Cloudflare terminate 8Chan

[mr moose]

1 hour ago, RejZoR said:

Those people aren't dumb motherfuckers who jump on moral bullshit like normies do and start whining on twitter about it. There was something else going on behind the scenes.

Of course they are not dumb mother fuckers,  I don't know what you think is happening here but it really isn't that complicated,  business number 1 is looking after itself because business number 2 is a liability.   And before you go redefining what a liability is, it can be anything that causes a financial loss. 

 

 

 

 

[PCGuy_5960]

14 minutes ago, dalekphalm said:

The problem is that this is already happening. It happens here on LTT, for example. In this case, it's ultimately Linus that decides, though I'm sure that he largely delegates that to the Admin team, etc.

I mean a tech forum isn't exactly the same as a platform that's used by like half the world's population every day.

16 minutes ago, dalekphalm said:

government regulation to force Facebook to undertake certain actions, such as forcing them to allow free speech despite the fact that law (nor the constitution) does not guarantee that.

Honestly, why not? Platforms like Facebook/YouTube, have a huge influence on society/public opinion, so I believe that free speech should be protected.

16 minutes ago, Commodus said:

I'm sorry, but it's pretty easy to establish a baseline for what constitutes hate and misinformation on a privately owned site.

Is is though? Let's take the Steven Crowder/YouTube example. YouTube at first said that according to their guidelines, Crowder didn't do anything wrong. One day later they decided that Crowder did break their guidelines and demonetized his videos. Not even the website's own guidelines are a good enough baseline for what is acceptable and what is not.

20 minutes ago, Commodus said:

For example, flat-Earthers and anti-vaxxers are demonstrably wrong. That's not the site determining what's false; that's objective reality.  If there's a well-established consensus based on evidence, a private site shouldn't have to entertain someone trying to spread false claims, especially since it can produce real damage.  Look at anti-vaxxers, for instance -- arguably the rise of infections was spurred on by ignorant parents trusting in false claims on Facebook.

Sure, but what about "fake news"? That is misinformation and a lot of news outlets often promote such news. Should these news outlets be banned too?

23 minutes ago, Commodus said:

As much concern as there is that private companies might have too much sway over what's allowed, I'd rather them do something than let hate purveyors make life miserable for everyone else.

I disagree, I don't think that letting big corporations control what opinions users can and cannot have is a good thing because some opinions can make someone's life "miserable". (Especially when there's a block user feature available)

[RejZoR]

Lets just shut down ALL DNS servers because they are all linking to some fucked up manifesto somewhere...

[Majinhoju]

Regardless of popularity or influence from sites such as Facebook or Twitter, they are privately owned and they own the server space that you're putting your speech on.  It's not a public forum. You have to sign up and abide by their terms of service and those terms of service can change over time.  If you let the government decide what they can or cannot censor you are opening a whole can of worms of what the government can control over private platforms. It could start at Facebook and trickle down to a site like this one.  Also if you support a small government free market style system of business then you should highly against giving that sort of control over the government.

[Drak3]

41 minutes ago, PCGuy_5960 said:

Sure, but what about "fake news"? That is misinformation and a lot of news outlets often promote such news. Should these news outlets be banned too?

Going by the logic put forth, yes.

 

But let's be honest here, those arguing for banning wha they claim is misinformation are highly disingenuous. They don't really want to stop misinformation, they want to stop opposing viewpoints.

[Spotty]

- Thread cleaned - 

This is not the place to be debating gun control. Please stay on topic which is discussing CloudFlare terminating the services it provided to 8chan.

[leadeater]

1 hour ago, comander said:

Who defines hate?

What if everyone with left leaning views was determined to be an agent of evil, and then rounded up and systematically excluded from society? You could easily argue that authoritarian left-wing groups committed the world's worst atrocities (something like 100M people killed between Stalin and Mao in the name of "equality" - basically Hitler times 4x). Should "supporters of genocidal maniacs 4 times worse than Hitler" be allowed in society? 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarthyism

------

I say this as I know you have a certain slant. I don't think you're evil and I do think you are entitled to your opinions. There should be protections explicitly built into society to ensure that this continues, even if "this makes me feel icky" is a side effect at times. 

Well the first question you should ask is how did it get to that point, because the counter argument to this is because you allowed unchallenged hate speakers to degrade society to the point that this could happen. It is a nuanced and difficult situation but the inaction, doing nothing, is actually how that happens, it isn't a left or right problem and dictatorships under which events like those happen violates core principles of the classically defined left and right.

 

It's also a mistake to try and define actions or issues as left or right, boxing things up and labeling them somehow has become a preferred tool, because different political groups and different social and regional groups identify the same thing as either left or right and on different issues they can follow or oppose each other.

 

Edit:

Cloudflare kicking 8chan off their service isn't a political move, or really have any political motivation behind it. Protecting a company image doesn't have to be politically motivated, because what they fear and the reasoning behind it can equally come from either side of the political spectrum. Cloudflare provides a technical service to it's customers and try to do no more than that, stepping in a removing a customer is very uncommon and they reasoned why. It's not a simple matter of that customer breaking laws or the site being used to break laws because Cloudflare operates globally, they can't just not provide service on those grounds alone because laws are not common across all their customers and regions they service. There isn't much point me rehashing what Cloudflare said because you can actually go read their statement.

[leadeater]

12 minutes ago, comander said:

Who has the institutional power to define what constitutes hate speech? Are they democratically elected? Are there checks and balances to prevent abuse?

The power is the private company who can decide who they will and will not do business with. If a business doesn't want to work with you that's not an abuse of power, that is their decision to not work with you. Unless they are violating a law by refusing that business your money alone doesn't require they work with you. These are the laws of business that they operate under and came to be by democratic processes, at least in the  'western countries' or rather the democratic ones which isn't a small list.

 

If every business that provides the service that you want or need all refuse to work with you then it's likely you are the problem and not them. If that is not the case then you can go a legal route to resolve the issue, your checks and balances.

 

What you point to is covered already, it might be 2 to 10 steps removed but it's there already. Unless you actually want government regulation of speech but I doubt you actually want that, "In the name of speech protection I mandate you allow [insert here]". All you'd be doing there is scoring an own goal.

[CarlBar]

4 hours ago, Majinhoju said:

Regardless of popularity or influence from sites such as Facebook or Twitter, they are privately owned and they own the server space that you're putting your speech on.  It's not a public forum. You have to sign up and abide by their terms of service and those terms of service can change over time.  If you let the government decide what they can or cannot censor you are opening a whole can of worms of what the government can control over private platforms. It could start at Facebook and trickle down to a site like this one.  Also if you support a small government free market style system of business then you should highly against giving that sort of control over the government.

 

Random point before i go off on another tangent. I'm guessing like a lot of people your from the US. What you call small government free market style systems and what other parts of the world call that are not the same. You'd probably call the european versions oppressively heavy handed government overreach.

 

In fact it's probably worth stating that if you put it up before most europeans a lot of the discussions that happen in US politics would get put on the banned list. So many of them for us are such nonsensical things, (along the lines of why haven't you implemented a stronger version of the measure under consideration decades ago, who would be so stupid). Which firmly demonstrates the difference between various different viewpoints and parts of the world. The whole Obamacare fight is a perfect example really.

 

 

A few other things now.

 

First don't fool yourself into thinking that the internet magically encourages things like mass killings and child abuse. They've been going on since before we discovered dirt, all it's done is make people who are inclined that way more visible. Just as it's made all the rother viewpoints of all stripes and colours more visible.

 

Likewise, please don't blame facebook and twitter for the anti-vaxxer thing. It blew up big long before the internet became a major communication means. Arguably the real culprit was a UKI weekday morning TV talk show. But to be fair to them the research they did the piece on had been thourghly faked and it was a while before anyone caught on. But that publicity resulted in a ton of people, some of them highly visible celebrities to latch onto the thing before that happened. Facebook and Twitter may play a significant role in spreading the message now, but things had allready blown up big before that, and they also help  spread the opposing opinions. People of a certain disposition will allways create echo chambers for themselves, it's human nature, but hiding those echo chambers never helps. Not least because when you censor somthing a certain subset of people will allways assume it's because your trying to silence the truth.

[Majinhoju]

19 minutes ago, CarlBar said:

 

Random point before i go off on another tangent. I'm guessing like a lot of people your from the US. What you call small government free market style systems and what other parts of the world call that are not the same. You'd probably call the european versions oppressively heavy handed government overreach.

 

I mostly brought up the free market idea because I've noticed that most of the opposition towards all this supposed internet censorship is coming from people who would typically believe in a capitalist free market system with minimal government intervention.  

 

I debated a similar topic regarding Florida lawmakers trying to pass a bill to block Facebook's removal of hate speech.  Plenty of right wingers in this discussion were fully onboard with government getting involved to prevent Facebook from removing any such content.  Yet in other discussions the same people wanted the government to stay out their business on other matters.  They felt that posting on Facebook was like a public gathering, yet kind of forgetting that everything they post on Facebook resides on Facebook's paid server space.

[mr moose]

1 hour ago, CircleTech said:

“When you tear out a man's tongue, you are not proving him a liar, you're only telling the world that you fear what he might say.”

― George R.R. Martin

 

Maybe they are just punishing him from being a dumb shit and don't want him spreading any more lies misinforming the masses.

 

The world doesn't fit into neat little boxes, not every silenced critic is a martyr to free speech, some are actual criminals who only cause harm.

 

[matrix07012]

So Jim Watkins was summoned to appear in front of congress. 

This is going to be fun. Just like when 4chan's owner was summoned. 

[PCGuy_5960]

8 hours ago, leadeater said:

Well the first question you should ask is how did it get to that point, because the counter argument to this is because you allowed unchallenged hate speakers to degrade society to the point that this could happen.

Is that really true though? I mean think about it, what is the first thing that Hitler or any fascist government did when they got power? They got rid of freedom of speech and press and started spreading lies and propaganda. Freedom of speech doesn't help hateful ideologies.

5 hours ago, leadeater said:

The power is the private company who can decide who they will and will not do business with. 

This makes sense for smaller businesses, but should this really be the case for big corporations like Facebook, YouTube or even cloudflare? Especially when they claim to be platforms and not publishers. 

4 hours ago, mr moose said:

Maybe they are just punishing him from being a dumb shit and don't want him spreading any more lies misinforming the masses.

Define "dumb shit" and "misinformation". I bet that your definition is completely different from mine or anyone else's for that matter. Why should that dumb shit be punished, instead of being debunked through free speech? If an idea is actually dumb and misinformation, proving it wrong shouldn't be that hard. (for example, anti vax)

[Drak3]

13 minutes ago, PCGuy_5960 said:

I mean think about it, what is the first thing that Hitler or any fascist government did when they got power? They got rid of freedom of speech and press and started spreading lies and propaganda. Freedom of speech doesn't help hateful ideologies.

Don't forget that they implemented gun control, before they turned their rifles against citizens.

[msknight]

This appears to be getting deeper... https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-49249574

 

Quote

In response, 8chan switched to BitMitigate, a cyber-protection service owned by a web hosting company called Epik.
BitMitigate also provided protection to the neo-Nazi site the Daily Stormer.
But then BitMitigate itself was driven offline.
Both Epik and BitMitigate relied on infrastructure provided by another company, Voxility.
And Voxility decided to remove Epik and BitMitigate from its network.

 

[leadeater]

35 minutes ago, PCGuy_5960 said:

Is that really true though? I mean think about it, what is the first thing that Hitler or any fascist government did when they got power? They got rid of freedom of speech and press and started spreading lies and propaganda. Freedom of speech doesn't help hateful ideologies.

Those people don't just get in to power and those acts start before then, which is partly how they get in to power. Hilter's rise to power is well documented, other dictators follow similar patterns. No country just goes from a democratic government to an ultra nationalist dictatorship one because a new leader or party is voted in, something has to allow that to happen.

 

With the benefit of being able to talk in hindsight more would have been done to counter those sentiments, but at the time who could know and there were genuine grievances the citizens of Germany had with other nations, these were used as a tool for the rise to power.

 

Hilter is one example of doing nothing about hate speech and what can happen, he was one of the most talented and effective users of speech and people listened.

 

35 minutes ago, PCGuy_5960 said:

This makes sense for smaller businesses, but should this really be the case for big corporations like Facebook, YouTube or even cloudflare? Especially when they claim to be platforms and not publishers. 

It makes sense for all businesses, success should not be measure for the reduction or removal of rights or ownership. As it stands also you can get by without Facebook, I do every day. Practically speaking I can get by just fine without Youtube as well. So if either of these want to enact policies that push people away that is their choice, be that viewers, creators or advertisers.

 

As big as they may seem they can be replaced, people will support another platform like Youtube and Facebook if they see reason to.

 

Cloudflare isn't actually that large either and aren't the only competing service provider. Companies like Cloudflare are only security guards, their job is to protect the venue (the website/backend service) and the attendees while also ensure that their own security guards are safe. If said security company deems the situation too unsafe, say too many attendees getting stopped and found with weapons they can advise to shut down the event, or if necessary cancel the security contract because it's too unsafe to protect.

 

Publisher vs platform really has nothing to do with anything other than copyright issues, that's why they try and maintain that image of offered service. Platforms still have the right to decide how they run their platform in the same way a publisher has the right to decide not to publish someone's work. A religious publisher won't publish anti religious material for example and there is no amount of "but they are a large company" that should require them to do so.

[PCGuy_5960]

16 minutes ago, Drak3 said:

Don't forget that they implemented gun control, before they turned their rifles against citizens.

That too, but let's not start this debate againpls.

5 minutes ago, msknight said:

-snip-

So basically what is going to end up happening is that 8chan will just go to the deep web or something to become an even more violent echo chamber. 

 

This is absurd. From what I can tell, voxility was barely associated with bitmitigate, let alone 8chan.

[PCGuy_5960]

16 minutes ago, leadeater said:

Hilter is one example of doing nothing about hate speech and what can happen, he was one of the most talented and effective users of speech and people listened.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but the way Hitler got power was by promising people what they wanted. It was after he got to power and started shutting up his opposition that he started supporting the gassing of Jews and the other horrible things he did. 

16 minutes ago, leadeater said:

It makes sense for all businesses, success should not be measure for the reduction or removal of rights or ownership.

It's not a matter of success, it's a matter of influence though. Facebook, whether we like it or not has a lot of influence on public opinion. Do I use Facebook? No, but a lot of people do, so letting Facebook decide what is acceptable and what is not is a horrible idea. 

16 minutes ago, leadeater said:

As big as they may seem they can be replaced, people will support another platform like Youtube and Facebook if they see reason to.

Let's be realistic, no platform is going to replace YouTube or Facebook any time soon. They are way too big and have so much money that even if a viable competitor appears, they can just buy them.

18 minutes ago, leadeater said:

Publisher vs platform really has nothing to do with anything other than copyright issues, that's why they try and maintain that image of offered service. Platforms still have the right to decide how they run their platform in the same way a publisher has the right to decide not to publish someone's work. A religious publisher won't publish anti religious for example and there is no amount of "but they are a large company" that should require them to do so.

A publisher is responsible for the content they publish. A platform is not. If a platform decides what content is acceptable, doesn't that make them responsible for the content that is on their platform and therefore a publisher? 

[miagisan]

11 minutes ago, PCGuy_5960 said:

Correct me if I'm wrong, but the way Hitler got power was by promising people what they wanted. It was after he got to power and started shutting up his opposition that he started supporting the gassing of Jews and the other horrible things he did. 

It's not a matter of success, it's a matter of influence though. Facebook, whether we like it or not has a lot of influence on public opinion. Do I use Facebook? No, but a lot of people do, so letting Facebook decide what is acceptable and what is not is a horrible idea. 

Let's be realistic, no platform is going to replace YouTube or Facebook any time soon. They are way too big and have so much money that even if a viable competitor appears, they can just buy them.

A publisher is responsible for the content they publish. A platform is not. If a platform decides what content is acceptable, doesn't that make them responsible for the content that is on their platform and therefore a publisher? 

So why have a TOS on this site which you moderate? By having a TOS and limiting talk, locking posts, and banning users, aren't you doing exactly what you are railing against in the above comment? 

 

Businesses have every right to limit and manage their product as they see fit. 

[PCGuy_5960]

4 minutes ago, miagisan said:

So why have a TOS on this site which you moderate? By having a TOS and limiting talk, locking posts, and banning users, aren't you doing exactly what you are railing against in the above comment? 

There is one big difference between Facebook and LTT. LTT is a tech forum that has less total users than Facebook has daily. And LTT isn't even close to a monopoly in tech forums, don't like it? There are plenty of viable alternatives. You can't say the same for YouTube or Facebook. In my post I was talking about huge platforms, like Facebook, YouTube, Reddit etc.

8 minutes ago, miagisan said:

Businesses have every right to limit and manage their product as they see fit. 

I agree, I just don't agree that a few big companies should be able to tell me what I can say and what I can't.

[leadeater]

37 minutes ago, PCGuy_5960 said:

Correct me if I'm wrong, but the way Hitler got power was by promising people what they wanted. It was after he got to power and started shutting up his opposition that he started supporting the gassing of Jews and the other horrible things he did. 

He did that along with other actions like destabilizing the government and making them unable to govern forcing them to use executive powers, which that was then used as fuel to denounce the democratic majority party. It is odd saying the democratic majority party when they were also democratically elected but they were firmly anti democracy and publicly so. Further to that supporters of the party orginised parades and beatings of the opposition supporters and broke up their meetings.

 

The extremely condensed above all happened before attaining majority power and rule and before the Enabling Act of 1933 instating Hilter as the leader aka dictator. Before 1932 NSDAP were not the majority party in government but had a lot of power and control due to their violent actions and rhetoric. Suppression of speech and journalism was very much in place and happening before 1933 by NSDAP and it's supporters.

 

37 minutes ago, PCGuy_5960 said:

A publisher is responsible for the content they publish. A platform is not. If a platform decides what content is acceptable, doesn't that make them responsible for the content that is on their platform and therefore a publisher? 

A platform is responsible, just not when it comes to copyright. That's the only distinguishing difference between a 'platform' and a 'publisher', these two words in this context only having meaning in regards to copyright and the reason they having any meaning at all is because it's defined in copyright law. Outside of that it has no real meaning or exemption from responsibility, it's this that needs highlighting more because once people, politicians, law enforcement/regulators realize that the terms 'platform' and 'publisher' mean absolutely nothing outside the context of copyright then things might start to change. Pretty sure Youtube and Facebook don't want that to happen.

[PCGuy_5960]

18 minutes ago, leadeater said:

Suppression of speech and journalism was very much in place and happening before 1933 by NSDAP and it's supporters.

So basically there was no freedom of speech anyways, right?

18 minutes ago, leadeater said:

A platform is responsible, just not when it comes to copyright. That's the only distinguishing difference between a 'platform' and a 'publisher', these two words in this context only having meaning in regards to copyright and the reason they having any meaning at all is because it's defined in copyright law. Outside of that it has no real meaning or exemption from responsibility, it's this that needs highlighting more because once people, politicians, law enforcement/regulators realize that the terms 'platform' and 'publisher' mean absolutely nothing outside the context of copyright then things might start to change. Pretty sure Youtube and Facebook don't want that to happen.

Is that so? Because AFAIK it doesn't only apply to copyright. 

[leadeater]

14 minutes ago, PCGuy_5960 said:

Is that so? Because AFAIK it doesn't only apply to copyright. 

What legal difference is there outside of copyright?

 

14 minutes ago, PCGuy_5960 said:

So basically there was no freedom of speech anyways, right?

There was and it was that which was used to gain power and during that progression of increasing power speech started to get suppressed. The suppression was enacted by way of non legal means and not in accordance with the ruling government. So you have a political group leveraging their protected right to speech while also violently suppressing it, speech in opposition of theirs. Then when they gained actual leadership of the country officially removed it. But as to the section that really matters their speech was used to overthrow the ruling government, because that is where it started from. I mean you have to gain support before you can carry out any of the proceeding actions, there is a chain of events and you cannot get to the end without the start. I cannot jump from the ground to the top of a building but I can use the stairs to get to the roof, the question is should I be allowed on the roof?

 

That's a hard question when everyone should have the right to access the roof and you cannot know beforehand what they will do with access to the roof. How and why you climbed the stairs does matter though.

[PCGuy_5960]

44 minutes ago, leadeater said:

What legal difference is there outside of copyright?

Censorship? While platforms can decide what content they want on the platform (like for example, no pornographic content on YouTube) they can't censor specific viewpoints they don't like. (Doesn't mean that they have to promote them though)

47 minutes ago, leadeater said:

The suppression was enacted by way of non legal means and not in accordance with the ruling government.

Wouldn't you say that this is comparable to Facebook/YouTube being allowed to censor viewpoints they don't like? Basically if a big corporation decides to censor specific opinions to put a candidate they want in a position of power, couldn't they do that? 

50 minutes ago, leadeater said:

But as to the section that really matters their speech was used to overthrow the ruling government, because that is where it started from.

Sure, but the public was the one who put them in a position of power. Probably because they were dissatisfied with the government or because they were misinformed (possibly because the Nazis were supressing opposing viewpoints while promoting their hateful ideology)

54 minutes ago, leadeater said:

How and why you climbed the stairs does matter though.

If how doesn't matter then why are we even discussing this. I think it's safe to say that most countries that have freedom of speech aren't ruled by people with hateful ideas and hateful opinions are (usually) deeply unpopular and frowned upon. So no one has really even gotten to the roof.

[dalekphalm]

8 minutes ago, PCGuy_5960 said:

Censorship? While platforms can decide what content they want on the platform (like for example, no pornographic content on YouTube) they can't censor specific viewpoints they don't like. (Doesn't mean that they have to promote them though)

Can you point to a source that says YouTube can't censor people?

 

It might be a PR backlash if they do censor people, but as far as I'm aware, they have that right, so long as it doesn't break other laws in the process.

8 minutes ago, PCGuy_5960 said:

Wouldn't you say that this is comparable to Facebook/YouTube being allowed to censor viewpoints they don't like? Basically if a big corporation decides to censor specific opinions to put a candidate they want in a position of power, couldn't they do that? 

It's not like that, because what Facebook and YouTube are doing is legal. They can censor you, if they want. Because they are a private business. The same way I can tell you to shut up if you are spouting stuff I don't like in my own home.

8 minutes ago, PCGuy_5960 said:

Sure, but the public was the one who put them in a position of power. Probably because they were dissatisfied with the government or because they were misinformed (possibly because the Nazis were supressing opposing viewpoints while promoting their hateful ideology)

They were put into power because realistically there was no one there to oppose them. They literally beat up opponents, or threatened people's families if they voted for the opposition, or even made people disappear (meaning: murder). They frightened away most opposition and threatened anyone who would dare vote for what little opposition remained.