- cross-posted to:
- europe@feddit.org
- cross-posted to:
- europe@feddit.org
cross-posted from : https://lemmy.zip/post/56719476
Italy fined Cloudflare 14.2 million euros for refusing to block access to pirate sites on its 1.1.1.1 DNS service, the country’s communications regulatory agency, AGCOM, announced yesterday. Cloudflare said it will fight the penalty and threatened to remove all of its servers from Italian cities.
What about censoring neo Nazis? What about banning Trump from Twitter?
That’s moderation. When there’s a law against it, that’s censorship.
Frankly a couple of countries have passed laws against Nazi speech and paraphernalia, and after the Nazis plunged the world into the biggest war of all time and murdered 12 million people for their racist ideology, I’m cool with that. If that’s the bar: I can live with it. Murder 12 million, your little club no longer gets to meet.
There have always been rational limits on speech.
A lot of people don’t seem to remember Alex Jones getting banned from YouTube in 2018. While rightwing, ultra-MAGA’s were already a thing, they were relatively small compared today. Alex Jones was the first high profile ban from social media and it was like tossing gasoline onto a small bush fire.
You have to remember that Trump did not win the first time because he had an army of fanatics. A lot of other factors were at play; from people still upset about the DNC’s snubbing of Bernie, to people who weren’t fully paying attention (remember, politics used to be boring), to people who voted for Trump simply “for the lols” (don’t discount this last group, any historical account that doesn’t factor in how important internet memes were to getting that man elected is being willfully ignorant) . Die-hard MAGA’s were relatively rare, and usually a source of ridicule.
Until their spokespeople started getting banned from places. It seems so small by today’s standards. People get banned and deplatformed all the time. But Alex Jones was the first real incident, and people saw it as a massive attack on free speech. To his relatively small number of followers, the man had his free speech rights violated by the left-wing news cabal for daring to speak the TRUTH™. Suddenly, all their bullshit was justified.
I’ve always been pretty far-left but I got a deep chill when that happened. I remember remarking to my friends that banning political speech, no matter how full of shit, would only cause problems in the long run, and so it has. Precedent was broken, and the right took it as a declaration of war. I truly believe things would not have gotten nearly as insane as they are had Google not decided to ban him. He deserved it, but they opened a door that couldn’t be shut again; and following this was a couple years of high-profile bans of rightwing figureheads and safe-spaces, all cumulating to the shut down of /r/theDonald in 2020. And the infection, which had been contained to a few small corners of the internet, suddenly exploded.
I really cannot follow the argument. In Germany, we have a law making it illegal to deny the holocaust. People will say that seven million jews never died, and the police will investigate them, they are taken to court and put into prison if necessary.
Nothing bad ever came from this. We simply get to put one specific kind of asshole into prison if they spread lies to sow hatred.
My fellow countrymen generally seem to struggle with the concept of narrow and focused laws.
Everything is always all or nothing, and it makes nuance a problem to talk about.
DNS is not Twitter. Blocking DNS is the equivalent of blocking off the street to the pub. Getting banned from XYZ service is the equivalent of starting shit at the pub and getting thrown out.
They should be able to talk all they want. Right up unto the steps of the gallows.
What government entity does Twitter represent?
To the people that don’t get it. Censorship is when the government oppresses or modifies speech.
What the user above is talking about is when social media companies like Twitter banned Donald Trump and neo-nazi accounts.
Social media companies are private entities that you have a contract with where they provide you with service and you agree to abide by specific terms of that service. Hate speech and promotion of violence are things that you have agreed to not do on their services. If you do those things, then you agreed that your account could be terminated. That is what happened to Trump and the neo-nazi accounts (but I repeat myself).
I can agree that social media companies have too much power over public interaction and media consumption but I also agree that a person or organization should not be forced to host and broadcast messages that they disagree with.
Ironically, this standing legal interpretation is due to a right-wing lawsuit widely celebrated on the religious right about a cake baker who didn’t want to make wedding cakes for a gay wedding. The ruling is what affirmed the ability of private entities to regulate speech on their platforms.
Complaining about being banned from a public platform and also celebrating the victory of the cake baker is a situation where their side wants to have their cake and eat it too.
People seems to be fine with corporate censorship, but government censorship is somehow a no-no. I don’t get it. Corporate censorship is still censorship, but it’s now worse. Because you have now given up democratic control of what to censor, and let the tech billionaires have free reign over it. Twitter could ban Trump today, and promote fascism tomorrow and you’d have no say. (oh waiiit, that actually happened?!?!). If you think twitter banning Trump in 2021 is a good thing, why won’t you want the power to vote to ban Trump?
I could be wrong, I am open to change my mind, but please give me a good counter-argument.
corporate censorship is not illegal. If you come to my house spouting Nazi rhetoric I have ever right to call you out on it and kick you out of my house.
There are laws deliberately protecting the people’s right to free speech that is not infringed by the government.
Now if you want to talk about how we should remove companies/corps rights as entities, we can have the conversation.
Trump was banned from Twitter and it was a good thing because it was them enforcing their TOS/EULA rules in a reasonable manner that doesn’t play favorites. Because the average person like you or me couldn’t say a lot of what Trump said on the platform and not get banned.
That doesn’t mean Twitter is a good company. There are no good companies. Corporations are not your friend. But they also aren’t government entities and they shouldn’t be. So if the state wants to sponsor the internet as a utility it can create its own cloudflare-like service for the purpose of DNS blocking and block whatever it wants. But cloudflare isn’t a state sponsored utility. It’s a corp. It has every right (whether you agree it should have rights or not) to not operate in countries it doesn’t want to operate in.
Your thinking is so calcified by the specific laws of the united states of America it is frustrating. Laws are written by mere mortals like you and me. When those bunch of dudes wrote the Constitution more than two hundred years ago, they couldn’t have imagined the internet in theirs wildest dreams. And that’s without pointing out that the reason they valued absolute freedom of speech so much can be largely attributed to the historical backdrop at the time.
A long time has passed, something better is possible. It’s time to think again from first principles.
If platforms aren’t allowed to moderate their platforms discussion will devolve into the same shit-tier content that Lemmy is so famous for.
Corporations have rights. Quite literally. They are legal entities. We aren’t required to use their services. They aren’t required to provide said services.
In this case public authority is the government.
The choice for Cloudflare or any company that operates in the jurisdiction of the government enacting the law is to obey the law or not do business in that governments jurisdiction. It seems like that’s exactly what Cloudflare is suggesting they will do if the government tries to force them to adhere to said law. That’s their right as a company.
I’m not saying cloudflare is a good company. My argument isn’t that pulling out of the country is a good idea.
My main concern and the reason that I responded to your comment in the first place was because you tried to make this about freedom of speech, and as it pertains to this discussion I’m not really sure what your argument is except that your idea of free speech is predicated on the idea that the freedom of the people and their speech should in some way negate the freedom of the company.
The threat of legal action on Cloudflare’s part seems to be to do with the fine that the government is trying to force on them for refusing to agree to obey the newly enacted law. It’s normal for corporations to fight civil penalties like this.
Your argument doesn’t seem to be that it costs tax dollars (it does), or that it’s unfair because you or I wouldn’t have the same opportunity due to monetary limitations to legally fight the government. Or even that if you or I didn’t agree with the law we couldn’t just up sticks and leave the country. Your argument seems to be that somehow, by standing up for the rights they do have, this company is somehow blocking free speech? I’m asking because I still am not sure I understand.
Amazing this is so downvoted.
It is literally impossible to discuss free speech online, and has been for decades, due to a tsunami of americans thinking their specific law is the only position possible and flooding all debate with smug explanations of how it actually works, actually.
I’m not arguing against free speech here. Granted I also didn’t downvote these comments.
The main problem is that the original comment and subsequent comments don’t explain what the alternative is. It isn’t just the US that has such laws (as I tried to demonstrate by posting an alternative law from the UK.
The thing is, generally the rights of an individual generally stop where the rights of another individual start and vice versa.
The original comment doesn’t even explain what part of either the ruling by the country in question or the threat of legal action on the part of Cloudflare they disagree with, nor did they explain how that is in any way related to free speech.
There exist whole countries that have internet that doesn’t use Cloudflare’s services. Cloudflare is a big player in the DNS space but they aren’t the end all be all of the internet.
If the concern is that Cloudflare’s threat to leave the country will amount to censoring free speech because websites won’t be available due to the lack of Cloudflare services, that’s a problem with the infrastructure of the country in question and their ability to provide DNS blocking as a service (forcing them to rely on a business that is provides said services in exchange for money).
That same money can be used to stand up a Cloudflare alternative.
Reliance on tech corporations is not an excuse to claim free speech is being detrimentally affected by censorship.
Even if it was, the least the original commenter could have done was offered alternative solutions.
It’s not somehow a no-no. It’s literally banned by the Constitution
When that site has 20+ felonies including pedophilia, yes
And who is going to ban Trump from Twitter?
He uses his own social media?
Yeah, he has his own Mastodon instance. I was trying to make a different point, though.
People couldn’t even agree to keep Trump away from government, even though that’s a no-brainer. If you react by trying to build a consensus that some people should be banned from social media, you may get that consensus. But it won’t be Trump who is banned. That is a no-brainer, too.
It’s shockingly fascist thinking, actually.
Censorship is, at best, a band-aid. And they can always find ways around it. The best solution isn’t to block them from view temporarily, but to teach people to evaluate what they say with empathy and critical thinking.
That is, of course, difficult to accomplish. But then again, there’s no easy solutions, only easy excuses.
The “you don’t need to censor fascists, bigots, racists, etc., you just have to be louder than them” idea hadn’t worked. The world had decades to make it work but didn’t succeed. It is ideologically pure, I’ll give you that. Really nice if you can drive those bad people out without dirtying your own hands with censorship. But I have lost confidence that that approach can ever work.
At no point did I mention volume, I implied education. I actually find just yelling louder to be worse than censorship, as all it does is increase the level of tension and push people towards extremes. Which helps no one.
I also didn’t mean to imply that we shouldn’t use band-aids at all, just that it’s a simple treatment, not a cure. Blocking certain speech and rhetoric can help to a degree… but not if it’s the only thing you do.
The problem with current strategies is that no one wants to go beyond that first step. Whether it’s censorship, or shouting.
You can’t educate people over Twitter. 😂
Banning groups like that only amplifies their “persecuted” persona. It’s best to spend on education and destroying their credibility, which is how we dealt with fucking idiots before we got complacent.