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.
Based. Censorship no bueno
What about censoring neo Nazis? What about banning Trump from Twitter?
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.
DOGE
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.
It’s not somehow a no-no. It’s literally banned by the Constitution
And who is going to ban Trump from Twitter?
They should be able to talk all they want. Right up unto the steps of the gallows.
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.
You need to read and understand about the Paradox of Intolerance, it’s really important.
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.
banning political speech, no matter how full of shit, would only cause problems in the long run, and so it has.
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.
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.
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.
I mention it to my friends and family every chance I get. I try to explain that the digital walls they’re building aren’t going to keep us safe but I’m always met with tired indifference.
Yeah the worst fucking part is that theyre indifferent. They dont promote these measures, they just dont care. If they did, a discussion could be had at least.
Are they becoming less shitty or is this accidentally doing the right thing?
They’re arguing that applying filters would degrade performance for everyone. So… to me that kinda sounds like accidentally doing the right thing.
Cf has always been taking the “freedom of speech absolutist” approach.
Any DNS beginning filtering anything gets removed from my Adguard Home. I will do my filtering myself. Ads and nazi websites like *.il, or whitehouse.gov for example do not load in my network.
Whats wrong with *il? Its just domain, like com
As a European, I’ve really come around to a more American view of Free Speech.
Over the last few years, we get more and more laws requiring more and more surveillance and censorship to protect copyright, stop hate speech, enforce GDPR, … We’re building up this infrastructure and the population thinks it’s fine. The courts go along and ask for more.
What is going to happen when a European Trump comes to power? You think it’s terrible that Big Tech goes along with Trump? That Must bought Twitter? We ain’t seen nothing yet.
Yeah I don’t get that. How did free speech help when the Nazis humiliated jews publicly in the 1930s? How does it help now that the US president says that Somalis are trash people? Nick Fuentes saying the “organized Jewry in America” being a problem?
It seems obvious that I want the state to prevent hate speech, especially against minorities.
How did free speech help when the Nazis humiliated jews publicly in the 1930s?
How did it help taking “jew-baiters” like Julius Streicher to court during the Weimar Republic? Obviously it didn’t.
It seems obvious that I want the state to prevent hate speech, especially against minorities.
You want the state to act against hate speech coming from the elected head of state. What about that seems like a good plan?
You can’t convince people that Trump is a bad guy, and so you want the state to go after the bad guys. Maybe you can convince people that the state should smash bad guys. It’s not hard. But Trump is in charge of the state and not you. He’ll decide who’s a bad guy.
Blocking cloudflare is about as useful as a screen door on a submarine. Unless they start blocking IPs like the great firewall of china blocking any DNS is kinda pointless. Unless maybe if the domain’s primary name servers are cloudflare but I can’t seeing any site doing nefarious things using cloudflare. Run your own DNS resolver on a VPS somewhere besides Italy.
My worry is the internet starts getting terribly segmented and not interconnected. That would be more of an issue.
So then the Italian court orders its local ISPs to blackhole 1.1.1.1 (which would be stupid easy). Which will end up pushing people to VPNs but still satisfy the court order.
Gaslighting article after CEO of Cloudflare started harassing Italian organizations and people https://xcancel.com/eastdakota/status/2009654937303896492 . Probably sponsored. I expect at least 10 more. Looking at brainwashing today is such a joy. I expect people start defending their favorite company and this asshole.
Can you explain more? It sounds like you think it’s acceptable for the owners of an Italian sports league to have this power over the Internet?
Explain what ? That I can read and understand ? I am saying that it’s not ok for CEO of company to cancel services in whole country after receiving spam email. It’s not ok to call politicians to support online aggression actions against foreign country and at the same time wash mouth with freedom. But well I know you who praise him. Good luck and keep destroying internet.
In addition, we are considering the following actions: 1) discontinuing the millions of dollars in pro bono cyber security services we are providing the upcoming Milano-Cortina Olympics; 2) discontinuing Cloudflare’s Free cyber security services for any Italy-based users; 3) removing all servers from Italian cities; and 4) terminating all plans to build an Italian Cloudflare office or make any investments in the country.
It seems like you are misunderstanding the situation. I’m asking you to explain why you support Italian media executives having the power to censor the Internet.
Are you sane ?
I like to think so. You?
Love to see America taking up this free speech fight again. EU has gotten out of control.
Ah yes, USA - the country with the most strict anti-piracy laws, also responsible for forcing them onto the EU. I’m sure it’ll happily defend piracy from supposed attacks on free speech.
The Ameri-cunt of the Fascist States of America has spoken, we better all listen to him or else…
