Nobody has a problem censoring hateful and harmful content, so long as they’re the ones that get to decide what that means.
Misinformation and violent rhetoric about minorities is hate. It has no place in society and allowing it achieves nothing expect the proliferation of bigotry.
Sure, but should it be illegal? Unless it’s causing direct harm, I think the answer is no, regardless of how disgusting and hurtful it is.
For example, I can stand on the corner with a sign saying something disgusting like, “all Jews must die” or “all GOP members must die,” and as long as it’s not seen as an actual, credible threat, it’s not and shouldn’t be illegal. Should we, as a society, tolerate it? No, I fully expect people to confront me about it, I expect to lose friends, and I also expect businesses to choose to not serve me due to my speech. However, I also don’t think there should be any legal opposition.
The same is true for platforms, they should absolutely be allowed to tolerate or moderate speech however they choose. That’s their right as the platform owner, and it’s a violation of free speech to restrict that right. However, people also have the right to leave platforms they disagree with, other entities have the right to not boost that content, etc. That’s how free speech works, you have the freedom to say whatever you want, and others have the right to ignore you and not let you onto their platforms.
Okay, but are Jewish people supposed to just accept that you’re walking around calling for the mass murder of their communities?
Weimar Germany was a society that was governed on this principle of a “marketplace of ideas” where “unacceptable evil beliefs will naturally be rejected”, so is the modern united states. You can see two pretty clear examples of how this does not work and just allows fascists to promote their view points.
Say in you’re example you’re not just some guy on the street corner. Say you’re a media executive. Say you’re a politician. Say you’re a billionaire. Is it still permissible? Say you make a new political party called the “kill all the jews” party, and you make friends with all the major media executives to promote your views non-stop all day every day on the air. Is it still permissible? Say you buy out social media websites, and make it against the TOS for those websites to say anything denouncing of the “kill all the jews” party. Then you flood those websites with indoctrination material and fabricated news stories. Is it still permissible?
Hate speech can and should be faced with legal prosecution. You should face legal repercussions for calling for all Jewish people to be murdered. Freedom of speech should not protect violent bigotry. The goal of government should be to provide the greatest quality of life for all. That is incompatible with allowing people to spread violent hate speech and indotrinate others into violent bigotry. This mistake has been made time and again. Fascists are the ones who fight the absolute hardest for “freedom to say nazi shit”. Because of course they want it to be legal for them to do that, they’re nazis. Protecting them from legal consequences for being Nazis literally only benefits Nazis.
And it’s not just calling for mass murder, but providing the framework to organize it. There’s a point where a threat becomes specific and actionable, and at that point, it’s not protected speech any more, it’s incitement. the problem is that the courts have so far failed to recognize that the technique of stochastic terrorism is actionable, just as a more traditional threat is.
Protecting them from legal consequences for being Nazis literally only benefits Nazis.
Yep, it’s going to be cold comfort for the absolutists when they’re being mass-murdered. This is not genteel debate we’re talking about, it’s crimes against humanity, and I’m quite willing to sacrifice a few absolutist principles to prevent even more of such crimes being committed.
Fascism isn’t the only form of authoritarianism, and authoritarianism in general wants to control speech. If you can frame your opponents’ speech as “hate speech,” you can use the law to silence them, even if their speech has no chance of actually causing any harm. If becomes a political tool to maintain power.
The examples I gave are fairly extreme and most would consider them hate speech, but as soon as we allow silencing people over hate speech, we open the door to abuse for political purposes. The charges don’t even need to stick, you just need to tie someone up in the courts so they can’t properly campaign.
Look at less free countries like Venezuela or Russia, they go after speech first (e.g. journalists). That alone should give you serious pause when you hear any attempt to regulate speech.
We don’t have to, there’s no rule saying either we have Nazis or no one can say anything. I don’t agree that “saying nazi stuff” is nebulous enough that it could be construed to mean “saying not nazi stuff”.
I also don’t feel you adequately responded to my pointing out that protecting the rights of Nazis to be Nazis only benefits Nazis at the expense of literally everyone else and allowing Nazis to make political parties and manipulate society.
Your society has fundamentally failed to protect the rights of its citizens if Nazis can exist within it. They should face legal action for their views.
Allowing Nazis to say Nazi stuff doesn’t in any way limit your ability to say anti-Nazi stuff. Banning Nazi stuff enables law enforcement and courts to determine how broadly to interpret that. If Nazi simps (or actual Nazis) get into power, maybe they’ll decide your speech counts as “Nazi stuff.”
Your society has fundamentally failed to protect the rights of its citizens if Nazis can exist within it. They should face legal action for their views.
I strongly disagree. They should face social ostracization and be rejected by the public because their views carry no weight.
If Nazis exist in your society but only at the fringes because people have rejected their ideas, you’ve won. If the only way you can defeat dangerous ideas is by getting the “right people” in power to create laws, you’re on very dangerous ground.
Nazis will limit my speech if they get into power one way or the other, what are you talking about lol. If they get into power they will literally kill me, that’s their stated goal.
Okay, well, in FreeSpeechAbsolutismLand the nazis will now run around convincing everyone that being a Nazi is totally cool and you should do it too, fast forward and congratulations Hitler just got elected because the Nazis bought out the major media organizations and indoctrinated everyone into Nazism. Now, let’s review. Is there anywhere along the way that the government could have done something to prevent Nazis from taking over the country?
Like, come on, this is so ridiculous. You’ve been so convinced by conservatism that restricting the right to say literally anything immediately turns your country into Soviet Russia that you’re here protecting Nazis. It’s just foolish. You’re acting like it’s absolutely impossible to have any laws at all because inevitably they will be misinterpreted to their extreme. It’s like “should murder be illegal because what if people in power decide fetuses count as people and are therefore murder-able” like no we can actually restrict specific things. I don’t see many people advocating the legalization of murder so as to prevent abortion rights from being restricted by advocates of fetal personhood.
Yeah, it’s quite the marketplace of ideas when some asshole is out in the street hitting you in the head with a lead pipe.
And excluding from power those who should never hold it seems an an entirely reasonable feature of a legitimate polity.
the law shouldn’t dictate this because that would require rigid definitions of misinformation and minorities. are Nazis minorities? What about Israelis? Or Palestinians?
is spreading a rumor misinformation? What if it is later found out to be true?
Fascist speech is not hard to point out. Advocating for the removal of the human rights of minority groups should result in legal punishment. Advocating for violence against minorities should result in legal punishment.
No one is born a Nazi. You should not be able to exist in society as a Nazi. You should face legal action for being a Nazi. We hung people at Nuremberg over this. We have already long since had established definitions of what inciting genocide is, of what spreading fascism is.
the main problem I have with the government doing this is that they would be the ones to define who the minoritys are. If I remember correctly the US consider veterans to be a protected class, what if a government decided to extend minority status to those that themselves (as part of their “culture”) codified intolerance to existing protected minorities (such as certain religions with respect to homosexuality)?
I mean I’m not advocating for that though. I don’t think it’s impossible to restrict specifically fascist rhetoric. I don’t think it’s impossible to make it illegal to advocate for genocide of racial and gender minorities.
if the (US and many others) governments weren’t run by fascists I might agree, but I know that politics change and facist, homophobic, racists are always going to have a chance to be elected in a democratic (republic) system.
If this is already true then how does making it illegal to be a Nazi change that? If Nazis will already get into power (and then restrict non-nazi or anti-nazi speech), then what exactly is the risk of making it illegal to espouse Nazi ideology?
Nobody has a problem with getting a malignant tumor removed, so long as they’re the ones who decide whether they believe the diagnosis or not.
Censorship or not, tolerance is a social contract, and those who want to undo this system must be stopped by any means possible. Content moderation is actually the compromise.
That depends on who’s doing the moderation. If it’s a government entity, that’s censorship, and the only time I’m willing to accept it is if it’s somehow actively harmful (i.e. terrorist plots and whatnot). If it’s merely disgusting, that’s for private entities to work out, and private entities absolutely have the right to moderate content they host however they choose.
Why is a private entity significantly different from a government entity? If a coalition of private entities (say, facebook, twitter, youtube, … ) controls most of the commons, they have the power to dictate everything beyond the fringes. We can already see this kind of collusion in mass media to the extent that it’s labeled a propaganda model. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_model
I just don’t think the private/gov dichotomy is enough to decide when censorship and moderation is valid.
The government is supposed to be representing voters’ best interests and have a monopoly on force to enforce rules. We can’t trust anyone to decide for us what speech we can listen to. A government should have no say on restricting speech (sadly, even if that speech does cause harm to people in our LGBT family).
A business should not have power comparable to a government. You probably have to interact with the government to some degree, you shouldn’t have to interact with a specific business at all.
These points both make sense given ideal conditions. People and businesses should have liberty over themselves, with the government serving as a neutral foundation representing the interest of voters.
Unfortunately, these ideal conditions don’t exist. The government isn’t neutral, but that’s not because of themselves or a democratic decision, but because businesses have more power to influence politics than you and me. Look at the major shareholders of mass media and social media, look at fundraisers for political parties, look at the laws made to bias the system. The government is evidently not a neutral foundation or a representative of the common people, but a dictatorship of the owning class (I’m using the term dictatorship not to imply one person ruling, but rather, that business owners as a class dictate the actions of politicians and therefore the government). And while it’s easy to consider this a crony capitalism or corporatocracy, it’s ultimately just capitalism itself taking its logical course, as business owners generally have a common class interest and the government cannot work without the complicity of business owners. We see this consistently in capitalist states, all the way back to the first ones. It’s not a fluke, it’s the power of capital.
We also see the trend of monopolization emerge - more money makes more money, more resources makes more resources, so small businesses are generally muscled out or incorporated into larger companies unless the government can force them to stop. So while you technically don’t have to interact with a specific business at all, there are many industries where you are effectively forced to interact with a small collection of the most powerful businesses or even a duopoly, even more so if you don’t have enough money to be picky.
So, while I agree, the government is supposed to be representing voters’ best interests, and business should not have power comparable to governance, they don’t represent us and businesses do govern, and history shows this won’t be changed through the electoral system they control. It has only changed when the worker class, as opposed to the businesses, has become the class directing the government.
It’s because of the power imbalance. If a private entity decides LGBT content is inappropriate for kids, you can find something on the fringe because someone will fill that gap. If a government makes the same decision, they can prosecute any service that doesn’t follow the law, which chills smaller services from offering it.
On the flipside, if a large tech company does it, it affects nearly everyone on the planet, whereas if a government does it, it should only impact people in that country. However, with larger countries, impacts often bleed into other countries (e.g. I see EU cookie banners in the US).
Likewise, it’s less likely for a government to rescind a bad law, whereas a bad policy can be easily reversed if it hurts profits.
the only time I’m willing to accept it is if it’s somehow actively harmful
Oh, like the dissemination of propaganda originating from the troll farms of hostile powers? Good idea.
Harmful meaning things like harassment (defined as continued and targeted use of speech intended to harass an individual) or credible threats of violence (i.e. a threat to kill a specific individual, attack an area, etc).
Harmful doesn’t mean “ideas I don’t like.”
We don’t have a social contract. It’s everyone for themselves.
Tolerance is tolerance and it can break any time. You just keep tolerating until you can’t anymore, as simple as that. Its artificial.
Advertising is hateful content. Ban the entire marketing industry now please.
The majority of advertising we see in the US should be banned for sure. It is just thinly veiled psychological fuckery designed to manipulate us. Not cool.
Agreed. Let everyone be free to decide. I don’t want something shoved to my face 24x7, its inorganic and harmful.
Lemmy was created because Desaulines(sp?) got “censored” on reddit. Now he famously over-censors his darling instance lemmy.ml.
My point is just that nobody really thinks it should be a free for all. Everyone is human and doesn’t want to hear anything that they consider egregious, or in the case of lemmy.ml “against rule 2”.
.ml is garbage lead by legit garbage people. But, open source means we can take lemmy code made by garbage people and repurpose it for good. Unfortunately it seems like Lemmy image is forever stained by those people and the network will never be adopted by normal people fully.
nobody really thinks it should be a free for all
Social media probably shouldn’t, but the law should allow for a free for all. I personally think we should be closer to “free for all” than “completely locked down,” but everyone has their preferred balance.
The creator of Lemmy is just one example. They remove a lot of content that isn’t hateful, just against their political ideology. I used that as an example of a private social media website which does a lot of censoring, even though the creators are sort of, somehow, outwardly against censoring? So everyone is human is my point.
The article in question is about hate speech, not political dissent. Hate speech is pretty widely moderated away on Lemmy, and I think a majority of people here are cool with that. Some here are arguing semantics which is fair. Censoring is censoring which is the definition of censoring. I’m in the camp that if someone online is threatening another person or group of people, that should be hidden/removed.
which does a lot of censoring, even though the creators are sort of, somehow, outwardly against censoring?
Another perspective on the Lemmy situation is that, for example, I can sincerely say I believe free speech has merits while creating a book club where political discussion isn’t allowed. Some would call that censorship, but restricting a certain community doesn’t mean I approve of unconditional societal censorship. “Censorship”, like many abstract concepts in the liberalist worldview, doesn’t make sense to think of as a universal value, but rather in contexts, like you pointed out with hate speech removal being in line with the beliefs of most people on the main Lemmy instances.
There are some concepts, for example, that I think are fine to discuss in an academic situation but should be censored in public spaces, especially when it comes to explicitly genocidal ideologies like Nazism, or bigoted hate speech.
The article in question is about hate speech, not political dissent.
It’s also by a politician with political power.
Do you know what the difference is between political dissent and hate speech? A clever application of the law, or a particularly persuasive lawyer. The law should be limited to prosecuting credible threats of violence or other speech intending to cause direct harm (e.g. repeated harassment, shouting “fire” in a crowded room, etc).
Overbearing private moderation is absolutely fine, since people can take their speech to another platform or create their own. Laws controlling speech is another matter entirely.
Lemmy devs are free to moderate their instances however they see fit, and I’m free to not engage with their instance.
It sounds like we agree, but I’m much less lawerly due to my lack of experience in that field.
No worries, I don’t have any direct experience either, just a strong interest.
As a kid, I wanted to be a lawyer, but I was quite introverted so litigation wasn’t appealing, so I decided to go into software patent law (I loved computers). While doing a CS undergrad, I learned how terrible software patents are, so I stuck to software dev.
I still really like the law, but now I’m more interested as a citizen knowing my rights instead of looking to prosecute the law.
Meta’s anti-LGBT rules are closely knit to their ending the fact-checking: It is science denialism and linked to racism and vaccine skepticism.
Homosexuality and gender identity are not considered mental illnesses, Sex is not a binary, and Race is not connected to intelligence.
Bigots never liked science on these three, and now they use political power to impose their narrative.
Meta never moderated such discourse. Nor reddit nor twitter nor youtube. There was no censorship to end here. What this is, it is a free pass to punch down trans and gay people. It is incitement to violence, and Zuckerberg and Musk must go to the gallows for it.
Don’t get me started on the toxic harassment these platforms have allowed against African and Carribean reparation activists, how they have destroyed the lives of feminists, and how they have named all Palestinians terrorists.
At this point race realists and gender essentialists have ensured political and technological control of the narrative.
There is no room for debating sealioning trolls on this one. If they don’t understand the social dynamics against gender/sex/minorities at this moment, they are no better than brownshirts.
It is permabans and hooks and jabs all the way, for every single weird freak that backs this deranged hateful shit.
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You really don’t have a clue what trans people are do you? The reason some of us require access to hormone replacement and surgical healthcare is specifically because of the way that our bodies are. Accepting trans people is not in any way illogical or unscientific. It is an acknowledgment that gender is not a simple binary option. We would expect gender to exist identically across the entire world if that were the case. It doesn’t. Western imperialists have a long history of enforcing a binary patriarchal view of gender onto conquered peoples. And people have always resisted that too, non-binary gender and trans gender people have always existed under differing names throughout human history.
Man and Woman are not and never have been determined by biology. When you choose what pronoun to use for a stranger, you do not need to first look at their blood tests or their genitals. If you gender a stranger wrong, and they correct you you generally just apologize and move on. When I was a young child and had long hair people frequently referred to me as a girl. It was never an issue when they would be corrected on that. They didn’t need to see my blood tests or my genitals to believe me when I corrected them. Because that’s not how gender works, it is not and never has been a product of biology. It is associated with different bodies, but that is not its basis.
Trans people are not denying reality, rather we are acknowledging it and saying people should have the choice of what gender is assigned to them. That instead of assigning it everyone should be free to state their own gender. That this process is not disruptive or damaging to any aspect of society (and it isn’t, there has never been one single legitimate peer-reviwed non-discredited study that showed that it is).
You might love having a cock and a flat chest and being a man but I absolutely hated it! It was the driving force behind multiple suicide attempts throughout my adolescence and early adulthood. I’ve been on hormones for a decade and it has made me a million times happier, I got reassignment surgery 2 years ago and I have never been a healthier person and never felt as good about my own body. It has had a very provably fantastic effect on my well-being. It is entirely scientific.
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Do you need to see proof that someone is, has been, or can become pregnant before you can agree they are a girl or woman?
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I’ll ask again since you seemingly didn’t understand.
Before you can decide if someone you’re referring to or talking with is a girl or a woman, do you need to see proof that they are pregnant, have been pregnant, or can become pregnant? Do you put a hold on every social interaction you have until you are presented with such proof?
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you’re missing the point of being transgender.
the goal is not to claim that they were born a different gender. that would be delusional, and transgender people can be totally rational.
the point is simply to live as their preferred gender, and ideally be accepted as such.
when they live as their preferred gender, they are able to feel happy and content, just like everyone else. it’s not that difficult to consider how miserable we would feel if people misgendered us. it’s a common insult.
treating everyone as the gender they prefer is a simple act of kindness. you can choose to be an asshole about it, but you’re not standing up for the truth, you’re just choosing to be an asshole.
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I live on my own and support myself and my family with a full-time job in technology.
And yeah, people like you are very predictable in your arguments. Like how you didn’t even argue against anything I said. Because you can’t, there is no actual counterargument except to deny everything and assert God. Took me all of 10 minutes to type my response. This concerns my rights and freedoms, the rights and freedoms of my community, and the rights and freedoms of vulnerable people like trans youth and disabled trans people. I will never accept an attack on their rights.
I don’t live in the US, so I’ll have to ask 9 days until what exactly? Go off buddy you’re so cool spreading hate speech about minorities on the internet. Your ideological allies got shot by allied soldiers landing on the beaches of Normandy in June of 1944. That’s who the group of people with views and strategies most closely aligned with your own are. You should think a bit about what that says about you.
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In what way do trans people hurt you?
Never said they did
But calling people moronic before having a conversation does seem mean. Matter of fact a trans person just did.
We see how cool headed are men when pay-gap is brought up.
Fucking cry-babies, they call everyone a snowflake and want to concern troll endlessly, but the moment sexism and racism comes up in a discussion they lose their shit.
Imagine when a trans person is perpetually punched down by the whole of society and still have to be nice because of strict tone policing.
To me, a trans person has every right to call you a moron when if you tried to debate their existence and rights, especially now that blatant transphobia is legitimized and normalized.
Did you just assume my gender?
It’s your responsibility to correct someone if they misgender you. It’s their responsibility to accept the correction and respect your identity after they have been corrected.
As I would do. You wanna be called a chick when you’re a dude? Cool fine. I can respect that. But the fact is playing extreme dress up doesn’t make you whatever it is you’re saying you are
You claim in your username you are a guy. I respect your pronouns, sorry if this is confusing.
Valid lol
You people bring up those arguments for years and years. Having a gender identity that mismatches your genitals is not a delusion. This is a hundreds or so medical organizations opinion. If you are willing to educate yourself, rather than being an ignorant piece of shit. This has been the case for YEARS, at this point if you have not gotten the message, you don’t want to be educated.
That link leads to no where
Switch invidious backend from the links on the top
I don’t know what to do from here
See where it says “switch backend” try one of those links. Or watch it on youtube if you are not concerned about privacy.
Alright hold on lemme give it a watch
I mean it is censorship. But not all censorship is bad.
There will be no protection under the social contract for those who wish to violate it.
Yes, but just deleting without comment, as if it never existed, isn’t the solution either.
Are you saying it should be required by law to have a comment regarding removal of content?
Law is per country, web is international, i don’t think that’s gonna work.
a belief held by most reasonable people and only opposed by Nazis
So the ACLU are Nazis now?
i mean they’ve historically defended nazis yes
That doesn’t make them Nazis. It makes them defenders of free speech.
Free speech protects unpopular speech. Popular speech doesn’t need to be protected.
This isn’t about free speech. This is about amplification and publication of speech.
You can say whatever you want, but we shouldn’t guarantee you a megaphone to say it.
The platform isn’t the megaphone. That’s the algorithm.
If you’re wanting their access to platforms limited, I’d like the know where you draw the line. Are they allowed to text hate speech to each other? Publish their own email or print newsletters? Should we ban them from access to printers (or printing press while we’re at it)? Should they be allowed to have hateful conversations with large groups of each other?
That’s up to the owner of the megaphone.
If the megaphone owner doesn’t want you to use it, create your own.
Barriers to entry and the first-mover advantage make that impossible.
And there’s the expected bootlicking. You went from complaining about who gets access to the megaphone, to openly praising government censorship coordination.
Maybe if you want more censorship so bad, you should take your own advice and start your own platform.
no it makes them defenders of nazis. if youre at a table with ten nazis, youre at a table of eleven nazis
So you’re an authoritarian bootlicker who can’t tell the difference between defending free speech vs spouting hateful speech.
I’ll defend a Nazi’s right to say their hateful shit. I’ll also gladly plead guilty to an assault charge over beating their ass for it.
They shouldn’t fear the government for their speech. They should fear physical retaliation from their community.
That’s the problem with the internet, really. You can’t punch these a-holes through your monitor or keyboard. The consequence here is moderation instead of physical violence. Removing these people from their platform is the punch in the nuts that they deserve. It’s still free speech because these are non-government websites.
Edit to make it less mean sounding.
Exactly, which is why this should be handled by the platforms as they choose instead of by government requirement. If you don’t like how a platform moderates content, don’t use that platform.
Considering this moderation is often done in cooperation with government censors, and the executives working at these platforms are often former government, the lines are blurred enough that I don’t support it.
We need more legal blocks to prevent the government from getting around the constitutional protections by coordinating with corporate third parties.
Like so many others, you’ve mixed up general society with law enforcement. We defend the right for the Nazis to say their piece without being imprisoned. Running a business profiting from letting Nazis publish their speech is a choice, and not a necessary one. Using and supporting the social relevance of a social network that voluntarily publishes hate speech for profit is a choice, and not a necessary one.
Sounds like you’re the one mixing it up.
And that’s exactly what the user you’re replying to has been saying all along.
This post is about the UN, as in, a governmental authority. The whole discussion here is that moderation isn’t something for the government to do (outside of prosecutable crimes), it’s for private entities to do. Meta can moderate its platforms however it chooses, and users can similarly choose to stop using the platform. Governments shouldn’t force Meta to moderate or not moderate, that’s completely outside its bailiwick.
And those that still think fReE sPEECh is an acceptable concept in the modern world?
Free speech without consequences is what fascists are after. Free speech is an action to which they want no reaction or even worse when there is a negative reaction (also a desired goal) they will use that to attack the structures attempting to uphold peace.
And it’ll only be their speech that’s free.
Yes that’s why the Chinese are such big proponents of free speech!
Post free speech. They have already finished their objective.
The freedom to speak has nothing to do with being heard.
Free speech is absolutely an acceptable concept, but it’s merely a restriction on government.
Private platforms are free to drop you from their platform if they don’t like your speech, and you can be prosecuted if your speech violates a law (e.g. hate speech). Platforms can also restrict the types of speech allowed on their platforms. None of that is a violation of free speech.
Free speech is only violated if governments place a restriction on the speech itself, or force private entities to enforce restrictions.
but it’s merely a restriction on government.
It isn’t. Free speech is a right the gov can give you, but it’s also just a concept.
Governments don’t grant rights, they can only restrict them.
They can recognize them. But nice strawman.
It’s not a strawman, it’s literally what you wrote.
The Bill of Rights in the US only exists to prevent encroachment on individual rights, they’re not necessary in order for people to have them. Arguably, governments only have rights explicitly granted to them, because they only exist due to the people submitting themselves to them.
It’s an important distinction, and one so many seem to misunderstand. I’m not saying you do, I’m merely clarifying in case someone else does.
And, in reality, the only rights that remain are those that have been fought for. “Inalienable rights, granted by the Creator” is a lovely concept, but it’s not self-enforcing, and as we’ve seen, rights can be effectively nullified by a corrupt Supreme Court and a fascist legislature and executive branch. OK, you can pretend they still exist in the abstract, but they’re de facto gone if state institutions or people power don’t defend them.
It’s not a strawman, it’s literally what you wrote.
You ignored the point I was making to argue about semantics. Still are. That’s a strawman.
In what sense is algoritmically-amplified, targeted data transmission speech? It’s of a scale that makes it qualitatively vastly different, and its impact has nothing to do with human speech or the press before the time of the internet (with the exception of yellow journalism, and we all know how well that served us).
I defend the right for you to say what you want, with few restrictions. But that doesn’t mean you can set up a 250 kwatt PA system outside my bedroom window and 3 AM and shake me out of my bed with the subsonics. And that’s where we are with the oligopoly social media providers.
Ya know I never thought I’d see the day that a marginalized people would protest free speech fundamentally. This is just next level stupid.
Suddenly they care. One dead CEao and a bunch of whiny scared Billionaires is enough to stop 10 years of hateful content. Interesting lesson right there. Censorship is only good if it protects the rich.
Who decides when the content is “hateful”? The perpetrators of genocide characterize themselves as marginalized and their victims as a force seeking to eradicate them. That is the problem with censorship. Those are the people who end up with the control of speech. You end up with an Orwellian inversion of concepts like hateful speech for the exact reason that they can be weaponized for profit and power.
You show me which fascist government is going to censor the fascists living under it. It’s a paradox. They will not. They will censor the resistance.
We’ve come to decide ‘hate content’ on ideological basis that the question of ‘who decides’ arises. If people could be more realistic than idealistic, that would’ve never been the issue. In this situation, what’s in your head becomes more important than what you really need because something didn’t go your way.
If in a work of fiction I have a villain call my hero the n-word to demonstrate that the villain is an unapologetic racist, and I am told that I can’t have that because the word is bad in and of itself and that racist behavior cannot be tolerated even in fiction…
That is censorship, even if your goals are noble they are also ignorant, as showing disgusting things in fiction is often done in order to condemn similar behavior in real life.
If you call a black person the n-word in real life, and he stomps your ass.
This isn’t censorship, this is comedy.
If one goes onto an online community and calls its members radical insults in an unfriendly clearly non-joking hostile manner. Then the guilty party should be removed from that community,
Are we redefining words now?
“BAAAHHH!!! YOU’RE CENSORING MY HATE SPEECH, RACIST SLURS AND DEATH THREATS!!! WAAAAAAHHHHH!!!”
That CANNOT be the arguement you stand behind.
I mean, we do that. Just say it’s good to censor bad things. There’s nothing wrong with that, so don’t lie about what you’re doing.
No one said it had to be platformed, but call a spade a spade
The argument is the dictionary.
Which one?
I mean there has always been illegal speech, we just don’t usually call it censorship.
We’re always redefining words, that’s how language works. This isn’t even close to the most egregious within the last couple decades.
Language works when words have a common meaning between the speaker and the listener. When 2 parties have 2 different interpretations of the same word because 1 decided they were going to manipulate into meaning something different from the commonly understood one, language breaks down, and we get senseless arguments among people who otherwise agree outside of semantics.
So no, that’s not how language works.
Literally means figuratively now.
Yes, language changes, that is why you don’t rely solely on individual words to define your argument.
The reason people might argue despite agreeing outside semantics is that they never bothered to go beyond a very basic explanation of their argument. If your sole disagreement comes from a differing interpretation of a word… then do your best to define your argument better. Otherwise you’re just arguing for the sake of arguing.
Literally means figuratively now.
Which is an excellent example of how stupid this is because this word has literally lost all meaning, thank you.
then do your best to define your argument better.
My argument is that manipulating definitions to suit an agenda is stupid nonsense.
Yeah, “purchasing” movies or shows comes to mind. When streaming services revoke access and never grant a way to download them, did you ever really purchase the movie or did you just rent it?
An excellent example of the negative impact of the manipulation of definitions.
like how the right redefines free speech to mean hate speech
Which is absolutely disgusting, especially when they try to apply it to private platforms, where that right doesn’t exist.
Free speech means the government cannot arrest you purely for your speech. It doesn’t mean social media has to let you on your platform or retain your hateful posts.
Censorship means that some higher authority wants some information not to be seen by certain people. The target of censorship is therefore the readers/listeners and not primarily the person writing/speaking. Hence if the readers/listeners don’t actually want to read/hear the hateful drivel that some person shouts into the void, removing it isn’t censorship but content curation.
And what if 50% of people want to read what you consider hateful drivel?
They can go somewhere else and talk to each other there.
It’s not a right to harass people, and you’re not entitled to others’ megaphones
I don’t disagree with you. But calling it anything other than what it is is disingenuous and misleading. Like when you buy a movie and it isn’t available to download and the streaming service takes away access, did you really purchase that movie or did you just rent it? Words have meaning is all I’m saying.
Words also have connotations.
Human rights violations aside The EFF and Techdirt have already said that it is hate speech and effectively suppresses the free speech of gay and trans. Do you know better than these sources? The latter is like the very person who states that anti-hate speech laws are First Amendment violations. He said it loud and clear: this is actual censorship of LGBT voices.
Is it not censorship to allow violent assholes to scare minorities into silence?
I’d say that censorship when enacted by governments is violence and there’s no smaller minority than the individual. That said, if the UN Rights Chief wants to censor certain things, he should just say it. Besides, I don’t put much faith in an org who puts Iran as the chair of the human rights council. Stances like this and the OP’s link are reasons why there’s a ground swelling in the US for withdrawing from the UN.
No they just have oppositional defiance disorder. Not recognizing that protecting every individual also means working against prejudiced hate means you’re going to fail every time.
It’s only censorship if it’s something I personally agree with.
It’s literally censorship, but I argue it’s acceptable - even desirable and laudable - censorship
What?
@Ledivin actions against discriminating someone for their racial, sexual, ethnic belonging are in line with constitutional demands
…and what does that have to do with what i said?
He just wants more censorship. They will ban “hateful” content, and then reclassify anything they don’t like as hateful. We’re already seeing a number of platforms and institutions labeling criticism of Israel as hate speech.
Here on Lemmy, people who claim to advocate for freedom of speech and information, demanding for social networks to be shutdown and people to be censored based on unknown and ambiguous criteria, without even understanding the implications of it.
Details at six
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