Lately I see a lot of calls do have specific instances defederated for a particular subset of reasons:
- Don’t like their content
- Dont like their political leaning
- Dont like their free speech approach
- General feeling of being offended
- I want a safe space!
- This instance if hurting vulnerable people
I personally find each and every one of these arguments invalid. Everybody has the right to live in an echo chamber, but mandating it for everyone else is something that goes a bit too far.
Has humanity really developed into a situation where words and thoughts are more hurtful than sticks and stones?
Edit: Original context https://slrpnk.net/post/554148
Controversial topic, feel free to discuss!
Maybe the disconnect is what is meant by open market. You might actually be complaining that people have too much choice and are free to start an instance, using their own resources and choose to disassociate from some others users. If someone sets up a roadside stand and lets their friends sell things there but refuses to let a friend of a friend sell his swastika stickers there, that isn’t censorship if the guy is allowed to open his open stand. It’s just not being overly helpful. If no one wants to go to swastika guy’s stand, and everyone makes fun of him, or even discourages other people from going there, that isn’t censorship either. It’s only censorship if he isn’t allowed to set up his own stand by someone in charge of that sort of thing.
What it sounds like you want isn’t a censorship-free platform, but a platform that is restricted from not choosing to give everyone the exact same voice. That may sound more fair to you, but when it costs person A money to facilitate person B’s access, and you don’t allow person A the choice to opt out of that (basically raising the bar for person A to participate), you’re actually restricting A instead of being fair to B.
In the case where person A is actually a public resource, that’s where it becomes censorship to block person B’s access, because then it’s a position of authority determining who gets to say what. But when person A is a regular guy, hog-tying him into helping person B blather about something hateful, or even just annoying, to person A is actually infringing on rights instead of promoting them.
Everybody has the right to live in an echo chamber, but mandating it for everyone else is something that goes a bit too far.
Here’s the thing though: nobody’s mandating it for everyone else. The admin has the final call. If you don’t like it, find an instance with an admin that runs things the way you like. If you have the skills and/or money, make your own instance and run it the way you like.
This isn’t Reddit/Facebook/Twitter where if you don’t like the way things are run, your options are suck it up or cut yourself off from the network. Things are more nuanced here.
All of those arguments are not objective, they’re subjective. This means that the idea of invalid/valid is irrelevant. To use an analogy, saying that “I like apples” is an invalid argument is pretty ridiculous, how is “I like/don’t like this content” any different? To push that a bit farther, how is “I don’t want to associate with these kinds of people, and I don’t want to interact with people who find that ok”? This is all personal, subjective, messy stuff.
First of all: Thanks for your contributions, I appreciate you participating in this discussion.
While you’re right with the assessment that the final call is for the admin(s) to make let me rephrase it a little bit:
Isn’t the immediate call for censorship/defederation as soon as some views are challenged a bit too entitled? It looks like centralised platforms like FB and Twitter allowed this mindset to flourish and I’m not really comfortable with this.
Isn’t the immediate call for censorship/defederation as soon as some views are challenged a bit too entitled?
There’s a big difference between “views are challenged” and either active misinformation (vaccines = gene therapy?!?) or rampant bigotry. As a half-jewish person, I’m especially (again, subjectively) keen to avoid interacting with people like that. There’s so many dog whistles crammed into that unformatted wall of text that I’m surprised my whole neighbourhood isn’t filled with the sound of howling.
There’s a big difference between “views are challenged” and either active misinformation (vaccines = gene therapy?!?
I would first start with the definition of gene-therapy and take it from there to start with, but if we keep in on a layman level:
- mRNA vaccines do contain a genetic program to code a specific protein
- Once the mRNA instructions are processed in your cells they will start to produce the protein encoded in these instructions
- the resulting protein is released and your immune system reacts which ideally leads to immunization against this protein.
The above is current scientific status quo and not controversial at all. So could you call is agend therapy? Yes using the term just bit more broadly this would still fit.
Is it misinformation? Maybe. But don’t we have a right to decide for ourselves what is and isn’t misinformation? Shouldn’t misinformation be challenged and ridiculed when exposed? I’d like to be able to do that but I can’t if it’s behind walls or hidden in dark corners, where it festers and attracts the wrong people.
or rampant bigotry. As a half-jewish person, I’m especially (again, subjectively) keen to avoid interacting with people like that.
Again: Dont they have a right to be bigoted?
I understand if you don’t want to be associated with them, this is legit. But shouldn’t other be allowed to debate them, confront them or even partially agree with them?
If you’re hiding or prohibiting open debate you will only get more of it, we can see this over and over, again and again. Prohibited fruits are the interesting ones.
Make it uncool to be a bigoted Nazi and only a marginalized group will associate with them. Demonize and censor them and see them grow exponentially in number, influence and power.
Find a new instance of you don’t like the admins policy, or start your own? Seems pretty straightforward to me.
Why are you under the posts calling for defederation saying this?
Boycotts are a feature of an “open marketplace”
Boycotts as individual decisions yes. Boycotts as institutional warfare (top to bottom) are not.
Exploding Heads guy here…
I’d like to say that the Exploding Heads admin, Kapow, is first & foremost anti-censorship. He’s going to let anyone post things - there are lines in the sand not to be crossed, but the general belief of Kapow and many of the core contributors is that free speech doesn’t hurt anyone.
Kapow is not far right. Many of the EH members are just Libertarians. Another large amount are Trump-type “populist right.” Call them fascists, I don’t care. It’s fine. A rose by any other name… But there aren’t any Nazis on Exploding Heads. We banned one just the other day.
The topic here is free speech & the marketplace of ideas and I can tell you that… man changes and grows throughout his life, and that people grow and change more through education, free exchange of ideas, exposure to the truth, than they do through isolation, shame, hatred…
In fact, the quickest way to make an asshole act like an asshole and become incapable of change is to treat him like an asshole.
I think if you are actually pro-peace, you must be pro-liberty, beause you would deny yourself the ability to coerce.
I think if you are actually pro-democracy, you are 100% supportive of free speech, because you would not use coercion and censorship to manufacture consensus and have a stranglehold on society.
I think anyone who believes in any value we can call “progressive” must first believe in the right of the individual to express themselves freely, and they should be secure enough in who they are to allow themselves to be challenged and to be ready to interact in good faith with others.
Has humanity really developed into a situation where words and thoughts are more hurtful than sticks and stones?
Just Americans want this stuff. It’s a part of their culture.
Is the idea of the open marketplace of ideas outdated?
Yes, it is. We ran this experiment with 8chan already. I consider Frederick Brennans opinion on internet moderation pretty well-tested by reality, unlike the ‘free speech absolutists’ I meet. Musk is a classic poster boy for that mindset and the instant he was given power his convictions really amounted to ‘hide the stuff I don’t like, boost the stuff I do’. So I think we should all be suspicious of people who claim this at this point.
8chan exists, as do lots of deeper, darker unmoderated boards. If they are superior, why aren’t the majority of people there? Why are they almost universally despised and shamed?
Has humanity really developed into a situation where words and thoughts are more hurtful than sticks and stones?
No, humanity lives in reality where thoughts lead to actions and pretending like there’s a firewall between the two is unrealistic. 8chan is routinely linked to mass shootings, and NOT JUST IN THE USA
So your conclusion is: “Dear admins, defederate from everything I deem offensive?”
No, how silly. Where did you get that idea?
I had that impression from your initial response, but I might have misunderstood.
I still disagree that thought and speech lead deterministically to action which is a thing you actually stated. Your argument is the same as the one used against POV shooters and there’s no evidence for this claim.
Yes, my stance is far from ‘ban everything I dont like’. But you need to understand that ‘ban nothing at all’ (which is what free speech absolutists argue for) is on the other extreme of the moderation spectrum. I like to think I fall somewhere in the middle.
it’s hardly a binary choice between the 2 so I was thrown when you instantly assumed that.
There’s plenty of evidence that 8chan leads to mass shootings as many of the shooters leave vast manifestos on the site itself referencing beliefs they learned on the site. It has nothing to do with video games. If you want to claim that ‘words and beliefs never lead to actions’ that’s fine but I think that’s obviously false. In fact I’d say all actions are the result of our beliefs.
its fine for us to disagree here.
Has humanity really developed into a situation where words and thoughts are more hurtful than sticks and stones?
What a ridiculous question. “Is a stabbing really more hurtful than a gunshot?”
They’re both hurtful!
We can’t stop physical abuse in the real world by defederating with a hateful instance, but we can stop the hate speech from having an audience here.
Hateful content is routinely disguised as memes, “just asking questions”, “just a joke”, etc. Humans are human, and many of us are suggestible. There’s a reason Holocaust denial is literally illegal in Germany. If people hear something often enough, from enough people, it doesn’t matter what it is. They’ll start to wonder if it’s true.
It’s super easy to teach a child to hate, for instance. They believe everything they hear, and it’s very human to hate things and certain people. This doesn’t just go away when they hit the legal age to have an account here. Reddit allows 13 year olds to have an account. (Or is that Facebook? Whichever.) I don’t know what the official policy is of this instance or Lemmy in general, but the fewer 13 year olds we have reading literal hate speech, the better. It’s a black hole that it’s easy to get sucked into.
If every “good” instance blocks the hateful ones, then no one will see their content unless they go out of their way to sign up for that specific instance. That’s a good thing. It keeps the hate locked away where it’s hard to stumble into.
Now, what counts as hate? Whatever the admin decides. If the admin chooses to delegate that decision to the users, it’s still the admin choosing to do that. If you don’t like that, find a different instance.
Fuck hate. Fuck Nazis. Fuck the alt-right. Defederate them.
What a ridiculous question. “Is a stabbing really more hurtful than a gunshot?” They’re both hurtful!
Hyperbolic. Nobody is being shot, people feel offended for more or less valid reasons.
Hateful content is routinely disguised as memes, “just asking questions”, “just a joke”, etc
So? The burden of proof that this is hate is on you. Apart from this: Even if it was hateful, it’s not unlawful per se. If it becomes unlawful that’s a whole other topic.
It’s super easy to teach a child to hate, for instance.
Yes, children are children, they’re supposed to be stupid. They will hate another kid because it wears glasses, is fat, nerdy or because it’s Tuesday. You won’t change that, you just add another layer why certain kids will hate others. Hate because of hate. Doesn’t sound like a good plan.
If every “good” instance blocks the hateful ones, then no one will see their content unless they go out of their way to sign up for that specific instance. That’s a good thing. It keeps the hate locked away where it’s hard to stumble into.
Ah the hear no even, see no evil, speak no evil approach. Yeah that has always worked out pretty well, ask the French about Zemmour and Le Pen, the Germans about the AFD and so on.
Now, what counts as hate? Whatever the admin decides. If the admin chooses to delegate that decision to the users, it’s still the admin choosing to do that. If you don’t like that, find a different instance.
Ah there it is, the leftist authoritarian. Whatever Big Brother decides is good for me.
Fuck hate. Fuck Nazis. Fuck the alt-right. Defederate them.
Have a look at the state at which the right wing parties are re-emerging in Europe, look at Reassemblement National, Vox, AFD, etc etc.
That is only possible because people like you think that containment and oppression of dissenting discourse and opinion is a good thing. You’re the new Neville Chamberlain and I fear what the result of this new cowardice will be.
Ah there it is, the leftist authoritarian. Whatever Big Brother decides is good for me.
🤦♂️
Dear Lord, you are just grasping here. Go fight your straw man somewhere else. Each instance is run as a charity. The admin makes the rules. If you don’t like the rules, leave. If I don’t like the rules, I’ll leave. Take your techno-libertarian, infinite free speech bullshit somewhere else. Make your own instance where you are the benevolent dictator where your only rule is “Absolute freedom of speech for all”. Fucking christ…
