Microsoft threatens to stop hosting Gab unless posts are removed

For example, QAnon believers have not had their speech restricted. That conspiracy theory is as open as anything you could name. People have challenged it. It's still going.

If you believe that challenging terrible ideas makes those who hold them think twice... why hasn't the exact argument you're using gotten rid of the terrible idea that we should restrict speech? Answer: because logical refutation doesn't work.

I am not arguing against the slippery slope. This is a very, very hard and risky problem. I am refuting the misconception that shedding light on bad ideas makes them go away.

I wish we didn't have to wait. I wish there was a large enough group of people that would boycott companies that make up the internet infrastructure (e.g. ISPs, registrars, DNS, CDNs, cloud providers, etc) for censoring lawful content. I wish we didn't require mass media articles to get groups of consumers to act in a common interest. And I would prefer it was absolute, regardless of content, because it's frustrating to watch lots of people agree with one decision and then get shocked when these companies become more choosey on the foundation of acceptability that was previously built. To be clear though, I want no government involvement in any way (on the censoring or non-censoring side).

I for one will point an Azure sales rep (or hiring recruiter) to this as a reason I will not engage with them. I have the same feeling about CloudFlare's decision. And I really don't like either of the censored groups.

If there is a sufficiently large group of willing listeners (or determined trolls), then having a bad idea out there in reach of that audience legitimizes it far faster than private discussion could. At which point, challenging them invites the creation of a cult rather than dispersing the idea.

For a frivolous example, my roommate is now convinced that the Star Wars prequels are legitimately good movies because of r/PrequelMemes.

http://comp.social.gatech.edu/papers/cscw18-chand-hate.pdf

Not to get too far off topic, but is this actually true in practice in the real world? Scientific studies have shown that the idea that gets repeated the most often is the idea that "wins". A bad idea gets repeated and spread every time it gets criticized. If the idea proves more "credible" than the criticism of it, then all that criticism does is contribute to the spread of the idea it's trying to kill.

Take the example of QAnon. It's a movement based around utter nonsense conspiracy theory. It is debunked on a daily basis. It still has a lot of followers.

Compare to Milo Yiannopoulos. I remember around the time his social media accounts were banned that people said doing so was pointless, and that banning him would only increase his popularity by making him look like an outlaw. Yet his profile has sunk almost entirely.

The common spaces have to be policed. People with bad intent have to be dealt with not left for everyone to deal with on their own. It is entirely possible to destabilize a society sufficiently for the social contract to break down simply by allowing bad actors to intentionally poison the social commons. You do not want to see that outcome if you are a non-sociopath human.

I honestly don't know where we go from here - I continue to believe that giving the state the right to determine what speech is allowed and what's not to be far more dangerous than the alternative, and that's not likely to change. But it's almost as if we've discovered that idiocy is contagious, and the vector is the internet. Maybe it's temporary, because the internet is new - maybe society, having never dealt with a deluge of information like this before has no natural immunity to it, and it will develop over time. Or maybe we've found a loophole in human cognition that will end up destroying us.

At any rate, I can't fault a private company for trying to do something about it; it's like a bus company finding out their seats are the vector for some horrible disfiguring viral disease and removing them in an attempt to stop the epidemic.

I used to subscribe to this position, but now consider it wrong for several reasons.

First, ridicule of a bad idea will have that effect anyway - people who like the idea but not the ridicule will form and gather in niche communities to incubate whatever weird ideas they hold. This is not a bad thing, as such, and can often be productive of new cultural or scientific ideas.

Second, everyone is not a rational philosopher. Some people are easily tricked by fallacious arguments, and other people are willing to treat a threshold level of social proof as equivalent to logical validation. Hence the wide currency of 'skeptical' responses to climate change, the dangers of smoking, or evolution - for a suitable fee, you can find some people who are willing to rent out their reputation or credentials and you can then manufacture the appearance of scientific controversy.

Third, proponents of bad ideas tend to make bad faith arguments, so challenging a bad idea is treated as equivalent to trying to suppress it anyway. Of course, such weak arguments don't hold up very well in philosophy journals or social fora, but that's because people in those contexts generally have academic degrees or equivalent study and there are fairly well established standards of discourse. If someone consistently makes fallacious arguments or recycles debunked ones eventually they will be ignored. In broader social fora those institutional safeguards are absent, while nontrivial socioeconomic payoffs for the production of bad faith arguments are present - in other words, you can make a good living out of pretending to believe the earth is flat because there's a market for comforting lies that help to relieve people's existential anxieties, and the cost of repeating the false ideas is relatively low compared to the cost of debunking them over and over.

Also, you keep making non-sequitur arguments, going from claiming that bad ideas will fester unnoticed in private spaces to slippery-slope 'you're next' arguments within the same paragraph. The latter does not follow from the former, and in fact implies that it is not possible to distinguish between good and bad ideas and that if bad ones are driven to the margins good ones will suffer the same fate despite their merits.

When you have a small group with social bonds, you don't have to worry about a bad actor constantly repeating their already-refuted arguments to people who haven't heard the refutation.

But when you have the whole internet as your audience, no matter how many times you are refuted, you can say it again and a whole group of people will be hearing it for the first time.

I have been on the Internet since the 80s. What I have personally found is that a lot of its social norms were lifted from academia, and they work very well as defaults in a new social media context. Like Hacker News when it was first launched.

But eventually, every "social medium" on the Internet has its "Eternal September," when the number of new folks in any conversation outweighs the old hands. At that point, the social norms that worked for the small, cohesive group no longer work.

And worse, there are specialist parasites who exploit people's reluctance to change their social norms, and the act in outrageously bad faith.

Sites like HN have survived by changing. For all of the popularity on HN of "unrestricted free speech," HN is actually moderated, and that's why it works.

Big hammer censoring is not the solution, as it enables censoring the truth too (that may threaten, incomodate, etc the one handling the big hammer), but sometimes respecting the freedom of the ones that don't respect the same right for others is not a wise policy.

  A common argument in philosophy is that bad ideas should 
  occur in the open - where everyone may ridicule them.

Problem is that on internet there is no open commons where the bad ideas can occur; instead they occur generally always on someones service on some level. This leads to the conflicting freedoms of the service providers and their clients.

(Those entertained by intellectual diversions will observe that if you assume that I am incorrect and that in fact the evidence supports OP, you end up with a logically inconsistent position.)

Problem is combining ignorance with confirmation bias and then multipling it by distribution engines like FB, Youtube, Podcast etc....

unfortunately information is NOT absolute. it's asymmetrical and heavily influenced by our limited world view, ignorance and confirmation biases.... allowing bad agents to take advantage of this fact and then allowing them to use the massive distribution channels like FB etc. is recipe for unrest.

Or is it an argument that there is not enough social shaming on the Internet? Since that's what we're likely to get instead of reasoned debate.

Maybe the old arguments in favor of debating bad ideas need to rethought to account there are so many people posting them, and they don't necessarily deserve attention. It's not 1995 anymore; we know that attention is valuable, and it's important to have efficient defenses against denial-of-service attacks due to spam, trolling, viral post-sharing, and so on. Debating every post of the same old outrage isn't efficient.

For bad ideas that aren't new, something like Snopes makes a bit more sense. And I'll point to the Ask Historians subreddit for a good example of how to run a high-quality Internet forum.

The article clearly states that the removed comments incite violence:

> "Microsoft received a complaint about specific posts on Gab.ai that advocate ‘ritual death by torture’ and the ‘complete eradication’ of all Jews. After an initial review, we have concluded that this content incites violence, is not protected by the First Amendment, and violates Microsoft Azure’s acceptable use policy," Microsoft said in a statement to The Hill.

Are you suggesting that this type of language should be protected by free speech laws?

Good evidence can't be trusted to cause change in mind, see for example the classic paper "Biased Assimilation and Attitude Polarization: The Effects of Prior Theories on Subsequently Considered Evidence (https://www.unc.edu/~fbaum/teaching/articles/jpsp-1979-Lord-...).

This is a major escalation and honestly it's changing my mind a bit about the whole issue. I was a fence sitter before but now I'm siding with the libertarian crowd on this one, and I say this as someone who is nowhere near the alt-right politically.

We're going from what amounts to forum policing (though on huge scale quasi-public forums) to infrastructure level censorship. No longer can you just "go set up your own site." Even more significantly we are seeing an incredible amount of coordination between corporations on this, proving that competition and diversity in the marketplace is not sufficient to protect the openness of the Internet as a system.

Once again: liberals really should know better, especially any that care about net neutrality. This is a really extreme example of ISP traffic discrimination and it sets a precedent that this kind of thing is okay. A top level infrastructure provider blackballing a site for speech should be a third rail regardless of the content in question.

Censors always start with the least popular ideas and speakers. They do that for a reason: they want to gauge what they can get away with and they want to shift the Overton window toward increasing support for censorship. They know that few people will overtly stand up to defend Nazis, trolls, and blithering red faced demagogues, so that's where they start. Other popular targets in the past included pornographers, lewd writers and musicians, and religious blasphemers.

Two thoughts that ought to keep you up at night even if you are inclined to agree with these moves:

(1) What happens if/when the political winds shift and someone like Donald Trump or maybe someone even to the right of him ends up in control of these powers? Who gets silenced then? A power once created becomes a political entity that can easily be handed off.

(2) What happens if/when some liberal cause -- like a reboot of unionization and a new labor movement for example -- really threatens corporate and Wall St. profits at a large scale? Will Neo-unionists get this deplatformed and shadow banned now that it's been legitimized? Will anyone even notice?

Again... we are setting a precedent here that this is okay. You really all ought to know better. The reference metric for freedom of speech is the freedom enjoyed by the most offensive and least popular speakers: political fanatics, pornographers, demagogues, hate-mongers, etc. If they are free to speak then you are free to speak. If they're not then the process of clamp-down has started and you are next.

There's a reason the ACLU has in the past defended neo-Nazis and other unpopular speakers, and it's not because they support these speakers' messages. It's because you need a canary in the coal mine.

Edit:

The conspiracy nut devil that hangs out on my shoulder whispers that this combined with the abolition of net neutrality is a coordinated campaign. Use massively unpopular triggering demagogues to get the left to abandon its commitment to free speech while simultaneously using fallacious libertarian arguments to get the right to eliminate net neutrality. Put those together and you have a Great Firewall of America and enough public support from a broad enough subset of Americans to deploy it.

(The libertarian arguments against NN are fallacious because ISPs are government backed and sometimes even funded monopolies.)

The next ratcheting up would be for peering points to refuse to peer Internet traffic that they don't like, and abolition of net neutrality would allow that. That means Gab (or tomorrow moveon.org, who knows) couldn't even host at an indie hosting provider or overseas.

But that's crazy talk right?

If sites like Gab get banned from being hosted the next step for them will be to move to decentralized platforms or Tor. If the above is true I predict that this combined with the words or deeds of a few nutjobs will be used to start convincing both liberals and libertarian-minded conservatives to start supporting bans on un-escrowed encryption as well as ISP and cloud provider efforts to block "horizontal" network traffic. This is how you'll be convinced to support a ban on P2P protocols and privacy technologies.

Then let them occur in the open. I welcome them to the nearest soapbox.

It's not clear at all, to this student of philosophy, why neo-Nazis are entitled to time on Microsoft's servers.

This includes corporate influence on governments, so that the politicians act as their servants in also squashing said good ideas.

Not sure what some of these ideas might be, off the top of my head right now, but I know that some have to exist.

I'm not placated. According to Microsoft,

>After an initial review, we have concluded that this content incites violence, is not protected by the First Amendment, and violates Microsoft Azure’s acceptable use policy

If the posts were illegal, why isn't the poster being arrested? Where are the real police in this matter? Why are California cops deferring action to the Redmond internet police?

I don’t think free speech means a platform company has some imperative to offer a level playing field to racists.

If not, how is that possible -- since Gab was created to explicitly tolerate pretty much any kind of barely-legal speech under pressure in Twitter? are we to believe that this style of expression is completely new to Gab? (or did Microsoft just now notice?)

It's a nice poetic conceit to think of good ideas as thriving in the light like flowers while bad ideas flourish in the darkness like mushrooms, but they both thrive on the same thing -- attention. To make another comparison with things that grow in the shadows: the crawlspace under my front porch is full of bugs and critters, but they didn't get there because I cast them out of my house, and I don't keep my house bug-free by periodically inviting them in for debates.

Also, so that good ideas can have their day in the sun. Lets not forget that most "good" ideas were once considered bad ideas.

List of ideas that was once considered bad.

Abolitionism. LGBT rights. Heliocentrism. Germ theory. Endless list.

The idea is that all ideas deserve discussion so that the good rises and the bad sinks.

Also, by allowing censorship when you have likeminded people in power, you also allow other people to censor in the future when power shifts.

This is just basic stuff you learn in philosophy 101. Unfortunately, we don't seem to be teaching basic principles in high school/college anymore.

People naively think that censorship keeps the bad ideas away. Most of the time, it is used to keep the good ideas away. Look at the censorship by the catholic church, soviet union, china, nazi germany, etc.

If your ideas have solid footing, you would be against censorship. It's when you can't defend your ideas that people advocate for censorship.

Yes we all know about that theory, but what we haven seen happening in the last 10 years as the internet has become populated by the masses seems to suggest that theory is very wrong.

Ugh. Did you even bother to read the article? This has absolutely nothing to do with "bad ideas." MSFT asked Gab to remove content that "incites violence." MSFT is not cracking down on anyone because they have some disagreement with their public policy positions or political philosophy.

Yelling "fire" in a crowded theater is not an "bad idea" it's deliberately putting people in immediate danger. Likewise advocating that we physically harm people or commit acts of terrorism against specific locations are not "bad ideas," they're advocating specific actions that will physically harm other people.

Obviously, there's no censorship of edgy and extreme ideas by MSFT, if MSFT wanted to do that they would not be hosting Gab to begin with.

Instead, all they're doing is cracking down on content which incites violence, which is in violation of their terms of service, and is absolutely not protected by the First Amendment.

Finally, can you cite any evidence from the psychological literature showing that shining light on bad ideas changes anyone's mind? Just about everything I've read has suggested that's not the case.

Exactly this. When the First Amendment was authored, I don't think it was even conceivable that any organization besides a government or state church could effectively censor speech at scale. Now that we have "private" organizations that effectively have that power, it's perhaps time that the law be updated to reflect that change in facts and preserve people's right to free expression.

The internet shouldn't be another Zuccotti Park.

Because ISPs are, because of infrastructure (access to and across property, or access to scarce spectrum) requirements, naturally sharply limited, but anyone who connects to an ISP can host content.

*free rein

It is not there to force companies to serve you if they don’t want to.

The solution is to simply have everyone host themselves. Even a moderate home broadband connection is more than enough to serve up your personal website.

Once you start relying on third parties you've lost. That's their property, not yours. When you claim it is yours and use government violence to enforce your wishes you are doing more damage to society than what you're trying to stop.

[...] I'm radically free speech which means I enjoy living in a world where literally everyone can say quite literally everything. Whether there is a slippery slope angle to all this is not even relevant for me.

Perhaps you'd like to explain the fundamental difference between the outcomes that lie at the bottom of these variably tolerable slopes.

Of course, I do wonder how far this goes. What happens if the DNS server refuses to host the IP lookup? Host your own DNS server? What if the browsers refuse to allow access to the site? Build your own browser? What if ISPs refuse to transfer the data over the wire? Make your own internet?

People have defended that this vs. Net Neutrality (at least the extent of the ability of an ISP to control what goes over its wires) as having a core difference, but it feels to me they are closer than people realize and the standards set by one can influence the other.

Out of curiosity, why?

partial quote:

" Gab is absolutely not a “white nationalist social media platform.” We are a free speech social media platform. We welcome everyone and have since the day we launched. My co-founder Ekrem is a Muslim Kurd in Turkey. Our Chief Communications Officer Utsav is an Indian and a practicing Hindu. Our “frog logo” that the media wants so desperately to tie to “pepe,” was inspired by Exodus 8:2–7 and was designed by our Creative Director Brandon, who is Jewish."

There happen to be plenty of people who go around collecting and rebutting white (and other ethnic) separatists/nationalists on Gab, and they aren't being repressed (in fact, some are receiving tips for the service).

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This seems to accurately describe "free speech twitter". All the content that would get people banned on twitter is displaced into sites like Gab and 4chan. The few occasions I've perused these sites supported this: there were lots of hateful speech against minorities, but a few instances of hateful speech against the majority. A very narrow minority were the latter, but as far as I could tell these sites upheld their commitment to freedom of any legal speech for all and didn't censor them.

Wow, what a sad website. I don't quite understand the mindset/vitriol/hate/anger/etc here (the reason for it or need for it) psychologically speaking.

In any case I've taken my own simple screenshots of the repost in case it disappears, which I expect will happen eventually. If anyone absolutely needs them let me know.

Twitter is full of racism and calls for violence (even genocide) against white people

Why would they give Little the option to delete his posts instead of banning him and removing the posts themselves? If I was in their position, it wouldn't even be a question of free speech considering he was breaching the ToS.

"When our enemies say: But we used to grant you freedom of opinion -- yes, you granted it to us, that is no proof that we should do the same for you! That you gave us that just proves how stupid you are!"

(source: https://de.wikiquote.org/wiki/Joseph_Goebbels and https://www.sr-mediathek.de/index.php?seite=7&id=37143 ; translation by me)

IMO Europes rules are designed this way on purpose, they are sort of exporting their rules, and eventually if that's allowed to continue the internet will devolve to the lowest common denominator. Whomever has the biggest most enforceable fines rules the internet.

Perhaps, but that's not really an argument against complaint-based ToS enforcement. The US (or any other) government may lack the ability for a complete and fair manual triage of all behavior subject to their jurisdiction, but few people argue that complaint-based enforcement of criminal law is therefore unacceptable.

Fighting words are not covered by the first amendment according to the established supreme court interpretation. Regardless of your views on freedom of speech, it is not in any way relevant to the posts in question. The court would certainly uphold Microsoft's decision to step in.

It would be interesting to have a sort of two-column format, where one column is who you normally follow, and the other column is an auto-generated list of people in the most opposite social-graph cluster.

The lifeblood of places like Twitter is the ability for people to get into loud arguments that people feel matter more than they actually do. If Twitter ever actually did a full purge of one side of the ideological spectrum they'd find a massive decrease in interest. People want to fight deep down and so need the other around.

> Late yesterday, Dorsey posted a tweetstorm explaining Twitter’s decision not to ban notorious conspiracy theorist Alex Jones ... At that point, current Twitter employees got in on the action. Marina Zhao, a senior software engineer on the Twitter Moments team, called out her CEO for muddled thinking

haha, good one!

Untrue. Religious extremist content has been silently taken down for years.

People advocating for workers rights, anarchists and communists have all had a history of facing censorship online.