Comment by int_19h | Hacker News Reader

Comment by int_19h | Hacker News Reader

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I disagree with the author in very strong terms - but only with their premises, not with their conclusions. The conclusions are accurate - if you believe that the ability to censor public discourse is necessary to maintain a stable and desirable society, then of course IPFS and similar projects are counter-productive.

(FWIW it's refreshing to actually see this being argued openly and honestly, instead of the usual "of course we support free speech, but ..." tripe.)

The parade of horribles presented as evidence is not particularly convincing, though, although bias (either way) can make a big difference here. But while we're at it, since the blog post mentioned the Christchurch shooting in 8chan context as an example of the case where censorship would be desirable, I want to talk about the censorship that happened after - specifically, the attempts to take down copies of the terrorist's manifesto that were floating around. NZ apparently had some emergency legal powers to criminalize distribution outright, which is bad enough. But the real mess was Australia; they didn't have any legal pretext to ban it, but there was a strong social consensus - among people who make decisions, anyway - that "somebody ought to do something".

So, the Australian ISPs made a synchronized private effort to censor it, to the point of domain-blocking several large forums where the manifesto was posted and not removed by the local admins (because it didn't violate their lax rules, nor local laws!), while the government caught up on legislation. Effectively, it was a private censorship cartel, and the citizens that didn't like the outcome had no recourse - not even the usual democratic mechanisms to repeal the laws etc, since there were no laws involved. This is the kind of stuff that the present non-decentralized structure of the Internet makes possible, and the inherent power makes it a near certainty that it'll be abused eventually, whether for cynical political suppression or a do-gooder witch hunt. I'd rather take my risks with more decentralization - some parts might stink more than others, but at least I'll have a choice.

You are conflating censorship with moderation (a.k.a self-censorship), particularly by stating that "there were no laws involved". eg. If you have kids in a school and someone makes innuendo to do significant major harm to that school you have the RIGHT to remove that post even if it's not legally required. The "private censorship cartel" you speak of may have just been a precautionary reflex to stop future litigation or even widescale boycott of one's online service, which is a direct democracy, since you mention democratic mechanisms.

Fwiw, the Australian who carried out the act in question here in NZ did so because Australia had banned the specific weapons used after the Hobart massacre. We here in NZ hadn't experienced such a massacre and were slow to act. He was easily able to legally acquire the weapons here that may have been very hard to acquire at home, thus the Australian problem was "exported" to a softer target in a near jurisdiction. I expect the early online reaction in Australia may have been tacit acknowledgement of this fact.

Transparency: I'm an Australian in Christchurch.

Censorship is restriction on others' flow of information. Legal censorship by governments is only one of its many forms, and private censorship has a very long history. What the ISPs did in Australia was very much censorship, since Internet users in the country were locked out from several websites, even if they wanted to access the content there.

I also don't think that justification matters all that much - indeed, the whole point is that, just because the majority of the population might want to censor something, that doesn't make such censorship any more inherently legitimate. The laws against "gay propaganda" in Russia are similarly supported by the majority of the population, but they're no less wrong and oppressive for that. .

> "Censorship is restriction on others' flow of information."

There was nothing stopping people emailing the manifesto to each other privately using any archive formats. That is different from having to provide a free soapbox for supporters of the manifesto. Just as you have the right to block someone commenting on your Twitter posts. The ISPs are businesses and have legal terms and conditions to remove anything. That is not censorship. Here in NZ it became illegal to transfer the manifesto, but primarily the video which was deemed offensive under existing censor laws.

> "The laws against "gay propaganda" in Russia are similarly supported by the majority of the population, but they're no less wrong and oppressive for that."

If the Russian example you give is supported by the majority then that is by definition democratic, even though propaganda created that public sentiment in the first place. Should propaganda (manifestos of hate in this case) be censored? Your own example suggests "yes it should".

There was nothing, yes. But if Austalian mail providers joined the fray, the same excuse would apply to them as well. At what point does it become "genuine" censorship on your scale? Even in China, there are ways to get past the firewall, so if the ability to pass information somehow is sufficient to have freedom of speech, then China has that.

The Russian example doesn't work out the way you think it does, though. Yes, it's by definition democratic, and it's also oppressive - but saying that the propaganda that led to its popularity should be censored to prevent such laws amounts to saying that democracy is a sham, because people should only be allowed (by whom?) to hold "safe" opinions. If that argument were made openly - that we should abandon democracy in favor of rule by the enlightened elite, because people just can't be trusted to make the right choices unconstrained - I'd still disagree, but that would be a different conversation. But advocating censorship of political propaganda for the purpose of maintaining the illusion of democracy is just hypocritical.

My actual takeaway from that story is simply that nobody should have the power to do such things on a large scale. In a more decentralized political system, there can still be localized hotspots of oppression - but they don't suddenly apply to tens of millions of people at once, and with no easy way to escape.

> If the Russian example you give is supported by the majority then that is by definition democratic, even though propaganda created that public sentiment in the first place. Should propaganda (manifestos of hate in this case) be censored? Your own example suggests "yes it should".

Not at all. If you give governments powers to censor people, sooner or later you will have someone in power that will use those tools maliciously against their own populace.

Therfore you don't allow a government (or anyone else for that matter) to censor except in very specific circumstances e.g. when the content is considered obscene (child pornography being an example).

That why it is important that everyone has a right to speak their mind, even if it highly objectionable.

Knuth writes in the beginning of The Art of Computer Programming that he will deliberately lie to the reader, to further her understanding of the main subject.

> if you believe that the ability to censor public discourse is necessary to maintain a stable and desirable society

I understand this can make sense, when reading capacity of each individual is limited

When you get a advance warning about a "lie", is it really still a lie? Although I would argue that even if it is, the warning is enough for you to establish consent to be lied to, so it's not actually harming you. Real censorship is different.

Of course, the real problem with censorship is that whoever ends up in charge of it, automatically gets immense political power - including the ability to suppress opposition to censorship, thus perpetuating the arrangement. I would argue that the only reason why we haven't seen more abuses of that yet is because the Internet infrastructure was not originally designed to make such large-scale censorship easy, and as this changes more towards centralization, censorship will be more pervasive and more oppressive, as well. Countries where the government could mandate infrastructure tailored to censorship (e.g. China) are a good example. Now, some argue that, so long as functioning democracy is retained, it doesn't matter, because any such censorship in a democracy would be majoritarian in nature, and thus it's a fundamentally different and justifiable case, but one only has to look at historical moral panics in various democracies to see the flaw in this argument.

I think this is actually very insightful. What if we agree with Knuth, and we add "but only sporadically and in a limited way"? That's a much more subtle and interesting line of thought.

I wonder if that applied to sites like drive.google.com... If you are going to censor, you should treat all the players equally. The annoyance from customers when google doesn't work after all is small price to pay right?

Completely agree with you. Government-Corporate marriage does wonders to democracy and freedom.

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