ISPs Should Not Police Online Speech—No Matter How Awful It Is.
ISPs Should Not Police Online Speech—No Matter How Awful It Is.
www.eff.org
ISPs Should Not Police Online Speech—No Matter How Awful It Is.
36 comments
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"If we don't let the oppressors roam freely, they might try to oppress you" is not something I expected to read from the EFF today. But well, here we are.
It has been standard internet behavior that if a platform does not have the proper response to abuse complaints, you move up a layer higher until you find someone that is receptive to it. This has been standard operating procedure for more or less for the entirety of the current millennium, and this article has done absolutely zero work to provide a good reason it should be anything otherwise, other than bringing up generic "free speech" stuff.
You should not get a path out of that process because one layer immediately above the problematic entity is actively choosing to disregard abuse complaints. You simply move up to the next step. And this process simply must keep existing, as doing anything otherwise is to allow people to pull off all kinds of bad things; scams, spam, illegal activity and far more.
And if you abolish the non-legal form of that process? Well, there's still a legal process - and as soon as someone that wants to censor minorities gets control over the legal process, they will simply change the rules in their favor, as has happened countless times in the past.
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I think what distinguishes Internet service provision from all the other "platform" aspects of the Internet is that Internet service has become a kind of baseline utility. Everything depends on it: your smart home devices, your security system, Point of Sale systems, etc. You can't search for employment without it, your kids can't attend remote school, etc.
We all understand that when someone buys advertising space in a newspaper, they are forming a contract with that newspaper, and the paper has to be a willing participant. But that's not really how we think of utilities. I think we'd all be pretty unhappy if the electric company refused service to a facility, or if the water company refused to hook somebody up to the water supply, or the fire department refused to put out a fire, due to the property user's political speech. Even if we deeply disagreed with that speech.
I think ISPs are a lot more like utilities, and a lot less like newspapers. If it's that important, then write a law explaining exactly how and when ISPs are intervene by removing or refusing service in these situations, and defend the law in court. But don't leave it up to ISP terms of service.
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If such a process existed, the entity in question would almost certainly end up being shut down by that process, unless they find a funny technical loophole around it, in which case that would be a failure of the law that should not be rejoiced by anyone.
But as it stands, that law and process does not exist; ISPs already can and will shut you down for things like downloading copyrighted content (with or without complaints from the copyright holder), tethering without approval, being a technical nuisance in the form of mass port scanning, hosting insecure services and other such stuff. "Hosting a platform solely dedicated to harassment and stalking and ignoring abuse complaints about it" absolutely deserves to be on that list.
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It's consistent with stances on things like network neutrality. ISPs suck, are a monopoly in most areas, and I don't trust them to make these judgement calls. If we had actual competition in the space in the US then I'd care less.
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To add to this I don't think under any circumstances a for-profit business should be responsible for this kind of regulation. An ISP as a business has the main goal of maximising profit, and whatever they do would only be in service to that goal. This is aside from the fact that they're completely unelected which gives the public little recourse. This should be the government's job.
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That's because you and every other idiot zoomer has been brainwashed into thinking protecting free speech is racist or something. If you don't understand why megacorps and the government shouldn't be able to censor you then you shouldn't be able to use the Internet at all.
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Hey, person whose been on the internet since doing so involved torturing a modem here. You're not a wizened authority and people who believe differently than you aren't brainwashed children. Fuck the Nazis.
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Reminder to be nice on our instance
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Free speech absolutism is even more of a brain dead idea.
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It shouldn't be on the ISPs, it should be on the SERVICES that USE the ISPs.
I'll give you a perfect example, the Uvalde shooter.
He had been using a French social media platform called Yubo where he posted animal abuse videos and threatened to rape and murder other users.
He was reported to Yubo, REPEATEDLY, and Yubo did nothing.
Maybe we need to make social media companies mandatory reporters in cases like this? Rather than just ban a user wholesale, increase monitoring of them and report the account to local authorities?
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I think the question then becomes "what happens when the services refuse". Because the next step up is getting their ISP to kick them off.
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The only thing Yubo could/should have done is forward it to the police though (which is what the users that initially reported this content should have done as well, independently). I'm not sure why that hasn't happened. I hate to say it but this is still not the company's responsibility, the most they can do directly is ban his account which wouldn't accomplish anything in this case. I'd say go straight to local authorities rather than expecting services to handle it.
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@gsa4555 So if ISPs are utilities like a electricity or waste water, should they be regulated? Even Proud Boys have electricity and water to their house, and laws prevent them from being cut off just because they are vile.
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I apologise beforehand for a slightly rude tone. I won't be "kind" towards stupidity - because that would be arseholery towards everyone, as everyone gets harmed by stupidity.
Plenty individuals are reducing the matter into two positions:
- Let hate discourses and harassment run rampant.
- Let corporations dictate what's considered acceptable or not.
And then, when you criticise one of those positions (because they're both foul), you'll get some assumers neighing that you're defending the other view, even when explicitly stated otherwise. It's that old false dichotomy: "if u dun think dat red is blue than u think dat red is green! Red is not green you is dumb lol XD lmao".
And that is exactly what is happening here. EFF is criticising #2 as short-sighted and dumb; it is. However it is not defending #1. This is blatantly obvious for anyone with basic reading comprehension, as the following excerpts show:
But just because there’s a serious problem doesn’t mean that every response is a good one.
Finally, site-blocking, whatever form it takes, almost inevitably cuts off legal as well as illegal speech. It cuts with a chain saw rather than a scalpel.
Here's the third position:
3 Governments should institute and enforce laws against hate discourses and harassment.
That's rather close to what EFF is proposing, see:
The cops and the courts should be working to protect the victims of KF and go after the perpetrators with every legal tool at their disposal. We should be giving them the resources and societal mandate to do so.
I agree with this because it's easier to whip a gov into defending your interests than doing it with a private entity, that will always defend its own interests against you. EFF is spot on when it says that they won't stop at illegal speech, you're giving them precedent to dictate what you - intermediated by your government - should.
36 comments
A lot of free speech absolutionists always make the slippery slope argument with regards to suppressing minorities or other undesirable repression of valid speech. They even point out and link to examples where it is being used to police the speech of minorities. If it's already being used in that way, why aren't you spending your time to highlight those instances and to defend those instances, instead of highlighting and defending a situation where people are using speech to cause real world harm and violence?
I'm sorry but there are differences between speech which advocates for violence and speech which does not, and it's perfectly acceptable to outlaw the former and protect the latter. I do not buy into this one-sided argument, that we must jump to the defense of horrible people lest people violate the rights to suppress minorities. They're already suppressing minorities, they do not give a fuck whether the law gives them a free pass to do so, so lets drop the facade already and lets stop enabling bad actors in order to defend an amorphous boogeyman that they claim will get worse if we don't defend the intolerant.
I must disagree.
We need not wait for marginalized groups to be impacted to decry T1 ISP censorship. Ban whatever speech you want; the method of enforcement should be to arrest the perpetrators - not stop the sale of paper, the delivery of mail, or blocklist class A ip ranges.
On a more philosophical level, this is the question of “kindergarten policy” - do we punish those who crayon on the walls, or do we take away everybody’s crayons. To punish the ability to do wrong, or the act of doing wrong. Like most philosophical questions, there’s no good answer to this.
To do that, you have to know who the perpetrators are, which is routinely impossible.
This isn't a hypothetical situation, we are living in a world where servers are kicked off the internet, SSL certificates are revoked, vast quantities of emails are deleted without even sending them to a spam folder, lemmy communities are closed down, etc.
In a perfect world, none of that would be necessary and we could simply send the perpetrators to jail. But we don't live in a perfect world. We live in one where censorship is the only option.
Requiring arrest to be the correct method of suppressing abhorrent speech is actually way worse than letting ISPs decide to deny it a platform.
I absolutely agree. It's fear-mongering for freedom. Frankly, every law we create enacts a restriction on freedom. America needs to accept that there are certain things that we deem okay to restrict freedom with. It reminds me of that John Oliver interview with the OK State Senator where he says you don't give a fuck about saving the lives of children and only oppressing the freedoms of minorities.
You thinking of Jon Stewart? The gun control interview?
My initial concern is that internet access is mostly considered a utility which at least the UN considers a human right. "If you can take away a right, it's not a right, it's a privilege." That being said, "rights" are a social construct anyway which we regularly violate for "good" reasons, eg prison violates one's right to freedom of movement, and as an institution they weirdly reinforce The State's monopoly on violence and arbitration of who qualifies as "human" - in a twisted sort of way, prisoners are rendered "less human" by the state by their rights being taken away. Maybe it would be better to consider taking away internet access via ISPs sort of the moral equivalent of turning off someone's water if they're using it to poison the town well? If you abuse your right, you don't get to use it anymore as a defensive mechanism for everyone else's rights, ala sex offenders being put on a list which violates their privacy for better protection of more vulnerable groups.
I'd rather prisons focused on rehabilitation, and kept everyone in there until they were sufficiently rehabilitated. Instead of having second class citizens who can't participate in society because of what they're branded with, and prisons that do everything they can to break people and make them incapable of seeing themselves as part of society.
Thanks for this comment. I totally get how it can feel like 'free speech defenders' have a blanket defense that ends up protecting evil people. And you're right.
The world has become so loud with instant global communication. So many different ideas, cultures, personalities, perspectives... I think we all wish we could turn down the volume, but none more so than for people that spew hate.
No group deserves to receive threats of violence, harassment, or belittling of their existence. While I think we sit in agreement that it should be an obvious choice to ban people like Nazis and stop there, you could easily apply my previous sentence to many groups of people. There are some left-leaning communities where you'll see people wishing Trump to be strung up, or saying MAGA supporters should use their second amendment right and kill themselves. Many members of those communities would never condone violence against the former president or his supporters, but whoever we give the power to make the 'free speech' decision may see it differently.
The whole concept of free speech is not that everybody has a good idea. It's that nobody can be trusted to decide what is a good idea. If you believe in free speech, you believe in hearing a lot of bad ideas that can make people very uncomfortable. While I do agree that there can be very minimal exceptions to this in extreme circumstances, (death threats, stalking, harassment) we need to be very careful about who makes the call.
This is asking we put the responsibility of that arbitration in the hands of Spectrum and AT&T. Take a minute and think about that.
No, they already have that responsibility and are already arbitrating it. ISPs already block content. This is the existing system working entirely how it was designed.
Do I want a better system? Yes. But we don't have it. So let's not defend assholes who don't deserve it until we've created a system which protects the people we want it to.