I mean it is, but it’s also not a bad thing in moderation (heh)
Well, it is censorship.
People just wake up to a realization that some censorship should exist, and it makes many uncomfortable.
Other than that, don’t be tolerant of the intolerant, and you’ll be fine.
Suddenly they care. One dead CEao and a bunch of whiny scared Billionaires is enough to stop 10 years of hateful content. Interesting lesson right there. Censorship is only good if it protects the rich.
Who decides when the content is “hateful”? The perpetrators of genocide characterize themselves as marginalized and their victims as a force seeking to eradicate them. That is the problem with censorship. Those are the people who end up with the control of speech. You end up with an Orwellian inversion of concepts like hateful speech for the exact reason that they can be weaponized for profit and power.
You show me which fascist government is going to censor the fascists living under it. It’s a paradox. They will not. They will censor the resistance.
We’ve come to decide ‘hate content’ on ideological basis that the question of ‘who decides’ arises. If people could be more realistic than idealistic, that would’ve never been the issue. In this situation, what’s in your head becomes more important than what you really need because something didn’t go your way.
If in a work of fiction I have a villain call my hero the n-word to demonstrate that the villain is an unapologetic racist, and I am told that I can’t have that because the word is bad in and of itself and that racist behavior cannot be tolerated even in fiction…
That is censorship, even if your goals are noble they are also ignorant, as showing disgusting things in fiction is often done in order to condemn similar behavior in real life.
If you call a black person the n-word in real life, and he stomps your ass.
This isn’t censorship, this is comedy.
If one goes onto an online community and calls its members radical insults in an unfriendly clearly non-joking hostile manner. Then the guilty party should be removed from that community,
I mean it is censorship. But not all censorship is bad.
There will be no protection under the social contract for those who wish to violate it.
Advertising is hateful content. Ban the entire marketing industry now please.
Agreed. Let everyone be free to decide. I don’t want something shoved to my face 24x7, its inorganic and harmful.
The majority of advertising we see in the US should be banned for sure. It is just thinly veiled psychological fuckery designed to manipulate us. Not cool.
leftists have become what they hated the most, horsehoe theory is real people, call it horseshoe fact
And what exactly have leftists become and what do they hate?
Freedom of speech, rationality, pragmatism to name a few. What else, lolz!
And we say we are living in a democracy. Mark my word, there is not a SINGLE democracy in the world. It sounds good on paper but the technicalities are far from theory.
Democracy isn’t about getting your own way.
True democracy (Direct Democracy) can’t happen - you’d need to vote in every single decision. Without everyone’s decision, nothing could get done. It’s bad enough for a family of four to agree what movie to watch, let alone a whole country. It would be democratic if most people watched what they wanted, but the logistics for a country ain’t gonna work.
That’s why most Western countries in the world have Representative Democracy - we elect people to do that stuff on our behalf, and are aware of affecting factors. And by and large, it works. Sure, there are always failings and scandals and someone can point these out, because human beings like to cheat and have their own agendas, and of course, power corrupts. Sadly, there is no form of government that is safe from subversion.
If you don’t like a decision, vote for a representative that you think will do more of what you want. Or form an effective protest.
The voting system used is important. “Pick the one you want, most votes wins” sounds perfectly usable but it trends towards two main parties. There is undue pressure to avoid the main party they dislike the most from winning by voting for the main party they dislike the least. It gets worse the deeper we look at the “winner take all”/“first past the post” voting system (used in the USA, UK).
I don’t know what an effective protest would look like but that’s probably the better option. People tend to get insulted or bored if you try to explain how their vote doesn’t really matter.
That’s the problem. You can elect any representative but you can’t ensure its a good one if the voters themselves are the choke-point, maybe you decide not to vote, vote based on trends, vote in panic or vote for some ideology rather than what should really matter to everyone in a long term.
I wonder how is US a true democracy. Its a two-party system, you can argue its better than China’s one-party system or Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (ahem!) but that’s all there is to it.
Well it depends on the definition of censor.
If you define censor as, “to suppress or delete as objectionable” (Webster) then it fits just fine.
Censorship or not, tolerance is a social contract, and those who want to undo this system must be stopped by any means possible. Content moderation is actually the compromise.
Tolerance is tolerance and it can break any time. You just keep tolerating until you can’t anymore, as simple as that. Its artificial.
We don’t have a social contract. It’s everyone for themselves.
That depends on who’s doing the moderation. If it’s a government entity, that’s censorship, and the only time I’m willing to accept it is if it’s somehow actively harmful (i.e. terrorist plots and whatnot). If it’s merely disgusting, that’s for private entities to work out, and private entities absolutely have the right to moderate content they host however they choose.
Why is a private entity significantly different from a government entity? If a coalition of private entities (say, facebook, twitter, youtube, … ) controls most of the commons, they have the power to dictate everything beyond the fringes. We can already see this kind of collusion in mass media to the extent that it’s labeled a propaganda model. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_model
I just don’t think the private/gov dichotomy is enough to decide when censorship and moderation is valid.
The government is supposed to be representing voters’ best interests and have a monopoly on force to enforce rules. We can’t trust anyone to decide for us what speech we can listen to. A government should have no say on restricting speech (sadly, even if that speech does cause harm to people in our LGBT family).
A business should not have power comparable to a government. You probably have to interact with the government to some degree, you shouldn’t have to interact with a specific business at all.
the only time I’m willing to accept it is if it’s somehow actively harmful
Oh, like the dissemination of propaganda originating from the troll farms of hostile powers? Good idea.
Harmful meaning things like harassment (defined as continued and targeted use of speech intended to harass an individual) or credible threats of violence (i.e. a threat to kill a specific individual, attack an area, etc).
Harmful doesn’t mean “ideas I don’t like.”
Just to put some perspective over here:
Pretty much the exact same thing in pretty much the exact words is being said on the other (right wing) side of things. Its just the things being tolerated are different
I honestly think that the bigger issue here isn’t so much tolerance but certain parties that keep pointing out relatively small things to the common people (mostly on the right side of the political spectrum) and go “ooohhg my God can you believe these evil fuckers and they will do that to children too and won’t anyone think of the children”. Basically I’m talking trump, musk, Fox news, that sort of shit.
I’ve long held the believe that Trump did untold damage and harm to millions, but the biggest harm he has done is the division he’s sown. There has always been a rather steep divide in the US, but that divide has grown into a fucking ocean between the two sides.
I think most people in the US, when receiving the actual proper facts, would really not think and feel that different. Nobody would rage against universal healthcare, why would they? You only do that when you’re misinformed.
Not trying to excuse anyone, not trying to say that most trump supporters aren’t insufferable assholes, but the vast majority of them wouldn’t be as bad had they have access to actual news sources, had they not been constantly lied to.
Now with what you said, please understand that there are loads of highly armed militia groups out there in the US that would love to go into detail of that “any means necessary”. Were this to happen, you’re basically talking civil war. once that happens, everyone loses, you will too.
I think that the only way to repair this divide is to keep building bridges, keep talking, keep listening, because once it gets too far, then that’s it. One only has to look at Yugoslavia as an example of what happens when neighbor starts massacring neighbors. There is no winning for anyone.
The biggest issue is, those who divide us make those people untrusting of said bridges.
Delete the data on my device and let me in control of the sliders and ban words. Make the defaults reasonnable to stop hate. This would not be censorship anymore, just deamplification and no one is a martyr now.
Simple as. Why censor when you can just let the users have the power to see what they want to see? In voyager I have all of the annoying headline keywords filtered. Makes browsing the fediverse much more pleasant.
The reason to say not but will not admit. This strips the owner class for the power to shape discourse and control the means of communication. This dynamic also exists on open source communication platforms such as lemmy and mastodon.
Imagine if we could simply subscribe to the content filters of fellow users. If I could just click your username, see you filter keyword list and click to add to mine the ones I like or subscribe to your named filters and their future changes.
Here on Lemmy, people who claim to advocate for freedom of speech and information, demanding for social networks to be shutdown and people to be censored based on unknown and ambiguous criteria, without even understanding the implications of it.
Details at six
in a year Lemmy will be a cesspool of extremist thoughts and opinions. left, right, doesn’t matter.
the average Lemmy user is become far more caustic towards any differing opinions and that directly increases the toxicity of the platform.
this is why mods are trying to be pedantic about the rules in communities, but unfortunately they’re only accelerating it.
for a truly free and moderated platform a mechanism must be put in place that allows the community itself to self-moderate. unfortunately every new platform wants to start out as Twitter or Meta or Reddit. All three of these platforms failed in their goals of becoming a better socialmedia platform while exceeding expectations for financial viability.
IMO communities should have a cap limit of members that can grow over time of positive growth. if there’s negative growth the community must resolve the issues together or be forced to shrink and lose members.
this doesn’t mean the community blocks access, it just means you can’t post content or comments.
If we don’t believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don’t believe in it at all. —Noam Chomsky
Less well known [than other paradoxes] is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal.
- Sir Karl Raimund Popper, speaking on The Paradox Of Tolerance.
I mean, sure, but does that mean people get to express themselves everywhere all the time?
I go to work and there’s always a couple fuckers who bring up their hateful opinions in a “I’m not racist but,” way.
It affects my productivity when I have to hear that bullshit all day while trying to get them to stop in a diplomatic way.
I can’t say it so directly, but it’s not censorship to say “shut up and let me work”
If they’re disturbing you from working, that’s an issue independent from the message they’re expressing, so freedom of expression does not apply.
Ok, now I argue that the constant bombardment of misinformation and hate speech we face online and through the media clearly affects people’s ability to live their lives, and is no different than the guy talking my ear off at work.
I’m not saying they can’t express themselves. I’m just saying that we don’t have to listen, but with the current state of things we’re being forced to listen.
Nobody is forcing you to read anyone’s comments on Facebook.
No, but we’re on the receiving end of the consequences of those comments.
When they come for you because they’re acting on some shit that Zuckerberg’s algorithm amplified, your shallow moralizing won’t make any difference.
By this logic they should ban all religious speech from every platform
It’s not just comments and I’m not talking just about me.
You and I and Mel Brooks all know that the common person is a moron.
Algorithms push misinformation. Bots push information. Are we limiting free speech by saying “you can’t use algorithms and bots to spread lies”?
Does lying count as free speech?
Yes, but just deleting without comment, as if it never existed, isn’t the solution either.
Are you saying it should be required by law to have a comment regarding removal of content?
Law is per country, web is international, i don’t think that’s gonna work.
I feel like it is still censorship, but a degree of censorship required for public safety is tolerable…
Unless he’s saying that social media sites policing content on their platform isn’t censorship, because it’s not. It’s only censorship if it’s a government doing it, you have the right to control what is said on a platform you own
It’s only censorship if it’s a government doing it
The amount of public space, both real and virtual, is decreasing dramatically. I think limits on private censorship should definitely exist.
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If I make sandwiches and people decide to eat my sandwiches then why should the government require me to follow basic health and safety.
Service offered to the general public should expect to be regulated.
Or do these limits only kick in for platforms above a certain size?
That’s how it’s in the EU, the DSA only applies to large providers. It’s kinda like the fairness doctrine in broadcasting but in the digital domain, e.g. TikTok is currently in hot waters over the Romania elections because they did not take sufficient precautions to make sure that everything’s fair and square.
And in that case, why would the same principle not apply?
Because size obliges. If I want to smelt some cans in my backyard I can just do that provided I have a “fireplace” – which is just an area set up to be suitable to have a fire. If I want to build an industrial-scale aluminium smelter I have to get permits and everything. The public interest in the latter is much larger, that’s why I have to jump through hoops and follow regulations.
(I can’t burn garden waste though, gotta give it to the municipality to compost. A matter of waste of perfectly fine organic material and unnecessary emissions).
Excellent point
