Section 230, Voat's shutdown and the future of internet free speech. (Voat)

submitted ago by NorthSeaPagan

I suspect that Voat is being shut down to protect the admins and moderators from legal action if (and really when) Section 230 is revoked, Section 230 gives legal immunity to site admins for posts their users make (death threats, calls to violence, doxxing, child porn, etc.) and if Section 230 was revoked (and it most likely will be) this legal immunity which gives sites like Voat, Stormfront, 4chan and Kiwifarms and other "controversial" sites which are either White Nationalist in "tone" and/or allow for freedom of speech the ability to exist would go away. I suspect the site admins and moderators were worried about facing possible legal consequences for Voat users posts/comments and especially our (possible) actions, if any one of us were to "do a terror" the site's admins could very well face serious legal issues and be sued, or worse, imprisoned. Other free speech sites, including Kiwifarms have already stated that they will shut down if Section 230 is removed due to legal issues the site would face. I worry that it won't matter if we find a new site to migrate too if Section 230 is revoked because it's very likely that site would start facing legal issues as soon as it grew and it's presence became known as well. The internet was "interesting" while it lasted and some sites like Voat have been a lot of fun, but it seems the age of internet freedom of speech is coming to a close and that only sites which support the MSM's positions, big tech sites (Amazon, Google, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc.), controlled opposition sites (although those will probably be phased out eventually too) and porn sites will be left.

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RiverWind ago

Aether doesn't "download stuff", it only updates the index of what text has been posted on the Aether blockchain. There is a good discussion here:

https://getaether.net/docs/faq/how_private_is_aether/

"How does privacy in Aether work?

The privacy that Aether offers is statistical: when you post something, after it leaves your computer, it floods the network, everyone gets a copy of it from somebody that’s not necessarily you. As a result, no one knows which node posted it first. So posts have no IP addresses associated with them.

This means two things. First, the more people Aether has, the more private it becomes. The second is, if someone really wanted to find you, they would insert a lot of dummy nodes into the network, and start to listen. Some of those nodes would receive content earlier than others. With enough nodes and enough time listening, they can close in on the node that has posted it, bit by bit, and then end up in front of your house.6

Aether could make it so that this is much less likely. (That said, even Tor has a form of this problem.) However, this would make the user experience worse (in terms of latency, development velocity, or user-facing complexity), and it would not improve the privacy of the average user, only those that fall into the edge cases.

This feature might eventually come, in the form of onion routing. However, this is not a priority, since it does not improve the total ‘deal’ the average user gets."