the point is, currently NO ROAD is the Autobahn. thats not a balance, thats censorship.
If you think this is true, you're not looking very hard.
Meanwhile, they absolutely forbid expressing common, mainstream political viewpoints that are inimical to their ideology.
For example, “Six-in-ten U.S. adults say that whether a person is a man or a woman is determined by their sex assigned at birth.”
If I can paraphrase Ian Fleming;
* Once is happenstance,
* Twice is circumstance,
* Nth time is a sign of deeply nested anti social malcontents that seek to inflict life theatening scenarios upon others for the Lulz.
Those qui know, know.
In any case, lets not be deemed offensive for harboring thoughts of rebellion against the overlords lest we be yeested from the platform for attempting to pique the curiosity of those not entirely lobotomized by the oppression machine yet. Such fallacious behaviours shall be left without scrutiny while we all dance together under a rainbow of landmines, minimum wage and proxy wars funded by alphabet companies ever-seeking to exercise greater and greater control of the human mind at scale.
Yes, let's strive not to offend others, for that way we will surely make the most progress, ignoring all prior knowledge and our very evolutionary mechanisms so we don't make lines on a page that induce rage in the untrained mind.
Those that can't hold a thought without judgment, can't think critically, yet they are the ones we decide to put in charge of our social narrative?
I wonder WHO decided that was a good idea.
Disingenuous hot take. People tolerate the offensive. I’m tolerating you right now.
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/sites/kiwi-farms
Kiwi farms was a haven for degenerate anti social wanna be mass murderer. No sane business wants that association. No one is silencing these people, they are being lawfully discriminated against (refused service) for their reprehensible behavior. That’s freedom of association in action. The laws prohibiting the government from acting against someone for their words do not apply to the individual. In other words, tolerance only extends insofar as the infringers intolerance can be tolerated without relinquishing inalienable rights.
Off topic, but kiwi farms is a weird hill to plant a flag in on this topic.
They're not just being refused service by hosting companies or the like, ISPs are not routing to them. That's new, and that's what I think is worth "planting a flag" about; it's not a newspaper refusing to print your articles, it's the post office refusing to ship your newspaper. If that's not being silenced then I don't know what is.
Said clause being, “specifically”, clause 3.1 of HARICA Subscriber Agreement. Which can be read here: https://repo.harica.gr/documents/SA-ToU_EN.pdf
This argument is unsupported by your comment. What value does kf create? Far as I can tell it only destroys value with their trail of suicides and bigoted behavior.
Even if that were true (and I don't think it is), freedom only for those who "create value" is no freedom at all.
Distinction without a material difference. This is only slightly to mail delivery services refusing delivery to homes with aggressive animals. In this case it’s telecom operators not enabling violent criminals that could create liability if left unaddressed.
No it wasn’t. Both in life and in death William Atchison was made fun of by the members of multiple communities, gaining the posthumous nickname “Couch Cuck”. A “haven” for murderers would not obsessively archive information relating to murderers, such as social medias (which consistently delete the information to avoid being associated), prior convictions, etc with the intent to study and publicly shame them. One can argue of the efficacy of this, but it is no different than what MSM does. In fact, KiwiFarms can be attributed to the destruction of a CP/animal torture ring and multiple arrests, due to their archival efforts and Internet sleuthing.
Additionally, on the topic of “reprehensible behavior”, companies like CloudFlare happily accept money from animal abuse websites. And under every metric KiwiFarms is legal under US law. So while companies are legally allowed to disassociate for almost any reason, we have to ask why illegal websites remain while legal ones are disassociated. And considering CloudFlare initially sided with KiwiFarms, it truly is not as clear cut as “they found the content disagreeable”.
On topic to your off topic, I was definitely not expecting KiwiFarms to mentioned either.
>A “haven” for murderers would not obsessively archive information relating to murderers, such as social medias (which consistently delete the information to avoid being associated), prior convictions, etc with the intent to study and publicly shame them.
This is not logical. Many murderers study infamous murder cases to learn how to be better murderers. For some it may merely be a morbid curiosity, for others, it’s research. You cannot discern the intentions from the comments, but rather the outcomes, which speaks voluminously; if you’d bother to look for the reports on this.
>KiwiFarms can be attributed to the destruction of a CP/animal torture ring and multiple arrests, due to their archival efforts and Internet sleuthing.
And 4chan got a terrorist training camp bombed. And Reddit got an innocent killed during the hunt for the Boston bomber. These are not examples of uniformly good character, even the worst criminals have soft spots. Nazis made some wondrous technology, should we forgive their attempted genocides and eugenics?
Re cloud flare, I support shaming them for this support of bad actors and hurting their bottom line but that is off topic goal post moving.
Alright, can you prove they funnel others into such depraved communities?
> This is not logical.
By your own “logic” anyone who studies crime is practicing to be a mass murderer, which is objectively not true. If they were truly some murderous training ground, why is their so little as a result?
> Nazis made some wondrous technology, should we forgive their attempted genocides and eugenics?
Well the USA, Europe, and many others certainly did when harvesting their best minds. However that is besides the point, as KiwiFarms has done nothing comparable. They say mean things and archive actions taken by others in public. Making fun of others is seen as rude, however it is not illegal. If it was false and caused damages it could be slander/libel, however that has yet to be the case to my knowledge.
> I support shaming them for this support of bad actors
The problem is that there is inconsistency here. You and many others do not campaign CloudFlare to remove illegal websites, or even websites in a similar vein to KF, yet you urge them to remove a single legal (albeit unsavory) gossip forum? If this stance was uniform I could understand it better. As it stands it simply comes off as intellectually dishonest.
Take Chloe Sagal, who fraudulently crowdfunded money to pay for a sex change. Not misappropriated-- defrauded. Prior to her demise, she made a speech in a public park about homelessness or something and self-immolated to raise attention to it. One would think she'd have named her abuser and drawn attention to that were they responsible for her death...
...like Byuu tried to do, when he faked his own death and blamed KF in a forged "suicide" note. Surprise, KF "victim" commits fraud.
Chris-chan was another of their victims. Poor guy (or girl? I can't keep up). This tortured soul was recently released from prison for raping his own 80 year old mother.
Your link complains about Onision being harassed by Kiwi Farms. Poor Onision. He's been deplatformed since that article was written. I'm sure the entire subsection of his Wikipedia article addressing "allegations of abuse, child grooming and rape" are all fake news.
There's Keffals-- SWATed by KF, we are told...around the same time KF was asking questions about $100K misappropriated from a fundraiser for Trans Lifeline. So, more fraud. Prior to that, there were detailed discussions about Keffals' involvement with the Catboy Ranch child-grooming Discord channel and their conspiring with another party to sell back-channel hormones to children without parental knowledge or consent. The media lapped up the persecuted victim narrative though. Keffals fled to Ireland after the raid, for no credible reason. This is the most egregious example I saw.
Exposure of sexual impropriety involving children and/or crowdfunding fraud are disturbingly common stories involving most of Kiwi Farms' "victims." These are very damning public accusations, yet despite this, nobody I'm aware of has bothered to sue the owner for defamation. Instead, the social media campaign against them relies entirely on histrionics, extralegal abuses like sustained DDoS attacks, smear campaigns and falsifying abuse claims to upstream providers. For as terrible as they supposedly are, the truth alone should do the job, but the story is that they're just so full of hate they must be banned from the entire internet. This narrative is brought to us by the very people the site identified as fraudsters.
It's only fitting that when you call out public figures engaging in abuse and fraud, people with an interest in getting away with either will leverage both in their efforts to silence opposition.
And as the digital world increasingly invades and influences our realities and experiences the importance of not only serving the common denominator gets more important, not less.
In my opinion it is about making the online world safer for advertisers. The advertisers are the real customers of the internet - users are just the product.
The evolution of the internet is being increasingly driven by profit seeking and most common way people try to monetize the internet is through advertising. That is primarily what drives censorship and moderation - a need to protect the advertiser's brands.
The old internet that so many people are pining for in this thread comes from a time before big ad-tech. All the old schools forums, newsgroups etc didn't care about making a buck - heck most of them probably ran at a loss. All of that was eaten by social media, there was a transition away from internet communities, to for profit businesses instead.
If you are a parent weary of an internet riddled with porn, traffickers, drugs, or other dangerous things. I believe it is on the parent to filter whats acceptable content for their kid to watch and not the website administrators to moderate whats acceptable. Its baffling to me that people see it the other way around. The latter is certainly easier and the parent can come up with all sorts of excuse why they cant find the time to do that given how hard life is and how it gets in the way, but at the end of the day. Who knows what's best for you or your family than yourself?
IRL we outsource some roles of the parent to the community. I send children out into parts of the real world confident that they won’t have shown magazines of animal torture or have abuse screamed at them because they are female or gay. The internet is an important part of our cultural space and it’s not ok for children not to be able to use it.
I know plenty of parents who give a smart phone with complete control to the teen on what app or content they can see, and are shocked to find out to where on the internet they find their kid. Parents need to take some accountability for what their kids do. Shocking right?
I should note on the other hand that I don't understand why pornography is such a proeminent issue in these discussions. As a teenager, I definitely consumed porn (as I suspect the vast majority have) and no damage has come to me.
There are reddit groups above 1 million members who feel porn has interrupted their life and incubated as an addiction because of early and excessive teenage use. The field is not studied well but there are certainly many many others that feel different than what you wrote, me included.
>>> The only possible option I see is to become a helicopter parent.
I dunno I think the main issue is you see this as a black and white issue. No good discussion can come when you always see the different side as the most extreme option.
To me, it seems very inorganic outside of specific platform niches that allow for self moderation of subsets of the network (Reddit somewhat, IRC, discord, Mastadon, etc.). A single globally shared moderation policy with local deviances to accommodate local customs and laws does not seem “organic” as much as forced.
Compare this to the real world.
If I go to my local business networking group, there is one set of moderation policies that is strictly enforced.
If I go to my local pub, there is a very different set of moderation policies that is loosely enforced.
If I went to my business networking group and behaved as if I was under the moderation policies of my local pub the contrast in behavior would be stark.
Church has one set, school another, the local swingers club another, the gentleman’s club another, etc.
Compare this to many social media platforms where it seems like the moderation policies attempt to moderate a baseline of behavior consistently across all communities regardless of whether they are pubs, business groups, or otherwise.
I suspect (maybe hope?) we are going to start seeing organic social start happening as groups start trying to increasingly assert their own identities and moderation policies that are incompatible with a global standard.
Building on your analogy, it'd be like if in the real world your local pub mates and your business friends met. These are two different communities that most certainly cannot be welded into a single forum.
>I suspect (maybe hope?) we are going to start seeing organic social start happening as groups start trying to increasingly assert their own identities and moderation policies that are incompatible with a global standard.
I think this is exactly what you're seeing. Of all the different social media models, personally, it's reddit and discord that won out for me, along with a smattering of more niche like Hacker News and the discussions page on Github.
You can't and shouldn't build a community that satisfies everybody.
This is solved by people just make another profile to keep it separate. It is okay not to add your mother on your hobby account.
>These are two different communities that most certainly cannot be welded into a single forum.
But sites like Facebook are not just a single forum. Each group can be it's own community. People can keep two discussions separate.
Note that Facebook and many other social media sites go out of their way to prevent the same person having two accounts. It is against their terms of service, and they do try to enforce it in various ways.
In your example the problem was that someone's mom was reading all of their posts and not that they wanted to use different login information for each profile.
Still, the comment above used both profile and account to refer to the same thing ("create a new profile", "your hobby account") so I'm not even sure which they were suggesting.
A "baseline" where, as mentioned above, misogynistic, racist behaviour isn't allowed sounds easy. But is it though? You take what Nazis and racists have said for ages and put "Russian" instead of their victim of choice and suddenly most Americans will agree that's fine behaviour "because Ukraine".
How about age limits, alcohol, sex? Hell, even Americans couldn't agree on a baseline in those.
I don't know if you're American but as I said I'm not and the internet has teached me how to behave as one online to not be caught in strange Americanised moderation rules. That's not agreement but enforcement that's caused this and if asked I would vote No to those rules.
I doubt you could get just American communities to agree.
Large social media sites are a pale shadow of an actual community. These sites love to throw that word around to get you to sign up, then act like properly moderating their sites to actually feel like a community is impossible.
Today will feel early too in 100 years.
It’s less about a hegemony, and more about a shared experience.
There’s a lot of firsts still to be shared together.
Still, the first time trying cable/adsl, or wifi when there was none was a seminal moment that that group didn’t see coming or pick, but it is theirs.
It might not be what you meant but this comment comes across on its own as a bit of sour grapes.
Similar to how we’re all soaking in LLMs together.
When something like the web was underground, counter filter and mainstream it’s a different formation period. Tech wasn’t cool and certainly didn’t impress many. Still it was chosen. The promises to be around a keyboard were limited and it took going to great lengths for many. It’s really good it’s not as hard anymore.
Facebook was the first thing the broadest group of people did on a computer or the web. It really lived off mainstream technology adoption. That is Fb’s greatest contribution, but if we felt like where a platform is going, the next curve of connecting awaits for you to make something you and others want.
Stopping people from using a platform they don’t like might be harder than just building the next thing.
The internet will get more personal.
I think feeling that loss, and expressing it, is valid.
> Todays web is much better and more accessible.
Whether or not it's better depends on what you found valuable about it. It is worse for some, and better for others. Disclaimer: it's much, much worse for me. But I acknowledge that it's better for others. Such is life.
> The internet will get more personal. And that’s good.
Whether that's good or not depends on what you mean by "get more personal". If what you mean is "more personalized", then I think that's the opposite of good.
But, again, that's just me and I'm mourning that the web is most of the way toward becoming a thing that no longer meets my needs or desires. That it meets the needs and desires of others is fine, and I don't want to deny others from being able to derive value from it. But, nonetheless, the loss to me, personally, is real and I don't see why I shouldn't be able to talk about that.
Great quote
This is what I found bizarre about Jack Dorsey pining for the old days of the internet (usenet, irc) and the lack of discovery, and blaming centralization for it. There are still decentralized places that exist, and anyone is free to set up their own host, and they would get mountains more traffic than was even possible in the 90s or early 2000s. The problem is that that isn't good enough anymore. It has to make a mark on the internet or something. Not satisfied with 10,000 people viewing your page or your post, gotta be 10M+.
The other thing is that "old internet" was largely about the type of people on it. Mostly university students, most of those engineers, most of those male and from the same socioeconomic background. Fast forward to now when everybody is online, and the callout culture and seeming animosity towards viewpoints favored by early internet people is because opposing viewpoints exist.
Not to mention the fact that one person's grimy is another's milquetoast, so what do you do about that? Moderation is the organic balance that resulted from years of trial and error.
I miss the old internet as well, but I know the internet is not just for the weirdos and nerds (anymore). Every road in the world does not need to be the Autobahn.
What would really be saying something is if people stopped using platforms they don't like. But that's like taking a drug user away from his dealer--they both need each other in a perverse, symbiotic relationship. It's not that hard to leave platforms anyways, teens have already mostly stopped using FB.
The most uncharitable bone in my body thinks that people who don't migrate off Twitter etc. like being the "cool" guy who doesn't like that stuff and having others around to read that. But I suppose that's just my opinion.