Comment by chvid
9 years ago
I don't have any sympathy for the Daily Stormer.
I just don't see where this is stopping. What else needs to be taken down? /pol/? Who about Breitbart? Or maybe some 2nd WW Nazi propaganda? Or something from the US civil war?
You guys seem to be ok with this very slippery slope being assessed by random private companies accountable to who knows. And then you have the nerve to call us who believes that limits of free speech should be set by courts and open process "nazis"?!
>You guys seem to be ok with this very slippery slope being assessed by random private companies accountable to who knows.
To me its strange someone would consider closing down /pol/ a "slippery slope". I am amazed that someone would consider 4chan a moral compass for the type of things their admins should put up with. moot has closed down /pol/ for this very reason in the past with even less "political" awareness than the CEO of cloudflare.
4Chan is "free-speech" not through effort but through negligence & apathy. moot shut down /pol/ (aka /n/) before, twice, on a whim because he didn't like the content. It's not the first time it has devolved into nazi-fetishism. While 4chan has the reputation for being a seedy place, moot has taken stands and banned people and conversions from 4chan (for example most recently gamergate on /v/) for reasons that can be boiled down to that he didn't like it (mods of 4chan have done this as well, such as no Naruto on /a/). The current iteration of /pol/ has likely been allowed to live through negligence - moot is no longer involved with 4chan, and the new owner hiroyuki has been as absent as moot during his VC startup days. Simply put 4chan never had any moderator accountability (see Rule 9 of the internet).
In conclusion, the notion that this is a "slippery slope" is nonsense. "Free speech" on the internet never really existed, the current view points that exist only exist because their operators have never bothered to flex their muscles - and the reason they haven't has rarely been because of some moral high ground. At the end of the day there is plenty of "reasonable" content YouTube won't host for you, and that Facebook will kick you for. If you are concerned about being silenced by a corporate vendor, then choose your partners wisely. If none will support you - then self fund. Free Speech doesn't mean the NYT is obligated to print your content, only that the government wont stop circulation of your newspaper. If you can't acquire the resources to start your own print, then tough luck.
> If you are concerned about being silenced by a corporate vendor, then choose your partners wisely.
The issue here is more nuanced. It's about any site on the Internet being censored by a mob. That's why the YouTube or Facebook analogies don't hold. You could always host the content yourself. But DDoS can knock out any unprotected host anywhere. And DDoS protection isn't really something you can DIY.
So the issue here is not about being silenced by a corporate vendor. It's about being silenced, period, wherever you host.
Free speech doesn't stop a child's parents from shunning him when he swears at them, free speech doesn't mean that you get to yell in church with diplomatic immunity towards being silenced, free speech doesn't mean that you go around soliciting sex in public without possibly getting arrested. You get silenced if you act like a cunt, that's freedom, and it's not an issue.
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Comes down to the argument of "how dare you be intolerant of my intolerance"
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Ok cool. The question stands. How do you feel about ISIS does? Do you leave terrorist recruitment up or take it down? And if ISIS does have to go, why are white terrorists different?
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It's harder to DDoS Tor onion sites.
The whole Gamergate shitfest was disallowed on /v/ because it constantly hijacked the board, had tangential relevance in most cases, and the legal implications weren't worth supporting a largely off-topic subject. Having five pages of threads on a single subject would pretty much never be allowed on any board (save /b/), especially if that subject focused on a holy war between two radical elements.
/j/ was temporarily accessible through a bug and IRC chatlogs are widely available. The moderation on 4chan is very much active, it's just not compelled to fast and hard action for anything save child porn or an impending murder. Much of the hooliganism is largely explicitly allowed, at least according to the info currently available to us.
>moot shut down /pol/ (aka /n/) before, twice, on a whim because he didn't like the content
Hate to bring /b/ into my hn, but newfriends, who make up the majority of the /pol/lacks don't even know this.
It is also an ideal ground for groups with bad intentions to manipulate folks. Who is actually operating those keyboards? What are their actual motives?
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>If you can't acquire the resources to start your own print, then tough luck.
"See, we just had a misunderstanding. I thought I lived in the USA, the United States of America, and actually we live in the USA, the United States of Advertising: freedom of expression guaranteed, if you've got the money!"
-Bill Hicks on being censored by CBS
> "Free speech" on the internet never really existed
Long before 4chan repeated everything Usenet had done many years earlier there was plenty of free speech on the Internet.
Not because nobody was in control to prevent it, but because the news admins who were in control believed in free speech enough to facilitate it. Although Usenet is a shadow of its heyday, that still applies even to this day.
CloudFare served DailyStormer for years.
Then DailyStormer says CloudFare are secretly nazis.
Then CloudFare say "no we don't, goodbye".
If DailyStormer hadn't been so stupid, and had never claimed CloudFare was anything other than neutral, then they would still be served?
Stupid own goal DailyStormer.
The censorship and 'line' seems to be not what you say or incite against others, but what you say about CloudFare.
Well, sure.
But if you shit on my living room carpet I'll also show you the door. As I think is my right.
He peed on my rug!
Think of this scenario:
Oppresive government wants cloudflare to stop hosting some dissenters site.
Cloudflare says no
Then such government tries again, this time accusing dissenters of terrorism or something else despicable such as child molestation or hate speech.
Cloudflare still refuses
Then someone in such government impersonates the dissenters and claims cloudflare is on their side.
Cloudflare immediately kicks dissenters out of their network.
Free speech is hard.
I think it was probably a tongue in cheek statement (since a lot of people would have accused them of being secret Nazis over this eventually) that Cloudflare took seriously, or at least saw as a good excuse to shut them down to appease some people while positioning themselves as strong supporters of free speech on the internet at the same time.
Doesn't matter if it was tongue in cheek, it was still said, and that's not the kind of thing CloudFlare really need associated with their name.
Of course it's going to be dragged through the mud anyway now, but at least it'll be for something they actually did.
> Then DailyStormer says CloudFare are secretly nazis.
According to CloudFare... Can't seem to find exactly where they say this. Their platforms on which to say things seem to be dropping like flies here.
Not saying they didn't claim that, but that's one of the problems with taking away someone's speech entirely - your only "source" for knowing what they have actually said is the claims of the people who just shut them down.
The Daily Stormer doesn't have access to printers? I'm unclear why they need Cloudflare to distribute their beliefs.
Many European countries (like Germany etc.) have operated with free speech restrictions since the end of WW2 and the slippery slope that is always brought up never materialized.
Slippery slope arguments are only valid if you believe that your jurisdiction doesn't have proper rule of law. Otherwise experience, at least in European countries, showed that courts are very well capable of recognizing the importance of free speech even for tasteless and hateful speech.
> slippery slope that is always brought up never materialized
The targets of the 234,341 criminal insult investigations conducted by German police last year[1] might argue otherwise. A few thousand of those were elementary school kids. Sixteen were preschoolers.
> courts are very well capable of recognizing the importance of free speech even for tasteless and hateful speech
Bless your heart. I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that your personal experience is untainted by exposure to actual courts. Prosecutors in the United States are not exactly known for rigorous exercise of discretion, and defending yourself in court can be ruinously expensive even if you prevail.
---
[1] https://www.bka.de/DE/AktuelleInformationen/StatistikenLageb...
Investigations are not convictions.
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> the slippery slope that is always brought up never materialized.
Very true. Well, except maybe for that one time when Germany became an open-air rape camp under the noses of police who did nothing for fear of being accused of racism. That kind of sucked.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Year%27s_Eve_sexual_assaul...
And, oh yeah, there was that time they threw a lawyer in jail for defending a Holocaust denier.
http://www.dw.com/en/german-neo-nazi-lawyer-sentenced-for-de...
But otherwise, sure, unqualified success. Great example.
> And, oh yeah, there was that time they threw a lawyer in jail for defending a Holocaust denier.
That's not an honest reading of the article you linked. From the article, "[the lawyer] also signed a motion during Zündel's trial with "Heil Hitler" and shouted that the lay judges deserved the death penalty for "offering succour to the enemy" -- leading the court to dismiss her." She was a neo-Nazi herself.
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I have nothing to say really about your first point where you do nothing but speculate about police motives, but the second one doesn't prove anything either.
The second case is not a slippery slope because it does precisely what's codified in German law, nothing more and nothing less. The lawyer herself denied the holocaust and that's punishable in Germany. So the law was correctly applied. That has absolutely nothing to do with the slippery slope discussion.
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>Very true. Well, except maybe for that one time when Germany became an open-air rape camp under the noses of police who did nothing for fear of being accused of racism.
What an awful example and has nothing, what so ever to do with the laws against being a Nazi. Do you honestly believe the US has never avoided reporting something for fear of being labeled? Really?
The other example you gave was covered by others in the thread. Spoiler: it's a lie.
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Germany is a joke. The fact that it's even considered a country and not a US territory is beyond me.
If you have a US military base in your country you are objectively not a sovereign nation.
Daily stormer, pol, and breitbart are all free to find another web host/CDN or start their own. There is no slippery slope with one business refusing to do business with another one. The business does not need to be accountable to anyone, because they have no requirement to host the daily stormer in the first place.
So a baker could refuse to make a cake for homosexuals then ?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_group
HTH
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What's with everyone bending over backwards to equate Nazis with non-genocidal, non-terrorist groups of people?
Given the chance, gay people will try to live their lives in peace.
Given the chance, Nazis will try to exterminate billions of people.
Nazis haven't been systematically persecuted and killed for millennia. Ironically, gay people have been systematically persecuted and murdered by Nazis. Such persecution is why there are protected classes, which some governments recognize gay people as belonging to.
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False equivalence. Your sexual orientation is not a choice. Your political orientation is.
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If the cake is denied because the baker doesn't want to create content they disagree with (as opposed to being denied merely because the requestor is homosexual), then why not?
Look. We only apply those rules for sides we like.
Homosexuals are the way they were born.
Nazis are not.
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business is accountable via money to its owners and creditors. which ultimately means its accountable to the market.
I'm curious, if you imagine a possible historical situation, let's say a German business owner in the 1930s that took a stance of not offering services to Nazi organizations, does that appear commendable, or bad in the same "slippery slope" way that you apply in the present situation?
It seems to me that such a business owner would seem in hindsight to have been acting virtuously, and it seems that businesses that did in fact offer services to e.g. the Nazi party are now tarnished morally because of that.
>I'm curious, if you imagine a possible historical situation, let's say a German business owner in the 1930s that took a stance of not offering services to Nazi organizations, does that appear commendable, or bad in the same "slippery slope" way that you apply in the present situation?
How about the possible historical situation where a business owners doesn't offer services to the irish, jews, gays, blacks, etc?
Because those things have also happened -- and when you say it's ok to refuse those services to a group, you open a window for refusing those services to other groups too.
Just because consensus or power today is with the "good groups" (as far as you're concerned) doesn't change that fact.
It's even worse when what's right and wrong is even more muddy. E.g. someone criticizing their own country (like the Vietnam war protests) or in favor of a regime change etc.
Being Irish, Jewish, gay or black are not choices (for the most part, anyway) and do not inherently imply that you're intolerant of any other group. Being Nazi, on the other hand, is clearly a choice, and intolerance is inherent to it. I think the difference is clear.
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> How about the possible historical situation where a business owners doesn't offer services to the irish, jews, gays, blacks, etc?
I'm sorry if someone was born a nazi then.
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A more realistic historical example than yours (which assumes hindsight): what about the McCarthyism? "If these guys are communist let's not give them jobs, particularly in the medias where they could spread their ideas".
The US liberals kept a pretty sour memory of McCarthyism. But fundamentally it is no different.
There are many differences:
1. Nazis started WW2 with around 80 million deaths, including hundreds of thousands US soldiers, and killed 5-6 million Jews in the gas chambers of concentration camps.
2. McCarthyism originated from and was systematically exerted by the US government in many official capacities. There were vetting committees, job prohibitions, and other direct government interference including using intelligence agencies to gain information on US citizens. They didn't let Charlie Chaplin enter the US.
That's very different from a private company that ceases to make business with a Nazi website due to violations of their ToS.
On a side note, John von Neumann suggested to government officials to pro-actively launch a nuclear strike on Moskow. That tells you how different the climate was then as opposed to now.
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> It seems to me that such a business owner would seem in hindsight to have been acting virtuously,
No it wouldn't - There is a large percentage of population joining Nazi parties for convenience, for their career or even out of fear. Are you going to deny them the food you sell from your shop? If they are Nazi's, are they still not human beings deserving to access food in the market?
Does someone being a member of the Nazi party mean we can let them starve to death? Shoot them and push them into a trench even?
The moment you dehumanise vast swathes of the population, you've already lost and dropped to the level of "Nazi's". It's not wise to let your enemies turn you into them.
> If they are Nazi's, are they still not human beings deserving to access food in the market?
No, they can stop being nazi's at any point. Literally in less than a second.
Blacks, jews, gays, disabled people can't.
Stop trying to equate the two.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
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Well, I might ask whether you think there is a difference between selling food to an individual who happens to be a member of the Nazi party, and catering for a Nazi party event?
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Let me ask you this then. If a homeless Nazi begged me for a dollar to get a McMuffin (not sure if those are on the dollar menu but take it as part of the hypothetical here) so they won't starve that day and I refuse to give them a dollar because they are an unrepentant Nazi, am I a bad person?
At what point do I as an individual have the right to not associate with a group or ideology that's seeks my destruction? Because that's really what's at the heart of the matter whether we're talking about Cloudflare or just me because I'm sure that Cloudflare has Jews, racial minorities, and LGBT folks on their staff. And I'm sure even some of those folks are even investors. So why should the investors and employees of Cloudflare protect Nazis who seek their destruction? For money? I can accept that it's a matter of profit, but if you're asking for a moral basis to aid those that want to kill you I can't see there being any argument in favor of protecting or aiding them.
>Does someone being a member of the Nazi party mean we can let them starve to death? Shoot them and push them into a trench even?
Historically, yes.
People sitting on the fences talking about slippery slopes are only ceding space to people pushing the conversation down.
I'm sorry but The space to sit idly and think about it is gone. All of society is on the slope because America didn't realize that some points are raised not to discuss, but to tie down discourse and keep logic at bay.
Leaving the field open for emotion and lazy logic to defeat whoever remains.
There's rules to how this is done, and they have little to do with facts but everything to do with owning the communication channel.
Congratulations, you've just employed the Sex With Ducks argument. Remember before employing slippery slope arguments to explain why we haven't already fallen down the slope when we banned terrorist websites.
And taking down The Daily Stormer was speech. If you want to regulate that kind of speech, it's your right to say so. But don't pretend you're supporting the First Amendment when you do so.
Don't pretend you're supporting the First Amendment - a restriction on governments making laws against press freedom - when you use it to compel companies to assist in the dissemination of Nazi propaganda against their will.
It's not a defence of political freedoms to compel people - rhetorically or otherwise - to disseminate messages that appall them; it's a grotesque imposition upon their political freedom.
That is indeed a tough question. And to Cloudflare's credit, they discuss it at some length. I'm quite impressed.
But in any case, it's Cloudflare's business, and so it's Cloudflare's decision to make. What concerns me more are censorship mechanisms involving DNS and BGP games. Which the US has been quite fond of using, to take down what it considers to be illegal content. That's a vulnerability of the Internet itself, reflecting continuing US dominance.
So hey, we have Tor and other overlay networks.
Edit: And just to be clear, I'm a communitarian anarchist. I'm not at all sympathetic to fascists. But I do oppose all censorship.
Maybe you should be the one who chooses what a private company can and can't do?
As for the slippery slope arguments, come on.
Feel free to feel outraged when someone you do have sympathy for gets taken down then.
Until that time comes, good riddance to Daily Stormer, you lot of motherfucking nazis.
>What else needs to be taken down?
It would be interesting to see how much of this applies to sub sects of Islam, namely the sub sects that promote violence or which promote child marriage.
My big issue here isn't the logic itself, but the selective application of it. For a similar related topic, whose statues should we have up? What is the objective criteria by which we should decide if a statue is allowed (on public property/at a memorial) and will it be applied to all statues?
If Breitbart or /pol/ are hosting discussions in the open between known Nazis or people who are advocating to take terrorist actions and they do not moderate and delete these things then yea they actually should be shut down. We would not tolerate this from Al Qaeda or with child porn so I really don't understand the problem. Nazism has caused orders of magnitude more suffering in the history of man than either of the previous things I mentioned.
Well communism caused even more suffering, so should we shut down every communist site as well?
> If Breitbart or /pol/ are hosting discussions [...] advocating to take terrorist actions and they do not moderate [...] they actually should be shut down.
> [...] shut down every communist site as well?
And you completely disregarded the conditions why?
And christian sites? Christianity caused much suffering, christening whole nations by the sword, the crusades etc.
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Any website that promotes terrorism and hateful discrimination should be opposed.
That doesn't fit Communism, but that's the definition of Nazis.
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