Service-providers giving the boot to « problematic » users is as far as I know as old as the Internet.

You were always perfectly free to go find a new account elsewhere if anyone would have you. But there was always a point where if you passed far enough beyond socially acceptable behavior, your Internet provider might choose to stop doing business with you.

This was especially true in the case of harassment, attacks on network infrastructure, and criminal behavior.

Eventually they are going to find that there's a limit to how much violence you can incite before getting slapped down, legally or otherwise.

This doesn't mean 'planning a coup' is one of these contexts, but you are focusing on a very narrow example of the broad social system impact of anonymity in online communication.

Other than anonymity, talking to people who have no incentive to karma-farm is very refreshing.

In websites like Reddit/HackerNews, the karma system gamifies posting. You "lose" if you post any wrongthink, and you "win" when you reiterate whatever is socially acceptable.

This means there are consequences to posting. In *chan websites, there is no consequence to posting your thoughts (or just trolling, because that's fun sometimes).

If you go into a store or cafe and start shouting at the top of your lungs, the owner is free to refuse service, kick you out and/or even ban you from ever entering their store again.

What's the difference between that store owner and an ISP?

You're free to go to any other store that will have you, and is ok with your shouting. If it turns out there are no stores ok with it, whose problem is that? Should store owners be prohibited from refusing service to anyone, no matter what their behaviour?

You can start your own store, so long as you can pay rent, have suppliers that will sell you goods, etc - but again, no one is obligated to do any of that.

(I get there's protected classes that prevent discrimination based on things like age, gender, ethnicity, etc, but that's a separate issue, and tangential to their behaviour which is what we're discussing here.)

Damn near every channel on 2010 EFNet or DALNet would be deemed in violation of most of 2020's TOS. To say nothing of mid-90s EFNet. Whoo-boy, the eggdrop bots logging those channels could get probably a thousand well-known, well-respected developers and network engineers working at FAANGs today fired, if someone took the time.

Repeat customers that would get DDOS too many times (cybercafes would fall into that category often) would have to either pay more to cover for the cost of the network engineers dealing with the DDOS or get the boot.

From what I remember it's quite similar with many service providers, including hosting providers. Their TOS will allow them discretion to stop providing services to anyone that may negatively impact their business, it's not like there's any law that forces them to provide service to a customer.

I worry more about Google et. al. killing the free and open internet by creating centralized walled gardens. I worry more about legislative attacks on encryption, about the overzealous use of copyright law and the sorry state of intellectual property generally.

If service providers want to deplatform centers of radicalization, I think that's ok.

In the limit what you would get is a world where speech is basically under the influence of people who, for all intents and purposes, are operating infrastructure services the whole world runs on.

Those downvoting me I guess feel they trust the arbitrary CEOs of a few large corporations to never deem their actions online of worthy of being censored. Just because you want to live in that world doesn't mean I ought to accept it.

The issue isn't that service providers are arbiters, the problem is that there are so few service providers that one can meaningfully choose from due in large part to the difficulty of taking one's social network along with you.

If service providers had federated communication then it would be a different story.

I've heard folks suggest making it criminal to share or sell user data, for instance, which would be the death of freemium services.

The fact that there is widespread support, let alone demand, for subjective, unaccountable censorship is frightening. You don't understand this, "war on domestic terror" will include legislative attacks on encryption? That bad actors always use, create and amplify perceived crisis to expand their power and permanently erode our rights? You can be certain that when the center of radicalization in Washington DC decides to whip up another war that will kill a million people, they won't be "deplatformed" (as opposed to those "radicals" who will oppose that war, who most certainly will).

* people who view democracy as a set of values, and if you do not share those values then you are against democracy.

* people who view democracy as the democratic principles (voting, representation, freedom of assembly, and so on)...

In my world (I belong to the second group) democracy is freedom of speech, the exchange of ideas, and coming face to face with values and opinions that you do not agree with (in fact you may find them abhorrent), and thinking that that's the whole point.

I found it an enlightening take on the situation, and thought that I'd share it here.

The thing is: left-wing radicalization is tolerated by the platforms, but right-wing radicalization isn't.

  EDIT: Original claim is left intact for posterity, but it is definitely wrong and I misremembered.

Here's a list of subs banned that day with active user counts:

https://www.redditstatic.com/banned-subreddits-june-2020.txt

Chapo was the largest by a large margin besides /r/darkhumorandmemes (edgy jokes).

And you are just straight up lying about /r/chapotraphouse2. It was banned the same day, as was /r/chapotraphouse3 through /r/chapotraphouse49.

"On February 26, 2020, Reddit administrators removed a number of r/The_Donald moderators "that were approving, stickying, and generally supporting content in this subreddit that breaks [Reddit's] content policy" and called the remaining moderators to choose new ones from a list of Reddit-approved individuals. About the same time, Reddit placed r/The_Donald in "Restricted mode", removing the ability to create new posts from most of its users. Since then, some users of the subreddit had moved to theDonald.win, a separate site based on Reddit's old user interface."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/The_Donald

From Heavy:

https://heavy.com/news/2020/06/the-donald-subreddit-moved-to...

Reddit admins did the same to Chapo before it was banned too. They replaced a bunch of their mods, chapo just kept going though, with some new rules and stricter moderation to try and stay unbanned.

You mean everyday?

Look at the parent I responded to. This is a question of extremes, not mere left/right spheres. The far right / alt-right is fascist, racist and violent by definition: that's what makes them far-right. No one said being a conservative is violent.

A private company choosing who to allow on their platform? Seems like the freedom to me. And in the absence of any government action against these domestic terrorists (they have been planning exactly this violence for weeks), it's great to see private companies step in and take action.

So yeah, there's some government action against this domestic terrorists and it's resulting in private companies banning their websites.

You can agree with the action or not, I think it's a good idea to have infrastructure in place that thwarts the spread of dangerous misinformation, but that shouldn't be censorship. It should be easy to access education and mental healthcare to help people be strong against misinformation on their own and without the long arm of the law having to babysit them.

It's wildly different from a website company running their public business on another companies infrastructure.

Alright, so then you'd be OK with some phone company, that has a monopoly on a certain geographic area or town, banning anyone who has made a public social media posts that is critical of the company?

Do you see any problems with this position?

But to answer your question, no, I would not be OK with that. Utility companies (in the United States at least) are typically contracted by cities to provide service, and regulated by a public utility commission as well as various laws. I assume denial of service over social media would violate a number of regulations or contractual obligations. And I agree with that.

Now if you're really asking whether or not various service providers should be regulated as utilities and obligated to provide service to everyone, that's a much more difficult (and vague) question that I don't have a easy answer for.

I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that you don't have a lot of exposure to terrorism. A bunch of idiots breaking into the Capitol and… mostly wandering around taking selfies? Not really very effective terrorists. It was a stupid, pointless move, and illegal — but a long, long way short of terrorism, except possibly on the very fringes of some three-letter organization's idiosyncratic definition.

And the ones not taking selfies were running around with zip ties and IEDs. Just because some of them were idiots, doesn't mean they all were.

Edit: how do you think these "idiots" got in? https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=20m04s&v=cJOgGsC0G9U

Edit: It sounds like the cops say they found IEDs. I'll be following that closely to update my view on the proper response to this.

Edit2: Actually the report is that the IEDs were not found at the Capitol or as part of that but near the RNC and DNC offices elsewhere, and a pipe bomb was found in a car. So there is no evidence that the people who entered the capitol were carrying bombs. The specifics in this case matter.

I wonder when people stopped thinking. By the same argument, should they be allowed to block all black people?

It is a little more nuanced than that. Bakeries were not denying anybody based on sexual orientation.

If a gay man went to get a straight wedding cake, a non-wedding cake, or a wedding cake for a gay wedding that did not have anything to indicate it was for a gay wedding the bakers would not have denied them.

It doesn't really matter. If this starts being a problem, we'll use a decentralized web of trust for SSL. It doesn't have to be centralized.

However, context may tell a different story. It was known to anyone who follows Qanon conspiracy theories that Wednesday was one of the days of the predicted coup (of course, virtually every other milestone in the past two months have had the same prediction and came and passed without incident). It is totally reasonable to assume that some of the crowd at that rally were Qanon believers ready to participate in a coup, were listening for the magic words to start the coup, and took these words to be them. I actually expect some of the investigations to uncover people who followed this exact chain of events. In short, that people took his words to be an incitement to imminent lawless action is a conclusion that I expect to be substantiated by facts.

But even that is not enough to say that Trump fails the Brandenburg test (and this is why my personal legal knowledge starts getting shaky): it's not enough to say that people were incited; you have to demonstrate that Trump expected (or should have expected) that these people would be incited by those words. And... honestly? I'm not sure if that's the case. Given the knowledge of what happened later, it would now (to me) be willful ignorance to suppose those words would not be incitement, but I'm not sure I can say that the same is true merely hours before it happened.

On Wednesday night, I watched a livestream with several lawyers talking about what laws were and weren't broken [1] on Wednesday. When it comes to Trump's legal woes, the main phrase was "matter of first impression": no court has heard a similar enough case for there to be any guideline on how the facts and the law should be interpreted. Does it matter that it's the President saying these words? Does it matter that he is seeming to endorse attacks on another branch of government? There's no precedent... we don't know... and we can't predict.

[1] Definitely no treason, and it doesn't look like anything qualifies as felony murder in DC or federal law, although this was obviously before we knew a police officer died. Definitely sedition though!

A secondary problem seems to be selective recognition of this: people are easily able to see the potential second order effects of Trump's rhetoric and react to it, but the same levers are not being pulled as actively when other people take similar rhetorical risks that have plausible deniability as contributing to violence for the reasons I mention.

Are there nuances to be observed or the process is applicable regardless of the context in which it is implemented?

Source: https://www.vox.com/recode/22218963/capitol-photos-legal-cha..., and if you don't like Vox there's confirmation of this stuff all over Twitter; just search.

That's assuming that all parties involved are concerned about fairness.

Nothing good comes out of these places, regardless of where in the political spectrum you position yourself (except maybe downright fascists). Look at what happened at the Capitol, did he further the right's agenda? Of course not, if anything it put them in a much more awkward situation.

Reddit admins are enablers and they share a part of the blame. Remember how subreddits like /r/jailbait and /r/creepshots were allowed on the website for months, if not years (among many others I can't be bother to remember, including some extremely explicitly racist ones)?

Then it's always the same thing, some news outlet or politician talks publicly about how Reddit hosts fascists/pedos/racists or something like that and within two days you have bans and a heartfelt post by the admins saying how they felt that it was their duty to do something and "think of the children" and all kinds of bullshit.

Reddit is 4chan wearing a tie to try to look more business friendly.

These subreddits and websites don't host free speech, they host hate speech. I have zero issue drawing a line in the sand here. "First they came for the fascists, and I said nothing because I'm not a fascist, and the world was a better place. The end."

Most people lurk. Lurking these sites has a lot of benefits despite the risk of being drawn into radicalization:

- It allows you to truly understand the motives of these kinds of people, and predict what they will do.

- Understanding these motives allows you to address root causes that lead to this extremism. For every radical who storms the capitol, there are a thousand people who have slightly watered down but directionally parallel beliefs. This is good to understand so you can contribute to finding solutions to any justifiable grievances motivating their higher order beliefs (some won't be justified, some will), to help pull them in the other direction.

- Seeing this stuff full-on and not heard about through second hand accounts demystifies it. There are people like yourself who look at this, get a sense of revulsion from it, and then that both hardens their mind away from it and also motivates them to counteract it when they see people in their own lives starting to echo similar sentiments. If you don't truly grok the mental models these people have, you lack the prerequisites needed to disarm any version of them in the minds of people you care about. This isn't a sure thing, but anyone who doesn't will have no effect.

The people with slightly watered down but directionally parallel beliefs certainly exist in huge numbers, but they're the reason why such places are so harmful; they're much easier to radicalize than deradicalize, and they're the ones getting the content recommended to them or being swept along by the enthusiasm other people who share some of their views seem to have for it. And it'd actually be easier to understand their justifiable grievances if they weren't encouraged to connect them to pizza parlours or Jews.

Hate when that happens..

I'm not preaching tolerance here, but the more you understand your opponent the more you approach the inevitable conclusion: people are creatures of convenience, rarely going out of their own way for the sake of concepts like good or evil. If you want to change the way people act, the only way to really do it is to change what is convenient for them. Or to take certain conveniences away.

I don't go on 4chan anymore (or any social media outside HN [1]) and have mellowed out but it gave me the courage to call BS from either "side".

My theory is that 4chan hasn't become more extreme in the last 10 years. It's that "judgment-zones" like twitter and reddit have caused everyone else to become softer.

[1]: I'm serious, I didn't know about any stuff happening in the capitol until I saw it on HN.

You are right to worry - I remember reading an article about (FB?) moderators on anti-vaxxer pages finding themselves inadvertently internalizing that worldview, despite previously consciously not believing in it. The human mind appears to absorb information after repeated exposure, despite any conscious efforts not too - I assume it's similar to how the placebo effect works even when the person "knows" it's a placebo.

It was quite clear that this was going to happen. No one on my timeline is shocked at all. In fact, I’ve been complaining about these deplorables since 2013 (even before the phrase was coined).

My timeline consists mainly of 80% American minorities and 20% graduates from elite US universities (with some overlap between the two groups obviously). What about yours? No one on my timeline was surprised. And if they were, they were privileged white people (no offense just being honest when talking about Harvard/MIT grads).

These insurrectionists complained all year about wearing masks. Some of them even shot retail workers because they were so upset. How could you not see this coming?

It’s sort of hard for me to tell based on your comments. Do you live in the U.S. and where about? I could see how one would be surprised if they lived abroad and only used mainstream social media to gauge what’s going on.

But if you’ve lived in the U.S. and read any of the think pieces in mainstream newspapers or even popular Medium articles over the last 4 years, you would have likely learned about the surge in domestic terrorism committed by white supremacists. There were so many articles, especially this past year in the summer. How could you not have read any of them?

Well, I do know that those sort of articles get downvoted on HN and don’t surface to the top. I’m not sure why articles with titles like “FBI confirms a surge in domestic terrorism” aren’t important to HN. (That was sarcasm.)

I literally had a conversation with dang@ the other day about this, and he didn’t believe me.

And my bubble was well aware that they were going to storm the Capitol because protestors often try to get past the police barricade and the police were going to go easy on them.

Note: I wasn’t downplaying that visiting sites like the one you mentioned was helpful. I do that from time to time as well to troll them but also to get the full perspective.

Nonsense, you've built a straw man. Maybe you've been hanging around 4chan too much and assuming that a subset of swamp creatures from the low parts of the internet represent the millions of Americans who support the President, but I assure you the overwhelming majority of conservatives are nice, hard-working people.

30+ people died as a direct result of the media-condoned protests over the past summer, led by blm/antifa and associated groups. Did your bubble predict that? Do you think those killings, burnings, lootings, violent behaviors were justified? If so, why is it ok for one group to protest in such a manner, but not the other?

Shouldn't we as a society, especially including the mainstream media, have a strict and principled standard that we apply?

It is true that 30+ people died, some of them from police, some, of them from being shot and murdered (chop/chaz/portland), some by other means. It doesn't change the fact that many people died as a direct result of ongoing chaos and anarchy that was largely dismissed as justifiable by the most prominent news organizations and pundits (cnn, nyt, wapo). Two wrongs don't make a right, we need to disavow all violent protests across the board and stop with double standards.

What do you disagree with?

No, your comment was just inappropriate. dang@ is the moderator.

And I don’t have discussions with delusional people. I wrote a super long reply to someone else as you clearly saw. But they weren’t talking like brainwashed people.

But if you did want to delete your comment instead of being passive aggressive, please do so.

This is a public discussion platform and not a one-sided filter bubble. Many people will have different perspectives and it is indeed healthy to listen to and consider them, even if you disagree.

Big tech companies are largely left-leaning internally (which isn't surprising since California is the most left leaning state), so there is nothing to fear as long as you lean left yourself, (i.e. I guarantee you won't be censored for left-leaning speech any time soon).

Also, I find the idea of classifying FB as left-leaning to be laughable.

Your list was pretty narrow in scope until this one. ToS could contain anything and be used to censor speech for any reason.

I’ve not heard any legitimate, evidence-backed claim that any of the major sites are enforcing their rules unfairly. Instead, the claims are usually along the lines of:

“I got banned for saying we should do violent stuff! And yet they allow this other ideologically opposite person to have an account!”

“Can you point to a specific post where the other person is saying we should be violent?”

“No, but everyone knows they support it!”

Well, “everyone knows” isn’t evidence.

Suppose it's a white family but they're wearing MAGA hats and the restaurant denies them service. That's nearly acceptable among a broad swath of the population today.

Now suppose it's your mom wearing a MAGA hat (you may not like that she wears one but it's her right, no?) and she gets denied service in a Starbucks. Maybe someone gets violent with her and knocks the hat off her head. Maybe the server spits in her coffee. All of which has happened. Are you still comfortable with "private property"?

Suppose you wander into a restaurant wearing a "Biden-Harris" T-shirt and they say "Get out!" Are you okay with that?

I could keep going, but you get the picture. We can't have a "freedom for me, not for thee" attitude. It has to be universal.

Also in practice, there is way bigger outcry over right wing reedits being banned then left wing reddits. Each time reddit banns a bunch of subs, there is discussion about right wings ones - including on HN. Nobody cares about left wing subs being banned, that discussion never appears.

For the record, I am fine with both left and right reddits being banned right now. But I have yet to see free speech advocates to fret about toxic leftist and feminist places being closed.

https://twitter.com/sunraysunray/status/1320078487970041856

Just throw out anything that doesn't fit your narrative and keep your message on repeat and your audience will fall captive eventually since most are not open to doing their own fact-checking.