Hacker News Reader

Comment by not_a_cop75 | Hacker News Reader

"They are, however, both well-known breeding grounds for radicalism and extremism." First of all, they are hot beds for the 1st amendment. If you believe in the 1st amendment, then you believe that places where people can voice their opinions, no matter how misled, should exist.

Secondly, this journalist has no idea what the darkweb is and should be put on leave until they actually do their research.

Lastly, and this is a biggie: If you ban people who talk about terrible things, all you've done is succeed in moving them where they are harder to monitor.

View on HN

The 1st amendment is very important however it doesn't contradict the fact that these forums are "well-known breeding grounds for radicalism and extremism".

Second, since those sites are many times being DDoS or going offline, they also have a mirror on the darkweb (TOR & ZeroNet).

Third, as the article states, there are many other forums on the darkweb that exploit the anonymity to incite and share violent propaganda.

They can be both.

When I re-read this article and some others in the same context, I think the journalist meant that such type of discussion threads, even though backed up by the 1st amendment is considered to be dangerous and might evolve into a more physical reaction, thus they considered it as dark web.

Hate speech isnt protected speech. Sorry, friend, the constitution doesn't offer the right to blame Jews for everything and call black people 'nigger'

Why wouldn't both those things be protected?

I'm glad that you will happily incriminate whites as long as they are not also Jews. That can not possibly be racist.

The 1st Amendment is irrelevant.

At best you can appeal to a general principle of "freedom of speech," but you cannot appeal to the right to free speech protected by that amendment, which has to do with limiting the Government's ability to curtail freedom of expression.

8chan and 4chan are private entities.

https://xkcd.com/1357/

Well, it depends. If the government is perceived as using corporations to do their dirtywork, then it would definitely fall under that law. And we know from government history that the government does indeed do this from time to time.

And certainly the right to say something never guarantees freedom from the repercussions of saying it. That was never implied in my words, although maybe you've pulled that from some groupthink somewhere.

If there's any groupthink somewhere, it's in the notion that "[N-chans] are hot beds for the 1st amendment."

They are not. Nothing prevents them from creating and enforcing standards of conduct, not even the constitution.

group·think /ˈɡro͞opˌTHiNGk/ the practice of thinking or making decisions as a group in a way that discourages creativity or individual responsibility.

What newspapers or media outlets are defending these sites? I have not seen a single one.

Why limit it to media? Ideas travel through so many other vectors, too, like from n-chan-denizen to n-chan-denizen via comments on n-chan.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com