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!
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.
To some extent, YES, but I think it’s a bit more nuanced and comes down to where you draw that line. Everyone is going to draw it in a different place.
I moderated an academic listserv with membership in 5 digits back before the html protocol even existed. That was huge for the time. And, as you would think, in academia at the time the idea of cronterversy, free speech, and engaging in items you disagreed with was pretty comprehensive. Even so, we still had to moderate, primarily for spam and obvious trolling as well as the occasional personal attacks.
I was an active participant in Usenet in the 90’s. Usenet was federated servers hosting posts and comments from participants on that entire federation. I know a server admin could control what Usenet groups they carried. I have no idea what other levels of moderation were available. Discussions were definitely more freewheeling and challenging than you see today, but they also had a higher content level and a greater respect for intellectual argument, even in trolling. Again, I suspect that was because the bulk of the participants were coming from higher ed institutions.
I was active in Internet forums when SCO sued IBM. There were active attacks on communities and successful attempts to splinter communities based in part on what side of the very question you are asking participants came down on. Again, though, there was a strong respect for intellectual engagement. And, I came down strongly with the same opinion you are expressing back then.
I think that strong respect for engagement exists here in the fediverse, particularly when compared to something like FaceBook or Reddit. As the fediverse grows, I think that will go away.
I don’t have much respect for low content trolling, for active attacks via brigading, for manipulation. I think the ability to upvote is important, but I also think the ability for bot accounts to manipulate that is a very difficult thing to combat, particularly in something as young as Lemmy that is experiencing exponential growth.
I also have a much better awareness of how subtle that manipulation can be in influencing individuals and society, including my own views.
I no longer have the absolutist attitude I once had. I agree with your own concerns about echo chambers, because that leads to its own manipulation of views and the splintering of society. However, I’m also more willing to support the idea of not providing a platform for some of the more odious content than my older self would have supported.
I’m probably in a position to piss off nearly everyone. I disagree with your view that there should be almost no lines drawn, but I disagree with the majority that the lines should be drawn where they want it to be.
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.
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:
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.
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.
If that counts as gene therapy, then the term becomes meaningless as the majority of medicine is now counted as gene therapy. They use it in this way to make it sound scary and dangerous. All medicine has side-affects and risks, but the vague use of scary language is the point.
Sure, I’m not the thought police and I’m never going to claim to be always right, all the time. That way leads to a complete and utter inability to engage with new information that challenges worldviews. Where that ends for me is judging people based on parentage and ethnicity. I have no interest talking to a person like that.
Debating a racist isn’t normally a productive experience. You can’t logic your way out of a position that you started believing for emotional reasons. Also, they normally don’t treat words and arguments with the same care as their interlocutors. Consequently, if somebody wants to go engage with them and try and convince them they’re wrong, I wish them all the luck in the world, I just think it’s a waste of time most of the time. For me, I just want to share links and have conversations with people who don’t think of me as sub-human or inherently evil.
Wholeheartedly agreed! And that is the point from where we can look at things we have in common despite, maybe, some opposing views:
We both want to read, share and comment on interesting stuff we expect to find here on Lemmy in the Fediverse.
It also seems that we’re both interested in civilised exchange of views and arguments.
The only key difference I see, and correct me if I’m wrong here, is that you wouldn’t want to see/engage stuff you define as bigoted/racist or hateful, correct?
Which I can understand and even agree upon. The only thing that makes me doubt is: Is defederation and the call for authorities (admins) the right way to deal with this? Or should the recipient decide what the filters should be? Like in the email approach, the recipient decides if he wants to receive an email and even then it might get filtered out and land in spam.
A blacklist, to keep using the email protocol as example, is a tool used sparingly and only when other filtering methods are unsuccessful or when greater damage is prevented that way.
What do you think?
Have you ever run a mail server? If so, have you looked at your logs? The RBL’s on the managed mail gateway for my work turns away 70% of the attempts. This is even before spam scoring kicks in on the 30% initially accepted. A significant percent of that is considered spam. Email has a complex set of automated tools to reject content without even viewing it.
I still think email, even though federated, is a poor analogy to make for Lemmy.
There’s a key difference with email: that’s opt-in communication. Generally speaking (outside of botspam which does get blacklisted) you have to sign up for a newsletter or ask someone to email you. It’s opt-in, not opt-out. Lemmy/Kbin are by definition opt-out: a new user, browsing All, will see everything they haven’t blocked.
An admin, attempting to make the kind of user that they want to see on their instance feel welcome, does have a duty to curate it. If the first post they see on their New feed is a screed calling for the death of all LGBTQ+ people (for example), do you think a brand new user will calmly block the community and move on, or decide that this instance isn’t the one for them? And a user that agrees with that hateful message, they have now gotten the message that this instance is friendly to their worldview.
Curation determines userbase which determines content. I know which side of the coin I fall on there.
Good point!
And here I disagree with you. The world is a horrible, dangerous, wonderful, exciting , murderous, funny, sad, depressing, manic place. Hiding that some people hate gays will not change the fact that some people hate gays. It will also not make these people disappear. Isn’t it better to know reality and accept it as it is, deal with it as it comes?