On the other hand if we're serious about free speech absolutism, this is probably the best case scenario. Federated Mastadon instances should have the option of blocking harassment from Gab users. Allow them to have their free speech, but the rest of online society should have the option to shun them - a real-world dynamic that is not well reflected on platforms like twitter _because_ of centralization. Rather than hopelessly petitioning Jack to ban the nazis, users + communities should be empowered to do it themselves.

If it was ever going to happen at this point, it would probably be by venture backed company addressing an alienated audience from the platform who is incentivized enough to switch platforms, building a good UX around a decentralized alternative, and then hoping you can get enough critical mass for network effects to kick in. In the limit, the alt-right focus of Gab will eventually dilute away if the edges of the network get built up and Gab is just another (big) node in the network -- nascent services have an audience focus to get traction that self-evidently goes away as they reach global scale. You don't have to like their choice of initial audience, but this strategic execution certainly seems one worth keeping an eye on, not just to see if the migration starts to happen at a larger scale but also because if they validate the strategy other companies can target similar niche audiences.

I think this kind of federation for under-served audiences, combined with good productization, is a necessary step towards a future where fan-out 'microblogging' has the same place in our society as email. To me, it was quite a sight to see Congress speaking to half a dozen white men about how to decide what words people can say to each other over the Internet -- the absence of a representative for regulating "email speech" made it clear the importance of decentralizing these services.

Or that the company itself has repeatedly made anti-Semitic statements?

Or that there are photographs of the founder making white supremacist hand signs?

And what exactly leads you to believe that gab is going to somehow morph into a site for anything other than their "initial audience"? Why would "normal" folks actively seek out and participate in a forum full of racist, radical white supremacists?

[1]: https://thinkprogress.org/social-network-that-caters-to-whit...

Not too long ago this was a classical liberal position. Today free speech is passé. Guess I'm just old fashioned.

I'm happy to see that Gab is switching to Mastodon. I think it will increase the survivability of the platform. They've struggled under the engineering challenges of scaling a social network. Mastodon fans should be happy that this may mean an influx of hosts and developers.

Where are the people advocating for the destruction of intellectual property rights, for widespread declassification of state communications, for suffrage rights for felons, and for unionization and striking rights? I don't exactly see the gab users advocating for laws permitting sympathetic striking.

No one is banning those opinions on gab, there is simply no point in them being there because they are free to post those opinions on twitter (and others) with impunity.

They aren't. You're totally free to advocate instituting a Marxists state, the execution of the bourgeoisen masse, and forming a communist society on Gab. Gab has the blanket policy that any legal speech is okay on their platform (and yes, calling for the execution of the bourgeois is legal in the US. Non-specific threats of violence are legal as per Brandenburg v. Ohio). There's nothing fascist about that in and of itself. The fact that Gab is filled with fascists is because of displacement. Fascists got banned from all the major platforms, so the only ones that don't ban them like Gab and 4chan are full of them.

Free speech absolutists are disproportionately made of up right wingers these days, likely because the right wing is being subject to harsher censorship. I think it's unambiguously true that most big tech platforms are overtly biased in their policing. People are getting banned for tweeting "learn to code" to journalists (in mockery of how some suggested that laid off coal miners should learn to code). And by comparison, verified leftist Twitter users outright advocated for the doxxing and violence of the Covington high school students with no apparent repercussion. This podcast with Jack Dorsey, Twitter's global lead for trust and safety, and Tim Pool gives some good insight into the situation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZCBRHOg3PQ

> Where are the people advocating for the destruction of intellectual property rights, for widespread declassification of state communications, for suffrage rights for felons, and for unionization and striking rights? I don't exactly see the gab users advocating for laws permitting sympathetic striking.

This is pure whataboutism. What do any of those things have to do with free speech? Why do you assume that support for freedom of speech should needs to be coupled with destruction of intellectual property rights? Is it not possible to staunchly believe in free speech but also believe that patents are an effective way of incentivizing innovation by allowing innovators to monetize their work? Why does freedom of speech have anything to do with unionization or letting felons vote?

To be fair, you see just as many if not more socialist and black bloc anarchist content on /pol/ as you do nazi content. It's a meme and most of it is posted by the same people.

Heck, I know one of the more prolific white supremacist troll /pol/lacks and he's Pakistani.

While I don't think it should be considered lightly, a lot of the reporting about that board comes from journalists that know better and deliberately deceive the public because it gets hits.

> Not too long ago this was a classical liberal position.

I'm not sure who or what you're thinking of, but the classical liberal position would be to support something like the Cambridge Union, Cleveland City Club, or some other free speech and debate forum where social norms exist.

Regarding free speech, the classic standard is "content neutrality", which means that, regardless of the media, the decision on allowing certain speech cannot be based on what the speech is.

Well then!

It's not old fashioned, it's just that people differentiate free speech in principle from paying the server bills. Just as freedom of the press never meant the newspaper had to publish your op-ed, free speech online doesn't mean Twitter has to give anyone server space to post Nazi stuff.

(I agree that there should be more platforms, but that's why I've supported other Mastadon instances instead of Gab.)

True, they may not have the same reach as everybody else, but they can have their own decentralised space to air their views and build their own stuff rather than relying on the mainstream social networks, free from censorship.

Imagine the conversation: this is fake news, we should remove it. No it isn't fake. You're making me feel unsafe, ill have the government put you in a cage.

No, it really isn't. It's a minority of people calling for violent white supremecy.

They recently deplatformed infamous anti-semite and black nationalist Louis Farrakhan. And before anyone says this guy has always been a crank: he was actively being courted by Repulicans like Jack Kemp in the 1980s back when his anti-communist views were deemed politically useful.

Maybe such a claim is useful to you but it really doesn't hold up to scrutiny. I grew up in the 80s, in a conservative household, and in New York City - Jack Kemp's home turf.

His political career was effectively over by 1982, taking 6 years to really die and I don't think I heard his name mentioned a single time in the 15 years I grew up having to listen to conservative talk radio all day every day.

What I did have to hear though, starting from the beginning of Bob Grant's era through Sliwa's morning and Limbaugh's afternoon shows, was what a threat to American society Louis Farrakhan was. He literally was enemy number one in the crosshairs of right-wing talk radio hosts for nearly 20 years.

I understand these days the conservative establishment is mostly in sync with what’s said on talk radio, but that wasn’t always the case.

The fact that, in 2019, you can't post on Gab without effectively declaring an affinity for white supremacy (whether you agree or not, that's certainly the message you'd broadcast by doing so) can't help user acquisition either.

† It's been a minute since I looked, but all the accounts I had there, none of which have ever interacted with the site, seem to be, err, popular with the ladies in my area just looking for a good time.

The perils (or benefits?) of open protocols.

Existing mastodon/pleroma clients will be able to connect to Gab by adding a server setting.

Now I wonder if mastodon client app developers will start filtering the allowed servers users can put in...

This is not the duty of client applications. Banning instances is the duty of the operators of individual instances, and the instance(s) on which you have your account(s) are the instance(s) whose blocking policy affects you. This is a feature.

Most sane instances on the Fediverse already ban extremist and alt-right content, and Gab will be no different in that case - just another entry on the blacklist, next to https://freespeechextremist.com/ and https://rapefeminists.network and other instances who shamelessly abuse the right to free speech.

If you don't like what they're saying, you have every right to not listen to it, promote it yourself, and you also have the right to start a movement to let people know this is going on and to bring awareness to the festering shitpiles those websites are.

It's not an abuse of the right to free speech.

Is the BDS movement abusing or using their rights to free speech?

Let's flip this around - if I started a movement to Boycott, divest, and sanction palestinians would my speech create real world harm?

I know that the perfect solution for this problem does not conflict with free speech, but if that perfect solution (whatever it is) doesn't come soon enough, the world will get fed up with waiting and implement imperfect solutions, and limiting free speech is first on that list.

the classical definition of unfree speech is easily abusable, which is why free speech exists.

If an idea is bad, the best way to beat it is with better ideas.

Of course some bad ideas are good at spreading, or otherwise persuasive. But if you take the big picture view, the vast majority of really bad ideas and statements have been imposed centrally and have persisted by latching onto the levers of censorship and censoring all competing viewpoints.

The level of censorship and central control of information is already far too high in our world.

Where?

As a free software guy, this troubles me.

This is on par with firefox deciding which websites they should block.

(In fact the Oculus Browser blocks 4chan / 8ch / other sites)

It might become their duty. Since Gab's apps are banned, and those apps would be used to access Gab's servers, I could see Apple/Google blocking Mastodon apps as well.

App creators might be forced to ban Gab in order to avoid getting banned from the app stores.

I don’t think we should be advocating for app stores to exert any more control over generic client software than they already have.

/s

That's precisely what Mastodon's creator suggested earlier today: https://mastodon.social/@Gargron/102184195834215862

Of course, he has no authority over mobile apps, so it remains up to app creators to decide. I believe there are three apps that share the majority of users (Fedilab, Tusky, Mast). Most popular instances will probably stop federating with them as soon as they can.

EDIT: Fedilab's creator already expressed that he'll do so to avoid the chance of being banned from the app store.

https://mastodon.social/users/tootapp/statuses/1021853659238...

> In case anyone was wondering due to recent discourse, Toot! will be blocking any gab domains.

> I do not support white supremacy and hatred, and will never support any server that promotes it.

Their whole social network is literally a garbage fire, Apple doesn't want to associate their brand with garbage fires. I expect Gab management is in for a rude awakening.

I'm just waiting for the first scandalous "here's how Apple is promoting rampant racism" article to pick up steam.

Any of this type of client app can and will be used for the worst things in the internet. So far Apple has not tried to censor it, I’d be surprised if that changed but we will see.

How will users of the Gab network know if it is INSERT_NATION_NAME agents, paid and incentivized to manipulate them and cause unrest in a societal structure we call democracy? Perhaps they're not even thinking or caring about it and its consequences, perhaps they're even simply happy they have a helping hand?

From what we've seen it takes very few bad actors to infiltrate a nation's foundational structures once the atmosphere of a population is disenfranchised enough, once we're disconnected and disengaged enough, and that has been accelerated by the cheap economies of scale the internet has afforded.

At the end what I hope for is that security services of democracies are being intelligent and allocating resources to fully and carefully infiltrating these groups (carefully as to not escalate the situation) to know who those who are involved is: this of course comes down to potential overreach, which must be addressed not because you may more easily know/discover who bad actors are - but because it may be bad actors who actually someday may get hold or access to these systems.

A fresh name is a fresh start and maybe you take the chance to do better this time.

It seems like people feel free to post the most atrocious nonsense on Facebook under their real name or maybe using one of the apparently billions of fake accounts that look just like real people. I don't think trust really works in internet conversations with strangers, you can't ever know their motives even if you know their names.

Part of atrocious nonsense, as you put you, is lack of accountability and peer pressure with enough mass to influence one's behaviour and thinking. Bubbles of algorithms amplify this problem, and what ends up happening is like with Gab - where what most consider atrocious behaviour simply finds its own platform which creates a bubble of its own without algorithms.

Fake accounts as you mention, is one reason associating with an identity - at least confirmation it is associated with an identity, needs a solution. This becomes a problem when there isn't a chain of command and clear rules for accessing this information, when government is corrupt by bad actors. I'm not saying this identity should be forced on people, they should realize it is beneficial to join a network they trust until they don't - if that happens. With Facebook as an example, they've violated trust of people countless times and yet many still have FB accounts. If data and people were more mobile, more able to move their data around, then people could easily change networks - and let's say their alliances based on the leadership. Is the person in charge, leading a platform/network, someone who in the past called their users "dumb fucks" for trusting them with their data more favourable/trustworthy or someone who addresses issues with authenticity, fully, and while perhaps acknowledging their own mistakes vs. trying to write their bad past behaviour out of the story by not acknowledging it as pivotal moments of growth? Who they'd want at lead is of course for each person to decide based on what resonates with them as trustworthy, what behaviour they align with.

Trust does work on internet conversations, assuming you've developed that skill - or could call it developing your intuition - assuming that your trust systems aren't locked up (ego mind coping mechanism) from trauma - which I'd say in this day is very common. Trust isn't binary - like with our conversation here, I'm sure you trust what I'm saying more than not - whether by the structure of my words and my trying to be careful and clear with my words and meaning, my responses. I'd trust my mother to pick me up somewhere if she says she will, however not with certain other things. And it's true, there will be a percentage of people who are really good at deceiving, being pathological liars, sociopaths, however that's certainly not the majority or where they're purposefully trying to sway someone for their own selfish gain.

Pretty sure they do that already, but weird to see people advocate for it.

We have to decide as a society what that line is - and that it isn't discussed is a problem. There's nuance required for it and a black-or-white solution - full open access for security services vs. complete blackout and being blind also isn't ideal. And is it even possible to allocate resources efficiently enough to do so, perhaps only being ready to enact resources once the hate starts boiling over noticeably? I believe the cheaper solution will be people subscribing to network(s) they trust, where it is known and accessible by the leaders and only the highest in the chain, and how their governance holds for accountability and safety will evolve over time - with best practices evolving.

For example, if all data was instantly movable from Facebook - there would have been entrepreneurs immediately developing duplicate platforms, perhaps with better UXs and features, to capture the perhaps even small amount of users who stopped trusting Facebook's controller(s) - aka Mark Zuckerberg. Even if a small amount of users initially that would have been detrimental to Facebook enough due to network effects being hurt, enough hopefully that would have kept Facebook in line, in check. For each subsequent violation of trust and without an authentic, full response or explanation by leadership, the more fodder there would be for people to disperse to more trusted networks - and people trying to bring their network with them. This mobility is more inherent to and mirrors what real life trust networks look like. If someone violates your trust too strongly and you have no interest in giving them another chance, you can (in most cases) cut them out of your network. When your data is essentially hostage however, it's like you're married, living with them, and you don't have the financial freedom or support to escape an abusive spouse.

It's interesting to see that Mastodon will grow further and allow Gab and the groups it is happy to support to continue conversing in a decentralized manner, and benefitting from tools that may or may not have the authors' blessings to be used for hate and violence.

I've never said if this is negative or positive. Overall it isn't useful to not have conversation because that allows hate to fester, for potential energy to build up enough that then once the blister is ready to pop - it can make a mess, and by mess I mean terrorism to civil war. We now know this riling up of people has been actions and funded by tyrannical governments (bad actors in control of government in other nations) who want to see democracy collapse.

The next Hitler is what we're trying to fight against, however with the internet, data, technology, the bad actors are intelligent enough to know they have to maintain some level of incognito - until perhaps one day they make a massive power move. Journalist Jamal Khashoggi¹ being cut apart alive only murdering him after, likewise the recent poisoning of Alexander Litvinenk² were brazen and obvious attacks - and becoming more and more obvious as to who is aligning to try to fail democracy and strengthen their control, and using tactics like hiring evil people and firms with no integrity like Cambridge Analytica³ who is happy to lie and/or blackmail, and promote propaganda to help bad actors win elections.

Along with current U.S. administration - Trump and family - supporting and condoning these behaviours - Jared Kushner 'justified murder of Saudi dissident journalist Khashoggi, calling him a terrorist’⁴, and Trump trying to signal to worst of humanity that there is no law and they will get away with their horrific behaviour by Trump being expected to pardon Navy SEAL Edward Gallagher of war crimes⁵. And more confirmation of Russia’s propaganda efforts by deploying its team of propagandists to cover up the murder of 298 people on flight MH17⁶ to attempt to control the narrative around the world and within their own population - something that we know China does, and Russia is copying, on a whole other level and we should be equally responsive to knowing what pitfalls exist with censorship.

¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamal_Khashoggi

² https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisoning_of_Alexander_Litvine...

³ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mpbeOCKZFfQ

⁴ https://www.alaraby.co.uk/english/news/2019/5/30/kushner-jus...

⁵ https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/18/us/trump-pardons-war-crim...

⁶ https://www.thedailybeast.com/mh17-russia-deployed-its-troll...

Any action of that kind would only fuel the alt-right persecution complex. Servers however do filtering all the time already, and that's how the Gab folks can be left out of view of the rest of the world.

Note: I'm not trying to take a side in this, and I don't try to identify with any particular "faction" in the federation space.

> Mastodon server instances already have blocked lists of "banned" instances.

well, yes.

I think ActivityPub has huge potential to be a way for communities of disparate views and perspectives to exist out there, and two distinct and very opposing groups have grasped onto it: People who want space spaces who don't think mainstream platforms moderate enough, and the alt-right and free speech crowd.

In the long run, I think you'll see a lot of ActivityPub servers, but two distinct federations, with very few links between them: One radically liberal and one radically conservative.

I've never really understood the 'safe spaces' line of argument. I'm a 30 year old white male, and whenever I log onto YouTube I see nothing but recommendations trying to force me down the alt-right rabbit hole.

Sure, Twitter has booted off a few high profile people on the alt right but I don't think I've ever seen anyone argue that the debate on Twitter isn't pretty robust.

Where's the censorship? And how attractive is a community of people only for people who have been kicked off larger platforms?

I remember when Wil Wheaton tried to join Mastodon, and some transgression he had against one gender identity or another led to him getting bullied off the network, despite him being... fairly bloody liberal. He just wasn't liberal enough for the crowd.

Also, there's no such thing as "not liberal enough". People on the far left aren't liberal — they don't believe in capitalism in the first place. Liberals are more center-left according to US standards, and center-right according to European standards. Further to the left are socialists, communists, and anarchists, not "super-liberals".

The second instance was a non-US-based instance that looked like mastodon.social but was not (IIRC, the instance was Japanese run and moderated?), and the instance moderators had moderation trouble exacerbated by English not being their first language and moderation not being their full time jobs.

I feel like Wil could have been successful on Mastodon had he found (or founded) an instance better aligned with his interests and moderation needs in mind (maybe even mastodon.social). Part of the problem of the whole debacle was that learning that any way but the hard way was likely next to impossible for someone like Wil, because Federation is complicated and hard enough to explain to technical people, much less someone with so many complicated moderation/community needs by nature of being a "celebrity" to begin with.

(I still sometimes hope that someone like Wil would make the right technical connections to learn everything they need to know in order to thrive in the Fediverse and have joked that I would be happy to be such a guide if I were asked.)

I've seen people say that wearing a hat with "MAGA" on it is alt-right.

I've also seen people say that opinions like "we want an entire race of people locked up and punished" is alt-right as well.

While one is definitively magnitudes worse than the other, they're both put under the banner of "alt-right".

Because it's a disingenuous argument, and it's always been about:

1. Making one side feel like the victim, which maintains coherence

2. Playing the refs

No. Black people can't own slaves. They aren't going to get to profit off centuries of colonial oppression. They aren't going to get to be the only enfranchised people in the country.

They won't even get to enjoy the comfortable middle class lifestyle that persisted until the late 20th century.

Edit: Nor was I trying to make the claim that this is limited to any political party. It's a tool commonly used in populism.

It's really not a big thing to me. I've been blocking Pleromas run by people with anime girl avatars who like to post swastikas for the entire time I've been running an instance. This is just a bigger one.

Your theory about how this will sort out in terms of federation topology matches mine.

The other social networks just love to censor everybody they disagree with, even a particular orange looking website.

I am also excited and glad they are utilising open source software as well. (This was bound to happen sooner or later) This can make activitypub & decentralised networks mainstream.

Even though this is your opinion I find this statement extremely ridiculous.

I don't support or agree with their views, but free speech grants them the right to say it and I will defend that right (which includes everyone).

The great thing is that you don't have to hear it, just block them if you don't like it.

I made no argument about the value of free speech. I am arguing that, given the fairly obvious clientele, it is reasonable to assume that principled fealty to free speech was not the driving motivation in Gab's creation. I don't think it's ridiculous to point to the specific content that makes up the majority of Gab and say you would have to be extraordinarily obtuse not to realize what and for whom you were building a social network.

Well, I believe that free speech was the reason for Gab's creation, they were getting censored from other social platforms so they built their own. It just so as happens that over time they have attracted vile users to the platform who have way more unpopular views.

So what are you really trying to say here?

My point is that there is not much daylight between the former and the latter. Gab was not created in a vacuum by neutral arbiters of free speech.

And it's just a coincidence that the official account pushes anti-Semitism, right? https://twitter.com/ClenchedFisk/status/1027690034718224384

It is sad that you would like to give up freedom of speech with such weak excuse.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gab_(social_network)

You can argue that this type of trolling is bad because helps normalize white supremacy, but that doesn't mean their motivation is actual white supremacy.

- @OldEarthNeoFash, whose description literally says they're a Nazi

- @AlexanderVI, who posts about how gay men should not be allowed to be President

- @Reality_and_Truth, whose description boasts about "exposing Leftist scum 300 chars at a time"

- @cashmoneyglock, whose posts reference Stalin "marrying Jewesses" and a conspiracy theory about MLK being a rapist

- @BruceKenneway, whose description references Jews and white genocide

- @AnthonyBoy, whose posts insinuate that Robert Mueller commits bestiality

Try it! I'm sure you'll get a similar collection of terrible people.

Remember, this is apropos of nothing. I don't have a Gab account, so they're not personalizing these for me based on accounts with which I've interacted before. It's just a random sample of people on Gab.

You can, but it's a tiny minority of people on Twitter. When I load this page on Gab, literally every single recommended account is like this. A random sample of Twitter users will be basically the same as a random sample of Internet users and brands; a random sample of Gab users seems to be entirely alt-right, white supremacists and Nazis.

Of course people who tend to get deplatformed will tend to congregate on a platform where they don't. But Gab actively courts this userbase. See for example https://twitter.com/ClenchedFisk/status/1027690034718224384

Not to say that Gab isn't a cesspool, and Mr. Torba, when he shows up here, appears to be a rather unpleasant character, but Gab being full of bad people is a function not only of Gab being bad by definition, but also of bigger players' policies as well.

I'm not saying Andrew Torba shouldn't have built Gab; I am lamenting its existence, insofar as I don't want anyone to be a white supremacist. But white supremacists do exist, and as long as they do they'll make spaces for themselves, whether on Gab or 8chan or some dark corner of Twitter. All we can do is push those spaces as far away as possible.

And in any case I just am not sure if pushing undesirables (especially if it is undesirables only of a certain political bent, but not the others) into some dark corner is a good strategy. Both sides end up in even stronger filter bubbles, and banned people get good recruiting tools and feed theior persec ution complexes -- because the "lamestream media" and "libturds" actually are out to get them.

I would call ISIS recruitment videos evil. If someone created a social network for ISIS under the banner of "free speech", I would call their project evil.

I don't in any way apologize for flatly condemning the kind of speech Gab is designed to harbor. And yet I happen to be a pretty big fan of free speech, somehow! If you'd read closely, you might notice I haven't called for the government to shut them down, and suggested that a Mastadon instance might be a good move. There's a case to be made that the Streisand effect means unilaterally banning neo-nazis helps spread their ideas.

In my mind, perhaps it's better to pre-empt their persecution complex by allowing them a space that the rest of us can mute. On the other hand, there is plenty of evidence that these spaces serve as recruiting grounds for a rising international terrorist movement. That complicates things, and I don't have an easy answer for what should be done.

I understand and respect your deep support of free speech. But please, take a step back here and think about what you are saying you are glad about.

Are you really glad a group of people decided to roll up their sleeves and build a platform for white supremacists? Is that really an admirable use of someone's time, energy, and expertise?

[0] https://www.cnn.com/2018/10/30/tech/gab-anti-semitic-speech-...

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2018/10/31/silicon...

_Now_ do you see why maintaining free speech protections is important?

In my view, believing that if you defend free speech hard enough the forces of fascism and hate will become interested in "hearing all perspectives" is incredibly naive.

To be clear, I do not think it should be illegal or impossible to express hateful views. I don't think there needs to be some effort to block their forking of Mastedon (if it were even possible).

I think it _is_ wrong to celebrate a company which trades in hate and has provided a platform for radicalization which has contributed to at least two major terrorist attacks.

I take issue with the sentiment that it is somehow good they are

> "standing up to their principles of being a truly free speech social network"

It's not true that they are a "free speech social network," they are a platform deliberately cultivating hate. And I think it's wrong to give anyone working to promote hate a pat on the back.

Don't hold up Gab as some free speech hero, you're just playing into their narrative.

Sure, that isn't unlikely. However, does that make it okay for the left to be the first to disrespect their free speech rights? "Our opponents would oppress at us as soon as they get the chance so we'll do our best to oppress them first"? Clearly, that's not right.

> In my view, believing that if you defend free speech hard enough the forces of fascism and hate will become interested in "hearing all perspectives" is incredibly naive.

Again, true, the true believers will never be convinced by any amount of debate or evidence. But that tends to be a relatively small group in any movement. It's the undecided silent majority that needs to be kept on your side and taking the moral low road is sure to alienate them, with disastrous consequences.

This sounds like a defect-defect equilibrium taking shape.

If they do this, I'll be making sure I blacklist their instances. While there are plenty of free-speech oriented or even right wing mastodon instances, the signal to noise ratio on these is pretty good and there is actually content worth engaging with.

any recommendations?

I feel like a burden being on someone else's server, using their bandwidth.

Obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1357/

People like J Peterson and Sargon could deal with being deplatformed in the way they preach to their disciples, but instead they whine about it while shaking their e-collection boxes.

Criticism of "thought leaders" like these guys only strengthens the hold they have among the legions of young people who follow their words like gospel.

Any criticism of these figures for their platitude-heavy content and huckster-style marketing must also be a criticism of their followers as individuals, because they have bought into that mindset wholesale.

And young people have rebellious tendencies, they form countercultures. The current world culture tilts to left-progressivism, so there's a right-ish counterculture.

In EU, if a place cancel a reservation because someone is homosexual then they are likely breaking a human rights law. Anti-discrimination laws covers ideology, political, philosophical, religious and other identities, and showing people the door is often illegal if it done on the grounds of difference in ideology or politics.

In the US I don't know if a hosting company has the same right to show the door to a racist (that follow the law) as a racist hotel owner has the right to show a non-white person the door. I suspect the law does not really distinguish between online and offline so my guess would be that racist hotel owners can discriminate if they wish to not host a customer regardless of reasons.

1. a video of a man being shot and killed during an armed robbery 2. 3 anti islam posts 3. the usual pro trump propaganda 4. a meme warning about the evils of feminism urging women to get back to their "place" in the family.

Gab is a festering pile of trash. Anyone responsible for making any technical decisions on it should be ashamed of themselves.

The way I see it building platforms for detested people is a pretty good canary in the coalmine. If Internet technologies aren't resilient enough to keep the most hated people in the world online, then that's a pretty bad sign that those technologies wouldn't stand up to motivated state actors.

Tor isn't just a software stack and protocol. It's also a service made up of many hundreds of volunteers who agree to relay traffic, blindly, anywhere, despite (a) knowing what kind of traffic they're protecting and (b) having the ability to blacklist destinations. For instance it's common for Tor exits to ban SMTP or Bittorrent ports.

Bear in mind Tor also supports hidden services, and could also choose to blacklist them if they want - the way the protocol works does allow that, and of course they could change the software stack and the nodes listed in their directory services to make such things easier.

So Gab is a service run by a bunch of people that allow stuff pretty liberally, including bad stuff. So is Tor.

What's your goal here? Do you honestly think that preventing these people from having a public voice will make them disappear? Or do you simply want to brush them under the carpet so you can pretend they don't exist?

I think a much better approach is to allow free speech, and to spend some of our time kindly and empathetically trying to understand these people so we can address the underlying issues that cause them to believe what they believe. That's what Martin Luther King did, if you read his more theoretical writings. And I think it's what we should be trying to do today. Gutting free speech isn't the solution.

While we are on the subject of censorship: yes people with vile viewpoints exist. Yes they have a right to express those viewpoints. NO a platform does not have to help them spread said viewpoints. I would like to remind you that Gab is a _business_, not a government. They are under no obligation to honor the 1st amendment. It's no different than places like Hacker News which heavily moderates its content. Codes of conduct exist for a reason and it is to protect the vulnerable. If you don't feel that deeply in your bones it's likely because you aren't a member of a demographic that is under threat.

Gab, by its very existence and prominence legitimizes racism, nazism, sexism, violence, etc. It creates a community and a sense of moral righteousness around it. People are _dying_ and the country is on the brink of chaos. We can't ignore this threat any longer. Gab _can_ in fact moderate hate speech on their platform. They just don't either because they believe it or because it's profitable. Either way I hope their business dies and they go broke because what they are doing is wrong.

You ARE calling for censorship. It's no less censorship just because it's developers doing the censorship instead of governments.

> While we are on the subject of censorship: yes people with vile viewpoints exist. Yes they have a right to express those viewpoints. NO a platform does not have to help them spread said viewpoints. I would like to remind you that Gab is a _business_, not a government. They are under no obligation to honor the 1st amendment.

The thing about unalienable human rights is that they are UNALIENABLE. The right to free speech doesn't simply go away when you put a business in charge.

I agree that the first amendment doesn't apply to businesses, and this is one of the largest reasons that we should be concerned about the increasing control that businesses have over the most influential of our communications platforms. This how free speech dies--all mainstream communications are moved onto corporate platforms where free speech isn't protected, and then opponents of free speech call for censoring views they disagree with.

You seem to be under the misconception that free speech is only important because of the first amendment, but the opposite is true. The first amendment is only important because it protects free speech, which is what really matters.

> It's no different than places like Hacker News which heavily moderates its content.

It's different because Hacker News purports to be a forum for specific topics, rather than a general communications platform like Gab or Twitter.

> Codes of conduct exist for a reason and it is to protect the vulnerable. If you don't feel that deeply in your bones it's likely because you aren't a member of a demographic that is under threat.

And here we get to the crux of what you completely ignored in my previous post: the censorship you're demanding DOESN'T PROTECT THE VULNERABLE. It just doesn't work. The people who hold racist, nazi, sexist, violent, etc. viewpoints don't simply disappear because you censor them. They still exist, and censoring them merely drives them together, into more unified communities, since they can't talk to anyone else. We lose the opportunity to talk to them, and change their minds. The censorship you're demanding is not the solution to to the division in our culture, it's the CAUSE of the division in our culture.

When you call for censorship, you're opening Pandora's box. Maybe today you can successfully censor Nazis, but only a few short decades ago, Nazis were in power and censoring other people. Censorship doesn't benefit the right ideas, it benefits the ideas that are in power, and the ideas that are in power aren't always right. Before you throw away free speech and call for censorship, consider that free speech allows YOU to say what YOU'RE saying, and in the future it may be YOUR ideas that are censored.

No I'm not. No amount of caps lock changes that and the entire rest of your argument rests on this point [0].

People have a right to say what they want its true. I am simply saying we have no obligation to make their message easier to find. Nor do we have any obligation to connect people of like mind. In this specific case I am calling out those developers responsible for helping Gab and telling them I think they are morally repugnant. My stance in the original comment was that of professional ethics. If you help platforms like Gab stay online, I think you should be ashamed.

> And here we get to the crux of what you completely ignored in my previous post: the censorship you're demanding DOESN'T PROTECT THE VULNERABLE.

I didn't ignore your argument. I disagree with it because you are trying to assert a position that I am not taking. De-platforming does work. It's not about preventing someone from saying something. It's about adding friction to their ability to spread that message. Vulnerable communities ask for it all the time. People can say whatever they want it's true but the world is not obligated to amplify that message.

While we are at it, what about disinformation campaigns from hostile foreign governments? Anti-vaxxers? Climate change deniers? Bots? Trolls? Does all that get to continue unabated? Hows that working out?

We are living in an unprecedented time where objective truth is no longer collectively agreed upon and fringe viewpoints have made their way to the mainstream. I will happily admit that I don't have all the answers but I can tell you that the status quo is not working and we need to start thinking out of the box.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man

1. What do you think happens to racists when they are no longer allowed to talk? Do they suddenly become not racist? Disappear in a puff of smoke?

2. How do you propose we change racists minds if not by talking to them?

3. Do you think corporate platforms will always only make progressive ideas easier to find? Or are you open to the possibility that if we allow companies to pick and choose what speech they make easier to find, they may choose ideas you disagree with to make easier to find?

> People have a right to say what they want its true. I am simply saying we have no obligation to make their message easier to find.

You're saying people have a right to say what they want, but then you're proposing that Gab not make it easier to find certain messages by not allowing people who say that message to say what they want. So which is it: do people have a right to say what they want, or not?

You just want to say you're pro free speech and anti-censorship, so you're saying "make their message easier to find" instead of "allow them free speech on your platform", but they're the exact same thing. A rose by another name would smell as sweet.

Keep in mind, platforms like Reddit/Twitter/Facebook originally sold themselves as communications platforms. I doubt even you would be okay with telephone companies refusing to connect calls between people they don't like--why is it okay for a newer communications platform to refuse service to people they don't like?

> De-platforming does work.

No, it absolutely does not. When Reddit censored bigots, they just went to Voat, and now they have a community where if they say something reprehensible, nobody downvotes them or counterargues. We've just put them in an echo chamber where they can organize and communicate unchallenged, without hearing any reasonable viewpoints.

Even if every single open-minded person on the planet refused to allow racists to post on their websites, racists would just create their own websites. Do you really think there are no racists or terrorists or anti-vaxxers who are capable of writing a Twitter/Gab clone?

> While we are at it, what about disinformation campaigns from hostile foreign governments? Anti-vaxxers? Climate change deniers? Bots? Trolls? Does all that get to continue unabated? Hows that working out?

> We are living in an unprecedented time where objective truth is no longer collectively agreed upon and fringe viewpoints have made their way to the mainstream.

Objective truth has NEVER been collectively agreed upon. All the objectionable groups you mention existed before the internet. Crazies have ALWAYS existed.

What's different now is that with increased communication, mixing of communities, and the loss of social inhibitions caused by the anonymity and impersonality of the internet, sane people are suddenly confronted with the craziness that has always existed.

And yes, crazy people are able to communicate with each other in unprecedented ways. But that cat's out of the bag--unless you're proposing that we shut down the entire internet, they're going to be able to communicate, whether it be on Twitter or Mastadon or Gab or some equivalent platform created for racists by racists.

But the flipside is that SANE people are able to communicate with crazies in unprecedented ways. Where previously a racist could live their entire life only talking to their racist family and neighbors, now a person of color from the other side of the world away can call them out when they post something racist on Twitter, and tell them that what they are saying isn't true.

If we push the crazies off mainstream platforms, that doesn't solve the problem--they just go on being crazies. But if we allow them to communicate on mainstream platforms, we get to explain to them why their crazy beliefs are wrong. Over and over again, publicly, so that anyone who comes across bigoted or hateful or otherwise harmful ideas also comes across the truth. It's much more difficult than sweeping racists under the carpet and pretending they don't exist, but it actually stands a chance of changing racists into open-minded people.

> I will happily admit that I don't have all the answers but I can tell you that the status quo is not working and we need to start thinking out of the box.

Let's look at what the status quo is:

Reddit: "You agree not to use any obscene, indecent, or offensive language or to provide to or post on or through the Website any graphics, text, photographs, images, video, audio or other material that is defamatory, abusive, bullying, harassing, racist, hateful, or violent. You agree to refrain from ethnic slurs, religious intolerance, homophobia, and personal attacks when using the Website."

Twitter: "Hateful conduct: You may not promote violence against, threaten, or harass other people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or serious disease."

Facebook: "We define hate speech as a direct attack on people based on what we call protected characteristics — race, ethnicity, national origin, religious affiliation, sexual orientation, caste, sex, gender, gender identity, and serious disease or disability. We also provide some protections for immigration status. We define attack as violent or dehumanizing speech, statements of inferiority, or calls for exclusion or segregation."

The status quo is already doing exactly what you want, and it's not working. So yes, I agree the status quo is not working.

1. Of course not. I am not an idiot. Fringe viewpoints belong on the fringes. It's why they are called that.

2. You don't and can't. It's been shown that when they do change their minds it's often through indirect means.

3. A company has a right to do whatever it wants within the confines of the law. I am saying they should make better choices and shame on the ones that don't.

This argument has gotten circular and pointless. The tone of your responses has gotten frankly combative and rude and your counter argument is based upon a false premise. I've clarified my original intent as much as I care to. If this is how you engage with those that you disagree with I would encourage you to find a better approach. I am out of this conversation.

I capitalized two words in my entire post, for emphasis to make the meaning clearer. I'm not sure what your objection to this is.

> 1. Of course not. I am not an idiot. Fringe viewpoints belong on the fringes. It's why they are called that.

Okay, so that's a straightforward admission that you're demanding companies do something that doesn't create the change you're looking for.

> 2. You don't and can't. It's been shown that when they do change their minds it's often through indirect means.

I think it's been shown that it's difficult, not that it's impossible.

> 3. A company has a right to do whatever it wants within the confines of the law. I am saying they should make better choices and shame on the ones that don't.

Okay, but I'm saying that the choices you're shaming them for are the better choices.

> This argument has gotten circular and pointless. The tone of your responses has gotten frankly combative and rude and your counter argument is based upon a false premise. I've clarified my original intent as much as I care to. If this is how you engage with those that you disagree with I would encourage you to find a better approach. I am out of this conversation.

I don't think I'm being combative and rude. Every step of the way I've attempted to attack your assertions rather than attacking you personally. You have not given me the same courtesy.

This reaction is consistent with my assertion that your actual position is just to avoiding people who you disagree with, rather than actually creating any change.

That's my point. Minimally-moderated free speech zones always seem to go septic almost immediately.

Censorship can be (and in the most heinous cases, is) compelled by a government, and can even arguably serve the public good, as is often argued with hate speech laws, or (less controversially) with laws against libel and slander. But as far as free speech is concerned, all censorship is equally dangerous.

It's hypocrisy for defenders of Gab to complain about platform owners and businesses de-platforming them, while accepting Gab doing the same.

>Yes. Abridgement of speech in any form is censorship.

That wasn't the question asked.

"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize."

The question was whether the other examples were compelled by government law. That puts them in a different category. Unless you would like to argue that the other censorship was performed to keep the organizers out of prison, your argument falls flat.

Indeed, many settlements in the yesteryears were founded by outlaws and dissidents (also see: the Pilgrims and Mormon settlement of Utah)

Or are you saying that, like the Pilgrims, they will eventually transmute themselves into something less unpleasant if left alone? That's stretching the metaphor a bit far, I think.

They don't become that. Or rather this is orthogonal to moderation.

What I've seen happens is different, no actual genuine bigotry, but some organized effort to spread hateful propaganda and moderators not banning any of that, taking sides, especially when the organized effort comes from the government and is supported by mainstream government propaganda, so the moderators are naturally conflicted. Owners, moderators sometimes realize it's hurting the site, but still don't like to compromise on their views and eventually ban entire topics, not hate, personal attacks or anything like that and still being soft to the views they share even if they are against new rules.

Why wouldn't they? Everyone else does, you and me included.

Voat was a tiny site of 30,000 users in April 2015. Two months later, Reddit banned r/ShitN*ggersSay, and Voat's user base exploded. That was four years ago. Go take a look at the front page of https://voat.co/ right now. Don't do it at work, though.

Do you believe that if the people on gab became state leaders that they'd protect your right to dissent?

Freedom of speech isn't freedom from criticism. And it's also not freedom from any other lawful reaction. Anybody helping with Gab richly deserves criticism and shunning in the technical community.

"First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me."

Hate speech should not be allowed a safe haven. Gab is a business and, as such, is not required to adhere to the first amendment.

Why shouldn't businesses be required to adhere to the First Amendment if they function as the modern public square? The only reason they get out of that requirement is Section 230 of the Communication Decency Act, a law that exists to make sure that websites such as Facebook can't be held liable for how they moderate their site provided its content remains within US law.

This is the definition of privatizing gains, socializing losses.

>First they came for the [people most don't like], then they came for the [progressively larger fractions of the population]

This is why we keep the Overton window focused on scoundrels, like we are now. It never stops just with them.

Gab is no different than any other social media site in that what you see is a function of who you follow, but gab has no moderation at all so you will see things you don’t like more often. It is what it is, but it always seems strange to me to blame the platform for its users.

> At some point you have to accept that people can say and do what they want and only they are responsible for it.

I could not disagree with you more. It is very different and they are known as a haven for some of the vilest viewpoints out there. These fringe viewpoints reach a larger audience and bad things happen. Literally every social media platform of any scale is grappling with this problem. Since, as you say, Gab has no moderation, this is what you get.

It's very easy to just throw your hands up and yell "freedom" with this stuff but I'd be willing to bet you aren't part of a demographic that gets regularly demonized in these corners of the internet. There are stakes. It matters that things like this get called out for what they are.

What's wrong with freedom? Free speech is a right and this is a platform that guarantees it as much as possible. If you don't want that then you have the right to not use it. I think you'd be surprised at the speech that people use around the world, let alone the actions that are committed, if you think Gab is the worst out there.

A part of me feels it'd be nice if people who broadcast their love of cruelty to white men got banned from Twitter and refused employment at the New York Times. But sadly, I know a Twitter ban wouldn't stop Jeong being a misandrist. She picked up those ideas from various places and being booted onto some fringe website wouldn't change her views.

Over time, there's a larger exodus of regular people, leaving only the crazies talking to each other.

That's how it's supposed to work. At the end of the day, there's a nonzero amount of people who believe this nonsense, and reaching them is a different set of problems (Education? Therapy?) but getting the vast majority to abandon it is sufficient.

As a counterpoint, just recently we saw Tommy Robinson, far right activist and repeat felon, get crushed in the European elections. Why did fail? He himself says social media bans were the reason: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/european-elec...

Deplatforming works. If we need people to understand awful people and awful ideas, history provides us with plenty of examples. Similarly, if we want people to understand tigers, we don't just turn tigers loose in the classroom. We read books, we see videos, maybe we visit a zoo.

Plenty of folks have tried to ban history books too.

You can handwave all you like about the (vague, unspecified) horrible cost. But unless you have clear, specific harms to weigh against the actual harm caused by Nazis, you're just blowing smoke.

There is a place on Earth where opinions deemed to be bad are vigilantly monitored for and instantly deplatformed: The People's Republic of China. Is that truly the future you wish for?

Reading these posts from the modern left is ghastly to those of us who remain old school liberals. To defeat their opponents and prevent them from crushing the human rights of innocents, the modern left has become willing themselves to crush various other human rights that they deem unimportant. Thus we see Nietzsche spake truly: "He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you."

I'm just saying that free citizens should not be obligated to serve Nazis or publish their content. And also that citizens should be able to criticize those who do. My position here is consistently pro-freedom. Specifically, I'm for free speech and free association.

Note also that actual Chinese people think your position, that criticism is equivalent to what the PRC does, is hyperbolic pants-wetting: https://twitter.com/jackiehluo/status/1134038887893016577

The analogy with Nietzsche's quote gets even closer. Much the same pious rhetoric about free association was once used by your opponents to defend their denial of service to various racial and religious groups. It took years of activism to get legislation that recognized that freedom of association had to be limited to stop discrimination against protected classes. Consider that California has recently enacted legislation that recognizes political affiliation as a protected class in the workplace; that is the spirit and philosophy of liberalism.

And, for the record, no, no one should want to provide service to Nazis or other hate groups. But once denying services to groups becomes normalized as a political weapon, we are pretty much guaranteed that it will eventually be misused.

> ...that criticism is equivalent to what the PRC does, is hyperbolic pants-wetting

I note that you have deftly slipped in the word "criticism" here when the topic was deplatforming. Criticism is, of course, not equivalent to what the PRC does but deplatforming most assuredly is.

Politician blames everything but his own politics for his failure to get elected. News at 11.

>For decades US Nazis and other loons were justifiably obscure. But the rise of the Internet, which enabled all sorts of connection, also enabled our country's worst to more easily connect, network, and recruit.

And yet the number of race riots and violent crime has fallen drastically since the 1980s, even with the rise of the Internet. LA hasn't had a repeat of 1992 yet. There is no Unabomber trying to spread their manifesto and the number of terror attacks in the Western world has subsided dramatically (there are no Troubles in Ireland, terrorists aren't taking over the Olympics, etc.), even though the knowledge to make explosives and sorts of manuals to commit those crimes are more available than ever before. OWS never got off the ground, even with Internet support; it's no surprise that more unpopular groups with far smaller membership aren't getting a huge benefit from it either.

Even if hate crimes are on the rise because the Internet exists, the correlation is small enough to be trivial because the factors contributing to the massive decline in crime utterly dominate them. Maybe we should be focused on keeping those going rather than jumping to conclusions.

Besides, if the Nazis come, they'll be voted in overwhelmingly due to an utter failure of economic conditions. Limits on what such a government can do that can't be easily sold by a society, like freedom of speech, are the best protection against such a thing should it ever actually happen.

It's also ridiculous that you conflate the 1992 riots (which were a spontaneous reaction to police violence) with the sort of things that Nazis would like to get up to. It's even more ridiculous that you ignore things like the Charlottesville car attack, the Isla Vista killings, or the Christchurch mosque shootings, all of which were by ideologues radicalized on the Internet. Ridiculous and telling.

Can you quote some experts? And, preferably not some far right quack blaming twitter for him losing.

Likewise, you seem to be caught up in some epiphenomenon issues - you blame the internet for these attacks yet similar attacks and much worse ones preceeded the internet. Therefore deplatforming is a red herring, you're literally just using tragic attacks to push deplatforming messages you disagree with - and I don't like those messages either, but censorship isn't the answer.

So as mentioned in my bio, I think you've used up your ration of my time. You'll have to carry on in your support of violent white supremacists without me.

Freedom of speech is not a right to a platform. Freedom of speech also isn't the freedom of consequences from one's speech. I'm free to say what I want. Other people are free to, based on that speech, decide I'm an asshole and that they don't want anything to do with me.

In practice I can see that you're fully in support of censoring politicians you disagree with, whilst allowing those you support free reign. That's an exceptionally dangerous path. You certainly cannot hold that view and also make arguments about "foreign interference in elections" being bad - beyond the total absence of proof around what you're thinking of (Russia), Facebook blocking local politicians is by any definition a foreign company interfering in local elections. The fact that you support the move because it's against people you dislike is irrelevant for avoiding a charge of hypocrisy.