"Ethics and Journalistic Integrity"

[Henroid]

This is tangentially related to all this; Arthur Chu, a name I've only seen come up from GG mostly (they hate him) has decided to piss EVERYONE off with a bombastic opinion: He wants Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act to be removed. The reason? He believes it will curb harassment. The reality? Section 230 prevents providers (Twitter, Facebook, etc) from being responsible for the shit that users post to it. Comment sections being the most obvious example. He's being a dumb dumb because removal of that law would make every site ever a target of lawsuit for anything that anyone says ever just because someone else doesn't like it. It's a pretty important law in the books right now.

 

This article below covers it in good detail but goddamn. This is the dumbest scorched-earth policy to getting rid of GG or online harassment ever.

 

https://popehat.com/2015/09/29/arthur-chu-would-like-to-make-lawyers-richer-and-you-quieter-and-poorer/

[Claire Hosking]

Yeah it would pretty much destroy the idea of the platform-oriented web and megacommunities. Hard to puzzle out the long term effects of that - the web wouldn't go away, but everyone would have to go back to hosting their own webspace/shitty opinions, and social media and aggregation would look very different. 

 

This is tangentially related to all this; Arthur Chu, a name I've only seen come up from GG mostly (they hate him) has decided to piss EVERYONE off with a bombastic opinion: He wants Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act to be removed. The reason? He believes it will curb harassment. The reality? Section 230 prevents providers (Twitter, Facebook, etc) from being responsible for the shit that users post to it. Comment sections being the most obvious example. He's being a dumb dumb because removal of that law would make every site ever a target of lawsuit for anything that anyone says ever just because someone else doesn't like it. It's a pretty important law in the books right now.

 

This article below covers it in good detail but goddamn. This is the dumbest scorched-earth policy to getting rid of GG or online harassment ever.

 

https://popehat.com/2015/09/29/arthur-chu-would-like-to-make-lawyers-richer-and-you-quieter-and-poorer/

[Vainamoinen]

Over here, some courts HAVE made website owners responsible for the comments people posted on their website. There was a prominent case in 2008 with journalist Stefan Niggemeier, as I recall (the Landgericht Hamburg bastards of course).

 

To put it mildly, it's not a good idea.

[Apple Cider]

At the risk of sounding intensely cynical, Arthur Chu suggesting this is not surprising. I have not really liked most of his ideas for a while. 

[Vainamoinen]

Chu's lost a lot of friends over this. Randi Harper had just finished a veritable rant against the UN report on "cyberviolence" (this report is, unfortunately, a piece of crap, so gaters are now trying to spread the lie that Zoe Quinn "co-signed" it) when Chu offered his 'perspective'.

 

These are all very sad proceedings. I'm just glad that the people I personally trust in this debate were saying and doing the right thing.

[Henroid]

Wouldn't that kind of report have a level of public accessibility? Meaning it'd be VERY easy to determine who puts their name on what?

[itsamoose]

I've only read a bit of the report, though I understand the citations at least are complete garbage. What bothers me about what I've read so far is just the typical UN cowardice-- they describe the problem in detail but never name names. There is a section about ensuring an open internet with unfettered access, but they don't take the next step and name the telecom companies that are responsible for this not being the case. The report is a lot of high minded language with little to no concrete, implementable policy suggestions. As much as it is nice to see the UN address this kind of thing, I have zero confidence in their ability to move the needle in terms of public policy.

[Vainamoinen]

Wouldn't that kind of report have a level of public accessibility? Meaning it'd be VERY easy to determine who puts their name on what?

 

The ultimate level of public accessibility. Yes of course.

http://www.broadbandcommission.org/Documents/reports/bb-wg-gender-report2015.pdf

[Gaizokubanou]

The report is a lot of high minded language with little to no concrete, implementable policy suggestions.

 

Isn't this UN in a nutshell?  Or is my world history bit shaky and UN as organization actually managed to do something beyond the wills of security council members?

[itsamoose]

Isn't this UN in a nutshell? Or is my world history bit shaky and UN as organization actually managed to do something beyond the wills of security council members?

From my understanding they are pretty good at crisis response, minimally effective in peacekeeping, and an utter failure in public policy. I'm hopeful, but not holding my breath.

[Mangela Lansbury]

From my understanding they are pretty good at crisis response, minimally effective in peacekeeping, and an utter failure in public policy. I'm hopeful, but not holding my breath.

They are pretty good at humanitarian responses to crises, specifically. They are an utter failure at navigating anything that's geopolitically complex.

[Fingus]

I personally hadn't seen too much of Arthur in a long while, so to have him suddenly reemerge banging that shitty drum is pretty disappointing. What a bummer, I used to like him.

I woke up to this Twitter thread, what an embarrassment:

https://twitter.com/arthur_affect/status/649220940161658880

[Henroid]

His refusal to acknowledge white-hat and black-hat hackers as terms (which they are; I mean you can't just denounce shit that simply is in this world) and his lacking thought process on the 230 stuff tells me that Arthur Chu is a person that wants the world to be black and white on every issue possible. Which just... isn't the case. A friend and I were talking about, in the case of the 230 thing, how ironic it was that we were in agreement with Popehat.

 

But stuff like that is what makes this whole situation pretty highlighted. By which I mean, Gamergate and everything surrounding it - people in general get SO tied into a group-think purity or ideological purity that they will go to the extent of abandoning rational or critical thought. Arthur Chu is demonstrating this by wanting to apply scorched-earth policy to the internet. GG demonstrates it by never owning up to their terrible shit

[Problem Machine]

I still like Arthur Chu even if he has some learning to do. I do think that in their haste to poke holes in the specifics of what he's saying a lot of people are disregarding why he's saying it, being that certainly giving websites carte blanche to host any material with no responsibility isn't a valid solution -- something we readily acknowledge when it comes to child pornography, but very little else.

 

To my sensibilities website legal responsibilities should more or less line up with those of the owner of a building. By default, they're not responsible for what happens there: Once they've been notified that their property is being used for illegal purposes, it's then their responsibility to work with law enforcement to make that no longer be the case, and if they don't they have some degree of culpability for any continued illegal activity. If a site is being habitually used as a locus of illegal activity, it's then their job to implement systemic changes to prevent that from happening in the future, and if they don't they are again culpable..

 

So, you know, while I understand that getting rid of a foundational law is probably not a good solution, it's at least a bad solution, and thereby a better starting point to the conversation than no solution at all.

[Gormongous]

His refusal to acknowledge white-hat and black-hat hackers as terms (which they are; I mean you can't just denounce shit that simply is in this world)...

 

Further down in the Twitter feed, he rephrases his opinion that "black hat" and "white hat" feel weird to use because of their roots in Western films. It might just be an attempt to change the subject, but I agree with him there anyway.

 

Overall, I'm sympathetic to the ultimate purpose of his argument to remove Section 230, in that it establishes one bound of the Overton window in our ongoing discussion on harassment, moderation, and responsibility on the internet (the other, of course, has long been established as total anarchy and chan-ology). I'm not thrilled for Chu to have advocated an ignorant position so publicly, but it sounds like the editors of TechCrunch encouraged him to do so and to be incendiary about it, so I really only blame him for being stubborn about being Wrong on the Internet. Watching Randi Harper spend an hour excoriating him for being "a legitimate threat to free speech, the internet, poor people, and now infosec" for, uh... posting a dumb op-ed has weakened my resolve even there.

[Bjorn]

I've generally tried to avoid black hat/white hat (and similar style terms) because of the continuation of the black = bad/dangerous and white = good/pure motif.  It's kind of funny to see Harper (and others) defend it as this sacrosanct term, when there are a lot of other terms that can describe the same thing (and many of those terms are more accurate). 

[Fingus]

I didn't take umbrage with his stance on the terminology. I was more annoyed with him categorically dismissing white hat hacking and penetration tests. These vulnerabilities exist regardless and I'd much rather that someone with good intentions discover them instead of someone criminal.

I wouldn't complain if someone found my car window open and before they rolled it back up and locked the door they left a note telling me, even though they technically broke into my car.

 

I don't really care for Randi's general hyperbole and shotgun approach either, but that's a different discussion.

[Vainamoinen]

http://motherboard.vice.com/read/im-disappointed-zoe-quinn-speaks-out-on-un-cyberviolence-report

 

But since the report comes from the United Nations, its potential persuasive power is quite strong, and given many of the problems with the report, the conversation seems to have gotten off to a bad start. And for Quinn, the report breathes new life into fears she’s had since the start of Gamergate. She worries that one day, an harasser will take aim at a legislator, who will then seek [to] enact overly punitive laws. In her email to me, she warned against “overbroad, knee-jerk, fear-based legislation drafted by people who don't understand what's good about the internet, the importance of things like privacy and free speech online, or how the internet even works in the first place.”

♥ Quinn

[BadHat]

This is only tangentially related to GG, but I read this and couldn't help but think of them.

 

http://www.gameplanet.co.nz/news/g560c5ef778fda/OpenCritic-to-battle-Metacritic-with-transparent-systems-user-customisation/

 

Particularly this part:

 

Part of the website’s ethos is that users get an opportunity to influence how media outlets are weighted.

“As we developed OpenCritic, we realised that it is imperative for gamers to be able to decide for themselves which publications they trusted,” said co-founder Charles Green.

I mean, I'm all in favour of giving Metacritic some healthy competition, but... I don't have to explain why this is doomed to fail, right?

[Vainamoinen]

Depends on how failure is defined. If they find a way to financially milk gamergaters just so those can downvote reviews that put games into a cultural context, they could be darn successful with it.

[Merus]

A friend and I were talking about, in the case of the 230 thing, how ironic it was that we were in agreement with Popehat.

 

Popehat's a group blog and most of the really terrible shit is posted by Clark. Ken White's reasonable, although as a foreigner I can't really take his stance on free speech, even though I understand, as a First Amendment lawyer when he's not writing pseudonymously, why he'd have that stance.

 

But yeah. Black-and-white thinking generally doesn't lead to the moral clarity people hope it does.

[Vainamoinen]

The Oregon shooter was allegedly cheered at and encouraged on a thread on 4chan.

Zoe Quinn notes that these forums need proper moderation in order to escape legislation that takes your freedom away.

Teh gamergaters accuse Quinn of making this tragedy about herself and her agenda.

[Henroid]

The Oregon shooter was allegedly cheered at and encouraged on a thread on 4chan.

Zoe Quinn notes that these forums need proper moderation in order to escape legislation that takes your freedom away.

Teh gamergaters accuse Quinn of making this tragedy about herself and her agenda.

Another thing about this is that it makes the shit people have been saying to Quinn (and others) even scarier, because it turns out some crazy fucks will indeed follow through on violent acts they threaten via the net.

[Henroid]

Gamergate 'champion' Milo Yiannopoulos has decided that the Oregon shooting is an issue of feminists putting men down. His Twitter feed is full of garbage 'explaining' that. Also this:

Someone should tell him that people are not "things" to be shot.

[Zeusthecat]

Oh my god. That is an incredibly disgusting thing to say. So now gamergate is about ethics in mass murdering?