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we have a centralized overlord?


Several:

- Google (including GMail)

- Twitter

- Meta (Facebook, Instagram)


And discussion outside of these platforms is impossible?


Not impossible. Insignificant in volume.


He said on a platform that's controlled by any of those organizations.


The number of people here who claim to hate moderation blows my mind.

If someone thinks far right content is reasonable and good it would be refreshing to hear that take.

Instead people bend themselves into logical pretzels to oppose the idea of moderation for supposedly “content neutral” reasons. It’s tiresome.


It would be equally refreshing to see "moderation" advocates acknowledge that it's not just the "far right" being bullied and censored off of mainstream platforms.

That straw man incinerated and replaced with "mainstream conservative content", you still are not going to get any examples because the one providing that will be voted/flagged into invisibility, or if not that, the resulting discussion will be derailed into quibbling about the specific example rather than the much more important general principle.

It would be not at all honest to imply that this forum is anything but generally hostile to the American right, regardless of how extreme or not the take is. With that in mind, it is no surprise that specific positions are only ever mentioned indirectly, or negatively.


Yes no proponent of this law ever complained about ISIS recruiting accounts being banned by twitter.


It is definitely federally illegal on the grounds of sanctions [1], if not treason, to knowingly provide service to the Islamic State. Twitter's hands are tied.

[1]: https://sanctionssearch.ofac.treas.gov/Details.aspx?id=8759


So I guess government restricting free speech is fine?


If you are in a democratic country, your society has explicitly granted your government authority through your voting systems to be the ultimate arbiter and parts of it can and does get revoked as the will of the society changes.


Whataboutism. Government passing laws on free speech is unrelated to internet platforms enforcing arbitrary rules depending on the outrage mob of the week.


Also I am not certain that publishing tweets is a violation of sanctions?


Personally I complained about that to anyone who'd listen.


I, for one, would like to hear far right takes just in case they're reasonable and good. I don't want to have to argue that any particular one is good without even being able to see them.


Should boys be allowed into a girls locker room. Ignoring feelings of the girls. That is now considered a far right questions.

Should a million or two people be allowed to enter the country with no rules or oversight. Again, far right.

Should parents have a say in child’s education. Far right question.


And then I found the strawmen three, but not the original ones we were looking for.


The context where those count as "far right" is when someone is lying about the actual issue.

Those three actual opinions are completely uncontroversial. But people pretend other issues are those issues so they can be the common-sense instant victor.


Ah yes, because it's the questions and not the answers that have ideological implications.


These takes are all over social media so if they’re supposed to be banned then the real crime is how bad social media giants are at tracking down this nonsense.

What mostly gets banned at big social media sites is spam and bots. The political speech that does get banned is overwhelmingly violent.

The right gets banned more because there is no liberal equivalent of the Christchurch shooter, the Buffalo shooter, the El Paso shooter, the Charleston shooter, the Tree of Life shooter.

The last president got kicked from Twitter because he tried to violently overthrow our government.

Kiwifarms was finally taken down by cloudflare only because of immediate threats of violence.

The right wing in the US has a violence problem. Culture war junk and social media moderation policies pale in comparison to this problem.


I'm not sure why you're trying to link Kiwi Farms to the far right. I wouldn't consider myself a fan of the site, but from what I've seen it's very much apolitical and political views from either side are generally frowned upon.

>Kiwifarms was finally taken down by cloudflare only because of immediate threats of violence.

A single threat of violence originating from a long dormant account which had posted once, in 2018. It was reported multiple times and removed by Kiwi Farms moderators within 30 minutes. It wouldn't be unreasonable to conclude that there might've been shenanigans at play. Possibly by the same actors behind the DDoS campaign.


Your just repeating liberal lies.


Echoing the sibling to this, this is not a viewpoint I have seen expressed before. Do you have a link?


A link to their own opinions? Huh?


It is both reasonable and good.


It would be refreshing to hear this take for once :)


But not tiresome enough you keep engaging with the pretzly people :)


I yearn for the day we can defeat bad faith losers and get back to discussing what really matters: tabs vs spaces.


“I’m flabbergasted these strawmen I’m attacking exist!”


Do you have a link to these strawmen?


It's controlled by Ycombinator, who uses the forum to showcase their own interests.


They certainly did not.


So free speech = free access to a high volume of people?


“I’ve been sending the Times a list of headlines to publish every week, and so far they’ve all been censored your honor!”


Email and other Internet infrastructure is more analogous to the phone company than news publishing, because you do not need to "peer" with other newspapers to get published.

Imagine if Bell was touchy about letting "undesirables" use their service.


Oh I 100% agree, if this argument were about the ISPs, which control access to the infrastructure via local monopolies.

It’s not. It’s about individual private publishers, of which there are potentially infinite. That is the beauty of the internet.


The internet infrastructure is completely controlled via local monopolies and bureaucracies, and this extends beyond ISPs. The entire DNS and PKI system for example is simply a racketeering scheme for registrars and CAs. In general the internet (from the hardware to application-level) is structured in such a way that is weak to sybil attacks, and this requires central (usually corporate) entities to discriminate on traffic.

EMail is one such example: there is no meaningful way to filter spam, so the peering relationships between mail providers break down unless they each implement some sybil-proofing on their own side. The end product is that everyone is forced to use a provider like Google, and play a corporate-political game to stay in good favor with their peers. This is because there is no spam-resistance on Email application level

We've seen a similar situation this week with a controversial forum called KiwiFarm taken down by DDoS. They need to maintain a political relationship with their DDoS-protection provider, CloudFlare, who also controls a massive chunk of the internet infrastructure. This is all so that there can be a central entity that discriminates on the traffic, as there's no spam resistance features on IP level.

https://secushare.org/broken-internet


You can set up your own mail provider, but if GMail blocks messages sent from your new provider, it will never overcome network effects needed for success.


You mean like Truth Social?


Ask Parler


Yes.




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