> I'd like to also thank fediblock for never fact-checking anything ever
Nitpicking time: The link in the blog post just goes to a list of instances that have chosen to defederate. The reason it's not going to any sort of official Fediblock list is because Fediblock was shut down years ago. The author of Fediblock expressed the specific intention of not being definitive in any way and for people to thoroughly cross reference listed instances' standards with their own. My intuition tells me that the author wanted to link to the entry of Fediblock, and failing to find it, substituted that link for its nearest equivalent without fact-checking anything ever.
I run a medium sized Mastodon server. I blocked them because one of their users called me the n-word, I reported them to their admin, and nothing happened. It had zero to do with fediblock or any other communal mechanism. Their users acted like assholes, their admins did nothing about it, so I decided I didn’t want to talk to them anymore.
The notion of FSE whining about being blocked by some cabal is hilarious to me. No, they’re garden variety trolls that are capable of annoying others directly. There’s no grand conspiracy required to make a bunch of people disconnect from them.
>The notion of FSE whining about being blocked by some cabal is hilarious to me.
Are they whining about being blocked? I didn't catch it in the article, but maybe I missed it?
The only thing I saw was kind of the opposite of whining: "FSE being fedi's equivalent of a dive bar, I understand people on "gated community" instances not wanting to deal with it"
They seem totally fine & understanding if people want to block them. They just don't want the block reason to be a lie (e.g. saying they allow loli stuff when they don't). Presumably, you saying they are a bunch of assholes as your reason for blocking them would be completely accepted by them.
> I'd like to also thank fediblock for never fact-checking anything ever
and link to a list of all instances who have blocked them for any reason whatsoever. My instance is on that list, as though I blocked them because of fediblock. In reality, it’s impossible for them to know why someone blocked them without doing a survey or something.
>Their users acted like assholes, their admins did nothing about it, so I decided I didn’t want to talk to them anymore.
It has been my experience that the more vocal someone is about free speech rights the more likely it is that they are only vocal because they want to use those rights as a shield against criticism of their bigoted, annoying, or anti-social behavior and they want to criticize people for distancing themselves from the bigotry.
To them free speech is mandatory listening-- to them, no matter what.
That's been my observation. "Freedom to... say what exactly?"
I'm A-OK with people saying constructive, civil things I disagree with. I might reply with my disagreement but that's OK. We're talking! I have zero patience with someone jumping in with trolling, harassment, or other abuse.
What's the difference between this and saying "Criminals want trials with defence lawyers, so people who want trials with defence lawyers are criminals"?
At least when someone promotes free speech there's a chance that they are proponents of democratic principles. If they are against free speech you know that they have an authoritarian ideology.
If you can’t shun someone for their direct misbehavior, then why can you decide not to mute someone?
Note that I never told you that you’re not allowed to talk to them. I just said they’re not allowed to harass me or my users anymore. You can still hang out with them all you like.
I was unable to settle on the Fediverse as i did not find an instance from where i could follow and interact with all the people that i know. My social circles are rather "diverse" and people like you are apparently working hard to not allow that.
I guess your users were okay with you setting blocks?
I really liked how the story starts with not wanting to introduce captcha because it hurts real users, then continues to spend the next 80% of it covering how open registrations and the public timeline were down for however long, extremely negatively impacting users.
Still, fun read though. Also made me definitively realize I can't imagine myself hosting a community space for others online.
I agree, fantastic writeup with a nice amount of technical detail sprinkled in. This would work really well as a talk at something like the Chaos Communication Congress.
notice the incorrect conclusion he makes. the fbi emails him asking for info about a user, with a screenshot that includes a threat of violence. FSE guy jumps to the conclusion that it's just innocent braggadocio (despite the fact that another CEO was murdered just 6 months ago). jump to end of article: guy has already committed countless acts of violence (by proxy).
I'm glad that FSE guy engaged with the feds, but it shows dangerous bias when he sees a screenshot of a threat and immediately assumes that can't be a violent individual.
I personally think that the fact that violent people exist shouldn't diminish our values regarding privacy and/or anonymity. I don't think you should accommodate messages such as the one WitchKing shared...but I think if you value privacy, your priority should be removing the user and the content, and not appealing to the Feds. Don't make it a safe space for either party, because neither of them are on your side.
You doubt the seriousness of the Witch King of Angmar? The Pale King? The man leads a dark host of fell origin! He wears a ring of Power! His threats are clearly entirely credible, it is only a small step from posting on the Fediverse to a siege of the White City and the deaths of a multitude.
Yeah. For the life of me I don't see how someone could see a credible threat in that post. The man could actually murder Fink the same day and the post still wouldn't be evidence of a credible threat; it is just too silly. At best it is evidence he is deranged in addition to the trolling it turned out to be in this case.
The problem is entirely that you cannot tell a baseless threat from a real one from just the forum post.
Just like for credit card fraud, you can only improve your heuristics so far. At some point, you either treat every single possible as real for investigative purposes, or you accept that you find a threat, ignored it, and people die as a result.
Plenty of real world crazy terrorist bullshit had a pointless online threat component!
More importantly, depending on the threat, it's probably a crime itself. Bomb threats are criminal even if it's clear that it wasn't a realistic threat.
So no, that screenshot is not "total weaksauce", for law enforcement. Hell, even here, that screenshot was demonstrably from a guy running a criminal enterprise!
> Just like for credit card fraud, you can only improve your heuristics so far. At some point, you either treat every single possible as real for investigative purposes, or you accept that you find a threat, ignored it, and people die as a result.
This isn't borderline though. This is blatantly nothing. You might as well arrest everyone who leaves their house in the morning.
> More importantly, depending on the threat, it's probably a crime itself. Bomb threats are criminal even if it's clear that it wasn't a realistic threat.
That doesn't make the legal system better, that makes it worse! What world do we live in where Pepsi can offer a valuable prize and welch on it and it's fine because they're joking, but it doesn't go the other way?
That is a completely accurate description of that screenshot IMO. Even if the guy who posted it was making phone calls to get thugs to beat people up and hoping they'd take it further, that post is still clearly absurd, an obvious joke, not a credible threat. This is "96% of serial killers have used bread" stuff.
>I'd like to also thank fediblock for never fact-checking anything ever, giving the false impression that things that FSE has never permitted were allowed.
Proceeds to link to a website whose source code is hosted by kiwifarms. If you are blocked, that's because most of us don't want to interact with the "free speech" crowd, that's pretty much it.
The non sequitur was implying that the list was related to why those instances blocked this one, as though everyone blindly followed the fediblock recommendation. I didn’t. I’ve never, not once, taken fediblock’s advice without following up personally to verify their claims.
I blocked this instance when their user called me the n-word and the instance moderators didn’t act on my report. I didn’t block them due to fediblock, but because of negative interactions that I was personally involved with. And yet my server shows up on that list, as though it were related to fediblock.
Great read. I have a tiny, inconsequential, possibly wrong correction. You had assumed that the “Negative” word on the internal search engine screenshot was sentiment analysis. I think it was instead a button to report the post in the internal system as a “negative” result as in, not actually matching the search they were trying to do. Sentiment analysis doesn’t seem like it would be very useful in this scenario.
I disagree. The icon of "Negative" is of a red human head. Who would choose that icon for "False positive"? IMO it makes more sense as "Negative sentiment"
Interesting to see that this is kicked off by the referal header. Seems like a privacy issue to have your browser tell servers part of your browsing history by default.
Interestingly enough, it's configurable both from the user side and from the referring site side.
Most (all? all the relevant ones, I think) browsers honor the referer-policy[1] header if a referring site sets it. There are options in common site frameworks, like Django[2] to control that for UAs that respect it.
Since most UAs respect it, if the indexing site had wanted to, they could easily have prevented the header from being sent for most users.
Wasn't there a better technical way to block the scraper? Like blocking IPs/domains at ingress instead of serving requests? Probably you do still pay for request traffic though...
Isn't there a market for anti-DDOS third-party services for API endpoints (Cloudflare etc) — through probably for "Free Speech Extremist" that wouldn't be suitable solution, and there are charges too (though presumably when facing a situation like this you actually save money).
> So, I tell the server to drop traffic from the IPs that were scraping. Problem solved! Then immediately I start seeing a large number of attempts from different IPs. Residential IPs in the US: they're buying residential proxies.
Aside from the obvious (it is clearly somewhat tongue-in-cheek, especially given the author's sense of humor) the truth is that the U.S. still has some unsettled business regarding what counts as protected speech. The past few decades have seen a lot of debate and legal back-and-forth regarding what to do with lolicon and shotacon illustrations, which FSE also addresses in another linked post[1]. (Not sure if any other remnants of obscenity law still exist: I'm sure they do, they just don't seem to come up very often online.) In any case, it seems like their fediverse server runs on the idea that if it's legally protected speech it should generally be allowed, or at least not disallowed on the basis that it's gross or something like that. Personally, I can get behind the spirit even if I'm not sure I'm in to go along for the ride. I definitely lean in that general direction. (The counter example would be, well, basically every other fediverse instance. They get pretty long on the rules and instance block lists.)
> The past few decades have seen a lot of debate and legal back-and-forth regarding what to do with lolicon and shotacon illustrations
wild that of all the examples you could choose to bring up, this is the one. not saying the conversation doesn't need to happen, but i think there are a lot more concrete examples that affect many more people that come to mind first.
for GP, there are a lot of other contested ideas around what constitutes free/protected speech in america that aren't related to pedophilia - much of it revolves around political speech, especially with Citizens United (the supreme court case that effectively declared monetary support for political causes to be considered "free speech"). conversely, ground-up economic speech (such as BDS) is often stifled (even calling for boycotts etc under the BDS framework is not considered protected speech in some places).
As far as protected speech as it relates to the Internet and American law though, I don't think I've really seen anything that has been debated quite as much, and not only that, it actually seems to have picked up considerable heat over time rather than quieting down. It first came around (at least in any way that I noticed it) with the Chris Handley case in 2008 and has become a serious point of debate online especially with younger people.
Citizen's United isn't even really about free expression IMO, and I personally don't think people are all that split on it anyways, I think it's just a case where the people and the establishment disagree. BDS I'm simply not familiar with.
It does seem that there are new mounting challenges to free expression right now, but they're relatively new and it's unclear if they will stick around yet.
> Citizen's United isn't even really about free expression IMO
unfortunately, it is about free expression in the opinion of the supreme court:
'the Court found that laws restricting the political spending of corporations and unions are inconsistent with the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.' [0]
BDS is a topical instance of a bottom-up movement recommending boycotting, divestment and sanctions against organizations that are considered to materially support the israelli government. naturally, you can imagine this attracts strong opinions from many sides. in some cases, states/municipalities have deemed this to be unprotected speech. [1]
Oh that is a good point, I have heard of some free expression debate going on around the Israel/Palestine conflict lately.
I think the reason those don't come to mind is because even though they really do regard the interpretation of free speech law, they don't actually feel like they're about expression. When it comes to the Israel/Palestine conflict though, even the opinion that it isn't really about free expression might be controversial, so clearly it is.
"Extremist" is just a pejorative variant of "radical". I assume they're using it tongue-in-cheek.
When it comes to speech, it's really not hard to imagine positions that would have been controversial at any point in the history of the US. That doesn't mean you can't hold them, but others don't need to agree, and that's how you end up with labels of this sort.
Aside from the bit about "frontiers", Article 19 of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights is pretty straightforward:
> Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.
As is the First Amendment to the US Constitution:
> Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
I can't speak for Pete. However, given that the expressed position of influential portions of the US government (as well as many of my peers and acquaintances) runs counter to the letter and the spirit of Article 19 and the spirit (if not the letter) of the First Amendment, I consider myself to be a free speech extremist.
Because there are inumerable forms of banned speech. Because freedom of speech is in reality a very narrow construct. See Hustler Magazine v. Falwell 1998.... or just watch the last few scenes of the movie.
You're asking that on a story specifically describing how the FBI is either avoiding or directly violating the constitutional restrictions they are supposed to follow?
I'm sorry, how did the FBI violate anyone's First Amendment rights here? Where in this story did they take down content? Where did they compel speech or silence or association?
LMAO you do not have a first amendment right to not be investigated for making threats in public, even if those threats are baseless! You do not have a right to baselessly threaten people!
Their agents were bypassing OP's security measures (and breaking the CFAA) to make an extremely broad search of their papers. That's absolutely a Fourth Amendment violation.
The courts have held that the rights in the constitution have limits. Generally, anyone operating outside of the limits would be called an extremist when someone disagrees with them.
A feature of extremists is that they tend to support one cause over all others. They see no room for compromise or balancing of concerns. A breathing extremist may prioritize breathing over eating food and drinking water which are also important for survival.
While, from an immediacy standpoint, breathing is the higher priority, if you prioritize breathing continuously to the exclusion of drinking and eating, you will have problems on the 3-5 day and 8-21 day horizons.
Because the US has very unfree speech, despite what someone wrote on a piece of paper in 17-whatever year.
In general, the US ranks pretty low on most freedom metrics, except for the freedom to kill with a gun. In general, the more your country has to tell you you're free, the less free you actually are.
Many other countries explicitly do not have free speech in their constitution, but something more narrow, like freedom of opinion. In those countries, what rights the constitution says you get, and what rights you actually get, tend to be more closely in alignment.
US ranks 78 of 80 on the Free Speech Index here, not sure what your metrics are that make it supposedly "very unfree". Perhaps you'd like to share with the class?
>There has been debate over whether the laws violate the right to free speech and organizations such as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Council on American–Islamic Relations (CAIR) have challenged many of them in court cases.
Freedom of noise might be more descriptive than freedom of speech, in so far as the Western democracies are concerned.
In the US unlimited money has unlimited political power, so free speech, is irrelevant to power distribution, although it might have some academic or personal value for some.
are there any good open-source porn-detector models out there? if i ran an image board in 2025, that would be job #1, since it’s really just a weapon, and we don’t speak or print with our genitals—well, most of us anyway…
Assuming that: the use of money in order to achieve a political outcome is an abuse of power that happens to be legal (I agree to a degree).
The equivalent use of DDOS would be to influence the decision making process in a way that leads to the same outcome. And it would have to be a way of operating that is generally accepted and legal in the first place.
The difference between terrorists and freedom fighters is whether they're aligned with my views. When it's the government making the distinction, the difference is whether they're aligned with the government's views.
Furthermore, a rebellion or freedom fighters in a moral framework is when you have an authoritarian regime, aka “the monster that comes for us all” (Andor S2) that needs to be overcome.
An authoritarian regime has no representation of the population, has no need for feedback, and is ruled by a few. In the work of Thomas Payne he says “When all rights have been taken away, the right of rebellion has been made perfect.”
War. It's called war. In ye olden days, military forces pillaged farms (for food) and sacked cities (for loot). Rarely, there have been short eras of formalized military v military conflicts within various cultures, but this was not the norm. In more modern times, military forces destroys enemy infrastructure to degrade their ability to make war directly target civilians to reduce the # of enemies and hurt morale (supposedly). While sad, one of the facts of life is that war leads to civilian deaths. Usually far more than direct military deaths.
I wish it were so, but the real answer is: because the law doesn't care about your technicalities, they care about what people think/feel, in particular what lawyers and judges think. And lawyers and judges feel that there is a difference between DDOSing a thing offline and politicking your way through the legal system to get a thing taken offline.
The difference is the lawyers and judges do not make any money from the DDOS achieving the same goal. Really, what the law cares about is money. Greed, plain and simple. Yes, what people think/feel factor into this _only_ because when the constituency (read: supporters) are put in an emotionally agitated state, they can be manipulated to believe just about anything, which helps pass things like batshit crazy budget cuts to critical public infrastructure or fuel witch-hunts for imaginary enemies in order to build an enforcement arm.
I know plenty of lawyers that would absolutely disagree with your first sentence, "the law doesn't care about technicalities." Oh, but they do. Technicalities are their tools of exploitation.
> because when the constituency (read: supporters) are put in an emotionally agitated state, they can be manipulated to believe just about anything […]
That’s democracy, at its most basic. Often, it means people with little access to education, but with a lot at stake, casting votes that go against their own interests. And in the U.S., it’s not as if party leadership on either side truly represents them anyway.
The upside, though, is significant: when power shifts, we usually don’t resort to violence. That simple fact - the peaceful transfer of power - provides the stability necessary for society to function and potentially thrive.
What the heck is this? It's hysterical to report cp immediately?
You can be a free speech 'extremist'(clearly a bit tongue-in-cheek) and still want to protect your site from bad actors. Not much free speech to be had when their violations get your site removed.
I agree slightly that the 'meat' in the article was lacking as far as what was actually happening with the FBI. Seems no party would give him an inch tho.
It is hysterical to spaz out upon seeing a cp posted on the internet where anyone from a pool of 7 billion people are allowed to post. It is hysterical to lose sleep over that. No "free speech extremist" bends over to fight cp because it would involve vetting each post individually, only letting people you know personally post to your site, etc. You are giving into the FBI's impossible request.
fbi contacts a guy who runs a free speech website asks who a particular shitposter is. free-speech guy hates the fbi but complies anyway (as best as he can), later finds out shitposter (who finally got arrested) was an actual commit-violence-against-you terrorist.
> To summarize, the FBI pays some shady companies to scrape data, the data is scanned for keywords (yep, just like CARNIVORE). Links and content are then fed into Facebook, organized by topic based on the keywords. Some rudimentary analysis is performed (sentiment analysis at least, but as friendly as Microsoft is with the feds, and as LLMs have gotten popular, the influence of machines has probably expanded) and perused by agents, using some FBI internal interface.
FBI paying a front group (BoardReader?) to collect open source intelligence isn't too weird, doesn't sound like a crime. And I'm happy the FBI spent resources going after "swatting".
I'd really like to know how the front group are controlling Facebook servers to collect data.
Nitpicking time: The link in the blog post just goes to a list of instances that have chosen to defederate. The reason it's not going to any sort of official Fediblock list is because Fediblock was shut down years ago. The author of Fediblock expressed the specific intention of not being definitive in any way and for people to thoroughly cross reference listed instances' standards with their own. My intuition tells me that the author wanted to link to the entry of Fediblock, and failing to find it, substituted that link for its nearest equivalent without fact-checking anything ever.
The notion of FSE whining about being blocked by some cabal is hilarious to me. No, they’re garden variety trolls that are capable of annoying others directly. There’s no grand conspiracy required to make a bunch of people disconnect from them.
Are they whining about being blocked? I didn't catch it in the article, but maybe I missed it?
The only thing I saw was kind of the opposite of whining: "FSE being fedi's equivalent of a dive bar, I understand people on "gated community" instances not wanting to deal with it"
They seem totally fine & understanding if people want to block them. They just don't want the block reason to be a lie (e.g. saying they allow loli stuff when they don't). Presumably, you saying they are a bunch of assholes as your reason for blocking them would be completely accepted by them.
> I'd like to also thank fediblock for never fact-checking anything ever
and link to a list of all instances who have blocked them for any reason whatsoever. My instance is on that list, as though I blocked them because of fediblock. In reality, it’s impossible for them to know why someone blocked them without doing a survey or something.
The rest of the sentence is important to the meaning of the sentence, though...?
"giving the false impression that things that FSE has never permitted were allowed." with a link to a claim that they allow loli.
(For what it is worth, I've blocked them as well, but I still didn't read this paragraph as them "whining about a cabal")
It has been my experience that the more vocal someone is about free speech rights the more likely it is that they are only vocal because they want to use those rights as a shield against criticism of their bigoted, annoying, or anti-social behavior and they want to criticize people for distancing themselves from the bigotry.
To them free speech is mandatory listening-- to them, no matter what.
I'm A-OK with people saying constructive, civil things I disagree with. I might reply with my disagreement but that's OK. We're talking! I have zero patience with someone jumping in with trolling, harassment, or other abuse.
What's the difference between this and saying "Criminals want trials with defence lawyers, so people who want trials with defence lawyers are criminals"?
Note that I never told you that you’re not allowed to talk to them. I just said they’re not allowed to harass me or my users anymore. You can still hang out with them all you like.
I guess your users were okay with you setting blocks?
Still, fun read though. Also made me definitively realize I can't imagine myself hosting a community space for others online.
1) Gentleman is doing citizen science figuring out a small part of the FBI's intelligence gathering/spying apparatus.
2) Random Fediverse drama tidbits.
3) Interesting sysadmin tactics for small server operators.
4) This torswats fellow sounds like a piece of work and gets arrested which adds an interesting subplot.
5) Seems like quite an intelligent writer, I just like the style.
5 stars. Well worth reading.
I'm glad that FSE guy engaged with the feds, but it shows dangerous bias when he sees a screenshot of a threat and immediately assumes that can't be a violent individual.
Yeah. For the life of me I don't see how someone could see a credible threat in that post. The man could actually murder Fink the same day and the post still wouldn't be evidence of a credible threat; it is just too silly. At best it is evidence he is deranged in addition to the trolling it turned out to be in this case.
Just like for credit card fraud, you can only improve your heuristics so far. At some point, you either treat every single possible as real for investigative purposes, or you accept that you find a threat, ignored it, and people die as a result.
Plenty of real world crazy terrorist bullshit had a pointless online threat component!
More importantly, depending on the threat, it's probably a crime itself. Bomb threats are criminal even if it's clear that it wasn't a realistic threat.
So no, that screenshot is not "total weaksauce", for law enforcement. Hell, even here, that screenshot was demonstrably from a guy running a criminal enterprise!
This isn't borderline though. This is blatantly nothing. You might as well arrest everyone who leaves their house in the morning.
> More importantly, depending on the threat, it's probably a crime itself. Bomb threats are criminal even if it's clear that it wasn't a realistic threat.
That doesn't make the legal system better, that makes it worse! What world do we live in where Pepsi can offer a valuable prize and welch on it and it's fine because they're joking, but it doesn't go the other way?
"it was also clearly absurd, an obvious joke, not a credible threat."
Proceeds to link to a website whose source code is hosted by kiwifarms. If you are blocked, that's because most of us don't want to interact with the "free speech" crowd, that's pretty much it.
I blocked this instance when their user called me the n-word and the instance moderators didn’t act on my report. I didn’t block them due to fediblock, but because of negative interactions that I was personally involved with. And yet my server shows up on that list, as though it were related to fediblock.
That seems to be a problem with the Fediverse in general. And admittedly, Discord.
IIRC, Tor doesn't have that issue.
Most (all? all the relevant ones, I think) browsers honor the referer-policy[1] header if a referring site sets it. There are options in common site frameworks, like Django[2] to control that for UAs that respect it.
Since most UAs respect it, if the indexing site had wanted to, they could easily have prevented the header from being sent for most users.
[1](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Security/Refere...)
[2](https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/5.2/ref/middleware/#referr...)
Isn't there a market for anti-DDOS third-party services for API endpoints (Cloudflare etc) — through probably for "Free Speech Extremist" that wouldn't be suitable solution, and there are charges too (though presumably when facing a situation like this you actually save money).
[1]: https://blog.freespeechextremist.com/blog/the-loli-question....
wild that of all the examples you could choose to bring up, this is the one. not saying the conversation doesn't need to happen, but i think there are a lot more concrete examples that affect many more people that come to mind first.
for GP, there are a lot of other contested ideas around what constitutes free/protected speech in america that aren't related to pedophilia - much of it revolves around political speech, especially with Citizens United (the supreme court case that effectively declared monetary support for political causes to be considered "free speech"). conversely, ground-up economic speech (such as BDS) is often stifled (even calling for boycotts etc under the BDS framework is not considered protected speech in some places).
Citizen's United isn't even really about free expression IMO, and I personally don't think people are all that split on it anyways, I think it's just a case where the people and the establishment disagree. BDS I'm simply not familiar with.
It does seem that there are new mounting challenges to free expression right now, but they're relatively new and it's unclear if they will stick around yet.
unfortunately, it is about free expression in the opinion of the supreme court:
'the Court found that laws restricting the political spending of corporations and unions are inconsistent with the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.' [0]
BDS is a topical instance of a bottom-up movement recommending boycotting, divestment and sanctions against organizations that are considered to materially support the israelli government. naturally, you can imagine this attracts strong opinions from many sides. in some cases, states/municipalities have deemed this to be unprotected speech. [1]
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boycott,_Divestment_and_Sancti...
I think the reason those don't come to mind is because even though they really do regard the interpretation of free speech law, they don't actually feel like they're about expression. When it comes to the Israel/Palestine conflict though, even the opinion that it isn't really about free expression might be controversial, so clearly it is.
When it comes to speech, it's really not hard to imagine positions that would have been controversial at any point in the history of the US. That doesn't mean you can't hold them, but others don't need to agree, and that's how you end up with labels of this sort.
> Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.
As is the First Amendment to the US Constitution:
> Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
I can't speak for Pete. However, given that the expressed position of influential portions of the US government (as well as many of my peers and acquaintances) runs counter to the letter and the spirit of Article 19 and the spirit (if not the letter) of the First Amendment, I consider myself to be a free speech extremist.
https://youtu.be/gh30mLyNQM0
LMAO you do not have a first amendment right to not be investigated for making threats in public, even if those threats are baseless! You do not have a right to baselessly threaten people!
While, from an immediacy standpoint, breathing is the higher priority, if you prioritize breathing continuously to the exclusion of drinking and eating, you will have problems on the 3-5 day and 8-21 day horizons.
In general, the US ranks pretty low on most freedom metrics, except for the freedom to kill with a gun. In general, the more your country has to tell you you're free, the less free you actually are.
Many other countries explicitly do not have free speech in their constitution, but something more narrow, like freedom of opinion. In those countries, what rights the constitution says you get, and what rights you actually get, tend to be more closely in alignment.
US ranks 78 of 80 on the Free Speech Index here, not sure what your metrics are that make it supposedly "very unfree". Perhaps you'd like to share with the class?
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-BDS_laws
In the US unlimited money has unlimited political power, so free speech, is irrelevant to power distribution, although it might have some academic or personal value for some.
Assuming that: the use of money in order to achieve a political outcome is an abuse of power that happens to be legal (I agree to a degree).
The equivalent use of DDOS would be to influence the decision making process in a way that leads to the same outcome. And it would have to be a way of operating that is generally accepted and legal in the first place.
An authoritarian regime has no representation of the population, has no need for feedback, and is ruled by a few. In the work of Thomas Payne he says “When all rights have been taken away, the right of rebellion has been made perfect.”
Fair play to the Ukrainian forces who are doing a fantastic job of minimising Civilian deaths. Road map for the future[?]
I know plenty of lawyers that would absolutely disagree with your first sentence, "the law doesn't care about technicalities." Oh, but they do. Technicalities are their tools of exploitation.
That’s democracy, at its most basic. Often, it means people with little access to education, but with a lot at stake, casting votes that go against their own interests. And in the U.S., it’s not as if party leadership on either side truly represents them anyway.
The upside, though, is significant: when power shifts, we usually don’t resort to violence. That simple fact - the peaceful transfer of power - provides the stability necessary for society to function and potentially thrive.
You can be a free speech 'extremist'(clearly a bit tongue-in-cheek) and still want to protect your site from bad actors. Not much free speech to be had when their violations get your site removed.
I agree slightly that the 'meat' in the article was lacking as far as what was actually happening with the FBI. Seems no party would give him an inch tho.
https://www.hackerneue.com/item?id=44221205
> To summarize, the FBI pays some shady companies to scrape data, the data is scanned for keywords (yep, just like CARNIVORE). Links and content are then fed into Facebook, organized by topic based on the keywords. Some rudimentary analysis is performed (sentiment analysis at least, but as friendly as Microsoft is with the feds, and as LLMs have gotten popular, the influence of machines has probably expanded) and perused by agents, using some FBI internal interface.
The word TLDR appears in the third paragraph, but the summary it refers to is in the second paragraph, starting with the words "To summarize, ..."
https://blog.freespeechextremist.com/blog/fse-vs-fbi.html#:~...
"SBF is already in jail tho right... er, oh"
I'd really like to know how the front group are controlling Facebook servers to collect data.