I don't know if that's supposed to sound like a good thing, but to me this sounds like a distopian place where anyone that does not align with the "correct worldview" is made to disappear and never be heard of again.
If you think "only bad people are toxic", you probably haven't been to many debates where your viewpoint happens to be the minority viewpoint.
Your right to freedom of speech is between you and the government. People aren’t required to publish your work just because you complain.
The difference here is you can just hook into the same decentralized system the publisher is using, and subvert them by finding another instance to use or even making your own! With no difference in reach or power.
Why is that bad? The seems to MUCH better for you.
This is a strawman. Commenter said anything about the right to free speech, only about the willingness to be exposed to opposing viewpoints.
We all know that Bob is not obligated to listen to Alice, and he is not required to host a venue for her opinions. But Bob's eagerness to run away to a place where there is no risk of seeing Alice's view, while not necessarily bad (if you want to live in a bubble, live in a bubble), it is _not_ a virtue.
Let me try to help: one is not illegal so it should in principle be allowed on a platform that is seeking an honest discussion. The other is a crime and can be dealt withing the framework of the law. If the person commiting crimes is behind an anonymous identity, I think that's where the problem actually lies - perhaps the administrator should be compelled by law to disclose the real person behind the anonymous profile (is the Mastodon community against that)?! If what they've done is indeed against the law, then a ban is definitely justified (and may be required by law - i.e. we're back to the rule of law, not mob rules), no one will argue against that... but what I am against is banning people simply for having opposing views, which is what we actually see happening. Do you see people complaining that someone who commits crimes online should not be banned from anything? That's not my argument or anyone else's argument, so your response comes as a complete strawman.
Frankly, if Alice is seeking honest disagreement discussion, Alice should seek to talk with people who consent to that kind of engagement with her, instead of chasing after Bob who would rather not engage. If Alice is having difficulty finding those people, maybe her source selection is simply quite uncommon; lots of highly controversial subject matter applies almost exclusively to small parts of the population, and a minority of that minority is generally available to debate on that subject.
I’m sure Alice can have spirited debate about toppings on pizza, a subject that a larger set of people are usually willing to disagree and discuss about. If she insists on trying to force a minority of a minority to debate with her, I think a friend group is fairly justified in defending Bob by ousting Alice, as Alice is unable to respect people’s basic boundaries like “can we change the subject”.
This is a commonly parroted error. The First Amendment to the US Constitution which protects freedom of expression is mostly between the gov't and you...
...but the CONCEPT of freedom of speech is an ethical concept that goes well beyond the roll of government. It is about ensuring the rights of minority speech and controversial opinions.
Speech that makes you uncomfortable can be some of the most valuable speech people need to hear.
I often find it telling when you ask someone who favors social media censorship if they would prefer themselves be shielded from uncomfortable speech, or if they specifically want everyone to be shielded.
Without fail, they want censorship for everyone else - not themselves.
If you went to your local community newsletter, asked to put in an article saying “this community is full of bigots, and none of you want to hear about it” and they deny including your article, there’s no legal recourse for you.
Sure, there’s the ideals of the marketplace of ideas, but there’s also very real restrictions on speech because society wouldn’t function if everyone was required to hear and consider every voice.
I’m also not American, so I’m no expert here obviously. I could be totally wrong on this and maybe there is legal precedent for forcing a private publication to publish something after some sort of legal free speech complaint.
In 1776, a person shouting obscenities in a pub, would get duly thrown out. He had the freedom to shout in the park, at a coffee shop, in the library, or in any of a thousand other places in town.
Today, political discourse takes places almost entirely online and via private corporations. Google isn't a pub on 2nd ave and 54th street. It's ALL THE ESTABLISHMENTS IN TOWN. ...or at least it, along with 3-4 other of the global tech oligopolies. It's important to note that while massive global tech companies are not formally part of government, they are very integrated with gov't through lobbying, gov't contracts, and direct political sponsorship, and a variety of other individual contacts and arrangements.
As a result of their SCALE of their control, they implicitly inherit some ethical obligations to allow uncomfortable speech to occur.
I don't believe in limitless speech rights - but the current limits are vague and selectively enforced and thus easily susceptible to political bias - which is the most dangerous kind of censorship.
Mastodon is decentralized at the protocol level. It's the opposite of that at the social level. The mob rule may be "decentralized", but it turns out it still sucks. Cross one extremist and get accused of being a bigot / -ist du jour, and them and their friend will run you out of town. No big deal, you say, you can always switch towns? Except no, because the extremists will follow and denounce you for your "bigotry" / -ism, and threaten to do the same to anyone willing to harbor you, and then no town will want you in, because none of them want to be cut off of everyone else. On the main subnet, it's every instance pointing a gun at every other one - even if most believe the common rules are extreme, no one trusts others enough to challenge them.
The irony is, this is basically rediscovering the lessons of past thousand years of civilization. Mastodon is the digital equivalent of a sea of towns afraid of their own people and other towns alike, due to roving parties of political officers executing criminals and wrongthinkers alike. Somewhere along the way people figured that rule of law, presumption of innocence, due process, proportionality of punishment, civilization, are nice things to have.
Anyway. Been there, done that, tried to enjoy it while pretending there is no problem, until the admin retired the instance. I don't feel like participating again. I'm off both Twitter and Mastodon. As much as I hate corporate ad-poisoned Internet, I do have to grant it that it's the more honest one - people will do bad things to each other in pursuit of ad revenue (or revenue in general), but at least they're not pretending too much. They're not bending their own minds past breaking point to feel OK with delivering mob punishment and signalling allegiance to not become targets themselves.
If the group-think and witch hunting is as hard on you as you seem to describe, I can assure you there are MANY others in the same position.
So make your own thing.
Why’s that bad? Why are you responsible for expanding the minds and exposing the group-think sheep to new viewpoints? Live in your own rebel communities. Basically like the internet has operated for the last 30 years.
The adventurous among them will venture over when they want.
Maybe. And maybe it's my age showing. But there's one other thing - the modern social media solve for a different problem than the forums and boards of yore: they're all-encompassing, topic-agnostic. They're social, as in, one identity, for everything, with everyone.
Back in the day, topical, isolated cliques were all we had. All the different mailing groups, IRC servers, phpBB boards, etc. were entirely independent of each other. Sure, I may have used the same handle on a bunch of them, but reputation - good or bad, pristine or smeared - did not propagate through the boundaries. Then social media happened, and we got used to having centralized platforms, with a single identity, for all aspects of life. That's the world of Facebook, Twitter, et al. Mastodon is just decentralizing Twitter on a protocol level - it's carrying over the expectation of single identity, of a topic-agnostic, all-encompassing platform.
> Why’s that bad? Why are you responsible for expanding their minds and exposing the group-think sheep to new viewpoints? Live in your own rebel communities. Basically like the internet has operated for the last 30 years.
Because the Internet isn't a niche hobby anymore. It is life. There's no on-line vs. off-line anymore, they're both intertwined in almost everything we do daily. In other words, it's serious. Serious, as in, standing up to worst cases of dishonesty and hatred on some board may suddenly cost you your actual job, and your family a roof over their heads.
People have tried to create more sensible set of community rules on Mastodon. Last I checked, none of those attempts were successful - mostly because anyone who tries or is seen supporting the attempt, gets shot on sight^W^W^Waccused of being hateful racist bigot wanting to harbor literal nazis. There's an inherent asymmetry here; it's the same kind of play as "would someone think of the children", except the society doesn't have antibodies for the former just yet, like it has for the latter.
You misunderstand. Being banned from a Mastodon instance doesn't mean you disappear never to be heard from again. No one is going to try to murder you. You're still allowed to participate in society and communicate. Also, the "correct worldview" in this context means not being a racist, bigoted, anti-Semitic asshole. If you find that too much of a straitjacket on your personal liberties or radically free-thinking beliefs, there are Mastodon instances that will happily accept you.
Of course, not everyone, everywhere is compelled to accept you and your speech with open arms, nor should they be. Freedom of speech and freedom of association are equal and opposite.
I agree with your point about freedom of association, but let's not pretend this is just limited to racism.
And if you support the concept of free association, what do you do when it collides with civil rights law?
What if this happens more than once? Should I reregister every month and refollow the same people again and again?
What if I set up my own server and people will decide that some of my toots are not "left" or "progressive" enough?
I'm not a sexist. I love women which is why I don't want them to be killed in the womb.
I didn't do anything in his living room. He said "we don't serve your kind here", so I left.
OK if that's the rules - fine, but don't then complain about your friends being refused service. We either have freedom of association or we don't.
Reading your own comment history here, I see you self-identify as a "honkler", which is an explicitly neo-nazi, anti-woke political identity. It's not surprising you wouldn't get along on a pro-choice instance, or even be able to refrain from trolling it. I can imagine plenty of private opinions others have that you likely object to, and that you just as likely wouldn't tolerate on your own instance if you had one - which you're free to make, as well as find a community more tolerant to your beliefs.
And that's fine. Freedom of speech means you can have yours and I can have mine, and that good fences make good neighbors.
>And if you support the concept of free association, what do you do when it collides with civil rights law?
If this has to do with a baker and a cake I'm going to be very disappointed. Your lot really needs to find new material.
> It's not surprising you wouldn't get along on a pro-choice instance, or even be able to refrain from trolling it.
If I had spoken forbidden things, I would have been kicked out. I left voluntarily.
> If this has to do with a baker and a cake I'm going to be very disappointed. Your lot really needs to find new material.
No I don't think we do. That one will serve just fine.
Civil rights trumps freedom of association, and indeed all other rights.
Wait, I can't ask you to leave my property because I don't like what you're saying? Also, freedom of association is explicitly a civil right.
As a Russian who is lost in modern english langauge: does this "honkler" thing has anything to do with https://humungus.tedunangst.com/r/honk? Also a golang fediverse project.
One who is strongly partial to one's own group, religion, race, or politics and is intolerant of those who differ.
This is why all leftists started leaving twitter when Musk took over and promised free speech (not freedom of reach), they knew instantly that the gig was up.
All censorship-based platforms, such as reddit or mastodon that has _mods_, are left wing.
Secondly, the woke left is the same in the US as it is in Europe. The west is one global entity these days. JK Rowling is hated by swedish leftists and california leftists.
Third, "it's simply not true" is not a convincing argument in the face of millions of examples. Why do you think all the biggest comedians in the US avoid colleges?
> All censorship-based platforms, such as reddit or mastodon that has _mods_, are left wing.
This seems to be relying on popular belief rather than facts, and making a lot of assumptions in regards to why particular groups would prefer particular forums. If we're drawing spurious correlations 4chan also seems to enjoy a lot more violent and illegal pornography than say reddit - can we draw conclusions from that regarding the right as well?
> Secondly, the woke left is the same in the US as it is in Europe.
You're now defining a sub group of the left. What separates the "woke" left from the regular left. or are they all one and the same in your eyes? And if so, do you think that actually aligns with everyone who calls identifies as left?
> The west is one global entity these days.
Are you American? As a Canadian I say it definitely is not, we're now at an impasse I guess?
> Why do you think all the biggest comedians in the US avoid colleges?
Who are the biggest comedians? And if they are the biggest why would they go to a college when they can fill a stadium.
If you think modern leftism is being mad about people being racist, that says more about you.
This is oversimplifying things.
Here is the example: https://gts.superseriousbusiness.org/@gotosocial/statuses/01...
>We do not work with transphobes/fascists/racists. If you open an issue or PR on our git repo and we see you are one of those things, or hang out with people like that
So I can't really be part of the team if a person whom I follow on github or somewhere else is somehow "correct worldview". I may even not be aware of this.
Not to mention that many people actually have no idea what they are talking about and use words like "nazis" only to describe abstract "bad people" as opposed to their image of "good people"
Example from the same link:
>we are a strictly antifascist organization. we have zero tolerance for fascism or anything that enables or allows it. (yes that includes capitalism)
Apparently I won't be able to participate if I follow Bill Gates blog.
If you are against gay marriage there’s nothing at all toxic or hateful about that. Hell, I know gay people who were against gay marriage when the public debate was at its peak.
Where it’s toxic is if any time a gay person talks about wedding planning, posts a meme about the phrase “her wife” having good energy, or shares art of two guys at the altar you appear in the replies to get on your soapbox and start an argument about gay marriage. Nobody asked. Alternatively, just like HN, if your account is entirely flamebait about gay marriage nobody wants to see that and you’ll get the hammer.
Where it’s hate is when you express the that you’re against gay marriage because you don’t want to see gay people to be out in public, you think affection between two men is disgusting and unnatural, you call their sexual orientation a lifestyle choice, call gay people pedos, or otherwise pick on, doxx, belittle, or dehumanize gay people.
Like y’all, it isn’t that hard to expressly minority opinions without being toxic or hateful. I express minority opinions constantly and have never once even been worried about the banhammer.
<< Like y’all, it isn’t that hard to expressly minority opinions without being toxic or hateful.
You can, but it becomes a game of using language that it is harder to pinpoint ( hence silliness like Xi banning 8 for infinity ). All the while majority opinion can be as hateful as is deemed necessary ( and no one complains because it is the majority ) creating yet another echo-chamber we so sorely need.
FWIW, this trend is now being challenged.
edit: I like calling spade a spade. You can dislike it all you want, but I am personally less and less willing to comply with other person's sensibilities[1].
[1]https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2013/09/19/224183763...
Which is why dirty commie liberals like me want to get a national hate speech law passed just like other countries have.
Canada (which passed in the 1989)
Ireland (passed in 1989)
New Zeland (passed in 1993)
Germany, France, Sweden, Switzerland, Ukraine, UK, Iceland, Denmark
I moved from the old country partly cuz of Lèse-majesté laws regarding ruling elite and clergy. Forgive me, but other countries having X type laws does not automatically constitute a valid argument to enact anything similar here. I now personally see it as an indirect way to circumvent original framework of this country having failed to do it directly.
In short, I am going to use a very, very old argument. If everyone jumped off of a bridge, would you do it too?
<< is more free when it's not stifled by hate.
Fascinating statement and I would love you to elaborate further, because to me it is contradictory.
Freedom of speech is called freedom of speech for a reason. It is not called freedom with asterisk to account for other person's perception of your communication. That is not freedom. It is the opposite of freedom. Frankly, what you are proposing inevitably results in an echo chamber. It is cool if that if it is what you want. It is not what I want.
You seem reasonable. I am willing to engage. Convince me 'free speech' is more free when it is restricted.
Both sides actually want free speech, the blue side just argues that speech is more free when it's not stifled by hate.
Is the most alarming doublethink I have seen in some time.
I don't really see it as doublethink. There's plenty of examples were rules make people more free. Our whole system of laws is based on that idea.
I can drive on public roads and get where I want to quickly and safely because we all follow traffic laws. I have greater freedom to travel because there are rules.
I can mostly (well during the day at least, give it up for being a woman) walk around freely and completely defenseless because of the laws about assault, murder, and theft.
Right now we're on a forum where good discussion can be had because the mods will drop the banhammer if you start posting hate. If you know that posting anything about a controversial topic or just being a person who's identity is controversial at the moment will bring out a tidal wave of green accounts hurling insults against, you likely wouldn't post. Would you feel comfortable existing in the public sphere as a trans person if when you tweet you about any topic you got a hundred replies telling you to kill yourself already? Would you want to hang out in an IRC channel where any time you talk someone says, "shut up woman, get back to the kitchen?"
If you believe your right to swing your arm ends where my face begins then whether you think it's right to restrict hate speech or not I think there should at least be some recognition that my position is at least logically consistent because I see hate speech as an act that restricts others' speech.
You, an individual who does not want to see this can set ignore on that someone.
<< logically consistent because I see hate speech as an act that restricts others' speech.
It is consistent if you accept the logic leap made to assume restriction on speech somehow enhances it. Personally, I am not convinced, because I think you confuse safety ( or mental comfort ) with freedom.
Maybe the word freedom has become too overloaded with meaning in English language. Maybe we should use something else:
"If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear"
Also, as a very practical measure, even if we do assume that hate speech actually does what it is supposed to do ( identify hate and remove hateful content ), do you really think it is smart to hide it from public view? And we did not even touch that 'hate speech' has recently come, not unlike nazis' to mean 'anything I don't like'.
[1] https://tradingeconomics.com/country-list/corruption-index?c... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/14th_Waffen_Grenadier_Division... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azov_Brigade
I didn't use being against "gay marriage" as the example though. I used being against "gay people" as the example.
I've been banned from several subreddits for simply disagreeing with majority views, and pretty much every time it was in a neutral or respectful tone.
-----
PS: the entire concept of "toxic" seems "new age-y" and pseudo-religious. People refer to things being toxic as a substitute for "evil" and "taboo" - stuff that brings uncomfortable or negative associations, and in this manner they are embedding their projection of a civil religion onto others, which is an act of aggression in itself in a medium that is supposed not to have such rules.
Note that they say "toxic" and not just "rude" which would imply a certain common, traditional culture that most people would be expected to know and to some extent abide by. Toxic takes the place of the figure of "rudeness", "bad manners" and "heresy" but instead of based off a longstanding tradition, culture and religion, based of a newfangled atheist civil religion that a lot of people simply don't accept or don't want to play ball with. Their very presence and their discourse is seen as contaminating society, thus "toxic" - this is exactly equivalent to the moral worldview of a religious fanatic.
And those "heretics" are dealt with with medieval intolerance as there is no discussion to be had on these "values" from their point of view. You see in this people the fervour, hatred and emotional response you'd expect from an inquisitor who just witnessed wanton heresy or a taboo being broken, and that is exactly how more often than not mods behave in these platforms. Their interest in expanding their ideology and protecting themselves and others from heretics motivates them to put a lot of free labour in these endeavours, which is hard to compete with.
Trans person: *exists and makes a post*
"Honest debater": I don't think you should...
And they get banned. Not everything is or was an invitation to "debate".
Like, if you're only there to argue, nobody is going to want to hang out with you, sorry. Plenty of good debates happen, including people with differing political views, but you have to bring something besides hate to the table.
Of course, then those people claim they were "censored" for "being conservative" or whatever, but more than likely they were just banned because their only point in registering was to attack other people.
[1] https://mashable.com/article/twitter-reply-guys
[2] https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/sealioning-int...
People said exactly the same thing about open relays and spam filters some twenty years ago. A very famous Internet personality kept an open relay around for many years until there was literally no one left to federate with. I worked at a place who thought themselves obligated to keep around copies of all incoming messages for some period of time.
Who are you to decide between signal and noise, and so on, the discussion went. Turns out that's useless discourse. Because similar logic goes the other way around, who are you to decide what I keep?
I am not obliged to read email from all senders, and above all, I do not have to explain myself and I don't have to keep them stored as to not infringe their right of expression.
Every decentralized protocol with any real world traction allows every actor to filter traffic in a permissionless manner. You can call it righteousness or as amoral as you'd like, but until you can present an alternative system that's how it's going to work.
1. Spam is filtered, not censored. I can still see spam in my "Spam" folder if I want to. Mastodon doesn't merely filter "bad" content; it prevents you from seeing it even if you want to. It would be the equivalent of email actively deleting spam, and "spam" includes an email that suggests vaccines have side effects.
2. It's easy to see that it's not for the benefit of users. They could easily mark things as toxic (perhaps by category, or by who marked it as toxic), and let users filter out what they want. It's not about helping users. It's about controlling users.
3. "Spam" does not include contrary political viewpoints. There's a difference between a viagra ad. I don't want my uncle sending me political rants, but I certainly don't want google deciding I can't read them.
You can pick a different server if you don't like the censorship on the one you're on, that's the whole point
To the spammers it's all great content you should be getting. No one's deleting your messages on your own Mastodon server, they're just not copying it to their server, what's the problem?
Today, social media are all-encompassing, and Internet is now a critical part of normal life. Getting banned from one modern discussion board can easily get you banned from every other one too, and/or the fallout may impact "offline" aspects of your life. At best, it'll make a bunch if things inconvenient. At worst, it may destroy your relationships, your career, and push you into poverty.
Or, in other words: getting banned from a group in the 1990s or early 2000s was like getting a formal reprimand in your record at school. Today, it's starting to look more like getting a criminal record in the police database.
Who are these people? The protocol is decentralised, if you don't like it, spin your own instance! 5-10$ a month and you get more than enough for a few thousand people.
Just so we’re clear here, Florida wants to ban children from discussing their periods but also wants student athletes to report their periods, in case you were still unclear about how fucking dumb these people are.
I run a politics forum and the one rule is no name calling/insulting people (famous or a forum member), groups, ideology etc. It is incredibly civil. It turns out 1) that is the only rule you need to keep civility 2) it makes for a really boring place as most people just want to name call and not actually discuss politics.
To me there are basically two sides to this, and I'll outline them with two examples.
One is when people decide to have a debate on whether or not trans women should be allowed in women sports. In this case, banning people who have the "wrong" opinion is sort of dystopian. At least with the decentralized social network, you can't really ban them, just silence them on your particular server, so in a sense it's less dystopian than centralized social media. But I frankly agree with you on this, because it makes having discussions on certain subjects impossible, which isn't great.
The other example is when someone posts pictures of Warhammer models they have painted, and someone starts commenting on their gender, race, religion or whatever that is completely unrelated to the original post. Or when someone is being plain hateful in any context. In those cases, the way I see it is that the hateful person is breaking the social contract in which we all agree to be respectful to each other. Once you break that contract, then it no longer applies to you. This is the way the real world functions, and it's how the internet used to function before the ability to moderate assholes was centralized and sort of removed.
Specifically, for the "sin" of defending people who choose to also remain at Twitter because we still have some people we care about over there (in my case, lots of Black folks who haven't made the switch.)
And for that, I've been called, e.g. a Nazi.
I'm not sure which mastodon server you are on, or which ones you're linked with, but I'm on Universeodon and I've frankly seen nothing of the sort.
You do have a point of course, but I haven't seen any sort of toxic behaviour. Toxic and hateful people simply get banned, and the servers that house them get blacklisted. Which isn't too dissimilar to how the world used to function before centralized social media made it harder to moderate which people you want to spend your time on.
I'm progressive of course, so it's easy for me. But the thing is, if you came up to me in the real world and started to talk about how wrong it is for people to be gay, then I'd frankly walk away from you. This is what becomes possible with decentralized social media, but I'm not sure I'd call it a bubble or safespace, it's simply going back to the world before Facebook and Twitter, to when it was much easier to ignore people.