Re:Twitter says it will restrict retweeting world leaders wh...
by belorn on Wednesday October 16, 2019 @04:06AM
(#21268119)
Have you heard of the StackOverflow CoC controversy where a larger part of the community, possible the majority, disagree on the exact definition of harassment of other people on the basis of gender identity?
Did you also hear about the Wikipedia Fram controversy where a large party of the community, including the highest democratically appointed authority (arbcom) disagree with the wikipedia foundation on what harassment is?
To take a random sample further from the past, a guild wars 2 developer accused a fan of harassment after criticism of the game story line got posted. The controversy lead to two developers being fired and the company posting a huge apology which said that criticism of the game story line is not harassment and any fan should be free to express constructive views about the art.
A rule that forbids harassment only has meaning based on how harassment get defined, and with current cultural environment that definition is all over the place.
An even more political loaded area, hateful rhetoric is quite common. Here in Sweden there were a brief suggestion to forbid it on the national broadcast channels, but then the idea had to be basically scrapped as the definition could never really be agreed on. If you have one political party using immigrants as the target demographic for all problems, and an other political party using males as the target demographic for all problems, should we ban both? That is not going to happen.
Protected category is interesting but a extremely US centric concept where the federal government specify a list of protected groups and anyone not on it is a free target. It is a list not even all the states agree on, as political views is sometimes added by specific states and others don't. The concept of an "official religion" is also one which is constantly debated, with groups like copyme trying to get included in the protected category. EU has a bit better and broader definition in Article 10, but the enforcement is mostly up to individual nation states.
Did you also hear about the Wikipedia Fram controversy where a large party of the community, including the highest democratically appointed authority (arbcom) disagree with the wikipedia foundation on what harassment is?
To take a random sample further from the past, a guild wars 2 developer accused a fan of harassment after criticism of the game story line got posted. The controversy lead to two developers being fired and the company posting a huge apology which said that criticism of the game story line is not harassment and any fan should be free to express constructive views about the art.
A rule that forbids harassment only has meaning based on how harassment get defined, and with current cultural environment that definition is all over the place.
An even more political loaded area, hateful rhetoric is quite common. Here in Sweden there were a brief suggestion to forbid it on the national broadcast channels, but then the idea had to be basically scrapped as the definition could never really be agreed on. If you have one political party using immigrants as the target demographic for all problems, and an other political party using males as the target demographic for all problems, should we ban both? That is not going to happen.
Protected category is interesting but a extremely US centric concept where the federal government specify a list of protected groups and anyone not on it is a free target. It is a list not even all the states agree on, as political views is sometimes added by specific states and others don't. The concept of an "official religion" is also one which is constantly debated, with groups like copyme trying to get included in the protected category. EU has a bit better and broader definition in Article 10, but the enforcement is mostly up to individual nation states.