black mirror episode that starts with giving the protagonist autonomy and freedom instead of preventing it.
Your alternative I presume is just to treat everyone like a small child equally so that nobody can see anything potentially painful or commit any thought crimes (the ends etc etc). Certainly the internet is very hard to regulate with children but maybe they just shouldn't be spending so much time on it. It's much harder to keep track of 15v hours of usage a day vs 1 or 2. But again that's a personal responsibility thing. If a child gets hit by a car we examine the circumstances surrounding it, the logical conclusion most people would assume is not to sue the car manufacturer to prevent the operation of their vehicles. There's definitely a balance between corporate and personal responsibility but I'm strongly against the childification of the internet and apps that is occurring. It doesn't matter that most people don't understand something, if you prevent them from observing or utilizing it you're effectively enforcing that ignorance.
We should not be enforcing such restrictions. Any restriction may benefit some children, but will rob everyone of the ability to learn how to discern good from bad. We should not be training total reliance. Encountering difficulty is an essential part of human existence
> I can't imagine a black mirror episode that starts with giving the protagonist autonomy and freedom instead of preventing it.
I was confused by how your comment related to what you were replying to, until I realized you just assumed that a child can't possibly be deserving of any autonomy at all, or even be considered a protagonist.
Thank you, I was so confused I didn't know how to reply to them. I was like "but we're specifically talking about taking away all autonomy from kids. This is the opposite."
It's super wild to me that there are so many people who parenting as "I own this child" and not "I am the proximate caretaker of this independent person."
Please note that I didn't say anything like that and you're making an assumption. The other option is teaching your child to be safe, as you would when they are old enough to stop holding hands.
You don't hold 10 years old hands when crossing the street. At that age, they are going through streets alone when they go to scool or club or visit friends.
> At that age, they are going through streets alone when they go to scool or club or visit friends.
In the united states, this stopped being socially acceptable sometime time in the past 20 years. Letting your kids walk to school before high-school (13/14) is considered child abuse by many. Not everywhere, not everyone. But there has been a huge shift in views around what kind of out-of-the-home-unsupervised activity is seen as normal.
In Switzerland 5 years old walk unsupervised. Literally. Every August/September there is big campaign for drivers "be careful inexperienced kids on the roads" with billboards and what not. That is it.
It might be other extreme. But it does seem to me that if you are not letting them navigate world until 13, you are probably harming their development.
Is that true? In Germany in most cities children walk to school alone when they start elementary school at 6 years old. They are only accompanied by the parents for the first few weeks when they start school.
Unfortunately, disastrously, it is more or less true, yeah.
Here's a recent episode of the podcast 99% Invisible, about the Japanese TV show about toddlers running their "first errand" alone (which has become popular in the USA via netflix, perhaps because it seems so wild in the US?), and comparing US (and apparently Canadian) physical landscapes for children. https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/first-errand/
The episode touches on the fact that in Japan dropping off your children to school by car is generally prohibited, with a principal explaining why. I have heard this is true in Germany. It is definitely not true in the USA -- and the US physical and social landscape has been built in such a way it would be largely impossible. It's a disaster.
> 3. Kids and the Internet. About half the 10 year olds I know (which is more than a few) have phones with no filters on them. Kids running wild. If more things were more easily accessible than the culture around screens and handling that with kids will need to change. Kids are ready for different things at different ages and the way they view things during their formative years impacts the way they view and treat others.
Honestly, this was not different in my youth. When we found access to the internet, we of course looked for weird stuff (for those who remember: for example rotten.com; I was rather disturbed by it and learned my lesson that you shouldn't click on every link that you see on websites).
I can tell you how this transformed me: if you have seen the early free spirit of the early web in your formative years, you become deeply suspicious of the political attempts to censor the internet - for example to "protect the children". This is what the authorities really fear: that people don't believe that this is all for their best.
I played Doom as a toddler, in my dad's lap. I had early and unfettered access to all kinds of porn. I listened to insanely homophobic, sexist, and generally antisocial music (Eminem, D12).
If you wiped my brain and gave me amnesia and asked me if those things will mess a kid up, I'd say yeah -- how couldn't they?!
It turns out they had no negative effect on me that I can notice; they were just fun. As an adult, I don't do drugs, I've got all the fashionably cosmopolitan social views, etc. :p It's anecdata, but I think the biggest factors for how kids end up are "did you come out screwed up already" and "are your parents emotionally and financially-supportive while vaguely indicating the glide path they think you should follow, with stuff like off-handedly remarking on how racism is pretty bad at some point and generally forcing you to do well in school and putting you through college".
> Sex slaves and porn are a thing and a problem. There's both more of it and more awareness of it. In many places there are laws about this that companies who process money have to take in to account.
Citation needed. Unless you're taking about CSAM shared on the dark web, I seriously doubt that sex slaves account for any significant portion of pornography. The only way I can see this being true is with a very wide definition of "sex slave" that includes someone doing porn to pay for rent.
#3 was no less true in the 2000s - I can attest to that myself.
I used to have your view, then I learned about the amount of porn production that happens via organized crime that traffics young (17-22) girls for this express purpose.
It looks the same as “normal” stuff. You can’t tell from watching it.
> I learned about the amount of porn production that happens via organized crime that traffics young (17-22) girls for this express purpose.
I know of one instance [1] of criminal porn production, and it involved deception and fraud rather than kidnapping women - which, to be clear, is still terrible and should be prosecuted. And it ended with the people in charge getting convicted and imprisoned.
I am not at all convinced that a substantial portion of legal pornography involves organized crime. Again, the logistics of producing content that also serves as video evidence of a crime is difficult to overcome. If there is evidence that this is more widespread, it'd be good of you to share it.
GirlsDoPorn case is somewhat surprising to me because I think US regulators failed to prevent abuse of protentional and eventual victims of this porn company. The company was active from 2009 to 2020 and they only stopped their business when they ended up in court. Why weren't they earlier under legal scrutiny and why wasn't their license to do porn revoked? And it seems like most of this girls didn't have any legal advice or assistance prior, during and after of signing contracts with GirlsDoPorn. Imo amateur porn is fishy and should be more regulated.
“Amateur porn” is regulated, by the same laws in fact. People hosting such content for commercial gain are expected to obtain sufficient documentation of the performers identity, age, and consent, so as to not be liable under such laws.
As with most laws, the level to which they are enforced correctly and complied with varies.
Lured and forced can be very similar though. Especially if poverty, mental illness or similar are involved. Plus the fact that many people aren't really 'adults' when they turn 18.
Come on now... Do you really think some of the pr0n out there was consented upon by all parties?
Let's be real. Even the largest pr0n sites have had a shit ton of cases come to surface, which should've put them out of business for good. And yes, some of it is about sex slavery.
The pr0n industry is all rotten. Great to see legit, humane alternatives gaining traction, don't get me wrong. But, most of it, is just pure misery.
What is the motive to producing non-consensual pornography? The risks are large: you're literally recording yourself committing a felony and publishing evidence of the crime to the world. Most porn production companies are looking to make a profit, not land themselves in jail. In the US, there's regulations to ensure all actors are of age and consented to recording [1].
People are investing in pornography production companies because they just like to get people off? No, the goal of production companies is to make money. The goal of the consumer is to get off, but the production company's goal absolutely is to money. As other commenters have pointed out [1] non-consensual pornography is indistinguishable to viewers from consensual pornography, so the risk of filming yourself commit rape and uploading evidence of the crime to the internet is not a decision I can see productions companies being keen on making.
For a very loose idea of "sex trafficking" that includes people deciding to work in porn to make ends meet - but at this point you could say your janitors are being trafficked because they wouldn't do their job if they didn't have to pay rent.
There are quite a few resources and stories available if you have a real interest in learning about it. The term 'sex trafficking' is more widely used than 'sex slaves' for what is being discussed.
To be blunt, these sorts of articles are precisely why I'm skeptical of the claim that sex-trafficking is a significant portion of pornography. Nowhere in any of these links is there a claim for what percentage of pornography features non-consensual or trafficked actors, and details about the methods used to arrive at that figure.
Instead, the articles either focus on anecdotes (e.g. "California Substitute Teacher Filmed and Profited off of Incest") or broad statistics non-specific to pornography, (e.g. "By some estimates, 4.8 million people are trapped or forced into sexual exploitation globally.) Nobody doubts that there are instances of non-consensual pornography. But 50 people out of 13 million is a small, small percentage.
It’s 0.00038462% and I completely agree with your point that the majority of this discourse is based on anecdotes and non specific statistics, I don’t support slavery of any kind but I also don’t support pressuring social change based on bullshit. I’ve had it happen to me once for a small and largely inconsequential thing arbitrarily banned by my state government and I will never stand for it again it’s a feeling of powerless violation for nearly zero genuine social good, yes there’s probably some, but it was like this, on the order of a few police officers less inconvenienced each week.
It's complicated. Unfortunately real life is never binary. There are several gradations between open internet and dystopian closed internet that only allows you to see what the governing powers want you to see. Most people are somewhere in the middle, as with all things.
>Most people are somewhere in the middle, as with all things.
And they're wrong. I'd agree that perhaps there should be guardrails, but for those who want to leave the safe-zone, it ought to remain without filters.
It's about the same argument as general computing. Should it be illegal to have root access on your devices? Do you think it's a fair compromise in order to be able to have convenient streaming entertainment?
I rooted my android phone and now I can't access Netflix (well, not without putting in effort I don't care to). Fair trade for me, I prefer to actually have control over my devices.
Nope. There is no middle ground. It. Is. Not. Complicated.
Either you think of the internet as a utility where everyone is equal, like a telephone, or you think people should be "nudged" into harmonious behavior, where it takes on the worst aspects of a broadcast medium.
The problem with "nudging" people is there's an equal and opposite reaction through the cybernetic system. For instance, adding fact check labels to every sensitive topic, COVID vaccines for instance, will lead people to think that it's all part of a larger conspiracy and they'll get a hit of dopamine when they "follow the qlues."
Even utilities have limits on the behavior you can use with them. Granted you gotta really go out of your way to trigger those limits but there is no society wide system in existence that follows that level of openness
Doing actual actual crimes or committing a fraud using the phone, computer, fax, telex, or whatever other electronic means generally falls under wire fraud.
The phone company doesn't de-platform "literal nazis" simply for being "literal nazis."
The distinction is between perfectly legal speech, and specific acts fraud or things that are direct, actionable, and credible threats to physical safety (e.g., bomb threats). This isn't a complicated blah blah, where we need a technocratic meta-god to put his thumb on the scales. The existing legal pre-computer legal frameworks cover these cases.
And if the literal nazis we’re actually using a private person to person (can be through a service) communication medium like a phone the number of people who want them deplatformed would drop to basically zero.
Your argument has to account for the fact that Twitter is more like public radio than a phone and that WhatsApp is more like a phone than radio.
To be fair I do see articles written pointing to the fact that hate groups are using signal or discord, the implication being that such companies are "platforming" those groups.
> 3. Kids and the Internet. About half the 10 year olds I know (which is more than a few) have phones with no filters on them. Kids running wild. If more things were more easily accessible than the culture around screens and handling that with kids will need to change.
Why? As a child who grew up either the free Internet of the early 2000s I can tell you it does far less harm than thing like going to school where a teacher dislikes you. If you're worried about kids getting an inaccurate impression from porn that take them aside and show them real sex tapes.
I had unfettered internet access at 10. I picked up programming and hacking by age 12, watched fetish porn at 14, figured out Tor and FreeNet, then got into (learning about!) clandestine drug synthesis by age 16, rhodium and the hive and all that. Very formative years.
Sure, I got myself into sketchy situations, but I wasn't at risk of getting murdered. The worst that would have happened is being emotionally scarred or going to juvy. A good exchange, for me.
For 3 - kids have been on the internet for a while now. If anything there was much more of a moral panic about it in the 90s.
I think point 1 is key - the internet is a bigger place, which also means things get more specialized and separated. You dont stumble across specialized content as much anymore, you have to go looking instead.
Does "female presenting nipples" === porn? It was a SCJ who said, "I'll know it (i.e., porn) when I see it". Also, it's a double-standard to say men can have free-will to present their bodies as they see fit but women can not.
Yes because the internet, really the web, is a shared public broadcast medium. What makes it any different than radio? Don’t say logins because sites where basically anyone can join is essentially public.
Says who btw. Does that include 3D porn ? AI generated porn? American prudishness is the problem, as well as all the backwards religious societies which are now more dispersed around the world than ever and support it. I think it's important to remember that liberalism is what brought technological progress to the west, not the inward-looking repressive attitudes. And that includes bodily liberalism as well.
The majority of the net is easily accessible porn. If there is anything here showing how easy it is to decentralize and stay alive, it is probably porn.
The big boys make it harder and squash the heads sticking out, but people are acting like you won't find ungodly things the moment you turn off the safety filters and pick your words a little recklessly.
Most of the commerical porn on the net is run by very few companies with many many brands. It's hard to run your own porn business if you don't rely on a major company.
If you search for porn images on Google you get much more porn without ever leaving Google, than you could have dreamed on all of the specialized forums in 1997.
It remains to be seen whether a sustainable business can be built on OnlyFans; it came very close to getting destroyed last year. And almost every other name in the sector is owned by MindGeek.
> It's hard to run your own porn business if you don't rely on a major company
It's hard to run your own porn business even if you are a major company.
People act extremely sensitive about their fetishes and think they are connoisseurs. but the reality is that 1000 porn movies in the 70s and 80s could satisfy jackoff habits of the whole global population for the forseeble future.
The marginal value of more porn being produced is essentially zero
OnlyFans is very present in culture and has a monstre evaluation, but if you look at revenues you'd be looking at the sum of some 300 big gas stations. Also OF is not a porn website it's an online GFE service.
By this standard we don’t need any additional media of any kind. No new movies, books, or tv shows.
99% of everything is crap. Most new movies or books are awful or entirely pedestrian and completely unoriginal to boot, and most don’t turn much of a profit.
But people still make them for a huge variety of reasons.
We have new movies? I thought they abandoned that in the quest for reliable profit, dooming us to endless live action remakes, and and endless stream of remakes of comic book blockbusters.
Even porn websites are sanitized. Pornhub purged all their user content sometime ago and the parent company owns all the other major streaming sites. The only non sanitized stuff is torrents as it’s always been.
There is an immense gap between 'major streaming sites' and torrents. If you're a bit unlucky, you'll find stuff straight up illegal to create through rather innocent searches.
Whoever did the 'sanitizing' of the web should get charged a fine for doing a shoddy job.
Seems the main point of the article was that it is being made highly impractical to build any system that allows you to get paid for it, short of using crypto, which (15 years later) still has an abysmal UX.
Seems like an opportunity for some ShadyBank to make a new payment scheme, with KYC (not get busted), small transactions only (not attractive to money-laundering), and transfer from customers to vendors, but building the anti-fraud infra from scratch would likely kill it.
This isn't true, though. Porn makes tremendous money, using normal payment methods like anything else. All of the repression is on user-generated content hosting platforms, not porn in general. So sure, direct performer to consumer without a studio is difficult to monetize, but that has always been the case. It hasn't become harder. User-generated content platforms largely didn't even exist a decade ago. Porn on the classic Internet people are pining for was still mostly studio-produced and stars needed agents.
FedNow might be able to provide another avenue, if and when it launches, even though i'm not a big fan of the gov being more involved, but private sector has a monopoly and are being needlessly moralistic and essentially censoring both political and cultural movements through their control.
The whole point was to be decentralized, and now we
have Visa, Mastercard, Apple, Google, Amazon and Cloudflare
Visa and MC are by far the most powerful forces at work here. You can start an online business without the others, but you can't do it without getting paid.
Currently, for most of the world, that means you need to take credit cards.
It's also crucial for us to note that Visa and MC don't care about porn for puritanical reasons; they're not the root cause of this particular issue. They care only about money.
People buy adult content and frequently dispute the charges, which is a headache and eats profits.
I'd tweak it slightly. Either you need MC/Visa or you need ad revenue. Though if your business is one the duopoly won't touch I dunno how many advertisers with real money will touch you.
So why not just up processing fees on those transactions to the point that they're profitable. If Visa/MC made a new processing code that all adult platforms were required to use, and charged a 10% fee, they would make plenty of money. I have to conclude that this is more than just a profit consideration.
Doesn't matter what they set their fees to. If a jury decides that Visa/MC is liable for the exploitation of a minor, they will be instructed to assess punitive damages, and the whole point of punitive damages it to make it hurt for the losing party. No tweaking of the transaction fees will prevent that.
I have to conclude that this is more than just a profit consideration.
Maybe? But in general they're pretty morally agnostic - they don't go shun other "controversial" businesses. Except the cannibus business here in the US, but that's because it's technically still illegal at the federal level.
“So long as it’s legal” is an interesting caveat to universal service. Utility companies, e.g. electricity suppliers, don’t check whether you’re using the utility for illegal purposes. It seems like a true “utility” internet company would only take down content on receiving a court order.
It’s possible that a “choose to be utility or publisher” world would have an extremely polarised internet. On one hand, “utility” services with a lot of illegal content and the police playing whack-a-mole. On the other hand, “publisher” services with liability and therefore intensely risk averse, allowing only the most anaemic content.
>It's sad to me how successful people have been sanitizing the internet.
>The whole point was to be decentralized, and now we have Visa, Mastercard, Apple, Google, Amazon and Cloudflare deciding what we are and are not allowed to see, read and buy. And virtually in lockstep, they are becoming increasingly prudish.
I mean, yes and no. People have been successful in sanitizing the mainstream internet, the pop culture internet, the one your grandparents like to visit. There's plenty of internet out there beyond what is commonly used.
Sure, but more of the internet is sanitized compared to 10-15 years ago, which is likely what they meant. More restrictions in place over more domains. Couple that with the fact that more people spend their time on fewer sites these days than they did in 2007, and it's hard to really argue that the internet most people experience isn't more content restricted.
Most of this stuff used to spread word to mouth. It still does.
'Funny people' on Reddit still post links to NSFW in SFW spaces. Googling something angsty can be interpreted as a search for XXX. Twitter isn't exactly safe either, and can teach a few people NSFW words to get curious about. R34, DeviantArt etc. are all alive, and anything hentai related is far more prominent and mainstream than before. People interact on these sites and suggest enough to instill curiosities.
It's not as on the nose as old flash game sites showing a highlighted "18+" with a shitty age verification or a random ad sending them into the rabbit hole, but it's still very much there.
Freedom of choice aside, there is also a shocking lack of awareness that a major factor in the rise of the internet is that it wasn't like traditional media. There were memes, blogs, video content, music, etc. that would never gain traction with the legacy entertainment industry. There is no point in using youtube or twitter if it's all just clips from mainstream tv or shittakes from established pundits that I can see on repeat on cable all day anyways.
"The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it" is propaganda and cultural myth.
Conditioning liability limitation on being hands-off will only go so far. For one thing, most platforms are basically unusable if you try to turn them into the verbal equivalent of 2b2t[0]. You need to do spam filtering at the least, and that implies making editorial judgments as to what users to take on. It is also possible to use free speech as a censorship tool - say, by harassing or doxing users as reprisal for speech.
Even if we walked this back to "utilities must have consistent rules and users can sue for unfair application of them", this is still historically lenient in terms of intermediary liability. The law does not chase pointers: with literally any other field of endeavor, we don't accept the idea that someone can facilitate a crime without being liable for it. That would be a massive loophole. But we accept it for defamation and copyright law because we convinced Congress to accept the propaganda of the Internet[1].
Under current law, Visa and Mastercard cannot disclaim liability that Apple or Google can. This is why the anti-porn campaigns have been so successful at killing amateurs in that space. Apple might be prudish about not having porn in their app, but they can at least accept filters on the app[2]. And, as we've seen with cryptocurrency, letting those companies disclaim liability would be an absolute nightmare. Cryptocurrency has been an absolute boon to ransomware and scam enterprises that otherwise would not be able to take payments. So you will never convince Congress to carve massive, gaping loopholes in banking law the same way we did to defamation and copyright law.
A decade and change ago our biggest worry was that Comcast would try to turn the Internet into a series of cable TV packages. Now, we have forced so many people to effectively immigrate to the Internet, that they are in a position to demand that it does actually work like cable (in that things they don't like can be sued into oblivion or taken down). The old Internet cannot exist in a world where it can be used against itself to destroy itself.
[0] The oldest anarchy server in Minecraft.
[1] For the record, I am not opposed to CDA 230 or DMCA 512. But we still need to recognize that these liability limiters have massively harmed the ability for plaintiffs to prosecute legitimate defamation or copyright cases.
[2] I am aware that Tumblr got smacked down for this, but this is not because Apple refuses to accept filtering on social networks. They got smacked down because they are absolutely terrible at filtering anything, and an app reviewer saw CSAM.
Copyright only hurts the small creators it was intended to protect. Hell, I work in a creative field and in order to get employment that isn't soliciting freelance work on a project-by-project basis, most companies heavily push creative people to sign away all rights to the things they make on or off company time. I've only successfully gotten a company to drop onerous IP language once. The other times I've walked away from what are otherwise dream jobs.
> But we still need to recognize that these liability limiters have massively harmed the ability for plaintiffs to prosecute legitimate defamation or copyright cases.
Have they really though? I guess plantiffs might find it easier to get damages out of Facebook or Google, but it still seems to be very easy to get stuff taken down.
It's actually impossible to get damages out of Facebook or Google. Believe me, a lot of really big copyright plaintiffs have tried. The law around them is iron-clad.
The reason why it's very easy to take down things is directly downstream of this. Social media companies will trip over themselves to take down content, and the standard for what constitutes a legitimate takedown notice is hilariously low. Remember how Bungie had to basically yell and scream at Google to get them to reverse an illegitimate takedown request an angry fan made to tarnish their reputation? Google didn't want to lift a finger, because all the processes heavily encourage passing the buck. Likewise, social media likes to use content recommendation algorithms because it also lets them get around the law. If you use humans to recommend or curate content, then you're a publisher, you get full copyright liability, and you become the big copyright punching bag[0]. But, if you write an algorithm to make the same decision you would have made as a human, then you're in your safe harbor and there's nobody to sue.
And plaintiffs don't want easy takedowns, they want to sue a big company for lots of money... so that they'll settle and agree to a licensing deal. That's how copyright is supposed to work. When someone with money doesn't pay for the thing, you get to use the law to smack them until they pay for the thing. Nobody wants to sue individuals; it's expensive, time-consuming, and makes you look like an extortion artist.
But that doesn't work under DMCA 512, because there isn't a big company anymore. There's just an online service provider doing things "at the request of" billions of individual users.
We as hackers, myself included, love to complain about copyright. The problem is that copyright only inconveniences those who want to play by the rules. We get angry about it because we want to be told "yes" and will never, ever afford to actually pay to be told "yes". But if you don't care, it's quite easy to evade the system. Register new accounts, use a VPN, lightly disguise your infringement, and you make yourself far harder to sue.
[0] See Mavrix v. LiveJournal. This is the only part of law that I can think of where being willfully blind to abusive conduct is actually rewarded rather than being punished.
I don't really see how cloudflare fits on that list. There are dozens (hundreds?) of other DNS services. 8chan and kiwifarms have found different providers.
they're fairly unique in their free DDoS protection. They provide a LOT of security and uptime services for free that you just don't really find elsewhere (at least, the last time I checked; I'm sure they have reasonable competitors by now).
Even if a monopoly is not legally enforced, it can still dominate through quality or market forces or numerous other avenues.
Really? So every company that has a free tier is “dumping”?
CloudFlare is not s monopoly even by HN commenters weird definition.
But if you define “dumping” as “selling a product below what it takes to turn a profit”, every unprofitable company funded by YC is doing something illegal.
> Really? So every company that has a free tier is “dumping”?
Offering a sustainable free tier isn't dumping. Funding a free service with profits from a different business is.
> But if you define “dumping” as “selling a product below what it takes to turn a profit”, every unprofitable company funded by YC is doing something illegal.
Some of them have sensible unit economics and just need investment while they scale up. But yes, intentionally or not there is absolutely a whole lot of antitrust violation going on in silicon valley VC.
You really think a company can’t legally enter a new market by funding the division from another market?
Was Amazon engaging in “dumping” when it was using the revenue from Amazon to build out AWS? And no “AWS wasn’t started by Amazon selling excess capacity”
You can legally invest into a new business with revenue from your existing business. What's not legal is running a line of business in a way that's inherently unsustainable.
So how is CloudFlare having a free tier not “sustainable” when that’s what almost every company does? Do you think the Google Pixel makes money selling only 800,000 phones a quarter? Would it be sustainable as a standalone company?
Is the “HomePod mini” a line of business? Would it be sustainable if it weren’t subsidized by the rest of Apple?
Are you starting to see how meaningless your definition is?
Right - Visa, Mastercard, Apple, and Google are walled gardens and should, in my personal opinion, be held to a somewhat higher standard in terms of free speech (Yes, I know that the first amendment doesn't apply to companies. I'm just saying how I think things ought to be, not how they are). It's unreasonable to expect consumers to get a new credit card or buy a new phone to use your service. But companies routinely choose alternate DNS providers and lots of people buy things that aren't on Amazon.
You realize the same politicians who are complaining about censorship from the social networks fought tooth and nail against net neutrality?
While net neutrality is not strictly the same thing, you can easily imagine where ISPs are forced to act as common carriers, but are not forced to prioritize it.
> The whole point was to be decentralized, and now we have Visa, Mastercard, Apple, Google, Amazon and Cloudflare deciding what we are and are not allowed to see, read and buy.
5 out of the 6 companies you mentioned are only involved in how you consume goods and services.
Not being able to buy something is not the same as the web not being centralized.
Also, the reference point you're using as a paragon for decentralized web is also a point in time when people were not able to buy goods and services from any of these companies.
Consumerism and free speech are not the same thing.
I am a “personal cognitive freedom across contexts should be protected, full stop.” For example, that means opt-in social healthcare should be a thing that resources are provided for. A minority in charge saying “no” to the public “opting in” spending agency on providing free healthcare is living under a police state mindset; forcing poor who have no real choice into illness, empowering death is freedom! It’s a twisted joke to not care as a society and say we individually chose this; individually we’re beholden to the group think, how neighborly of you all. That we should be expected to spend our time only on profitable (a form of political correctness serving official economic policy ) application of agency is authoritarian, and conveniently coupled to maintenance of financiers past investments.
Fascism was alive and well in Yerp before WW2 started in the form of old aristocrats who lorded over the soon to be new aristocrats, who had yet to claim total control of public institutions. So with that in mind the “solution” is public control of life preserving logistics networks, and tribal, de-centralized DIY social media for fluffing our imaginations. Ogling punsters, memes is hardly a universal preference.
Decentralized filter bubbles are getting easier and easier to host; Docker and k8s via private Wireguard networks anyone?
There’s a lot of chatter about new protocols needed for decentralizing. Other than email, I have been self hosting a long list of personal services via Docker for years. I am shocked other hacker types are bought into all the service subscriptions. New protocols will be taken over by old social forces.
Tech workers have been told to dog food products as if they’re pets. As a society we once made shopping at the company store illegal. Monopoly busting is about avoiding a minority guiding species agency at scale.
You really expect the government to pass laws that force companies to allow porn?
Did you miss this part?
> There are lots of new rules around verifying consent and age in adult content. The rise of smartphones also means that everyone has a camera that can capture pictures and video at any time. Non-consensual sharing has grown exponentially and has been a huge problem on dedicated porn sites like Pornhub – and governments have rightly been expanding laws and regulations to make sure everyone being shown in online adult content is of legal age and has consented to the material being shared. Tumblr has no way to go back and identify the featured persons or the legality of every piece of adult content that was shared on the platform and taken down in 2018, nor does it have the resources or expertise to do that for new uploads.
I've got a teenage cousin with a dark sense of humour.
The shock stuff, edgy humour and 4chan-line shenanigans are still out there, even on mainstream social media like TikTok. It's just that most of 30 year-olds don't know about it any more because we're out of the loop. We're square.
I don't see that. They dont seem to abide by a different set of principles, they are just not targetted enough and thus dont need to act. The other actors in the list are shielding them. There doesn't seem to be a competition among any of them. The goalposts are generally moved around to whatever is convenient but the principles remain the same.
It's not just prudish, it's down to legality as well. Age verification is a big thing there. It's trivial for a minor to post their junk online (please don't ask me how I know) outside of parental oversight; everything has a camera and is internet connected these days. Who dares take responsibility?
Since Pornhub could not guarantee they had 0 underage content, the credit card companies decided to withdraw.
Because if the law finds out the credit card companies dealt with Pornhub, and Pornhub was hosting underage people's explicit content, then the credit card company would end up in real trouble. Human trafficking and child pornography laws are no joke.
I'm confident Reddit and Twitter will be targeted and announce a crackdown on adult content soon enough.
At least in the UK there seems to be some push back. PayPal recently cancelled (but re-instated after pressure) [1] the Free Speech Union [2]. This seems to have got the attention of quite a few MPs who are looking to pass laws banning politically-motivated cancellations.
First off, you kinda have wrong notion of "utilities or publishers", there is no such distinction, at least, not in a sense that would put finance companies into "impartial utilities" category. KYC is why somebody is allowed to be a finance company, they are required to be partial.
Second, I don't find it worthy of contemplation if such laws would help, because if they would — they just wouldn't be passed, simple as that. The same way as there's no real point to invent a perfect cryptocurrency, because if it would actually enable things that crypto is supposed to enable — it would be basically shut down, like Monero.
For the most part (leaving aside harassment, actual crimes) there's nothing stopping you from setting up a personal website to post photos of your nuts on the internet.
But all of these platforms are about making money selling ads, so they are going to make policies that are advertiser friendly.
If you want the internet of 1996, you can still have that, but you're going to have to run your own server. Most of the "hackers" on this site are not prepared to do what the old-school web required.
> I'm curious if this could be addressed with laws
In some cases the laws are front-running the tech companies, and in other cases it's the reverse. The problem (hand-waving warning) is the vocal minority of the easily-offended enforcing their sterile worldview on a political class too scared of being seen to be permissive of anything less than that which would paint them as puritanical.
Despite the realities these laws and policies are incompatible with.
Having said all that, yes, it _should_ be laws that address these things.
>"If you're a publisher, you take liability for your content and can edit it at will. If you're a utility, you do not take liability for your services, but you cannot pick and choose which customers you service so long as it's legal."
Would absolutely vote for this assuming it starts when the company reaches some size.
It's pretty obvious that the individual posting illegal content is the person responsible for it and not the platform it's posted to, unless the platform is soliciting or refusing to remove said content.
Websites with content moderation should be allowed to exist.
You can still buy a domain and happily host it in thousands of places that will allow you to put up anything you want, including your own home. However you have a point about utilities/publishers.
I would argue it's laws that make them behave this way. Of course profit-seeking companies would like to profit off everything. But they also don't want to risk be sued or investigated.
A lot of these laws are being pushed by religious-affiliated anti-porn groups that rebranded as anti-sex trafficking because it's more effective for them to make that argument.
It's always people who produce zero meaningful creative content who complain most vociferously about Internet censorship.
It would be better for the average content creator if porn were blocked. I also think things like virtual slot machines should be banned from the App Store. I think conspiracy theorists should be banned.
Why do we tolerate ads? A branded video game doesn't have to make money, so it can focus on being fun. There are fun branded games. The budgets are bigger. You don't give a fuck that it's a fucking cereal or cookie or whatever, it doesn't really matter. Chex Quest was a branded video game. And nobody is forcing a creative person to make games sort-of promoting junk food. Like everything it has tradeoffs.
But seriously, it's the same people who say "sanitizing the Internet" as the ones who pay for literally nothing new. They are the mouth agape neckbeard guys clutching a fistfull of dollars for a 30 year old gigantism IP, only paying for Star Wars and Game of Thrones, and if it was something that Hollywood hasn't yet said is good, they just do not care. They don't pay for porn. They complain about it being not in the App Store and then they don't pay for it. They are the worst audiences!
All this crummy stuff drains audiences away from more substantive cultural endeavors. I understand it is stuff people want, and is high engagement, but honestly, who the fuck cares? So what. What comes next? Engagement is not meaning. But audiences have a finite amount of time. You will reduce meaning if people spend all their time on meaningless things. That's just common sense.
And if you actually knew a single talented creative person in your life, you'd learn that they yuck people's yums all the fucking time. It's an essential reason they are successful - they have opinions about good and bad.
A certain Twitteratti demand Apple show the nipples and Netflix, in the opposite direction, ban the saucy comedians. In service of what? For really dead end, lame, seriously unfunny and uninteresting teenage-depth narratives about sex. Seriously, again, who the fuck cares.
And these companies you mention are getting wrongfully blamed.
It’s must simpler, it’s just the digital equivalent of a brick & mortar business saying “no shirt, no shoes, no service”.
Additionally, there’s regulatory requirements for some of these companies to not do business in certain circumstances. You can’t fault them for refusing service in order to comply with laws.
The whole point of the internet was for distant parties to be able to communicate. That's it. Parts of it were implemented in a decentralized fashion because neither the nodes, nor the links between nodes were considered reliable.
You can still do all that communication in a decentralized fashion, you're just unhappy that all the value-add services built on top of that substrate don't share the initial design constraints of the network.
The whole point was to be decentralized, and now we have Visa, Mastercard, Apple, Google, Amazon and Cloudflare deciding what we are and are not allowed to see, read and buy. And virtually in lockstep, they are becoming increasingly prudish.
I'm curious if this could be addressed with laws that force companies to either be utilities or publishers. If you're a publisher, you take liability for your content and can edit it at will. If you're a utility, you do not take liability for your services, but you cannot pick and choose which customers you service so long as it's legal.