> If they choose to support the PKK, which the EU, UK, and US have all deemed a terrorist organization for over 20 years, then of course the US should sanction them and they have no moral ground to stand on.
No moral ground to stand on? Would you say that about Amazon who supports the US regime, which is in the business of bombing Iranian schoolgirls? Is that less terrorist?
This collective of course has much more of a moral ground to stand on than indeed Amazon.
> Would you say that about Amazon who supports the US regime, which is in the business of bombing Iranian schoolgirls? Is that less terrorist?
Strictly speaking, unintended collateral damage of civilians in a war does not fulfill the definition of terrorism. The attack on Iranian school was to the best of my knowledge a mistake stemming from old intel. Terrorism is deliberate attack on civilians to achieve a political goal.
>The attack on Iranian school was to the best of my knowledge a mistake stemming from old intel.
Bloomberg piece on this topic:
>An Analyst’s Missed Remark Surfaced in Deadly Iran School Strike Probe
>An analyst's missed remarks and US intelligence systems that weren’t connected to one another are among the missteps that investigators have surfaced while probing the cause of a missile strike on an Iranian school that killed an estimated 120 children, people familiar with the matter said.
>Years before the US attacked Iran at the end of February, an intelligence analyst examining information about potential future strike targets in Iran noticed changes at a site the US had previously characterized as a naval facility belonging to the elite wing of the Iranian military in Minab city in the southeast of the country. It was, in fact, now an elementary school.
>The analyst remarked on changes at the site in a digital intelligence tool, but that tool wasn’t linked up to the official intelligence database that the US uses to develop strike targets and the information was never conveyed to military commanders, according to people familiar with the matter who declined to be named discussing sensitive matters.
Strictly speaking, no. If you're going to play semantics, you first need to define how "unintended" is "unintended". If I drive down the highway at 200mph and get someone killed, is this unintentional? Now what if I do so in a crowded street? If I'm sending a missile at a country, how much effort do I need to put into research to be able to say it was "collateral" damage? If I aim them completely randomly, then what's the verdict?
If you're going to go down the semantics route, every word needs proper inspection. You're focusing on only one of them, "terrorism".
Luckily though, we don't need to; the US does more than enough intentional extrajudicial executions of civilians on its own. Even just considering one particular area where it does them, and then only the ones we know about, we're at about 227 civilian executions in just the last few years [0].
I think that when you’re bombing thousands of targets, a 0.1-1% targeting error rate leads to dozens of unintended collateral hits (and thousands of civilians dead) — and is among the many reasons wars are horrific.
>And even if they were that doesn't mean the US shouldn't sanction them for supporting terrorism.
careful, if you start going after neutral infrastructure providers, that means google, amazon, microsoft, meta, and more will also need to go. i guarantee more terrorism-related content is discussed via those providers than a/i.
we should probably also go after internet service providers, too. maybe the companies that make the fiber optics?
(has anyone checked who is providing terrorists with electricity?)
All the providers you mention here work with the US government in situations where their platforms are being used by terrorist organizations. It sounds like the a/i folks are specifically offering free services to a militant group, so that's why they're being sanctioned. I don't think your argument flies.
My point is, most people are looking for strategies that actually make sense. Shutting down Google to stop terrorism, even when Google is already cooperating with the US government, makes no sense.
They aren't specifically supporting terrorism, and in fact are cooperating with the US to stop terrorist groups. This isn't an ends justifies the means situation, as I was trying to illustrate with the oxygen/atmosphere metaphor.
>To be explicitly clear, a "neutral infrastructure provider" does not describe A/I so your scenario is hypothetical.
i am replying specifically to your comments about neutral providers (that's why i quoted the part of your comment that i did)
>No, because they actively respond to removal request.
there is still orders of magnitude more conversations going through the providers i mentioned, related to terrorism/csam/etc., which is simply not reported or not known. right now, meta is facilitating significantly more terrorism than a/i.
in any case, this isn't really about terrorism. they've just overused the child-safety angle lately, and needed to drum up some anti-privacy/anti-encryption using the terrorism card.
>So no one knows about these conversations but you know there are orders of magnitude more? Walk me through that.
sure. whatsapp is used by literal billions of people. add in a few more billion people through facebook, instagram, gmail, outlook, amazon.
would you like me to walk through the statistics calculations? or can you extrapolate from the billions of users? now make a guess how many people a/i has facilitated. a few thousand? a hundred thousand?
>Even if that were true how would that change anything? They still comply with the US government and their mission statement isn't to empower, protect, support political extremists.
because it demonstrates that the goal is not to curtail terrorism.
Wait, is this the right analysis? WhatsApp doesn't enter into any kind of agreement with organizations using it about their political alignment or objectives. The allegation (I have no idea how valid it is) is that A/I does.
upthread, nonethewiser said "They aren't some neutral infrastructure provider. __And even if they were that doesn't mean the US shouldn't sanction them for supporting terrorism.__"
emphasis mine. my assertion is that whatsapp, a neutral provider, facilitates more terrorists than a/i. i.e., the US should consider sanctioning them, if we are to follow nonethewiser's recommendation.
(to be clear, i'm on the pro-privacy, pro-encryption side, and don't actually think the US should be sanctioning whatsapp)
Right, I get that. I'm also not taking a position on this (in particular, the PKK seems like a Europe problem, not a US problem, and if Europe doesn't care I don't see why we should.)
But the analysis isn't based on "which service enables more terrorists". By that logic, forget WhatsApp, forget Signal; Google Mail probably runs the table in absolute numbers. But all three of those services assist terrorists without any deliberation or really even actual knowledge on the part of the providers.
from this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49479169 on, i was talking about the neutral providers and the claim that neutral providers should also be subject to sanctions.
>without any deliberation or really even actual knowledge on the part of the providers.
i think we agree that this is an implicit requirement of being considered a neutral provider.
so, to claim neutral providers should be subject to sanctions implies that a provider who does not know or purposefully facilitate terrorists should still be subject to sanctions (gmail, whatsapp, signal, amazon, etc.)
then we got sidetracked by me being asked how can i possibly know that meta/google/etc. facilitate more terrorists than a/i. which i, and seemingly you, agree is a pretty obvious answer given the scale of the organizations. and i was asked to "walk them through that".
i would agree there as long as the providers are actually neutral they should be free from culpability. we shouldn't encourage providers to restrict who they serve because of potential liability, that's giving them way to much power.
Isn't forcing a provider to do business with everyone who asks just as bad? You're saying noblogs should be compelled to host nazi blogs. (Actual Nazis, not a euphemism. People who want Jews to be gassed.) You're also saying wedding cake bakers should be compelled to bake cakes for gay weddings.
A service can't be refused for reasons like religion or race, a power company cannot refuse to serve a customer because they're black or Muslim. If a company is acting as a platform or provider they should serve customers regardless of their views and this should give them protection for being liable for their customers actions.
Do you think providers should be allowed to refuse service because they don't like certain customers views?
It's a good question. If someone comes on my forum and posts "I strongly believe that all Jews should be immediately gassed" am I allowed to ban him or am I obligated to provide equal service?
> (has anyone checked who is providing terrorists with electricity?)
Or for that matter, where they get their air?! Oh gosh golly darn, gee, if Earth is providing air to those commie bastards…
I may not agree with their political views, but to say that the tool is the problem is equivalent to saying guns kill people instead of people that use guns. The problem isn’t the tool or their point of view, or then even speaking about it - the problem comes from humans not controlling themselves. Any actor taking any adverse or malicious action inspired by words or ideas isn’t the fault of the ideator or author, but of the actor failing in self control.
did you read the part where nonethewiser said "And even if they were [neutral] that doesn't mean the US shouldn't
sanction them for supporting terrorism."?
the double-negative might be confusing, so we can reword it to: "And even if they were neutral, the US should sanction them for supporting terrorism"
Did they? There's a lot of implication with that "if", and I saw someone else point out (albeit rudely) that anything that may have supported them was taken down.
we should be careful not to assume that the eu, uk and us set a good moral standard to follow.
you might ask who is right; the groups like google providing services to the us military, or the groups providing services to those opposing the us military.
> If they choose to support the PKK, which the EU, UK, and US
But they are not choosing to support the PKK.
They accuse it of being “a major far-left tech collective whose services are used by the most active and violent Antifa cells in the United States and across the world.”
The far left is a terrorist group? Where are all these violent "antifa cells"?
They labeled this groups as a terrorist organization so they could claim that anyone protesting the fascist Trump regime will easily be labeled terrorists and thrown in jail without a trial.
Yes, we are talking about a communications service, one specifically focusing on political speech.
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
Email, chat, websites, blogs - these are all speech! A/I's overt political statement (that you are indicting them for) points to their primary interest being to facilitate political speech - a type of speech with some of the strongest protections (that whole "assemble ... and petition the Government" thing)
Beyond that, they're presumably a neutral conduit like every other service provider. If some users of their services are communicating to coordinate crimes, then unless A/I is getting directly involved in those conversations (with the government producing hard evidence of this), it's the exact same dynamic as every other email/hosting provider.
There is a law (18 U.S.C. § 2339B) that says you cant knowingly provide material support for designated foreign terrorist organizations. A law firm wanted to provide financial support and legal services to some, including the PKK (the same group A/I was accused of helping). They argued the federal law violated their first amendment rights.
The court concludes that the first amendment doesn't protect your ability to provide material support including services and communication equipment and the law still stands today.
US courts have made many decisions that go against the US Constitution. This is an example. Notice the US Constitution says Congress cannot do that, period. And it doesn't limit that only to laws concerning US citizens, differently from other articles and amendments that explicitly say this is for citizens only, and that for non-citizens. And yet, the many SCOTUS incarnations look at that and go "naaah!" because reasons.
That's why the US Constitution Americans know is a few pages long, while the one actual US judges, lawyers etc. use is a massive 3,000 pages long volume. That's what it takes to rhetorically weasel oneself away from most of what those few initial pages do say.
I didn't claim that there was no basis in the legal system for these draconian actions. Clearly there must be, or they wouldn't be happening, right? Positive arguments rooted in what is aren't terribly compelling when the government has gone off the rails (unfortunately).
From a normative what ought perspective, a rationalization from an institution that has been slowly chipping away at our Constitutional rights is not particularly compelling. "Bad facts make bad law" is a saying for a reason. You're certainly not the first to casually disregard the freedom of speech!
So make no mistake, this action here is still fundamentally about speech - regardless of the routine legal hack of focusing on the concrete embodiment of said speech to sidestep a restriction on policing the speech itself. A/I is providing a platform for speech to these other groups, which seems eminently reasonable to me. Accepting the government's arguments here would imply accepting that it's also illegal to read what a terrorist group has written, as you would be giving them "material support" by helping their writings reach you by transiting your network and processing them with your computing device.
Which is why I said "weak men create hard times". It is difficult work to look at people you disagree with and acknowledge they too have rights, especially in the face of the powerful pushing rationalizations otherwise. But it's necessary work, lest the next time political winds shift you find yourself staring down the business ends of same exact pointy sticks that you had been cheering on.
> If they choose to support the PKK, which the EU, UK, and US have all deemed a terrorist organization for over 20 years, then of course the US should sanction them and they have no moral ground to stand on.
No moral ground to stand on? Would you say that about Amazon who supports the US regime, which is in the business of bombing Iranian schoolgirls? Is that less terrorist?
This collective of course has much more of a moral ground to stand on than indeed Amazon.
> Would you say that about Amazon who supports the US regime, which is in the business of bombing Iranian schoolgirls? Is that less terrorist?
Strictly speaking, unintended collateral damage of civilians in a war does not fulfill the definition of terrorism. The attack on Iranian school was to the best of my knowledge a mistake stemming from old intel. Terrorism is deliberate attack on civilians to achieve a political goal.
>The attack on Iranian school was to the best of my knowledge a mistake stemming from old intel.
Bloomberg piece on this topic:
>An Analyst’s Missed Remark Surfaced in Deadly Iran School Strike Probe
>An analyst's missed remarks and US intelligence systems that weren’t connected to one another are among the missteps that investigators have surfaced while probing the cause of a missile strike on an Iranian school that killed an estimated 120 children, people familiar with the matter said.
>Years before the US attacked Iran at the end of February, an intelligence analyst examining information about potential future strike targets in Iran noticed changes at a site the US had previously characterized as a naval facility belonging to the elite wing of the Iranian military in Minab city in the southeast of the country. It was, in fact, now an elementary school.
>The analyst remarked on changes at the site in a digital intelligence tool, but that tool wasn’t linked up to the official intelligence database that the US uses to develop strike targets and the information was never conveyed to military commanders, according to people familiar with the matter who declined to be named discussing sensitive matters.
https://archive.is/LNMMf
Strictly speaking, no. If you're going to play semantics, you first need to define how "unintended" is "unintended". If I drive down the highway at 200mph and get someone killed, is this unintentional? Now what if I do so in a crowded street? If I'm sending a missile at a country, how much effort do I need to put into research to be able to say it was "collateral" damage? If I aim them completely randomly, then what's the verdict?
If you're going to go down the semantics route, every word needs proper inspection. You're focusing on only one of them, "terrorism".
Luckily though, we don't need to; the US does more than enough intentional extrajudicial executions of civilians on its own. Even just considering one particular area where it does them, and then only the ones we know about, we're at about 227 civilian executions in just the last few years [0].
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/10/29/us/us-caribbe...
Oh okay, how about the deliberate attacks on civilian infrastructure?
I love how governments (in the west) are absolutely incapable of campaigns of terror.
What about intended collateral damage?
I don’t think it was intended.
I think that when you’re bombing thousands of targets, a 0.1-1% targeting error rate leads to dozens of unintended collateral hits (and thousands of civilians dead) — and is among the many reasons wars are horrific.
What if someone tells you it's an elementary school and you ignore them?
They hit the correct target. It's that although they could have, they didn’t check to see if it was a school first.
They did — in the targeting database which wasn’t correctly updated with the new analysis.
That’s exactly the sort of bureaucratic mistake which gets exposed via wartime mishaps.
> The attack on Iranian school was to the best of my knowledge a mistake stemming from old intel.
A mistake in a completely unjust war.
And what about the fishing boats we are bombing in the Caribbean and the Pacific? Not even the pretense of a legitimate war in that situation.
[flagged]
>And even if they were that doesn't mean the US shouldn't sanction them for supporting terrorism.
careful, if you start going after neutral infrastructure providers, that means google, amazon, microsoft, meta, and more will also need to go. i guarantee more terrorism-related content is discussed via those providers than a/i.
we should probably also go after internet service providers, too. maybe the companies that make the fiber optics?
(has anyone checked who is providing terrorists with electricity?)
All the providers you mention here work with the US government in situations where their platforms are being used by terrorist organizations. It sounds like the a/i folks are specifically offering free services to a militant group, so that's why they're being sanctioned. I don't think your argument flies.
if the argument is harm reduction and reducing the overall incidence of terrorism, my argument flies.
Removing all the oxygen from our atmosphere would kill 100% of terrorists, that's a good strategy too right?
indeed, that would be a very effective way to reduce terrorism to 0.
My point is, most people are looking for strategies that actually make sense. Shutting down Google to stop terrorism, even when Google is already cooperating with the US government, makes no sense.
And if the terrorist group that provides the impetus for the sanction is practically nonexistent, it's entirely sensical?
They aren't specifically supporting terrorism, and in fact are cooperating with the US to stop terrorist groups. This isn't an ends justifies the means situation, as I was trying to illustrate with the oxygen/atmosphere metaphor.
[flagged]
To be explicitly clear, a "neutral infrastructure provider" does not describe A/I so your scenario is hypothetical.
>careful, if you start going after neutral infrastructure providers, that means google, amazon, microsoft, meta, and more will also need to go.
No, because they actively respond to removal request. Open by default, supporting request for removal.
The difference comes in when you are open by default and tell the US to fuck off when they ask you to stop supporting terror groups.
>To be explicitly clear, a "neutral infrastructure provider" does not describe A/I so your scenario is hypothetical.
i am replying specifically to your comments about neutral providers (that's why i quoted the part of your comment that i did)
>No, because they actively respond to removal request.
there is still orders of magnitude more conversations going through the providers i mentioned, related to terrorism/csam/etc., which is simply not reported or not known. right now, meta is facilitating significantly more terrorism than a/i.
in any case, this isn't really about terrorism. they've just overused the child-safety angle lately, and needed to drum up some anti-privacy/anti-encryption using the terrorism card.
[flagged]
>So no one knows about these conversations but you know there are orders of magnitude more? Walk me through that.
sure. whatsapp is used by literal billions of people. add in a few more billion people through facebook, instagram, gmail, outlook, amazon.
would you like me to walk through the statistics calculations? or can you extrapolate from the billions of users? now make a guess how many people a/i has facilitated. a few thousand? a hundred thousand?
>Even if that were true how would that change anything? They still comply with the US government and their mission statement isn't to empower, protect, support political extremists.
because it demonstrates that the goal is not to curtail terrorism.
>would you like me to walk through the statistics calculations?
yes
okay, great. we can do this together.
lets start with this: how many terrorists do you think a/i has helped?
Wait, is this the right analysis? WhatsApp doesn't enter into any kind of agreement with organizations using it about their political alignment or objectives. The allegation (I have no idea how valid it is) is that A/I does.
upthread, nonethewiser said "They aren't some neutral infrastructure provider. __And even if they were that doesn't mean the US shouldn't sanction them for supporting terrorism.__"
emphasis mine. my assertion is that whatsapp, a neutral provider, facilitates more terrorists than a/i. i.e., the US should consider sanctioning them, if we are to follow nonethewiser's recommendation.
(to be clear, i'm on the pro-privacy, pro-encryption side, and don't actually think the US should be sanctioning whatsapp)
Right, I get that. I'm also not taking a position on this (in particular, the PKK seems like a Europe problem, not a US problem, and if Europe doesn't care I don't see why we should.)
But the analysis isn't based on "which service enables more terrorists". By that logic, forget WhatsApp, forget Signal; Google Mail probably runs the table in absolute numbers. But all three of those services assist terrorists without any deliberation or really even actual knowledge on the part of the providers.
The claim is that A/I can't say the same thing.
from this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49479169 on, i was talking about the neutral providers and the claim that neutral providers should also be subject to sanctions.
>without any deliberation or really even actual knowledge on the part of the providers.
i think we agree that this is an implicit requirement of being considered a neutral provider.
so, to claim neutral providers should be subject to sanctions implies that a provider who does not know or purposefully facilitate terrorists should still be subject to sanctions (gmail, whatsapp, signal, amazon, etc.)
then we got sidetracked by me being asked how can i possibly know that meta/google/etc. facilitate more terrorists than a/i. which i, and seemingly you, agree is a pretty obvious answer given the scale of the organizations. and i was asked to "walk them through that".
i would agree there as long as the providers are actually neutral they should be free from culpability. we shouldn't encourage providers to restrict who they serve because of potential liability, that's giving them way to much power.
Isn't forcing a provider to do business with everyone who asks just as bad? You're saying noblogs should be compelled to host nazi blogs. (Actual Nazis, not a euphemism. People who want Jews to be gassed.) You're also saying wedding cake bakers should be compelled to bake cakes for gay weddings.
A service can't be refused for reasons like religion or race, a power company cannot refuse to serve a customer because they're black or Muslim. If a company is acting as a platform or provider they should serve customers regardless of their views and this should give them protection for being liable for their customers actions.
Do you think providers should be allowed to refuse service because they don't like certain customers views?
It's a good question. If someone comes on my forum and posts "I strongly believe that all Jews should be immediately gassed" am I allowed to ban him or am I obligated to provide equal service?
> (has anyone checked who is providing terrorists with electricity?)
Or for that matter, where they get their air?! Oh gosh golly darn, gee, if Earth is providing air to those commie bastards…
I may not agree with their political views, but to say that the tool is the problem is equivalent to saying guns kill people instead of people that use guns. The problem isn’t the tool or their point of view, or then even speaking about it - the problem comes from humans not controlling themselves. Any actor taking any adverse or malicious action inspired by words or ideas isn’t the fault of the ideator or author, but of the actor failing in self control.
Gotta reign this insanity in.
except they aren't neutral, which is the whole point
did you read the part where nonethewiser said "And even if they were [neutral] that doesn't mean the US shouldn't sanction them for supporting terrorism."?
the double-negative might be confusing, so we can reword it to: "And even if they were neutral, the US should sanction them for supporting terrorism"
that's the part i quoted and my comment is about.
So since The International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, will US sanction him too?
Or since ONU has declared illegal the occupation of territory in West Bank, will US sanction Israel?
Or will the United States only sanction those who simply see things differently from them?
> If they choose to support the PKK
Did they? There's a lot of implication with that "if", and I saw someone else point out (albeit rudely) that anything that may have supported them was taken down.
we should be careful not to assume that the eu, uk and us set a good moral standard to follow.
you might ask who is right; the groups like google providing services to the us military, or the groups providing services to those opposing the us military.
> Their own manifesto says they use their limited resources to support groups they align with.
Woah, with radical statements like that, we might have to go after mutual aid groups, PACs, and churches.
I mean, I think it entirely depends on the nature of the groups they support?
You miss the point. It establishes they aren't neutral. Of course it's not necessarily bad to support things you agree with.
Amazon also only supports groups it aligns with.
It's bullshit made up by Shideler [0], and it's not even the PKK directly either that A/I supported, but some blog that reposts communiqués.
We'll see if the Bush- and Obama-style thoughtcrime back in action will lull USA citizens and make them forget the gas price.
[0] https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/4a3850cc-9186...
Morality != legality. these anarchists have a much better moral grounding than most US tech companies which gladly support US military destruction.
Cherry picking bad one organization doesn’t make me feel any better about this over-broad order.
[flagged]
Yeah you're not, what you've done is basing your arguments on a false premise.
> If they choose to support the PKK, which the EU, UK, and US
But they are not choosing to support the PKK.
They accuse it of being “a major far-left tech collective whose services are used by the most active and violent Antifa cells in the United States and across the world.”
The far left is a terrorist group? Where are all these violent "antifa cells"?
They labeled this groups as a terrorist organization so they could claim that anyone protesting the fascist Trump regime will easily be labeled terrorists and thrown in jail without a trial.
[flagged]
Can you articulate this more? Are you saying the first amendment gives A/I a constitutional right not to be sanctioned?
Yes, we are talking about a communications service, one specifically focusing on political speech.
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
Email, chat, websites, blogs - these are all speech! A/I's overt political statement (that you are indicting them for) points to their primary interest being to facilitate political speech - a type of speech with some of the strongest protections (that whole "assemble ... and petition the Government" thing)
Beyond that, they're presumably a neutral conduit like every other service provider. If some users of their services are communicating to coordinate crimes, then unless A/I is getting directly involved in those conversations (with the government producing hard evidence of this), it's the exact same dynamic as every other email/hosting provider.
There is the absolutely perfect Supreme Court case that ruled against your theory.
Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/561/1
There is a law (18 U.S.C. § 2339B) that says you cant knowingly provide material support for designated foreign terrorist organizations. A law firm wanted to provide financial support and legal services to some, including the PKK (the same group A/I was accused of helping). They argued the federal law violated their first amendment rights.
The court concludes that the first amendment doesn't protect your ability to provide material support including services and communication equipment and the law still stands today.
US courts have made many decisions that go against the US Constitution. This is an example. Notice the US Constitution says Congress cannot do that, period. And it doesn't limit that only to laws concerning US citizens, differently from other articles and amendments that explicitly say this is for citizens only, and that for non-citizens. And yet, the many SCOTUS incarnations look at that and go "naaah!" because reasons.
That's why the US Constitution Americans know is a few pages long, while the one actual US judges, lawyers etc. use is a massive 3,000 pages long volume. That's what it takes to rhetorically weasel oneself away from most of what those few initial pages do say.
I didn't claim that there was no basis in the legal system for these draconian actions. Clearly there must be, or they wouldn't be happening, right? Positive arguments rooted in what is aren't terribly compelling when the government has gone off the rails (unfortunately).
From a normative what ought perspective, a rationalization from an institution that has been slowly chipping away at our Constitutional rights is not particularly compelling. "Bad facts make bad law" is a saying for a reason. You're certainly not the first to casually disregard the freedom of speech!
So make no mistake, this action here is still fundamentally about speech - regardless of the routine legal hack of focusing on the concrete embodiment of said speech to sidestep a restriction on policing the speech itself. A/I is providing a platform for speech to these other groups, which seems eminently reasonable to me. Accepting the government's arguments here would imply accepting that it's also illegal to read what a terrorist group has written, as you would be giving them "material support" by helping their writings reach you by transiting your network and processing them with your computing device.
Which is why I said "weak men create hard times". It is difficult work to look at people you disagree with and acknowledge they too have rights, especially in the face of the powerful pushing rationalizations otherwise. But it's necessary work, lest the next time political winds shift you find yourself staring down the business ends of same exact pointy sticks that you had been cheering on.