Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
It seems the choke points on the internet, currently, are (1) companies like Cloudflare that protect sites from DoS attacks, (2) payment processors, and (3) ICANN registration. There are enough hosting companies that KF could have kept hopping around so long as they were a Cloudflare client. I haven’t seen too much controversy around ICANN. But we are seeing weird stuff around payment processors. Some of the conditions placed on porn sites are odd and arbitrary…
https://taibbi.substack.com/p/meet-the-censored-cherie-deville
…as in, not full-stop anti-porn, but byzantine as to the specifics of what is allowed. And PayPal recently had to walk back a company policy where they could confiscate a set amount of money from users engaging in “disinformation”.
Taibbi's treatment of WikiLeaks as a one-off is bizarre, even for the age of the post. I could understand not hearing about AFRCOM, or not putting it in the same category, but Defense Distributed's One Last Bank was old news, and GiveSendGo losing Stripe and Discover was more recent. There's been a handful of other targets for similar deplatforming from finance outside of porn... if almost solely of right-leaning targets.
ICANN directly, no (if only because they don't really televise policy changes); registrars themselves, yes. This is better-known for adult content, but non-porn materials have been booted around a lot -- worse, it's not unheard of for a registrar to take a name from a controversial enough target.
I'd also add hosts as a soft spot: you don't have to use someone like AWS, but you can get locked into them if you made sufficiently bad decisions, and they absolutely will can you, both for [porn reasons] and otherwise. And there's no such thing as a principled webhost, these days: I trust NearlyFreeSpeech enough to use them as a host, but there's reasons I keep a local backup even if I don't think I'm in the category this post is railing against [contrast], and that's because I've seen no small number of places with except-Nazi or except-Racist policies get into really expansive definitions of those terms.
This is more serious and immediate an issue in some sectors than others. Amazon's porn restrictions for its Kindle services are not unusually arbitrary, but they are still pretty arbitrary, and because so much of the market goes through that approach, even many of the few people who can build outside of its domain depend on it's tolerance; there's a handful of authors (cw: nsfw, furry, not an author I'd put on my top ten list) that prioritize Smashwords or similar more-kink-friendly places, but they're very far outliers.
There's a method to the madness: 'sleeping' is usually fantasy non-con or consensual non-con kink (even if a lot of real-world people don't treat it like such within established relationships), 'vampire fantasy' kink to bloodplay and abduction or hypnosis (and thus to non-con), 'alien' is largely about abduction fantasy (again, non-con), too many drops of red dye to a werewolf or gryphon dildo makes it look enough like a dog's genitals.
They're just a bad method, in the same way that the Australian censors trying to eyeball age from breast size is stupid. Not just that the goals range from the laudable to the marginal and back, sometimes within the same focus matter: they're operating on proxies for matters they're unwilling or unable to state outright, that themselves are yet still proxies for other more direct causes they can't even point to. But why would the censors care? They're not the ones that suffer from overaggressive censorship, and neither are the people appointing or paying them. They get a complaint and a front page news article by outraged feminist/moral majority/think-of-the-childreners if they don't go too far!
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link