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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 19, 2022

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The only silver lining is that sooner or later, the harassment mob will probably run up against breaking an actual law in such a legible way as to fully suffer the consequences in court (I'm not a lawyer, but tortious interference probably fits the bill here).

One of the problems for everyone involved in this trash fire is that these sort of lawsuits are incredibly impractical. There is no federal small claims court, finding an actual bad actor to identify is a mess, and the wheels of justice grind slow and not particularly fine. CDA230 makes that worse because a lot of people the identifiable people can whitewash bad actions of third parties, but there's similar issues for print and paper that CDA230 doesn't cover.

No one's going to successfully bring a lawsuit, here, for the same reasons that the lawsuits aimed at KF were only going to drain coffers rather than actually bring down the site or even harm the actual bad actors rather than the guy hosting and encouraging them. No one's bringing state charges against SWATters on either side, or the people taking photos through rando's windows, and that's part of why this whole mess could get so amazingly bad.

Well, the way I see it, there is probably nothing that can be done unless fundamental internet services are regulated as common carriers.

This reflects a really bad understanding of common carrier rules. Shipping -- one of the classical common carriers -- has already banned firearms parts shipments; the USPS bans the shipment of handguns. For rails, Amtrak prohibits firearms in checked bags from 2001-2009, only accepting them again after congressional action.

Common carrier rules for the purposes of telecommunications are merely that :

It shall be unlawful for any common carrier to make any unjust or unreasonable discrimination in charges, practices, classifications, regulations, facilities, or services for or in connection with like communication service, directly or indirectly, by any means or device, or to make or give any undue or unreasonable preference or advantage to any particular person, class of persons, or locality, or to subject any particular person, class of persons, or locality to any undue or unreasonable prejudice or disadvantage.

If you heard the sound of a vast abyss of judicial interpretation with the words "unjust or unreasonable", you're not wrong. There are few reasonable definitions that couldn't fit KF!

Shipping companies banning firearms parts may be unjust (and I agree), but I think the frustration that Null has is that he keeps getting booted off places for reasons that don't match up with what he's actually done. It would be one thing if these companies would simply be honest and just say "Okay, you know what, we have a new policy that criticizing other people on your website is banned due to the many externalities, that's why we banned them." If they were common carriers, they wouldn't be able to come up with bullshit justifications for booting them off. To analogize this to shipping, it would be like if shipping companies secretly decided to ban firearms, but never published a formal policy stating it, and they enforced their policy by banning people known to sell firearms under vague pretenses like "they assaulted and harassed someone to death" despite there being no evidence for that. It's what Cloudflare said about needing to follow the rule of law, before of course they became dishonest, bent the knee to the harassment mob and rendered their own word worthless.