https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
The original JSON license is even deemed not free because it limits the ability to use it for Evil.
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#JSON
There is a reason for this decision and it applies to speech as much as it does to software.
This also includes booting someone off your platform.
You seem to misunderstand that reason. It is because qualifying the evil is best done out of the license, and not because qualifying the evil is universally bad.
It should be noted that the Debian Free Software Guidelines words that decision as "no discrimination" and this choice is not light---it is there to prevent prejudicial behaviors by licenses. And that doesn't mean that the society should not judge them either (otherwise it won't function at all). The DFSG doesn't prevent you from doing evil with a free software and face the postjudicial consequence at all.
> [...] it applies to speech as much as it does to software.
And that's where your comparison is wrong. Not because the freedom of speech is not absolute (this is a tough topic by itself) but because 8chan was blamed because it didn't even acknowledge the post-judgement.
The example in case does not qualify what counts as evil, only that it bans evil. It thus leaves it to others, outside of the license, to qualify evil when they determine how the license applies. Thus the license the FSF rejects does what you claim should be done.
>The DFSG doesn't prevent you from doing evil with a free software and face the postjudicial consequence at all.
It does suggest not using licenses that would increase the legal consequences of doing such evil.
>because 8chan was blamed because it didn't even acknowledge the post-judgement.
Does encryption acknowledge the post-judgment of all the evil it enables?
Should Cloudflare be forced to host 8chan?
Even more than YouTube/Twitter, this seems like a clear case of business owners deciding that 8chan is too much of a liability to do business with.
I find it ironic to see cheering of these actions by The Verge, who is in the tank for "net neutrality". I don't like what site in question was hosting, but there're other ways of dealing with them.
"Property rights for me but not for you"
And to be clear: I do think that companies have capacity to terminate contracts, however, there either should be clear violation of ToS, or court's decision behind that. Neither seem to have had happened in this case.
I'm not aware of any consumer-accessible supplier who provides ToS that require abuse. In particular, CS doesn't:
"we may at our sole discretion terminate your user account or suspend or terminate your access to the Service at any time, with or without notice for any reason or no reason at all. We also reserve the right to modify or discontinue the Service at any time (including, without limitation, by limiting or discontinuing certain features of the Service) without notice to you. We will have no liability whatsoever on account of any change to the Service or any suspension or termination of your access to or use of the Service. You may terminate your account at any time through the Service’s account dashboard."
And there was certainly meeting of the minds on this term. CF has booted sites in the past due to political backlash. Those boots were high-profile and well-covered in the news. And even without those high-profile boots, any reasonable person will expect someone using CF and running a site like 8chan to know what CF's terms say about terms for continuing service with any/no reason.
If you want your site to stay up even in the event of one of your customers committing a mass murder while your other customers cheer him on, then don't use CF.
It's true that finding another provider might be hard unless you have $$$ because the market for that product is really small -- not even 8chan's original founder is in that target market.
Oh well. I want $0.001 diapers for my kid and a lower grocery bill. The market doesn't provide those either. But if universal access to cheap diapers and high-quality food aren't fundamental human rights, I don't see why cheap anything-goes top-of-the-line DDoS protection services should be.
If they have a monopoly on a necessary infrastructure, yes.
Alternatively, should the local power company be forced to provide electricity service to a resident in their area they do not like?
Are you suggesting this is somehow equivalent? Should we regulate the internet and hosts that serve?
You can not support Net Neutrality and support this action by CF without being a hypocrite
Youtube has as a policy that they will demonetize/ban you if you bring in bad PR (which has been abused by media company).
Read Hayek BTW.
But the size of the platform is commensurate with the tolerability of the speech, right? No one is preventing you from standing in a public place making whatever objectionable claims you want. But reddit/facebook/cloudflare/whoever don't have an obligation to let you use their platform to publish it if they don't like it.
This is certainly not a meaningless distinction.
In the age of print media, some random guy's fringe opinions were not "required to be published" -- you couldn't even buy a classified ad espousing objectionable content in large publications. No "ban" required.
> We now live in a society where it is acceptable for private companies to essentially completely ban individuals from exercising their free speech
We have always lived in such a society. And it's not "private companies" it's people. Some person makes this decision.
Social media is now the equivalent of standing in a public place. Times have changed. The town crier that used to tell people that latest headline? That's now the Facebook news feed. Public library/coffee shop where people can go discuss whatever new subversive political idea they've had? That's now online chat rooms.
Sticking our heads in the sand and thinking that the Internet is anything other than the new public square is disingenuous. People need to wake up and realise that at present, the "public space" once protected by our rights has become almost entirely controlled by private monopolies.
Just as the Wall Street Journal is in no way obligated to publish your letter to the editor, Twitter is allowed to broadcast what they wish.
Nothing at all is stopping 8chan from hosting their content on their own infrastructure.
Due to the monopoly of control on social media right now, companies like Facebook, Twitter, et. al. are the new public spaces. Due to their unique position as monopolies over the popular communication mediums of the day, they are able to make decisions about what very large segments of the population have access to. Google even moreso.
If the WSJ was one of 2 or 3 news publications in the entire world that people got their information from, them choosing to not a run a story or firing a particular journalist would be a big deal.
Just because you want them to be considered "public spaces" doesn't make them so. These are private companies using private funding, nothing public about them. Go to the countless other forums to post your opinions. Make your own Twitter alternative. Nothing is stopping you.
The ideas being promoted on 8chan and the like have lost in the "marketplace of ideas". The only free speech issue here is that you seem to want government intervention to promote hugely unpopular ideas, and force private companies to use their resources to broadcast content against their wishes, clearly violating the first amendment.
> If the WSJ was one of 2 or 3 news publications in the entire world that people got their information from, them choosing to not a run a story or firing a particular journalist would be a big deal.
How many major publications do you see running white supremacist content? How many major publications do you see running anti-vax conspiracy theories? What you describe has been happening for the entirety of media's existence. Ideas largely fall out of favor and people no longer wish to pay the cost of broadcasting them.
This is not a definitively answered question, and is something that the courts are indeed struggling with. It is actually not as simple as having a ToS which says “we can deny service to anyone for any reason”.
Twitter, for example, advertised itself as a neutral platform. Therefore it would be an unfair and deceptive business practice (per the FTC) for it to institute politically motivated account terminations.
Similarly, Google certainly has the capability to influence both election turnout and perhaps even voting itself through the type of content it surfaces, and Congress has held many hearings and even heard testimony from Pichai on this exact topic.
cloudfront is not really a platform. It's more like a CDN, or WAF. I think your point is worth discussing, just seems to link less to the context of 8chan.
> We need to allow people on the edges of the spectrum to say what they want even if it is without merit. Extreme speech is what prevents normal speech from being censored.
I wonder if the anonymous portion of these boards is what makes them so toxic?
Plenty of fringe forums for example have account names. Frequent posters are known and have reputations, if a known person says something controversial, they can be challenged by others, known or not. I think it really just allows for discussions to happen in good faith. Half the time I think some of the most toxic discussions are not even between any two people but are actually between tens of different unique trolls who may not even be following the thread at all. Maybe bots, who knows.
Of course people look for something to blame, and there’s nothing quite a satisfying as shooting the messenger.
It’s also convenient when a site is small enough, there’s not quite such a backlash when companies fall into PR ass-covering mode and terminate their service.
Now, there’s no forcing CloudFlare to keep hosting any particular site, and there’s no convincing the mob that bowing to their demands is a really piss poor long term strategy for everyone involved.
It takes very strong leadership to stand up against the mob and say “that’s no how we do things” and these days most people would rather just pile on, than risk the guilt by association.
It’s reasonable to cut support to players that relentlessly fail to comply with the rules.
The platforms are not turning against them, they are constantly abusing the ToS of these platforms .
Now some people disagree with the ToS in the first place, but it’s another discussion to be done at another plane. There has always been a filtering of what goes to a super wide audience, movies airing on public broadcast have always been filtered, the same logic applies to platforms as wide as reddit.
For instance if you were harrassed on twitter, twitter being blazingly fast at taking down tweets you report wouldn’t help you much, you’d still have to report every single tweet of users harrassing you.
Even if 8chan takes down every violence threat, if it still propagated enough to be worth it for the poster, 8chan’s modus operandi has very little impact on the situation.
I am not saying it’s easy, just that they clearly haven’t found a good solution.
Cloudflare just decided to drop 8chan as a client. That's it. That's all that happened. 8chan can sue in civil court if they feel a contract was breached or they suffered damages. No one did anything illegal. No claim that anything illegal was done need be made. That's not how this works. That's not how any of this works.
I'd rephrase the first: "it's okay for 8chan to be kicked off the internet, if there is no one who is willing to host it".
> It's like saying "you can say anything you want, but we won't let you use the atmosphere to propagate the sound waves".
And what you are saying is more like "I have the right to say anything I want but I'm too lazy to move the muscles of my face, so everyone (those who I point at, actually, by calling them EVIL MONOPOLIES) MUST help me in this noble mission of spreading the truth".
"Free speech on the internet" is not something found in law.
> The canary in the coalmine was The Daily Stormer
Because The Daily Stormer was just a site to share ideas, right?
> The Daily Stormer, which has established 31 physical chapters in the United States and more in Canada
> Some of its readers do more than issue threats. Dylann Roof, who massacred nine African Americans in Charleston in 2015, posted on the site. Thomas Mair, the neo-Nazi assassin who last year killed Jo Cox, a British member of Parliament, was a regular reader. And just last month, another Daily Stormer reader, James Jackson, was charged with murder and terrorism after carrying out a plan to go to New York City to kill a black man at random.
How ever will the Nazis share their hateful and violent ideas without the private internet companies? Oh no, the poor racists!
> One message included an image of Gersh being sprayed with a green gas, along with the words: Hickory dickory dock, the kike ran up the clock. The clock struck three and the Internet Nazis trolls gassed the rest of them.
https://www.splcenter.org/news/2017/04/18/splc-sues-neo-nazi...
How so? They're welcome to come here anytime.
It's toxic and intolerable.
That happened because they repeatedly violated rules on Reddit, not because of their extremist views. Reddit was lenient with them for a looong time.
> We need to allow people on the edges of the spectrum to say what they want even if it is without merit
/r/jailbait was banned, but it was technically "free speech" and technically legal, so according to your standards Reddit should have allowed the community to continue to exist, right? (Even though it existing probably led to some deviant / reprehensible / illegal behavior)
But to me, it's obvious that that doesn't need to be allowed to exist on the platform. So to me, that means there is some line that we as a society draw between allowed speech and not. It's not codified in law, but it does exist. That line can move based on the whims of society.
Right now, at least in the tech world, that line seems to be moving in such a way so as to not allow right-wing extremist speech. And that's totally fine in my book - in the same way that /r/jailbait is rightfully considered unacceptable "free speech" now, so is right-wing extremist "free speech".
There are still places to congregate online for that sort of speech if you want. Or you could spin up your own server. It's not disallowed by law. But it's just not as accessible as it was before.
Those people can say whatever they want, but no other individual or company needs to allow them the soapbox to do it.
This is phrased as something to be fearful of here, but I think I'm actually fine with this precedent.
There's nothing to stop people with extreme right-wing ideologies from marshaling the resources required to stand up all the pieces of web infrastructure they find themselves blocked from. If they can't amass those resources, that's ultimately a market decision, no?
And if they were able to stand up that infrastructure, it would indicate a high level of financial support for their agenda, which would be the real thing to be afraid of, in my own opinion.
The purpose of the canary in the coal mine is not to protect the canary. It is to protect the miner from the encroaching danger.
The slopes are not that slippery. Germany isn't a dystopian hell-hole because they banned Nazism.
Leaving all that aside, even if you think all bad things should be banned, I do not think that Cloudflare of all things should be the arbiter of right and wrong.
Despite several recent high-profile banning attempts, Germany still has a nazi party, established in 1964. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Democratic_Party_of_G...
People are doing the "yada yada not entitled to a platform" thing, but the distinction between free speech and having a platform is meaningless in reality. It's like saying "you can say anything you want, but we won't let you use the atmosphere to propagate the sound waves".
We now live in a society where it is acceptable for private companies to essentially completely ban individuals from exercising their free speech on the internet. The canary in the coalmine was The Daily Stormer; all the content there would be considered very objectionable and completely without merit by any remotely sensible person, so few people complained about it being shut down. Then came Gab and such. Now it's 8chan, which last time I checked still had more posts about video games and anime than about politics.
Make no mistake, sites you use will be next. /r/the_donald is already quarantined. Youtube and Twitter have gotten much more aggressive with their moderation too.
We need to allow people on the edges of the spectrum to say what they want even if it is without merit. Extreme speech is what prevents normal speech from being censored.
More than anything we can not allow random internet companies to be de-facto lawmakers and speech police by controlling who is allowed to say things on the internet.