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Liberals never actually left the free speech refuge - they just wanted to keep the far right out of it. There's a logic to this; you don't want people advocatin

Liberals never actually left the free speech refuge - they just wanted to keep the far right out of it. There's a logic to this; you don't want people advocating for mass censorship to be able to use free speech as a weapon to cut your head off. In other words, it's OK to censor Hitler[0]. Not everyone will agree, I suspect you don't. I put that disagreement in the same category as, say, the BSD vs. GPL arguments back in the day. The problem with true P2P social networking is that I don't want to have to make individual moderation decisions based on each identity that happens to try and send me a message. That is makework best delegated to someone at least marginally trustworthy so that I can spend my time actually using the network as intended. Moderation is a necessary precondition to any kind of online forum actually, y'know, working as a forum. In order to actually have effective moderation, you need scarcity of identity. In a completely P2P network, you can just make new identities to spam people with, so blocking them has no effect. Centralized platforms have a certain magic to them in that they can make identities cost money without actually charging people for them. That's why everything wants a phone number now - because phone numbers cost money, and they can limit sign-ups to a few per number per year. The closest Mastodon has to this is domain names, which is why defederation is the first thing instance operators run to when dealing with rule breakers. It forces you to at least burn a domain name to continue harassing someone. > Many amongst the left obsesses over what the right is doing (and vice versa), which tells me people enjoy rubbernecking rather than tuning out. It's a game of "neener-neener" high school football rivalry. No, this is just Twitter. Twitter is structured to encourage clout-chasing and toxic behavior. [0] Or spammers. Actually I don't get why people who call for extreme free speech aren't also calling for getting rid of spam filters. Spam filters are censorship, but it's censorship we tolerate in exchange for a functional e-mail system.

mcpackieh 3y ago
You're right about one thing; those who are liberals today never abandoned free speech. Many progressives did, but in so doing, they ceased to be liberal.
xigoi 3y ago
> Liberals never actually left the free speech refuge - they just wanted to keep the far right out of it. There's a logic to this; you don't want people advocating for mass censorship to be able to use free speech as a weapon to cut your head off. The political censorship on current social media goes far beyond “we don't want people advocating for mass censorship here”. Ironically, they do like advocating for mass censorship, as long as it's censorship of the “correct” side.
- kmeisthax 3y ago
  If you mean Twitter specifically they jumped from "we have a bunch of rules that accidentally censor right-wingers more because they break the rules more" to "we intentionally censor left-wingers for the sake of balance" the moment Musk jumped in. I'm not entirely sure how that refutes my point, though - the liberals the grandparent post was talking about aren't the same class of people who actually have moderation privileges on Twitter. Their crimes here are... cheering when Twitter did a thing that might technically go outside one's core values? The biggest thing I can fault liberals for is adopting the Comcast argument: i.e. that Twitter is allowed to censor because it's a private platform and only government action carries the Evil Bit that makes content removal into censorship. This was always a losing argument, and we knew it was a losing argument because we'd already shat on Comcast for trying to do the same thing back when Net Neutrality was still a thing. But it's less "leaving the refuge of free speech" and more "adopting obnoxiously technical arguments that only Daddy SCOTUS would love right before Daddy SCOTUS decides to start tearing down Roe v. Wade."
  - xigoi 3y ago
    > we have a bunch of rules that accidentally censor right-wingers more because they break the rules more “Accidentally”? When people got banned for hating on black people, but hating on white people was fine, for example?
    - themaninthedark 3y ago
      see also 'Learn to code' It was fine for journalists and others to say to blue collar workers, coal miners, truck drivers(obstentionally politically right wing). The moment that it started to be 'weaponized' by the right, it became hate speach. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learn_to_Code https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learn_to_Code

mcpackieh 3y ago

You're right about one thing; those who are liberals today never abandoned free speech. Many progressives did, but in so doing, they ceased to be liberal.

xigoi 3y ago

> Liberals never actually left the free speech refuge - they just wanted to keep the far right out of it. There's a logic to this; you don't want people advocating for mass censorship to be able to use free speech as a weapon to cut your head off. The political censorship on current social media goes far beyond “we don't want people advocating for mass censorship here”. Ironically, they do like advocating for mass censorship, as long as it's censorship of the “correct” side.

kmeisthax 3y ago
If you mean Twitter specifically they jumped from "we have a bunch of rules that accidentally censor right-wingers more because they break the rules more" to "we intentionally censor left-wingers for the sake of balance" the moment Musk jumped in. I'm not entirely sure how that refutes my point, though - the liberals the grandparent post was talking about aren't the same class of people who actually have moderation privileges on Twitter. Their crimes here are... cheering when Twitter did a thing that might technically go outside one's core values? The biggest thing I can fault liberals for is adopting the Comcast argument: i.e. that Twitter is allowed to censor because it's a private platform and only government action carries the Evil Bit that makes content removal into censorship. This was always a losing argument, and we knew it was a losing argument because we'd already shat on Comcast for trying to do the same thing back when Net Neutrality was still a thing. But it's less "leaving the refuge of free speech" and more "adopting obnoxiously technical arguments that only Daddy SCOTUS would love right before Daddy SCOTUS decides to start tearing down Roe v. Wade."
- xigoi 3y ago
  > we have a bunch of rules that accidentally censor right-wingers more because they break the rules more “Accidentally”? When people got banned for hating on black people, but hating on white people was fine, for example?
  - themaninthedark 3y ago
    see also 'Learn to code' It was fine for journalists and others to say to blue collar workers, coal miners, truck drivers(obstentionally politically right wing). The moment that it started to be 'weaponized' by the right, it became hate speach. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learn_to_Code https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learn_to_Code