The only basis on which these emails should be judged is on whether
they're spam or malware.
It is always within the purview of private companies to put whatever
parameters they want around who they do business with. Sometimes the
risk/reward incentives just aren't there. But being an internet
infrastructure supplier and subjecting your clients' content to your own
subjective moral values is highly problematic.
At the risk of talking my own book, (I did write an entire book on this)
what I said specifically around mailer services and citing Mailchimps
banning of "anti-vaxxer" content was this:
/"What you or I believe about vaccinations is immaterial. In my
mind, it is indefensible for an infrastructure provider to make any
subjective opinion about the content of its downstream, paying
customers. The only thing an email service should concern itself
with is whether the recipient list is clean, that their user is not
spamming anybody, and that the content being sent is virus free.
That’s it. //
/
/What’s in the messages shouldn’t be anybody’s business other than
the sender and the recipients, those people who have actually
opted-in to the list. //
/
/Alas, increasingly this is not the world we live in. Service
providers seem to think it’s ok to increasingly moderate the content
of their customers, and all this looks to get worse before it gets
better."/
The reason why this is a problem is because the linear extrapolations
of this practice at the extreme become dystopian:
/the problem with cancel culture is that Irredeemable Miscreants
also buy MacBook Pro laptops, they may drive to Irredeemable
Miscreant rallies in Teslas and eat vegan soy patties. The only way
to truly guarantee the sterility of all interactions would be
through the enactment of a top-down command-and-control society in
which nobody can do anything until everybody involved can prove
their moral purity. It quickly becomes dystopian, which is why even
a hypothetical impulse toward this “ideal” should be resisted on all
fronts. //
/
/There are far scarier things in the culture wars of today than
Irredeemable Miscreants. Whoever those may be, they are almost
certainly a minuscule rabble of dysfunctional fringe types who would
be completely irrelevant if it weren’t for the incessant din of
hysterics shrieking about how awful they are. There is only one
magic bullet that is guaranteed to kill a truly irredeemable idea,
and that is disinterest./
We've seen this already in recent times as people get hounded out of
restaurants or having their careers destroyed for having voted the wrong
way, liking the wrong tweet or being associated with the wrong political
belief. All of this impetus toward content moderation should really be
called for what it is: thought moderation. If you want to moderate
content, you want to moderate thinking.
/"No man, no group and no nation has the right to any man’s
individual freedom. No matter how pure the motive, how great the
emergency, how high the principle, such action is nothing but
tyranny. It is never justified. The question is: are we able to face
the consequences of democracy?"/
/-- John Parsons, Freedom is a Double-Edged Sword./
- mark
On 2020-12-22 12:24 PM, Mark Fletcher via mailop wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 21, 2020 at 9:53 PM Rob McEwen via mailop
> <mailop@mailop.org <mailto:mailop@mailop.org>> wrote:
>
>
> The moment "spam" gets away from "consent" and goes into "content"
> (specifically *legal* content) - there are enormous problems -
> because
> it then becomes one person's often very subjective opinion - against
> another' subjective opinion - about the content. So I 100% strongly
> disagree with this opinion that Sendgrid should be the political
> "thought police" for LEGAL content that is sent from their platform.
>
>
> I've never understood this line of thinking. Sendgrid is not the
> government. It's a company. If you disagree with whatever choices they
> make about how they run their company, you can go somewhere else.
>
> Mark
> (whose service most definitely does not allow some types of legal content)
>
> _______________________________________________
> mailop mailing list
> mailop@mailop.org
> https://list.mailop.org/listinfo/mailop
--
Mark E. Jeftovic <mar...@easydns.com>
Co-founder & CEO, easyDNS Technologies Inc.
AxisOfEasy.com <https://AxisOfEasy.com> - /For full coverage of a world
gone full cyberpunk.../
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