
A Heretic's Guide to Deplatforming - StuntPope
https://easydns.com/blog/2018/11/02/a-heretics-guide-to-deplatforming/
======
dleslie
> The tech giants today are by their own actions cultivating the motivation
> and the will to necessitate the creation of their own challengers and
> everybody is watching closely what works and what doesn’t.

And this is why I find the trend towards deplatforming to be altogether
_exciting_. I haven't been this _excited_ about potential changes in how we
communicate since I first installed Skype; when it was still P2P.

There hasn't been this much social pressure on individuals with technical
ability for some time, and sufficiently many appear to be attempting to turn
that pressure into new ways to communicate. Safely, securely, and in a way
that is resilient to outside attempts to silence.

Our current state of affairs is distressingly centralized; we have but a
handful of _enormous_ silos of personal information and communication, and
progressively less independent sources of content distribution. While it may
seem a non-issue when it's ethnic supremacists and fascists being silenced;
it's a situation precariously vulnerable to abuse by the powerful. These
experiments in decentralized communication and data storage couldn't come any
sooner.

~~~
wuliwong
I am right there with you! I am oddly excited by the recent waves of de-
platforming. I think they are hastening the next step of development.

~~~
arto
Indeed, sometimes things have to get worse before they can get better.

------
evrydayhustling
Reading this article is like watching someone beat the ocean with a stick.
What would it look like for an "anti-deplatforming" initiative to succeed? All
ideas have equal access to all platforms? Just the big ones? The objective is
so poorly formed, it's not even wrong.

A platform's identity and ability to attract an audience are determined by the
activities they accept / cultivate, not vice versa. Infowars wanted to be on
Facebook because it made it easier to sell your grandparents vitamin
supplements, but Facebook felt that leaving them on make it a place families
(and their grandparents) won't visit. Gab would like to use Stripe or Paypal
because they are trusted payment providers, but those networks felt they'd
stop being trusted payment providers if they let Gab stay on.

And there's plenty of reason to think they're right: super-permissive
platforms exist and work (4chan et al.), they just don't attract the same
broad audience. When people complain about being deplatformed, they're just
saying "the platforms that accept me aren't popular enough". I'm glad our
internet is enough of a distributed commons that many platforms are broadly
accessible -- but nobody owes you an audience at the most popular ones.

~~~
im3w1l
First people get kicked off their platforms "build your own platforms"

Then platforms got kicked off the platform platforms "build your own platform
platforms"

What reason is there to assume those platform platforms will not get kicked
off the platform platform platforms?

These people are not arguing in good faith.

~~~
amputect
What's the alternative to "build your own platforms" though. Are you willing
to compel Stripe by threat of force to keep processing credit cards for nazis?
Are you willing to completely torpedo freedom of association, as long as the
people demanding your company continue associating with them are sufficiently
monstrous?

~~~
hakfoo
What makes the 'deplatforming' threat viable is that so many critical aspects
of an online business are a choice between private-enterprise players. Stripe
or Authorize.net. AWS or DigitalOcean. GoDaddy or Namecheap.

As you suggest, they have no individual legal obligation to serve a business
that may cause bad press/high risk/whatever. But when you can enough of them
pointing in the same direction, it creates the chilling effect-- a business
that's technically legal but can't get the services they need. It basically
creates am unspoken private regulation well beyond the actual law of the
state.

I tend to think the answer might be non-profit or state-run "service providers
of last resort" \-- charter-bound to provide service for any legal purpose, no
matter how distasteful. Not necessarily cheap or slick, but they won't pull
your plug because people complain about your content. Such a provider would
defang the deplatforming strategy pretty fast.

~~~
Faark
> it creates the chilling effect-- a business that's technically legal but
> can't get the services they need

They can get it, but have to pay for that. Just like the porn industry had to
build their own payment providers.

The chilling effect is working as intended. You need something in society to
make people find common ground and live in a similar reality. The current US
seems like a great example of people not being able to do so. They blame more
and more blame other side for their problems. And i wonder if that trend can
be reversed before you guys start shooting each other.

Recent developments like social media made and the US TV landscape make it
easier than ever to live in your favorite filter bubble. Algorithms getting
better and better at giving you what you want to hear. I don't see
developments emerging to counteract that.

If de-platforming is bullet we have to bite for society to keep functioning,
than so be it. It's still somewhat mild tool you can work around... i take
that over government intervention any time.

~~~
hakfoo
>They can get it, but have to pay for that. Just like the porn industry had to
build their own payment providers.

There are two problems with that argument.

First, it's nowhere near as trivial as you make it sound. A one man shop could
potentially build and maintain a custom forum service himself, but trying to
create a real-world ready payment processing infrastructure from scratch is
going to mean a team of tens of specialists.

The porn industry was able to solve it because it was a big, industry-wide
problem that left a lot of money on the table-- a need big enough to create a
market for specialists.

Second, it may not be possible to bypass every firm that presents a
deplatforming risk. The porn industry may have avoided rejection by the
mainstream gateway providers, but they're still dependent on retaining good
relationsips with Visa and Mastercard at the end of the day. I'd think those
guys are the nuclear option for deplatforming-- no matter who you line up to
take your payments, if you can't accept 90% of the cards on the market, you're
not going to be able to monetize effectively.

------
tptacek
It's probably unrealistic to expect us to stop seeing threads about this
(Gab's #1 objective at this point will be to make more noise and surely
something "newsworthy" will happen with them sometime soonish). But it's worth
noting that we've had several recent discussions about Gab stemming from the
events that occurred after the mass shooting.

Here, Jeftovic is arguing from faulty premises. Correcting those premises
might not change the conclusions he draws, but they're worth fixing anyways.

While it's true that the worst speech on Gab.ai doesn't come from the
operators of the site themselves, it's _not_ true that the site operators have
clean hands. Gab's (verified) Twitter account has repeatedly been screenshot
posting anti-Semitic comments, and retweeting white supremacist posts from
others (for instance: they pointedly RT'd a white supremacist mocking Ken
White, of Popehat fame, for being the adoptive father of Asian children). Gab
itself openly embraces white nationalism.

Gab is white supremacist Twitter (you might have called it "white nationalist
Twitter" before whatever weird Brazilian politics thing conspired to begin its
transformation into Fascist Orkut, which is where it's heading now).

That doesn't mean you have to agree it should be taken off the Internet by
GoDaddy; you can form coherent arguments in either direction. But the idea
that it's being taken offline solely because of the actions of its users is
false. It has the users it has because those are the users its operators
begged to get.

~~~
StuntPope
Jeftovic here.

I actually wasn't aware of many things you cite above, having cursorily
examined, then abandoned Gab I never followed their twitter feed, etc.

Without having seen any of that myself, I wrote the article extending a
certain benefit of the doubt, trying to look at it from a neutral (ostensibly)
vendor vantagepoint.

~~~
pvg
You've added an update to your article pointing out it was 'flagged' after
'rapidly ascending'. Flagging is done done by users, so both the (brief) rapid
ascent and the flagging are results of user action.

~~~
StuntPope
So what's your point?

~~~
pvg
There's nothing 'ironic' about it, flagging is like downvoting. You aren't
being 'deplatformed' by some inscrutable power, users just don't think it's a
fit for the site.

~~~
StuntPope
No, flagging is not like "downvoting", this isn't reddit.

As somebody else here already pointed out:

> From
> [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)
> > If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it.

This isn't spam and given the interest it's garnered it's obviously not off-
topic.

So if you're flagging it you're basically throwing your opinion over it and
preventing others from seeing it and from upvoting it. That's imposing your
opinion over everybody else's.

If you don't like the post, then don't upvote it or better still, post an
erudite missive on why the author is a brain-dead moron, but don't mis-label
it as spam or off-topic.

~~~
tptacek
Can I offer a different complaint? Mine is: you updated your post to reflect
that it had been flagged by HN users, but _not_ with material new information
you acquired from the thread before that flag had occurred. That feels a
little dishonest.

~~~
StuntPope
What material new information is that?

~~~
tptacek
You acknowledged it upthread!

------
asdfasgasdgasdg
> Most successful deplatformings are Pyrrhic victories

Big fat citation needed on this. You speculate as to how they _may_ become
pyrrhic victories, but it's far from concluded that this will be the case.
Previous deplatformings (Milo, Alex Jones) haven't produced any visible
negative consequences for the platforms. There's little reason to think this
will either. Surprisingly few people care if a den of hate speech has trouble
finding a DNS registrar. Especially, surprisingly few important DNS registrar
customers care.

~~~
stcredzero
Likewise, almost no one cares what a Jehovah's witness has to say.

The US government coming in and telling a private entity, no you must tolerate
free speech on your property is historical fact and precedent.

There is a lawsuit where a company owned this mining company town, including
all of its roads and sidewalks. A Jehovah's witness won a lawsuit on the basis
of the First Amendment, enabling her to walk about that town and distribute
her pamphlets.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBozijndSLc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBozijndSLc)

Originally, it was once widely recognized by US jurisprudence, though property
rights and freedom of association are important, the First Amendment was even
more important and trumps property rights.

 _Surprisingly few people care if a den of hate speech has trouble finding a
DNS registrar._

Surprisingly few people cared when the US government carted off my bandmate's
parents to concentration camps. That's a very poor metric to apply to a
principle of rights and justice.

~~~
tptacek
It sounds suspiciously as if you're drawing a direct comparison between the
internment of Japanese-Americans during World War 2 and Gab getting kicked off
GoDaddy. That can't possibly be an argument you really want to make.

~~~
badatshipping
His argument is that few people caring about something doesn’t mean that thing
doesn’t matter.

~~~
tptacek
Isn't that, like, an extremely banal observation? It doesn't mean it _does_
matter either. Meanwhile: what was the point of comparing this situation to
internment camps?

~~~
PavlovsCat
Banally true, yes.

> It doesn't mean it does matter either.

Someone said something doesn't matter because "few people care", just one
example of something that mattered and about which also "few people cared"
refutes that reasoning. They're not making an argument, they're refuting one.

edit: Another example would be Linus' announcement of Linux at the time. Few
people cared, in contrast to the people who today find Linux extremely
important, or depend on it without knowing. And there you go, I now made a
"direct" (whatever that means) comparison between Linux and Japanese being put
into concentration camps in the US, as well as a "direct" comparison between
Linux and neo-nazis being deplatformed. The point matters more than the
comparison used to make it.

~~~
TheSpiceIsLife
> The point matters more than the comparison used to make it.

Only if we assume the soundbite _it 's just like when Japanese Americans were
put in concentration camps_ didn't happen.

The point could have been made without the comparison, by writing something
like this:

 _" Surprisingly few people cared" is a very poor metric to apply to a
principle of rights and justice._

And then we can discuss how _social norms_ and _the legal system_ interact,
rather than have _this_ conversation.

~~~
PavlovsCat
The complaint wasn't that it was worded poorly, but that a direct comparison
was made at all, using kinda spooky language such as " _It sounds suspiciously
as if you 're drawing a direct comparison_" and " _That can 't possibly be an
argument you really want to make._".

English isn't my first language, even I had no problem understanding the
intention of the words, and arguing against the "strongest plausible
interpretation" is in the guidelines.

> And then we can discuss how social norms and the legal system interact

Personally I'm content with it being settled that "few people care" is an
invalid argument.

------
mattsfrey
It seems like many people are caught up in the details here and missing the
wider principles.. What kind of internet do you want? I grew up with an
internet that was entirely open and free, there have always been the hate dens
and their garbage. I view domain services as essentially infrastructure, not
arbitrators of content. If sites/services are being shut down at the
infrastructure level, we've entered a new age of the internet and it is
terribly frightening.

~~~
tptacek
Stormfront is still up and running. They had a hard time getting access to the
same QOS and pricing as do sites that companies actively want to host, but at
some point we're complaining that white nationalists don't get FRAND terms,
and it's a little hard to get worked up about that.

Gab ran Twitter for White Nationalists off Digital Ocean, Azure, and who knows
where else. Gab's users have a disconcerting tendency to blow up synagogues.
Gab itself has a disconcerting tendency to recruit people who cheerlead anti-
Semitism. Are we surprised they aren't getting the $15,000 startup promo
credit from AWS?

~~~
mattsfrey
Again, details.. What if every single domain company decides to blackball
them? What do they do then? Nothing, they are off the internet.

~~~
wpietri
I guess they'll have to return to sharing their desire to kill black people
the old fashioned way, in person.

Something you aren't grappling with here is the way the Internet has enabled
previously-scattered terrible people to connect and self-radicalize. David
Neiwart, who tracked various "patriot", white supremacist, and other fringe
groups since the 90s, wrote a very readable book about how things have changed
since then: [https://www.amazon.com/Alt-America-Rise-Radical-Right-
Trump/...](https://www.amazon.com/Alt-America-Rise-Radical-Right-
Trump/dp/1786634236)

I definitely appreciate the early ethos of the Internet. It's a good founding
myth, and I would like to work to keep things open by default. But if the
worse 0.1% of humankind ends up not being able to host anything because
otherwise they will work together to murder people, I am 100% ok with bending
my "anything goes" bias a bit.

~~~
mattsfrey
Actually inciting violence or conspiring to do so is covered under common law
statutes and can be easily prosecuted. This is far different, it is companies
deciding on their own volition to unilaterally ban entities from accessing the
very "pipes". Today it's at the domain level, so the convenience of being able
to type in a name versus an IP is what's at stake. What next, ISP's blocking
traffic?.. Like I've said it's the principle. I believe in free speech and a
free and open internet, if there is criminal activity the FBI, et al. can
easily get involved. This is about the fact that the very infrastructure of
the internet is largely dictated by private entities who are now imposing
their own discretion based on content they object to, odious as it may be. I
for one am not keen on allowing the sociopolitical whims of the time to
dictate who is allowed on this great thing called the internet. I see
something once pure, beautiful, and glorious entering its first stages of
death.

~~~
b1daly
I’m responding to your comment more as a representative of a general
sentiment.

The implicit psychological construct behind this little “mini-panic” around
fringe groups be “de-platformed” is a common one: something bad is happening,
and we are losing freedoms/rights/capabilities we (society) has in the past.

It’s a variation on the notion that “the world is going to hell a hand
basket.” The rhetorical fallacy is called “false idealization of the past.”

In fact, the access of everyday people to a variety of mediated forms of
communication is at historically unprecedented levels.

In virtually the entire history of human society, access to powerful methods
of communication was completely under the control of the elite power
structures of the society.

The problem that these new communication platforms are trying to deal with is
unprecedented. It turns out there are unexpected consequences of allowing
access to mass communication, and means of spreading propaganda, to “fringe”
groups like “white supremecists” The problem is unique in a couple of ways.

One is that it is only very recently, very recently, in our society (the US in
this case) that the precepts of white supremacy have been “fringe!” In fact
these are the hateful ideologies that built much of our modern world, on the
backs of those unfortunate to have not been born “white.”

This has been hard fought-for progress, and banishment to the “fringe” of
these ideas is a major success. The attempts to drive these ideas even further
to the fringe represents a triumph of humanistic values. Especially as
reactionary groups inevitably fight back with whatever means they have at
hand.

It just happens to have happened right around the time that technology put
methods of mass media into the hands of more and more everyday people.

Using “De-Platforming” as a method of social control is entirely civilized,
and justified. We have bedrock principles of free speech in the US, but those
are almost entirely based around the idea of preventing the government from
jailing speakers it diagrees with.

To raise an alarm about, “well, what if your currently considered
‘progressive’ movement is deemed deserving of De-Platforming in the future” is
a false alarm, because there simply are no historical examples to draw from.
These technologies are too new. (Not just the technology, also the increasing
ubiquitousness of networked communication.)

It also pretends that in some philosophical sense, all ideas are equally
valid, and is divorcing the content of ideas from the form.

I don’t agree that all points of view are equally valid, and viewing ideas
through the lens of “form” over “content” is antithetical to the very core
concept of ideas and thought itself.

IMO, people are too quick to trot out “slippery slope” fears about difficult
problems. However, we can’t get “off of the slope” in a metaphysical sense. We
are alive, until we aren’t,and must navigate the treacherous slopes of reality
to the best of our capabilities. As both individuals and as members of
society.

~~~
cousin_it
> _The problem that these new communication platforms are trying to deal with
> is unprecedented._

The early internet had to deal with the same problems, yet it was much more
free than the internet of today. This isn't a false idealization of the past -
I was around at the time.

To me the only reason the internet matters is to let individual people speak
and be heard - without being silenced by advertisers, the government, or the
mob. If we let these entities institute censorship for the common good, we
might as well have TV.

~~~
tptacek
Large portions of the Internet were cordoned off from commerce altogether.
There was a weekend back in the 90s (probably more than one, but this is the
one I remember) where there was an Internet-wide netsplit that cut commercial
ISPs like Ripco off from the rest of the Internet.

Most conversations on the Internet took place on Usenet, and even in the alt.
hierarchy, there were rules and politics behind what stuff got propagated.

~~~
hollerith
I spent a decent amount of time on news.admin.net-abuse.email in 1993 and in
the mid-1990s. (ISTR that is where spam on Usenet was mainly discussed.) I was
very curious about Usenet, but recall no restrictions on any unmoderated
newsgroup (and most newsgroups were unmoderated).

I always believed that the reason it took years for Usenet to do something
about spam is because (1) before spam got so bad they had to do something
about it, there were no existing restrictions on the propagation of messages
and (2) a widespread ethic among those running news servers that _any_
restrictions on propagation, even restrictions on spam, were to be avoided.

What sort of content, in your opinion, was denied propagation back when most
conversations on the Internet took place on Usenet?

I got the impression that the ban on commerce over the US backbone was to
prevent making any business big enough to be able to afford a PR person or a
lobbyist in Washington afraid that the Internet was a threat to its revenue
stream.

Back when only a small fraction of the public knew anything about the
Internet, the US Government was spending a relatively large amount of money
keeping it running, and was consequently vulnerable to sniping from
journalists and politicians to the effect that the US government is spending
money to giving, e.g., people who are sexually attracted to people dressed up
as animals, a forum to communicate with each other.

You and I know that the _marginal_ cost of adding an alt.sex.furries news
group to the Internet was so low as to be not worth thinking about, but it
would've been hard to get that point across to the voting public.

People were worried for example about the National Science Foundation, one of
the major funders of the Internet, getting one of these:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Fleece_Award](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Fleece_Award)

Or maybe the ban on commerce over the US backbone was a concession the US
backbone's patrons in Washington needed to make to get Congress to continue to
allocate funds for it.

The ban was mostly successful only because very few people _wanted_ to do
commerce on the internet while the ban on commerce over the US backbone was in
place. Possible exception: the last year or so of the ban when the internet
was growing very quickly. Exception: people seeking W2 workers or W2 jobs
rather than 1099 workers / jobs would've liked to be able to use ba.jobs to
advertise, but IIRC it was a moderated newsgroup, and the moderator, like most
people running internet infrastructure back then, grudgingly recognized the
need for the ban (i.e., to protect the Internet's supporters in Washington
from ridicule or from the animosity of powerful groups).

------
throwawaysea
This is a good article that explores many of the angles involved.

Deplatforming is a dangerous step for a free society, especially when so much
power is accumulated in a few platforms*

The big risk is this: when only a few entities funnel so much societal
discourse or control our communication infrastructure or process payments,
those entities making arbitrary decisions about who they serve has similar
impacts and risks to the government imposing similar restrictions through the
law. These companies should not act as a moral police and should not impose
their own personal governance above what is minimally required by the law. Nor
should they rely on the judgment of an angry mob to make decisions.

Case and point, take a look at Medium blocking Gab, as referenced in this
article. Gab's _statement about the shooting_ is being blocked? That is
ridiculous, and unacceptable. And we should not patronize such businesses.

* Spare me the tired arguments that these private companies have a right to not serve customers at will. That seems like self-serving cherry-picking, when in other situations the same folks would be against granting freedom of association.

~~~
roenxi
> has similar impacts and risks to the government imposing similar
> restrictions through the law

We can't really compare them to the government until they have a standing
army. That said, pure scale does matter. There will debate over whether
powerful organisations are currently benign or hostile, but there is no doubt
whatsoever that they are a mighty force.

If Google or Facebook ever decides to seriously wake up politically, China's
internet strategies will start looking very sensible. I don't agree with them
either though.

~~~
dragonwriter
> We can't really compare them to the government until they have a standing
> army.

While I disagree that the firms in question have government-like comprehensive
power, even without their own army, a monopoly or coordinating oligopoly able
to lock out new participants on essential communication services would have
such power, and be a de facto part of the government, even if they lacked
formal command relationship over the armed forces of the host state.

------
DoreenMichele
_Gab illustrates a “catch-22” around setting out to be specifically a “free
speech platform”. You initially appeal to the most fringe elements of public
discourse. Your first wave of users are going to be people for whom this has
been a problem, and if you’re an absolutist and let them on then suddenly
that’s your base._

For me, this is one of the more profound take-aways from the article. This
piece is very thought provoking.

~~~
teddyh
Yes, the first wave defines the project; if the first wave has problems, the
project is infused with these problems. This is true of free software projects
also. I have a couple of examples:

• The KDE project (to create a nice graphical desktop environment based on the
X windowing system) was initially formed around using the Qt library for
graphical user interface widgets. The Qt library had, at the time, a somewhat
friendly but distinctly non-free license. The first wave of developers on KDE,
therefore, were developers who considered proprietary software and/or sketchy
licensed to be A-OK.¹ This will probably forever define the development
practices of the KDE project.

• The Go language is, by many accounts, a very nice programming language. But
it was started, and still run, by Google people, for Google purposes, and with
Google backing. This means that the first wave of developers were and are
those developers who think it’s perfectly fine to _work at Google_ , or to
work with Google to further Google’s goals. People who don’t like Google will
of course have stayed away from the Go project at the outset, and so the
developer elite of the Go project will probably always reflect Google values
and priorities.

1\. Those developers who did not agree went on to start Gnome, which is in
fact the very reason Gnome was started.

~~~
DoreenMichele
Yeah, that's obvious on the face of it and not what grabbed me.

I'm fascinated by the power of positioning of the creators of the project and
how easily that can go wrong. That has long fascinated me and this is an
incredibly powerful example summed up in a nutshell in the paragraph I quoted,
which is a rare thing to see.

------
woodruffw
> Most successful deplatformings are Pyrrhic victories

We have reasonable (not perfect!) empirical evidence that this is _not the
case_ [1]. It appears that toxic and hateful movements can only resist
disapprobation when they develop a sufficiently large, sufficiently public (in
the visibility sense, not the publicly-owned sense) channel. Continually
disrupting those channels works.

[1]: [http://comp.social.gatech.edu/papers/cscw18-chand-
hate.pdf](http://comp.social.gatech.edu/papers/cscw18-chand-hate.pdf)

~~~
stcredzero
For awhile, the Soviets could "deplatform" people from their lives entirely by
threatening them or sending them to the Gulags. They held things together for
many decades through that continual disruption.

Yes, you can coerce people with your advantages, and it will work for awhile.
You can even create enclaves where you can keep undesirables out. But no, that
never wins in the end.

~~~
woodruffw
> For awhile, the Soviets could "deplatform" people from their lives entirely
> by threatening them or sending them to the Gulags. They held things together
> for many decades through that continual disruption.

I take the scarequotes there to be you admitting that gulags aren't really
deplatforming -- it's a government terrorizing its citizens. Nobody in this
conversation is interested in building gulags or putting the undesirables in
them.

> Yes, you can coerce people with your advantages, and it will work for
> awhile. You can even create enclaves where you can keep undesirables out.
> But no, that never wins in the end.

I don't understand this reasoning. I've presented some research indicating
that banning hateful online communities actually does have some kind of
positive effect, and your response it that it "never wins in the end"? What is
the "end" here? Do we have _any_ sort of evidence or overarching political
theory that suggests that it _doesn 't_ win in the end?

Most of us are on board, intuitively at least, with the notion that you can't
have both a dictator and be a democratic republic. Why are we so hesitant to
accept that other entities fundamentally conflict with the notion of liberal
democracy?

~~~
stcredzero
_I 've presented some research indicating that banning hateful online
communities actually does have some kind of positive effect_

I'm sure that you can find a Soviet study indicating that certain of their
programs had an effect against Bourgeois oppressor thinking and activity for
some number of years.

 _Why are we so hesitant to accept that other entities fundamentally conflict
with the notion of liberal democracy?_

Conditioning a society to accept the practically suppression of free speech
fundamentally conflicts with the notion of liberal democracy.

~~~
woodruffw
> I'm sure that you can find a Soviet study indicating that certain of their
> programs had an effect against Bourgeois oppressor thinking and activity for
> some number of years.

Again, no gulags here. Just Twitter, Reddit, and bad clones of the
aforementioned. It's also worth noting that the Soviet Union, at its best,
simply _was not a liberal democracy._ The position that I'm taking is
nonsensical outside of a liberal democratic context, so comparing it with
various inhumanities under a non-democracy is unconvincing at best.

> Conditioning a society to accept the practically suppression of free speech
> fundamentally conflicts with the notion of liberal democracy.

We're talking about the scope and structure of liberal democracy itself, a
discussion that's been going on for as long as liberal democracies have
existed (others have brought up Popper, but Popper cribbed the idea from
Immanuel Kant). There's no conditioning going on.

------
jstanley
> Does this mean that if Zerohedge, or Black Lives Matter, two of our clients
> from opposite ends of the political spectrum, post something, or even if one
> of their users posts something, that is beyond the pale, then we have to
> worry about having our finances cut off?

> I know as “the DNS guys” we have a near pathological aversion to single-
> points-of-failure, but it’s not a stretch to come to the conclusion for any
> business that it’s not an acceptable risk to have that possibility just
> looming there and to do nothing about it.

> That means we will now be looking for backup payment processors.

FWIW, this is _exactly_ what Bitcoin does well: uncensorable payments with no
single points of failure. And, by way of anecdata, I currently pay for domain
names in Bitcoin already (from gandi).

People buying domain names are probably one of the best demographics to have
if you want to take Bitcoin as they are likely to be technically savvy.

------
djsumdog
What's interested about Gab is that it wasn't content hosting on another
platform (Facebook/Twitter). It was their own platform, that people wrote and
built.

What if you run a Plemore/Mastodon server that has users with controversial
content? Is it okay for Vultr or DigitalOcean or Amazon to just yank your
account? Sure you can claim capitalism and find another provider, but we've
seen here that finding another provider is hard and migration is expensive!

I wrote about this almost a year ago when it happened to The Daily Stormer and
I still think it's more relevant today:

[https://fightthefuture.org/article/the-new-era-of-
corporate-...](https://fightthefuture.org/article/the-new-era-of-corporate-
censorship/)

Shutting down platforms just drives people to more extreme platforms. You
can't just yell "decentralization" because then you could have providers
pulling individual instances of federated ActivityPub/OStatus based software.

At some point we're going to need to address free speech online, because it's
not like the real world. You can't just go to another news stand or buy your
own printer. There are a limited of people that can host general purpose VMs
at a reasonable price with a decent provisioning API.

The domain issue is the most troubling. I don't see any reason a registrar
should be allowed to pull domain services from people. Right now it's just
content some people don't like, but what if a business starts pulling domain
registrar service for business they just don't like, and claim it has to do
with hate?

~~~
wuliwong
I agree that there is a difference between deplatforming gab and someone like
Alex Jones.

I don't think that any solution is going to be a permanent one, whether it is
a law or a technology. I tend to look towards technological advancement to
first outpace laws and then the govts slowly catch up. I do think that
decentralized storage solutions behind decentralized applications are pretty
interesting. There is even something called IPFS which is being pitched as a
possible challenger to HTTP. In some of the distributed solutions, the
computers holding the data only ever see it encrypted, so the possibility of
censorship on that end is mitigated at least for a while. I'm not expert on
the topic but I've recently found it very exciting and has given me a glimmer
of hope.

------
kmooney
> We run the risk that the act of deplatforming can become as extreme as the
> hate speech it seeks to banish.

Let us cross that bridge when we get to it.

~~~
colonelpopcorn
Pretty sure we're already here. Ignorant or evil folks won't become
enlightened or good if they can't use the internet.

~~~
fhood
No, but they will be isolated, and an isolated person is powerless person.

~~~
colonelpopcorn
Seems like a recipe for creating a lot of people with very little or nothing
to lose.

~~~
fhood
Nah, I think the real danger is when they find others who re-affirm their
convictions.

~~~
jesssse
You are advocating isolating, deplatforming, etc.. These are tactics that
hurt. Hurt people hurt people. If people are allowed to be heard and
socialize, they gain happiness and are less likely to hurt people.

------
wuliwong
The conclusion of the article where it speaks about the consequences of de-
platforming people leading to 'counter measures' is what I'm thinking will
happen. In my opinion, the difference between government censorship and
godaddy censorship is that I can just stop using godaddy. Then I can either
close my business, use a different service, or try to help build something new
to circumvent godaddy.

I've been back and forth on distributed storage and blockchain in my mind but
my current thinking is that the recent de-platforming is going to hasten the
development of alternate solutions that are more robust with regards to
censorship. I'm not even considering about whether it is right or wrong, I
just think that's going to happen.

------
justaaron
Despite all the handwringing here, there's no concrete proposal for what to do
with rent-seeking attention-seeking deliberatvely difficult individuals whom
one has no obligation to entertain the ideas of.

If I were NYU, I would simply never book Milo Whatever-his-name-is. Having to
deplatform him indicates that someone wanted to platform him in the first
place. Kick his useless ass to the curb/kerb, as the case may be.

------
superkuh
As long as the ISP stays as a dumb pipe there will always be alternatives.
Self hosting is the best hosting and these days ISP connections are definitely
fast enough to host anyones' small personal site up to a medium size forum.

Hopefully as this wave of authoritarian practices sweeps the globe and the
'net people will simply adopt federated services like IRC or notabug for
communication and host it among themselves.

------
tomohawk
A private company has quite a bit of latitude, until it becomes a monopoly (or
part of an oligopoly). Monopolists always hide behind the "but, we're a
private company" defense. Who wouldn't? Settled law and legal tradition holds
that we tolerate a monopoly only when they are regulated and conduct
themselves in a manner that is fair to all.

It is unacceptable for monopolists to infringe on peoples constitutionally
protected rights. When a monopolist offers a service, they have to provide it
to everyone. We can't have electric monopolists cutting power to people
because they voted for the "wrong" party. We can't have banks and payment
processors making it practically impossible for people to conduct commerce.

Going down that path leads us to where China already is. Calling someone on
the phone leads to a message about how the person is socially unacceptable and
that proceeding with the call may cause you to be similarly blacklisted. Or,
you just get phone access cut off.

------
adamrezich
The problem with free speech on the Internet is that our human minds have not
sufficiently evolved to even remotely begin to understand just how
fundamentally the Internet changes our perception of our fellow humans.
Dunbar's number shows that we're only able to keep track of a very small
number of ongoing human relationships relative to the Internet-connected
population of the planet, and at a societal level we're used to only hearing
ideas from people around us, and those in published works or in mass media
such as radio and television. Yet now anyone, literally anyone, can go online
and proclaim whatever they want in certain online public spaces.

If I walked into a local bookstore and saw a whole shelf dedicated to white
supremacy, I would rightfully be appalled that it was allowed to exist,
because stocking such books would reflect on the bookstore. The Internet is
like a bookstore where anyone can write a book and guarantee it's stocked, and
free to read, and therefore completely unlike a bookstore at all. Yet we tend
to think of online discussion platforms in these terms because the idea of a
true online free speech platform where only content that is Actually Illegal
is taken down and reported to the authorities accordingly is still incredibly
foreign to us at a societal level. Someone who's never used the Internet and
never met any (for example) white supremacists in their lives may go online
for the first time and see an active discussion among white supremacists
taking place, and this causes cognitive dissonance: "I've never met a single
white supremacist in my life, yet here's _dozens_ of them, virtually
congregating and discussing their racist viewpoints! What the hell is
happening? Is the Internet full of racists?" Humans are terrible at
comprehending numbers on the scale of "the number of Internet-connected users
in the world," so it's hard to understand "the proportion of vocal white
supremacists online compared to the total number of people using the Internet
in the world is just about as small as you previously thought it was" when
they're given the same equal voice as everyone else.

There's no easy solution to this. Unless a massive societal shift in
understanding how the Internet works and fits into modern human society
happens, "safe" yet censored platforms like Twitter will always be more
popular with normal users compared to "true free speech" havens like Gab, and
generally-offensive extremist viewpoints will congregate on services like the
latter after being kicked off of services like the former, making services
like the latter a hard sell to people who don't hold extremist viewpoints
themselves, in spite of the promise of unrestricted free speech.

It's been wild seeing the increase of people openly advocating _against_
unfiltered free speech on the Internet as the Internet has gotten popular with
the rise of smartphones, to the point where some people seem to consider "free
speech" a "talking point" or "dogwhistle" of "the other side."

Until the singularity happens and we become one global consciousness and
ascend to a higher plane of being, we're never going to have uniform beliefs
as individual members of our species, and people with offensively extremist
views will always exist. Silencing their views on a given platform out of a
sense of righteousness and justice may feel good but solves nothing. You
cannot change peoples' minds or eliminate ideas by making them illegal or
against platform policy to express. Once you acknowledge and internalize this,
browsing the Internet and occasionally coming across extremist opinions
becomes a lot easier to grapple with.

~~~
stcredzero
_The problem with free speech on the Internet is that our human minds have not
sufficiently evolved to even remotely begin to understand just how
fundamentally the Internet changes our perception of our fellow humans._

Douglas Adams understood. (Babelfish)

~~~
YouAreGreat
> our human minds have not sufficiently evolved

They're also not evolved to deal with TV news.

~~~
stcredzero
Hell, I don't think we're all that good with distorted print media either!

------
SideburnsOfDoom
> We run the risk that the act of deplatforming can become as extreme as the
> hate speech it seeks to banish.

So, they're saying "I won't help your speech reach millions" runs the risk of
being as bad as encouraging the idea that "all $ethnics must die" \- speech
which as very real and deadly consequences.

I don't know where to even with that. Someone has not though it through at
all. Is the rest worth reading?

------
cauwelaert
People should have a chance to speak their mind but in an ideal world decency
would prohibit some things from being said. It's dangerous when certain
platforms who coordinate with government agencies decide what is acceptable
and what is not. I'm not ready for a ministry of truth like snoopes.

------
InclinedPlane
Read this instead: [https://datasociety.net/output/oxygen-of-
amplification/](https://datasociety.net/output/oxygen-of-amplification/)

------
wstuartcl
Freedom of speech is a right provided by the constitution. Me, You or
privately held platform(s) providing the venue for that speech is not. Just
like I will not be allowing GAB like speech from my properties, I will also
look poorly upon anyone else hosting that garbage.

~~~
neuralk
>Freedom of speech is a right provided by the constitution

No, it is not. It explicitly is not. Freedom of speech is one right among many
other unstated rights held in common by the people. The first amendment merely
prohibits Congress from passing a law that restricts it. The wording is clear
that this freedom is something that exists inherently beyond the scope of the
Constitution, and is certainly not "provided" by the document. We naturally
have rights such as freedom of speech. It is from institutions like the
government that restrictions are placed on them.

Also, the 9th amendment was included precisely to clarify and codify the fact
that the Constitution, in enumerating the rights, is not itself granting those
rights or even stating that these are the only rights people have.

~~~
tptacek
The 9th Amendment does not mean that Twitter must allow your speech. In fact,
at the time the 9th Amendment was drafted, it didn't even require _the states_
to grant you a right to free expression; that right wasn't incorporated onto
the states until Reconstruction.

So, no, not so much.

~~~
dragonwriter
> that right wasn't incorporated onto the states until Reconstruction.

Much later, actually; while the Supreme Court grounded incorporation in the
Due Process clause of the 14th Amendment, which was part of Reconstruction,
the doctrine of incorporation was articulated and developed in the 20th
Century, starting, IIRC, with _Gitlow v. New York_ in 1925.

------
mlillie
This reeks of both-sides-ism and enablement.

"Where does it stop?" is the same slippery slope garbage peddled by #HimToo
and #BlueLivesMatter acolytes. But even engaging with the question at face
value, the answer is very simple, and the author of this piece didn't try very
hard if he couldn't find someone who is able to answer it. In fact, the best
answer was given by Karl Popper in 1945.

> In order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must be intolerant of
> intolerance.

That's it. Platforms like Gab are themselves intolerant, and we must continue
to be intolerant of them.

~~~
stcredzero
_This reeks of both-sides-ism and enablement._

The whole point of Free Speech is to enable all sides of any issue to have
their say. That is a fundamental mechanism against totalitarianism.

 _In order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must be intolerant of
intolerance._

Sorry, but Karl Popper's idea is just Orwellian nightmare fuel. "War is peace.
Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength."

Tolerance is to live and let live. Oppressing those you disagree with is the
very opposite of tolerance. (Even if they are truly horrible people.) If
Silicon Valley were tolerant, they'd let Gab live and possibly be a cesspit of
horribleness. A society that de-platforms and un-persons everyone and every
idea it doesn't like isn't a free society. That's not a free market of ideas.
That's totalitarianism through economic hegemony.

~~~
archagon
Totalitarianism is gaining power _right now_ through bad actors operating
under the cloak of free speech. The bigger their communities get, the more
they infect the communities around them with their hatred and lies. This
should be blindingly obvious if you’ve been online for more than a couple of
years.

Your mechanism against totalitarianism will lead you straight into a
dictatorship.

~~~
BurningFrog
This is the "fascism is infectious" theory, under which we are all potential
fascists if we just get exposed to the "infection".

By this theory fascism is somehow so inherently attractive that is has to be
regulated similar to an addictive drug.

~~~
archagon
People are surprisingly easy to reprogram. You can read countless stories of
once-liberal parents turning into hateful conspiracy nuts in their old age out
of prolonged exposure to right-wing media.

If you see people around you saying “white males are undergoing a genocide” or
“brown people are criminals” every day, chances are you’ll eventually start to
internalize some of those talking points. Without tremendous effort, we’re
nothing more than a rough aggregation of the opinions we surround ourselves
with.

~~~
philwelch
> People are surprisingly easy to reprogram.

Not you, though. No way could YOU be under the influence of a totalitarian
ideology despite the fact that you are _openly advocating restricting basic
human rights_.

~~~
archagon
I am advocating the right for private organizations to ban fucked-up
ideologies from their services. That this is being framed as some sort of
totalitarian assault on free speech shows just how far the right-wing rot has
gotten.

The balance fallacy will be the death of democracy in America.

~~~
ThrowawayR2
> _I am advocating the right for private organizations to ban fucked-up
> ideologies from their service._

Can we start with yours? /s

This has nothing to do with "right-wing rot". We already have ample historical
examples of what happens when those wielding power, whether religious, royal,
or financial, can suppress views and speech and it wasn't a good thing! The
Enlightenment and the birth of the liberal movement (now classical liberalism,
I suppose) were in reaction to those abuses and they fought many hard battles
to get us the rights we enjoy today. It would be insane to throw that away for
a little temporary advantage.

~~~
archagon
You're speaking as if these groups are working to amend the Constitution. It's
a ridiculous comparison.

Worse yet, all this anger is a massive distraction. We should be talking day
and night about the rampant voter suppression and e-voting security flaws that
_do_ actually pose an existential threat to our democracy. But no, let's just
focus all our attention on Gab for weeks on end.

~~~
ThrowawayR2
> _We should be talking day and night about the rampant voter suppression and
> e-voting security flaws that do actually pose an existential threat to our
> democracy._

In that much, at least, I will agree with you.

------
throwawaysea
Why is this article being flagged?

From
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)
> If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it.

This story is not spam, and it is not off-topic since it clearly relates to
current news in technology.

~~~
hcg
People flag controversy because they want to avoid flame wars and this place
devolving into political discussion constantly.

------
happilycentrist
In my other writings, I've touched on how these tech companies compromise
their stability and reliability when they engage in witch-burning campaigns.

For example - once upon a time, I could trust the google search engine, g-mail
and the chrome browser. I recommended them to other people, and utilized them
myself. But now, I can't in good faith steer folks to any google property,
because they run the risk of losing access to their data. Today it's
fashionable to cut off GAB, what will the moral panic of tomorrow be?

Another example - I used Pay-pal weekly to make purchases and send money to
people and causes I supported. But after PayPal began denying service based on
what keeps the outrage mob mollified, I've closed my account and have been
helping website operating on the dissident right to transition away from a
system that might deny them service on a fit of whimsy. Paypal, like so many
other platforms, has become too unreliable to be a single point of failure.

All of these institutions were, until the last few years, treated like
utilities - which bolstered their reputation for reliability. But now, so many
of these giant Near-Monopolies have decided to become overtly political,
denying their services without any manner of due process or even a reasonable
amount of notice to the people being cast off. This damages the brand
reliability, and where once customers could rely on their Registrar, Host, or
Payment Processor, they now must consider it imperative to have redundant
systems - lest they risk having their service cut because they suddenly find
themselves on the bad side of "the fashionable opinion" of the hour. (Goal-
posts that move by the hour, and today's cleric of the faith can easily find
themselves tomorrow heretic).

A high-trust business environment is required to maintain the sorts of
business relationships a content creator enters into with a
platform/host/registrar. The fact is, as it stands now, no content creator,
business or group can trust these tech-corporations to maintain a stable
relationship - or even adhere to a basic contract - in good faith. Once a
company - like PayPal for instance - has proven itself unreliable, it has
already done half the work of replacing itself.

------
StuntPope
Article flagged. Nice. Love the tolerance and receptiveness to discussion
here.

------
wisty
While Americans seem obsessed with defining "free speech" as being exactly the
same thing as the 1st Amendment, it might help to ask exactly why the 1st
Amendment is a good idea.

JS Mill argued that censorship is wrong on a rights basis, that it leads to
bad ideas being unchallenged, and it leads to people not being able to
understand the reason why ideas are rejected. If censorship by a government is
harmful, how is deplatforming by a near-monopoly different? I suspect some
left-wingers argue this in a hypocritical way, because they think it will
"trigger the conservatives" to force them to attack the actions of private
companies, but this is hardly a good argument.

~~~
YouAreGreat
> "trigger the conservatives" to force them to attack the actions of private
> companies

Conservatives will come to understand that big capital is not a conservative.

~~~
wisty
I'm not personally a conservative, but I'm pretty sure conservatives are not
all hardcore libertarians or objectivists. Some of the intellectual brain-
trust of conservative thought is libertarian or objectivist, but a lot of the
broader conservative movement is not.

------
CM30
I've said it before, and I'll say it again; online platforms needed to be
treated like their offline equivalents. Why can an ISP not censor traffic but
a web host can? Why can the utility company or a credit card processor not
'shut down' customers they disagree with while the likes of Cloudflare or
PayPal or Stripe can?

There's no logic behind this. No, you can't just say 'offline stuff has a
monopoly', because it doesn't. It might in some parts of the US (where choice
in ISPs is limited), but it certainly doesn't in much of Europe, other parts
of the US or other countries around the world. You've got multiple choices for
banks and building societies, multiple choices for electric companies and
multiple choices for ISPs, yet we're sane and don't let them discriminate by
political views at will.

It's time similar standards were set up for online services too. If you market
yourself as a platform or network or service that should be morally neutral,
then you should be obligated to act that way, just like your offline
equivalents generally do. There should always be a way to host a platform for
your views, no matter how many people hate them and you in the process.

Google and Apple should also be looked into in regards to their app stores
too. They're defacto monopolies on their platforms (unless you jailbreak
them), and their standards for what's 'acceptable' are clearly broken and
biased to all hell. Apparently something like Gab isn't allowed, but dozens of
copyright/trademark/whatever infringing ripoffs are? It's fine for apps to
ripoff consumers and target kids with exploitative in app purchases but not
provide a platform for 'questionable' views?

Yeah, that doesn't add up much, and it's clear they're falling short as both a
platform and a publisher.

Finally, something should definitely be done about the whole 'contact their
employer and try and get them fired' crap. I'm not really sure what, but there
should be a legal way to stop people trying to screw over people's livelihoods
based on online disagreements. Maybe an actual ban on contacting someone's
employer/company/coworkers unless it's about illegal activity? I don't know,
anything I can think of seems like it'd hurt freedom of speech more in the
attempt to save it.

But something does need to change, before the laws basically become
ineffective and trial by media/mob becomes the judge, jury and executioner.

~~~
TheAceOfHearts
Unfortunately, credit card processors can and do deny services to people with
which they disagree. To give one example: you can't use any mainstream payment
processors for anything related to pornography.

Also, on Android you can run alternative app stores without having to
"jailbreak" the phone. One example of this is f-droid [0]. You just need to
change a single configuration option to allow installing APKs from third-party
sources. Fortnite is an example of a popular Android game which you have to
download and install outside of the Play Store, presumably because they don't
want to pay for the large cut that Google normally takes.

I think domain name registrars should probably be treated like utilities,
although I'd have to think it through very carefully to consider any
consequences.

I'm generally in agreement that platforms should be neutral, otherwise they
should be treated as publishers and be forced to deal with the consequences.
It sets a poor precedent when rules are not enforced evenly.

[0] [https://f-droid.org/](https://f-droid.org/)

~~~
amanaplanacanal
Are there any platforms that are still neutral? It seems like reality has
shown those that tried to be, that really, they can't. Spam takes over your
email, hostile ads take over your advertising space, trolls take over your
forums.

Maybe there is some way around this, but I have no idea what it might be.

------
Krasnol
> The next challenger to Twitter will not be another centralized platform like
> Gab. It will be decentralized – perhaps a federation like Mastodon, where
> each node runs its own CoC and community standards – similar to IRC days.

You might want to ask Wil Wheaton what he thinks about Mastodon...

~~~
mmirate
Why is some random actor's opinion unusually important, let alone on a
technical topic such as this?

~~~
Krasnol
Because what happened to him is relevant to the topic.

