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Milo Yiannopoulos Wants To Buy 4Chan, Promises Free Speech Haven (hollywoodreporter.com)
An anonymous Slashdot reader quotes The Hollywood Reporter:
Milo Yiannopoulos, an alt-right hero known for his banishment from Twitter, is preparing a bid to acquire his own social media firm: 4chan... The Hollywood Reporter learned that Yiannopoulos, with the help of a wealthy backer, is preparing to approach 4chan owner Hiroyuki Nishimura, a Japanese entrepreneur, with a bid this week. Contacted Saturday, Yiannopoulos confirmed plans for a possible acquisition but did not offer details.
"As a free-speech fundamentalist and a student of Internet culture, I appreciate how fragile and precious the 4chan ecosystem is and how much it gives to the wider Internet -- even if some corners of it, such as /pol/, don't always approve of me very much," Yiannopoulos said... "I spoke to my lawyer this morning about purchasing the business... I intend to approach the current owners in the next few days with an offer."
Yiannopoulos added this his philosophy as an owner "would be very simple: free-speech central, no ifs, no buts."
"As a free-speech fundamentalist and a student of Internet culture, I appreciate how fragile and precious the 4chan ecosystem is and how much it gives to the wider Internet -- even if some corners of it, such as /pol/, don't always approve of me very much," Yiannopoulos said... "I spoke to my lawyer this morning about purchasing the business... I intend to approach the current owners in the next few days with an offer."
Yiannopoulos added this his philosophy as an owner "would be very simple: free-speech central, no ifs, no buts."
PEPE
sad that so called social media as they expand try to restrict speech to what is acceptable in a drawing room of bourgeois white women, and internet has to depend on a self described faggot troll to consciously create a truly free speech haven.
I'm not actually sure who I want in charge of the place less, him or Martin Shkreli.
Hey if they both bought it maybe it could bankrupt both of the bottom feeding fuckers
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
And when you say "freedom of speech" you mean the freedom to be a white supremacist neo-nazi hate monger. Sure, this is America, and we have the First Amendment and all, but let's not pretend he's doing/being something noble.
While I disagree with Milo on many, many things, he seems to be committed to free speech above all.
Also he showed that he is able and willing to learn and change his oppinion when presented with new facts: There are famous tweets from him where he accused gamers of being immature, but a few month later he recanted and even tried to learn how to play Dota2.
On the other hand I fear that 4chan may turn out to be un-monetizeable. Most advertisers will never agree to show their ads there, not even on the worksafe boards, plus most 4chan users probably have an adblocker enabled anyway.
Whether you like 4chan or not (I don't, particularly), you have to agree that speech there has been pretty freewheeling. And that's perhaps 4chan's most redeeming feature, the one feature I wouldn't want to change. And Milo is, simply put, the best possible custodian of free speech. Whether you like Milo or not (I happen to like him, a lot (no, I'm not gay (but I have nothing against gay or any LGBT people, and am probably bisexual (this is a lot of nested parentheses, huh? But am keeping track, we're at number 4.)))) you must admit that there are few people as dedicated to free speech as he is.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
you mean the freedom to be a white supremacist neo-nazi hate monger
Sure, and also the freedom to be a lying leftard knee-jerk SJW. They go hand in hand, and fuck you for sniveling about it.
There's a reason why the ACLU defended the Nazis in first amendment cases. Educate yourself.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Keep in mind that even moot, the founder of 4chan and a guy renowned for his protection of free speech, had to ban all the GamerGate harassment. It's not that he particularly wanted to, it's that legally he had to or no-one would want to host or advertise on his website. In other words, it wouldn't be able to pay for itself. Plus, he would be dealing with a lot of log requests from law enforcement.
8chan only manages to ignore harassment and child porn because it's small and doesn't cost much to run. So depending on your personal definition of "SJW", you might find that Milo is one of them when he is forced to delete threads and wield the banhammer.
I also wonder where Milo would find the time for 4chan, considering he works for Breitbart and tours and is supposed to be running that college scholarship fund that is already behind schedule.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Al Gore once titled a movie of his "an inconvenient truth". The premise being that the truth can be isn't convenient, pretty or profitable. It's an argument that was widely embraced by the left when it was in there favor. Now that it is against their favor it is condemned (flashbacks of wikileaks anyone?).
Milo has previously stated that in today's society only trolls are allowed to speak the truth. This position used to be taken by the court jester or fool, the one person who could speak freely, to say what no one else dared. In today's society sites like 4chan have become the fool, saying what no one else dares.
4chan or it's replacement while always exist because history has always demanded that the truth be told, no matter how politically incorrect it is.
"when you say "freedom of speech" you mean the freedom to be a white supremacist neo-nazi hate monger."
Definitely! Or maybe freedom to be advocating a homosexual lifestyle, or freedom to be a pornography spreading filth monger, or freedom to instruct people about making bombs or cooking meth.
Yes, in the USA there is a First Amendment, but that only provides a little protection against government censorship. It does nothing to restrain the militant, hate-filled SJWs from using every tactic imaginable, including brute force, to stifle speech that they don't like.
Creating a forum for unpopular opinions and controversial material is an entirely noble enterprise
he meant free as in not paying for it.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
>>but let's not pretend he's doing/being something noble.
Sure he is. In fact, he is providing a vital service. He is shining a big searing spotlight on how free speech is being restricted on college campuses, and all the hypocrisy that entails. Of course, one has to be outlandish and outrageous to cut through all the noise and attempts to dampen the message, but that seems to be something Milo revels in, so maybe he is uniquely qualified for the job.
>> white supremacist neo-nazi hate monger
You Social Justice Warriors really need another smokescreen other than race and fascism to throw down every time your views are questioned. The country has pretty much caught on to the tactic. (You can thank the violent BLM movement for expediting its demise; boy, what a miscalculation THAT was, wasn't it?) Y'all should try being, I dunno, entertaining. Like Milo.
Without those evile white men recognizing that these things are indeed horrible, we would still be in antiquity, ethics-wise.
Slavery, sexism and all other kinds of barbarity were "business as usual" for 95% of human history.
This guy is less harmful than Martin Shkreli overall, and certainly far less potentially dangerous. He's an icon and popular writer in alt-right circles as well as their leading "gay Uncle Tom" figure, and a leading social media harassment campaign coordinator. He hacked the accounts and organized the mass-trolling of Leslie Jones for, as far as I can tell, having the audacity to be black and female in a comedy movie.
That said, he's never sent the price of any life-saving medication through the stratosphere. He's hardly more powerful or dangerous than any Average Joe with seriously fucked-up ideology and a computer, and there are like a dozen of those who post regularly on Slashdot :-P
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Yiannopoulos added this his philosophy as an owner "would be very simple: free-speech central, no ifs, no buts."
Let me know how that goes for you 5 seconds in when somebody posts child porn or makes a credible threat of violence.
You don't understand 4chan do you? Or free speech for that matter. In the appropriate boards, like /pol or /b you can attack white people, call for the death of all men, advocate communism, extreme leftist anarchism, or whatever you want. And 4chan won't ban you, or censor your posts. Now, if you says stuff the user bases doesn't like, well they may insult you, tell you to get cancer, ignore you, hell they may even debate you. Free speech works for both sides. This is way better than most left wing boards, which I have noticed will censor your post, or ban you if your opinions stray too far from the mainstream.
Except those are mostly what are known as "lies", not facts. The worst cases of modern oppression and extermination have certainly not been committed by 'white' people, particularly if we further limit it to those white peoples that are traditionally considered to make up 'the West' (and thus exclude the attempted ethnic cleansing in the Balkans, which America and Western Europe opposed.) And you are free to look up the statistics on rape and molestation yourself; the causative agents are more complicated than either side wants to admit, but using a simple and naive survey of the facts the racist-tinged radical right of today usually comes off looking a lot better than the 'reverse'-racist radical left.
And it doesn't help your cause that gay white men (including but certainly not limited to aberrant right-wingers like Milo) are being removed from their former place of victimhood. I'm not at all sure what the radical left hopes to accomplish by intentionally ejecting millions of people from their base.
The really sad part is, you guys could've easily taken the wind out of the sails of the alt-right by simply being rational and favoring free speech, but instead you've chosen to double-down on that reactionary white-bashing that, while kinda cute and perhaps even thought-provoking in the 1990s, comes off as rather delusional and self-destructive in 2016. You've given people like Milo the high ground, and it's going to take you at least half a generation to get it back.
Neo-nazis. I think even anti-death penalty ACLU lawyers would have been happy to pull a lever at the Nuremberg gallows.
He had to do absolutely nothing at all.
That Gamergate had anything to do with hatespeech at all is a blatant lie, made up by Gawker and their ilk and repeated ad nauseum by everybody else.
Why? Because that was easier than admitting that, yes the gamers were right, there was no ethics whatsoever to speak of in gaming journalism, everyone whas sleeping with each other, discussing on what to report and what not to mention etc...
It really is outrageous for gamers to demand just a minimum of standards in the way of journalistic integrity.
I was there on 4chan back in August 2014 when it really started: No hatespeech whatsoever. Any post even slightly hinting that violence of any kind was appropriate was reported and taken down quicker than even child porn. On Twitter and the other, moderated, social medias, the situation was even more tame: A Data scientist ran a statistical analysis on tweets containing the #gamergate hashtag and found that less than 0.2% of them were hostile in any way. Keep in mind that this tag was also used by the SJWs and the trolls (of both sides).
All supposed death threats (which by the way happened before that tag was even created, meaning that they were not even part of Gamergate) have been thoroughly debunked.
I think what really made the mass media (well video game mass media at least) so angry, is that this bunch of outcast nerds did not keel over and die when ordered/expected to, but instead had the audacity to fight back, completely politely. And what a fight it was: Using only polite emails and even paper letters, they got pretty much every single advertiser to pull out from Gawker and their subsites, contributing to its well earned demise, they got the FTC to update its guidelines on hidden advertising, they got an apology for the creator of Sins of a Solar Empire who had been falsely accused of rape, they greenlit a steam game from a femminist that had been bullied (including death threats) by other more extreme femminists for not being as rabid as she was supposed to be (Seedscape), they made The Escapist and even IGN adopt an ethics codex and of course they got many of the ringleaders of those 11 articles along the "Gamers are dead" line fired (those articles were released completely coincidentally all on the same day, I am sure the secret GamesJournoMailinglist that Milo uncovered later had nothing to do with it). Not officially of course, but many had their contract not renewed or were let go for "creative differences".
Meanwhile moot was spending weeks in europe with his not-girlfriend who was a SJW and at that time writing an academic paper about him.
It is kinda sad that currently the most objective article on GG is the one on encyclopediadramatica. The one on wikipedia is so biased that even Jim Wales spoke out against it. Of course they cite sources (mostly from Gawker) so by Wikipedia standards the article is fine.
I know, right? The 21st century is all about properly censored and curated 'safe spaces.' WTF is he thinking?
Yeah. A site that was started in 2003 is 20th century, moron.
Pretty funny how right-wingers cry freedom of speech to defend their inflammatory bullshit but are the first ones in line to whine like babies about Colin Kaepernick exercising that right by quietly kneeling during the national anthem. Everyone is a hypocrite, on both sides.
He's free to kneel all he wants, doesn't mean we have to watch it or like it.
Is fabricating tweets by an actress because you don't like a movie reboot a noble enterprise?
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
The government isn't trying to shut down trolls and shitposters. Trolls and shitposters, however, demand to be heard and call that free speech. Being judged for what you say does not violate your free speech. Social media platforms are not obligated to grant them a platform for their speech either. Facebook and twitter are not the government and can do whatever they want.
That in and of itself isn't hypocritical unless they try to force him to stand. You're allowed to criticize other people's speech, but trying to prevent them from speaking at all is different (and worse). Yes, the NFL and colleges are (mostly) private property, they can decline to host events or give a platform, etc. but one of the major reasons for going to college is to be exposed to new ideas and learn how to think better. You can't do that if you refuse to listen to any points of view besides your own.
Examine even your most deeply held beliefs. Nobody is always right.
You know what happens when white men really become angry? Everybody else ends up in a mass grave, that's what happens.
Cambodia, Tibet, Rwanda, Turkey, Saddam-era Iraq, etc.
You want to argue Hitler trumps stuff like that, fine, but that requires admitting (rightly or wrongly) that the Jews have suffered the most and it also implies that they are non-white.
This might come back to bite you in the ass if you ever want to argue that some disputed cases of land theft in the immediate aftermath of that persecution were the worst atrocities ever committed and our current support of Israel is therefore entirely unjustified.
If I can get a bit more theoretical here, a number of people have posted the Free Speech xkcd comic. It's absolutely right that there is a difference between 'the government won't arrest you' and 'no one should be compelled to host content they disagree with'. For this reason, I am indeed glad that Milo is keeping 4chan as a place where people can indeed post unpopular opinions.
However, I've been thinking about this recently: to what end is it not required for there to be a platform given? Twitter doesn't want to host offensive tweets. Fine. I'll join the four people on Google Plus and do it. Well, seems the other three people on Google Plus don't like my offensive speech, either.
Okay. I'll head on over to HostGator and install Friendica and make my own place where I can post my offensive things. Well, HostGator says I can't do that on their servers, rinse and repeat for GoDaddy, BlueHost, and 1&1. I head over to Amazon and rent some server time there, but Amazon says I can't post my offensive things there.
Fine, no more cloud for me - want something done right, DIY time. So, I call up Verizon and get their you-can-have-a-web-server FiOS package and load up an old desktop with a LAMP stack and host it myself. Verizon says they're not obligated to give me a platform, and when I call Cablevision, I get the same story. So, "no one is required to give me a platform" is, at its logical conclusion, a statement that can prevent a sufficiently offensive message from ever reaching the internet.
What is the reasonable expectation here? Should someone sufficiently down the line be expected to provide the same platform to hate speech as they provide to acceptable speech? Obviously I paint a picture of a fairly remote possibility, but it does raise the question of how "freedom of the press" works if no one will sell you a printing press.
Discuss.
There isn't a need for a haven, he just wants a place to be mean and disagree with me. Equating free speech with being mean to me and disagreeable demeans free speech and needs to stop!
FTFY
Charter Member of The Committee Group For The Elimination And Eradication Of Repetitive Redundancy
Free speech is not a blank check, and private organizations are not bound by the same restrictions as the State. Milo can say what he likes, and maybe he can even buy a website to say it, but he crosses that redline too many times and he might very well find himself in front of a judge defending himself against libel.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
So you just conveniently cherry pick dates. It's called moving the goalpost.
No, you disingenuous twit. As I just clearly explained, the OP originally planted the goalpost by using the phrase "today's ills". In my original reply, I clearly indicated that I was addressing this specific topic via my use of the word "modern." You are the only one who is attempting to move the goalpost here.
Your freedom of speech is an individual right to speak without Governmental interference; when you put on an organisations uniform, you appear to be a representative of that organisation not an individual. If you say things that harm your organisation, you will likely be removed from that organisation. Colin Kaepernick is just a spoiled middle-class kid trying to pretend he's ghetto; he was playing an image game and it blew-up in his face. The NFL has ratings problems and the brass will gladly duct their responsibility in it and shove all of the blame on to Kaepernick. The NFL is probably secretly glad he volunteered to be the pariah because if Kaepernick didn't exist, the NFL would have to invent one. You have to have a scapegoat on standby after all.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
There is only one angle: the journalistic one. Everything else was tacked on top of it.
It was no lie either, she even thanked him in the credits of her "game", go get it, its free on steam.
There was no harassment whatsoever (no seriously, I have never ever seen a more civil and polite discussion on 4chan, on any board), thus the banning could not have been because of that. He defended free speech in 2011 and then claimed in 2014 that 4chan was never about free speech, one of the reason he became a persona non grata on his own website. Why he did a u-turn we do not know, may have been a crush, may have been one sided love, may have been SJW-brainwashing
The one demanding to be heard are the social justice cancer. They are the one claiming all platforms, "reclaiming" internet that they never owned or created, so them and only them can speak. They are the one specifically excluding peoples base on race (White) and gender (male). And they get hated for it. What did they expect? A Nobel prize? (LOL the Nobel comity is so stupid it might actually happen)
Shitposting is criticizing them. Shitposting is yelling at them. Shitposting is boycotting them. Shitposting is showing them the door.
Shitposting is EXACTLY what the XKCD comic you linked is defending. Shitposting is free speech.
The "Gamers are Dead" 11 articles are what first introduced me to Gamergate. The one posted on Ars was a poorly written shitpost hit piece trying to shame the reader into hating the object of its derision. That prompted me to search out the reason why they'd tarnish their brand in the attempt. I thought I'd be done in a moment but discovered a rabbit hole with no bottom.
Whatever Ars hoped to achieve by participating in that vile coordinated smear campaign, they did succeed in losing me forever.
The Left has gained such control over media, academia, and government that certain ideas were entirely banished from the public eye. This left us with "cuckservatives," or neoconservatives who believed in Leftist goals through conservative methods, as the only option to the Left. That option was not an alternative, so the Alternative Right arose.
Censorship can occur through many methods. It is not merely a legal term; it means disallowing your ideological opponents from expressing necessary ideas as a way of weakening them. Doxxing people, getting them fired from their jobs, and otherwise destroying their lives is a means of censorship. This is why anonymous internet forums like 4chan came about: people wanted to talk about these taboo things.
Milo is "alt lite," according to most, in that he is from the libertarian tradition of anarchy with free markets more than the Alt Right mainstream of opposing equality. He will be fair as an owner of a free speech site, as there is nothing on record showing him ever supporting censorship or trying to censor others.
Alternative Right.
Free speech needs a safe space.
"gay uncle tom"? What a first class tool you are. Since you - for some reason - seem to think that a person's ideology descends from their biology, you are the bigot in this equation. He's just gay. Just because he doesn't agree with you politically doesn't make him a traitor to anyone, especially the likes of you. It's funny how you lefties always seem to find the limits of your tolerance at the edges of your dogma.
My bad, he actually didn't carry out the hack himself, he just incited it:
https://thinkprogress.org/lesl...
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Sure, and also the freedom to be a lying leftard knee-jerk SJW. They go hand in hand, and fuck you for sniveling about it.
For someone who purports to defend free speech, you're pretty intolerant of those who don't share your views.
Yep, by attempting character assassination rather than trying to invalidate his point you are practising your own form of censorship. Censorship is not just done by governments, companies, religious organisations, communities and individuals can all be censors, all it requires is that a dissenting opinion be suppressed by force. About 10 years ago, an episode of Top Gear was filmed in the American south, one of the challenges was to drive deep into the bible belt with pro-Liberal and pro-Gay slogans painted on their cars. The cars were openly attacked and forced to be abandoned by the presenters. Jeremy commented to Richard Porter, TG's script editor that he "was almost killed to death". That was a good example of how mobs censor people, in the heart of the "land of the free" no less.
In fact, I consider you the worst of all forms of censors, instead of trying to rationally deal with the GP's point, you called him names hoping that people would get angry at the GP and ignore your terrible message, you're attempting to suppress the OP's opinion by force and ironically, drawing more attention to it.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Have you seen the leaked CON logs, or the leaked logs that show a bunch of the prominent anti-GG people trying to dox mombot? Pretty much all of the big names in the whole GG fiasco (on either side) turned out to be awful people. Doxing happened to both sides, there was harassment on both sides, it was a big mess. But almost nothing was written about the bad stuff anti-GG did, because they were the ones allied with the "journalists" GG was attacking (amongst others).
Examine even your most deeply held beliefs. Nobody is always right.
Not exactly. It's the default space that allows expression. I suppose it does need protection from those who would try to take it over to impose their own limited views as the default. These typically take the form of anti-'harassment' and 'hate'-speech laws.
Let me clarify that, then: Right now, free speech needs a safe space. It shouldn't, but it does.
A generation of citizens, now old enough to vote, appear convinced that free speech is a completely meaningless concept (I'm not talking legal vs. illegal, but whether the term means anything at all) outside of a narrow discussion of the First Amendment. I sometimes try to suggest that maybe Twitter shouldn't censor people on political grounds by using an argument that phone companies don't generally go around telling people whom they are and aren't allowed to speak to or what they're allowed to talk about... the response is either silence or "Well, why not? They're a private company and free speech is entirely meaningless / worthless / irrelevant if we're talking about private companies and not the government."
And if you don't see what's wrong with that argument, try replacing "anti-free speech" with any other controversial activity.
The First Amendment protects people from government interference in their speech (with certain exceptions). It does not stop Twitter from banning him (which they did) should they decide to do so.
Milo never argued the First Amendment makes it illegal to do what Twitter did. This might just be the biggest straw man of all time... pretending that people who support free speech are trying to misinterpret the constitution.
And Milo seems to deliberately distort the idea that just because we have freedom of speech in the U.S., it doesn't require anyone to allow him on their privately owned or publicly traded forums.
You people are the ones who are grossly distorting the idea of free speech (yes, I just linked xkcd as an example of how NOT to do something), although I'm not certain if you're doing it deliberately. Free speech has a definition outside of constitutional law and even outside of any courtroom. It is a thing that you can choose to support or not support regardless of whether or not you are acting as part of a government.
That doesn't mean anyone has to or should listen to any jackass who opens his mouth. I'm not advocating against filters or opt-in block lists, but supporting free speech generally means advocating that people who want to voluntarily read a political opinion that has been published through a general purpose communication platform should be able to. I'm not saying illegal/legal, I'm just saying *should*. If you are against this, if you think that Twitter and ISPs and phone companies should be dictating our political speech and social mores, then then you are at least to some extent against free speech.
Guess what, if a private golf course discriminates against a black person... it's racism! It's racism when the government does it. It's racism when a private business does it. It's racism even if it's legal for them to do it. And so it is with free speech.