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.
Find a new instance of you don’t like the admins policy, or start your own? Seems pretty straightforward to me.
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.
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
So your conclusion is: “Dear admins, defederate from everything I deem offensive?”
No, how silly. Where did you get that idea?
I had that impression from your initial response, but I might have misunderstood.
I still disagree that thought and speech lead deterministically to action which is a thing you actually stated. Your argument is the same as the one used against POV shooters and there’s no evidence for this claim.
Yes, my stance is far from ‘ban everything I dont like’. But you need to understand that ‘ban nothing at all’ (which is what free speech absolutists argue for) is on the other extreme of the moderation spectrum. I like to think I fall somewhere in the middle.
it’s hardly a binary choice between the 2 so I was thrown when you instantly assumed that.
There’s plenty of evidence that 8chan leads to mass shootings as many of the shooters leave vast manifestos on the site itself referencing beliefs they learned on the site. It has nothing to do with video games. If you want to claim that ‘words and beliefs never lead to actions’ that’s fine but I think that’s obviously false. In fact I’d say all actions are the result of our beliefs.
its fine for us to disagree here.
