dmatech

That doesn't appear to be the issue here, though. The users of the site don't find each other completely repugnant. The ISPs might, but repugnance has historically not been a justification for de-peering in the past (at least in the USA).

For decades, we've had a pretty consistent notion of what constitutes "network abuse". It's traffic that threatens the stability of the network itself (such as spam and worm traffic). Obviously illegal stuff can be taken down by law enforcement. But stuff that's simply "bad for society" is generally given a free pass. If you don't like it, your options should be:

1. Don't visit them. 2. Sue them. 3. Get law enforcement involved.

Note that there is no #4 that says "harass everyone they depend on in an attempt to get them taken offline".

There's a fundamental difference between being spoken to and being spoken about. You have a right to prevent others from speaking to you but not about you (at least in the USA).

PayPal themselves linked to it as upcoming official policy on their main site. It doesn't appear to be a publication mistake.

    Amendments to the PayPal Acceptable Use Policy
    Effective November 3, 2022:

Live link: https://www.paypal.com/us/webapps/mpp/ua/upcoming-policies-f...

Archived link: https://web.archive.org/web/20220930164438/https://www.paypa...

The PDF in question has since been replaced with a single blank page. You can see both revisions here:

https://web.archive.org/web/20220000000000*/https://www.payp...

Why can't we just have some kind of "virtual squash" where the commits are preserved, but they're grouped together so you could view it as a single squashed commit if that's preferable?

Twitch did this a few years ago. Amazon Prime used to give you ad-free viewing, but they ended that. I believe the reason was so they could grow their ad business.

Likewise, If too many people buy Premium, they won't be able to sell as many ad spots. Plus, the people who actually pay for Premium probably make heavy use of YouTube. My guess is that they'll instead start increasing the price of Premium to get more people to give it up.

Just because it's parked (in a WWW sense) doesn't mean it's unused. I've got a few domains that are used for Azure, Google Workspace, email, or just testing stuff. I don't really have any interest in setting up a web site for those.

I must say that I dislike the rationale for banning structuring. It's basically a law that bans attempts to comply with the letter of another law without complying with its spirit. Complying with any law should be completely straightforward.

Perhaps not, but there doesn't need to be legal benefit. Remember that there is absolutely no "right to erasure" in the USA (and I don't think it ever could exist given our First Amendment). At best, they can sue if there's defamation or copyright infringement.

The endgame appears to be the complete elimination of KF and all copies of it.

They might claim that its mere existence psychologically harms marginalized people, but it seems that their real goal is more about power. You get a ton of clout by both appearing as a marginalized person under attack as well as winning victories over enemies. Right now, Keffals and another person are fighting over who gets to take credit for this.

The more long-term goal is to establish a precedent that sites that are "harmful" are simply not allowed to be on the internet. This will serve as an example to any ISP that might consider hosting them or anyone like them in the future. All it will take is someone finding the site, reporting it to Keffals and gang, and the mob flooding their CDNs, data centers, upstreams, and business partners with demands to either deplatform or be deplatformed themselves.

There's currently no defense against the "Layer 8 DDoS".

Being on the cover of a major magazine (with an accompanying article) absolutely makes you a public person, and you can't expect people not to criticize your family for doing something that is still controversial.

I'd be cautious. One of the people editing these articles has extremely high Wikipedia privileges yet has publicly campaigned for the elimination of the site. There is absolutely no neutrality here.

FOSTA/SESTA was a poorly-conceived law that created a lot of potential liability for the ostensible goal of reducing sex trafficking. Pretty much all sex work is potentially sex trafficking, so any corporate lawyer will tell management to stay as far away from that as possible.

The USA cannot criminalize being a "Nazi" because freedom of political affiliation and political expression is a core right. The USA went through political inquisitions in past decades to root out communism among US citizens, and nobody looks back on that with approval.

As an aside, "Nazi" has devolved into a completely meaningless term, so I'd prefer something a bit more specific.

That's why society is dependent on large companies staying in their lane. If a hospital decides to refuse service to bad people because the world would be better if they died, we'd obviously condemn that. The same is true of some utilities, but general businesses can shun people.

Cloudflare tried to stay in its lane, but it was dragged out of it by the Twitter mob.

You're using the "stochastic terrorism" argument, and what that does is create liability for anyone who might recklessly increase the probability of something bad happening (even if there's absolutely no clear causation). If "stochastic terrorism" were unprotected speech, then it would create immense chilling effects. People would be terrified to say anything controversial. Thank goodness it's not part of American law.

The most recent one was probably Parler. Usually deplatforming is due to a moral panic involving a massively exaggerated risk. All sites probably violate the AUP or TOS if you look closely enough. But during the panic, you can't see that the risk is tiny in the grand scheme of things.

Inciting harassment might be someone telling everyone to order pizzas and send them to an address. It wouldn't be posting a picture of someone's house with no context. While that might facilitate harassment, it doesn't actually incite it.

This has all the hallmarks of an overreaction to a moral panic, not a rational response to the actual evidence. People become incredibly sure of their positions and don't even want to look at the evidence, but to be honest, the evidence doesn't matter, because people won't be persuaded by it anyway given the stress level and strong emotions.

Is the internet a better place without this site? Who knows. But that's not the question we should ask when making censorship decisions, because these panics invariably exaggerate the immediate harms of keeping a site and minimize the longer-term harms of terminating it.

Calling it "harassment" is perhaps a bit misleading if it's people gossiping about and making fun of someone behind their back. Harassment generally involves intentional (as opposed to incidental) communication to the target. The issue is that this forum (like Twitter and other forums) is generally readable by the public, so someone can observe two people saying stuff about them, but it's not addressed to them.

It might be more like stalking, but one could also argue that writing a hit piece in a mainstream publication is also stalking as it could intimidate the target.

What they wish to do is cut the head off the proverbial snake when the snake hasn't committed a crime or directly conspired with people who did commit a crime. It might be an effective strategy, but it's not one our laws allow, because we don't base guilt on "but-for" causation alone. Nor do we base it on that icky feeling we get when we look at the proverbial snake.

Sadly, I've had to block him and all the other people on this self-righteous authoritarian crusade and don't think I'll ever interact with them again. Most of the security community (and larger technology community) used to care a lot about free speech, but they've completely abandoned that principle.

Posting someone's address can obviously facilitate a swatting. In some cases, it might even make someone an accomplice to one. But just recklessly posting someone's address doesn't make one an accomplice.

There's no implied request for someone to SWAT or even harass the person. I get that this provides no comfort to the victims, but this isn't Brandenburg incitement.

In the case of the Christchurch video, the harm has already been done. One could argue that sharing the video creates demand for more shooting videos (as is argued with CSAM), but the USA considers this to be protected for whatever reason (unlike CSAM or obscenity).

There's pressure, but at some point, it can cross the line into extortion (which is not protected).

It's clear that they're trying to take down the site by any means necessary, and that's why I ultimately find them far more dangerous than the people on that site.

Deplatforming using Twitter pressure is a terrifying tactic that tosses out the rulebook and replaces it with a popularity contest.

Correct. If you can get enough of a mob together, you can get any company to drop any client or fire any employee irrespective of the merits. I don't know of any workarounds so long as Twitter exists in its current form.

A realization that you have to share an internet with people who hate your guts so long as they don't break any laws. This includes all sorts of bigots. Rather than harassing internet backbones, file lawsuits.

It generally means freedom from government consequences. It also generally means that third parties won't actively prevent you from speaking to people who choose to listen to you.

As a society, the USA has decided that mere pragmatism is insufficient for restricting speech or the closing down of platforms. It would be much simpler if we could make case-by-case decisions based on cost-benefit or risk-reward, but we don't.

I know that people wish to just cut the head off the snake, but our norms caution against that and our laws prevent governments from doing it.

Getting back to cancel culture, you can see the tactic here. The host is privately owned. The data center is OK with them as a tenant. Now they're putting Twitter pressure on the upstreams to cut off the data center. These people aren't willing to accept anything but victory.

https://twitter.com/lizthegrey/status/1566301416917856256?t=...