I take it that (a) your income doesn't depend on your internet presence, and (b) you're reasonably well off. KiwiFarms has done massive damage to people in "the real world", and some people concerned for their safety cannot afford to ignore it. It is a genuine danger.
Violating the principle and right of free speech is nothing more than grabbing and abusing power.
So that makes them easy to target for abuse, eg https://oaklandside.org/2023/08/29/chabot-elementary-evacuat...
An episode like that costs tens of thousands of dollars in lost productive time, police response and investigation etc. And it's increasingly common.
I don't think ISPs can or should proactively try to prevent this (or they'd have to preemptively scan and evaluate every packet request), but I also don't think your dunk on the ACLU has any substance. If an ISP knows that a customer is bad actor because it's brought to their attention in a credible and rigorous way, then it seems quite legitimate to me to cut them off.
Are you trying to say that some opinion posted online that may or may not have been consumed by the offender in this case is somehow directly responsible?
My question to those who support big brother any lawful but awful speech is - do you really think it won’t be used to silence any dissent of the ruling powers?
My question to those that use this line of reasoning is do you really think a ruling power willing to silence dissent would do so whether or not it is supported?
I would argue if we have people in positions of power who would make decisions like that then it is our duty to our progeny to relieve those in question.
The Stasi would be insanely jealous of the new tools for totalitarianism the tech industry is building. We're constructing a digital panopticon around ourselves. If this is allowed to go much further, escape will become incredibly difficult.
Because Mississippi and New York have very different ideas about who are bad actors.
This would invite false-flag attacks to get others kicked off the internet, especially if you run a public-facing service. If you can find any way to attribute something to someone, it doesn't even have to rise to the level of preponderance of evidence.
This changes the venue for addressing allegedly-criminal behavior of owners/operators from courtrooms with established procedures to arbitrary decisions by nameless individuals accountable to nobody. This certainly works to someone's advantage, especially in cases where the allegations have been fabricated or exaggerated. Let's move things to a kangaroo court where a doctored screenshot is sufficient evidence for us to ban someone/something and there is no formal procedure or record for anyone to review. The accused isn't even entitled to an appeal; the accusation is the conviction.
ISPs were really rigorous in their diligence when the RIAA started suing their customers. DMCA takedowns have never been abused either. ISPs have notably not been quick to do anything about the DDoS attacks Kiwi Farms' detractors have brought to bear against them.
For some reason, of all those people "victimized" by Kiwi Farms, not one can muster a defamation suit? Apparently they organize raids or something on a public forum inclusive to all, but no screenshots or archived copies of these pages exist? For all the claims against KF, apparently none can survive scrutiny from either civil or criminal litigation. The one untrained guy that runs it can only be tried in secret tribunals, in absentia, and must not be allowed to have a platform on which to defend himself. This is the cliquish behavior of spoiled children crying to their gullible grandparents as an end-run around their parents-- not a means of justice.
People claim a lot of things about the Kiwis but the one thing nobody ever calls them is liars.
> So that makes them easy to target for abuse, eg https://oaklandside.org/2023/08/29/chabot-elementary-evacuat...
It's unfortunate that a school that went out of its way to host events only for children of color received a bomb threat. That terrorist should go to jail, and by the rules of this New Woke Order someone should send a letter to the school's upstream hosting providers to get that racist school kicked off the internet.
The people pushing for ISP-level policing aren't going to like living under the rules they're creating. It's going to make it completely fucking unusable for everyone. Like the HOA board members who want to run speed traps and install speed bumps to stop all the speeders, they always end up being among the first ones caught speeding. They'll create all these bypasses to make things intolerable, and then start up with "this place sucks now" and try to rally everyone into leaving.
Just say no. Because it worked so well for Nancy Reagan.
Oh, wait...
(For those too young to remember: https://www.history.com/topics/1980s/just-say-no)
It is not merely the case that, faced with something potentially addictive, you just recall "Just Say No" and bada-bing, no addiction happens. Humans aren't robots. Humans get addicted to drugs and other activities, not just in social situations but also as a coping mechanism for life failures they can't fix, or see no way to fix. It can take years of psychological work to break the cycle of dependence, and in some cases it might not even be possible.
If you have time for a moving speech, listen to Craig Ferguson's monologue on his own alcohol addiction, his path to sobriety, and the constant vigilance needed to maintain it, which he gave rather than joke about Britney Spears' public freakout in 2007: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K46P7loICXY
I know there are such people, but they are a small minority. If "addiction" is only talking about them, then the response to the GP is simple: sure, "Just Say No" doesn't work for that small minority, but it can still work for everyone else, and shouldn't be discarded on that account.
My read of the GP is that they were not using "addiction" in this narrow sense, and my response was based on that interpretation. But they're welcome to correct me if I'm wrong about that interpretation.
One recent example of this was the lack of free hospital beds at the height of COVID. In a pandemic, the overoptimization of nixing bed/supply reserves left no slack, leaving hospitals unfit to address the emergency.
That resulted in lots of funding from the anti-Trump crowd. "Trump derangement syndrome" meant previously unimaginable funding.
They needed to do something with the money, so they staffed up, using the new staff to double down on the Trump-fighting.
Before 2016, there were a few claims that the ACLU was biased toward liberals. Afterward, you'll find many articles even from outlets like the Atlantic and the New York Times lambasting the ACLU as openly partisan. Just do a search for them!
So if this is censorship is intended to keep things safe and liberal, people suppose that the ACLU would support the censorship.
https://www.vox.com/2017/8/20/16167870/aclu-hate-speech-nazi...
> The backlash has already spurred other ACLU chapters to declare that they don’t believe free-speech protections apply to events like the one in Charlottesville, and led the ACLU’s national director, Anthony Romero, to declare the group will no longer defend the right to protest when the protesters want to carry guns.
> “Until now,” lawyer and blogger Scott Greenfield wrote, the ACLU has “never quite come out and announced that they will refuse to defend a constitutional right. This announcement says that when someone seeks to exercise two rights at the same time, the ACLU is outta there.”
And their internal policy document listing out things that might stay their hand in an otherwise vigourous defense of free speech:
https://www.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/20180621ACLU....
> Considerations Specific to Speech Cases
> * Whether the speaker seeks to engage in or promote violence
> * Whether the speakers seek to carry weapons
> * The impact of the proposed speech and the impact of its suppression
> * The extent to which we are able to make clear that even as we defend a speaker’s right to say what they want, we reserve our right to condemn the views themselves
> * The extent to which we are able to mitigate any harm to our mission, values, priorities, and/or relationships
I think that the ACLU had a bigger impact with 60m in funding as a nonpartisan organization with a respected reputation than as a soldier in the culture war.
smartphones and modern social media bulldozed over our glorious cyber-libertarian future and brought millions of people, all completely unacclimated to the Web and its social customs, online, together, in the name of social progress or something (but, not-so-secretly, it was just to target advertisements and content to people more efficiently), and this is the sad end result—corporate censorship everywhere, with normal people even going out of their way to espouse gratitude for said censorship, complete with all manner of stock memery to disparage anyone who disagrees ("freeze peach", "only the government can censor—if it's not the government, it's not censorship", etc.).
pour one out for the Internet of Yore if you must, but those days are long since over—there really isn't any way to put the genie back in the bottle anymore.
twenty-five minutes ago, I posted the above comment, then got into my car to drive home from work. on the way home, at an intersection, I checked my phone to see if anyone had responded to my comment, and indeed, you had. I thought about it a bit, then, while waiting in line at drugstore to pick up a prescription, I typed and submitted this reply. this is most certainly not how Things Used To Be. you used to have to jack into the Matrix at a designated jacking-in terminal—you couldn't just wirelessly jack in anywhere, about the town, at any point in your daily life.
only a decade ago, the idea that a politician would use the Internet to directly attack or insult a political opponent was unthinkable—now, it's completely commonplace, as common as anyone arguing over the Internet, with anyone else about anything else. now, it's been successfully integrated into everyday life, completely. in the past, though, there most certainly was a time in which it was a completely separate thing, with completely different social norms than meatspace. I don't know why some are so eager to erase this in-the-greater-scheme-of-things extremely-recent history, and pretend like the Internet was always some sort of sanitized "safe space." there were "safe spaces", to be sure—but you had to make them yourself(!), or seek them out. communities were ideologically-driven, not advertiser/moral guardian-driven.
I see ISPs blocking "mean speech" to "protect people" as another symptom of the enshittification of the internet. I legitimately cannot understand problems in this arena because you can just...walk away from your computer. Or turn off the website. Or hey, maybe don't TIE YOUR ENTIRE LIFE AND REAL IDENTITY TO THE INTERNET. I suspect the prominent use of pseudonyms 30 years ago prevented most forms of ongoing harassment. Narcissists need the validation and so now big brother needs to step in to protect them.
I think society is getting a little too comfortable with the idea of big brother and it's making me really, really uncomfortable. As an old man yelling at a cloud the internet really was better 20 or 30 years ago.