“If we don’t let the oppressors roam freely, they might try to oppress you” is not something I expected to read from the EFF today. But well, here we are.
It has been standard internet behavior that if a platform does not have the proper response to abuse complaints, you move up a layer higher until you find someone that is receptive to it. This has been standard operating procedure for more or less for the entirety of the current millennium, and this article has done absolutely zero work to provide a good reason it should be anything otherwise, other than bringing up generic “free speech” stuff.
You should not get a path out of that process because one layer immediately above the problematic entity is actively choosing to disregard abuse complaints. You simply move up to the next step. And this process simply must keep existing, as doing anything otherwise is to allow people to pull off all kinds of bad things; scams, spam, illegal activity and far more.
And if you abolish the non-legal form of that process? Well, there’s still a legal process - and as soon as someone that wants to censor minorities gets control over the legal process, they will simply change the rules in their favor, as has happened countless times in the past.
I think what distinguishes Internet service provision from all the other “platform” aspects of the Internet is that Internet service has become a kind of baseline utility. Everything depends on it: your smart home devices, your security system, Point of Sale systems, etc. You can’t search for employment without it, your kids can’t attend remote school, etc.
We all understand that when someone buys advertising space in a newspaper, they are forming a contract with that newspaper, and the paper has to be a willing participant. But that’s not really how we think of utilities. I think we’d all be pretty unhappy if the electric company refused service to a facility, or if the water company refused to hook somebody up to the water supply, or the fire department refused to put out a fire, due to the property user’s political speech. Even if we deeply disagreed with that speech.
I think ISPs are a lot more like utilities, and a lot less like newspapers. If it’s that important, then write a law explaining exactly how and when ISPs are intervene by removing or refusing service in these situations, and defend the law in court. But don’t leave it up to ISP terms of service.
If such a process existed, the entity in question would almost certainly end up being shut down by that process, unless they find a funny technical loophole around it, in which case that would be a failure of the law that should not be rejoiced by anyone.
But as it stands, that law and process does not exist; ISPs already can and will shut you down for things like downloading copyrighted content (with or without complaints from the copyright holder), tethering without approval, being a technical nuisance in the form of mass port scanning, hosting insecure services and other such stuff. “Hosting a platform solely dedicated to harassment and stalking and ignoring abuse complaints about it” absolutely deserves to be on that list.
Not sure about the US, but in the EU that process does exist: anyone can submit a claim against any domain, and if the “competent authority” which can be a judge or a law enforcement agency, so decides, they add it to a list of domains to be blocked at the ISP level… currently meaning at the ISP’s DNS resolver (use non-ISP DNS resolvers at your own risk), but technically they could request routing or deep packet inspection blocks through the same process.
As far as I know (but this might be outdated), ISPs in the EU are not allowed to play other shenanigans with user’s data.
It shouldn’t be on the ISPs, it should be on the SERVICES that USE the ISPs.
I’ll give you a perfect example, the Uvalde shooter.
He had been using a French social media platform called Yubo where he posted animal abuse videos and threatened to rape and murder other users.
He was reported to Yubo, REPEATEDLY, and Yubo did nothing.
Maybe we need to make social media companies mandatory reporters in cases like this? Rather than just ban a user wholesale, increase monitoring of them and report the account to local authorities?
I think the question then becomes “what happens when the services refuse”. Because the next step up is getting their ISP to kick them off.
The next step should be law enforcement: they can contact the service, and escalate to the judicial system if it refuses to act, which can decide whether to order the ISP to block the service, or close the company completely, or even jail the people behind it.
The ISP does never need to listen to, or even hear about, a problem with a service.
This feels like shutting down road access to the local stripmall just because the bar there doesn’t properly handle it’s drunks. Oh and leaving that decision up to a private, not elected and not accountable citizen
The only thing Yubo could/should have done is forward it to the police though (which is what the users that initially reported this content should have done as well, independently). I’m not sure why that hasn’t happened. I hate to say it but this is still not the company’s responsibility, the most they can do directly is ban his account which wouldn’t accomplish anything in this case. I’d say go straight to local authorities rather than expecting services to handle it.
@gsa4555 So if ISPs are utilities like a electricity or waste water, should they be regulated? Even Proud Boys have electricity and water to their house, and laws prevent them from being cut off just because they are vile.
I apologise beforehand for a slightly rude tone. I won’t be “kind” towards stupidity - because that would be arseholery towards everyone, as everyone gets harmed by stupidity.
Plenty individuals are reducing the matter into two positions:
- Let hate discourses and harassment run rampant.
- Let corporations dictate what’s considered acceptable or not.
And then, when you criticise one of those positions (because they’re both foul), you’ll get some assumers neighing that you’re defending the other view, even when explicitly stated otherwise. It’s that old false dichotomy: “if u dun think dat red is blue than u think dat red is green! Red is not green you is dumb lol XD lmao”.
And that is exactly what is happening here. EFF is criticising #2 as short-sighted and dumb; it is. However it is not defending #1. This is blatantly obvious for anyone with basic reading comprehension, as the following excerpts show:
But just because there’s a serious problem doesn’t mean that every response is a good one.
Finally, site-blocking, whatever form it takes, almost inevitably cuts off legal as well as illegal speech. It cuts with a chain saw rather than a scalpel.
Here’s the third position:
3. Governments should institute and enforce laws against hate discourses and harassment.
That’s rather close to what EFF is proposing, see:
The cops and the courts should be working to protect the victims of KF and go after the perpetrators with every legal tool at their disposal. We should be giving them the resources and societal mandate to do so.
I agree with this because it’s easier to whip a gov into defending your interests than doing it with a private entity, that will always defend its own interests against you. EFF is spot on when it says that they won’t stop at illegal speech, you’re giving them precedent to dictate what you - intermediated by your government - should.
