FSE meets the FBI
blog.freespeechextremist.com
blog.freespeechextremist.com
Nitpicking time: The link in the blog post just goes to a list of instances that have chosen to defederate. The reason it's not going to any sort of official Fediblock list is because Fediblock was shut down years ago. The author of Fediblock expressed the specific intention of not being definitive in any way and for people to thoroughly cross reference listed instances' standards with their own. My intuition tells me that the author wanted to link to the entry of Fediblock, and failing to find it, substituted that link for its nearest equivalent without fact-checking anything ever.
The notion of FSE whining about being blocked by some cabal is hilarious to me. No, they’re garden variety trolls that are capable of annoying others directly. There’s no grand conspiracy required to make a bunch of people disconnect from them.
Are they whining about being blocked? I didn't catch it in the article, but maybe I missed it?
The only thing I saw was kind of the opposite of whining: "FSE being fedi's equivalent of a dive bar, I understand people on "gated community" instances not wanting to deal with it"
They seem totally fine & understanding if people want to block them. They just don't want the block reason to be a lie (e.g. saying they allow loli stuff when they don't). Presumably, you saying they are a bunch of assholes as your reason for blocking them would be completely accepted by them.
> I'd like to also thank fediblock for never fact-checking anything ever
and link to a list of all instances who have blocked them for any reason whatsoever. My instance is on that list, as though I blocked them because of fediblock. In reality, it’s impossible for them to know why someone blocked them without doing a survey or something.
The rest of the sentence is important to the meaning of the sentence, though...?
"giving the false impression that things that FSE has never permitted were allowed." with a link to a claim that they allow loli.
(For what it is worth, I've blocked them as well, but I still didn't read this paragraph as them "whining about a cabal")
It seems like you're laser-focused on the fact that they link to fediblock instead of the actual words of the sentence.
Their complaint is not about being blocked, they make that clear in the part of the sentence you decided not to quote. They apparently just don't want the reason in the "Reason" column to be a lie.
It's probably a good bet to just read the whole sentence they wrote.
"I understand people on "gated community" instances not wanting to deal with it [...] but I would prefer if they did not lie about their reasons or about me personally."
They (seemingly) just don't want pedos thinking it's okay to post on there. Which is a good thing. So, if you're filling out a reason, just put "massive assholes" or whatever instead something untruthful.
Note that I never told you that you’re not allowed to talk to them. I just said they’re not allowed to harass me or my users anymore. You can still hang out with them all you like.
I guess your users were okay with you setting blocks?
Hang out with anyone you want to, and I’ll do the same. And yes, my users are specifically OK with it. Our moderation actions are public, we put them to a vote when there’s some question about the right thing to do, and I’ve blogged a lot about the details of it all. Users tend to join and stay with my instance because they agree with my moderation actions, not in spite of them.
Thanks! We’ve been online for 8 years and it’s been a lot of fun, other than dealing with moderation of bad actors. Like the one above who called me an n-word, for instance. Although that was one of the easier mod decisions we had to make, to be sure!
Take religion for example, seemingly most people that have one tend to believe not only they are right about it (if you debate it's correctness it shows your lack of faith), they are trying to convert you and if they fail you are an enemy.
You don't even need to assert your own position, just ask question like "What is your intent behind saying that" or "Why does it have to be this specific way?" to derail them into some status quo. Provoke them into explaining their "great plan" until they tumble.
But at the same time because of this there are some that say that this limits conversations and topics that can be discussed on HN. So, no you can't make everyone happy, but you can attempt to at least make the atmosphere pleasant.
So are we just not supposed to debate anything ever? Just find a convenient excuse to ban/block/mute and move on?
> The paradox of tolerance pretty much demands you weed out the extremists or they will be all that's left
Too bad everyone has a different idea of who an "extremist" is, and conveniently ignores the ones on their side.
Does HN have diverse opinions?
Some say yes, others will say no. It depends on the topic.
Now the moment you start acting like a jerk on HN you'll get a message from Dang or one of the other mods, and if you keep it up you'll be banned.
Diverse opinions are fine. The problem is there are a lot of people that get way too wound up in the rightness of their opinion, and there are others that are just trolls that live on the conflict. When you start banning the trolls/extremists they go off and make articles like "Site X bans any difference of opinion because they are big meanies" Then other groups like free speech extremists show up to complain about how the site is authoritarian in the most annoying and offensive ways possible, and it's not long after that admins block entire topics to make the problem FOAGA.
Being an admin/moderator of places where people can post will quickly drain you of understanding and compassion. The frog and the scorpion is a good fable here. You get tired of the scorpions asking for a ride then stabbing you in the back on your forums.
Me: "let's hang anybody with account in their username"
You: "why don't you come over to my house, I wouldn't want to seem like a tyrant!"
You see how this might not work out in your favor.
Calling someone the "n-word" doesn't really need a lot of cultural translation to be considered offensive.
You mean, you personally weren’t the target of an insult and you apparently are mystified as to why any other people’s feelings are taken into consideration
As far as they are concerned, the worst offense against propriety you can do is to ... call them racists. That is totally always unfair.
Isn’t that how the fediverse works? You sign up for an instance based on if you like how they admin it, and if you don’t, you join a different instance?
I’m failing to see how that is a problem for users if they aren’t compelled to stay
You’re using words like you’re pro liberty but the implications of you’re sentences is hyper authoritarian
Doesn't this mean you can just go to an instance that has mutual open communication with both other instances and then have access to both feeds? This is what happens IRL when I have two friend groups that don't engage, I engage with them both as a separate person.
How do i find these neutral instances? I tried around some but with unsatisfying results.
People who’ve been on my server for many years implicitly mostly agree with my actions. If they didn’t, they’d have migrated.
No. In exercising my freedom of speech to say I don’t want to hear their trash, and I don’t want them harassing my users. Their freedom of speech doesn’t say they have the right to force me to listen to them.
(For people following along at home: the speech I’m talking about here isn’t a debate about appropriate fiscal policy, but about vile escaped-from-4chan trash. I’d never block someone for disagreeing with my politics. I’ll block their ass in a heartbeat for a timeline filled with swastikas and death threats.)
Typical scenario is that someone gives me their fedi ident and i can't follow them because either my instance blocked theirs or theirs blocked mine.
Ideally i'd have a tool that knows all fedi blocks, where i can specify the people i want to follow and it tells me on what instance i need to register to be able to do that.
Currently researching managed fedi hosting...
So you expect someone else to incur that cost and not exercise control over how their resources are used, so you can use it for free/low effort?
It has been my experience that the more vocal someone is about free speech rights the more likely it is that they are only vocal because they want to use those rights as a shield against criticism of their bigoted, annoying, or anti-social behavior and they want to criticize people for distancing themselves from the bigotry.
To them free speech is mandatory listening-- to them, no matter what.
I'm A-OK with people saying constructive, civil things I disagree with. I might reply with my disagreement but that's OK. We're talking! I have zero patience with someone jumping in with trolling, harassment, or other abuse.
What's the difference between this and saying "Criminals want trials with defence lawyers, so people who want trials with defence lawyers are criminals"?
> I blocked them because one of their users called me the n-word
Still, fun read though. Also made me definitively realize I can't imagine myself hosting a community space for others online.
1) Gentleman is doing citizen science figuring out a small part of the FBI's intelligence gathering/spying apparatus.
2) Random Fediverse drama tidbits.
3) Interesting sysadmin tactics for small server operators.
4) This torswats fellow sounds like a piece of work and gets arrested which adds an interesting subplot.
5) Seems like quite an intelligent writer, I just like the style.
5 stars. Well worth reading.
I'm glad that FSE guy engaged with the feds, but it shows dangerous bias when he sees a screenshot of a threat and immediately assumes that can't be a violent individual.
Yeah. For the life of me I don't see how someone could see a credible threat in that post. The man could actually murder Fink the same day and the post still wouldn't be evidence of a credible threat; it is just too silly. At best it is evidence he is deranged in addition to the trolling it turned out to be in this case.
"it was also clearly absurd, an obvious joke, not a credible threat."
He wasn't being silly or lampooning anything or creating satire, he was trying to make conversation worse. That's not a joke.
It was blatantly a joke. The article even gives us the context that it was part of the guy deliberately getting himself banned from that instance.
> It was a guy basically running harassment enterprise, including swatting people and other false flag style crimes.
Sure, maybe (if it even was that guy and not some random unrelated joker). But even people doing that can also still joke.
> He wasn't being silly or lampooning anything or creating satire
He absolutely was. "I will leave my fingerprints and DNA behind so they can catch me"? That's really funny.
Just like for credit card fraud, you can only improve your heuristics so far. At some point, you either treat every single possible as real for investigative purposes, or you accept that you find a threat, ignored it, and people die as a result.
Plenty of real world crazy terrorist bullshit had a pointless online threat component!
More importantly, depending on the threat, it's probably a crime itself. Bomb threats are criminal even if it's clear that it wasn't a realistic threat.
So no, that screenshot is not "total weaksauce", for law enforcement. Hell, even here, that screenshot was demonstrably from a guy running a criminal enterprise!
This isn't borderline though. This is blatantly nothing. You might as well arrest everyone who leaves their house in the morning.
> More importantly, depending on the threat, it's probably a crime itself. Bomb threats are criminal even if it's clear that it wasn't a realistic threat.
That doesn't make the legal system better, that makes it worse! What world do we live in where Pepsi can offer a valuable prize and welch on it and it's fine because they're joking, but it doesn't go the other way?
Proceeds to link to a website whose source code is hosted by kiwifarms. If you are blocked, that's because most of us don't want to interact with the "free speech" crowd, that's pretty much it.
I blocked this instance when their user called me the n-word and the instance moderators didn’t act on my report. I didn’t block them due to fediblock, but because of negative interactions that I was personally involved with. And yet my server shows up on that list, as though it were related to fediblock.
That seems to be a problem with the Fediverse in general. And admittedly, Discord.
IIRC, Tor doesn't have that issue.
Most (all? all the relevant ones, I think) browsers honor the referer-policy[1] header if a referring site sets it. There are options in common site frameworks, like Django[2] to control that for UAs that respect it.
Since most UAs respect it, if the indexing site had wanted to, they could easily have prevented the header from being sent for most users.
[1](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Security/Refere...)
[2](https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/5.2/ref/middleware/#referr...)
Isn't there a market for anti-DDOS third-party services for API endpoints (Cloudflare etc) — through probably for "Free Speech Extremist" that wouldn't be suitable solution, and there are charges too (though presumably when facing a situation like this you actually save money).
When it comes to speech, it's really not hard to imagine positions that would have been controversial at any point in the history of the US. That doesn't mean you can't hold them, but others don't need to agree, and that's how you end up with labels of this sort.
> Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.
As is the First Amendment to the US Constitution:
> Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
I can't speak for Pete. However, given that the expressed position of influential portions of the US government (as well as many of my peers and acquaintances) runs counter to the letter and the spirit of Article 19 and the spirit (if not the letter) of the First Amendment, I consider myself to be a free speech extremist.
While, from an immediacy standpoint, breathing is the higher priority, if you prioritize breathing continuously to the exclusion of drinking and eating, you will have problems on the 3-5 day and 8-21 day horizons.
[1]: https://blog.freespeechextremist.com/blog/the-loli-question....
wild that of all the examples you could choose to bring up, this is the one. not saying the conversation doesn't need to happen, but i think there are a lot more concrete examples that affect many more people that come to mind first.
for GP, there are a lot of other contested ideas around what constitutes free/protected speech in america that aren't related to pedophilia - much of it revolves around political speech, especially with Citizens United (the supreme court case that effectively declared monetary support for political causes to be considered "free speech"). conversely, ground-up economic speech (such as BDS) is often stifled (even calling for boycotts etc under the BDS framework is not considered protected speech in some places).
Citizen's United isn't even really about free expression IMO, and I personally don't think people are all that split on it anyways, I think it's just a case where the people and the establishment disagree. BDS I'm simply not familiar with.
It does seem that there are new mounting challenges to free expression right now, but they're relatively new and it's unclear if they will stick around yet.
unfortunately, it is about free expression in the opinion of the supreme court:
'the Court found that laws restricting the political spending of corporations and unions are inconsistent with the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.' [0]
BDS is a topical instance of a bottom-up movement recommending boycotting, divestment and sanctions against organizations that are considered to materially support the israelli government. naturally, you can imagine this attracts strong opinions from many sides. in some cases, states/municipalities have deemed this to be unprotected speech. [1]
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boycott,_Divestment_and_Sancti...
I think the reason those don't come to mind is because even though they really do regard the interpretation of free speech law, they don't actually feel like they're about expression. When it comes to the Israel/Palestine conflict though, even the opinion that it isn't really about free expression might be controversial, so clearly it is.
LMAO you do not have a first amendment right to not be investigated for making threats in public, even if those threats are baseless! You do not have a right to baselessly threaten people!
In general, the US ranks pretty low on most freedom metrics, except for the freedom to kill with a gun. In general, the more your country has to tell you you're free, the less free you actually are.
Many other countries explicitly do not have free speech in their constitution, but something more narrow, like freedom of opinion. In those countries, what rights the constitution says you get, and what rights you actually get, tend to be more closely in alignment.
In the US unlimited money has unlimited political power, so free speech, is irrelevant to power distribution, although it might have some academic or personal value for some.
US ranks 78 of 80 on the Free Speech Index here, not sure what your metrics are that make it supposedly "very unfree". Perhaps you'd like to share with the class?
The word TLDR appears in the third paragraph, but the summary it refers to is in the second paragraph, starting with the words "To summarize, ..."
https://blog.freespeechextremist.com/blog/fse-vs-fbi.html#:~...
> To summarize, the FBI pays some shady companies to scrape data, the data is scanned for keywords (yep, just like CARNIVORE). Links and content are then fed into Facebook, organized by topic based on the keywords. Some rudimentary analysis is performed (sentiment analysis at least, but as friendly as Microsoft is with the feds, and as LLMs have gotten popular, the influence of machines has probably expanded) and perused by agents, using some FBI internal interface.
"SBF is already in jail tho right... er, oh"
I'd really like to know how the front group are controlling Facebook servers to collect data.