moderation

9 September 2022

CDNs are not phone books

The notorious website kiwi farms is no longer being protected by Cloudflare’s CDN (Content Delivery Network). This means that it is itself subject to DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks and other cybersecurity risks.

It’s been a long time coming. I agree with Ryan Broderick’s take on this, that websites are like street corners, and it helps them to be conceptualised as such.

Prince said that Cloudflare’s security services, many of which are free and are used by an estimated 20 percent of the entire internet, should be thought of as a utility. “Just as the telephone company doesn’t terminate your line if you say awful, racist, bigoted things, we have concluded in consultation with politicians, policy makers, and experts that turning off security services because we think what you publish is despicable is the wrong policy,” Prince wrote.

Which is a good line. I’m sure people who are old enough to remember when telephones weren’t computers love it. But I’m not really sure it works here. Telephones are not publishing platforms, nor are they searchable public records. Comparing a message board that has around nine million visitors a month to someone saying something racist on the telephone is, actually, nuts.

But, more broadly, I don’t even think this is a free speech issue. Cloudflare isn’t a government entity and it’s not putting Kiwi Farms members in jail. In fact, it seems like some users have done that themselves. A German woman seems to have accidentally exposed her real identity amid the constant migration of the site and now may be charged for cyberstalking. Instead, Cloudflare, a private company, has removed their protection from the site, which allows activists and hackers to DDoS it, taking it down.

[…]

Websites are not similar to telephones. They are not even similar to books or magazines. They are street corners, they are billboards, they are parks, they are shopping malls, they are spaces where people congregate. Just because you cannot see the (hopefully) tens of thousands of other people reading this blog post right now doesn’t mean they’re not there. And that is doubly true for a user-generated content platform. And regardless of the right to free speech and the right to assemble guaranteed in America, if the crowd you bring together in a physical space starts to threaten people, even if they’re doing it in the periphery of your audience, the private security company you hired as crowd control no longer has to support you. To me, it’s honestly just that simple.

Source: A website is a street corner | by Ryan Broderick

Image: Karol Smoczynski | Unsplash

22 March 2022

Cancel Technology

Noah Smith makes a good point in this article that ‘cancel culture’ has always existed, we just called it ‘social ostracism’. The difference is the technology we interact with, and the intended and unintended audiences with which we communicate.

First let’s think about distribution. In the olden days, you could “read the room” and decide whether you were going to get a sympathetic ear before you said something. You knew who you were hanging out with — your relatives, or your coworkers, or your buddies, or your neighbors, or your cell of the Communist Party, etc. On the internet, that’s much less true. On Twitter, anyone can see what you write and retweet it or screenshot it to millions of strangers all over the globe. In a Facebook group, you probably don’t know exactly what kind of others are in the group unless it’s really small. If you put something up on a website, anyone can read it. Etc.

The internet also makes it much less hard to maintain private spaces because text can be screenshotted and distributed widely. In the old days, if you said something that would be cancel-worthy outside the group of people you were talking to, it was impossible for someone to verifiably transmit that information outside the group — they could snitch on you, but it would be hearsay and you could deny it. But when you write something down, the text of what you wrote can be screenshotted and distributed widely to people that you didn’t expect to be watching you.

Now, this broad distribution has a number of effects. It makes it a lot harder to get together with your buddies in private and say racist or sexist stuff, because now one of them can betray you with a screenshot. Lots of people are probably pleased with that outcome.

But it also means that everyone who talks on the internet must always worry about their words being shown to someone who’s going to interpret it in an uncharitable way.

[…]

Thus, the internet changes Cancel Culture by massively increasing the number of people who can target you for ostracism. It’s a bit like living in a gossipy small town where you don’t know any of your neighbors — you don’t know who’s going to read what you write, so you don’t know how people are going to take what you say.

Source: It’s not Cancel Culture, it’s Cancel Technology | Noahpinion

9 January 2021

Nothing is repeated, and everything is unparalleled

🤔 We need more than deplatforming — “But as reprehensible as the actions of Donald Trump are, the rampant use of the internet to foment violence and hate, and reinforce white supremacy is about more than any one personality. Donald Trump is certainly not the first politician to exploit the architecture of the internet in this way, and he won’t be the last. We need solutions that don’t start after untold damage has been done.”

💪 Demands and Responsibilities — “If you demand rights for yourself, you have to demand those same rights for others. You have to take on the responsibility of collective action, and you yourself act in a way that benefits the collective. If you want credit, you have to give credit. If you want community, you have to be communal. If you want to be satiated, you have to allow others to be sated. If you want your vote to be respected, you have to respect the votes of others.”

🗯️ Parler Pitched Itself as Twitter Without Rules. Not Anymore, Apple and Google Said. — “Google said in a statement that it had pulled the app because Parler was not enforcing its own moderation policies, despite a recent reminder from Google, and because of continued posts on the app that sought to incite violence.”

🙅 Hello! You’ve Been Referred Here Because You’re Wrong About Section 230 Of The Communications Decency Act — “While this may all feel kind of mean, it’s not meant to be. Unless you’re one of the people who is purposefully saying wrong things about Section 230, like Senator Ted Cruz or Rep. Nancy Pelosi (being wrong about 230 is bipartisan). For them, it’s meant to be mean. For you, let’s just assume you made an honest mistake — perhaps because deliberately wrong people like Ted Cruz and Nancy Pelosi steered you wrong. So let’s correct that.”

🧐 What Wikipedia saw during election week in the U.S., and what we’re doing next — “To help meet this goal, we hope to invest in resources that we can share with international Wikipedia communities that will help mitigate future disinformation risks on the sites. We’re also looking to bring together administrators from different language Wikipedias for a global forum on disinformation. Together, we aim to build more tools to support our volunteer editors, and to combat disinformation.”

Quotation-as-title by the Goncourt Brothers. Image from top-linked post.

Tag: moderation (page 1 of 2)

CDNs are not phone books

Cancel Technology

Nothing is repeated, and everything is unparalleled