Gab, the "free speech social media" platform, has now had to delete its first posts because of violation of their domain registrar's "hate speech" TOS

Edited

Whatever you think of the site, this should scare you. There are so many levels of indirection for censorship now it's ridiculous.

App Stores censor because of user content
Hosting services censor because of user content
Domain registrars censor because of user content
Payment processors censor because of user content

A website's TOS doesn't even matter anymore because multiple sites are facing deplatforming from one or multiple of these sources.

Net Neutrality only focuses on the ISP level because that affects mega corps like Amazon, Google and Netflix and their video services. It needs to apply to all internet infrastructure.

[–] jobes [OP] 3 points (+3|-0)

An interesting response from that article:

8ch.net is registered under tucows, which seems to take a novel approach to avoid “abuse report” attack vectors:

http://www.tucowsdomains.com/disputes-and-complaints/spamorphishing/

Based upon this, I highly recommend switching registrants to tucows

[–] PMYA 3 points (+3|-0)

Gab has banned users for spamming, making death threats to the President, posting revenge porn, and doxing among others.

Why is making a death threat towards the President a bannable offence?

If they really wanted to make a site where you can say anything you want, they should have checked the TOS of their hosting provider and either found a new one or edited their guidelines accordingly, just like Phuks did.

[–] smallpond 2 points (+2|-0)

From Gab's Community Guidelines:

Users are prohibited from calling for the acts of violence against others, promoting or engaging in self-harm, and/or acts of cruelty, threatening language or behaviour that clearly, directly and incontrovertibly infringes on the safety of another user or individual(s).

I guess that covers the President as well.

[–] jobes [OP] 1 points (+1|-0)

Why is making a death threat towards the President a bannable offence?

...why shouldn't it be? If I was making death threats on Twitter versus the mayor of London, I'd probably not be banned, but get a no-knock house raid instead.

[–] Lord--Gaben 1 points (+1|-0)

Doesn't our host also have one of those?

[–] jobes [OP] 0 points (+0|-0)

With Phuks, it's the actual cloud hosting service. With gab, it was the domain registrar who does not actually host any content.

Gab, the "free speech social media" platform, has now had to delete its first posts because of violation of their domain registrar's "hate speech" TOS

7 comments

/s/Technology