Re:Did the early internet activists blow it?
by anigbrowl on Sunday February 16, 2020 @03:52AM
(#22340622)
Let's take a concrete example: how about people swapping recipes for chemical weapons and discussing their efficient deployment against unknowing civilians? Or people discussing and developing (largely anonymously) the logistics of mass shootings, with a view to maximizing the body count?
Re:Did the early internet activists blow it?
by heartbeats on Sunday February 16, 2020 @09:15AM
(#22341625)
They're just having a chat. It's unethical to censor them. Perhaps they should be brought in on some other charges, but there's nothing illegal about talking. They're not threatening to kill anyone, are they?
In practice, you see this as well. There's a lot of people posting on the Internet about how they're going to do this and that, but in practice most of them are just blowing off steam.
I get why a site like Facebook which wants to have community standards would like to enforce it, but it should be up to the proprietor.
Re:Did the early internet activists blow it?
by anigbrowl on Sunday February 16, 2020 @03:54PM
(#22343691)
They're not threatening to kill anyone, are they?
Yes, that's kind of the point.
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Re:Did the early internet activists blow it?
by dang on Sunday February 16, 2020 @08:58PM
(#22344962)
Would you please stop? This combination of flamebait and pedantry is definitely not helping.
I haven't heard it used that way. Wikipedia, abbreviated:
> Radicalization is a process by which an individual comes to adopt increasingly radical political, social, or religious ideals and aspirations that reject or undermine the status quo or contemporary ideas and expressions of the nation.
As in, adopting extreme views. And that raises the question: if you have 100'000 people and tell them all to go read Mein Kampf, then some of them will undeniably go, "yeah that Hitler guy seems like a pretty smart fellow". What is the solution? It can't be to say that extremist speech should be banned. If so, we have to burn most of Western philosophy.
And it seems like "it is morally justifiable to use violence to achieve political means" is just another political belief, correlating strongly with the strength of your political views. So all you are saying is that some political views should be banned. I don't like this.
> And that the management is shockingly hands-off about letting them do it and have been for years now?
The management did nothing wrong. Each site has a different vibe. In the case of imageboards, it's usually 'anything which isn't explicitly prohibited by law'. It's worth noting that 4chan bans the behavior which you describe.
Even if they didn't, it raises an important question: where should the line be drawn?
It seems easy to think of 4chan or 8chan as a discrete entity, which should be shut down. But say that we had some physical entity, like a pub, which for some reason attracted an extremely racist clientele who liked to go have a few drinks and then beat up the immigrants.
Should the pub be held liable for this? What about serverless mailing lists, where I manually put everyone on the list in the "reply to" field, or Usenet? Should that be 'shut down' too?
The thing I don't like about this is that both counterparties are willing. If you're spamming someone, you have person A who sends to person B, but person B doesn't want to hear from person A.
With an imageboard, you have person A who sends to B, C, and D, but B, C, and D all want to hear from A. Should they be stopped in this endeavor?