Garage band EvilWebsite.com is going to appreciate that 5$ way more than the SPLC or whatever.
This isn't to say that the policy is strictly bad, I just worry that it reinforces pretty negative patterns. Carbon offsets barely work, and that's an actual market - bigotry offsets are a dark line to walk.
(edit - misread the policy; it's not about matching cash flows through the service to offending websites, it's donating profits from offending costumers. That seems more consistent to me.)
I guess my sense is that if you actually want to counter this kind of harm, you have to do so on a fundamentally structural level, and the host in question is the structural enabler.
Unless you come up with a court order. They are not the police and are not judges. Let the professionals do their jobs.
Imagine you have a website about Vim and you realize you are paying for the promotion of Emacs.
Its no-frills, functional UI reminds me of the old internet before services and sites began coalescing into bigger, faceless, soulless monoliths. I didn’t know about this policy before today, but now I love them even more.
If you’re looking for a place to host your next project or domain, I can’t recommend them enough!
While I love the aesthetic and mission, I long ago moved away because the UX is just so obtuse and pricing unpredictable.
As NFS say, they're a service for smart people and while I hesitate to call myself smart, whatever neurons I do have are better spent thinking about my family than obscure service offerings.
Could you explain that in a bit more detail ? I used both OVH, Google Cloud and NFS to host small websites. With OVH and Google, even for small things like setting up DNS I’d get lost in a hellish kafkian maze of help pages, wheras the NFS FAQ is the best one I’ve see. I have yet to find an issue it doesn’t cover. Pricing-wise, I’ve found it pretty transparent, and overall, dirt-cheap.
> 2. The recipient organization is as opposite (and hopefully as offensive) as possible to the site operator that funded the donation.
This is vulnerable to "false flag" abuse, from faux-morons.
> 1. The recipient organization does share our values.
This partly mitigates that risk.
Faux-morons can still generate more funds for recipients chosen by the site, and/or hurt the profitability of the site, but at least it's for causes within the values of the site.
I'm not certain, but I read the following part to probably mean that nearlyfreespeech.net donates their own estimated profit from providing service to the morons in question:
> When we find a repugnant site on our service, we mark the account. We receive reports about all payments to such accounts, and we take a portion of that money larger than the amount of estimated profit and we donate it to the best organization we can find.
Someone trying to abuse this policy might have additional reasons to false-flag, but I no longer think that that angle on policy abuse is a significant risk.
Is it? If you just mean explicit "lets go kill <group>" messages, then sure. But, we also have:
- People who think the existence of trans people is harming children
- People who think alternative medical practices like homeopathy is harming people
- People who think vaccines are harming people
- People who think 5G towers are harming people
- People who think discussing methods of suicide is harming people
- People who think abortion is harming people https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/about/faq#BecauseFuckNazisThatsWhy
If only I could be so brave (rather I am a mewling coward who dares not insult the mighty Nazi global hoarde, and certainly not publicly! They might throw me in one of their odious concentration camps!)
I think this is because this is not actually about the words itself. Similarly, everyone agrees that black lives matter[1], but that words imply a certain political alignment that the person you're talking with may not subscribe. Similarly, by saying "fuck nazis" you will get reactions from people who, in principle, don't like literal nazis too, but feel targeted by that sentence anyway.
Sorry for my rambling thoughts.
[1] as in, nobody sane would unironically agree with "black lives don't matter"
1. The recipient organization does share our values. 2. The recipient organization is as opposite (and hopefully as offensive) as possible to the site operator that funded the donation.”
This seems flawed on so many fronts. This is likely just donating money to your own favorite causes. And if they are not causes that you have already vetted, how do you know that organization you found is not worse than the one you’re trying to punish? It would take a good deal of research to figure this out.
What percentage of the values of the organization need to meet your values? Virtually no organization perfectly matches the values for anyone.
Furthermore, who is “our”? Does everyone in your company or organization have the same exact values?
They take profits from a flagged subscriber (loosely defined as one they find "repugnant") and donate it to whatever organization they can find which is most anathemic to the offender.
How so? They're publishing things on their service they disagree with, so they clearly believe in free speech for people they disagree with.
"are clearly against free speech such as ADL and SPLC"
This is not clear to me. The SPLC has never taken any steps to criminalize speech or advocate for government censorship, as far as I can tell. In fact, it is just exercising its own right to free speech when it critiques what it perceives as others' harmful speech. That's the whole point of free speech, you counteract speech you don't like with speech you do like.
Of course, you are also just engaging in free speech when you accuse them of being against free speech, and I also just engage in free speech when I disagree with you, so it's all good :-)
I don't know if the GP is a member of this group but it does read that way.
I've since noticed a number of times that SPLC has aimed their justice cannon at undeserving (imo) individuals. Not saying everything they do is tainted, but I certainly now take everything I see from them with a grain of salt.
Having said that, this has nothing to do with the Southern Poverty Law Center's stance on free speech. Rather, you're pointing out an instance where they made use of their right to free speech to criticise somebody, and now you're making use of your right to free speech to criticise them.
In other words, Jews in other countries have nothing to do with Israel and nobody should harrass them for what Israel's doing... nor harrass them just because they're Jewish (which is sadly still common)
They're absolving themselves of the ethical "bad feels" of hosting content they disagree with.
If you host a Nazi website full of antisemitism, they'll donate to the ADL as a counter.
If you host a white supremacist website, they'll donate to the SPLC.
They're thinking of this as a form of equivalent exchange. If you put bad energy into the universe, they'll take your money and pay the groups that oppose you as a form of balance.
The reason they host these horrible websites is that they believe free speech is more of a moral high ground than turning these customers away.
> Why even bother to piss off users you don't like? For pretending rights?
Free speech is vital. You should defend the speech of people you find abhorrent (racists, Nazis, atheists, gays, whatever), because if the political pendulum swings and the machinery, will, or precedent to censor is present, you'll be the one silenced.
Before the internet, conservatives frequently censored topics they disliked. Atheism, LGBT content, porn, certain political discourse -- pretty much anything that the religiously pious people of the 80's and 90's would detest -- were censored from the airwaves, found unsuitable to publish, and pushed out of the zeitgeist.
From around 2014 to 2024 it was the exact opposite. Questioning liberal policies you got caught by social media dragnets - content was deboosted or removed, people were banned. Questioning the origins of Covid, talking about DEI policies, etc.
And now the pendulum is swinging back again. We're in for more of the same from the other side.
We should stop building tools for censorship and instead enable individuals to control the content they consume. We should be able to individually (or as a group) opt into blocking certain people and content. We should be able to tweak our algorithms. But we should always be immune to having our speech immediately deleted from the internet for going against whatever the current power may be.
Freedom of speech for thee means freedom of speech for me.
And freedom of speech does not mean -- and has never meant -- freedom from consequences. The minute you open your mouth your peers will judge you.
Note, people throwing a hissy fit about having too many or not enough dicks, pronouns, blackface photos of teenagers on the internet is waaaay inside, whereas people advocating for forced deportation is not exactly.
That said, I agree with erring on the side of less censorship, and especially with the desire for having more client-driven filtering capabilities.
But don't pretend to be free speech defenders then siphon money to fight your own customer because it makes you feel better.
It makes me feel like the margins are too high all around to even have such a plan. And judging by prices last time I looked, that's about right.
This is 100% consistent with being a free speech defender. Free speech defenders' position is that speech you don't like should not be fought by censorship, but should instead be fought by speech you do like, which is what what they're funding.
"It makes me feel like the margins are too high all around"
We don't know how the finances work out, for all we know, they take a loss on these accounts when their full effort to handle payment to charities is taken into account.
This is where they are wrong. Not doing something you don’t agree with is not censorship, it’s freedom of expression. Publishing things, even when saying they don’t support them is supporting those opinions with extra steps.
It's both. It's not government censorship, so it's not a free speech issue in the legal sense. But private entities can still censor things, because that is part of their free speech, as you point out. nearlyfreespeech's free speech allows them to either allow or censor other entities' free speech on their platform.
As a matter of principle, nearlyfreespeech does not want to censor other entities' free speech. They explain why here: https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/about/faq#TheLongGame
I don't quite understand what you're saying. Does donating to a charity they support make them not free speech defenders?
>It makes me feel like the margins are too high all around to even have such a plan.
They didn't say they're donating all the revenue. Just a portion of the revenue that's a bit higher than the profit. So if the margin is 5%, then they might donate 6% of the revenue from that customer.
The policy is not so innocent. It's not just good charities they support, it's charities that have a belief opposite your own, if they disagree.
Let's say you were really(and rightly) against pineapple on pizza. And you find a host saying they're OK with anything, have at it. So you make one.
Little do you know, they are taking your money and donating to those pineapple on pizza places.
Yes, it's contrived. Still, in some professions this would be outright illegal. I'm not saying it should be, but that it shouldn't be lauded, either.
I'm for free speech, but please don't say stuff like this, in any context. Nobody said the policy was "innocent," whatever you mean by that. The policy is a device that they use in order to make themselves feel better about facilitating the speech of people they dislike. The policy is not intended to create "innocence."
> they are taking your money
No, they're taking their money.
> Still, in some professions this would be outright illegal.
Which? I can't imagine one.
I'm not sure what you mean by "good charities." They're supporting charities they agree with ("The recipient organization does share our values") to counteract speech that they disagree with. So by definition, these are "good charities" from their point of view.
I love your analogy, even though I disagree with your conclusions. They publish their MMFAM policy right on their website, so you have fair warning that they may be donating a portion of your payment to those pineapple on pizza places, or other places whose views you disagree with.
I'm not saying it's a perfect policy that every company should mimic, but I think many companies may find this model preferable to applying active viewpoint discrimination to the content they host.
What professions are you thinking of?
Pretty much any profession where one has a duty to their client and has or pretends to have the client's best interest at heart - legal, financial, governmental, medical, etc.
You usually wouldn't either because you want the business relationship to continue, but it'd be news to me that your professional duties would extend so far that you'd have to consider how to spend the money you make from that business.
Then they use their own freedom to support speech that counters the shit they find offensive.
To me, it sounded an awful lot like they really want to be paid to host content but are also desperately trying to avoid the negative backlash of hosting it.
To make matters worse, they openly call their paying customers morons.
It would be very hard to take a stance that's worse than this, to be honest.