[Meekro]

Little known fact about the phrase "fire in a crowded theater": it was coined in a criminal case against a man who was distributing leaflets criticizing the draft during World War 1. The Supreme Court upheld his conviction by comparing those leaflets to "shouting fire in a crowded theater" -- even though most readers here would agree that those two things are nothing alike.

I think there's a lesson in that: when we tolerate any censorship, it will inevitably be used by the powerful to oppress the powerless. If the powerful need to compare the targeted speech to "fire in a crowded theater" or "Nazism" or whatever, they'll do it whether it makes sense or not.

[tdb7893]

Yeah but on the other hand you shouldn't be able to shout fire in a crowded theater so you need some censorship. As with like 99% of political arguments is about finding the line because the absolutist arguments generally end up kinda silly.

[dmix]

It's never just used for the original case either.

Now that 8chan is down why not every other site with a subset of (violent?) racist users?

By doing something about one and not doing anything about another, is Cloudflare not basically giving their ideology a greenlight to exist? This is the type of backwards anti-intellectual thinking that will seep into the decision making.

"Slippery slopes" are a cliche for a reason when talking about this stuff because it never stops with one really good example nor within a very narrow scope. Making this debate all about 8chan misses the larger point because it sets a precedent. There's already tons of people who want way more than 8chan banned from the internet.

[tdb7893]

The problem for 8chan wasn't having bad users, every place has those, it was the specific way which it enabled them. Reddit or Facebook make effort to take down extremist threats, which puts them in a different league altogether. I'm fine with taking down places that enable them in that way and it hasn't seemed to have led to the slippery slope you are worried about so far.

[dmix]

The point is slippery slopes don't stop after the fact.

The next time twitter blows up at Cloudflare [or insert tech company name] over a tragedy what's going to happen?

Does this apply to Islamic Extremism or some radical groups in Ukraine or some hypothetical Flemish separatist group who is openly violent and posts similar un-moderated content? Or is it only for some highly touchy US problems since they're a US company or the topic got the most noise on Twitter/news sites?

[almost_usual]

Private companies are incentivized to make money, they can host and kick off whoever the hell they want. I don't understand what you're getting at? It's capitalism at work.

If 8chan wants to exist on the internet without worrying about being knocked offline then 8chan needs to either build their infrastructure or find companies that are willing to risk their reputation to support them.