Calls for defederation - Is the idea of the open marketplace of ideas outdated?
Calls for defederation - Is the idea of the open marketplace of ideas outdated?
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!
People don't always engage in good faith. Such people are not bringing ideas to the marketplace, they are trying to manipulate people.
In order to really engage with each other, we have to have some common ground on which we can work from. If that base ground is not established, there is no discussion to be had. If I'm trying to talk about how to make grocery stores more efficient, but you're talking about how to get to Jupiter, we can't have a conversation that has any point.
A similar thing can happen at the instance scale.
Defederating for the reasons you said are, by themselves, poor reasons I agree. But sometimes I think they are trying to say they aren't engaging in good faith, or that enough of the basic point of that instance is at odds with the basic point of this instance that defederating makes sense.
It might be cool to be able to individually ignore/block instances so it's on a more individual level
If the instances that want to be a safe space defederate from instances espousing an ideology they can't stand, I don't see the problem. If an LGBTQIA+ instance and a Salafi Muslim instance defederate each other, most of their members are going to be happier even though it might be hard on gay Salafis.
"This generalist instance I am on shouldn't tolerate Salafis and I demand we defederate the Salafi instance tomorrow" sounds the same in outline, but feels very different. It's closer to an attempt to push your enemies out of the public square than an attempt to prevent harassment of your private meeting.
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.
I've been on the internet for a minute... if you think unmoderated free speech works in a primarily text based medium then I have a bridge in Queens that just popped on the market. Oh look that's a statement, i should defend that right with logically consistent arguments and citations and draw my conclusions from that and oh my God is anyone still reading this?
The most concise reason I have is that respect is a two-way street, and I haven't met a lot of folks online who actually understand what it means to respect an argument. The barrier to entry for me is the ability to think critically, and that involves regulating your own speach and not having to rely on others to do it for you.
So let's see... statement, some bullshit evidence, appeal to critical thinking, one more to go ...
This is a falsifiable and testable theory ... find me a site that promotes this and I'll look and see how long it takes for it to fail my one simple criteria.
Your mixing the need for moderation which I don't dispute with the call for defederation by users who feel offended by lawful freedom of speech.
So if you want to make an argument against what I actually said/wrote: Be my guest.
Defederation is a fancy term for shunning. Which is an appropriate response when a community fails to regulate it's speech. Differnent communities will have different standards based on but not limited to local social mores, geographical region, language and probably a lot more. I appreciate your effort in defending Freedom of Speech on this platform, but the sad fact remains that most people on the internet have no concept on how Rhetoric, Logic, and Burden of Proof actually work so it just ends up with everyone throwing shit at eachother.
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
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?
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.
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.
- Make lemmy stupidly easy to prop up an instance
- Cap users of any instance to 100
This way, no one instance can bloat up to thousands of users and start making a big island.
Sounds like a good plan! It makes the Fediverse more diverse, more censorship restitant and more resilient against corporate takeover attempts.
I like it!
I think people who feel this is controversial are missing the entire point of federation and should consider going to a platform that doesn't use it.
Nobody is 'mandating [an echo chamber] for everyone else' by defederating from a different instance, as many other instances are open registration. The largest problem here is that, in my opinion, the design is not well suited for overlarge instances such as lemmy.world or sh.itjust.works. We should all be on reasonably small instances that can smoothly choose who to federate/defederate and thus impact only a group of likeminded people. People with differing opinions can then just go to a different instance if they disagree. This is quite a democratic approach to problems like this, as it allows people who feel strongly about these things to 'shop around' for an instance that suits their needs and which will react favourably to further recommendations. If particular instances start hosting particularly disgusting opinions, they'll see a democratic process wherein a large plurality of instances all defederate from them.
In other words, you are seeing it as "defederation allows person X to determine what person Y can read" when in fact it should be "all people who feel the same as X are welcome on server lemmy.x". This problem is perpetuated not by people wanting instances that suit their needs, but by having a few specific very large instances that did not clearly lay out their philosophies (no fault of theirs I think, we're all learning this for the first time). They can no longer adapt with any agility due to a very heterogeneous and large user base.
On another note:
Has humanity really developed into a situation where words and thoughts are more hurtful than sticks and stones?
You really should study the lead-up to world war 2 if you think platforming dangerous beliefs is a simple matter of "words will never hurt me". I don't intend this as a 'gotcha' or anything, it's both fascinating and disturbing, and something every human should understand. The argument of 'we should at least let these fringe weirdos say their piece, what harm could it have' is, without exaggeration, how we wound up with ww2.
I think your idea of ten
thousandmillion small instances is what the fediverse was meant to be, but if you don't have the resources to run your very own instance and you have multiple small interests instead of one life-consuming one, it's a severe problem. Do I join the instance dedicated to bullet journaling, or the instance dedicated to Final Fantasy XIV, or the instance dedicated to Tolkien? Which instance will tolerate me posting on a debate instance and posting in a language other than English?It's much easier to join a generalist instance that will tolerate all of that, but that means the generalist instance has to be willing to tolerate the debaters (who will break down into rude squabbling), a Tolkien fan saying that Tolkien probably wouldn't have approved of the new MtG cards, and other things of which censorious progressives disapprove.
I'm interested in an answer to the problem, because having too many instances to choose from and that choice mattering a fair bit is a big barrier to more people joining the fediverse.
P.S. This is the third time I've had to restart my comment due to vanishing. Is there a known issue with comments in progress vanishing?
I don't want admins stepping between myself and other users, getting in the way of conversations. That's why I left Reddit!
Don't force your safe space on me. That's actually hostile.
No one forced you to join this server. Don't barge into others houses and re-arrange the furniture.
So many children.
The exact same idea applies to you. Except I don't disparage people for sharing their opinions.
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.
But there aren't any Nazis on Exploding Heads. We banned one just the other day.
That sounds like a contradiction in terms. Unless you banned the only Nazi in existence it stands to reason there are likely to be others.
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.
But we know for a fact that fascists do not argue in good faith
That sounds like a contradiction in terms. Unless you banned the only Nazi in existence it stands to reason there are likely to be others.
It's a tiny instance - yes, there has been an influx of new people, but it's still absolutely nothing like it is here. If there are any, they are lurkers.
But we know for a fact that fascists do not argue in good faith
There are those who self-identify as progressives, anti-racists, feminists, anarchists, etc., who also do not argue in good faith and even use these progressive monikers to go as a sheep in wolves clothing...
Point being: you have to argue in good faith, and not worry so much about assessing what other people think or are trying to do.
But if your actual position really is as simplistic as
-> this guy is a Republican -> he's a smooth talking Republican -> he's a secret racist -> he's a cryptofascist -> everything he says is a lie meant to advance his fascist agenda...
It's actually you who is not engaging in good faith with anybody.
I don't know anything about this instance and I'm right now only evaluating what the EH-member just posted above my response here.
I do not see any hate speech, I don't see anyone disputing anyone else's right to exist or live, I just see someone with strong belief in free speech. Unless somebody can point me to explicitly unlawful (hate alone is not forbidden, let's not forget that! Thought crimes are fortunately not yet a thing!) behaviour, I will give the instance the benefit of the doubt... And so should do any reasonable and sound human being.
I agree but calls to have a diverse market place of content, even if that offends someone, never works. That died a long time ago on Facebook, Reddit, Youtube. Twitter survives (kinda) only because Elon Musk owns it (who knows how long it will last). 4chan's POL only exisits because its been grandfathered in and people who don't like pol flock away and the people who don't like Reddit flock to it. I agree with you because the march of safe spaces will continue uninterupted.
If 4chan's moderation policy is superior in your opinion, why aren't you there?
I am there. I am also on youtube, twitter and facebook. I can use more than one social media service. Don't you?
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...
I'm really starting to like the term 'defederate'...it's so much more descriptive and applicable than 'censorship' or 'cancelling'. Me intentionally choosing not associate with you isn't the same as me actively trying prevent you from speaking. Me choosing a group that is choosing not to associate with you doesn't infringe on your rights in the slightest. You whining about the fact that no one wants to listen to you is so far away from censorship that it's almost humorous to listen to folks trying to shoe-horn it into the conversation.
By 'you', I obviously (I hope) mean the people whining about being 'defederated', not the commenter I'm replying to.
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.