I woke up in a bad mood too It appears that after cracking down on neo-Nazis it seems that Google decided to take down an old blog that had published many of my emails for years

http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/charlottesville-neo-nazis-white-supremacists-tech-hate-1.4253406

After cracking down on neo-Nazis, tech companies wonder who should police online hate

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Hmmm it appears that CBC deleted the entire thread that these two comments were posted within earlier today EH?

David Raymond Amos

@michael flinn You can't be even remotely serious. If so then perhaps you should read the signs CBC offers in the last picture of this article

http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/anti-racism-rally-boston-1.4254282

 

David Raymond Amos

@michael flinn Opps I just noticed that you were responding to the @Nikos Hristothoulou comment

 
John Napier

Actually the lefties are more responsible for the distraction and diminishing of western culture. Neo natzi are like small boy scouts with no wide support, I would not know even about the if it wasn't for media.

Lou Parks @Robin Blair

> What rubbish.

Not really. You just haven't understood yet.

> In what way is western culture being "dimished"?

In *all* ways. The greater the number of cultures that are added to a society, the more marginalized each become.

> How are "the lefties" diminishing it?

By falling for deceptive slogans promoting excessive immigration rates, and going into battle to defend those irrational visions of multiculturism.

> How do you know the neo-nazis have no wide support when you say you don't know anything about them?

Because many experts say so. Many experts aren't worried about these groups.

David Raymond Amos

@Lou Parks "Because many experts say so." So do you believe what many experts say or do you read all of them and decide for yourself who is correct?

Lou Parks

@David Raymond Amos
> So do you believe what many experts say or do you read all of them and decide for yourself who is correct?

I read the answers of several, then I settle on a point of view.

David Raymond Amos

@Lou Parks Methinks byway of your many comments that you already have a point of view and merely gleen the news reports from so called experts who support your reasoning.

Lou Parks

@David Raymond Amos
> Methinks ... that you already have a point of view ...

Youthinks correctly.

> ... and merely gleen the news reports from so called experts who support your reasoning.

I do some of that, and some of my own independent critical thinking.

David Raymond Amos

@Lou Parks At least you are honest

 

David Raymond Amos

@David Raymond Amos Anyone recall these comments?

David Raymond Amos
@michael flinn You can't be even remotely serious. If so then perhaps you should read the signs CBC offers in the last picture of this article

http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/anti-racism-rally-boston-1.4254282

David Raymond Amos
@michael flinn Opps I just noticed that you were responding to the @Nikos Hristothoulou comment

  

Lonnie Donnigan

Anybody here notice how the crack down on extreme right wing websites took merely a few days to shut down? All these social media sites also banned anything related. But whenever we talk about shutting down radical Islamic terrorist websites we get told "Well that's the internet, and nobody has control over it. We cant do anything about it"

David Raymond Amos

@Lonnie Donnigan I woke up in a bad mood too It appears that after cracking down on neo-Nazis it seems that Google decided to take down an old blog that had published many of my emails for years

 

Dwight Williams

We are faced, whether we want to acknowledge it or not, with a steady march of corporate neo-fascism across the planet and we are going to have to deal with it. People who use social media to advance the cause of this new kind of fascism are everywhere, and write things every day that are intended to normalize fascist-lite ideas and thoughts so that the stench comes off them and they become acceptable in everyday conversation.

A perfect example is how many people spend very large efforts right here every day trying to convince people there really IS a moral equivalency between the people marching to spread fascist ideas, racism and intolerance and the people who march to resist them.

All under the false guise of 'free speech'.

Lying is not 'free speech', it is lying.

Richard Jerfferson

@Dwight Williams
You want to lock up people for lying now?

David Raymond Amos

@Richard Jerfferson History proves that the Yankees wanted to impeach Nixon for lying about tapes and Hillary's hubby Bill about lying about having sex with a certain woman. That fairly serious actions to take against two presidents for merely lying Correct?

 

Eric Earls

I wonder if all those supporting internet censorship would change there minds if the US Government and it's Republican majority were to suddenly agree that the internet should be censored and free speech limited and they would set up the criteria and department to do this. - The moral is, better everyone have a voice than someone else pick and choose whose voices can be heard.

David Raymond Amos

@Eric Earls At the risk of being redundant I will repeat what I stated earlier today

For the Public Record I am the namesake of two fine young men who were killed in WWII fighting Nazis. David was one of my Father's friends who was killed on my Mother's birthday ( He was honoured with the Victoria Cross for his actions) Raymond my Mother's favourite brother was killed 2 weeks before in Normandy..My Father was the soul survivour out of an aircrew of 9 when his plane crashed in WWII or obviously I could not be typing this right now.

That said I truly believe the outcome of a World War that was over 7 years before I was born insured the rights of all people to associate and speak their minds within our purportedly profound democracies. Those people include Nazis and Communists and all others whom I have the right to detest and ignore or argue as I deem fit.

I must ask who in CBC thinks they have the right to block my opinions within a website financed by my fellow citizens as long as I keep my manners and obey the rules of this forum?

  

Hugh Minet

Even the CBC plays the same role as these tech companies, it pinks out what it doesn’t agree with and you never get to read what folks think. That is suppression of opinion, control of content. Should be illegal.

David Raymond Amos

@Hugh Minet It kinda sorta is illegal because CBC has a mandate to be non partisan and the Crown Corp has proven to me personally many times that its mandate means nothing to its many minions..

  

Andrew Evans

If no one wants to look at the 'neo-Nazi' website and read it, you don't have to

Content disabled.
David Raymond Amos

@Andrew Evans The Closet Commies wish to ignore that obvious fact

David Raymond Amos

@Andrew Evans I find it rather offensive that CBC blocked my agreeing with you

  

John Alexander

At the Boston rally today:

> "...Boston will not tolerate hate," said Owen Toney
http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/anti-racism-rally-boston-1.4254282

After reading the article, it seems more like "Boston will not tolerate free speech".

 

David Raymond Amos

@John Alexander I know for a fact that justice is a myth in Beantown and I have many legal documents of my own to prove it

 

Barry Todd

Any group that promotes hatred against others should not be allowed in the public sphere.

Lou Parks

@Barry Todd
> Any group that promotes hatred against others should not be allowed in the public sphere.

What about the mainstream media who, using 'opinion' articles and cherry-picked quotations from interviewees and anonymous sources, promote hatred against the Trump administration and against activist groups?

Should those mainstream media not be allowed in the public sphere?

 

David Raymond Amos

@Lou Parks
"Should those mainstream media not be allowed in the public sphere?" 

Free speech is free speech Who is anyone to regulate it within a purportedly profound just democracy? If the speech crosses the line and breaks laws then the evil doers should be duly prosecuted.

Lou Parks

@David Raymond Amos
> Free speech is free speech Who is anyone to regulate it ...

The government is who.

We still need *some* prohibitions -- such as the prohibition of threats.

> If the speech crosses the line and breaks laws then the evil doers should be duly prosecuted.

Of course.

David Raymond Amos

@Lou Parks Have you read all the sexual harassment and death threats against my children that the RCMP and the FBI laughed at while I ran for public office five times?

Lou Parks

@David Raymond Amos
No. If you received threats then those should've been investigated as crimes.

  

mike white

After cracking down on neo-Nazis, tech companies wonder who should police online hate''
no one
free speech rules
hate is just an emotion the same as all other emotions
no one can outlaw or stop emotions
if you have emotions.. let them out
God bless 

David Raymond Amos

@mike white I agree but I don't need your god's blessing to simply obey my conscience

  

Luke Gassien

STOP trying to control speech, even hate speech. It's a slippery slope to complete censorship.
What is wrong with all of you whining, sniveling little babies?
Can't you take a few words here and there... Sticks and stones and all that?

If you want free speech, you have to protect even the most vilest person's right to speak.
If you want to stop OBJECTIVE lies from entering the media (ie, fake news) that's one thing, but there are no such thing as subjective lies, they're simply opinions, and everyone is entitled to have one... And no one makes you listen to mine

 

David Raymond Amos

@Luke Gassien You tell em Luke but trust that the little babies won't listen they are too busy whining and crying

After cracking down on neo-Nazis, tech companies wonder who should police online hate

With no simple solution, firms have been left to regulate themselves, with mixed results

By Matthew Braga, CBC News Posted: Aug 19, 2017 5:00 AM ET

'I woke up in a bad mood and decided someone shouldn't be allowed on the internet. No one should have that power,' said CloudFlare CEO Matthew Prince in an internal email obtained by Gizmodo. (Steve Jennings/Getty Images for TechCrunch) 

For more than two decades, a question with no easy answer has consumed international lawmakers, tech companies and internet users: How should we handle those who spread hate, racism and abuse online?

This long-simmering debate came to a boil this week, after white supremacist website The Daily Stormer helped organize a rally in Charlottesville, Va. that left 32-year-old counter-protester Heather Heyer dead. Its administrators spent much of the week trying to find a home online after multiple service providers declined to do business with the site.

As early as 1994, the secretary general of the United Nations noted that France's Minitel, a pre-internet online service, was being used to share anti-Semitic material. In the years that followed, the UN watched as far-right groups embraced electronic methods of communication, and one of the first white supremacist websites, Stormfront, was brought online.

"The internet has already captured the imagination of people with a message, including purveyors of hate, racists and anti-Semites," the UN's special rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance wrote in 1997. Later, international working groups tried and failed to forge a policy that would satisfy all.

In the absence of a simple solution — say, a single standard for internet governance embraced by Europe and the U.S. — tech companies have largely been left to regulate themselves, often with mixed results.
All the while, some technologists and civil liberties advocates have questioned whether technology companies should have this power at all.

Neutral parties?

For years, platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have tried to paint themselves as neutral parties, uninterested in making judgment calls on what is acceptable speech. This approach has frequently angered users who feel that not enough has been done to combat abusive, hateful and racist language on their platforms.

But the violence in Charlottesville prompted an unusually swift reaction across the tech community, the likes of which hasn't been seen before.

The week started with GoDaddy and then Google cutting off The Daily Stormer from their domain registration services.

Other platforms took actions of their own. Airbnb said it banned people tied to white supremacist groups from booking places to stay ahead of the rally, while Facebook and Twitter doubled down on the removal of groups and accounts that violated their hate speech policies.

Since 2012, the German government has required Twitter to hide neo-Nazi accounts from users in that country. This year it passed a law that fines tech companies that fail to remove hate speech and fake news. (Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)

Meanwhile, Apple and PayPal, which provide services that enable merchants to accept payments online, disabled support for websites that sold clothing featuring Nazi and white supremacist slogans. Executives weren't shy about taking a stand.

"We're talking about actual Nazis here," wrote eBay founder Pierre Omidyar on Twitter, whose company owned PayPal from 2002 to 2014. "Let them send cash to each other in envelopes. No need to help them use our products."

'I woke up in a bad mood'

But the company that attracted the most attention was CloudFlare, an internet infrastructure provider that helps protect websites against distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks.

It made an exception to its long-standing policies on free speech and content neutrality and denied The Daily Stormer access to its services, too.

"I woke up in a bad mood and decided someone shouldn't be allowed on the Internet," CloudFlare CEO Matthew Prince wrote in an internal email obtained by Gizmodo. "No one should have that power."

"My rationale for making this decision was simple: the people behind the Daily Stormer are assholes and I'd had enough," he continued. But in a subsequent blog post, Prince explained what worried him: that a small group of companies, like his, in control of the internet can have such an outsized influence over the type of content that people are able to see online.

On the one hand, companies such as Twitter or Apple can freely decide what they will and won't accept on their platforms under U.S. law. And an increasingly vocal group of users and lawmakers have called on companies to take stronger measures against hate.

But others are concerned about what it means to have tech's biggest companies  — in particular, those that operate the internet services underpinning the web — making seemingly arbitrary judgments about what is acceptable behaviour on their platforms.

"All fair-minded people must stand against the hateful violence and aggression that seems to be growing across our country," wrote senior staff of digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation in a blog post.

"But we must also recognize that on the Internet, any tactic used now to silence neo-Nazis will soon be used against others, including people whose opinions we agree with."

Reining in racism

Each time a new wave of hateful rhetoric washes across the web, Twitter users point to Germany, where many of the neo-Nazis and white supremacists that appear in U.S. users' feeds are nowhere to be found.

It's not that Twitter can't filter these racist, hateful accounts out, users argue — just that they won't where they're not required to by law.

Since 2012, the German government has required Twitter to hide neo-Nazi accounts from users in the country, and earlier this year, the country passed legislation that imposed fines on tech companies that failed to remove hate speech and fake news.

It's a notable example of a government stepping in where it believes tech companies aren't doing enough. But there have been criticisms of this approach, too.

"Rather than reining in social media behemoths, the law risks reinforcing their role as online gatekeepers," argued researchers with the Global Public Policy Institute in Berlin. For its part, Facebook told Bloomberg earlier this year it was worried the legislation "would force private companies instead of courts to decide which content is illegal."

But for many still reeling from a weekend of hate and violence in Charlottesville, discussions of policy, due process and free speech are distant concerns.

They just want to see the Nazis kicked off — and this time, tech companies seem more than happy to oblige.