8chan Criticized By Its Founder, Blocked by Australian and NZ ISPs (marketwatch.com) 195
Several major ISPs in Australia temporarily blocked access to 8chan, along with "dozens" of web sites that hosted video of last week's mass shooting in Christchurch New Zealand, Ars Technica reports -- noting that the ISPs acted on their own in response to "community expectations."
Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal reports that 8chan founder Fredrick Brennan (who "cut ties" with the site in December) is now criticizing 8chan moderators for their slowness in removing posts inciting violence, including last week's post from the Christchurch shooter Brenton Tarrant: Their reluctance to do so, along with the proliferation of posts on 8chan praising Tarrant's actions, have persuaded Brennan that the toxic, white-supremacist culture that lives on parts of the site could someday be linked to another mass shooting....
Brennan, 25 years old, expressed regret that the site had consumed so much of his life. "I didn't spend enough time making friends in real life," he said. High-school events and classes in upstate New York didn't matter to him at all. What mattered was the community of like-minded provocateurs, trolls, libertarians and conservative thinkers he discovered online as a boy and that formed his identity as a young man. "I just feel like I wasted too much time on this stuff," he said.
Washington Post reporter Drew Harwell (in a Post video) argues that 8chan "has grown from this central place for tech libertarians, trolls, just people looking to get a rise out of other people online, and it's really radicalized into this place of overt neo-Nazi, white supremacist, racist, sexist, anti-everything discourse...
"We haven't really reckoned with how to deal with the negative parts of easy and free and anonymous connectivity around the world, and there's no real good mechanism for solving a problem like that."
Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal reports that 8chan founder Fredrick Brennan (who "cut ties" with the site in December) is now criticizing 8chan moderators for their slowness in removing posts inciting violence, including last week's post from the Christchurch shooter Brenton Tarrant: Their reluctance to do so, along with the proliferation of posts on 8chan praising Tarrant's actions, have persuaded Brennan that the toxic, white-supremacist culture that lives on parts of the site could someday be linked to another mass shooting....
Brennan, 25 years old, expressed regret that the site had consumed so much of his life. "I didn't spend enough time making friends in real life," he said. High-school events and classes in upstate New York didn't matter to him at all. What mattered was the community of like-minded provocateurs, trolls, libertarians and conservative thinkers he discovered online as a boy and that formed his identity as a young man. "I just feel like I wasted too much time on this stuff," he said.
Washington Post reporter Drew Harwell (in a Post video) argues that 8chan "has grown from this central place for tech libertarians, trolls, just people looking to get a rise out of other people online, and it's really radicalized into this place of overt neo-Nazi, white supremacist, racist, sexist, anti-everything discourse...
"We haven't really reckoned with how to deal with the negative parts of easy and free and anonymous connectivity around the world, and there's no real good mechanism for solving a problem like that."
free and anonymous connectivity is not the problem (Score:5, Insightful)
It is the solution...
Re: free and anonymous connectivity is not the pro (Score:1)
No no no... I believe we are all now expected to say in unison:
"Yay censorship! Down with freedom! Oligarchy forever! The cheers for censorship - hup, hup, hurrah!"
actually... (Score:5, Insightful)
free and anonymous connectivity is not the problem
When it comes to psychologically stable and educated individuals, this is correct. However, this is a significant contingent of humanity that is unstable and/or impressionable. With this segment of the population, free and anonymous connectivity can be weaponized to amplify their misinformation/disinformation. It can be used to rally people to focus their feelings of living an unfulfilling life on to a scapegoat.
Scapegoating has in fact been a highly successful engagement strategy for media outlets and politicians, which have in turn convinced many that education is elitist and to distrust experts thus further exacerbating the issue.
The question is really, how do we protect our society from those who would take advantage of these people?
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The elite always knows better than those poor ignorant masses of people less smart than they are.
The correct answer to misinformation is always true information. It is never censorship.
If you want to know why certain sites attract radicals its because we have banned these people from mainstream sites where their rhetoric would be challenged. Instead by banning them they are pushed to echo chambers where there is no one to challenge their ideas.
Meanwhile the mainstream sites become no longer mainstream as t
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for the radicals on the other end of the political spectrum.
...the other end only rhymes with "spectrum".
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When it comes to psychologically stable and educated individuals, this is correct.
And who gets to decide who is psychologically stable and sufficiently educated? You? A Donald Trump appointee? Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez's second cousin's therapist?
In the old Soviet Union, the psychiatrists and psychologists worked for the government, which was, in turn, controlled by the Communist Party. It was, of course, insane to undermine the workers' revolution.
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And who gets to decide who is psychologically stable and sufficiently educated?
Objective reality decides. If you are unable to tell fact from fiction despite having the tools needed to determine the difference then you have failed.
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The question is really, how do we protect our society from those who would take advantage of these people?
No, the question is, how do we protect ourselves from "these people" that are unstable and/or impressionable?
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No, the question is, how do we protect ourselves from "these people" that are unstable and/or impressionable?
You aren't wrong but if your solution isn't to prevent them from being preyed upon then you are not talking about a democracy. If you continue to allow them to be preyed upon then the only realistic solution to protecting everyone else is to exclude them from the political process. Ergo, solutions that don't protect them are undemocratic.
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You teach them to protect themselves. Let's not cripple anybody else.
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You teach them to protect themselves.
You can (try to) do that for the next generation but that still leaves many who are easy prey.
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Doesn't matter. You don't deny the rest of us our rights. You find another way.
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since when was anonymous speech on the internet a right?
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It's not even worth discussing. It's a stupid argument. It's not for you or anybody else to decide who can use the medium. So, the cat and mouse game will continue indefinitely. Rights have to be taken to respected. Hopefully we will find the bulletproof tech to circumvent the tyrants, and that will be the end of it.
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It's not even worth discussing. It's a stupid argument.
LOL! Sure seems like you don't have a leg to stand on.
It's not for you or anybody else to decide who can use the medium.
Actually, it's up to the people who own the medium.
Hopefully we will find the bulletproof tech to circumvent the tyrants, and that will be the end of it.
It already exists. Just move your server onto the darknet with Tor. People don't care what they are discussing but they do care if they are trying to infect other people on the internet under the guise of legitimacy.
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It already exists. Just move your server onto the darknet with Tor.
Hardly! Too easy to track and block. Gotta get around the good old ISP entirely, find a new way to connect, unseen if needed and possible. Philosophizing about it is stupid. It's all about the tech now, so that nobody can "own the medium". Universal, anonymous access for all! Speech doesn't "infect" anybody that doesn't want to be "infected". There is no right to regulate it, outside that derived from the might of heavy weaponry.
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It already exists. Just move your server onto the darknet with Tor.
Hardly! Too easy to track and block.
Access to Tor has not been blocked and that's the point.
It's all about the tech now, so that nobody can "own the medium".
The site is the medium and yes, people definitely own them.
Speech doesn't "infect" anybody that doesn't want to be "infected".
Again, it doesn't impact the psychologically stable and educated individuals but rather the significant contingent of humanity that is unstable and/or uneducated and impressionable. However, when these messages of hate reaches a vulnerable person then it's a memetic exploit just like any computer worm. Many books have been written on the topic and you would do well to read one of them.
There is no right to regulate it, outside that derived from the might of heavy weaponry.
I'm not
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Access to Tor has not been blocked and that's the point.
Not here.
Feel free to lodge your complaints with the governments that do.
I am fully aware of psychological frailties, but appointing the Handicapper General [tnellen.com] is not the cure.
That's so far off base that I'm embarrassed for you. Nobody is being handicapped.
As long as the market is open and universally accessible (dumb pipe), not subject to arbitrary authority, I will go along with that.
Great. Support net neutrality.
But as long as anybody has the power to shut them/you down...
The laws of physics ensure someone will always be able to take away your rights using brute force. Perfect is the enemy of good.
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Nobody is being handicapped.
Sez you. Censorship is handicapping. And sometimes the ISP engages in censorship, like in New Zealand. We simply need to route around that.
Great. Support net neutrality.
I do. I demand the dumb pipe, and pay for the bandwidth. Bits is bits. Content is nobody's business but my own. Anything less is not net neutrality. Very simple. If enough people demand the same, we will have it. If they don't, I guess I just have to hope for a technological miracle.
Perfect is the enemy of good.
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Censorship is handicapping.
You need to have a long conversation with a dictionary. -_-
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Nope, Censorship is handicapping the content of communications to conform to arbitrary standards. It's no loss to me if you don't want to accept obvious analogy. It just makes further discussion futile. I can only restate that censorship is merely something to be circumvented, by whatever means necessary. The ISP is the obvious target.
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However, this is a significant contingent of humanity that is unstable and/or impressionable. With this segment of the population, free and anonymous connectivity can be weaponized to amplify their misinformation/disinformation. It can be used to rally people to focus their feelings of living an unfulfilling life on to a scapegoat.
True. But when I point this out to leftists, that they are demonizing "Trump supporters" as a way of dealing with their own psychological problems, they don't seem to listen ...
Just illustrating the problem here. Who gets to decide what is "misinformation/disinformation"?
"Not to worry; we'll only censor bad stuff" is not reassuring ...
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By promoting psychological stability and education in the masses so that these few never have any reasonable amount of political power. Instead of, say, amassing enough idiots that their ideal candidate gets elected to be the most powerful man in the world. A few powerless nut-cases will not be the end of us. But if there are enough of them that they RALLY together, to make a political movement. If there are enough of them that they can drown out the voice of reason, then we have a problem.
We need to
Re:free and anonymous connectivity is not the prob (Score:5, Interesting)
It is the solution...
I reluctantly agree, but only to a point.
For an alcoholic, alcohol is not the solution. But neither is prohibition.
People who cloister themselves in the toxic world-views of sites like 8chan may be heavily conditioned against considering facts from other sites. Free and anonymous connectivity probably will not help such people. But I don't think ISPs banning 8chan will help either. Some other site will take its place, or the 8channer can switch ISPs.
Another topic is whether ISPs should be able to do this in the first place. I think they should not. IMHO, ISPs are common carriers. They provide a connection service, not a content service (like cable or satellite TV, that choose which content to provide.)
I think the solution is to teach young people how to spot false arguments and misinformation, as well as the history of the world, and the harm that extremist groups have caused.
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Banning is effective. It makes it harder to draw new people in and radicalize them, because you can't just post a link. Of course they can get around the block with some work, but that barrier means there will be a lot less casual/blind clicks through to that content.
It censorship wasn't effective it wouldn't be so popular and people wouldn't get so upset about it.
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It's effectiveness of censorship was never in doubt. The simple and necessary goal is to make it as difficult as possible.
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I think the solution is to teach young people how to spot false arguments and misinformation, as well as the history of the world, and the harm that extremist groups have caused.
Unfortunately, academia - which is entrusted with education of the young - is infested with extremists. The bigotry in an average sociology department would not be out of place on 8chan, although the targets are different.
(I say this as an academic who has heard an officemate voice some appalling bigotry, including repeated explicit calls for discrimination, directed at "white males".)
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It is the solution...
I take it you don't browse at -1, or don't browse 8chan ... or 4chan ... any other examples of free anonymous forums you want to talk about? I mean they are all so lovely, filled with loving level headed people.
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I take it you don't browse at -1
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the point of the article is that free and anonymous connectivity has caused a problem.
Yes, and that is bullshit. It has not caused a problem, except to the people who want to control communications and information. The rationale is simple to understand. So, leave it to them to make up stories to justify their existence, and sell their snake oil. The most important thing right now is to develop the tech that can route around all attempts at censorship instead of arguing about it. The tyrants can whine about
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The rationale is simple to understand.
... And? What rational? Why has it not caused a problem? In what way are their conclusions bullshit? You continue to say nothing.
I'm not asking for a lot here, the "article" in this case is just a crappy little video. It's really not worth even this much attention, but your "+5 Insightful" response amounts to "Nuh-uh."
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You cannot justify censorship.
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It is the solution...
Anonymity did not solve any problem. If you can't put your name on it, it's not worth fighting for, and not worthy of respect.
(Said the AC, ironically.)
There are many problems that anonymity can help to solve. For example:
- it allows whistle-blowers to report crimes without fear of reprisal
- it can encourage candor when people express concerns or opinions
- it allows someone to share non-identifying personal information (health issues, etc.)
- and so on.
Of course, it's a two-sided coin. Anonymity has disadvantages. I leave a listing of them as an exercise. But it's not true that "Anonymity did not solve any problem."
And Slashdot Forgot the Censorship Icon (Score:1, Flamebait)
When speech gets driven underground... (Score:5, Insightful)
...what's underground gets drudged back up into the open. In late 2014 discussions of run-of-the-mill internet drama regarding ideologues and he-said, she-said stories was unexpectedly banned from multiple websites, so it moved to 4chan. And then, in an unprecedented move, it was mass-banned from 4chan as well.
So, what happens then? The conversation doesn't stop; it moves to the venue which is least likely to inhibit it, which ended up being 8chan. The Streisand Effect was strong. As soon as it happened I knew that it'd be some kind of turning point.
All politics aside (jokes! I know that's impossible), the dynamics of crowds and movement on the internet seem to be something woefully misunderstood by the people who positioned themselves - through venture-capital funding and fuck-you money, I'd reckon - into power over moderation of the internet. Any long-time netizen could have predicted this would happen. Drama plays itself out in a matter of days or weeks if you don't take drastic steps to squelch it.
I think the point is to keep it away from (Score:3, Interesting)
And if I may, censorship has it's up side, especially when it's not done by the government. It makes content creators work harder to get their message out because they can't just rely on shock value. It discourages writers from relying on sex and violence an
I should add (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: I should add (Score:1)
It is still often rendered useless by the apk, "die in prison" and 'treason' crapflooding.
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the only reason anyone can read your post but you is that /. is censoring the "Natalie Portman Hot Grits / Greased up Yoda Doll / GNAA" trolls. I can't be the only one old enough to remember the time before when /. was rendered useless by trolling efforts.
It is still often rendered useless by the apk, "die in prison" and 'treason' crapflooding.
I have not seen any sign that Nataliel Portman, greased Yoda doll, apk, "die in prison" or "treason" posts are being censored. However, I do know of an extremely offensive GNAA first-post that was removed in a discussion recently. I know because I responded (critically) to it, and now my comment no longer points to a thread. I certainly wasn't upset.
For the most part, I can live with crapflooding. But I draw the line at offensive ASCII art, like GNAA and swastikas, that are visible to your co-workers from a
That's the point (Score:2)
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you're not seeing them because the Mods shut them down before you do. Both the human ones and the automated ones.
I'm not aware of "automated" moderators. When did Slashdot start using them?
But IMHO, moderating is not the same as censoring. And I do often read at -1, whether I'm modding or not.
Ages ago (Score:2)
I'm not sure, but I'm guessing they did it to prevent folks from wasting all their Mod Points on modding down trolls.
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You'll be blocked for certain comments. Certain common troll posts won't be allowed. I've tried to do a few parody troll posts where I'm calling out to old trolls and gotten blocked until I modified the post substantially and added a bit more content than just a call out to the old post.
You have intrigued me. What do you mean by "blocked?"
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I think your memory is a bit faulty. The 70s and 80s were the beneficiaries of the free speech movements of the 60s. If anything, they were less censored than even today (something like Wizards was a mere PG rating even with Nazi imagery, overt sexual innuendo, and violence).
And as someone who spent time at both 4chan and 8chan, there was honest to goodness free exchange of ideas where the trolls were mostly diffuse among the other conversations happening. The move towards censorship actually made matters w
Hotwheels claims to be misquoted on his twitter (Score:4, Informative)
Quelle surprise. It's almost like mainstream media has an agenda to push or something.
Brennan/Hotwheels does not support or advocate censorship:
https://twitter.com/HW_BEAT_THAT/status/1108729831703769088
This is what happens (Score:1, Interesting)
You 8chan edgelords who think death threats, racism, child porn, etc are the height of clever discourse can only blame yourselves for this. At some point, people will say, "enough" and just shut you the fuck down. So now you spoil things for the rest of us who believe in free speech.
Good job. You run with scissors, don't cry when someone gets their eye put out.
Re: This is what happens (Score:1)
Free speech is fine if it is non-anonymous so the author can suffer the consequences of their speech (which in many cases on 8-chan may involve a SWAT team knocking their door down at 4am). Cowardly posting hate speech anonymously is not what the constitution protects.
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Free speech is fine if it is non-anonymous so the author can suffer the consequences of their speech (which in many cases on 8-chan may involve a SWAT team knocking their door down at 4am). Cowardly posting hate speech anonymously is not what the constitution protects.
Um, actually, anonymous pamphlets were a thing when the Constitution was written.
"so the author can suffer the consequences of their speech" is literally what the Left used to call "chilling effect"
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Re:This is what happens (Score:5, Insightful)
You 8chan edgelords who think death threats, racism, child porn, etc are the height of clever discourse can only blame yourselves for this. At some point, people will say, "enough" and just shut you the fuck down. So now you spoil things for the rest of us who believe in free speech.
You're deceiving yourself. You don't believe in freedom of speech. The kind of "freedom of speech" you advocate for is a curated, moderated, castrated one, only applying to approved or popular points of view. This is pretty much the opposite of freedom of speech.
The whole point of freedom of speech is to protect unpopular speech - and yes, this specifically includes politically sensitive, distasteful or loathsome subjects. Otherwise, you end up with Soviet Russia - which, by your definition, was a great place for freedom of speech: edgelords who thought talking about gulags, freedom, the evils of communism were the height of clever discourse could only blame themselves for being shut the fuck down (with extreme prejudice, in many cases). They only spoiled things for the rest of the Russians, who believed in communist free speech.
Re:This is what happens (Score:4, Interesting)
Do your parents know you're insane?
Re: This is what happens (Score:1)
They probably do but his dad is a navy seal who graduated top of his class in the Navy Seals, and has been involved in numerous secret raids on Al-Quaeda, and he has over 300 confirmed kills.
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No, my definition of free speech is whatever the society you happen to live in will tolerate.
All rights are conditional. All of them. Nothing exists without context. Your "creator" did not endow you with a goddamn thing.
So much of his life... (Score:2)
Brennan, 25 years old, expressed regret that the site had consumed so much of his life.
You're 25 ding-dong. You (probably) have many, many more years ahead ...
community expectations (Score:1)
Community once expected that black people sat in the back of the bus.
Community once expected that women did not get involved in politics.
As a company it is a perilous task to hinder people in what they want to do based on "community expectations". Especially when it is quite clear that expectations are not uniformly shared across the community, which is almost always true when it concerns which information should be available to the public.
Facebook alone has deleted 1.5 million uploads of this video in the
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The creator of Photo DNA was on NPR bitching that facebook was lying when they said they couldn't automatically delete 300,000 of the 15 million shooting videos.
This is what kneeling to those in power who want you to censor will get you -- good will, until you aren't useful anymore.
I don't understand why it was banned. (Score:5, Insightful)
The perp live-streamed the whole thing on Facebook, and yet FB has not been banned...
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It's just an excuse to shut down a bunch of sites they don't like. I'd be surprised if the "temporary" bans ever get lifted.
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Facebook took action to remove the scenes and footage once it become evident what was happening. So did Youtube.
If you don't understand why 8chan was blocked and the others weren't I recommend staying in school because you really need it.
Oh no, theres a place somewhere (Score:1)
Antifa (Score:2)
Or may some of you will try to argue the neo-Nazi is somehow also an antifa.
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Actually, there is a way ... (Score:2)
... for solving a problem like that.
It came to us from the movie War Games.
Joshua: "A strange game. The only winning move is not to play."
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http://www.centerforsecuritypo... [centerfors...policy.org]
#notallmuslims, but a whole fuckin lot of 'em.
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What would we do without Kendall's superb sense of perspective and surface-level LoTR analogies?
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Because using a tragedy to destroy the rights of everyone else in the country is completely on the up-and-up.
If you lose a right every time something horrible happens in the world, you will soon find yourself without any rights at all. Ask people who lived under communist regimes how life was.
I always wondered how such governments could be allowed to exist by the people. How did things get that way? How could the people let that happen? I'm seeing it now. It makes sense. The propaganda infiltrates their min
Re:Not a coincidence (Score:4, Insightful)
There is more - every time a person starts shouting in German 'alles machbar' there is nothing to see - it is usually a deed by a single disturbed person etc. Here we do not even know for sure who this guy in NZ was - he used language that could be seen as left wing radical, certainly eco-fashists (this is what he called himself) are green and left in my country. Yet we all have to wear headscarf as a sign of solidarity? I do not have anything to do with this guy even if I am a white man. I do not subscribe to acts of senseless violence against other people. I may have a different view when it comes to politicians - after all attempt to kill Adolf is celebrated in some places. What I mean is this: we have a lot of lunatics on the right wing side of political spectrum. We have significantly bigger group of lunatics on the left side however. Plus the violence loving radicals of religion of peace variety do have significant support in their communities - nobody seems to be addressing this issue. Or rather - some people do and get banned. Quite frankly I do not care about chan or whatever the site in question is called. I think however that erosion of our free speech rights have to be discussed. While we are at it we shall also discuss the spread of Marxist ideology in politics, media and academia and we can also touch the problems that love of violence among certain religious community causes.
If you want to block all sites that incite violence go ahead and do Please be consistent while doing so!
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First thing you learn about Trolls, they no nothing about the truth and care even less about it.
New Zealand is ranked higher than the USA for free speech, for freedom of the press, and democracy, honesty.
New Zealand told the world that it will not accept nuclear weapons or nuclear powered ships into its waters way back in the 1980s, and no government has been brave enough to try and change that law, because unlike the USA the government is actually accountable to the people, not the corporations.
The USA tal
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They delete the copy/paste spam posts all the time now. I actually had my account suspended a number of years ago.
Re:When they tore down the wall... (Score:5, Informative)
New Zealand just demonstrated that they have no 2nd Amendment and no 1st Amendment...in the same week.
Don't worry, folks. Just because we have no historical proof an unrestricted legislative system can survive "emergency legislation" to restrict freedom in the long run doesn't mean we shouldn't try it yet again.
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Meanwhile, in the United States of America, a long-running experiment in having a heavily armed population is going just swimmingly...
Actually, yeah (Score:2)
Considering there are as many guns as people, it's astonishing how few gun crimes there are in the US...
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Considering there are as many guns as people, it's astonishing how few gun crimes there are in the US...
It's almost as though guns don't run around committing crimes all by themselves.
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Of course they don't have a 2nd or 1st Amendment. There is a world outside of the USA.
The idea that because you have guns you could stop a tyrannical government is so deluded.
Ya'll are loaded to the teeth and can't even get the government to prove you with decent health care.
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But lets be real, 8chan was founded because 4chan wasn't "free" enough.
I mean the only things banned on 4chan are doxing, specific threats and CP, so what exactly do you expect 8chan to attract?
Two of those three are actually illegal. Doxxing, as long as you didn't participate in illegal activity to get the info, is not, though lousy behavior.
So...doxxing?
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8ch is not purely about freedom of speech, that's only in aggregate. Neither all of 4chan or 8ch is /b/, a board owner can ban you on a whim.
I'd say the bigger freedom 8ch exemplifies is freedom of association. A freedom modern liberals find even more problematic than freedom of speech.