If so, do you consistently report it and get the feeling that it gets dealt with? Of course there are instances dedicated solely to being human trash
I’ve blocked a handful of people for spouting far right rhetoric and trans/homophobia so far, as well as three or so xtian instances (am I using ‘instances’ right?) that have shown up in the ‘new’ feed.
I like being able to block bigots and hateful subs, it’s really weird to me that ither sites (squabbles) don’t have this feature.
‘instances’ are websites. you might be thinking of “magazines” (subreddits).
‘Magazines’, that’s the one. Thank you!
Sure there’s instances dedicated to being human trash as you’ve put it, but in the general discourse it’s not an issue I’ve noticed, and I think there’s a few reasons for that:
- There are no “Agendas” here yet: Make no mistake there are people spending a lot of money to define the discourse on major platforms. An example people are fairly comfortable acknowledging is the existence of Russian content farms, - a lot of what stirs up bigotry on platforms isn’t genuine users sharing their experiences or hobbies or whatever, it’s people with an agenda astroturfing discontent so their backer can point to it and say “see, the ordinary people are revolting, they would prefer our regime/product/way of life”. I’m not saying every racist on Reddit is a paid actor, I’m sayinga lot of people who haven’t given things much thought are being prodded and goaded into being insensitive through consuming the fake bullshit those people put out.
- There are no advertisers here: Again, look at the major platforms, they sideline content and spaces about sexuality or race because they see these as unpalatable to advertisers. YouTube faced a lawsuit last year for “unlawful content regulation, distribution, and monetization practices that stigmatize, restrict, block, demonetize, and financially harm the LGBT Plaintiffs and the greater LGBT Community.” On YouTube, content is separated not by target age, or [N]SFW status, but advertising palatability.
- These spaces are not US centric. The US has some stupid laws, which Spez alluded to in relation to NSFW content, an example of which is FOSTA-SESTA. This is one of the reasons Tumblr and Only Fans attempted to go SFW. The laws claim to be anti sex trafficing but in reality they’re just social conservatism for the internet age, you’ll note in the link above regarding YouTube, the platforms defense of discrimination was that they were only abiding by the US Communications Decency Act, of which FOSTA-SESTA is an amendment.
The latter two points largely just hide or remove users from platforms, but that contributes to an overall atmosphere where bigotry goes unchallenged or bigot mods support bigot users. If people aren’t seen as a valid part of the community things do go sour from there.
Yup. And it’s been a thing. I’ll go as far to say that Mastodon has a racism problem.
My first move is to just block-- individuals, and whole instances if need be. Hell, I’m quick to block instances anyway! The Internet is vast; I don’t need access to every instance nor give every one a chance. I’ll report if I feel like it’ll do anything.
It also helps when you’re on an instance that takes this sort of thing seriously-- you need Mods That Actually Do Something. Furthermore, there are tags you can follow to keep up on what to block, at your discretion.
A little bit once federation got turned on in kbin, but it was pretty easy to just block those users and move on.
Personally I think kbin and @ernest should take a more backseat approach to this stuff, apart from very radical exceptions. If you don’t like content/people/magazines that you see, simply block it. If you want to join a community that will outright ban people who disagree with you, check out Tildes (left) or SaidIt (right) which are more 1:1 Reddit replacements (not in the fediverse though)
Time will tell what the overall approach for this is on kbin, but the great thing about the fediverse is if things get out of hand or take a turn here you don’t like, you can simply find another instance or a different fediverse site altogether and still interact with mostly the same people/content. But I personally very much like the relaxed and not-very-political space kbin has been so far
I strongly disagree. If there are a bunch of magazines here with racist / anti-LGBTQ+ / etc content, the site as a whole will get a reputation for it, other instances will block it, and people who don’t want to deal with that stuff will go elsewhere
While I tend to agree with your opinion, that people should be allowed to express their political view of the world, I also think that intolerance is not a political view. It’s just the heritage of a mob mentality that’s more suitable for the dark ages, rather than the globalized world we live into.
So if you want to spout about dumb non-facts like “ethnic replacement” and such, you can take a walk and come back when you’ll have a mindset more appropriate for this century.I agree with your first sentence and that’s what I meant when I said “radical exceptions”. I think the issue is many people coming from Reddit will equate anything that is right-leaning as racism or hate speech. Like I don’t want ernest to be in here during the US elections banning magazines supporting the Republican candidate
Sure, get rid of the users talking about how the Jews control the world or are going on frequent racist tangents. But I think there’s a lot more to gain about getting perspective from a place I might not necessarily agree with than just getting rid of it altogether. I hope people can be mature enough here to feel the same
Yeah for sure, political debate (done in a constructive way) is always helpful for both sides.
Extremism are to keep separated from political views, from both sides and that’s why I don’t hang out in Lemmy’s main instance too: because (while most people in there are cool) there are a bunch of self proclaimed “communists” that takes the sides of Russia in the war of Ukraine or denies the genocide of the Uyghur ethnic groups operated by the Chinese government.
And they use the same catchphrase the far-right extremists use: “don’t believe what mainstream media tell you”.
That’s because extremism is not a political problem, is a social issue. Extremists only use politics to have a justifiable outlet.Like I don’t want ernest to be in here during the US elections banning magazines supporting the Republican candidate
Just to be clear the last time this happened anywhere online was r/The_Donald, which was objectively a radical exception promoting racism and hate speech while also being a sub “supporting the Republican candidate”. You are being misleading.
What people consider “intolerance” is not a consensus. I consider some people to be very intolerant, while they think they aren’t intolerant at all. when you say intolerance shouldn’t be allowed, you have to say which one of us is right. who is getting kicked off for their “intolerance”? because whichever one you pick, they’ll be upset and think you are intolerant.
Dude we all know what “intolerance” or “racism” mean, don’t build an elaborate system of mirrors and pulleys to fuck yourself in your own ass.
Playing devil’s advocate on this matter is what allowed this kind of behaviour to exist in the first place
@ernest can only control what happens on the instances he controls, i.e. kbin.social and the others. If you’re on an instance, and find a magazine that is poorly moderated, that would be an issue to take up with That Instance and their Ownership/Moderation team. It’s not an issue for the software developer to be stepping in on.
Ernest can still block people on other instances, and whole instances themselves. If hateful people from hateful instances are intruding, we shouldn’t let that happen
No, he actually can’t. You’re confusing kbin, and kbin.social
He can absolutely choose to block people at the instance administration level, or defederate an instance, as the Owner and Administrator of kbin.social, or karab.in, or whatever other instances he might run.
There is no reasonable way, as the developer of the kbin software, that he can magically write into the source code that “nazis aren’t allowed” for instance. How would you even test for that, when somebody downloads the software, and tosses it up on their own server? He can’t control what people do with the software he writes, as long as they’re otherwise complying with the license he releases it under.
Could he put “nazis, bigots, and other assholes aren’t allowed to use this software” into the license? Probably, if he chose to, but it’s basically unenforceable.
It sounds like @Kara is just talking about defederation. Any instance in the fediverse can block connections to/from any other instance that they find to be excessively problematic. It should be used sparingly, but there are definitely cases where it is appropriate.
I will report it if I see it (hate speech, I don’t care about being edgy as long as it’s not hurting someone).
So block my account ahead of time if you can’t be decent. A block it not an insult, and it is way less effort all around if you block me ahead of time so I never see it in the first place.
I have not seen it yet, though I have no doubt that it exists.
I believe that in real life as in the fediverse, hate speech and bigotry of all kinds needs to be very firmly shot down. Immediately downvote and block that shit. It has no place here, or anywhere.
That being said, debating or even engaging with these pricks is worse than pointless because you’ll never change their minds and will only give them a platform.
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Won’t it make them angrier and more racist, though?
Racist is racist. Fuck them. I have no interest in appeasing these people, and even if I did, it wouldn’t calm them down or make their hatred tolerable. Sexists, racists, homophobes and the lot should be shunned without compromise. As the saying somewhat goes, there should be no tolerance for intolerance.
Only caveat I’d add is to differentiate between A racist/homophobe/misogynist/whatever, and someone who just expressed an ignorant viewpoint. Whether or not there’s actual malicious thinking behind things is important in figuring out if you can reason with someone or not.
Quickest example I can give off the top of my head: I’m gay, and one of my best friends is a straight man who, when I met him, had some reasonably-significant issues with his own masculinity, probably stemming from being short and slim and the resulting treatment he’d often get from both women and other men (which also lessened as we got older and out of the early 20s). That occasionally extended to things like worrying that other people would perceive him as gay because of hanging out with a bunch of LGBTQ+ people and women from work, or his slightly defensive reaction when I told him he looked good one day where he had a particularly nice outfit on and had styled his hair well, as if I’d propositioned him. Both things are a little insulting, but he also was never one of the types who views us as basically child-molesting mentally-ill deviants who don’t deserve equal rights.
We got closer, enough that he was willing to open up on the subjects, and I was able to explain how that kind of thing looked from my perspective and, in turn, kinda figured out where it was coming from on his end, but it was always from a place where he just didn’t understand why what he was saying or doing was wrong or hurtful, not because he intended to cause hurt. And he’s significantly better about that sort of thing now in general, because it made him do some introspection, and he got better at doing that for other things as well. And in all fairness, I learned a bit, too; I knew short guys often got made fun of for it, but being average size myself it wasn’t something I really had to deal with and I didn’t understand just how pervasive and wearing it is, so now I better understand how he might have gotten there in the first place.
@Kupo_Knight posted an article recently that I think is very relevant here:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tscc3e5eujrsEeFN4/well-kept-gardens-die-by-pacifism
Similar idea: https://extranewsfeed.com/tolerance-is-not-a-moral-precept-1af7007d6376?gi=cd412a4f533d
Tolerance is a peace treaty between society’s sub-groups. When one group breaks that treaty it’s moral and necessary to respond in kind and not tolerate them.
If a country rolls tanks into your country it’s not immoral to respond in kind to defend yourself. Same idea applies to intolerance.
Yeah, and then once they are banned from the public places they find the hell holes with the other racists and form groups that dress as nazis and march on washington. We literally drive them into echo chambers where people will agree with them, whereas we should be heckling them and showing them that the general public at large disagrees with them. It’s impossible to show that your community is the general public when you ban people right away. Then they think they aren’t allowed to be there and it’s not because they’re wrong, it’s because you’re woke or whatever. You can’t concentrate the evil, you have to dilute it.
The problem with this assessment is that we’ve tried the approach of reasoning with people like this and all it does is allow them to proselytise. They don’t want a polite debate, they want a pulpit.
A neo-Nazi who’s stuffed in a box talking to other neo-Nazis is a neo-Nazi who’s not infesting some other place trying to spread shit about “race realism”. They’ll find it a lot harder to “march on Washington” when it’s just a couple hundred Nazis and not a couple hundred Nazis plus thousands of others they’ve radicalised.
Sunlight’s a shitty disinfectant. I prefer bleach.
Yep. Deplatforming them works. When forced to their safe spaces, they have a much harder time recruiting.
Almost certainly, as you say, only way to control it is report it wherever you see it. Don’t let it spread.
I try to wake up each day and not be offended by everything. This way I don’t see a racist/bigot behind every tree.
Oh I’m not saying about being offended by everything. There’s a difference between disagreeing with someone’s PoV, or even them saying something disagreeable without malice, vs. Someone being a plain old hateful bigot.
Like my Mum will say things that aren’t necessarily PC, but I know she doesn’t mean anything hateful by it. I wouldn’t even think of reporting anything of that nature.
But someone disseminating hateful ideologies or being bigoted towards other people, then you need to shut that down.
this honestly. There’s a huge difference between “waaah this person disagreed with me!!” and someone actually being fucking rude and hateful. People who are progressive in their politics tend to conflate them for whatever reason.
Like, yeah, no one likes when someone is going around shouting slurs at people and generally just saying blatantly hateful shit (death threats, slurs, etc style content). But so many people end up crying that “oh you’re pro-life therefore you’re a sexist and misogynist and pushing hate speech you bigot!” like wtf?
I get this a lot as someone who is transsexual. I’ll merely talk about my transsexualism, explain the science and biology behind my condition, and then suddenly I’m a “hateful transphobic bigot” because I had the audacity to agree with the scientific literature rather than some random person’s political beliefs. Like no, I’m not being hateful towards you simply by talking about my medical condition and the science around that. What’s happening is that you’re disagreeing with me.
Whenever people place huge emphasis on “combatting hate speech” unfortunately it’s always this “disagreeing with me is hate speech” shit, and not actually dealing with hateful content.
Saying shit like “if you’re a gay man who doesn’t want to fuck someone with a vagina, you’re a bigot and you’re choosing to be like that” is blatantly homophobic and hateful (my phrasing here is nicer than some I’ve seen), yet it gets praised and rewarded and declared “not hate speech” because it happens to align politically with those constantly crying about “hate speech”.
This is the great part of the fediverse - if one server isn’t moderating a magazine well, another server can step in to help blacklist that other server’s instance pretty easily.
You’re phrasing this as if it’s something great about the fediverse, but centralized sites can just ban the magazine-equivalent directly (since they only have what we’d call local magazines). In fact, the fediverse may be worse. What’s stopping bad faith actors from constantly creating new servers pushing bad content? Centralized sites can generally do more to control who can use them with things like captchas, but federation can’t have such measures.
Saw some in the comments of a post yesterday about Starbucks and Target. It’ll likely pick up as more and more people come onto these spaces just by virtue of a larger population.
I saw that too. I asked and if you click on a person’s username you can then just block them.
This Is the way. report and block
im trans so, the answer is yes. my first day here i saw a christofascist arguing for genocide. very Politely lmao.
ive seen some outbursts on mastodon as well. i was harassed once, and ive seen a bunch of trash on social. my own small mast instance tends to defed when that happens and mastodon has been mostly good for me since i, on an account level, blocked .social.
here i reported the christofascist and it didnt get moderated over the course of the day and tho i know numbers here have blown up, i have some serious concerns about kbin.social that run in line with the nightmare scenario ive seen on mastodon.social (prior to blocking the instance.) even if they bring up the mod count, i suspect we’ll still see neolibs, fascists, and centrists dominate discourse while trans people get treated poorly with little recourse.
with that said, it cant possibly be worse than reddit or twitter so whatever i guess :/
im probably going to get harassed, see tankie shit, see fash shit, see centrists arguing that my right to access healthcare isnt important or shouldnt be prioritized (“its identity politics!!!”) until i find spaces that defederate from “main instances” bc “main instances” tend to exclude minorities in favour of protecting violent or proveably false speech, regardless of the harm it causes. im not sure that will change here. or anywhere.
polite disagreement isn’t hate speech.
None so far. But I’m also for free speech and think mods should only block the worst of the worst like CP or extreme racism. Conspiracy theories and ordinary bigotry/extremism (not directed at a specific person) are fine.
Free speech is not a right to force people to listen to you. One of the good features reddit added was personal block lists. As a user, I should be able to completely ban and not see speech of people I don’t want to engage with. If I could have my own personal AI filter assistant that would be even better, though I suppose that is best built client side.
I’m a fan of the self-censor model. If you don’t want to see something, you should be able to remove it from your view. but you shouldn’t be allowed to determine that someone else isn’t allowed to speak.
