8 ms·

All of those alternatives seem full of hate speech though

by moneywoes 6y ago

quotemstr 6y ago
So? Any platform free of censorship is going to have some speech you dislike.
- drdeca 6y ago
  There’s a difference between “has some of it” and “is full of it”. As SSC says, even if witch hunts are genuinely bad, if you found a town with the founding principle of having no witch hunts, you will end up with a town with 5 genuine civil libertarians, and 100 witches. I think an interesting strategy would be to found a site with an initially high level of censorship, but a public commitment to reduce the amount/degree of censorship on the site over time with a particular timetable.
  - quotemstr 6y ago
    No, there's no difference between "has some of it" and "is full of it". Where could the line possibly be drawn between those two? Why should your values in particular control other people's speech? If you don't want to participate on a discussion because it's full of something you dislike, that's your call. But big tech companies have no business shutting down other people's legal conversations.
    - drdeca 6y ago
      Quantitative differences are still differences. 1% is different from 1.01% and from 80% . My preferences determine what communities I prefer to be a part of. I prefer to not be part of a community where the majority says super racist garbage. As such, I choose not to join such a community/website.
      - UnFleshedOne 6y ago
        I think you guys agree. You are free to not participate. The point of contention is: are you free to deny others ability to participate if they want? (if you had that ability) That's where idea of public platforms as infrastructure (and actual infrastructure like DNS and carriers) if coming from. This reminds me of people wanting to ban or filter torrent protocol itself, instead of illegal content on it.
  - luckylion 6y ago
    Unless there's a limitless supply of witches somewhere, the more witch-hunt-free towns there are, the more the witches will be distributed among those towns, because witches aren't a homogeneous group either. So in theory, voat & co should either shrink or get less radical the more reddit-alternatives there are. That is, unless reddit is turning normal people into witches that will then populate the new alternative platforms.
    - drdeca 6y ago
      This is an interesting point! However, I also note that there is a limited number of “genuine civil libertarians” (or, of people in general I guess), so I am not sure that having more of these would necessarily improve the ratios between the two within any particular town/site ? Also if people are spread sufficiently thin, some of the sites will die from “no one is using this”, I think. I don’t know how this all balances out, but what you brought up does seem like an important force/mechanism to take into account. So, I’ll say “Further work is needed in order to understand the behavior in this area.”, haha.
      - luckylion 6y ago
        I'd guess that the need for genuine civil libertarians would go down with the witch density. The super majority of people is probably fine with seeing one witch per day, but they really don't want to live anywhere where they feel surrounded by witches. The dynamics involved in city districts rising and falling and rising again might be similar. Online communities lack the rent-dynamic however. A "difficult" part of town gets more attractive because the rent is much cheaper. I don't know whether there's anything equivalent in online communities that would "gentrify" a toxic community.
    - GoblinSlayer 6y ago
      What do you think a normal person thinks when he sees a witch being burned?
      - krapp 6y ago
        Historically speaking, "Good riddance."
  - mike00632 6y ago
    I think you just described TikTok. There is an extreme level of censorship due to how many children use the app. They've achieved a level of family-friendlyness that YouTube is trying very hard to get. Regarding politics, TikTok has often said that they just aren't a place for politics, and now they are being pressured to let up on political censorship because of issues about China and the coming US presidential election.
    - drdeca 6y ago
      Huh. I was imagining an organization which from the outset planned to be very permissive in what they eventually allowed, with initial restrictions just being in order to cultivate a desirable community to start with, but now that you mention it, perhaps the motivation behind the policies don’t matter so much as the policies themselves. Good point. That being said, I don’t imagine that TikTok will become quite as permissive in the end as I was imagining?
- HelloMcFly 6y ago
  Well, because I don't want to join communities where hate speech is common, much less the prevailing type of content. I don't think that speech should be outlawed, but that doesn't mean I want to be where it is. So if reddit helps remove hate speech and it funnels to these alternatives, that only makes reddit more attractive to me. Plainly: I want reddit to censor hate speech on their site, but I don't want hosting companies to disallow those alernative sites to exist, nor do I want Chrome to disallow any user to visit any of those alternatives in their browser.
  - quotemstr 6y ago
    Ok. But when you start denying basic infrastructure to those with viewpoints you dislike --- domain names, DDOS protection, app store distribution --- you're no longer trying to just maintain some particular community's culture, but instead eradicate certain speech from public life. It should be illegal to deny fundamental infrastructure to someone on the basis of his philosophy or point of view. That's what a free society means.
    - cortesoft 6y ago
      They are welcome to buy their own servers or even rent them. We don't have to subsidize their free use of internet resources.
      - pferde 6y ago
        Isn't that exactly what these federated platforms (and the apps to access them) are doing?
      - core-questions 6y ago
        You say that, but it's a well trodden argument. > We don't have to subsidize their free use of internet resources. We subsidize the FAANG's use of internet resources; the Internet was largely originally created with public money (military, academia, etc). > They are welcome to buy their own servers or even rent them. Are they? What if they get banned from there? What if they can't collect money from their community, because all the donation sites ban them? What if their donation sites are killed because all the payment processors drop them? Your argument leads to the logical end of "they're welcome to make their own internet". What happens when something you like to discuss falls into the category of hate speech? You think it couldn't happen, but plenty of topics that were totally reasonable subjects of discussion, plenty of totally reasonable publicly-held opinions from 20 years ago are now in this basket. It's totally plausible to imagine some newer topic you feel strongly about eventually becoming so, and you ending up on the side of wanting to have honest discussion about it and being locked out. Can't imagine it happening to you? Well, maybe you don't like pedophilia, or the huge push of incest porn that seems to be everywhere. Maybe you have legitimate, non-racially-oriented concerns about the riots around the country? Maybe you're worried about some particular changes coming to your children's education, or you're worried about the impact of ideas like UBI? Well, your opinions that are acceptable to post in polite places today might not be in 2030. The only way anyone should be okay with this continual incursion into free speech is if they have truly tied themselves to the idea of being 100% on board with whatever restriction is coming down the pipe next. Such a person has no principles, and it's hard to imagine defending them.
- krapp 6y ago
  There are few if any platforms on the open web free of censorship, they just draw their line in the sand in a different arbitrary place than others. Banning illegal content, spam, harassment, etc (which even the most hardcore "censorship free" platforms do) are also forms of censorship.
  - quotemstr 6y ago
    The danger here is viewpoint based discrimination. It should be illegal for a big platform to shut down certain points of view when these points of view are legal and expressed in a normal manner. You can shut down spam without harming the principle of free expression because you can express any idea in a way that isn't spam. The law gives you a legitimate and stable line that you can draw between allowed and disallowed speech. It's fine for a platform to censor what's illegal, because in a sense, we all agree on the law and have a say in its content. But we have no say in big tech content policy, and that's what makes it illegitimate. My basic point is that it's infuriating and wrong for big tech to impose its values on the public. A public space that's privately owned is still a public space. A free society is one where you don't get barred from public spaces because of your opinions.
    - jakelazaroff 6y ago
      Why should e.g. hate speech be allowed but not spam? Spam is perfectly legal. You’re not actually against lines being drawn through legal speech — you just don’t like where they fall.
      - yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
        > Spam is perfectly legal That's a somewhat bold claim. At minimum, CAN-SPAM makes the worst of it illegal.
        jakelazaroff 6y ago
        CAN-SPAM only covers email [1]: > [An Act] To regulate interstate commerce by imposing limitations and penalties on the trans-mission of unsolicited commercial electronic mail via the Internet. [1] https://www.ftc.gov/sites/default/files/documents/cases/2007/11/canspam.pdf https://www.ftc.gov/sites/default/files/documents/cases/2007...
- MyNameIsMyName 6y ago
  Censorship not related to government always strikes me as just complaining. Private entities, whether they be individuals or businesses should be free to determine what is an acceptable uses of their services, and what is not. Do you allow any form of speech in your house or is your house a platform that censors speech?
  - anoncake 6y ago
    A home is not a platform at all, let alone a public one open to everyone, anonymously and without needing an invitation. It's a personal and intimate place.
    - drivingmenuts 6y ago
      Most service platforms are not public, either, requiring, at minimum, a way to identify the content creator, even if only to the admins. While consuming the content may be anonymous, production is not. The platform itself is only acting as a publisher. In this specific instance, Google is n the wrong. 4chan, being the obvious exception, since content can be created anonymously.
      - anoncake 6y ago
        Irrelevant nitpicking. So it's pseudonymous, there is no practical difference.
        drivingmenuts 6y ago
        There’s a huge difference. The government has to let you speak. The corresponding duty on your part is that you won’t do harm (eg., shouting Fire, etC.) That right, and duty, does not exist on a private platform that you don’t own. You are limited by the TOS and license that you, like most, willfully skip over. A private, non-government platform can tell you to STFU and Get Out and they don’t even need a reason, because it’s their platform. You can easily set up your own free speech platform, but nobody is required to listen. That’s the main attraction of social media, a more-or-less guaranteed audience. At least until someone tells you to GTFO if you’re not hosting.
angio 6y ago
lemmy.ml does moderate content and does not allow hate speech. Once federation is implemented they said they will ban "free speech" instances.
- kixiQu 6y ago
  to be clear, I believe they will be defederating from instances that push over content against the flagship instance's ToS; those instances will still be able to run Lemmy software.
naravara 6y ago
I think that's a natural selection bias. Most people are either fine with reddit and therefore don't care about finding alternatives, or they aren't interested in what Reddit has to offer, in which case they ignore it. Even if they'd be open to an alternative that's better, spending a lot of time on a subreddit focused on alternatives, shopping through curated lists of them to try them all out is a pretty high investment of time and energy. The kinds of people who are going to spend a lot of time doing that are likely to be people who like how reddit works a lot, but have an ax to grind against some aspect of it, and usually that aspect is moderation. Most normal people who interact inoffensively have very few interactions with moderators. It's only going to be controversial people who gravitate to that sort of thing, and any platform that's full of people who frequently court controversy is bound to fill up rather quickly with insane freaks.
gadders 6y ago
I think them being full of "hate speech" is a consequence of them being deplatformed - they were forced to find a new home (I put "hate speech" in quotes because even saying "Make America Great Again" qualifies with some people). Unless you have been deplatformed, then there is a lot of inertia stopping a community from upping and moving to a new platform.
john_moscow 6y ago
We live in a time of extreme devaluation of terms. The Democratic Republic of Congo is a hardcore dictatorship. The People's Republic of China is run by a close circle of elites. Likewise, "Hate Speech" is used far too often to shut down fairly reasonable criticism against the "equal outcome, not equal opportunity" policies bundled together with original sin and Orwellian struggle sessions.
- UncleMeat 6y ago
  Places like voat consistently have holocaust denial and calls to actually murder jewish and black people at the very tippy top. There are few places that can be more accurately called "filled with hate speech" than voat.
  - john_moscow 6y ago
    In my personal opinion, Voat is completely bonkers. So I personally don't go there and consider the problem solved. Other places on the list are much more reasonable.
- offa 6y ago
  OK, but to be fair, it's hard to suggest a meaningful alternative to "hate speech" to describe the conversations happening on Voat and other such platforms.

All of those alternatives seem full of hate speech though

quotemstr 6y ago

So? Any platform free of censorship is going to have some speech you dislike.

drdeca 6y ago
There’s a difference between “has some of it” and “is full of it”. As SSC says, even if witch hunts are genuinely bad, if you found a town with the founding principle of having no witch hunts, you will end up with a town with 5 genuine civil libertarians, and 100 witches. I think an interesting strategy would be to found a site with an initially high level of censorship, but a public commitment to reduce the amount/degree of censorship on the site over time with a particular timetable.
- quotemstr 6y ago
  No, there's no difference between "has some of it" and "is full of it". Where could the line possibly be drawn between those two? Why should your values in particular control other people's speech? If you don't want to participate on a discussion because it's full of something you dislike, that's your call. But big tech companies have no business shutting down other people's legal conversations.
  - drdeca 6y ago
    Quantitative differences are still differences. 1% is different from 1.01% and from 80% . My preferences determine what communities I prefer to be a part of. I prefer to not be part of a community where the majority says super racist garbage. As such, I choose not to join such a community/website.
    - UnFleshedOne 6y ago
      I think you guys agree. You are free to not participate. The point of contention is: are you free to deny others ability to participate if they want? (if you had that ability) That's where idea of public platforms as infrastructure (and actual infrastructure like DNS and carriers) if coming from. This reminds me of people wanting to ban or filter torrent protocol itself, instead of illegal content on it.
- luckylion 6y ago
  Unless there's a limitless supply of witches somewhere, the more witch-hunt-free towns there are, the more the witches will be distributed among those towns, because witches aren't a homogeneous group either. So in theory, voat & co should either shrink or get less radical the more reddit-alternatives there are. That is, unless reddit is turning normal people into witches that will then populate the new alternative platforms.
  - drdeca 6y ago
    This is an interesting point! However, I also note that there is a limited number of “genuine civil libertarians” (or, of people in general I guess), so I am not sure that having more of these would necessarily improve the ratios between the two within any particular town/site ? Also if people are spread sufficiently thin, some of the sites will die from “no one is using this”, I think. I don’t know how this all balances out, but what you brought up does seem like an important force/mechanism to take into account. So, I’ll say “Further work is needed in order to understand the behavior in this area.”, haha.
    - luckylion 6y ago
      I'd guess that the need for genuine civil libertarians would go down with the witch density. The super majority of people is probably fine with seeing one witch per day, but they really don't want to live anywhere where they feel surrounded by witches. The dynamics involved in city districts rising and falling and rising again might be similar. Online communities lack the rent-dynamic however. A "difficult" part of town gets more attractive because the rent is much cheaper. I don't know whether there's anything equivalent in online communities that would "gentrify" a toxic community.
  - GoblinSlayer 6y ago
    What do you think a normal person thinks when he sees a witch being burned?
    - krapp 6y ago
      Historically speaking, "Good riddance."
- mike00632 6y ago
  I think you just described TikTok. There is an extreme level of censorship due to how many children use the app. They've achieved a level of family-friendlyness that YouTube is trying very hard to get. Regarding politics, TikTok has often said that they just aren't a place for politics, and now they are being pressured to let up on political censorship because of issues about China and the coming US presidential election.
  - drdeca 6y ago
    Huh. I was imagining an organization which from the outset planned to be very permissive in what they eventually allowed, with initial restrictions just being in order to cultivate a desirable community to start with, but now that you mention it, perhaps the motivation behind the policies don’t matter so much as the policies themselves. Good point. That being said, I don’t imagine that TikTok will become quite as permissive in the end as I was imagining?
HelloMcFly 6y ago
Well, because I don't want to join communities where hate speech is common, much less the prevailing type of content. I don't think that speech should be outlawed, but that doesn't mean I want to be where it is. So if reddit helps remove hate speech and it funnels to these alternatives, that only makes reddit more attractive to me. Plainly: I want reddit to censor hate speech on their site, but I don't want hosting companies to disallow those alernative sites to exist, nor do I want Chrome to disallow any user to visit any of those alternatives in their browser.
- quotemstr 6y ago
  Ok. But when you start denying basic infrastructure to those with viewpoints you dislike --- domain names, DDOS protection, app store distribution --- you're no longer trying to just maintain some particular community's culture, but instead eradicate certain speech from public life. It should be illegal to deny fundamental infrastructure to someone on the basis of his philosophy or point of view. That's what a free society means.
  - cortesoft 6y ago
    They are welcome to buy their own servers or even rent them. We don't have to subsidize their free use of internet resources.
    - pferde 6y ago
      Isn't that exactly what these federated platforms (and the apps to access them) are doing?
    - core-questions 6y ago
      You say that, but it's a well trodden argument. > We don't have to subsidize their free use of internet resources. We subsidize the FAANG's use of internet resources; the Internet was largely originally created with public money (military, academia, etc). > They are welcome to buy their own servers or even rent them. Are they? What if they get banned from there? What if they can't collect money from their community, because all the donation sites ban them? What if their donation sites are killed because all the payment processors drop them? Your argument leads to the logical end of "they're welcome to make their own internet". What happens when something you like to discuss falls into the category of hate speech? You think it couldn't happen, but plenty of topics that were totally reasonable subjects of discussion, plenty of totally reasonable publicly-held opinions from 20 years ago are now in this basket. It's totally plausible to imagine some newer topic you feel strongly about eventually becoming so, and you ending up on the side of wanting to have honest discussion about it and being locked out. Can't imagine it happening to you? Well, maybe you don't like pedophilia, or the huge push of incest porn that seems to be everywhere. Maybe you have legitimate, non-racially-oriented concerns about the riots around the country? Maybe you're worried about some particular changes coming to your children's education, or you're worried about the impact of ideas like UBI? Well, your opinions that are acceptable to post in polite places today might not be in 2030. The only way anyone should be okay with this continual incursion into free speech is if they have truly tied themselves to the idea of being 100% on board with whatever restriction is coming down the pipe next. Such a person has no principles, and it's hard to imagine defending them.
krapp 6y ago
There are few if any platforms on the open web free of censorship, they just draw their line in the sand in a different arbitrary place than others. Banning illegal content, spam, harassment, etc (which even the most hardcore "censorship free" platforms do) are also forms of censorship.
- quotemstr 6y ago
  The danger here is viewpoint based discrimination. It should be illegal for a big platform to shut down certain points of view when these points of view are legal and expressed in a normal manner. You can shut down spam without harming the principle of free expression because you can express any idea in a way that isn't spam. The law gives you a legitimate and stable line that you can draw between allowed and disallowed speech. It's fine for a platform to censor what's illegal, because in a sense, we all agree on the law and have a say in its content. But we have no say in big tech content policy, and that's what makes it illegitimate. My basic point is that it's infuriating and wrong for big tech to impose its values on the public. A public space that's privately owned is still a public space. A free society is one where you don't get barred from public spaces because of your opinions.
  - jakelazaroff 6y ago
    Why should e.g. hate speech be allowed but not spam? Spam is perfectly legal. You’re not actually against lines being drawn through legal speech — you just don’t like where they fall.
    - yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
      > Spam is perfectly legal That's a somewhat bold claim. At minimum, CAN-SPAM makes the worst of it illegal.
      - jakelazaroff 6y ago
        CAN-SPAM only covers email [1]: > [An Act] To regulate interstate commerce by imposing limitations and penalties on the trans-mission of unsolicited commercial electronic mail via the Internet. [1] https://www.ftc.gov/sites/default/files/documents/cases/2007/11/canspam.pdf https://www.ftc.gov/sites/default/files/documents/cases/2007...
MyNameIsMyName 6y ago
Censorship not related to government always strikes me as just complaining. Private entities, whether they be individuals or businesses should be free to determine what is an acceptable uses of their services, and what is not. Do you allow any form of speech in your house or is your house a platform that censors speech?
- anoncake 6y ago
  A home is not a platform at all, let alone a public one open to everyone, anonymously and without needing an invitation. It's a personal and intimate place.
  - drivingmenuts 6y ago
    Most service platforms are not public, either, requiring, at minimum, a way to identify the content creator, even if only to the admins. While consuming the content may be anonymous, production is not. The platform itself is only acting as a publisher. In this specific instance, Google is n the wrong. 4chan, being the obvious exception, since content can be created anonymously.
    - anoncake 6y ago
      Irrelevant nitpicking. So it's pseudonymous, there is no practical difference.
      - drivingmenuts 6y ago
        There’s a huge difference. The government has to let you speak. The corresponding duty on your part is that you won’t do harm (eg., shouting Fire, etC.) That right, and duty, does not exist on a private platform that you don’t own. You are limited by the TOS and license that you, like most, willfully skip over. A private, non-government platform can tell you to STFU and Get Out and they don’t even need a reason, because it’s their platform. You can easily set up your own free speech platform, but nobody is required to listen. That’s the main attraction of social media, a more-or-less guaranteed audience. At least until someone tells you to GTFO if you’re not hosting.

angio 6y ago

lemmy.ml does moderate content and does not allow hate speech. Once federation is implemented they said they will ban "free speech" instances.

kixiQu 6y ago
to be clear, I believe they will be defederating from instances that push over content against the flagship instance's ToS; those instances will still be able to run Lemmy software.

naravara 6y ago

I think that's a natural selection bias. Most people are either fine with reddit and therefore don't care about finding alternatives, or they aren't interested in what Reddit has to offer, in which case they ignore it. Even if they'd be open to an alternative that's better, spending a lot of time on a subreddit focused on alternatives, shopping through curated lists of them to try them all out is a pretty high investment of time and energy. The kinds of people who are going to spend a lot of time doing that are likely to be people who like how reddit works a lot, but have an ax to grind against some aspect of it, and usually that aspect is moderation. Most normal people who interact inoffensively have very few interactions with moderators. It's only going to be controversial people who gravitate to that sort of thing, and any platform that's full of people who frequently court controversy is bound to fill up rather quickly with insane freaks.

gadders 6y ago

I think them being full of "hate speech" is a consequence of them being deplatformed - they were forced to find a new home (I put "hate speech" in quotes because even saying "Make America Great Again" qualifies with some people). Unless you have been deplatformed, then there is a lot of inertia stopping a community from upping and moving to a new platform.

john_moscow 6y ago

We live in a time of extreme devaluation of terms. The Democratic Republic of Congo is a hardcore dictatorship. The People's Republic of China is run by a close circle of elites. Likewise, "Hate Speech" is used far too often to shut down fairly reasonable criticism against the "equal outcome, not equal opportunity" policies bundled together with original sin and Orwellian struggle sessions.

UncleMeat 6y ago
Places like voat consistently have holocaust denial and calls to actually murder jewish and black people at the very tippy top. There are few places that can be more accurately called "filled with hate speech" than voat.
- john_moscow 6y ago
  In my personal opinion, Voat is completely bonkers. So I personally don't go there and consider the problem solved. Other places on the list are much more reasonable.
offa 6y ago
OK, but to be fair, it's hard to suggest a meaningful alternative to "hate speech" to describe the conversations happening on Voat and other such platforms.