Luigi Mangione’s Account Renamed on Stack Overflow
Evan Carroll (via Hacker News):
On Stack Exchange, all of the contributions on the site are contributed under a license maintained by a third party called Creative Commons; Creative Commons provides a license which states that licensed content must be perpetually shareable for any purpose including modification and by anyone including for-profit ventures, so long as the work remains properly attributed. This incentivizes content creation because every contributor is working on a corpus of work which is free from royalties and modification restrictions: everyone is bettering and growing the commons by using the site.
[…]
Alas, this minimal obligation of attribution is too much for some companies which have sought to erode this right. Right now, on Stack Overflow, Luigi Magione’s account has been renamed. Despite having fruitfully contributed to the network he is stripped of his name and his account is now known as “user4616250“. As reported by one of the moderators, Zoe, on Stack Overflow.
Mangione has not actually been convicted of anything yet. Reddit, Facebook, and Instagram have deleted his accounts, but “the only one that chose to both erase him and keep the content, is Stack Exchange.” It’s not clear whether that’s legal.
The Ross Ulbricht case is even more egregious because he was convicted and his old pseudonym remains with his attribution as Ulbricht desired.
Previously:
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I mean he hasn’t been convicted but he shot a guy in the back in broad daylight and there is video footage. Whether a site wants to take down the posts prior to conviction is up to them IMO. I don’t know why they would erase his username and keep the posts though. His contributions on the site don’t look like they are so insightful that they are worth keeping.
How could it be legal?
a/ he's innocent until proven guilty.
b/ being guilty does not invalidate his copyright.
It probably isn’t legal but I can’t imagine there being any significant penalty. What are his damages? He’s got 4 answers and 6 questions. Nothing really significant in his posts tbh. Not sure what Evan is talking about when he says “ Despite having fruitfully contributed to the network”
If they don’t want his name on there they should just take all his posts down, as it’s a distraction. I think Luigi has got bigger problems to worry about though.
It's not just about him specifically it's about the principal generally. Old Unix Geek is right.
We can't just un-person people. This is the entire point of due process and an open legal system. So the government can't just disappear people.
Now it's not even the government that has to do it, the private corporations we've given our lives over to can just do it for them.
It's like how privately owned platforms neatly sidestep the issue of actual free speech. No one owns their own identity anymore, and their card can be quite literally pulled.
Personally I find it rather hilarious that so many of the people who have been cheering on various tech companies efforts to suppress things they disagree with are now clutching their pearls about this murderous idiot getting their accounts deleted or masked. I’d have more sympathy if I had seen them defending others from being deplatformed, but I haven’t seen it. At least not by many people, and the ones that do tend to get attacked by people who are supposedly on their side.
@gildarts Do you mean a lot of these people supported Trump being banned from Twitter because he posted stuff they didn’t agree with?
This guy has a few basic questions about SpriteKit on Stackoverflow and some pretty uninteresting “answers.” I mean sure I agree with everyone…that they shouldn’t keep the posts while changing his name. I say either take it all down or keep it as is. But it is pretty small potatoes…
“So many of the people who have been cheering on various tech companies’ efforts to suppress things they disagree with are now clutching their pearls.”
I think Twitter has every right to not publish somebody’s content on its platform if it doesn’t want to, and the same applies here. So, I’m not overly concerned about either of these situations. ‘Innocent until proven guilty’ is for the courts, not for you, me, or private companies. They have no obligation to keep someone’s content published, and depending on the situation, I also don’t see an ethical or moral issue with unpublishing somebody’s content.
It’s pretty obvious that Mangione killed that guy, and if Facebook doesn’t want to publish the words of somebody who is most likely a murderer, they’re not obligated to. Independently of whether they have any obligation, I also don’t see a moral or ethical issue with removing that content.
But I will say this:
1. There’s a difference between not wanting to publish somebody’s words because you don’t want them on your platform, and publishing them but then taking away the attribution.
2. There’s a difference between not publicly publishing somebody’s content, and deleting their account. You can log in to third-party services using your Facebook account. Taking that away doesn’t just mean that your content on Facebook disappears—it also means that you lose access to these third-party services. This goes way beyond just ‘we don’t want to offer a public platform to this person,’ and it is, in my opinion, messed up. The same applies to Twitter: I have no idea if Twitter SSO stopped working for suspended accounts, but if it did, that’s also messed up. The fallout of deleting an account will be even more devastating if other companies, like Google, start doing this, so I’d rather we didn’t even begin.
3. People are allowed to make nuanced ethical arguments. ‘People were fine with Twitter not publishing some content, and they’re not fine with this’ is not a compelling argument because you’re not addressing the reason why they might feel differently about the two situations.
