You don't want to traverse that domain, or?

The article technically does have a TLDR in the second paragraph, though not directly labelled.

Actually, I think if you set your referrer to boardreader.com and reload the page, the host might serve you a summary

this covers the highlights:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44221205

tldr from 2nd para of article:

> To summarize, the FBI pays some shady companies to scrape data, the data is scanned for keywords (yep, just like CARNIVORE). Links and content are then fed into Facebook, organized by topic based on the keywords. Some rudimentary analysis is performed (sentiment analysis at least, but as friendly as Microsoft is with the feds, and as LLMs have gotten popular, the influence of machines has probably expanded) and perused by agents, using some FBI internal interface.

"Extremist" is just a pejorative variant of "radical". I assume they're using it tongue-in-cheek.

When it comes to speech, it's really not hard to imagine positions that would have been controversial at any point in the history of the US. That doesn't mean you can't hold them, but others don't need to agree, and that's how you end up with labels of this sort.

A feature of extremists is that they tend to support one cause over all others. They see no room for compromise or balancing of concerns. A breathing extremist may prioritize breathing over eating food and drinking water which are also important for survival.

While, from an immediacy standpoint, breathing is the higher priority, if you prioritize breathing continuously to the exclusion of drinking and eating, you will have problems on the 3-5 day and 8-21 day horizons.

The courts have held that the rights in the constitution have limits. Generally, anyone operating outside of the limits would be called an extremist when someone disagrees with them.

Aside from the obvious (it is clearly somewhat tongue-in-cheek, especially given the author's sense of humor) the truth is that the U.S. still has some unsettled business regarding what counts as protected speech. The past few decades have seen a lot of debate and legal back-and-forth regarding what to do with lolicon and shotacon illustrations, which FSE also addresses in another linked post[1]. (Not sure if any other remnants of obscenity law still exist: I'm sure they do, they just don't seem to come up very often online.) In any case, it seems like their fediverse server runs on the idea that if it's legally protected speech it should generally be allowed, or at least not disallowed on the basis that it's gross or something like that. Personally, I can get behind the spirit even if I'm not sure I'm in to go along for the ride. I definitely lean in that general direction. (The counter example would be, well, basically every other fediverse instance. They get pretty long on the rules and instance block lists.)

[1]: https://blog.freespeechextremist.com/blog/the-loli-question....

I wish it were so, but the real answer is: because the law doesn't care about your technicalities, they care about what people think/feel, in particular what lawyers and judges think. And lawyers and judges feel that there is a difference between DDOSing a thing offline and politicking your way through the legal system to get a thing taken offline.

Your example misses something.

Assuming that: the use of money in order to achieve a political outcome is an abuse of power that happens to be legal (I agree to a degree).

The equivalent use of DDOS would be to influence the decision making process in a way that leads to the same outcome. And it would have to be a way of operating that is generally accepted and legal in the first place.

That sounds like a non sequitur to the statement you are replying to. What does blocking or disliking someone have to do with fact checking?