Comment by donohoe

>There is no government involved here though.

See the parent comment I was replying to. We agreed on the statement that "Private companies should not be the de facto moderators of free speech". I just think it is weird to argue this in a thread where we have just turned 180 degrees from our original premise.

We tolerate it legally, but a majority of society certainly does not tolerate it morally nor agree with the content.

Are you suggesting that large services like Cloudflare shouldn't exist, and instead there should be an ecosystem of DDoS-filtering reverse proxies? I do agree to that, though I think the problem remains that most of them do not want to be in the business of trying to decipher law and morality. So at the end of the day, the buck does stop somewhere.

And frankly, the example of Mastodon doesn't inspire confidence. Mastodon instance-level blocks have turned the platform into a huge mess. I genuinely would not be surprised if there was no single instance I can sit on that will allow me to interact with everyone I know on Mastodon, and as far as I've heard, if I choose to host my own instance and not to block certain instances, this will lead to my instance being blocked on some instances. I could be exaggerating a little, but this seems quite annoying.

Admittedly, e-mail works a bit better in this regard, but it's certainly not without issues (SPAM, deliverability, etc.) Still, it's perhaps possible that platforms that deal with public broadcasting are inherently more sensitive to cultural clash than ones that only deal with more or less direct communication.

Consolidation of power into platforms like Cloudflare is still a problem, but even if we fix that, we still have another service that has a lot of people all in one big amorphous zone: the Internet. I do wonder a lot if the Internet will ultimately wind up unifying a bunch of cultures, or if it will wind up creating even more bifurcation than it eliminates. It's starting to feel more and more like it creates more bifurcation, just a bit.

I don't understand trying to hide behind an argument other than "my tribe is in power here so you submit to our rules". The post you linked falls apart with how you define various concepts (how you define the terms of peace, etc.). The argument is eventually settled (like nearly all of them these days) by who is in power. They'll define the terms of peace and in a way that paints their causes as good and their enemies as evil.

There are established ways that we as a society, determine what to tolerate.

Most people would say the legal system is the correct avenue for this.

This is a nice platitude, but I'm not seeing the relation. Service providers that follow the law will in fact, stop tolerating a client when law enforcement tells them to do so.

Your second item isn’t even close to an illegal threat in the USA, it’s the loser equivalent of saying “mine is 12 inches”. It’s not true, never happened, and nobody believed them.

I don't. I'm going on what I think about Matthew Prince, who wrote the post we're talking about.

Not conjecture. Documented evidence of KF users doxxing and making threats against people: https://twitter.com/oneunderscore__/status/15657982526702387...

> That's a pretty easy litmus test.

Then a proceeding in open court will be simple and fast.

A proceeding where the accused has the right to cross examine and present evidence in their defense.

I prefer that to a corporate decision done in secrecy in response to bad PR.

Most eliminationist rhetoric is still protected in the States under current precedent. It advocates unlawful action but without "imminency". It could have been forbidden under the old "clear and present danger" standard.

Forbidden eliminationist rhetoric is quite rare and would be something like the "cockroach" broadcasts in Rwanda.

All of this is irrelevant and besides the point, 'hate speech' is not a magical word you say when mean people on the internet say things you don't like.

If you can't prove material damage in a court, it should be allowed.

in the US, there needs to be serious proof of intent beyond just saying something to prosecute.

> Then that's a philosophy virtually no one actually holds.

correct. most people don't hold a free speech philosophy. people just like taking a high moral ground they don't actually have.

> Very few people think death threats, fraud, etc. fall under free speech

us govt can't prosecute death threats unless they can prove intent beyond you just saying it, they can't also arbitrarily prosecute for lying

> If you do your speech at 3am with a loudspeaker in a residential neighborhood, you're probably getting dinged for "disturbing the peace", because other people have rights too, and society winds up having to resolve the conflicts.

if you said the same thing at a much lower volume, no one would care. the problem there is noise pollution, not the content of the speech said.

I presume users on kiwifarms (KF) use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction techniques to publish private information elsewhere (such as private addresses) so that the information can then legally be reposted on KF. Coordination-of-information has an accomplice role in some of the illegal activities "reported" by KF.