Comment by ajross | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ajross | Hacker News Reader

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> Maybe letting racists have a platform [is] better than hand-by-hand justification of what is and isn't "appropriate" to host.

Or, maybe it's not? I don't see that that follows. Yes, there's the slippery slope argument that someday a host could make a decision we don't agree with. But (1) hosts do that anyway, all the time, and (2) if fucking white power racism isn't on solid, level ground above the slope, then what else could be?

The solution to private sector choice about hosting and distribution of controversial content can't be a blanket protection for all speech. The first amendment is about public law, because of the reach of the government and the potential damage from abuse.

The solution in the end really can only be a case-by-case determination, individually by every host, as to what they are comfortable seeing on their systems. Which is exactly what we have here, even if CloudFlare's internal process was exposed as messier than we'd like to see.

Or, the internet has matured enough that we consider it a public utility and seriously form legislation that protects peoples' constitutional rights even on the internet. I literally don't see how anything TDS says is physically harming anyone. I've never been to the site, I don't give them my traffic, money, anything.. If you don't like them and find them so vile it's causing you mental stress then just navigate away and ignore the vile scum.

Works for well-adjusted, rational adults (hopefully). Not so much for children. It's moral pornography.

The idea that public utilities (e.g. public broadcast spectrums) must conform to a negotiated standard of decency is well-established even at the court level. It wouldn't necessarily be protected free speech, even if the publically-accessible internet were a public utility (which it isn't), especially if private alternatives exist (which they do, e.g. tor).

This is why well adjusted rational adults are responsible for raising children. You teach a child what is right and what is wrong and then hope beyond all else that when they set out on their own you've given them a strong moral compass. You don't neglect the responsibility and blame the government for not censoring all the bad things on the internet from them when they screw up later in adulthood. Are you really arguing society should be 100% childproof? We can't put anything on the internet that someone might find objectionable to a child.

> I literally don't see how anything TDS says is physically harming anyone.

That's your fault for not knowing about their propensity to violence.

Their rally this week resulted in 3 deaths.

The answer is that this is, in fact, a slippery slope, because though TDS seem to be something that could be reasonably called actual Nazis (I honestly haven't investigated them to determine the validity of the accusation), we've also got an enormous cottage industry with a thriving amateur sideline of political activists calling anyone they disagree with Nazis. And it's entirely possible for the "X is a Nazi" narrative to get off the ground and self-perpetuate without any actual truth to it, with no one involved actually examining the claim. A lie can run around the world, &c.

If you agree to censor any category of thing, then you'll immediately have a large group of unscrupulous people attempting to cast all their enemies as that thing. The only general countermeasure is to not censor anything.

We can solve that easily: We just call people Nazis who call themselves Nazis. Problem solved.

This would be great. Unfortunately, people especially in large groups don't seem to have the emotional strength to withhold from doing that.

These mass conversations quickly devolve from debates to name-calling and the click-incentivized media is quick to encourage it (more outrage = more clicks = more ads = more $)

Given that this is the first time in several decades that white racism and "neo-nazi" beliefs have broken through into a national news story, I'm going to say that you're flat wrong on this.

Being called e.g. a feminazi by right wing nutjobs happens every day. I don't believe CloudFlare has ever canceled the registration of a feminist site because of it.

This situation was different. It was more serious. The crimes were more obvious, and more hateful. And it's simply not about the name-calling that you think you see against whoever your favorite group (gonna guess "not feminists") on the internet is.

And when serious evil shit happens, I want to live in a world where I can trust moral people to agree that it's serious and evil, and not equivocate to make a bunch of glibertarians feel better.

I'm not saying Charlottesville wasn't bad. I'm saying that the practice of calling everyone who doesn't agree with you a "nazi" dilutes the meaning with bad stuff actually happens (like Charlottesville). As bad as that was, there's only 4,000 KKK members in the US. That's a lot of people, but that's a crazy small percentage of people in general overall. At a certain population number, you'll have a set # of people that have hold terrible beliefs. That doesn't mean it's okay, but it might just be reality. Given that, I still think the best way to engage with those people is to engage with them - not to name call. Case in point[1].

You don't need to infer who my "favorite groups" are. I'm more interested in actual discussion than playing team games. Some of my favorite people in the world to talk with have complete opposite viewpoints from me. We may not agree, but being able to hold a civilized discussion helps each of us learn. That would never happen if we didn't talk and just called each other names.

[1] http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/kkk-klu-klu...

Sorry, the notion of farcically inappropriate analogy to Nazi Germany is so common and pervasive that we literally have a meme for it.

It honestly seems like you're saying that companies like CloudFlare can't take a stand against real-life, actual nazis because Godwin's Law happened.

And that's why folks like me are so utterly horrified by the behavior of our seemingly moral counterparts on the right. We watched political discourse go off a cliff in the past few days and you guys all want to just wave it off as no big deal and have an argument about statues and domain hosting and stuff. It's a big deal. Not something to Godwin about.

This comment really nails it and makes me wish I was able to express in so few words what I feel. Thank you.

> a thriving amateur sideline of political activists calling anyone they disagree with Nazis

Sorry, who has lost domain hosting because of an unfounded accusation of nazism? This sounds like a straw man to me, informed more from a tribal allegiance than an actual concern.

No one has lost domain hosting, that I'm aware of. But at least one person got pepper-sprayed, more have been beaten in the street and others have had people going after their jobs based on mistaken identity.

This doesn't address the fundamental point: that if you declare a willingness to censor anyone, then you'll immediately have a whole lot of people trying to convince you that their personal enemies fall in the censor-worthy category. I don't trust domain registrars or CDNs to be the final arbiters of Who Really Is a Nazi.

> if you declare a willingness to censor anyone

How is that what happened, though? This is explicitly an internal decision. CloudFlare made it on its own, without input. They didn't "declare" themselves "willing" to do anything.

Isn't their behavior exactly the solution to the problem you're straw-manning? You allow individuals in the private sector to make their own moral decisions about hosting. Problem solved.

I mean, I'll just say it again: if you can't trust a hosting/distribution agent to make their own decision about white power racism, then you live in a bleak world without any effective morality. That might work within your safe spaces on the internet, but those of us in the real world need to trust each other to get stuff done.

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