All contributors to open source are not created equal. It is different when a literal 3 trillion dollar company does it, thus demonstrating they were unworthy of the trust and goodwill put in them. They have the money, they have the cloud infrastructure, they are doing all kinds of scraping themselves.
> Please help me understand what the difference is between, say, platforming racist harassment because of a "political commitment to free speech" and platforming racist harassment because you just kinda like racist harassment?
The difference is intent. Intent matters. Intent is the difference between murder and manslaughter, or between a conspiracy and mere speech.
Intent matters sometimes. To some people. But here, in either case the intent is to enable terrible people to, e.g., shout the n-word at people. So I don't see much of a difference in those terms.
Well it obviously mattered enough for the Founding Fathers of the US to enshrine freedom of speech in the Bill of Rights, and in the last 200-ish years it also mattered enough for US courts not to overturn or politicians of various parties to change it.
Now where I'm from (Germany), not just "hate speech" is against the law, but it's also unlawful to insult another person. It's complicated, but for the latter it's mostly sufficient that they feel insulted by what you said to them personally.
Now while I don't go around insulting people in person or on the Internet, I personally think - for instance - that it should be allowed to call a person an asshole, if they behave like an asshole. Yet, if I did that here, or even online to another German person, they could go to the police and press charges. If the public prosecutor is sufficiently bored, this very low barrier could also be used to dox me in an otherwise reasonably anonymous setting, since the resulting lawsuit could result in my data getting subpoenaed from, say, Twitter and my ISP. This has happened to other people here in the past.
Now while I'm neither in favor of either hate speech nor randomly and viciously insulting people online, I consider the law in Germany as outlined unreasonable in an online setting. I think freedom of speech is more important fundamentally than another person's right to not feel hurt, or for some powers that be to silence or punish me because I said something inconvenient that they merely claim to meet some of the criteria for speech that is restricted here.
Mind you, this is the case all the while freedom of speech is enshrined in the German constitution as well. But I think it is a pretty good example of why I think freedom of speech should not be curtailed just in the name of another person's feelings about said speech. Even if a person, as you do, doesn't see a direct and tangible benefit in allowing that kind of speech, I would argue that a larger fraction of people are against disallowing it, because of the indirect consequences and where that line of lawmaking leads.
Another thing to consider is this: Say you're modestly happy with the current government wherever you live, and you'd be happy for them to have an "easy" way to curtail freedom of speech. Would you also be happy for the opposing political side to do the same thing? What if some extremists came to power?
This kind of reasoning is why free speech absolutists are so staunchly defending freedom of speech, even if it may be inconvenient or insulting to themselves or others.
You're conflating a lot of things here. One is the free exchange of ideas with freedom to harass people. Another is legal versus socially accepted. A third is the difference between "the cops should be able to arrest your for X" and "I am choosing to spend my days creating a platform for X". These are all importantly different.
You're also shading over exactly who gets free speech. If digital Klansman get to freely harass black people, many of those black people will not participate in public spaces, silencing them. Indeed, that sort of ethnic cleansing is often the goal of racial abuse. See, e.g., Loewen's "Sundown Towns". So whatever "free speech absolutists" think they're up to, in practice the result is often a diminishing of the free exchange of ideas that the Founding Fathers were clearly pursuing.
I don't think this is a very accurate description of how things work in Germany. It's exceedingly rare in any Western jurisdiction for the aggrieved party to press charges. This power is usually left to government prosecutors, who are probably more impartial than the complainant.
how about this example: twitter would silence and deplatform some guy using the oh so terrible "n-word" ("because sticks and stones may..." is not a thing anymore). Now because this person is deplatformed, I cannot find his "hatespeech" when doing a quick background check, so I hire him in my company as responsible for recruiting. Now he makes sure no "n-words" get employed.
big win? whomever votes to silence the guy gets to judge.
If the only possible way you can catch a bigoted manager is by hoping that he spent a lot of time hurling racial abuse at Black people under his own name, then I think you really need to work on your management processes.
sure, I find out about it a year later, since i am a small company, and now 3 black people were not hired because of it. Is this a big win? also, I do believe that the word abuse is being devalued, and that such simple insults do not really qualify as abuse in general, lets not forget that a great deal of black people love to use the same words when talking to eachother, black celebrities get famous singing the word, self describing as such.
That is a very white understanding of what abuse means.
Also, it seems wild to me that you think a small company means you somehow have less ability to supervise your employees. What's your plan if you hire a racist who wasn't dumb enough to post openly? Just let him go to it?
I disagree that the "Do-Not-Track header is a perfect solution to this", because it implies that the default (i.e. the header being absent) should allow sites to track you. I (and apparently EU legislators) think opting in to privacy is wrong. You should have privacy by default. If anything, there should be a "Creepily-Track-My-Activity-Over-The-Entire-Internet" header, that, when present, allows tracking.
There also used to be another standard called "P3P" that tried to integrate privacy into browser UIs with a more or less standardized interface and that, too, failed. Among other reasons because companies wanting to track people subverted it.
I had a similar problem a while back where Google demanded a second authentication factor for an account that didn't have 2FA set. It asked for a previous password that the account must have had >10 years ago and I think the answer to a security question that I couldn't answer, because I always use cryptic responses to those and apparently didn't save this one way back when.
My rationale was that I wouldn't need any of that, because I knew the account password so there would never be a need to go through account recovery.
Either way, I found a solution to that on one of those Google user support forums: I had to not try and log in to the account for approximately 40 days. After that, it'd let me log in with just the password again. This is apparently because Google keeps flagging the account of getting attacked and requiring a second authentication factor for some reason and the timer for that keeps getting reset after a failed challenge for one of the account recovery factors.
After something between 30 and 40 days, I could log in to the account with just the password again.
> And while we're at it, standardizing on a browser-provided consent UI, instead of each site providing its own, with its own dark patterns. It's the same idea.
We've already been there and it was basically shelved because users were indifferent and companies wanted the data regardless.
> Then when a user visits a site, P3P will compare what personal information the user is willing to release, and what information the server wants to get – if the two do not match, P3P will inform the user and ask if he/she is willing to proceed to the site, and risk giving up more personal information.[4] As an example, a user may store in the browser preferences that information about their browsing habits should not be collected. If the policy of a Website states that a cookie is used for this purpose, the browser automatically rejects the cookie.
This sounds ideal, or at bare minimum, vastly superior to preferences boxes which take 10+ seconds or more of JavaScript to load, and impede access to content, (and sometimes don't load properly and never go away).
People want Facebook to stop following people, especially those signed out or without an account to begin with, around the internet in a creepy way. How hard can it be really? Is it too much to ask that some company I don't have business with doesn't spy on my web surfing habits?
The announcement also reads to me as if the "clearing" doesn't even do what people may expect it to do:
> Once we roll out this update, you'll be able to see information about the apps and websites you've interacted with, and you'll be able to clear this information from your account.
This sounds to me as if they still keep the information and just don't associate it with your account anymore.
