Technology

The EFF supported the prosecution of people from Kiwi Farms for their activities, just opposed their website to be taken out at the ISP level. I feel a lot of people jumped on the EFF without reading the full article.

Once an ISP indicates it’s willing to police content by blocking traffic, more pressure from other quarters will follow, and they won’t all share your views or values. For example, an ISP, under pressure from the attorney general of a state that bans abortions, might decide to interfere with traffic to a site that raises money to help people get abortions, or provides information about self-managed abortions. Having set a precedent in one context, it is very difficult for an ISP to deny it in another, especially when even considering the request takes skill and nuance. We all know how lousy big user-facing platforms like Facebook are at content moderation—and that’s with significant resources. Tier 1 ISPs don’t have the ability or the incentive to build content evaluation teams that are even as effective as those of the giant platforms who know far more about their end users and yet still engage in harmful censorship.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/08/isps-should-not-police-online-speech-no-matter-how-awful-it

Let’s say they were organizing using telephones instead. Would you want the telephone providers to proactively listen in on their conversations and cut them off based on content? No. You get the police or FBI to investigate and hunt down the people, possibly with warrants obtaining information from the telephone companies, and target the people doing the crimes.

I feel it should be exactly the same with ISPs. The ISP shouldn’t be doing the policing, the police should be doing the policing. The ISP’s job should be passing bits from MAC address A to MAC address B, nothing more.

It's weird to me because the first time I ever heard someone being seriously critical of any absolute idea to free speech, at least at a high-level, was on the EFF's how to fix the internet podcast.

I'm with you. Their logic makes some sense, but it's just not practical or reasonable to me. I just don't see the slope as particularly slippery. Kiwi Farms was enthusiastically engaging in dangerous, heinous, and illegal activities.

Perhaps we do need some kind of serious due process for this kind of intervention. I'll sign that petition or forward to my reps that letter. But in the meantime, I'm happy to say bye to this scumb.

The EFF understands that "somebody do something!" is an invitation to erode liberty, and guarding against those types of power grabs by corporations and the government is important.

In this case, EFF is arguing that ISP's should not have the ability to choose which sites to block. They are spot-on that this precedent would be used to block access to abortion assistance programs in Red States, and would get people killed.