Entrusting our speech to multiple different corporate actors is always risky. Yet given how most of the internet is currently structured, our online expression largely depends on a set of private companies ranging from our direct Internet service providers and platforms, to upstream ISPs (sometimes...
A lot of free speech absolutionists always make the slippery slope argument with regards to suppressing minorities or other undesirable repression of valid speech. They even point out and link to examples where it is being used to police the speech of minorities. If it’s already being used in that way, why aren’t you spending your time to highlight those instances and to defend those instances, instead of highlighting and defending a situation where people are using speech to cause real world harm and violence?
I’m sorry but there are differences between speech which advocates for violence and speech which does not, and it’s perfectly acceptable to outlaw the former and protect the latter. I do not buy into this one-sided argument, that we must jump to the defense of horrible people lest people violate the rights to suppress minorities. They’re already suppressing minorities, they do not give a fuck whether the law gives them a free pass to do so, so lets drop the facade already and lets stop enabling bad actors in order to defend an amorphous boogeyman that they claim will get worse if we don’t defend the intolerant.
I must disagree.
We need not wait for marginalized groups to be impacted to decry T1 ISP censorship. Ban whatever speech you want; the method of enforcement should be to arrest the perpetrators - not stop the sale of paper, the delivery of mail, or blocklist class A ip ranges.
On a more philosophical level, this is the question of “kindergarten policy” - do we punish those who crayon on the walls, or do we take away everybody’s crayons. To punish the ability to do wrong, or the act of doing wrong. Like most philosophical questions, there’s no good answer to this.
To do that, you have to know who the perpetrators are, which is routinely impossible.
This isn’t a hypothetical situation, we are living in a world where servers are kicked off the internet, SSL certificates are revoked, vast quantities of emails are deleted without even sending them to a spam folder, lemmy communities are closed down, etc.
In a perfect world, none of that would be necessary and we could simply send the perpetrators to jail. But we don’t live in a perfect world. We live in one where censorship is the only option.
Requiring arrest to be the correct method of suppressing abhorrent speech is actually way worse than letting ISPs decide to deny it a platform.
This isn’t about defending KF, this is about who decides whom to kick off the Internet: a private entity like an ISP, or an officially appointed judge.
The judicial system may have its flaws, but historically it’s been more reliable and fair, than private entities.
Exactly. I’m tired of more and more of my life being decided by boardroom execs instead of elected officials. Why are we trying to privatize ethical decision making? Government officials may be only barely accountable, but at least that’s more than a private company. And don’t even get me started on ‘voting with your wallet’. I feel like that phrase is going to be as ridiculed by later generations as we ridicule ‘trickle down economics’.
To me, going after oblique methods (like shutting off basic utilities) just to deal with criminal behavior represents a failure of the system. And the response to that failure shouldn’t be to make these hacky workarounds more accessible, but rather should be addressing the core problems in the first place. We shouldn’t be lobbying to shut off rapists power and water anymore than we should be trying to self sabotage our Internet infrastructure to deal with our rampant hate speech issues. Instead we should focus on actually addressing these issues by proper enforcement of laws we already have (which is often the sole issue), clarifying and updating where appropriate and developing responsive and auditable methods of problematic speech. In a way that isn’t totally up how one CEO feels that day.
Why are we so quick to relinquish control of our digital lives to the very corporations we claim to hate?
The system is failing right now. People are exercising any means to get the system to listen. When someone in the system finally listened, the response is to complain that action is happening? Is this ideal? No, but also these aren’t public utilities. We don’t have laws which make them such. We don’t have protections to ensure the utilities don’t cause harm (there’s no obligation to provide power to someone who wired their own home, not up to code because we want to protect our public utilities). Furthermore this gets complicated in terms of who’s hosting the content versus who’s routing it - we might not allow a utility company to shut off power, but we certainly allow the police to do so and we give them instructions on how and when to do it.
Why is the EFF grandstanding and making a blog post about this specific issue when there are so many other examples, including ones that they quite literally link to, where real harm is being caused? KF isn’t suing, this isn’t an announcement about how they are going to provide legal support. This is the system working exactly how it has always worked, and they decide to make this the hill that they wish to die on? There’s a thousand other hills already present why aren’t they getting blog posts?
This isn’t relinquishing control. We never had it. Maybe focus on that? Maybe focus on how things could be better? How the system should work? We don’t need to make a martyr out of these assholes.
My initial concern is that internet access is mostly considered a utility which at least the UN considers a human right. “If you can take away a right, it’s not a right, it’s a privilege.” That being said, “rights” are a social construct anyway which we regularly violate for “good” reasons, eg prison violates one’s right to freedom of movement, and as an institution they weirdly reinforce The State’s monopoly on violence and arbitration of who qualifies as “human” - in a twisted sort of way, prisoners are rendered “less human” by the state by their rights being taken away. Maybe it would be better to consider taking away internet access via ISPs sort of the moral equivalent of turning off someone’s water if they’re using it to poison the town well? If you abuse your right, you don’t get to use it anymore as a defensive mechanism for everyone else’s rights, ala sex offenders being put on a list which violates their privacy for better protection of more vulnerable groups.
I’d rather prisons focused on rehabilitation, and kept everyone in there until they were sufficiently rehabilitated. Instead of having second class citizens who can’t participate in society because of what they’re branded with, and prisons that do everything they can to break people and make them incapable of seeing themselves as part of society.
Thanks for this comment. I totally get how it can feel like ‘free speech defenders’ have a blanket defense that ends up protecting evil people. And you’re right.
The world has become so loud with instant global communication. So many different ideas, cultures, personalities, perspectives… I think we all wish we could turn down the volume, but none more so than for people that spew hate.
No group deserves to receive threats of violence, harassment, or belittling of their existence. While I think we sit in agreement that it should be an obvious choice to ban people like Nazis and stop there, you could easily apply my previous sentence to many groups of people. There are some left-leaning communities where you’ll see people wishing Trump to be strung up, or saying MAGA supporters should use their second amendment right and kill themselves. Many members of those communities would never condone violence against the former president or his supporters, but whoever we give the power to make the ‘free speech’ decision may see it differently.
The whole concept of free speech is not that everybody has a good idea. It’s that nobody can be trusted to decide what is a good idea. If you believe in free speech, you believe in hearing a lot of bad ideas that can make people very uncomfortable. While I do agree that there can be very minimal exceptions to this in extreme circumstances, (death threats, stalking, harassment) we need to be very careful about who makes the call.
This is asking we put the responsibility of that arbitration in the hands of Spectrum and AT&T. Take a minute and think about that.
No, they already have that responsibility and are already arbitrating it. ISPs already block content. This is the existing system working entirely how it was designed.
Do I want a better system? Yes. But we don’t have it. So let’s not defend assholes who don’t deserve it until we’ve created a system which protects the people we want it to.