The EFF is arguing here that companies should not take anything down and instead rely on the government to dictate what shouldn't be allowed. This is absolutely ridiculous. Imagine being such a free speech advocate that you say something like this.
The corporation is either responsible for its content or it's not.
If they can pick and choose whatever message they like with absolute discretion, then that's effectively the corporation's speech and should be treated as such, with full responsibility over it.
If they don't want to bear the responsibility for what they publish, then it's easy, don't pretend to have the legitimacy to choose.
That the same social media platform can have as big of a change in views as Twitter/X did is insane to me. That's not "the public changing opinion". That's a corporation exercising speech. Full stop.
It's a consequence of freedom. If companies aren't allowed to make the decision, then you're saying the government should make the decision instead. It's one or the other.
There is no functional world where no one is allowed to moderate abuse, because in that world the Internet ceases to function. You don't have to like the results, but someone has to do it.
This is actually completely legal in the USA. It might be illegal if you are doing it with the stated intention of facilitating targeted harassment, but just posting personal information isn't a crime. If it were, the media would be in a lot of trouble.
That's not the ridiculous bit, the ridiculous bit is the advocating that the government crack down on people saying mean things about third parties to each other on the Internet.
And make no mistake, that's 99% of what KiwiFarms does, the last time this came up on hackernews I browsed through hundreds of posts in a bunch of threads to see if there was anything other than that going on, so if its there it's in the DMs (and policing person-to-person communication is utterly insane) or very rare.
What they're really saying is the the bar for ISP intervention in speech should be higher than the bar for prosecution. Which is not particularly ridiculous.
They want to be common carriers, but also be able to discriminate users.
Start by banning racists and bigoted users, then slowly start discriminating against other groups while offering new "private connection" for only $9.99/mo extra.
I find it baffling that so much of the public is content with ostracizing despicable people when it's precisely "racists and bigoted users".
The only reason that those are despicable nowadays is precisely because minorities and their supporters, which were considered despicable at the time, exercised their freedom of speech.
Instead on censoring speech why not provide tools that lead to better speech? This is perfectly possible from a tech stand point but companies would rather have the power that comes from censorship.
1. Get rid of anonymity/pseudonymity. Free speech is a right. Anonymity is not. If people had to post everything in their real name you would get rid of all of the fake b.s. and people would be much more civilized in their speech.
2. Provide content filtering tools based on user voting with a public record of user votes and the option for people to turn off the filters so that they can see what is filtered.
With these 2 mechanisms you can create a public square with absolute free speech where hate speech is filtered and suppressed, if people choose that, but the records are clear and people who want to audit the filtering can do so as they please.
its a free market so people are always welcome to run services that allow pseudonymity (nothing is actually anonymous on the internet, everything is logged and tracked and traceable) and people are free to use them.
the most popular services (facebook/instagram, twitter) are the ones that have the most real people posting stuff under their real names.
those companies continue to allow fake users for a variety of financial reasons but the fake users are actively degrading the experience.
twitter is working on KYC now, but it is a cheap AI version that is easily exploitable, so it won't make much of a difference (as i understand it so far).
People talk about this a lot nowadays, but what's your definition of a "fake user" or a fake account? A real human using a name other than a legal name? Hasn't that been the norm online since the late '80s?
and if you have any hope for humanity at all you have to believe that the majority will continue to reject that evil. pretending evil people dont exist doesnt make them go away.
The majority of people have no opinion on most issues. Politics is a fight between minority groups that try to sway or force the majority into supporting them. If you are in favour of mandatory deanonymisation for all public speech, what you're doing is giving sufficiently powerful groups a license to harass, unperson or arrest members of less powerful ones.
Are you actually fine with this? I can't help but notice you're not posting under your real name...
Yeah the EFF has gotten ridiculously radical into pro-corporate and pro-free speech positions. Generally anything that protects a company's ability to willfully harm society for money is worth protecting for the EFF.
The EFF is so detached from humanity it doesn't mind innocent people dying for it's radical free speech cause. And that's really pretty sad.
Having the ~~clergy~~ ~~nobility~~ bourgeoisie decide what is "harmful to society" and unilaterally censor it is far more harmful. The fact that "pro free-speech" is considered something to sneer at makes me want to facepalm. People will say unpleasant things, but it's far less unpleasant then being told what we're "allowed" to hear "for our safety". The idea that they're "detached from humanity" and killing people by this is ridiculous
You're disagreeing with the comment you replied to. That comment said the EFF is bad because it actually wants the government to intervene, not ISPs. Your comment says the EFF is bad because it wants companies to be allowed to do what they want. Did you misread the comment or did I misread yours?
