In an ideal world, exclusively-US-based companies that host message boards, chat rooms, instant messaging services, and the like would look at this saga and

1) Notice that the odds that a foreign power is going to be able to harm them in any meaningful way for violating their "child 'safety'" laws that curtail freedom of speech and association are very low

2) Notice that 4chan is fighting harder to resist these attacks on free speech and association than many of big names in the sector and reflect on what it might mean when _4chan_ is the hero of the story

Alas.

▲ philipkglass 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Notice that 4chan is fighting harder to resist these attacks on free speech and association than many of big names in the sector...

Isn't the issue that the "big names" in the sector are not exclusively US based? Big American tech companies have employees, assets, or at least a business presence of some sort in countries outside the US, which means that they are exposed to legal systems in those other countries.

▲ simoncion 3 hours ago | parent [-]

> Isn't the issue that the "big names" in the sector are not exclusively US based?

That is an issue, but it's explicitly not what I was talking about. To pick one example, Discord is -AFAIK- US-based. They decided to knuckle under rather than tell the UK, Australia, and others to fuck right off with their free-speech-and-association-limiting horseshit.

Multinationals have their own problems, but they're -when we measure by number of businesses- a tiny minority of businesses. My commentary was exclusively about US-based companies.

And even if a US-based company happens to have employees in a country that's pushing this shit, well, they can shrimply close that office and explain to local politicians exactly why. It's regrettable to lose good employees, but it's way worse to be far less of a hero in the fight for fundamental rights than 4chan and Kiwi Farms are just to keep a few good employees.

▲ philipkglass 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

According to Discord's careers page, they're currently hiring people in the US, UK, Singapore, Portugal, and the Netherlands:

https://discord.com/careers

They have a registered office in Schiphol:

https://discord.com/company-information

Discord could keep all of its employees, infrastructure, and business within the United States, but like other companies it has not. It would rather pursue more business opportunities.

▲ dogleash an hour ago | parent | next [-]

>It would rather pursue more business opportunities.

You're agreeing with parent poster that they don't care to fight on principle (in the unlikely chance they hold any principle in the first place). You're just using avoidant terminology that skips the criticism inherent in parent's framing.

	▲	philipkglass an hour ago \| parent [-]
		I'm commenting on how non-US laws may affect businesses, descriptively speaking, without prescriptively stating what I think that the law ought to be. I am a US citizen and I approve of US-style free speech protection. If anything, I think that the US still has too much restriction on speech (e.g. DMCA limits on "anti-circumvention" software.) However, I also approve of democratic government. If people in other countries vote to treat speech differently than the US, I wouldn't want to live under those laws, but I also wouldn't say that they are incorrect. I think that democratic principles mean implementing the will of the majority, even if I think that the majority is foolish. There are some things that I would fight against (not just lament) even if approved by the will of the majority; I can't fully reconcile my conflicting impulses, but I acknowledge them. All of this would have been a long and distracting aside to my original point, which was that most American businesses of note operate under multiple countries' jurisdictions.

▲ simoncion 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> They have a registered office in Schiphol:

Ah, I stand corrected. Discord has a branch office in the Netherlands. Thanks for the correction.

> Discord could keep all of its employees, infrastructure, and business within the United States, but like other big names it has not. It would rather pursue more business opportunities.

As I said:

  And even if a US-based company happens to have employees in a country that's pushing this shit, well, they can shrimply close that office and explain to local politicians exactly why. It's regrettable to lose good employees, but it's way worse to be *far* less of a hero in the fight for fundamental rights than 4chan and Kiwi Farms are just to keep a few good employees.

Trampling on fundamental rights in order to chase marginally more money is neither admirable nor prosocial behavior.

▲ gpm 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Discord does business in the UK, Australia, and just about every other country of any relevance. It would be trivial for the UK courts to collect fines against them simply by ordering the payment processors handling payments for them in the UK to redirect those payments, for instance.

4chan is only reasonably immune from this because it's not really operating as a business...

	▲	simoncion 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		[dead]

▲ throwawayffffas 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The main difference is that most of the big players have physical presence in the UK. You can't argue British law does not apply to you when you have a campus in Kings Cross.

▲ tourmalinetaco 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

4chan and Kiwi Farms (via Lolcow LLC), to be more specific.

	▲	simoncion 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Rad. Thanks for the correction.

▲ shadowgovt 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Here's the thing though: nobody has to agree 4chan is the hero of the story. It's also reasonable to look at 4chan and say "Gross and legally correct is still gross" and let them soldier on alone.

You'll note the "First they came for" poem has a beginning and doesn't extend to all subcultures. It doesn't say "First they came for the KKK." And, of course, it doesn't say "First they came for the Nazis."

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simoncion 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> You'll note the "First they came for" poem has a beginning and doesn't extend to all subcultures.

Just as saints and captains of industry deserve no less scrutiny and liability under the law than the rest of us, scoundrels and horrible people deserve no less protection under the law than the rest of us.

If your disgust for an entity prevents you from being able to recognize when they're doing something that's an unalloyed good, then you still have quite a bit of emotional maturity to develop.

To put the previous paragraph another way: It's entirely consistent to decry an someone as a loathsome scumbag that all upstanding people should shun and refuse to associate with while also remarking that that one time they dove into a freezing river to save a child being swept away was a good and noble thing to do, and behavior that we should all aspire to mirror.

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shadowgovt 3 hours ago | parent [-]

> scoundrels and horrible people deserve no less protection under the law than the rest of us.

And they got it. "I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake." But that doesn't mean anyone needs feel sympathy for the devil. We're not obligated to cheer when the wretched hive of scum and villainy keeps its liquor license another year. The law was followed and we can move on.

> If your disgust for an entity prevents you from being able to recognize when they're doing something that's an unalloyed good

... It is usually the case when we're talking about 4chan (and always when talking about Kiwi Farms) that "unalloyed" is doing a lot of the kind of load-bearing one probably wants an alloy for. 4chan's most positive benefit to society is as a litmus test for precisely how far the [xkcd-1357](https://xkcd.com/1357/) principle goes. They are 100% welcome, per their freedom of the press (and the freedom of speech of their users), to host their website. On their infrastructure. With their own DOS protection. In a country that recognizes those rights and protects them. That's the system working as intended.

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simoncion 2 hours ago | parent [-]

> ...that "unalloyed" is doing a lot of the kind of load-bearing one probably wants an alloy for.

No? Saving a child from being swept away in a freezing river is an unalloyed good, no matter how terrible the scoundrel that did it.

Like I mentioned, it looks like you still have quite a lot of emotional maturity to develop.

(You might also benefit from checking out 4chan boards that aren't /b/, /pol/, and /gif/.)

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LoganDark 2 hours ago | parent [-]

> Saving a child from being swept away in a freezing river is an unalloyed good

What if it's only as part of kidnapping the child and forcing them into grueling slave labor until the day they die? Is that still perfectly unalloyed?

(Not that I'm saying 4chan is metaphorically doing that here; just for the sake of argument.)

	▲	shadowgovt 20 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Your twist on the argument is a fair one since the commenter you're responding to is equating fishing a drowning child out of a river with fighting formal scrutiny regarding their lax approach to policing CSAM on /b/ and /hc/. Emotional maturity is important. So is platform maturity. We are long past the point where "reader beware" and "it's just a hobby site" are good enough in an era where under-policed fora result in actual harm. I appreciate 4chan's strong stance on the topic of it not being their job to police their house... But I do often find myself cheering when someone compels them, as a site that receives 22 million unique monthly visitors, to act like they have any host responsibility. It's hard for me to be deeply supportive, beyond my legal requirements to be so, of a site that hosts /b/, /pol/, /hc/, and /gif/ because it chooses to host them too.

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murphyslab 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The original German of the poem does say, at the final line, "Als sie mich holten, gab es keinen mehr, der protestieren konnte." That is, "When they came for me, there was no one left who could protest."

So, yes, the poem does extend to all subcultures because it reaches out to include every voice of opposition to totalitarianism, until no one is left but the speaker.

It's also meant to be understood in the first four lines: The people mentioned — communists, trade unionists, social democrats, and Jews — were meant to be emblematic of people who are seen as enemies or outsiders to the author's cause. These are people whose values are seen to be radically different than our own.

Remember the context: the author of the speech, which was re-rendered as a poem, was a real person, Martin Niemöller, who was a pastor in the Confessing Church, which was an underground church movement organized in resistance to the Nazis.

However his speech, given in January of 1946, was an indictment of the Confessing Church. The movement was initially organized primarily as a form of resistance to governmental interference in religion, rather than to speak out for all people. Niemöller was, in fact, explicit that this was about people who were his "opponents" and his "enemies":

> "... The people who were put in the camps then were Communists. Who cared about them? We knew it, it was printed in the newspapers. Who raised their voice, maybe the Confessing Church? We thought: Communists, those opponents of religion, those enemies of Christians—"should I be my brother's keeper?"

Instead, Niemöller points out, in a theologically poignant allusion to the story of Cain and Abel in Genesis 4, that we have a responsibility to our fellow humans to look out for their wellbeing and their interests as our own.

So yes, that poem calls for you to look out for the wellbeing and interests — including freedom from oppression and censorship — for those folks who you might now perceive to be your enemies.

See:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_They_Came

It should be noted that Niemöller was not the only one to draw on this story as an indictment of the church's inaction. Margarete “Marga” Meusel, a contemporary and correspondent of Niemöller wrote this in 1935 which was antecedent in the body of thought informing the 1946 speech:

> Why does the church do nothing? Why does it allow unspeakable injustice to occur? ... What shall we one day answer to the question, where is thy brother Abel? The only answer that will be left to us, as well as to the Confessing Church, is the answer of Cain. ("Am I my brother's keeper?" Genesis 4:9)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confessing_Church#Aftermath

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marga_Meusel

	▲	shadowgovt 16 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		What of the wellbeing and interests of the vulnerable who stumble onto /b/ ill-equipped for the firehose? Are we their keepers also? This may be one of those "not everyone gets to win everywhere" situations. And if I have to choose protecting 4chan vs. protecting children... ... I can see two positions on the topic which have merit. So it's a good thing there are separate nations to decide on different bars of safety. I would have no problem with a world where 4chan is free to operate in the US and blocked in the UK. Different countries with different cultures.