Hi, I am setting up a danish site. The word ‘sl*t’ means ‘to complete’ in danish. Whenever we make a post with that word, we get an error saying “no slurs”. And the post is not accepted.
It does not help that we have enabled NSFW in community and on the post.
Please help. Thank you :)
It’s a difficult and controversial topic, censorship. I’m sure you’ve already had the debate. You know about the everyday damage and about the risks, and banning certain words is the right approach for Lemmy.
But nobody wants to go down the road of shadowbans, deleting off-brand subreddits, suppressing certain topics.
Sometimes censorship really is justified. The only crucial thing is to be transparent about it. If you publish the forms of censorship in use or planned, then it would be much less problematic.
Are you planning to publish a list of the forms of censorship currently used or planned?
Ideally you would even publish the list of banned words. That would have prevented the Danish instance’s problem.
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/blob/7cc5f53cad63a26bff8f4736e9a74d6c0a19c493/lemmy_utils/src/utils.rs#L10
Thanks. I don’t even know half of those. Maybe they are common insults in America.
I guess in the future each instance will chose its own list based on its region or language, it the culture it wants to build.
Shadowbans aren’t supported by the Lemmy platform and there are no plans to my knowledge to implement them. In fact, the moderation logs are public, and will show what posts or comments have been removed and what users and communities have been banned. Only very problematic or illegal content are completely removed from the server.
The comment above this one links to the slur filter in the source code, which contains all the words being “censored”. You’ll notice we only have actual slurs in it, words whose primary or only purpose is to attack people, not less serious swear words like shit and fuck.
The code is open source, and in fact, per terms of the license, everyone who modifies the code base for use on their own server needs to make their changes open source too.
Thanks that’s reassuring. So you can still have a discussion about precocious people (though i don’t know why you would) but just not using specific protected swear words. So the intention is not to suppress ideas or opinions or ways of thinking.
But what about that time a post was deleted from lemmy.ml for criticising public health advice on mask usage?
The post wasn’t just mask usage, it was saying that the virus doesn’t matter and no one should be taking steps to prevent its spread. It’s provably wrong information (papers have been written about the subject) and is dangerous if someone actually decides to take it seriously. You can see it in the modlog still.
That modlog is very interesting. The censorship is transparent just as it should be.
TBH I strongly disagree with your approach to freedom of speech. But you must be doing something right that Voat did wrong.
It’s not critiques of a government we remove, it’s hateful language, misinformation, trolling, and other such things. None of that is “freedom of speech”, it’s filth that has no place on Lemmy. The post you brought up, was one where someone was literally saying the virus wasn’t real, taking that post down wasn’t ‘censorship’, it was janitorially removing misinformation. If you have a problem with this, Lemmy might not be for you.