Internet Filters - Libertarianism is Hate Speech?

John Deere asks: "Just went live with a libertarian web-based discussion site a few days ago and today one of our members posted that our news and political discussion site has been listed as a 'Hate Speech' site by SurfControl ("details) Needless to say, some of our slacker members are now unable to access the site, due to blocks at their places of employment. Now, I don't mind our site being blocked by employers who want to keep their employees working instead of arguing objectivism vs. utilitarianism. It does concern me, however, that it appears to be quite easy to be listed as a 'Hate Speech' site, and not have much recourse. My questions are, has anyone been successful in changing the categorization of their site by one of these filtering services, from negative to neutral or positive? How much pressure was required and how long did it take?" It would be interesting to note how many GOP and Democratic sites are also listed under the same tag at SurfControl. I have a hard time seeing political discourse being listed as hate speech, but maybe this is a case of a single comment or post getting the entire site banned. Has anyone been able to negotiate a change of status with the various filtering services out there? If not, is there any legal way such changes can be forced by some form of arbitration or legal action?

Comments

How Can They Block it if it's Not on Their List?

[TheWanderingHermit]

Did anyone bother to check it out? I don't see any indication Surf Control is censoring it -- they don't even have it logged!

I typed in the url for the site mentioned (more precisely, I copied and pasted the link in the story for Liberty Forum from the /. page into the categorization/test page at SurfControl and it didn't even recognize the site name.

How can they filter it if it isn't in their database and catagorized?

Let's Think About This....

[zpengo]

Everyone's jumping on internet filtering services, saying that they're "censoring" sites and violating their first amendment rights.

Hasn't it occurred to anyone that this filtering services *also* have a right to say what they think is good and bad? That they have first amendment rights too?

And if people choose to use those services, shouldn't they have a right to select from a variety of independent, somewhat autonomous services, rather than a bunch of sites that only censor what the government says they're allowed to censor?

What kind of libertarian buys this rubbish?

If your site gets blacklisted by some company, tough crap for you. If they blacklist you and catch crap for it from the public, tough crap for them. But let's not get into this pansy liberal government regulation nonsense. Nobody's constitutional rights are being violated. Sheesh.

[OT] Interesting site.

[Black Parrot]

FWIW, a quick browse of the site suggests that the Libertarian posters to the site are an odd mixture of a group of people expressing a basic good-sense take on what's going on in the world and another group of people too right-wing for the Republican party.

This isn't really too surprising, since a moment's reflection will reveal that the Republican and Democratic parties are also coalitions of strange bedfellows. I wonder whether any Libertarian watcher would like to share his/her thoughts on the major coalitions that make up the Libertarian party and its supporters in 2002? (Please, no ideological fluff of the sort you'd get if you asked a Democrat or a Republican the same thing about their own party. I'm looking for someone that has watched and read and put some reasonably unbiased thought into it.)

Also, if anyone cares to venture so far off topic, I'd like to hear some opinions about the pros and cons of parliamentarian governments vs. what we practice in the USA. I have some thoughts on this, but I'll hold them to see whether the discussion gets off the ground. (I ask because a parliamentarian government would presumably break up the two-party system and let Libertarians and other "fringe" groups have more direct representation in government.)

Re:[OT] Interesting site.

[BitGeek]

The libertarian movement is made up of three groups.

1) The kooks that every third party gets almost by default for being "non mainstream" enough. A small proportion.
2) Ex-Repubulicans who realized that the republican party doesn't really support liberty (even economic) like they say. And a few hardline ex republicans who think the republican party doesn't go far enough in cutting taxes and spending.
3) Ex liberals who were liberals because they believed in free choice, human rights, and all that but who recornized that the democratic party opposes all of these things. Who realized that alle the "anit-corporate" and rich bashing was a form of hate speech, and that if you really want free choice, then that includes not just the choice to be a home maker, or marry who you want, but to work where you want and to keep your money. (Yes. I'm a member of this group.)
3) Anarchists. There are anarchists who share only the description with the 1334 idiots on college campuses who just really wanted a cooler way to say "slacker". These types have noticed that every government is corrupt and that the smaller the government, necessarily the more free the people, and so they have thought a lot about just how small you can make a government and have a safe free society. They tend to get into lots of arguments with the ex republicans and democrats.
4) Objectivism. Because Objectivism is a philosophy that has libertarianism as its political component, all Objectivists are Libertarians. (Unfortunately, there are a lot of "objectivists" who actually aren't objectivists, and are really 1334 slackers who wanted a cooler name. This includes the Ayn Rand Institute.)

The biggest problem in the libertarian party is that since they draw from so many groups the groups spend too much time noticing that they came from different places and not enough time going to the people in the groups they left and pointing out to them how their groups are failing them.

Personally, I lean to a parliamentarian government. But I don't think that would solve the problem of liberty in the US. The problem of liberty in the US will not be solved until a majority of people in this country realize that:
1) There are human rights.
2) Human rights are worth fighting for.
3) If you believe in human rights, you will take up arms to defend them.

Since we have most people convinced by the two major parties that 1 is false, we don't even have the bill of rights anymore. So, we're a long way from liberty.

the same recourse as spammers

[dirk]

It seems you don't have any recourse, or more precisely, the same recourse as spammers do. This is exactly what many in the /. community have been fighting for in regards to "spammers list". The company has a right to block any site it wants with it's software (just the same way an email server can block any address/domain it wants to). They have no obligation to let anyone using their software see your site. This seems one of those ironic cases of fighting to get the right to block something (spammers in this case) and then other people using that same right against us.

Just sue

[neitzsche]

You never need even the slightest reason, with our court systems, to sue someone. Let 'em have it!

Defining Hate

[Timinithis]

I sent this site over to a friend of mine at the Southern Poverty Law Center. They have an Intelligence Project that monitors Hate groups and Hate sites on the internet. I am still waiting on a reply, but for those wanting to know how to define 'hate' -- at least in the legal sense -- and free speech, this is the site to learn from.

Re:Gee, I wonder...

[neocon]

Do you have such an easy explanation for this story on the site? Eh? (quote:

When are the 97% of Americans who are not Jewish going to wake up to the subversion of their democracy by an alien money power busy subverting Christian principles and dictating a dangerous Babylonian-satanic foreign policy?

) This comes at the end of an article whose second half is a claim that ``there were no mass exterminations at Auschwitz'' and ``concentration camp conditions couldnt have been that harsh at all''

I'd provide quotes of some of the really nasty, hateful stuff which was in the story I linked to above, but the editors of the site seem to have yanked it after it was pointed out here....

Face it -- this site is chock full of anti-semitic nonsense. I see no problem at all with the fact that a (voluntary, independent) rating service classed it as `hate speech'.

Re:Hypocrisy

[adb]

Yes. You'll notice that I was talking about "libertarian philosophy", not "my philosophy". I mostly agree with the libertarian principle: that it is wrong to initiate the use of force against others, and that use of force includes both physical harm and misappropriation of property. There are some areas, though, where the LP falls short in my view:

• Scarse un-owned resources. Property rights aren't meaningful unless ownership is clearly established, so how do you deal with something like the air, which (under current property law) nobody owns? When is it OK to shit in a stream that passes through your property, and why? As long as un-owned resources are "infinite" (like the ocean was to humans of a thousand years ago), this is not much of a problem, but as they become scarse, the problem looms.
• Go/Monopoly. If a group of people asserts property rights to all the land around your property or all the means of production in a sufficiently large area around you, by deciding not to do business with you, they are giving you the choice of starving to death or violating their property rights.
• Inductive basis of property ownership. If you trade something you legitimately own for something someone else legitimately owns, or if you make something new out of things you legitimately own, it is clear that you own the new thing. This is the induction step in proving that any given piece of property is legitimately owned. The problem is, the base step always starts with property that was originally either stolen by force or initially unowned. (I'm talking about ethics, so the fact that the government typically assigned legal ownership of the property to somebody at some point is irrelevant.)

I'm sorry I can't be more confrontational about it; I'm genuinely interested in good answers to these questions, so I'm likely to do a bad job of providing a typical Slashdot throwaway remark about them.