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White supremacist chatroom Stormfront taken offline

salem said:
I won't miss stormfront, but I can't help but feel a bit of sadness at the rapidly declining demise of the free internet. I guess in hindsight it was always inevitable but lets not for a moment think that such shutdowns will be limited to the 'bad guys'.
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I'm not going to shed too many tears for the demise of freedom here - as far as I understand it, things like publicly advocating genocide and inciting racial hatred were already illegal. Having a forum like Stormfront open to them was emboldening white supremacists and literally getting people killed, I'm glad they have been deprived of legitimacy.
 
Can someone please walk me through how anything on the internet is actually a free speech issue?

I can see many cases where it's clearly not a free speech issue, such as a youtube channel censoring comments, or a web forum banning certain users. My understanding is that not allowing contributions of a certain kind, or not at all, does not equal censorship. Just as the opposite does not equal free speech, simply the permission to contribute on the platform offered by the publisher or owner. (I.e. a newspaper not publishing articles by anyone and everyone who submits one is not censorship either. it would be ludicrous to expect that, and it's not preventing anyone from publishing or stating their beliefs elsewhere)
 
Yossarian said:
I'm not going to shed too many tears for the demise of freedom here - as far as I understand it, things like publicly advocating genocide and inciting racial hatred were already illegal. Having a forum like Stormfront open to them was emboldening white supremacists and literally getting people killed, I'm glad they have been deprived of legitimacy.
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Lots of things that get discussed here are illegal too.
 
salem said:
Lots of things that get discussed here are illegal too.
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There's no equivalence - people on here might engage in hyperbole about stringing up Tory landlords, if they actually started doing it maybe the law would take an interest.

People on sites like Stormfront are advocating the extermination of people from other races, and some of them have actually carried out racist murders.
 
As I understand it the 1st amendment only applies to speech critical of the government. You can't be arrested or otherwise harassed for criticising the government. That's the extent of it. It has no bearing on private individuals or organisations.
 
Yuwipi Woman said:
No, it wasn't shut down by the government. I think they realized that they might have a liability problem if they didn't pull the plug. Soldier of Fortune was pretty much put out of print over a murder for hire ad in their magazine.
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It's not a free speech issue, it's a "no one wants to provide you with a platform for your speech to be heard". They're perfectly entitled to free speech, they're not entitled to be provided with a medium for that speech.
 
Yossarian said:
It was shameful, he used to sign off every post with 88888888, which is Nazi code for "Heil Hitler, Heil Hitler..." and people complained about it, but he passed himself off as a polite lawyerly type and fooled one or two moderators into taking his side when people wanted him banned.

He used to express astonishment at being called a "ladypart" when people called him a cunt, the Nazi cunt.
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Fucking hell, when was this.
 
editor said:
I recall that this site, me personally and a few other urban posters had the dubious honour of being mentioned on that awful site.
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Years ago my wife was involved in some anti fash stuff in Ireland, and their contact details were shared on Stormfront Ireland.
 
Obediah Marsh said:
As I understand it the 1st amendment only applies to speech critical of the government. You can't be arrested or otherwise harassed for criticising the government. That's the extent of it. It has no bearing on private individuals or organisations.
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A quick look at American history since the enactment of the first amendment shows you very much can be harassed or arrested for criticising the government.
 
8den said:
It's not a free speech issue, it's a "no one wants to provide you with a platform for your speech to be heard". They're perfectly entitled to free speech, they're not entitled to be provided with a medium for that speech.
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Where have I said different?
 
Magnus McGinty said:
It had over 100,000 members, if memory serves.
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That may not be active members. I think Urban has a larger membership than that, but I could be wrong.

The overall US murder rate is 5.8 per 100,000. So this one site has nearly 20 times the usual murder rate. Even the murder rate in Chicago, which these people are known to use as a basis for their racism, spiked at 27 murders per 100,000. We still haven't accounted for the number of church burnings, robberies, etc. connected with them.
 
Yuwipi Woman said:
That may not be active members. I think Urban has a larger membership than that, but I could be wrong.

The overall US murder rate is 5.8 per 100,000. So this one site has nearly 20 times the usual murder rate. Even the murder rate in Chicago, which these people are known to use as a basis for their racism, spiked at 27 murders per 100,000. We still haven't accounted for the number of church burnings, robberies, etc. connected with them.
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Is that annually? The Stormfront murders aren't 100 annually.
 
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