curate users #118
45 participants
and others
You can not enable an economy of gratitude, generosity, and love with force. It requires more than just banning people to sustain.
You can not enable an economy of gratitude, generosity, and love with force. It requires more than just banning people to sustain.
This is a hard problem to address: How do we deal with users of our service who abide by the rules and terms we've set forth to protect our other users and ourselves, but do things we personally don't like outside of our service?
Right now, as written, our Terms and Conditions point #5, "Guidelines for User Generated Content", the result of #1425, seems to govern a user's behavior, but only within Gratipay.com, and specifically any communication facilities that Gratipay.com provides. Right now, that's limited only to usernames, "I"m making the world better by", and any other unvalidated, user-editable field.
A series of questions, expanding as I think of implications:
- Should Gratipay extend its terms of service to include behavior outside of Gratipay's purview, i.e. gratipay.com, inside.gratipay.com, our GitHub presence, Twitter interaction with us, etc.?
- If Gratipay does decide to care about user behavior outside of Gratipay's purview, does that obligate Gratipay to police outside of its world?
- Would Gratipay be obligated to do some kind of background check before enabling a user to receive gifts?
- Should Gratipay then conduct ongoing background checks to ensure that a user hasn't become evil since signing up?
- This could occupy time and resources that Gratipay simply doesn't have available.
- Should Gratipay then conduct ongoing background checks to ensure that a user hasn't become evil since signing up?
- If Gratipay does not police, would Gratipay then be obligated to have a mechanism set up for people (not necessarily Gratipay users) to report the terms-breaking activity?
- What would the response time look like on this?
- Would this diminish the promise of Gratipay as a safe and reliable method of receiving gifts?
- What happens if people fraudulently report activity that doesn't actually exist, or is an attempt to frame the user?
- What if Gratipay's kneejerk suspension or banning is wrong or erroneous, and we disrupt someone's income stream wrongly?
- To what level of legal risk does Gratipay expose itself in the event of erroneous or fraudulent service disruption?
- What if Gratipay's kneejerk suspension or banning is wrong or erroneous, and we disrupt someone's income stream wrongly?
- Would Gratipay be obligated to do some kind of background check before enabling a user to receive gifts?
- If Gratipay decides not to care about user activities outside its purview, what is its cohesive response to criticism that it is or may be enabling the funding of evil outside of its purview?
- What constitutes "evil?"
- Ilwill?
- Injustice?
- Hate speech is already a crime, but a crime with seemingly rare convictions despite being incredibly common online
- What does Gratipay have to do?
- Legal orders are already covered in the Terms and Conditions (I think? section 12); Gratipay must abide by injunctions and probably even garnishments.
- Is Gratipay equipped to assess legal and illegal behavior, and suspend/ban an account ahead of a legal order if Gratipay detects the illegal behavior outside of its purview before law enforcement due process is carried out?
- The implications of acting without a legal order return consideration to the above legal risk question.
- What constitutes "evil?"
- If Gratipay does decide to care about user behavior outside of Gratipay's purview, does that obligate Gratipay to police outside of its world?
There are a lot of (bad|good) actors in the world. Sometimes, they get a loud enough voice and enough attention that they can do and say (bad|good) stuff, then ask for money so they can afford to continue to act or speak.
I think Gratipay, specifically the Gratipay team and its community of users, is well within its right to ask bad actors to cease using the service. However, it should not ban them unless they are violating the law or effectively posting on Gratipay's properties content that violates its Guidelines for User Generated Content. Banning bad actors without a legal order may expose Gratipay to legal risk in addition to the social risk it faces by terminating a bad actor's permission to use its service.
I don't think Gratipay should be in the business of deciding what is (bad|good). That's for the legal system and users themselves to decide. This stance could cost Gratipay users, but neutrality is the preference of business when acting any other way could harm the innocent bystander customers of the business, let alone be even more detrimental to the business itself.
A slightly related situation that CloudFlare found themselves in where a client wasn't violating their terms of service, but they didn't particularly like the nature of their client: http://blog.cloudflare.com/58611873/
Snippets of relatable bits from paragraph 4 in the article:
[...] First, CloudFlare is firm in our belief that our role is not that of Internet censor. There are tens of thousands of websites currently using CloudFlare's network. Some of them contain information I find troubling. [...] While we will respect the laws of the jurisdictions in which we operate, we do not believe it is our decision to determine what content may and may not be published. That is a slippery slope down which we will not tread.
So yeah, pretty much just going with what @colindean already stated. Unless there's a violation of the terms, or some other legal reason to remove someone (like Gratipay being put at risk by allowing these transactions to process), I don't think Gratipay can make that decision.
Copying over from https://gratipay.freshdesk.com/helpdesk/tickets/1518:
One of the sites on gratipay is known to host exploitative child and teen pictures.
https://gratipay.com/infinitechan/
https://medium.com/@FoldableHuman/the-mods-are-always-asleep-7f750f879fc
This is on top of 8chan being a known board for harassment campaigns and doxxing.
https://storify.com/a_man_in_black/gamergate-harassment
I will not go to the site to get direct links to these events, but I believe that this all violates the TOS of gratipay. Thank you for looking into it.
We are not the government. It's impossible for us to censor them by banning them. They can go elsewhere. We shouldn't accept them after they've been forced off of Patreon simply because we're too unorganized to create and enforce the necessary policy (yes I am volunteering :-).
@colindean could you elaborate on the possibilities for legal risk? Copying from the TOS:
Notwithstanding any of these Terms, Gratipay reserves the right, without notice and in its sole discretion, to terminate your license to use the Site and/or to block or prevent your future access to, and use of, the Site.
That should be updated to say that we will contact them before / upon termination, but it seems pretty clear that we reserve the right to boot people off.
Let's take a look at the Patreon community guidelines. This section clearly explains that you're liable to be banned if you do harmful things to people anywhere else outside of Patreon:
Facilitating Harmful or Dangerous Activity:
We don’t allow funds to be collected for organizations that promote, forums that distribute, or anything else that primarily facilitates harmful or dangerous activities. For example, an organization that promotes sexual abuse, intellectual property violations, weapons, commercial spamming, self harm, drug manufacturing techniques, or property crimes would be prohibited from receiving funds through Patreon.
People Who Can’t Use Patreon:
Because Patreon empowers people financially, we impose restrictions not only on the types of media and projects that can be funded on Patreon, but also on which people can and cannot receive funds through Patreon. After creating a Patreon page, any creator caught in the act or convicted of making credible violent threats, committing violent crimes, malicious doxing, coordinating nonviolent harm such as fraud, or encouraging others to do the aforementioned harmful activities may be banned from using Patreon.
People with a dangerous criminal history or known affiliation with violent or dangerous groups including terrorist or cyberterrorist organizations, organized criminal groups, and violent hate groups, cannot receive funds through Patreon, no matter the purpose or apparent intention of their Patreon page. Similarly, anyone who has ever been convicted of child sex abuse, fraud, or money laundering is not permitted to collect funds through Patreon.
This is a good policy, and we should adopt something similar. My only contention with their rules as a whole is on porn, which I think we should allow as long as the individuals aren't violating our other policies. We can get away with this where Patreon can't because there isn't strictly speaking an exchange of goods with Gratipay, whereas Patreon has a Kickstarter-style incentive system to provide donors with actual content.
An unexpected twist: in researching 8chan, I discovered /christian/, and I am smitten.
@whit537 8chan is just the reddit of chans. You'll probably find the best this world has to offer and the worst, it's up to the user.
I changed the bullets to numbering in my above post for easier reference to its contents.
@seanlinsley, you're right on with the Patreon policy citation. I think that adopting a policy like Patreon's would take Gratipay down the path of 1.i.b. I'm OK with that, but then we get into outcries of censorship despite being in the right. We will definitely lose some users while also reducing risk created by disallowing users who fall into those categories.
Also, I, too, believe that the termination clause (TOS #13) would cover us, but by clearly stating intentions and exclusions upfront, we certainly mitigate the risk of enraging infringing users and reduce the possibility that such a user might come after Gratipay regardless of the termination clause should they feel they Gratipay has terminated their account wrongfully.
What would really strengthen this policy is citation of statutory and case law for each exclusionary reason, but I'm not sure that's an effective use of time. Also, we non-lawyers are neither qualified or do we have the resources to find specific examples. I'd take it as a challenge myself if I didn't believe it to be incredibly laborious.
Personally, some of the above exclusions are too vague for my tastes.
organization that promotes
- sexual abuse - definitely exclude, pretty well-defined socially and legally, using progressive definitions of abuse
- intellectual property violations -
- Host links or howtos?
- Host pirated content with no takedown process according to the site's local laws?
- Host links or howtos?
- weapons -
- Talks about guns, e.g. NRA?
- Coordinates a site for gun trading and advocates following laws regarding transfer?
- Smuggling guns?
- Advocates build WMDs to kill people
- Talks about guns, e.g. NRA?
- commercial spamming - clearly defined
- self harm -
- Techniques?
- Where to get help/counseling?
- Techniques?
- drug manufacturing techniques - information is
- property crimes - I'm not really sure what this means, other than maybe graffiti
After creating a Patreon page, any creator caught in the act or convicted of making credible violent threats, committing violent crimes, malicious doxing, coordinating nonviolent harm such as fraud, or encouraging others to do the aforementioned harmful activities may be banned from using Patreon.
100% OK with this, because they are all clearly defined in legal terms. Fraud can be little more unclear, and I think that's one we'd have to act only on conviction. Maybe Gratipay needs a part of its terms that more clearly indemnifies Gratipay in the event of fraud and protects Gratipay against chargebacks resulting from a user's feeling defrauded.
People with a dangerous criminal history or known affiliation with violent or dangerous groups including terrorist or cyberterrorist organizations, organized criminal groups, and violent hate groups, cannot receive funds through Patreon, no matter the purpose or apparent intention of their Patreon page.
Gratipay is not equipped to define these, so we'd have to decide on someone else's list. US State Dept List of Foreign Terrorist Organizations would suffice internationally, and we're technically required by law not to do anything with them. Hate groups defined by the SPLC is a good list for that one.
Would we permit a user who claims to associate with Anonymous? What about other domestic organizations that are considered by some to be terrorists, such as eco-terrorists?
Similarly, anyone who has ever been convicted of child sex abuse, fraud, or money laundering is not permitted to collect funds through Patreon.
100% agreement with excluding those convicted of fraud or money laundering. I hate child sex abuse just as much as any rational person, but when state courts are convicting without the presence of or under antiquated Romeo and Juliet laws, I rollback that agreement to a case-by-case basis, defaulting to excluded.
Determining with whom one can do business is hard, especially when one wants to be upfront about it.
@colindean Thanks for the thorough taxonomy in #118 (comment).
a little attention from twitter: https://twitter.com/feedmeyourtears/status/548890123249909760
FD1533 is a +1 for removing 8chan.
FD1543 is the follow-up from #118 (comment) re: RHExcelion.
I've asked for permission to copy comments from both FD1533 and FD1534 over here.
As a basis for comparison, I started looking into what PayPal does. Here's their Acceptable Use Policy, and here's the eBay/PayPal Law Enforcement Center. They use a third party called LeadsOnline.
Three examples from eBay of ways they've worked with law enforcement:
eBay in legal wrangling over who is responsible for fencing:
2011 fact sheet about PROACT (PDF):
http://nasp.creativeimagewebsites.com/pdf/2011%20Proact%201%20Page%20Handout%20Gov%20Relations.pdf
From FD1533:
Hello. I thought you might want to be made aware that one of your users is fundraising money for a website that breaks at least these terms of service:
Campaign: https://gratipay.com/infinitechan/
- Defame, abuse, harass, stalk, threaten or otherwise violate the rights of others.
- Post content or imagery that is offensive and/or harmful, including content that promotes racism, bigotry, hatred or physical harm of any kind against any individual or group of individuals.
- Post content that provides materials or access to materials that could be used to exploit minors in an abusive, violent or sexual manner.
In the past few months alone, 8chan or infinitechan has been the headquarters for a known group of harassers - GamerGate. They recently also became home to a group called "pol" which is known white supremacists. As well, the owner of 8chan has stated that he will begin writing for known white nationalist website, Daily Stormer.
This website is used regularly to coordinate threats, doxing attempts, and launch large scale harassment campaigns.
It has also been recently linked as a hub for child abusers & pedophiles to share images & stories of acts with minors.
https://medium.com/@FoldableHuman/the-mods-are-always-asleep-7f750f879fc
It was also shown to contain similar just a few months ago:
http://www.dailydot.com/politics/8chan-pedophiles-child-porn-gamergate/
And here is the owner saying that he can't manage to compete with a site like 4chan without allowing such content:
https://twitter.com/HW_BEAT_THAT/status/547013158116663296
A cursory view of the website listed on the campaign should give you plenty enough information about the kind of content being cultivated, and how the owner of the website specifically & monetarily benefits from hate speech, borderline illegal child pornography, and white nationalists (aka neo-nazis).
He was also recently kicked off of Patreon for these very things, because they refused to be associated with such a toxic website.
I just wanted to give you a heads up about this company and its owner. Thank you for your time.
Then:
Oh, and I realized I forgot to add this screenshot about his new involvement in TheDailyStormer: http://i.imgur.com/PV9KDaf.png
https://archive.today/NMGM9
From FD1534:
The account in question is owned by RHExcelion. He runs a fairly large operation that takes streamed content from media providers (generally Funimation or Crunchyroll) and illegally redistributes it. Then he asks for donations to continue doing so (this is where gratipay comes in).
This is the post on his site where he talks about soliciting the donations: http://commiesubs.com/state-of-the-cartel-2015/
As you can see, he references that PayPal could shut him down at any time, which they do... often... because the kind of redistribution he does violates copyright law. He has also had his accounts banned from Flattr and Patreon for the same reasons.
If you want more detail around the quality of his character, a large portion of the money he acquires for such donations go to vacations, so he's even scamming his donators. Here's one conversation around it:
Dec 31 22:42:31 <BardicheAssault> Also the first jimmy wales donation drive was spent on madoka trip to nyc and I want to do something similar for axpo Dec 31 22:42:41 <&herkz> wow that sounds really useful Dec 31 22:42:43 <&herkz> oh wait Dec 31 22:42:45 <&herkz> not at all Dec 31 22:42:47 <&herkz> what the fuck Dec 31 22:43:21 <&herkz> why the hell would you spend donation money on that Dec 31 22:43:29 <BardicheAssault> I paid for food and hotel for like 6 people Dec 31 22:43:36 <BardicheAssault> Why notApologies for the length, but I thought it'd be better to be more thorough than not.
Then:
For what it's worth, on the curation front, when I brought this issue to my readers' attention, one of them tweeted me with "Imagine all the other accounts that are really fronts for drug dealing & such..." I imagine others could get that impression too. Anyway, just food for thought on that end as well.
I'm not a white nationalist (I live in Philippines lmao).
Here's what happened:
[...]
Now, of course certain people have come out of the woodwork to call me a Nazi, but that was exactly as planned. You guys need to realize that I'm the admin of 8chan, not the "leader" of GamerGate. Building hype around my business is my job, especially when we are strapped for cash and can't advertise directly.
and, thank you gamerghazi for hyping my article before it goes out
are you really surprised the owner of a chan is trolling? really?
What goes on outside of Gratipay is not our problem. What people do with the money received through Gratipay is not our problem. What people post on 8chan is not our problem. Copyright infringement is not our problem unless it happens on Gratipay itself. Etc.
I am against curating users. It would consume time and create conflicts within the team (there will inevitably be disagreements on whether a particular user should be banned or not).
I'm with @Changaco on this. (As long as it makes legal sense of course)
If you guys want to be known as the premiere money laundering service, I guess that's your call. I imagine it'd be profitable.
Just seems to me that if certain people are too toxic for even one of ThePirateBay co-founder's side projects (flattr), there's probably a good reason for that.
This discussion is not about money laundering, we already try to prevent that by blacklisting suspicious accounts, and payment processors also have their own algorithms that try to detect frauds.
@Changaco I was about to make a similar reply, but then started down this rabbit hole on Wikipedia:
Money laundering is the process in which the proceeds of crime are transformed into ostensibly legitimate money or other assets.
Gratipay isn't useful for money laundering in the narrow sense, because we only offer soft anonymity, not strong anonymity. If law enforcement comes to us with an investigation, we do have useful information we could provide.
However, in a number of legal and regulatory systems the term money laundering has become conflated with other forms of financial crime, and sometimes used more generally to include misuse of the financial system [...], including terrorism financing, tax evasion and evading of international sanctions. Most anti-money laundering laws openly conflate money laundering (which is concerned with source of funds) with terrorism financing (which is concerned with destination of funds) when regulating the financial system.
What are our obligations regarding detecting other sorts of financial crime besides money laundering in the narrow sense?
"International Standards on Combating Money Laundering and the Financing of Terrorism & Proliferation"
http://www.fatf-gafi.org/media/fatf/documents/recommendations/pdfs/FATF_Recommendations.pdf
I think our obligations are the same as Paypal, we offer a similar service, financially speaking. Maybe Balanced would be able to tell us if there's something we're not doing that we're supposed to do. In any case this should be discussed in another issue.
Agreed, AML/CFT is a separate issue. There are two lines: legal and (I suppose) moral. This ticket is about the moral line.
The text reads "Everyone," "Unsavory," and "Criminal," and "Not to scale!" :-)
We have to deal with the moral line in a way that PayPal doesn't for two reasons:
- We are social. There are no public profiles or other communication features baked into PayPal.
- Idealism is part of our brand. PayPal's mission is to build the Web’s most convenient, secure, cost-effective payment solution. Ours is to enable an economy of gratitude, generosity, and love.
Notice that both lines are fuzzy.
I guess we could even say that morality is part of our brand, not just idealism. Gratitude, generosity, and love are moral terms. @turnshek called this, btw. He pointed out in conversation once that Google gets burned all the worse for having promised to not "be evil," and a similar dynamic seems to be playing out for Gratipay.
Well if you're trying to be moral, I imagine it would be hard to square those ideals with financially supporting people who profit off of IP theft and scamming their user base.
And I don't think militant amorality is the way to acquire a user base that supports gratitude, generosity, or love.
Like all businesses, Gratipay must balance morality with legality and due process. Ethics is hard and as a young company with virtually no budget, Gratipay is wise to consider deeply the best course of action instead of a kneejerk reaction that sends the userbase and public into a furor.
Theoretically, under Gratipay's termination clause, Gratipay could terminate these accounts with the click of a button and such would save us all a lot of discussion and braintime, at the expense of finding a solution that is at equilibrium with the company's guiding principles, user expectations, social expectations, legal obligation.
There is no such thing as "IP theft", it's copyright infringement, and copyright is not something I want to defend.
Gratipay could terminate these accounts with the click of a button and such would save us all a lot of discussion and braintime
We could also save ourselves the discussion and braintime by ignoring these accounts, but I think we should follow through. We started this conversation over a year ago in gratipay/gratipay.com#1425, and in various forms it has soaked up a lot of our energy in 2014. I would like to see us reach a conclusion.
I imagine it would be hard to square those ideals with financially supporting people who profit off of IP theft and scamming their user base.
To me, "financially supporting" someone means actually giving money to them. I don't personally, and Gratipay as a team doesn't, give any money to RHExcelion. Providing a way for others to give money to RHExcelion is a step removed from "financially supporting." In 1.ii we're calling it "enabling."
Now, Gratipay's mission is to enable an economy of gratitude, generosity, and love. Different people will understand this in different ways, and that's okay: even shifting the debate to what "gratitude, generosity, and love" means would be a clear win. In order to justify removing RHExcelion, 8chan, or any other character who is "unsavory" from one point of view, I suppose it would have to be shown that enabling RHExcelion, 8chan, et al. actively interferes with Gratipay's ability to also enable an economy of gratitude, generosity, and love from another's point of view.
And here we're at a crossroads, and we have to make a decision. Because it's true that, for some people, the mere presence of certain others does represent such a threat, such a source of pain and anxiety and fear, as to inhibit their ability to participate fully, to function on the higher level of gratitude, generosity, and love that we're aiming for. Are we going to try to keep unsavory elements off of Gratipay for the sake of the people whom the unsavory elements painfully offend by their mere presence?
Framed as such, my answer is no. At a certain point, my pain and fear is my problem, no one else's. We're not here to force anyone to interact with anyone else (cf.), and if/when we bring more communication features online, we'll have to pay close attention to implementing proper anti-harassment tools. But, part of Gratipay's moral vision is that we embrace and work through the most painful tensions in our society, rather than avoiding them. In that spirit, everyone may be at least minimally present on Gratipay.
Practically speaking, this is actually a similar position not just to banks and PayPal, but also to Facebook and Twitter and other large social networks. 8chan and RHExcelion are both on Twitter, for example, yet Twitter is able to also provide value for many, many others who would find these accounts abhorrent.
However, unlike Twitter, we're not staking out a "free speech" position. We're deepening our "openness" position. Genuine human contact! Truly engaging one another! That's what "openness" is about for Gratipay: being open to one another, even—especially—those that offend me. Why? Because closing ourselves off from one another is a sign of fear, and fear is the opposite of love, and we're trying to enable an economy of love, because love is life, and fear is death, and death is bad, and life is good.
This gets at a much larger vision, of course. Gratipay can only do so much. Reining this back in, then, here's what I propose:
- Unsavory people are absolutely welcome on Gratipay. Criminals, even. Everyone is welcome!
- Unsavory behavior is not welcome on Gratipay. We've already defined "unsavory behavior" for both users (§5) and contributors. We're not going to have /pol/ or /younglove/ communities on Gratipay.
- Criminal behavior is, of course, unwelcome on Gratipay (see #119).
I'm going to leave this ticket open for a little while longer to allow responses. If you are -1 on my decision then you have to convince me that "enabling RHExcelion, 8chan, et al. actively interferes with Gratipay's ability to also enable an economy of gratitude, generosity, and love" for others, recognizing that you or others being painfully offended is not sufficient.
It could be the case that Gratipay becomes so associated with unsavory characters that we're unable to attract and retain "normal" people, which could hurt us in our mission by driving away everyone but the 8chans and RHExcelions. On the other hand, any publicity around this seems just as likely to attract people who share our particular commitment to openness in pursuit of love, and they're the ones that we'll be giving full voice to on Gratipay via the communities feature, etc., so the threat of brand damage is also not sufficient.
Perhaps I'm misunderstanding something here, but why wouldn't /pol/ or /younglove/ be allowed here? All the unsavory behavior is happening elsewhere; you'd only be enabling it. So what's the core difference here, and how is it defined? The links you provided only seem to refer to content generation or communications that occur via the Gratipay platform rather than what occurs as a result of said enablement.
@DSRK While it's true that we don't currently have much in the way of user-generated content (besides profile avatars/bios), we are looking at eventually making the community pages more communal (gratipay/gratipay.com#967). However, I would construe organization of communities even in their present attenuated form as "communications that occur via the Gratipay platform," because organization of communities is purely user-driven: all our communities are created by our users. Since communities are user-generated, they're subject to our Guidelines for User Generated Content: we're not going to have communities on Gratipay that are organized around, for example, racism (a la /pol/) or pedophilia (a la /younglove/). Am I answering your question?
It's worth noting that DSRK has a personal vendetta against RHExcelion/Commie Fansubs, which is probably why he's trying to get them banned.
@whit537 Not really. Seems to me as long as they don't create a community and just use your site for funding purposes they'd be fine. Or am I misinterpreting something?
I happened across a link to an internal discussion of @Gratipay's about whether to allow a child porn website to receive funding through their site. It's very candid and transparent, which I really appreciate, so I don't want to call any extra attention to it, but I would like to consider the following scenario- You see a man running down the street, drenched in blood, clutching a knife, pounding on every door as the sound of sirens approach. Everyone so far has turned him away. He reaches your door, begging to be let in, to hide from his pursuers. You can make the argument that he may not have just murdered someone, and you can argue that if he keeps trying inevitably SOMEONE will let him in, so you may as well be the one for him to show gratitude towards, but the reality is, you know it's wrong to harbor him, and you are destroying the fabirc of society if you rationalize immoral behavior by rationalizing what you know is wrong by imagining some hypothetical neighbor who would do the wrong thing too. And even if we look at this in purely legal terms, rather than basic human decency, there's that whole "aiding and abetting" concept. Child porn in particular is such a radioactive concept in the U.S. legal system I'd sure as hell never set foot into any sort of grey area.
That's an interesting scenario to consider.
Forgive me, as I do sometimes overthink scenarios such as these.
I question if I am sufficiently confident in my ability to protect myself and my family, should I decide to let the bloody man into my home. Though, my particular home lends itself to such, given a porch with two bolted doors and a window through which a phone could be passed so that this bloody person could call 911 at the same time my family is calling 911. The hero part of my brain says to me, maybe this person is running from someone who tried to kill them, but the attacked defeated his assailant and is now afraid of the sirens, not realizing self-defense? Let the guy call 911, or perhaps get him to simply drop the knife?
Or maybe he is the assailant. Maybe he's looking for somewhere to hide until the sirens pass, and looking for some poor fool to give him harbor.
Most folks would probably not open their doors, because they simply don't want to become involved. Too much blood, too many police, too much thinking.
The funny thing about Gratipay is that is has chosen for its doors to be open to everyone at all times, murderers and saints alike, as long as they're not murdering inside its metaphysical walls. Whether or not that's good for business is not yet fully understood and I think this issue is trying to hash that out.
Gratipay is not funding these questionable sites, but rather acting as a platform that enables others to do so. As long as an individual user is gifting or receiving legally and within the terms of service, Gratipay has no reason to terminate their account. Gratipay is not a court, so it cannot determine what is legal or not. Gratipay can only react to legal orders, or potentially suspend an account and notify authorities if a user is clearly engaging in illegal behavior via Gratipay. Gratipay has a legal duty to reasonably monitor for illegal behavior, but so does Balanced, and so do Visa, Mastercard, American Express, and any other company involved in the transfer of money from one person to another.
As an aside, has anyone thought to contact the authorities about these sites in question? Surely, if there are illegal activities, then law enforcement would be interested, and Gratipay would be obliged to terminate accounts if ordered by a court to do so. Gratipay may even be obligated to pass on these reports to authorities as a "we believe this user may be doing something illegal, but they're using our site legally, so you might want to look into it so that we can terminate their account if you find that they're going something illegal."
The Gratipay mentality prescribes changing minds rather than proscribing behavior. I think Gratipay would rather an unsavory user be stocked in the public square and lose their support of gifters' own volition, than unilaterally terminate an account because of a few reports of unsavory behavior from folks who may have their own agendas, biases, resentments, etc. In the case where there is actual illegal behavior, Gratipay reports it and acts as instructed. This may not satisfy the bloodlust of the aggrieved, but it is, to my understanding, the right way to ensure fairness: through the existing legal system.
Let me abundantly clarify something, so that there is no suspicion. I will not convey in a public forum how child sex abuse and all the things that go with it have negatively affected me. There is nothing that I detest more. Gratipay must tread lightly, but deliberately and confidently, and I feel that it is doing so.
We cannot allow Gratipay to become a service where illegal or even immoral platforms are funded. Gratitude, generosity and love should not be illegal, and we should make decisions on an individual basis if possible concerning these projects.
We need to remember that we want users who are "making the world better by..."
Freedom of speech and transparency are good. Child pornography, drugs and violence are not, and I think in many situations, we are actively qualified to decide this.
I'm in favor of having both the discussed cases (8chan and RHExcelion) to remain on the site. While I personally don't like what RHE is doing (seemingly using donation money for non-stated personal purposes), this is all off-site behavior and ultimate what I see as something that needs to be sorted out between RHE and his donors. After all, they can stop sending him money whenever they want to.
With 8chan, I'm happy to see that most seem to be in favor of not kicking them off Gratipay, but I would also like to bring up a couple things related to the whole "child porn" thing. First off, here's what 8chan itself says on the matter: https://8chan.co/obscenity.html
As the page says, 8chan works like Reddit in that anyone can create a board, much like anyone can create a subreddit. Illegal content, including child porn, is removed as reported, and whole boards can and do also get removed and banned for it. (As a sidenote, all content on 8chan is ephemeral in nature - threads expire eventually and get automatically deleted.) Claiming that the site harbors or encourages posting (or whatever else) child porn is nothing but a smear attempt, when in reality the site not really any different from Reddit in terms of "icky" speech (I mean, NSFW /r/lolicons NSFW exists, as do many other "morally questionable" subreddits), and when it comes to that, here's Neil Gaiman on why defend freedom of icky speech.
The funny thing about Gratipay is that i[t] has chosen for its doors to be open to everyone at all times, murderers and saints alike, as long as they're not murdering inside its metaphysical walls.
Yes! Thank you, @colindean.
After all, they can stop sending him money whenever they want to.
Yes, that's the proper thing to do if I don't like how a receiver on Gratipay is spending their receipts.
Freedom of speech and transparency are good.
here's Neil Gaiman on why defend freedom of icky speech.
As mentioned above, Gratipay isn't defending freedom of speech, nor transparency for its own sake, and we do censor content on Gratipay. By choosing to allow "murderers-not-murdering" on the site, we are deepening our commitment to openness, by which we primarily mean openness to one another, even murderers-not-murdering.
Do you have a link to where this was posted publicly, @clone1018? I.e., did you have permission to share that? I checked her tumblr.
As an aside, has anyone thought to contact the authorities about these sites in question?
Reticketed for 8chan as #121. The RHE case sounds like inside baseball.
Gratipay may even be obligated to pass on these reports to authorities
Reticketed as #122.
As mentioned above, Gratipay isn't defending freedom of speech, nor transparency for its own sake, and we do censor content on Gratipay.
I would say free speech is still related to the matter at hand, because people are asking Gratipay to kick 8chan out because "other people use 8chan to say things I don't like", or in other words, "I want to punish these people for their icky (but legal) speech (outside Gratipay's site)". As 8chan has been operating out in the open for quite a while and hasn't been shut down by any authorities (who should be well aware of the site's existence), I don't believe there to be any reason to kick the account off for any legal reasons, thus any action you take on this case will be considered from a free speech angle one way or another.
@Daiz- And how exactly are you going to bring that to the donors' attention? We've known each other for a while, but I've never known you to stick your neck out for anything. We can continue this on Twitter, if you want. Don't wanna clog up this discussion.
@whit537 You've made your decision clear so I'll respect that and leave this to the legal teams, per @colindean 's suggestion. You didn't exactly answer my question in comment #68331266 about /pol/ and /younglove/ though. As long as all sexism, racism, and pedophilia is occurring off-site, and no communities are being created around it on Gratipay, wouldn't enabling said behavior be part of how you interpret your mission statement? Assuming your mind hasn't changed since @benhc123 's comment, that is.
And thanks for the welcome.
Do you have a link to where this was posted publicly, @clone1018? I.e., did you have permission to share that? I checked her tumblr.
@whit537 Of course I had permission: https://twitter.com/SecretGamerGrrl/status/549805555733508096
This tweet thread.
Of course I had permission:
Thanks. Seeing it in IRC, too, now.
For the record:
Wow, someone missed the part of this metaphor where no credit card companies, paypal, etc. absolutely will go near CP.
https://twitter.com/SecretGamerGrrl/status/549825094806016000
Assuming your mind hasn't changed since @benhc123 's comment, that is.
It hasn't, because I didn't find any new argument in @benhc123's comment as to why enabling 8chan actively interferes with Gratipay's ability to also enable an economy of gratitude, generosity, and love for others.
You didn't exactly answer my question in comment #68331266 about /pol/ and /younglove/ though.
Okay, sorry ...
As long as all sexism, racism, and pedophilia is occurring off-site, and no communities are being created around it on Gratipay, wouldn't enabling said behavior be part of how you interpret your mission statement?
So you're postulating an individual gratipay.com/pol account (as opposed to a gratipay.com/for/pol community) that represents /pol/ in some way? And by allowing this account we're enabling /pol/? And that's part of how we're interpreting our mission? Yes, as part of how we interpret our mission, /pol/ gets to participate in Gratipay. Here's what that means:
- They can have an account on our platform (maybe they use Gratipay to give to the Red Cross or whatever, who knows?).
- They can state who they are, and even link to /pol/, but their avatar and bio have to be civil, according to our case-by-case application of section 5 of our terms.
- They can receive money through Gratipay. All money going through Gratipay is explicitly framed as a no-strings-attached gift, so it would go against the grain for Gratipay to police how people spend the money they receive here. We'll only do that when the law compels us (cf. #122).
- They can't form a /pol/ community on Gratipay, again, according to our case-by-case application of §5.
- If/when we add more user-generated content features, they can't use those features in violation of §5.
From /pol/'s point of view, they might experience themselves as being a second-class citizen on Gratipay.
From Gratipay's point of view, we're happy to have them on the site as long as they behave well according to our definition.
And with that, I'm going to go ahead and close this out. Thank you to everyone for participating in this important conversation. I feel like we reached a deeper understanding of Gratipay's mission together.
Here's to a grateful, generous, and loving 2015!
!m *
So the bottom line is that Gratipay doesn't care about off-site behavior as long as on-site behavior is fine? Sounds like a good common sense decision to me!
I am strongly opposed to this decision. Just because I can't keep up with the pace of everyone's replies doesn't mean that my, and other people's concerns are invalid.
Thank you for the reasoned discussion. As an outsider, all I can really contribute is that I strongly disagree with any reputable company doing business with the cesspool that is 8chan. It is your decision, of course, but continuing to allow 8chan to use Gratipay means I will never use your service, nor will I ever recommend it to another.
I am at least one of the original people who wrote to support about 8chan. It seemed to me then, as now, that a site that is based on gratitude and love wouldn't want to help facilitate the harassment of people that 8chan seems to approve of, along with the exploitation of minors.
Whether or not they're doing anything illegal seems to not be the issue. There are proper authorities to handle that. It's whether or not Gratipay, in setting up a community based on gratitude, generosity, and love, is helping to enable a community based on hatred, harassment, and exploitation.
I'm not the right person to decide this, I just felt it should be brought to the attention of Gratipay.
Agreed, @mimiheart
I think it's morality not just law we should be concerned about.
I didn't have time to go through all discussion but I agree with @mimiheart and @seanlinsley .
Since this was reopened I guess I should write some more words on the matter.
As I see it, the big question here is: Does Gratipay want to act as a moral police for the off-site behavior of its users?
In my opinion, the only answer to this that makes sense is a big and resounding no, because the alternative opens a massive can of worms, except all the worms are fractals.
Why? For starters, policing users on your own site is already hard enough, especially the more community features you add. Widening this kind of policing to the behavior of your users on the entire internet is a task that is simply impossible to do in any kind of comprehensive manner.
As such, this kind of policing would pretty much only be done based on user reports. Which in turn means that anyone who doesn't happen to particularly like someone else could start digging up dirt, taking things out of context, possibly from private sites where they can't be verified, then come knocking on Gratipay's door asking for "justice to be done" because of whatever "immoral" behavior they claim the target in question is doing. What would Gratipay do then? Just blindly ban people based on accusations? See if the mob decides that the person is evil enough to be banned? I don't know about you, but witch hunts and mob justice are the last thing I'd like to see rule my website. (EDIT: This whole thing actually reminds me of laws regarding obscenity in the US and how terribly vague they are.)
I can come up with specific examples of all kinds of awkward and morally challenging scenarios that having a global moral policing policy would lead to. Ultimately though, the big problem with something like this is that it will very easily turn into something that feels like arbitrary banhammer swinging, which will ensure that no-one who is doing something that could be perceived as even remotely controversial by some will be interested in using the site. That content could be porn, it could be violent video games, it could be a reddit-like website where users can create topical boards for anonymous (shit)posting. (All of which are legal under the letter of the law.)
As such, I come back to saying that the simple answer would be to put a stop to this kind of nonsense from the get-go, and simply say "whatever users do off-site is not our concern as long as it doesn't affect us legally". When it comes to matters like this, you're never going to satisfy everyone anyway, so you might as well go for the option that's actually clear (in contrast to having to constantly draw lines in the sand) and requires the least amount of continuous effort.
@Daiz- I don't think your worries are founded in reality. We can have a policy of what we do and don't allow, and have a team of Gratipay members that reviews complaints and decides whether to ban them. Patreon does it. We can too.
If there isn't solid evidence in wrongdoing, we don't ban them. If there is, we do.
If there isn't solid evidence in wrongdoing, we don't ban them. If there is, we do.
Sure, that might sound simple on paper, but even that can get complicated when you start thinking about what constitutes as "solid evidence". Consider if Gratipay started banning users for "off-site harassment", for example. What exactly will you consider to be harassment? The legal definition, or the (seemingly continually extending) internet definition? What will you consider to be solid evidence of harassment? Is saying "Some random guys who I just know where anonymous posters from 8chan totally harassed me" enough, as long as the person is "trusted"? How do you define "trusted" people? In this case, if the word isn't enough, then it's pretty much impossible to prove a connection between the two. Or even if it's a case with named users, there might not be a solid link between two people of the same name on different, thus they might actually be different users (and could deny being the same person). No doubt people would still demand "justice to be served". As I said, there's a huge can of worms here, and it is the very opposite of a simple matter.
Again: Patreon does it. We can too. We can figure it out along the way.
if you choose not to ban/remove the obvious accounts that are owned by people/community that do child porn, harassment and ruining people's life in general, you are not better than the people you are harboring.
If Gratipay choose the basic, minimum set of rules that the law is, then gratipay is not worth it.
Edit: typo
@Daiz - if Gratipay's stance is "whatever users do off-site is not our concern as long as it doesn't affect us legally," then this is not the mission statement:
Gratipay's mission is to enable an economy of gratitude, generosity, and love.
It's actually that simple. One other thing (emphasis mine.) :
We can't actively create such an economy because success depends on a cultural change, and that's not under any company's control. The best we can do is create conditions for the possibility of an economy of love, and to individually practice gratitude, generosity, and love ourselves. That's what we're trying to do.
That's utter nonsense. You're enabling a community (you say so yourself in the next sentence) to create an "economy of love," and you're allegedly seeking to practice gratitude, generosity, and love. If those are the company values, then curating your clientele is an essential piece of both the company's mission and your individual efforts to live in some sort of state of grace. If, instead, these are pretty words that describe a "hey, tip people, because money is an expression of gratitude to those among you, because Ayn Rand" philosophy, then stick with your above-quoted intention to dodge the issue of what your service is enabling in the "real world" of profiteering around [insert unacceptable thing here].
But also, if that's your stance, then it would be good to publicly abandon the notion that you are seeking to create a better world. It's not bad to be a money transmitter business that doesn't want to dabble in morals. But saying that you are and behaving differently? That's a "go fuck yourselves" level offense for many.
PS - apologies if "you," @Daiz-, are not in fact associated with Gratipay in any formal sense. Assume that all references to "you" are addressed to core devs/founders/whatever they call themselves.
PPS - I am a lawyer, but I'm not your lawyer. ;)
A conversation that is a close parallel to this one is unfurling on Medium right now, over the issue of conduct enforcement and codes of conduct at conferences:
https://medium.com/@jmspool/safe-conferences-are-deliberately-designed-2849b6cd3658
I am in fact not associated with Gratipay in any formal sense. I just follow the happenings around it occasionally and stumbled upon this discussion and decided to weight in because I think trying to play global internet moral police is a terrible idea all around, because morals vary from person to person and "proving" "moral wrongdoings" on the internet can be a very nebulous affair that will quickly devolve into arbitrary punishing (or at the least the appearance of it) and mob justice, neither of which will make the platform very inviting to anything that could be conceived as even slightly controversial or "problematic".
This is why I suggest using the law as the yardstick on the matter when it comes to any off-site activities of users.
Leaving the project #145
All questions of defining harassment and on-site vs. off-site behavior are irrelevant. It doesn't even matter if you fancy yourselves morality police (or not).
If your service facilitates or enables hate groups like 8chan, then your (in)actions speak for themselves and you are effectively condoning their behavior. I will go out of my way to avoid your service and I will recommend others do the same.
@jhersh, We're trying having a constructive discussion here. Threatening to tell others not to use our services without an argument of your own isn't particularly helpful, although I do totally support your view.
@benhc123 there is no lack of argument: Gratipay condones and financially supports child porn and harassment. That sort of behavior doesn't require additional arguments to explain why its a bad idea, unless you are literally a monster.
@benhc123 My apologies, I didn't mean to come across as unconstructive. Rephrasing my point: the only thing that matters is whether you allow hate groups to use the service.
@jhersh, @ironfroggy. I completely agree. @Daiz-, morals may vary from person to person, but understanding child pornography is wrong is pretty simple.
@Daiz- it isn't being "moral police" to have a moral position. We can't pretend that Gratipay is some neutral unfeeling machine: it is the product and a force of people, and those people cannot isolate themselves from its actions. We would demand better from a corporation, a non-profit, a government, or just a group of people walking down the street. The that people as groups somehow become inhuman is, well, dehumanizing.
but understanding child pornography is wrong is pretty simple.
Well, @benhc123, I obviously agree that real life child pornography is wrong, because real children were hurt in the process of making it. Regardless of my personal moral stance, though, I will defend things like drawn child pornography (eg. content that can be found on /r/lolicons or various 8chan boards), as no-one is hurt in the creation of it, and if pedophiles use harmless material like that to get off instead of real child abuse, then all the better.
I would also like to invite you all to revisit this link I posted further up in the thread: https://8chan.co/obscenity.html - which clearly states that 8chan does not allow illegal content like child pornography and will actively delete it and even ban entire boards for it. The page also states things like "If you are thinking of posting illegal content to 8chan.co, please think again. We will not protect you and will work with US law enforcement to the best of our ability to help them arrest you." Claiming that it's a "site for child pornography" is, in my opinion, utterly asinine.
Claiming that 8chan on the whole would also be a "hate group" is also ridiculous, unless you're also going to claim that reddit is a "hate group" - after all, as I also mentioned earlier, both sites allow people to create topical boards/subreddits where people can discuss whatever.
This is exactly kind of mob justice in action that I was talking about - people have convinced themselves that something is evil, and demand that justice be done, preferably swiftly and seemingly based on nothing but their word alone.
@Daiz- I don't care if all or most of 8chan partakes, but it is well documented that these activities do exist on the boards and slip the moderation, either by volume or by parading as barely-legal material that still involves real children's images being traded for the pleasure of pedophiles.
Frankly, I don't give a shit if you think this is "mob justice". A lot of people take a moral stance against it and don't want to be supportive of platforms or groups that enable it, and that isn't a mob that's a group of people standing up for what they believe in. Don't you think every individual has that right? Of course you do, because you're doing it yourself right now.
8chan does not allow illegal content like child pornography and will actively delete it and even ban entire boards for it.
How's that working out for them?
Claiming that 8chan on the whole would also be a "hate group" is also ridiculous
It doesn't particularly matter if you think 8chan or reddit or any other site is properly classified as a hate group. It also doesn't particularly matter how you define "hate group". If your service facilitates those sites, then you will be viewed, correctly and properly, as condoning and even supporting their behavior.
Are pictures of posed fully-clothed children in suggestive positions allowed? It's still exploitation of children, whether or not it is legal. (And whether it IS legal or not completely depends on the country. Something allowed in the Philippines may not be in the U.S., Canada, UK, or Australia, etc.)
There's no "mob justice" involved in saying, "We don't want to be associated with this."
Not to pile on (mob justice, indeed), but earlier on this ticket @whit537 referenced this article regarding 8chan and child porn, which collates quite a bit of evidence that the service is used both for distribution and for directing other folks to images stashed elsewhere:
https://medium.com/@FoldableHuman/the-mods-are-always-asleep-7f750f879fc
@ironfroggy So are you similarly going to condemn reddit as a child porn / harassment website, since you can pretty much guaranteed to find subreddit for similar kinds of icky matters? Would the admins of reddit be kicked off from Gratipay if people complained about it in a similar manner?
@lawduck That article certainly demonstrates a lot of questionable behavior (that could even be illegal in some places around the world). However, it also pretty heavily implies that said questionable behavior would make up the vast majority of the site, which, if you look at the site yourself, is very clearly not actually the case. There's tons of boards, with only a small fraction of them engaging in this particular kind of icky posting. Feel free to look at the board list of 8chan and see for yourself. Again, this is very similar to the case of reddit and subreddits, where you can certainly find all sorts of legally questionable content. It would be nice if someone could bother to address this comparison I feel is pretty relevant already.
re this comment from @mimiheart earlier:
Whether or not they're doing anything illegal seems to not be the issue. There are proper authorities to handle that. It's whether or not Gratipay, in setting up a community based on gratitude, generosity, and love, is helping to enable a community based on hatred, harassment, and exploitation.
I think Gratipay has a fundamental confusion going on here over whether it's a community or a public space. It's extremely common for communities to police their members, and to ostracize people who have violated community rules about behavior, even when no crime's occurred. The idea that "you can be here, even if you harm people elsewhere, as long as you're not harming them here" fits a public space much better than it fits a community. It's a completely reasonable way to run a public space, e.g. a shopping mall, but it's a very, very unusual way to run a community.
I'm sorry to say this, but I think Gratipay's so confused on this fundamental distinction that it's inevitably doomed to failure, and if that failure occurs, there's going to be a day when Gratipay leadership is going to look back on this moment and think, "I probably should have realized there was something wrong with my fundamental assumptions when I welcomed child pornographers into my community of gratitude, generosity, and love."
I think @gilesbowkett hit the nail on the head. Gratipay is not a government entity. It is not a utility. It is not a public space.
It's a company, a platform, and a community. By allowing the platform to be used to fund continued operations of a site such as 8Chan, Gratipay forces the decision onto it's community members about whether they want to continue to partake in the Gratipay platform.
The last time Gratipay had to make a decision about how to create an inclusive, welcoming community a disproportionate number of services that supported groups with a disproportionately low amount of power were harmed.
Compare the following gratipay recipients (Keep in mind accounts starting at different time have different graphs, but all follow the same "cliff" pattern):
- TransH4ck - An organization devoted to encouraging Transfolk lost almost half it's funding in a single week.
- CallbackWomen - A service devoted to helping women get speaker representation at technology conferences lost 40% of their income in the same week.
- AdaDevAcademy - A free school for women to learn computer programming also lost 50% of their income
- TKWidmer - The founding developer of RefugeRestrooms lost 75 of their income.
- Gratipay itself has seen a downward trend in it's income
- Not to mention the dozens of people and organizations who moved off Gratipay to other platforms.
Meanwhile @whit537 has been mostly unaffected, with ~10% varience here and there.
By refusing to take a stance on what kind of behavior the community can fund, Gratipay forces it's community members, some of whom who depend on Gratipay to make ends meet, to decide between paying their rent or staying on a platform that facilitates the financial support and continued operation of a child pornography ring.
@Daiz-
So are you similarly going to condemn reddit as a child porn / harassment website
Yes. They do not take any semblance of a moral stand on anything and they pretend this faux-neutrality is somehow admirable. This disgusts me.
@ironfroggy Seems like we rather fundamentally disagree on this matter, then, but I do respect your consistency on it.
I thought about this some more. This issue to too polarized, and it's bringing out the Ellen Ripley in many and Pontius Pilate in others. There's no more academic discussion to be had. As has been said elsewhere, Patreon and others had the privilege of discussing this in private, and it's clear that Gratipay's public thinking-out-loud is sufficiently radical as to be misunderstood as anything ranging from divergent philosophical thought to complacency in the face of what many perceive as a clear and present danger, a crisis, a perversion that should not be suffered.
Fail closed. +1 suspend infinitechan for now, seek legal counsel and the advice of other payment systems. The Gratipayers assembling this weekend should set aside some time to discuss this heavy topic.
A part of me still believes that Gratipay should defer to legal counsel and law enforcement, but it's clear that law enforcement doesn't move at Internet speed. I don't believe that there is a clear and present danger, because 8chan does have rules that seem to be enforced. There's some really disgusting stuff that goes on there (went on it last night, lots of eyebleach and bile duct cleanser necessary afterward), as it goes on on any site that enables users to submit content.
I normally take a very volunteeristic/libertarian approach to things, and I've tried here to apply that logic here as a Pareto efficiency: "Does this make any of us freer, without making anyone less free?" Or, really, more specifically, "If Gratipay goes a certain way, is anyone's freedom impinged?" But, alas, that logic is only truly necessary for a government legislator.
It is a duty of business to lead government by exceeding legal edicts where the business feels such is appropriate, either by internal compulsion or pressure from its customers. Sometimes the deviation from the legal minimum is just enough to sate that compulsion, sometimes it's far and above, wowing customers and winning them over for life on account of a singular gesture and commitment to do the right thing and make it right when it's not.
I will defend to the death someone's right to say and do things I disagree with - so long as no one is harmed - but that does not stop me thinking poorly of them and convincing others to feel the same, nor does that stop me from preventing them from speaking from my land, nor does it stop me from employing a louder bullhorn to drown their disagreeable message with ones of gratitude, generosity, and love.
I see now that Gratipay the site can take this to heart and act cautiously, minimally failing closed on this issue while counsel is sought. If 8chan et al. want to use Gratipay the open source project, well, good luck with that.
@Daiz-
You asked for people to not tar & feather 8chan without evidence, and you specifically pointed to their obscenity policy as "proving" that bad stuff doesn't happen. I reposted the article that says the obscenity policy is not enforced, and provided examples of people using 8chan for exactly the thing that is "banned." You're now complaining that the article is tarring and feathering 8chan with evidence of a "few bad apples" (if you'll forgive my paraphrasing).
There are an infinite number of "not good enough" responses that you can employ, and I believe that no matter what anyone presents or posts, the evidence will be insufficient to condemn 8chan in your eyes. Similarly, I understand your argument against curation to be that any effort to police users or evaluate consumer complaints about users is doomed because "what is evidence anyway." Skepticism is great - it's an effective tool in any rhetorician's toolbelt, and it is based in scientific principles. However, it doesn't extend to cover the position that you're advocating. Skepticism demands more than mere assertions for proof. In the face of "more than mere assertions," skepticism takes a back seat to more evaluative mechanisms - the process of sifting proof may be skeptical, but having been presented with proof, you don't jump to a complementary but different position and state that the proof is a hasty generalization.
What's great (from my perspective, at least) is that it does not matter at all whether you or I believe or disbelieve that 8chan is a "kiddie porn" site. It does not matter in the slightest whether or not reddit is a hive of scum and villainy or democracy in action. The broader question at issue is whether Gratipay should engage in the admittedly difficult work of limiting its pool of users to those that fit the values of the company. As I said above, assuming that Gratipay actually lives those values, the answer seems blindingly obvious to me.
you specifically pointed to their obscenity policy as "proving" that bad stuff doesn't happen
Err... The fact that they say they remove illegal content and have banned whole boards pretty clearly means that bad stuff does happen, and I never implied otherwise - the page just says that they do in fact deal with bad stuff.
There are an infinite number of "not good enough" responses that you can employ, and I believe that no matter what anyone presents or posts, the evidence will be insufficient to condemn 8chan in your eyes.
This statement is pretty funny considering that the article you linked is basically a "not good enough" response to 8chan's moderation policies, and I would say the very same thing in return - no matter what 8chan did, it likely would never be enough to be considered "good" in the eyes of people who have deemed it evil.
As for myself, I'm always open to changing my mind given convincing arguments, but having read through the linked article, I don't find it to have much of those - it definitely points to some shady (but not necessarily illegal according to the US laws that 8chan operates under) behavior happening in certain parts of the site, and I'm not going to deny that wouldn't be happening. However, I disagree with the article's claims that it would be what 8chan is all about / forms the majority of content on 8chan, as this is very simple to prove wrong with just a quick glance through the board list of the site. As such, I am indeed going to say the article is tarring the whole site based on a few bad apples.
The broader question at issue is whether Gratipay should engage in the admittedly difficult work of limiting its pool of users to those that fit the values of the company. As I said above, assuming that Gratipay actually lives those values, the answer seems blindingly obvious to me.
Well, let's take a look at 8chan's Gratipay page. The profile states:
STATEMENT
I am making the world better by creating an open source imageboard where users can create their own boards, as well as maintaining an installation of this software on free speech friendly hosting at 8chan.co.
I don't really see anything wrong with that in itself. Do you?
Now, people are calling for 8chan to be banned from Gratipay not because of anything in this statement, but on the basis that it is a "child porn site" due to a small minority of users who are (ab)using 8chan's stance on free speech to post some shady/icky (possibly illegal, possibly not) content on the site. Even though 8chan does moderate, delete and ban (illegal) content in this area, because apparently they don't "do enough."
I would say banning 8chan from using Gratipay to be rather unfair to all the other users of the site who have nothing to do with any of the icky matters and just want to support a site they use. I would also say that this situation it itself is a pretty murky matter, not something "blindingly obvious", and as such, if it's enough to ban 8chan from Gratipay, then what else could be banned next? Will you define a clear policy on how many bad apple incidents can happen / what kind of bad apple incidents they can be? What about the fact that the site claims to deal with said bad apples? How will you define insufficient moderation to the point where it qualifies a site for a ban? Or will it just be based on how many people complain about it? Where exactly will the lines be drawn? (Would Gratipay also ban 4chan on the same principles?)
The trouble of drawing those lines is a big reason of why I'm against banning 8chan. If no clear lines are defined, then the policing will be effectively arbitrary. Of course, if you're fine with having an arbitrary policy of "we will ban whatever we don't like", then that's up to you, but if something's going to be forbidden, I'd much prefer the rules for that to the very, very clear so that users don't have live under fear, uncertainty and doubt about breaking them.
"Where do you draw the line?" seems to me the toughest question to answer by those who want controversial users to be banned. The line is simpler for the other side... "let the state decide".
Regardless, it's not an easy issue (I'm a bit split), but @Daiz- makes great points, so to allowing "shady" users.
Now, people are calling for 8chan to be banned from Gratipay not because of anything in this statement, but on the basis that it is a "child porn site" due to a small minority of users
1 user or 1 million users; it matters not. Gratipay is directly funding a site that deals in child porn and other snuff, full stop. This is unconscionable.
What about the fact that the site claims to deal with said bad apples?
The policy is irrelevant. This content persists on the site.
Would Gratipay also ban 4chan on the same principles?
Yes.
@jhersh Gratipay is funding a site that is widely regarded to be insufficiently moderated. Gratipay presumably needs to somehow determine if this is because the site's owners don't really want to moderate it, or whether it's because they're understaffed, and whether, in either case, they should be allowed to get money through the platform.
Personally I think the existence of 8chan makes the Internet worse, because my impression of it is that it used more to be mean to people than it is to be nice to them, regardless of the legalities involved. It recently collected some of the angrier elements off of 4chan, the well-known "Internet hate machine".
Does Gratipay want to restrict itself to only funding things that are, on average, good in their effects? Given the mission and branding, I would think so, and I'm not sure that 8chan qualifies.
I think if Gratipay wants to live up to its mission, it does have to do more moderation than just making sure things being funded aren't illegal. Things being funded on Gratipay should not make the world worse.
Perhaps I was mistaken about Gratipay's mission, I viewed it as a personal tip account for software developers, and I set it up so that people who appreciate my contributions to the vichan (https://github.com/vichan-devel/vichan) and infinity (formerly named "8chan") (https://github.com/ctrlcctrlv/infinity) software packages could donate so that I can keep releasing bug fixes, security fixes and new features.
Some vichan installations that have benefited due to work I have put into this project (namely: multiple image posting, unanimate GIF option, security fixes in $config[debug], ?/config, et cetera): http://pl.vichan.net http://int.vichan.net http://neuschwabenland.org/ http://wizchan.org
If you have a problem with disabled developers who do not fit the common mould of wealthy, white San Francisco elite please come out and say so rather than point out content posted by random internet trolls on 8chan.co as "proof" that the vichan/infinity software packages are evil.
Also, @jhersh, I wonder how a "site that deals in child porn" could even exist on the clearnet given current international law, not to mention US law where we are based. I would direct your attention to the fact that (A) Twitter, a multi-million dollar corporation with far more resources than us has had CP problems http://www.mommyish.com/2013/11/19/twitter-child-porn/ (B) less than 0.001% of posts on 8chan.co the website are made by an administrator (C) our policy pages at https://8chan.co/obscenity.html and https://8chan.co/faq.html and (D) Reddit's struggles with this very same issue, but I doubt you care.
@ctrlcctrlv Are you the dev behind the account in question? What's the relationship between the chan software you develop (which probably is on average a public good) and the particular chan hosting platforms that people are up in arms about?
I'm not going to pretend to be anything but an outsider to Gratipay's community. Keep that in mind with any of my comments.
I think there is a fundamental mistake in arguing about whether Gratipay is curating a service or a community. Gratipay is, in a moral sense if not a strict legal one, a business partner of the people it handles funding for. As long as 8chan as is allowed on Gratipay, you are a business partner with Fredrick Brennan. You need to ask yourself if you want to be a partner to someone who feels that "banning [drawn porn of children] takes away [their] ability to compete". (https://twitter.com/HW_BEAT_THAT/status/547013158116663296) Taking someone who feels that way on as a partner is not a morally weightless decision.
e: Confirmation that I'm AMIB: https://twitter.com/a_man_in_black/status/550132930513608704
@ctrlcctrlv You pretend like the volume of content on sites like 4chan, 8chan, reddit, twitter and the like make these issues inevitable and fail to imagine the idea that if you can't properly moderate deplorable content you are responsible for hosting that you shouldn't be providing that space in the first place because you're obviously unable to do so properly and neither is any other site that cannot deal with or refuses to deal with these issues and pretends the blame is squarely on the users.
@interfect I would say that it is very similar to the relationship between wordpress.org and wordpress.com.
wordpress.org offers the open source WordPress software which people can use to make their own websites on their own servers, while wordpress.com offers an installation of this software that people can use.
Please ban 8chan from Gratipay. Not only are they pretty clearly a hate group, they specifically have attempted to subvert charity and use others' generosity as a weapon of harassment, which is why they are being banned from other, similar sites for collecting funding.
I agree with many other people here that I view enabling morally repulsive people and groups in itself morally repulsive. I urge the gratipay team to not allow these types of people and groups to use gratipay to enable themselves to do further harm upon the world.
Regarding “neutrality” - “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.” - Desmond Tutu
"They have attempted to subvert charity", Really? What a poor accusation. I'm not even upset you accused 8chan and or #Gamergate of something that vile, I'm disappointed in how silly it is to assert. You cannot subvert donating to charity, it is a yes/no event. There is no cause to subvert, merely a yes or a no. You either donate to the charity and assist in what it does, or you do not. Also,the claim that 8chan subverts charity couldn't be possible in the first place considering /gamergate/ is one of 1000+ boards on 8chan. 8chan doesn't have charity drives. Some boards owned by the users do. Many boards disagree with each other, including a lot of people who disagree with #gamergate. That board would be /leftypol/, a board dedicated to communism and leftist ideals.
Most of the charity raising comes through twitter anyway, generally through @Gamingandpandas or @Totalbiscuit. Need I remind you of the 100k #Gamergate has raised for charity? Most notably $16,000 for Pacer anti-bullying. Or how about the $5.5k raised for suicide prevention? All of that came from the hashtag on twitter, not 8chan. 8chan's only role in gamergate is hosting a board where people can discuss it. On to your next point, "If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor." That's a fallacy dressed up to look like poetry. Or in layman's terms: It's propaganda. Here's the better version: "You're either with us, or you are against us, you are either black or you are white."
Finally, the donation to 8chan through gratipay, patreon, or Paypal is either a donation to Frederick Brennan's living expenses, or it is to server costs to keep 8chan up and running. It is not a donation to a hate campaign full of coordination of any kind, it's a donation to a website, full of users that disagree with, and sometimes revile one another. You're not donating to any board, the boards are owned by the users, so you aren't donating to /gamergate/, you're only donating to keep boards online, and to allow users to continue creating and moderating their own boards.You're basically requesting to get Reddit kicked off of Gratipay because their are subreddits you find offensive. 8chan supports the first amendment, and the concept of free speech as an ideal. Everyone who donates to 8chan knows this, it's in the homepage. Removing 8chan from Gratipay because they say things that you find offensive or hurtful is censorship. You cannot twist that. Be aware of that. Some of you will find that a worthy sacrifice, but know that at it's core it is censoring a site for people to voice their opinions, for no other reason then they disagree with you and you don't like it.
@glyph not only you make serious accussations but you don't even bother to back them up. And all you said it's nothing more than lies. There's no injustice here, 8chan is just a website that works under the US law and works hard to delete and report any kind of content that breaks it.
@dsernst so what harm does the board of food and cooking (/ck/) bring? or what about the /argentina/ politic board? the fitness board /fit/? what about the board for amateur game developers /agdg/? tv and movies board /tv/? videogames board /v/? how about the language teaching boards like /spanish/? there's even a geology board in there (/geo/) that is slowly growing. I find it incredibly ill-intentioned and dishonest that you speak about a site without even knowing the content it offers, the micro communities that inhabit it and the good that comes from that site existing.
Gratipay is a site that helps projects and sites nourish to brighter future, and 8chan has infinite ways of making this possible.
@ironfroggy from https://8chan.co/obscenity.html: "Globally, 8chan.co has had an average turn around time of just one hour for deleting obscene images of minors. This is 48 times better than the NCMEC Cyber TipLine, who boasts of removing content in 2 days."
And please, let's not pretend a user that posts CP is blameless, everybody knows that's not true, that's the reason FBI goes after the user and not the website.
8chan operates according to the same legal guidelines as sites such as reddit, 4chan, and indeed almost any online forum and image posting site. It forbids Child porn and assists in the prosecution of those violating laws regarding it in every way possible. A few seconds reading the site's rules reveals this. It however does exist as a bastion of free speech, where the administration does not in any way control or forbid content beyond what they must as per the law.
The consequence of this is that the site hosts many things on user created boards. Christianity discussion (as you've seen), discussion about politics, anime, sports, television, comics, and yes, discussion between admitted (anonymous) pedophiles, images which are not legally child pornography but which most people would find distasteful if viewed with the IDEA that they are pornography in mind; young children in bathing suits, and the like. The boards that host these seem to constitute about 0.01% (1/10000) of the sites activity. /hebe/ (hebephile) is presently sitting at 4 posts per hour, with the top boards /pol/ (politics) at 572 and /v/ (video games) at 639.
The reason you've been told that the site hosts "child porn" is because of the third or fourth most active board at any given time, /gamergate/, a group related to the hashtag gamergate that has been accused by modern feminists, game developers, and video game journalists of harassment, after the hashtag was created to expose collusion, much of it between modern feminists, game developers, and video game journalists. In an effort to destroy the movement, some elements of these groups have sought to defund the site where some of the discussion related to the movement happens. To this end, and to discredit the movement in a way more provable than unsubstantiated claims of harassment; a blogger, Dan Olsen went to /hebe/, downloaded and edited pictures he calls "child porn", then posted them on his blog, with directions on how to find similar unedited pictures, and said that they were the work of his opponents in Gamergate despite /hebe/ and /gamergate/ having no relation other than being hosted on the same servers.
This level of honesty and transparency is what you can expect from those "exposing" 8chan as a bastion of child porn and asking you to refuse your service to them. I ask that you all consider that in making your decision.
Thank you
@glyph That's not only an emotional appeal but a strange one at that, coming from someone who wants to shut down a platform for free speech.
So, Gratipay is where the blackboards are picking up their new inventory. This discussion is morbidly hilarious, in a very disturbing way, considering the context of the situation, and your mission statement. What was it.. 'love gratitud' and something else? Oh man.
You think you arent big enough to moderate your own tiny userbase morally? You dont stand a chance at protecting them from 8chan, once you let them in, hell, it doesnt even matter anymore. I know of at least one woman already ratted and up for sale. Authorities have been notified, but they rarely succeed.
And Im not talking about the gamergate trolls that you may have noticed are flooding this subject now, having posted an 'operation' to dogpile this conversation with what they call an 'operation', that hate campaign, vile and disgusting as it is, is nothing but a joke to the ret of 8 chan.
No, im talking about the truly depraved things from the black boards. Your members are nothing but inventory, and none of it beyond the scouting, which you have exposed your members too, will be done on the site. Which will appear to be little more than oh so polite chatting for info. Hell, only the discussion and barter is mentioned on 8 chan. Once contact is made its off site from even there.
Your members will be ratted. Their private lives in the form of all the files on their computer will be ransacked. Web cams will be activated without knowledge or consent, nude pictures of them from the web camera, sexual acts they have on the computer, pictures of their children (where do you THINK 8chan gets these images) will be bartered traded and sold, along with your users themselves, in the form of selling access to the rat.
This is what now awaits your users, mind you, this is from the group that has been feircly defended on here as well moderated and legal, technically, this is skirting the line of barely legal, and impossible to enforce You could just take my word for it and not click the link, but some may need to see if its true, or just cant believe it. You have been warned, this is a thread about ratting, and they are planning to pull pictures of a victim:
https://8chan.co/i/res/1318.html
8chan will likely swarm now with disingenious efforts to shoot and incrminiate the messenger. But i didnt create this account for github, this will be the only post.
This was simply to give your users, hopefully, enough time to decide if this is something they want to risk, to either leave before this happens to them, or take preventative measures like unplugging/taping over webcams and taking all sensitive materials off of devices with open communications (connected to any form of internet). Somehow I suspect they wont want to deal with the murders not murdering here while laughing like hyenas at the open grave with bloody footprints leading to gratipay to find the next batch.
Good luck.
@ToooLate Did you seriously just make the hackers on steroids argument.
Really?
This is the kind of witchhunting mentality you'll be subjected to if you go forward with this, unverifiable claims that the evil 'anonymous' is going to haxxorz your computer and steal your bank passwords.
You're better than this, I've made a few friends on 8chan and I'd like the opportunity to give back.
One last thing. Rats are not done by hackers, much less 'hackers on steroids', they are dreadfully easy tools for any script kid to find, and require no advanced knowledge to use. Again, ratters are not hackers, they hav no actual skills in this area, nor do they need them.
They just ask for the tool that does it for them.
https://8chan.co/hack/res/471.html
Good luck Gratipay.
So short of someone here being stupid enough to click links sent to them by randoms in emails/DMs you've got nothing and are just fearmongering?
Good to know
Firstly, @ToooLate (now ‘ghost’, the poster two posts above this one) is a troll, for anybody that didn't catch it. He's here solely to stir up trouble and by the looks of it, he has already deleted his account.
8chan is a website that seeks only to provide its users with the freedom to speak. It has gained popularity due to several other social mediums demonstrating censorship of their users in unsettlingly high magnitude and close succession.
I take issue with allegations that 8chan is the home of ‘harassment campaigns’ and ‘doxxing’. I assume these allegations are made in reference to the GamerGate board(s). These boards have rules against both harassment and doxxing and the administration of these boards removes content that violates these rules as quickly as possible.
8chan is not a CP hub. I have unfortunately seen CP posted a couple times, but I and several others always report it and it gets removed.
There isn't any ‘icky stuff’ on /tech/ or /v/. Very rarely on /gamergate/. There's ‘icky stuff’ on /pol/, but much of it is jokes.
You may disagree with some of the users of 8chan. You bear the freedom to do so and we welcome you to enjoy your freedom, but do not try to infringe on ours.
I will say one thing about this. 8chan came to you believing you would be a fair and honorable site to do business with. After the Paetron fiasco involving a bunch of people fearmongering and shouting baseless slander Paetron decided to take the dive and kick off 8chan from the site. The entire point of that site is for Freedom of Speech on the Internet and without any oppression from any overzealous mods. The ability to say or do whatever you want within the confines of the law should be upheld everywhere. But look around the internet. Every forum has mods that have very strict guidelines that regulate their boars to the point of facism. Political boards will ban you for the unpopular opinions you might have instead of letting you have your say and then debating you on it to try to prove that you are wrong for thinking it. They would rather censor you.
Video game Journalism has gotten to the point where its either the select few who are all in bed together who have zero journalism degrees or integrity, or no main stage at all. The majority of video gamers are sadly so impressionable that they are led to believe whatever is given the highest rating so they will go out and buy it, leading to a massive corruption of the entire industry. Lets not forget how its becoming more Cultural Marxist and saying anything against what these people say will have you labeled as a hate monger among other things.
8chan is gaining popularity because the owner of 4chan decided to not have the interests of the users in mind but his own social tight knit group, that is some what apart of that gaming journalism fiasco, where he censored the video game boards. Later he abused the political board to the point where any discussion pertaining to the board was almost impossible.
So instead of having to deal with a website who's admin clearly does not care about its users everyone went to 8chan, where you can say what you want with an admin who isnt power hungry or afraid to speak his mind about any issues. His mission statement was that all boards should not be censored by him and that they are user made. Meaning if a board's owners for some reason or another do not have their users interests at heart, another user can make a board with the identical topic and re-establish. That way we are not forced to stay on boards who we know have corrupt moderation teams that would rather market to you and censor you than develop.
This isnt about which petty board some people dont like, or which board might have questionable content like a pornography board of a politics board that might talk about topics that are sensitive to most in nature or a site that people like to be mean on. This is about the ability to post on a board without fear of corrupt or biased moderation.
The reason im posting this is because 8chan needs support and we would gladly give it to him. The problem is that every time we find something, the group that hates chans and chan culture swoops in like a hate group and does nothing but attack and make smear campains without any evidence to back up any claims on why a site should be devoid of funding.
So I ask you gritipay, to allow 8chan to be apart of this site and to support free speech. Sure you may not like what some people say on that site, but we will support your right to say it on that site to those posters face. That is the kind of users we are. We value freedom above all else and wouldnt want anyone to feel that they cant post on the site. If people disagree with said posts, they will let it known, but that leads to a type of site where at the end of a thread you will have much more valuable input than any focus group ever could have.
This would be a good business move to allow 8chan to be apart of your site. I will be honest, I have never heard of Gritpay before 8chan said that they where moving there but if you support us, we will support you all the way because you will be known as a site that would take us when another wouldnt for no reason at all.
There are too many in this discussion who state their beliefs about the nature of 8chan and claim them to be proofs about the site. You tell us that a man has published an article where he claims to prove that content harmful to minors is allowed to remain on the site yet you provide no proof, only your beliefs that his claim is correct. You go further and state that it is child pornography that is allowed on the site, yet it is only your fervent your belief you give us. We get the claim, repeatedly, but nothing to back it up.
If my understanding of the nature of this process is correct, this is a court of public opinion and some wish to rush to judgement based on what you believe to be true, not what you have seen proven as true.
I can tell you what I believe about the issue, for what it's worth. I believe that very few sites or services on the internet are capable of preventing the introduction of photographs or videos they do not wish to host. I don't see how there can be many places at all on the internet that have never had such material introduced to them. Therefore, I believe that it falls upon these sites and the members thereof to ensure that such material do not remain on the sites.
I think the laws the Government of the United States has put forth in the interests of protecting minors delineating what materials constitute a danger to children are sufficient to identify materials which can cause harm to minors in their creation and dissemination. I believe that the obscenity policy of 8chan, if followed as written, are capable of identifying and eliminating material that is harmful to minors as defined by U.S. law.
I further feel the owner of 8chan as well as the owners and moderators of boards on site do in fact follow their guidelines on obscenity to the letter and do well in eliminating these materials from the site.
This last one I've seen for myself because I've never seen it there. In months of visiting 8chan, I've never seen child pornography on /v/. I've never seen it on /pol/. I've never seen it on /leftypol/ or /cats/. I've never seen it on any board I've randomed while board. I've never looked for child pornography on 8chan and I've never stumbled across any. If I thought the place was a den for this stuff, I wouldn't go there.
There are of course some of you who do not wish to to take my word that 8chan follows their obscenity guidelines over the word of those who they believe when they tell them it doesn't, but here is an area in which you can find some proofs. I don't know much about the structure of an anonymous image board, but i'll not be surprised if reports and bans and deletion of files and closures of boards are logged. While I cannot speak for those with access to those logs, I think it likely that they will be willing to provide these logs so that you can see the actions taken when child pornography is reported, so that you can see the removal of the material and know the work they do keep this stuff off of the site.
Whether you feel US laws is good enough to determine what you should be willing to accept from a member of your community or a customer of your company, however you view yourselves, is up to you. If you determine it doesn't go far enough and wish to set guidelines based on the presence of drawn art, then choose for what you feel is right there.
What I am here to ask you to do is to not rush to decide that 8chan be excluded it based on how you've heard the site handles it child pornography. Ask for proof from board owners in the form of logs. Get specifics from those claiming the site doesn't follow its obscenity policy, without giving anyone the hint of an idea they should go looking for this shit. Do not deny 8chan because of hearsay. Deny 8chan if you have credible accounts they don't do their duty as far as US law goes for illegal material. Deny 8chan because some material they do not consider too obscene is beyond where you see the line. When you consult other sites as you indicated you'd do, Ask them on what basis they made there decision. Ask them if they decided based on US law or a guideline they'd made, and whey they chose that guideline if it was the latter. If it was a question of whether 8chan complied with the law, find out what evidence they had that it didn't, what proof it requested that they did. Just don't do it because someone is truly convinced they are a haven for this crap because of an article they read or what a friend swore to be true and they've passed along here. Don't let yourself be another battleground for some mudslinging on the internet.
If you do that you will lessen yourselves. You'll be denying a whole group of people whom you don't even know the ability to provide support for a man you don't even know and nobody is going to win anything. Nobody can stop anyone from sending Hotwheels money in Paypal or a check in the mail. Don't let this be about a two groups of people who've been flinging shit at each other for the last five months, let it be about what you are willing to accept as a community or company from those who wish to use your service and how far you are willing to go to ensure that accusations of impropriety have merit.
I am in support of 8chan's continuation to use Gratipay in order to continue to provide a website where communities of all shapes and sizes may form and grow.
To push them aside on the account of a few user's actions to post illegal content, is pushing away any website that can have people maliciously post illegal content (practically anywhere).
8chan takes the proper precautions by making rules against illegal content and actively enforcing it with the help from board admins, board volunteers and it's users. Just like any site with moderation would do.
To discount a website because of it's "harassing" speech that's based on nothing more than differing opinions goes beyond immoral on the stance of Gratipay, as anyone can claim harassment when someone disagrees with another. And would the same discussion need to happen to try and stop funds from going to those websites as well?
Which I can say, seeing that your top receiver of funds for the LGBTQQIAAP community, Ms. Lynnmagic, when her statement reads:
"I am making the world better by
Aggressively flushing out misogynists / transphobes / racists"
I and many others can see this as a way to harass anyone who she finds to be any of those things.
The word "Aggressive", and the act of "flushing out" or as it's defined " To frighten someone or something from a concealed place; To drive or force someone into the open." Even though I may not agree with misogynists / transphobes / racists. If those people are not spreading violence, they reserve the right to their own opinion.
I would also like to mention that there has been no Doxxing (releasing of personal information to harass physically) on 8chan and if their had been it would have been met with a post deletion and a ban. If you were to compare this to tumblr users who actively and openly gathered information of one of it's users, CommunismKills, using an extension, statcounter, in order to gain her IP address. An extension that tumblr allows despite the fact that it gives users access to other users IP addresses and their subsequent locations. And with that, they used that resource to find, harass, and make threats against her and her family.
Now if tumblr were to use this service. Would you disallow them from using it because a few users harassed and threatened? Despite their rich culture of artists, writers, and other like-minded people who can express their ideals with one another? The same goes for sites like reddit, livejournal, and anything else that fits.
This is a community, and in this community are users who hold the keys to the town, Fredrick Brennan (Hot Wheels/Founder of 8chan) is only the overseer of all, while the rest of us double checks what Hot Wheels misses. We have a diverse group of communities within this big community ranging from video games, anime, politics (of both sides of the political spectrum), equalism, Christianity, LGBT and pedophilia support, just being whacky, and the list is literally endless. You think of it, and it can become it's own community despite a person's lack of web development or lack of funds to maintain.
I see no malice or intent to harm others here. I do not see a sign that welcomes the posting/linking of illegal content. I see a place anywhere can go and post without being bogged down by registration, where people are not criticized by a name or past posts, but the post that is at hand. Why destroy such a beautiful thing?
tl;dr I support 8chan, won't you allow me and others to continue to support it using this service?
I have serious reservations on this issue. It is clearly a non-trivial issue for Gratipay which is sure to cause complaint regardless of the outcome.
There are a number of persons who believe that moral judgement should guide Gratipay in providing a platform for project funding. I can sympathize with this viewpoint to a degree. However, I think that Gratipay should very carefully and clearly define what it does and does not consider moral outside of the laws that a website must operate under.
I will state my biases up-front: I believe strongly in free-speech; I agree with Steven Pinker in that I think places which allow free speech are critical to the progress of our species. I am an egalitarian having previously considered myself what would be described as a 3rd wave feminist. I am a scientist and advocate evidence-based decision making. I sometimes visit and post on message-boards.
As such, I find some of the content on reddit/4chan/8chan entirely contrary to my worldview. I've found boards obsessed with ridiculous, trivially debunked conspiracy theories, discussion of how rubbish [insert country] is and political opinions that I simply cannot agree with. Whilst I have difficulty understanding the rationale behind posting this kind of content I cannot accept that it should not exist as long as it abides by local laws.
Currently social justice as a concept is taking a beating due to some of the people who claim to be advocates. You will find persons who claim tolerance whilst being intolerant of those who do not completely agree with the very specific group mindset that has been formed by excluding alternative viewpoints. You will routinely encounter the highly divisive "you're either with us or against us" rhetoric claiming that one cannot be neutral. Highly emotive language is employed to put "problematic" persons on the defensive in an attempt to make the complainant's demands appear morally justified. Generalization is routinely used to make those who are critical appear to be part of some amorphous "hate group". Any concession made is seen as an opportunity to drag the person(s) attempting to be reasonable into a never ending complaint list. Free speech in the public sphere is demanded by the complainant with a simultaneously inexplicable expectation of no criticism.
I know that my points may seem rather detached from the discussion at hand but I thought it was important to point out that the aforementioned rhetoric is used widely to shame persons into adopting the beliefs of persons who excel at self-justifying their righteous anger.
As such, all I can hope for is that Gratipay look at and base their final decision upon the available evidence.
Best wishes.
I am a channer who registered to post my opinions on this discussion and also clear up some misconceptions.
1, it is absolutely a lie that 8chan allows child porn on their website or benefits from child porn. They delete dozens of CP spam per day with permabans and it is their most common type of ban. Just look at this. https://8chan.co/meta/src/1420013206291.png Someone previously mentioned that that's not good enough, and the fact that anyone can submit content to 8chan means it facilitates child porn. This person said they also believe Reddit is complicit in facilitating child porn. Well here are some other websites where anyone can make an account and upload content: YouTube, Twitter, Imgur, Facebook. I wonder if you would accuse GitHub of being a child porn hub since commits aren't pre-screened and can have images attached to them.
2, it is a lie to say that Commie subs steals content or revenue from Funimation or Crunchyroll. They take raws from Japan, reencode the videos and add their own translations as subtitles. This takes hours of volunteer work from multiple people who love what they do. Nothing is being stolen from American companies along the way. Fansubbers are the backbone of the foreign anime market and they generate more revenue than they take away, both from American licensors and imports. Crunchyroll themselves started by stealing fansubs and hosting them online before they went legit.
More broadly, I just want to say a message to 8chan's critics. You people speak of love and compassion, against harassment, importance of diversity, making sure everyone feels welcome. Yet it is always you attacking us and trying to chase us out of shared spaces. Instead of being the moral police, why not practice what you preach and reach out to us and show us love. You talk about being good members of our communities yet you always run us our of your communities and call us names. Why not try the Golden Rule for a change. Because how would you feel if you were treated how you treat us? We are easy to dehumanize since we're anonymous, but there is a real person behind that computer screen, not nazis, terrorists, pedophiles or whatever.
Gratipay has the right to host or ban whoever they wish, however I do not think they should remove 8chan and Commie on made-up lies. Critics should have the integrity to be honest about why they want these organizations removed instead of making up falsehoods about child porn and content piracy.
I was brought into attention of this issue by a friend because he heard that GratiPay is one of my consideration for a future project, so this issue could affect me eventually.
I'd like to remind GratiPay administration that they, as a US-based service provider, are protected by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (legally passed through a near-unanimous bipartisan vote) just as much as 8chan administration, or any other service provider administration for that matter. This law states the following:
(1) Treatment of publisher or speaker
No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker any information provided by another information content provider.
(2) Civil liability
No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be held liable on account of—
(A) any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected; or
(B) any action taken to enable or make available to information content providers or others the technical means to restrict access to material described in paragraph (1).
This legislation is backed back the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
I urge GratiPay administration to honor this right for other service providers without discrimination. There's no telling when will GratiPay's turn come where your own protection under §230 may come under risk. If GratiPay decides not to honor §230, I have no choice but to send the EFF a notice to alert them about this problematic decision, as your site no longer offer a safe space where service providers are assured their protection under §230 will be honored.
Dear Gratipay,
Maybe if 8chan was allowed to continue using Gratipay, they could obtain enough funding from their supporters to acquire resources (more users, therefore more mods) to provide better moderator coverage and improve the speed and thoroughness of their CP take-down efforts.
Blocking fundraising efforts mainly harms the site owner, a young programmer trying to make the world a better place for the people he serves, and the majority of the site's users who have nothing to do with any CP or illegal content on the site.
There is no percentage of CP posting or speed of CP removal which is acceptable to knee-jerk moralizers who would define all of 8chan by such a small, unrepresentative portion of its users and user-posted content. These people know full well that every free, popular online community struggles to police CP posting, yet they are posturing as if 8chan has a unique CP problem.
What is unique about 8chan is its acceptance of the burden of policing some of the most offensive user-posted content in existence because they believe free speech is worth the trouble. I can't even imagine the horrible things 8chan mods have to see/verify/remove on a regular basis to provide an invaluable, rare service that few of us are willing or able to provide.
While everyone else sits comfortably behind their overly-broad TOS (most of which throw out all legal adult content along with the illegal stuff), 8chan is trying to do better. They are walking a razor's edge at the absolute extent of what is permissible, legal free speech in a day and age where even relatively free countries like the UK are imposing morality laws to filter adult content at the ISP, and the ability of individual adults to make media choices for themselves is under attack from busy-bodies who cannot tolerate even the idea that anyone be permitted to make different moral choices than they would.
The value of the service 8chan is striving to provide is lost on many people, but that does not change the fact that they are making the world a better place for the group of people they serve in the chan subculture.
Most sites take the easy way out and ban huge swaths of unpopular yet perfectly legal content because everyone else is doing it and organizations rightly hope to avoid the moral panic, threats and bullying. It's no coincidence that the people in this very thread most opposed to 8chan's participation on Gratipay are the same ones threatening to not only abandon Gratipay but speak ill of it, smearing the service to anyone who will listen. These are not the tactics of people who are willing to live and let live, to be truly inclusive and empathetic toward substantive differences in world view. These are the tactics of people who will not be satisfied simply expressing gratitude, generosity, and love to the people and projects they support; these are the bullying tactics of people who are most satisfied when they are depriving the people and projects they despise of gratitude, generosity, and love. These are people working to make the world a worse place for those who are truly "other" to them.
I don't frequent chans much. I was on Patreon to support indie game devs and game writers, but also ended up supporting 8chan and a feminist video maker. I'm now going to support 8chan on Gratipay because they are so wonderfully idealistic about free speech that they are willing to manage the ugly, messy parts of a free-speech-friendly site, not just the cool, fun parts that people romanticize when they are donating to the Electronic Frontier Foundation. 8chan isn't halfassing their commitment to free speech, and I respect the hell out of that.
So I ask Gratipay to please maintain your inclusiveness. We already have a Patreon. Differentiate Gratipay and stand up for the outsiders, the unpopular, the misunderstood and misrepresented, the truly marginalized people and projects who just want to make some small part of the world a better place for some group of people. 8chan is definitely doing that for channers, and more broadly for anyone who NEEDS a place to have conversations that are difficult, if not impossible, for anyone else to host.
Please allow people like me to express our gratitude, generosity, and love according to our own moral frameworks. Trust and cooperate with law enforcement to address any legal issues, leave the moralizing to your users, and stay in the business of doing what Gratipay does best: helping people to support the people and projects they care about.
Some may take their money to other services, but at least you will know they were able to make that decision for themselves, rather than have you take away their choices by developer fiat.
Thank you for your time and consideration,
Kelly Rued (real name, real person, really believes tolerance and inclusiveness are only worthwhile when extended to those you dislike or disagree with)
As a donor to 8chan, I would like to start by qualifying my background. I'm a systems engineer working in a field which requires numerous security clearances. My very living depends upon freedom of speech and the neutrality of the internet, and also upon my associations being clean enough to pass smell tests for incredibly conservative organizations. I am required to submit to periodic audits and have absolutely zero concern regarding them noting my financial support to this organization. I'm also a Jew who, despite piled allegations of Nazism and White supremacy, feels welcome on 8chan, and does not appreciate people using my ethnicity as prop in attempts to shut down a forum for free speech.
The very reason this is being discussed at all is because 8chan is serving its purpose of free speech by harboring political dissent against certain pressure groups who do not wish dissent to be allowed at all. These pressure groups over the past month have been engaged in an all out propaganda war in an attempt to bully this site off the internet, and I find their efforts so repulsive I have volunteered to fully fund this site's costs should all other efforts become closed to this site's proprietors.
Regarding the serious allegations being repeatedly flung against 8chan, I would like to posit the following:
The proprietor of 8chan resides in a nation in which distribution and possession of child pornography are illegal without exception, and which has extradition treaties with the United States. If 8chan truly were facilitating such horrendous behavior, the individuals could have the board administrator arrested, his equipment seized, and neither ever seen again with a few simple reports to the Federal Bureau of Investigation or his local authorities.
The fact it has not happened given the repeated and intensive pressure put upon 8chan by these political groups is indicative of their innocence.
The reality of the matter is 8chan's proprietor, while making every effort to avoid censorship of any material deemed legal, has a militant stance against child pornography. Action is taken swiftly against individual posts, not only to remove the material and ban the offender, but to report the IP address to federal authorities. Boards which are alleged to facilitate such abuse are also reviewed, and if found to be encouraging said behavior, are shut down and their names permanently blacklisted.
I ask that Gratipay not become a tool for political repression. Do not simply take the politically expedient route of using the behavior of a few bad actors as an excuse to give what can only be termed as bullies what they want.
Thank you.
I think we've heard enough of both sides, please refrain from posting additional comments unless you believe that what you want to say hasn't already been said and really needs to be said.
@Changaco good idea. This issue is really just supposed to be internal.
So 8chan has been talking about us:
https://8chan.co/gamergate/res/157609.html#q158537
The SJWs raided first.
We take this information to the public then and make them breathe fire and smoke in the streets and in the hills they live in. Don't relent and don't let them breathe any ounce of fresh air they can spew out into a lie. They did wrong, they are wrong, and nothing they say or do can be right.
Burn the heretics. Don't let them breathe air that belongs to the free.
That's the sort of people we support by supporting 8chan.
So, this ticket has overflowed with people coming from that thread to argue that 8chan doesn't allow child porn. But what about doxing? We already know that GamerGate is a group that will use threats of violence to silence those they disagreee with. They will send a SWAT team to your house. They can get you killed.
Looking around the site, I found a couple things that would definitely be against our community guidelines, when we write them:
There's /dox/ that provides instructions and websites to aid doxing.
There's this thread on /gg/ endorsing doxing and posting multiple records of doxing. This might me a joke thread, but the fact that they can joke about something like this shows how little they care about the privacy and safety of others.
There are undoubtedly more, but this is all I had the time to find.
@seanlinsley
I just made this account because you've just commited a severe error in your post.
I've been with hatechan for a while, from before all the 4chan peeps came.
And the site has some story that you should be aware before posting stuff like that thread on /gg/ you mentioned.
The board /gg/ fell. Hard. To cut a long story short, several people were trying to harm their cause, a 3rd party known as the GNAA. So, in 8chan style, people just made a new board and left the old one. As a partying gift, they ruined and defaced the board (hence, the [trigger warning] and removal of one of the first tenets and original laws of the board: NO DOXXING).
The new board is https://8chan.co/gamergate/ btw.
8chan was always against doxxing. Some of the GNAA once tried shooting the board down by posting doxx, screencapping them and posting them on twitter. Anons found out based on details in the pictures posted. Since that one episode, posting Dox is met with a ban, post deletion and no warning at all. Noone dox's, and the few who did quickly learned to stop. Doxxing doesn't help their cause.
Secondly, you claim 8chan SWATS people. And can get people killed.
The few examples from swatting that I can find were caused by people outside the site, and in months upon months of lurking the site I never saw a thread about swatting someone.
And exactly how can they kill people? That just sounds like you're wielding fear as weapon to scare Gratipay from supporting them.
And please, please, next time you open one of their boards, lurk a bit more to understand the culture.
The /dox/ board isn't for mass doxing and sharing of details online. It's to give users tools.
Some of us have been harassed too, and were able to find the culprit and bring them to proper justice (eg: police) thanks to doxxing. Those tools exist outside the site and are provided by other parties. Telling people about them doesn't mean you endorse doxxing or harassement.
Also, before you think about cutting support to an online comunity of any sort:
This is the kind of think that got Wizardchan down. The owner disappeared (given the nature of the site, suicide is suspected) and after 4 months without payment, the thousands of users that relied on the site for support found a 404 when acessing their comunity.
Instead of censoring/not censoring, talk with Frederic about improving his site and thus, improving the world, like your mission is.
God knows, we could use a couple more moderators around.
@SeanLinsey
I just had to comment because you don't understand the police side of SWATTING anymore. PD's rarely send actual seat teams out anymore let alone kick in your door. The reason? Cops like my stepfather back in Texas have been abused by people being swatted multiple times.
As for the /gg/ thread. The gamergate community hangs out at /gamergate/ because /gg/ was trashed by the admin. People vacated the board because of that very thread. Please learn what you are talking about.
I've been meaning to get on github since I've been programming again, but this thread made me do it. 8chan and previously 4chan is and always will be my home. It's a place where quite literally a family exists that I will defend. Like any family (holy this Christmas with mine was terrible), there can be the black sheeps, but they often get shunned by the good members. The Chan's have been a place where I'm free to ask a question, and expect a challenge without a strict moderation from the admins. ALL illegal content does get reported and removed ASAP. Please don't do this.
It is a complete lie that 8chan/Gamergate SWATs people. Seriously, WTF.
So Chris Kluwe's dox and call for swatting has been taken down? A few minutes on the site, nope, still there (right above someone else's dox, a woman who has committed the insufferable crime of being a feminist.) I don't know (or care) if it's gamergate or not. It IS currently on 8chan and has been for days.
Capitulating to outrage machines is almost never a positive-sum action. I'm reminded of the donglegate debacle where an outrage machine got two people fired, and then a second outrage machine got a third person fired - and none of the three seemed, to my mind, to have done anything sufficiently wrong to even come close to justifying it (note that the first two had apologised, and the third had accepted said apology, before either outrage machine got going).
I'd rather avoid ideological curation on the basis that even the most important ideologies start out as a tiny voice crying in the wilderness; I once did a little research into e.g. the attacks made on feminism in its earliest days, and came away with an impression of "I dislike actions that might risk helping similar attacks on the next social movement that would cause so much good to succeed".
I can't believe anyone is actively trying to destroy an individual's ability to earn a living, especially an wheelchair-bound individual with brittle-bones disease.
HotWheels did nothing more than start an anonymous image board, and perhaps the fact that he respects freedom of speech attracts a minority of people with unpopular ideas, but does that mean he must give up one of his only sources of income? Just because some individuals that use his image board say things that others disagree with?
An individual with the challenges that HotWheels faces has few options when it comes to employment, but he has excelled in one of the few things he can do from his chair.
This is nothing but a witch hunt, by some mob that is frustrated they cannot control the way this man operates his boards, his own creation.
What has become of society, when the bullies & gangs can take over and demand control over EVERY narrative?
HotWheels does not agree with everything everyone posts on his boards, but he does believe in freedom of speech, within legal limits.
Why will they not respect his beliefs in this matter? Why do they think they have the right to crush opposing opinion through force and backdoor treachery?
Thanks to all for joining this conversation, and for by and large keeping it civil. We've decided (IRC) to go ahead and lock the thread for now, for the following reasons:
- Both sides have had a pretty good chance to make their case.
- The longer this goes on the more likely it is to descend into incivility.
- We (the Gratipay team) need time to catch up with the discussion so far.
- We're having our annual in-person Gratipay company retreat this weekend, at which we're planning to carry forward this discussion (we're discussing recording/broadcasting logistics on #123).
While locked, only repo collaborators will be able to post comments.
Note that we're not closing this ticket right now. This is still an open issue and we'll be working on it over the weekend. Thank you.
Printed out 23 pages of comments between reopening and locking this ticket:
I finished a first pass through the comments I printed out. I also skimmed "Safe Conferences are Deliberately Designed" (ref) and "Morality, Legality, and Enforcement" (ref; I slowed down and started reading at, "So now let’s get specific, OK?").
I did finally put tape over my webcam at #118 (comment). :-)
As part of our agenda for the Gratipay company retreat this past weekend, nine of us met in person to discuss this issue, which is not directly about the fate of any given user, but is instead about the meta question of how and how much to curate Gratipay's userbase. Based on our in-person discussion, and the discussion on this ticket leading up to our in-person meeting, here is how we are going to proceed:
We've adopted a new procedure for handling violations of our terms and conditions. Our new procedure calls for private internal investigation of potential violators, taking into account reports from our users and the general public, and working with law enforcement. We will directly notify any user whose account we decide to suspend.
We've reticketed a "report user" button as gratipay/gratipay.com#3060. Until then, please continue to report possible violations of our terms using any of our existing contact methods.
We're going to hire a lawyer to help us better understand our legal obligations around policing user accounts. We'll track this publicly on #122.
Thank you to everyone who weighed in on this issue. Speaking just for myself, I am quite proud that Gratipay's turf is a space where both sides of a highly contentious issue have been able to interact in a more or less civil fashion, however briefly.
8chan has joined Gratipay. See FD1518 (copied below) and also gratipay/gratipay.com#3032. This brings to a head the discussion we started over a year ago about what kind of userbase we want to cultivate.
My inclination is to start curating our userbase more closely. We want users who align with our mission, to enable an economy of gratitude, generosity, and love. However, I'm not going to take any action before we have a conversation on this ticket, and even if a day were enough time (it's not), today is Christmas Eve and I'm offline with my family. I expect tomorrow's payday to include 8chan.
Update: The conclusion of this particular ticket was that we would not start curating our user-base based on alignment with our mission. However, we reversed this decision four months later, removing two users (8chan and weev) through an unfortunately idiosyncratic and non-transparent process. Then, a month after that, we went out of business for unrelated reasons, and as part of bouncing back we implemented a proper team review process.
tl;dr We now carefully curate our user-base.