Zorque@lemmy.world
on 10 Jan 2025 22:10
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We’re always redefining words, that’s how language works. This isn’t even close to the most egregious within the last couple decades.
sorghum@sh.itjust.works
on 10 Jan 2025 22:55
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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?
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.
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.
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.
Natanael@slrpnk.net
on 10 Jan 2025 22:43
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It’s not a right to harass people, and you’re not entitled to others’ megaphones
sorghum@sh.itjust.works
on 10 Jan 2025 22:52
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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.
whydudothatdrcrane@lemmy.ml
on 11 Jan 2025 01:52
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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?
sorghum@sh.itjust.works
on 11 Jan 2025 04:20
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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.
poVoq@slrpnk.net
on 10 Jan 2025 23:46
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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.
They can go somewhere else and talk to each other there.
sunzu2@thebrainbin.org
on 11 Jan 2025 01:51
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Also block the source of speech.
But they don't care to block, the goal is to suppress the speech.
atrielienz@lemmy.world
on 11 Jan 2025 15:37
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The problem with blocking is this. It’s not a communally accepted part of any website. Here’s what I mean by that. Lots of websites say they allow you to block people. What they mean is they allow you to mute people. This can mean something as simple as you can still see their posts but you can’t interact (but they can see and interact with your posts (upvote/downvote etc), but can’t talk to you. That’s problematic. I feel like a block should mean block. I. E. The web host or platform completely isolated you from one another so that it appears on the user side of things as if you never existed. But that’s problematic too. On Lemmy, if I block someone I lose all post history related to that section of the post where the interaction took place. I can’t go back to my own comments. I cannot see my own comments.
Then there’s the problem of block or mute lists having a finite number. If you have a ten year old account somewhere and you have been muting or blocking people for all ten of those years, eventually you will run out of available space on the block list and there’s no good way to purge the list. You very often can’t back it up, can’t auto purge accounts that are dead or no longer in use, can’t even generally see if the people you blocked are still active in a way that insulates and protects you.
If the goal is to suppress speech that implies that the person/entity doing the suppression is in a position of authority and not following the will of their constituency. So if a mod gets hundreds of reports about a post or comment, some action is warranted because the community is speaking out against it.
That’s important to what we’re talking about here.
Ulrich@feddit.org
on 11 Jan 2025 01:47
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It’s only censorship if it’s something I personally agree with.
cupcakezealot@lemmy.blahaj.zone
on 11 Jan 2025 14:24
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like how the right redefines free speech to mean hate speech
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
on 11 Jan 2025 18:47
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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.
wewbull@feddit.uk
on 10 Jan 2025 23:56
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Sure, but there’s an lot of people classifying disagreement as hatred and using that to stamp out the discourse we need to have as a society.
Take positive discrimination. Some see it as corrective action for historical injustices. Some see it as newspeak it for just another form of discrimination and two wrongs don’t make a right. There’s a societal discourse that needs to happen there.
Nobody is preaching hatred, but I expect I’ll get shit for even suggesting there’s a ethical argument against DEI.
RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world
on 11 Jan 2025 00:49
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It would help if you re-thought your argument from the perspective of a person with the intelligence to understand the difference between discourse and intolerant hate speech. Yes. We are discussing hatred.
No, don’t drag DEI into this. There is no equivalency in this discussion. It just shows your biases to even remotely associate it.
You are proving the parent’s point and you don’t even realize it.
whydudothatdrcrane@lemmy.ml
on 11 Jan 2025 01:33
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It is intolerant hate speech targeted at people who are specifically targeted by racist, genderist, ableist, and sexist double standards, going against the very pillars of democracy and modern science, to serve a religious and corporatist agenda. What was your point, mfer?
GrumpyDuckling@sh.itjust.works
on 11 Jan 2025 12:39
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Running a company with people who are all exactly the same is such a stupid idea that it doesn’t even merit a discussion. How are you going to understand your market, your demographics, cultural changes? Dumbest shit I’ve heard in awhile.
OutlierBlue@lemmy.ca
on 11 Jan 2025 13:29
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You’re talking about equality vs equity. DEI is equitable.
ZILtoid1991@lemmy.world
on 11 Jan 2025 15:58
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DEI, when applied in the real life, usually means if there’s two people with similar enough skillsets, one hires the more disadvataged one. Some programs use a scoring system, where being marginalized grants you extra scores on top of what you get on the tests, sure, but it’s usually pretty low (10-20 max for a 450+ max score system). It also involves training for the HR, so their prejudices can be overwritten with actual fact.
However, when I first heard about DEI in 2012 (!), it was that people told me I could get fired for being white just so the workplace can expand its “diversity”, while the guy telling me its existence told me how can I help Fidesz to win the next elections, and that I should become a hardcore conservative ASAP because I would grow out of leftism.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
on 11 Jan 2025 18:42
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And society != government.
The law should tolerate intolerance, outside of credible threats of violance/restrictions of others’ rights. However, society shouldn’t tolerate intolerance, meaning we should shut down intolerance in all privately controlled spaces, and confront intolerance in all public spaces.
Doomsider@lemmy.world
on 11 Jan 2025 22:14
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This is extremely wrong. The government is most definitely our society. Trying to pretend the government is not made up of us is ridiculous and reeks of othering.
I have read several of your posts and they all rely on government bad private sector good methodology. It reminds me of good old fashioned anti-government propaganda pushed by corpo bootlickers.
The government is and always will be a tool of society. I can certainly appreciate your apprehension with our current government in the US. I also appreciate your diligence in defining the difference between public and private spaces.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
on 12 Jan 2025 00:07
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The government is most definitely our society.
That’s absolutely not true. To use a sports analogy (any sport), the government is the referees, and society is the culture around the game (cheers, rituals, etc). If nobody shows up to the stadium, the refs have nothing to referee, yet society carries on.
We try to set up rules that match the values we hold (i.e. no dangerous tackles), but if we try to rig the game in our favor, the other team will use those same rules against us. If we give the referees too much leeway in interpreting the rules, we open ourselves up to bribery and unfair game calling.
As you rightly said, government is a tool of society, but it’s also a dangerous tool. The same tool can guarantee equal protection under the law like the civil rights movement in the US, or it can guarantee unequal protection like in Nazi Germany. The difference comes down to what powers we let the government have.
First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
You can throw “fascists” (general term for the right wing these days it seems) in there as well. Once you give the government power to regulate speech, it becomes very easy to abuse. If you can control the narrative, you can hold on to power.
they all rely on government bad private sector good methodology
While I do most closely align with libertarians than either major party (who are stereotypically pro-private sector), I don’t think this is a good summary. I think government is a dangerous tool and we should be very careful in using it to solve problems. However, I also think large corporations are also dangerous, and we should have tools to keep them in check. For example:
rescind corporate protections for larger orgs - if a company is worth more than a certain amount, it no longer needs public protection and should be expected to carry insurance for any debts
expose executives to criminal prosecution
set strict limits on election interference, and get money out of elections
I believe in NIT, a formulation of UBI that has less sticker shock, so people can walk way with confidence from bad employment situations
We absolutely need checks on both the private and public sectors, the first to prevent any one individual or group from having an outsized influence, and the second to prevent weaponization of the state’s monopoly on force. I believe government should be decentralized, but powerful in the limited roles it has.
futatorius@lemm.ee
on 12 Jan 2025 01:47
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If they’d come for the Nazis first, the remainder of that over-repeated list would not matter.
Doomsider@lemmy.world
on 12 Jan 2025 03:27
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I know people who have ran for office and been successful on the city/county level. They made a difference in our communities. The people in government are not any different than you or I.
On a local level there is not even a doubt that we have a lot of control. I have “lobbied” local, state level, and federal level and I can tell you we have less control over the federal side. This does not mean we have no control though.
We are literally the government. The government has the power to regulate speech and exercises it’s authority regularly. The judicial branch is well known for regulating free speech in the public sector. We have a lot of laws for things like broadcasting or radio in the private sector.
Unfortunately our government never really caught up with the Internet age quite yet. The regulations they have wrote heavily favor corporate interests. Concepts like Net Neutrality were politicized instead of embraced. We still lack basic privacy protections. We gave hundreds of billions of dollars to telecom to provide fiber throughout the country and they squandered it.
We are forced to use shitty private companies for communication. We have to go through third parties for all our banking needs. Meanwhile these companies lie, cheat, and decieves us. Truly a libertarian hellscape where private interests control everything.
The very reason you dislike the government is the very reason we are here today. Our government is so ineffective it has basically given into private interests. This is particularly noticeable in the Tech sector.
I think it is past time to write a new constitution that actually works for everyone. We need to shed the “for the rich by the rich” part of our government and basically grow up. Governing should be highly regulated and designed to resist corruption.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
on 12 Jan 2025 03:58
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The people in government are not any different than you or I.
Yup, and I’ve thought of challenging my state rep because he always runs unopposed. I honestly don’t have time for the job, but my rep is such an idiot that maybe it’s worth risking the very remote chance that I’ll win. I doubt I’d get >20%, and that’s including all the protest and pity votes in my district.
Concepts like Net Neutrality were politicized instead of embraced.
It’s also not at all what it says on the tin.
Ideally, something like that wouldn’t be necessary at all because nobody owns the internet. Yet for some reason everyone wants to regulate it. If I pay for service, I should get the advertised speed, regardless of what I’m accessing. If someone like Netflix wants to host a cache at my ISP, go for it, but it should only be hit if my DNS resolves to that cache (and I control my DNS).
Yet ISPs, governments, and big tech companies all think they own it. Just back off.
Truly a libertarian hellscape where private interests control everything.
More like a nightmare for libertarians. Everywhere I look there’s cronyism, and that’s distinctly anti-libertarian. Banks get bailed out when they get caught with their hand in the cookie jar instead of the execs serving jail time. ISPs violate their contracts and nobody holds them to task.
Our government is so ineffective it has basically given into private interests.
I think the opposite is true. Our government is so effective that special interests rarely need to lobby, because our reps sell us out on their own. If you want to see who representatives are loyal to, look no further than their campaign contributions.
The problem is that we keep expecting government to solve our problems without ensuring that they’re actually loyal to us, the people. And why should they? It’s not like we’re going to vote them out next time, we’ll keep voting with our tribe because maybe this time they’ll listen (they won’t).
No, for government to actually be worth trusting, we need massive reforms to realign the federal government with the interests of the people. State governments are often better (esp in smaller states) because there’s less to get from buying those reps, though that’s not exactly true in my area (Utah, where the predominant church largely calls the shots on important legislation). Some options:
eliminate what campaign funds can be spent on, and largely eliminate rallys (candidates can host one town hall in each state), political ads, etc
replace House districts with proportional representation in each state
replace FPTP with something like STAR or Approval voting
In general, get money out of politics as much as possible, and attack the two party duopoly. That probably won’t fix it, but it’s a start.
write a new constitution
Maybe. I’m not sure what I’d change that couldn’t be fixed with an amendment or two though, and that’s likely way easier than replacing the Constitution (which I largely like).
Trying to pretend the government is not made up of us is ridiculous and reeks of othering.
Oh, the incoming US government is made up of us? There is no “us” that includes both me and those thieving, murderous, lying pieces of shit.
And as the man said, if my thought-dreams could be seen, they’d probably put my head in a guillotine.
Doomsider@lemmy.world
on 12 Jan 2025 03:35
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Yup it is, you must understand the incoming administration is just a fraction of the actual government.
I totally agree with you that Aotus and his handlers along with a lot of our representatives are pieces of shit. We definitely need to vote them out. Hopefully we will still be able to when it is all said and done.
Really though we need some serious reforms to restore our confidence.
Ledivin@lemmy.world
on 10 Jan 2025 22:21
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It’s literally censorship, but I argue it’s acceptable - even desirable and laudable - censorship
amassaro@mastodon.uno
on 10 Jan 2025 22:23
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@Ledivin@Sunshine having constitutional rights and limitations, would figure under censorship?
Amoxtli@thelemmy.club
on 10 Jan 2025 22:42
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More UN bullshit.
walden@sub.wetshaving.social
on 10 Jan 2025 22:50
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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”.
sunzu2@thebrainbin.org
on 11 Jan 2025 01:46
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.ml doesn't do parma bans generally speaking....
While I still think their over zealous daddy sheepooh and pootin speech policing is rather clown, their mod style is more reasonable vis-a-vis.World mods who are just same as reddit lol
Poor reading comprehension and regime narrative weaving...
Never forget how they handled Saint Luigi
drmoose@lemmy.world
on 11 Jan 2025 08:13
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.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.
Clinicallydepressedpoochie@lemmy.world
on 11 Jan 2025 17:09
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Lemmy is fine. It will blow up in the next 2-5, guaranteed. We will also learn new ways disinformation techniques will evolve in that time frame to adjust.
PalmTreeIsBestTree@lemmy.world
on 11 Jan 2025 17:14
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Unless the government outlaws federating/VPNs and forces ISPs to block instances.
Clinicallydepressedpoochie@lemmy.world
on 11 Jan 2025 17:16
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We had the chance in the last five elections to secure net neutrality. What can I say, people are fucking stupid.
PalmTreeIsBestTree@lemmy.world
on 11 Jan 2025 17:19
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People don’t even understand what those two words even mean. The chronically stupid will stay stupid. My own mother is a prime example of this. Her brain is warped by whatever Fox News, Facebook, and health guru podcasts she listens to tell her how to think and feel. The majority in this country are just like her.
Clinicallydepressedpoochie@lemmy.world
on 11 Jan 2025 18:00
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Unfortunately, yeah. It was remarkable that for some amount of time america was unique and maybe a decent place to live. All be it 10-20 years cumulatively, maybe. Best you can do now is look out for yourself; give the finger to your mom and people like her every chance you get; and hold tight while these idiots organizing leads to their idiotic demise.
Because we are the few, we can slip between the cracks and find plenty of places to live where the fasicists can’t breathe down our necks.
PalmTreeIsBestTree@lemmy.world
on 11 Jan 2025 18:30
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Thankfully my Mom and I still have a good relationship. I just don’t talk politics with her, however I am willing to sacrifice my privileged place in society to fight fascism if it comes down to a civil war.
Clinicallydepressedpoochie@lemmy.world
on 11 Jan 2025 18:34
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Oh, I don’t talk to my dad and avoid my mom. I have love for them but I can not tolerate their ignorance and I make sure they know it. Fuck them. They are not good people.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
on 11 Jan 2025 18:43
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It will blow up in the next 2-5, guaranteed
Big doubt. People will flock to something like BlueSky before they flock to Lemmy.
Clinicallydepressedpoochie@lemmy.world
on 11 Jan 2025 19:01
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Bigger doubt.
Clinicallydepressedpoochie@lemmy.world
on 11 Jan 2025 17:08
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Right, but they gave everyone their own platform which can compete with .ml in the same space
lukewarm_ozone@lemmy.today
on 11 Jan 2025 18:45
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My point is just that nobody really thinks it should be a free for all.
Don’t made judgements about everybody based on one guy. I’m on an instance that doesn’t defederate lemmygrad or lemmy.ml, so I commonly see utterly insane tankie takes in popular, and of course also in various comments - and yet I don’t want those people to not have a platform. Because I trust just about noone to decide whether my opinions should be censored, and if that means also not censoring the opinions of people who I think are very wrong, I’m willing to take that trade.
walden@sub.wetshaving.social
on 11 Jan 2025 19:43
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There’s a big difference between utterly insane tankie takes and hateful content.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
on 11 Jan 2025 18:45
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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.
walden@sub.wetshaving.social
on 11 Jan 2025 19:50
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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.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
on 11 Jan 2025 21:43
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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.
walden@sub.wetshaving.social
on 11 Jan 2025 23:37
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It sounds like we agree, but I’m much less lawerly due to my lack of experience in that field.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
on 12 Jan 2025 00:37
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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.
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.
whydudothatdrcrane@lemmy.ml
on 11 Jan 2025 00:56
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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.
LadyAutumn@lemmy.blahaj.zone
on 11 Jan 2025 15:24
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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.
LadyAutumn@lemmy.blahaj.zone
on 11 Jan 2025 15:45
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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?
LadyAutumn@lemmy.blahaj.zone
on 11 Jan 2025 15:51
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You’ve never gendered someone wrong before? Never seen a boy with long hair and called him a girl by accident? Never got someone’s gender wrong because of how they looked? Do you interact socially with other people very often?
But I’ll ask again. Every time you talk about another person, either directly or indirectly, do you demand to see biological evidence of past or present pregnancy, or the ability to become pregnant, before you can agree they are a girl or a woman? If the answer to that question is no, then how do you know that they are a girl or woman? What is it that tells you that? What are you assessing that tells you that they are a girl or woman?
thisguy1092@lemmy.world
on 11 Jan 2025 15:56
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No I’ve never gendered someone wrong. Pretty easy thing to differentiate
LadyAutumn@lemmy.blahaj.zone
on 11 Jan 2025 16:01
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Haha, I don’t believe that for a second. Whether you have or not doesn’t matter, because it happens all the time. And as someone who was an androgynous kid I got called a girl all the time. I certainly didn’t do anything to dissuade that. People used to ask my mom who her little sister was cause my mom was a young mother. And she’d have to awkwardly correct them both on the fact that I was her child and that I was a boy.
Are you going to actually respond to the rest of that comment though? Come on, let’s see some reading comprehension skills and critical thinking. Defend your views.
thisguy1092@lemmy.world
on 11 Jan 2025 16:06
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No I don’t ask those questions. I can see that they are a boy or a girl. You make it sound like it’s a complex thing. It’s not.
LadyAutumn@lemmy.blahaj.zone
on 11 Jan 2025 16:23
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I am absolutely not the one making it sound like a complex thing haha you’re the one who brought up pregnancy as though that’s how we determine how to gender someone.
Perfect, so you agree that how someone looks to you is how you gender them. It isn’t their ability to reproduce, it isn’t their chromosomes, it isn’t their genitalia, it’s how they look. Like someone might be wearing clothes considered feminine in your culture, they might be wearing makeup or have visible breasts or a frame or facial structure associated with femininity in your culture. They might carry themselves in a way considered feminine by your culture, have a voice in a higher range or speak in a cadence and tone associated with femininity by your culture.
You would be inclined to gender that person a woman and use pronouns she and her for them. Pretty simple right, you’ve seen girls your whole life you know what they look like. You know how they talk how they move what they wear. Same with boys. You know the way boys look and how they move and talk, what clothes they wear, how their hair is cut, how they’re built and what their faces look like.
But you’ll note that none of these things are hard-line biological rules. Women are still women without breasts, with deep voices, with squarer builds and heavier facial structures. Women are still women with facial hair from PCOS. Womanhood is not something determined by biology. Otherwise, you’d ask for concrete proof every single time you had to refer to someone. It also exists whether or not someone completely matches what you expect women to look like or not. And if you gender a cisgender person wrong, if you call a girl a boy, she can correct you, and you will apologize and refer to her as a girl. She looked like a boy to you from that angle, but you were wrong.
Gender is a social class. It is how we treat people socially. It defines certain rules and conventions for how you think about someone and how you interact with them. Transgender rights is liberating people to determine what their own gender is. It’s allowing gender identity to be self determined instead of assumed by other people. It’s pointing out, correctly, that gender is not defined by biology. It is defined by convention by what other people call you. That men and women are not biologically hardwired towards gender. Dresses are not a part of women’s biology, nor long hair, nor push-up bras. Those things are culturally and socially determined. Assigned gender is defined by restriction, boys can’t do that girls can’t do this. Liberating people from assigned gender allows them to define who they are.
In short, gender is something you assign by what you see. What you see can be wrong. And when it’s wrong you trust the person speaking when they correct you (unless you’re an asshole). This has always applied to cis people. But it is restrictive, it forces people to be and act a certain way even if they don’t want to. And it doesn’t have to be that way. Your gender should be up to you. Everyone’s should be.
thisguy1092@lemmy.world
on 11 Jan 2025 16:30
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See that’s where we’re not seeing eye-to-eye
I see a dude/kid/teenager have long hair act feminine or vice versa
A person may be more masculine or feminine in whatever way. But you are still the gender/sex that you were born with. Whatever you do in life based on who you are that’s up to you! Cool you made yourself happy. But bottom line. You’re still a dude or a girl at birth.
LadyAutumn@lemmy.blahaj.zone
on 11 Jan 2025 16:40
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In what way are you “a dude or a girl at birth” if “dude or girl” is something people decide by how you look and not by your biology? And how do you explain masculinity or femininity being culturally relative? Men hold hands and kiss each other on the cheeks in some cultures. Those expressions of affection are masculine, as are skirts and well manicured nails in other cultures. There are some culture where being thin and vain are considered masculine. And some cultures where being stocky and blunt are considered feminine.
Femininity and masculinity are 2 words that essentially mean “of men and women”. It’s just a roundabout way of referring to genders. A feminine man is gender non-conforming, their femininity goes against their assigned gender. They are presumed to be masculine because of their assigned gender, and therefore discouraged from being feminine. Allowing people to self determine their gender directly liberates them from this process.
If you’re willing to allow someone like me to exist, someone with a vagina and estrogen and breasts who was nonetheless assigned male at birth, what functionally is preventing you from respecting my identity as a woman? Why is that unacceptable to you? What is being damaged by acknowledging my gender? Language isn’t sacred, and I feel like I’ve more than pointed out already that the word woman is not determined by someone’s biology. So what is the reason why you insist that society affirm and uphold the right of other people to tell me what gender I am? If it’s not biology and it is restrictive, literally giving me rules for who I am and who I’m allowed to be and how people must treat me, like it’s demonstrably severely damaging to my mental well-being, then why is it necessary for assigned gender to still be upheld? Why is it okay for you to continue to assert that about me? You disrespect me and my experiences when you continue to call me a man.
You also say that you’re glad I made myself happy, but earlier said “9 more days ❤️”. A clear attempt to make me feel threatened and unsafe because of political persecution at the hands of the upcoming change in presidency. If you’re actually glad I myself happy, if it actually matters to you that I am healthy and have good quality of life, why do you promote support and endorse misinformation that is a direct threat to my safety? Why do you insist that society should take actions that would directly harm me? How can my well-being matter to you if in the same breath you disrespect my dignity as a person?
thisguy1092@lemmy.world
on 11 Jan 2025 16:42
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A penis or vagina at birth.
LadyAutumn@lemmy.blahaj.zone
on 11 Jan 2025 16:47
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You should respond more to what I said there. I added more at the end. Actually try and respond to what I’m saying. If your position is defensible and you are competent at defending it then prove it.
We already established that gender is not determined by biology. We determined that a dozen times over at this point. You assign gender based on what you see, and it’s up to people to correct you if you got it wrong. This works fine when the person is cisgender, but you have decided is unacceptable when they’re trans.
thisguy1092@lemmy.world
on 11 Jan 2025 16:49
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Gender is absolutely determined by biology. Remember I said I’ve never misgendered someone? You just chose not to believe a fact, remember?
LadyAutumn@lemmy.blahaj.zone
on 11 Jan 2025 16:54
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I don’t dispute the fact, I pointed out that I don’t believe you. It’s fine if that’s true though, because i then shared my own experience of being mistaken for a girl many times as a child and teenager. I was assigned male at birth, so at the time saw myself as a boy and I think you’d agree at the time that I was. I still was called a girl all the time. When I corrected people, they accepted the correction.
I stated a lot more about how gender isn’t biologically determined in the above. If you want to challenge individual points I’ve made, I’d like it if you could actually respond to those points. Instead of just blindly state that you’re right despite all the challenges I’ve made that you haven’t responded to.
thisguy1092@lemmy.world
on 11 Jan 2025 16:50
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Just stop taking the pills and tell me what happens.
I used to be a very focused person and that’s who I thought I was. But know what happened? I stopped taking ADHD medication and Whataya know I wasn’t always so focused.
LadyAutumn@lemmy.blahaj.zone
on 11 Jan 2025 16:55
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I also have ADHD. No argumentative points to that. I just thought I’d point that out.
As I said in my other comment, nothing, as I have had gender reassignment surgery. And even if I hadn’t it wouldn’t matter. My gender is not determined by my hormones.
thisguy1092@lemmy.world
on 11 Jan 2025 17:01
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Listen I got things to do and we’re not gonna see eye to eye. Good luck to ya
LadyAutumn@lemmy.blahaj.zone
on 11 Jan 2025 17:12
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We’re not going to see eye to eye because you won’t consider my perspective. You’ve already decided that you’re right and that I’m wrong before the conversation even starts. You’re not open to the idea that maybe you aren’t right about this. I’d ask you to consider that. Just open yourself to that one thing, that one possibility that maybe you’re wrong about this. Consider that maybe you haven’t thought of every possible challenge to your view of gender. I am absolutely willing to consider your perspective, and I feel I more than have throughout this conversation. Afford me the same dignity and treat my ideas as legitimate points worth considering. If you’re definitely right and I’m definitely wrong, then considering my arguments shouldn’t matter, right? Because if I’m wrong anyway, then my arguments shouldn’t change that.
I don’t think you’re really a bad person. You said some shock value troll comments at the start of all this but then actually spent like 2 hours of your time talking with me. The good thing to do, the morally right thing to do, when faced with information that challenges our worldview, is to consider whether we are right or not.
thisguy1092@lemmy.world
on 11 Jan 2025 17:15
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Oh I’m gonna watch that video when I have some free time. Always try to consider and educate myself on the other side ya know
LadyAutumn@lemmy.blahaj.zone
on 11 Jan 2025 17:50
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I think it’s great that youre willing to engage with content that challenges you. I think that you should think about some of the stuff you said today. What if I was a kid, what if children read your comments. What you said was very damaging and made others feel unsafe. Not just like an insult but actually like the threat of insitutional violence against people for who they are. That’s really serious. You shouldn’t want to make people afraid that they will be harmed because of who they are.
thisguy1092@lemmy.world
on 11 Jan 2025 16:44
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And sorry because I still would address as ma’am or ms.
But still in my head you are a man. You were born with a penis. Take the pills away and what happens?
LadyAutumn@lemmy.blahaj.zone
on 11 Jan 2025 16:51
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I highly doubt you would agree that I’m a man if we met. Even if you could tell I was trans id still be willing to bet you wouldn’t be able to internally conceive of me as a man. I am very conventionally feminine and dress and present myself in a way that is very in line with how other women my age dress and present.
I have had reassignment surgery, so nothing would happen if the pills were taken away. My body does not produce any more testosterone than a cisgender woman’s does. Even if I hadnt had reassignment surgery, biology still isn’t how we determine gender. My gender wouldn’t change in the absence of medication.
thisguy1092@lemmy.world
on 11 Jan 2025 16:52
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Yeah okay buddy
LadyAutumn@lemmy.blahaj.zone
on 11 Jan 2025 16:57
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I can’t tell what you’re responding to here. Are you saying you know how I look? I never said I was pretty, nor did I say that you definitely wouldn’t be able to tell i was trans. I said that actually speaking with and interacting with me I feel you’d have a hard time conceiving of me as a man. I do not fall in line with western masculinity in really any way. I’m also very confident in my identity. You calling me a man doesn’t make me feel uncomfortable, just disrespected.
Demdaru@lemmy.world
on 11 Jan 2025 15:42
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Here I am, going to get downvoted into oblivion, but you already speak about the topic so I want to ask.
Trans people have the cure for their condition - that being surgery. Why shouldn’t being trans (before actually transitioning!) considered being ill?
Sorry if I come as rude but in today’s hellscape there’s really no way to ask that without sounding like a douche.
whydudothatdrcrane@lemmy.ml
on 11 Jan 2025 16:22
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First, surgery is not sth every trans person seeks, nor the first thing that they seek.
Equating trans with surgery shows that you know next to nothing about the topic.
Being trans is a reality not a condition. Like (some) veterans have PTSD, that does not mean being a veteran is mentally ill.
World Health Organization lists gender incongruence under “conditions related to reproductive health” not mental conditions. American Psychiatric Organization has “gender dysphoria” under mental conditions, but clearly states this is to get access to care, being trans in itself is not a mental condition.
Finally, the fact that there is a “cure”, does not mean there must necessarily be an illness, for example abortions are health care for unwanted pregnancy this does not mean pregnancy is an illness.
helopigs@lemmy.world
on 11 Jan 2025 17:22
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gender dysmorphia is the illness, and transitioning is the cure.
ZILtoid1991@lemmy.world
on 11 Jan 2025 16:03
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In what way do trans people hurt you?
thisguy1092@lemmy.world
on 11 Jan 2025 16:04
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Never said they did
thisguy1092@lemmy.world
on 11 Jan 2025 16:08
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But calling people moronic before having a conversation does seem mean. Matter of fact a trans person just did.
whydudothatdrcrane@lemmy.ml
on 11 Jan 2025 16:15
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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.
thisguy1092@lemmy.world
on 11 Jan 2025 16:24
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Did you just assume my gender?
whydudothatdrcrane@lemmy.ml
on 11 Jan 2025 16:27
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You claim in your username you are a guy. I respect your pronouns, sorry if this is confusing.
thisguy1092@lemmy.world
on 11 Jan 2025 16:31
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Valid lol
LadyAutumn@lemmy.blahaj.zone
on 11 Jan 2025 16:28
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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.
thisguy1092@lemmy.world
on 11 Jan 2025 16:33
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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
LadyAutumn@lemmy.blahaj.zone
on 11 Jan 2025 16:59
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Okay, I mean you haven’t really respected my rights to be “called a chick” in this conversation but I’m glad you’re willing to respect my right to be identified with whatever terminology I feel best describes me.
What I’m saying I am is a woman, a transgender one who was assigned male at birth and transitioned as a young adult. I’m not claiming to be anything else.
ZILtoid1991@lemmy.world
on 11 Jan 2025 17:10
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whydudothatdrcrane@lemmy.ml
on 11 Jan 2025 16:10
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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.
thisguy1092@lemmy.world
on 11 Jan 2025 16:23
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That link leads to no where
whydudothatdrcrane@lemmy.ml
on 11 Jan 2025 16:28
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Switch invidious backend from the links on the top
thisguy1092@lemmy.world
on 11 Jan 2025 16:32
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whydudothatdrcrane@lemmy.ml
on 11 Jan 2025 16:33
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See where it says “switch backend” try one of those links. Or watch it on youtube if you are not concerned about privacy.
thisguy1092@lemmy.world
on 11 Jan 2025 16:36
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Alright hold on lemme give it a watch
Drewski@lemmy.sdf.org
on 11 Jan 2025 01:29
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The First Amendment exists to protect controversial speech. No one is getting jailed for discussing the weather or the latest Marvel movie (well, except maybe in North Korea). When governments and corporations can arbitrarily classify things as “hate speech” you better believe they’re going to use it to silence dissent.
sunzu2@thebrainbin.org
on 11 Jan 2025 01:43
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These mods are around fedi too, can't tell who their handlers are or they are just generic bootlicker labouring for free.
The biases are so obvious lol
whydudothatdrcrane@lemmy.ml
on 11 Jan 2025 01:43
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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? Where were you when bigots banned books? Did you protest for First Amendment when three racist groups banned books all over the country? Did you protest when these same platforms shadow banned lgbt voices? So you don’t care about First Amendment, you are just against LGBT lives in particular.
Your first amendment protects you from the government. It does not protect you from actions taken by companies or other people based on your speech.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
on 11 Jan 2025 18:46
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Exactly. I can say disgusting things all I want in public, and I can absolutely be shut down on private platforms like SM for saying the exact thing without there being a violation of free speech.
Drewski@lemmy.sdf.org
on 11 Jan 2025 20:54
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When government is coercing companies to censor information it is censorship, and a violation of the 1st Amendment.
LengAwaits@lemmy.world
on 12 Jan 2025 09:09
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I guess that primarily depends on whether or not you understand the definition of coercion.
What do we call it when companies coerce government into enacting policy that’s detrimental to the general welfare of the country?
Bgugi@lemmy.world
on 11 Jan 2025 02:06
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Nobody has a problem censoring hateful and harmful content, so long as they’re the ones that get to decide what that means.
LadyAutumn@lemmy.blahaj.zone
on 11 Jan 2025 15:12
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Misinformation and violent rhetoric about minorities is hate. It has no place in society and allowing it achieves nothing expect the proliferation of bigotry.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
on 11 Jan 2025 18:41
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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.
LadyAutumn@lemmy.blahaj.zone
on 11 Jan 2025 18:51
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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.
xigoi@lemmy.sdf.org
on 11 Jan 2025 19:51
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I’m looking forward to whenever someone decides that your beliefs are “hate speech” and suddenly you’ll be the one supporting free speech.
“Free speech” is a morally neutral thing. Most leftists don’t go on about “free speech” because it’s not a value we hold. We value tolerance of people of different races, genders, sexualities, and so on. The issue is not speech in general – it’s the content of speech that matters. “Free speech” sidesteps the issue of what is actually being said.
Well, at least you’re honest about being against free speech.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
on 11 Jan 2025 21:04
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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.
LadyAutumn@lemmy.blahaj.zone
on 11 Jan 2025 21:34
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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.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
on 11 Jan 2025 22:06
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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.
LadyAutumn@lemmy.blahaj.zone
on 11 Jan 2025 22:21
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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.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
on 12 Jan 2025 01:09
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Is there anywhere along the way that the government could have done something to prevent Nazis from taking over the country?
Yes:
antitrust to prevent monopolizing of the media
fact checking the media - government leaders have a pretty powerful bully pulpit
enforcement of the law - sociopaths and narcissists often violate the law; look at Trump, for example, he should’ve been held accountable long before he ran in 2016
Adding more laws that we’re not going to enforce fairly isn’t going to help, and will probably make it worse.
You’ve been so convinced by conservatism
I’m sorry, when did I ever give the impression that I’m a conservative? I’m about as liberal as they come, in the apparently old fashioned definition of the term that prioritizes individual rights.
For president, I have voted Republican once (McCain), Libertarian once (Gary Johnson; I hated Clinton and Trump near equally), and Democrat once (Biden). I abstained in 2012 because I had recently moved and didn’t feel comfortable enough with local politics to vote (and I didn’t know if I’d stay), and the Presidential candidate was a near guarantee in my new state (Mitt Romney in Utah, no way he loses there).
I’m a left leaning libertarian, and depending on who you ask, I’m simultaneously a dirty commie, a fascist, or an anarchist, none of which remotely describe me. I am in favor of liberalizing all parts of society and helping the poor. I believe firmly that the ends do not justify the means, and will spend a lot of effort looking for solutions to problems that don’t violate my principles.
LadyAutumn@lemmy.blahaj.zone
on 12 Jan 2025 02:29
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Hitler was elected my guy. There’s no evidence that his electoral victory in 1933 was in any way tampered with. He was democratically elected. He ran on a campaign of ending democracy. Same deal as Trump pretty well. He also served prison time. He was punished by the law. That didn’t stop the people for voting for him to end democracy. He campaigned on genocidal authoritarian fascism. He bought media companies and proliferated fascist ideology over radio and newspaper. He had movies made to promote fascism. But he broke no laws doing any of that. He was elected.
You are essentially saying that the government of Weimar Germany did nothing wrong. They prosecuted him legally for crimes he committed during an insurrection attempt. Then when he was free he ran about talking about how great fascism is and how awful the jews are and how great it’d be if he got elected cause he’d take all the jews out of the government and the schools and the media. All of those were actual campaign points of his. People readily voted for it. They practically worshiped him before he was even elected.
Nazis don’t deserve fairness. Nazis should be met with a fist. They advocate the destruction of liberty and crimes against humanity. They indoctrinate others into genocidal bigotry. Tolerating their presence at all is unacceptable, and they should be forcefully removed from society by legal frameworks.
I also never said you were a conservative but that you were convinced by conservatism. Liberalism is also not a left-wing ideology. Individual rights is mostly a buzzword for unfettered and unrestricted capitalism. Elon Musk loves talking about individual rights and freedom of speech from his billionaire fascist pulpit where he silences anyone arguing against him lol.
Ironically this conversation always comes up in conversation about how “we really need to let Nazis speak you guys. No don’t silence them it’ll hurt democracy’s feelings :( yes they’re convincing everyone to kill the minorities but no no no we need to let them talk, yes i know they recruit regardless of whether we tell anyone their fascists because their entire ideology is based on non-falsifiable conspiracies about minorities secretly controlling the world but no it’s okee we just need to let them talk and everyone will reject them im sure” aaaaaaaaaaand fascists have taken over your country. The same way they did in the 30s. And the 20s. The same way they have time and again over and over and over, proving without any shadow of a doubt that history will endlessly repeat itself specifically because everyone seems hellbent on refusing to learn from it.
Yeah you’re a liberal. You’re not a leftist or a progressive. I’m an anarchist, ironically as you listed that there lol Nazis can get bent, and the government should’ve had them all sentenced to life in prison without outside contact. If, you know, the government actually cared at all about preventing a fascist uprising. Kinda too late now, there’s probably a good 10 million totally indoctrinated american fascists, at least.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
on 12 Jan 2025 03:03
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Hitler was elected
He absolutely was, and no hate speech law would’ve stopped that because his speech was popular at the time. Don’t forget that.
Same deal as Trump pretty well
Not the same at all.
Nazis don’t deserve fairness.
They do, under the law.
Nazis should be met with a fist.
This is also true. And you have my blessing to punch the next Nazi you see.
Liberalism is also not a left-wing ideology.
That really depends on your definition of left vs right.
The original definition was based on the seating arrangements in the French National Assembly, with those on the left espousing liberalism (revolution, democracy, and secularisation, all liberal concepts) and those on the right preferring the monarchy.
I personally prefer the two axis “political compass” with economic policy on the left (socialism) vs right (laissez faire capitalism), and government authority on the top (authoritarian) vs bottom (libertarian). US politics is in the top right quadrant, I’d place classical liberalism in the bottom center-right, and I believe I straddle the left/right line in the bottom third.
Elon Musk loves talking about individual rights
And he wouldn’t know what those are even if they hit him in the face. All he seems to care about is the same thing as Trump does: seeing his name everywhere. He sort of hitched his wagon to the left when it was convenient getting Tesla visibility, and now he’s hitching to the right now that he’d like to keep out Chinese competition and get his Tesla compensation package approved.
He doesn’t care about individual rights, he only cares about himself. At least that’s the Musk I see.
we really need to let Nazis speak you guys
We need to let everyone speak, but we don’t need to give them a platform. I like this quote:
"When ignorant folks want to advertise their ignorance, you don’t really have to do anything, you just let them talk.” – Barack Obama
Let them out themselves, and move on with your day.
Yeah you’re a liberal. You’re not a leftist or a progressive.
Exactly. Thanks for recognizing the difference.
I’m an anarchist… and the government should’ve had them all sentenced to life in prison without outside contact.
I don’t see how this can possibly follow. An anarchist wouldn’t support the institution of prison, at least not one run by a central authority. Anarchists reject the idea of a monopoly on force.
there’s probably a good 10 million totally indoctrinated american fascists
LadyAutumn@lemmy.blahaj.zone
on 12 Jan 2025 03:33
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Well because 10 million people is more than enough to commit crimes against humanity on a frankly ungodly scale. You can commit genocide with those numbers.
I’m an anarchist, so ideally I’d advocate no government whatsoever in which case we could… shall we say do away with the nazis the way God intended. But we don’t, do we. We live in a society with prisons that currently house millions of people who shouldn’t be there. Nazis should be there, or dead. Either is fine but the least we could do is lock them up and prevent them from interacting with other humans.
Barrack Obama did nothing to prevent fascism. He was an American imperialist who was directly involved in the mass murder of innocent people in the middle east. I also just honestly love that you defended my strawman version of your arguments, genuinely incredible.
Saying that you’re not a progressive is as good as saying you don’t really care if Nazis take over again. You’re not invested in it enough to actually try and change anything.
You also ignored 90% of what I had to say about Hitler. I guess because you have no legitimate response to that? Do you believe that Hitler just came along to find a Germany that was already genocidally bigoted towards queer people and jews? If so you were given a seriously poor education. Germany was arguably the most liberal country in the world leading up to his rise to power. Your failure to understand that Trump played into the exact same political strategies that Hitler did belies your poor understanding of how Hitler came to be democratically elected. The world was not that dramatically different from today. People relied on mass media in much the same ways they do today, just at the time that was print and air waves. Radio stories and misinformation can be broadcast on the same day they happen though, much like social media stories can today. The media is and has always been inherently intertwined with fascism. It’s how you can indoctrinate someone into genocidal bigotry. Tell them everyone is lying to them and secretly jews control everything, and make it so that’s all they hear all the time from birth, and you have created a mass indoctrination machine and predisposed all those people towards genocidal violence.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
on 12 Jan 2025 04:29
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We live in a society with prisons that currently house millions of people who shouldn’t be there.
Preach!
Not sure I agree with your next statement which smacks of genocide, but I guess I’d need to see your definition first (with specific examples). That’ll likely get both of us on a list, so perhaps leave it at that.
Barrack Obama did nothing to prevent fascism
In fact, he arguably made things worse. But the man has some good quotes, even if he didn’t seem to live them.
I also just honestly love that you defended
I’ll defend good arguments, regardless of the source or original intent. I’m not here to win an argument, I’m here to discuss ideas, and ideas don’t take sides.
Saying that you’re not a progressive is as good as saying you don’t really care if Nazis take over again.
Non-sequitur much?
You also ignored 90% of what I had to say about Hitler.
My post was long enough, so I cut some corners. I don’t really see the point in rehashing the pre-WW2 German political and social situation.
Do you believe that Hitler just came along to find a Germany that was already
I think he succeeded because Germany was already primed for it. The people were destitute, desperate, and felt wronged, and Hitler channeled and focused that into a single, tangible enemy.
Socialists use “capitalists,” US conservatives use “woke,” and progressives use “hate speech,” though none seem nearly as effective as Hitler’s marketing, unless conditions are right. Lenin and Stalin succeeded because everyone hated the Tsar, but Trump succeeded because Democrats completely dropped the ball despite largely missing why people were pissed (and it’s not because of LGBT folk, it’s because stuff is expensive). The options in 2024 were more of the same or Trump’s promise to grow our way out. The former was probably the better deal, but the latter sounds better on paper.
Hitler won because he tapped into a common frustration (poverty and anger at reparations), and was able to redirect it at a latent concern that he could alleviate. People like simple solutions like “it’s their fault, if we take them out, our problems will be fixed.” Look at the messaging here on Lemmy, “eat the rich,” “Luigi was right,” etc. It’s the same kind of redirection Hitler and Lenin used to get power.
Trump kind of had that in 2016 with “drain the swamp” (people hate corrupt politicians), but he failed to deliver. He didn’t seem to find that same mark this time, but Harris fumbled so hard (said she wouldn’t have changed anything about Biden’s term) that he was able to win. People here like to blame Twitter/X, but I really don’t think that was a significant contributor.
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.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
on 12 Jan 2025 02:08
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hitting you in the head with a lead pipe
That’s obviously assault and should be prosecuted regardless of the content of the victim’s speech (i.e. even if he deserved it). I’d probably offer to help the aggressor post bond though if the victim was spouting Nazi nonsense.
excluding from power those who should never hold it seems an an entirely reasonable feature of a legitimate polity.
Exactly, and that’s why voting is so important, as well as party norms. Parties are our first line of defense, primary elections are the second, and general elections are the third. If a wacko gets in power, we also have impeachment and other similar checks.
If all of those break down, I guess we need to resort to revolution if the person in power is dangerous enough, because the system obviously can’t be rescued.
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.
desktop_user@lemmy.blahaj.zone
on 11 Jan 2025 19:49
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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?
LadyAutumn@lemmy.blahaj.zone
on 11 Jan 2025 20:35
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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.
desktop_user@lemmy.blahaj.zone
on 11 Jan 2025 20:52
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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)?
LadyAutumn@lemmy.blahaj.zone
on 11 Jan 2025 21:36
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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.
desktop_user@lemmy.blahaj.zone
on 11 Jan 2025 22:01
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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.
LadyAutumn@lemmy.blahaj.zone
on 11 Jan 2025 22:24
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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?
Zos_Kia@lemmynsfw.com
on 12 Jan 2025 08:30
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What is tiring about this conversation is that you have to balance real historically documented dangers of tolerating fascists, versus the theoretical dangers of whatever some internet person thinks might happen in an imaginary future.
I mean, it’s a tough call, right? “Regulating food sounds nice in theory but what if it gives some future government the power to ban pizza haha gotcha”.
Nobody is born a Muslim either, yet pointing out the hatefulness of Islam is considered racism.
NutinButNet@hilariouschaos.com
on 12 Jan 2025 19:08
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Why is this just about “minorities” and what is a “minority”? Who is going to define this definition? Why is this not also for hate of any kind such as calls for violence to “non-minorities”?
Demdaru@lemmy.world
on 11 Jan 2025 15:34
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I have a problem with idea of gov sayimg what goes. Whatever gov. If it’s your site - whatever goes, goes. You set the rules. Sheesh.
But I admit I am nos so sure when it comes to giants like FB or X. If they were like that from the get go, sure, but sudden switch is iffy as hell.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
on 11 Jan 2025 18:31
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“iffy” isn’t the same as “illegal.” They can change their policies whenever they want, provided that doesn’t violate any contracts, express or implied, with their customers. If they do violate a contract, they need to make fair restitution as per whatever the enforceable terms of the agreement are.
Contracts are only meaningful between parties with more or less equal power. When the power asymmetry is extreme, contracts are just a form of coercion. Consider the case of binding arbitration clauses.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
on 12 Jan 2025 02:01
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I 100% agree, and there’s a very good chance those binding arbitration agreements will be thrown out by a court. In law, there’s a concept of equal compensation, and if a contract heavily favors one party over another, it is treated as null and void.
For example, at my last job, I pissed off my boss for standing up for myself, but my boss knew I was indespensible, so he transitioned me to a full remote contractor from a salary position. My job was the same, and I was expected to join regular team meetings, but I no longer had my benefits. Anyway, when COVID happened, they “eliminated my position” (probably cost cutting), so I applied for unemployment. It’s not available for contract employees, but they said it would be if I was a de-facto employee (I think that’s the right term). They investigated, my employer fought it, and they determined that I was, in fact, a de-facto employee because of how I and they saw the agreement. In other words, our contract was voided because it was one-sided and only benefitted the company, and they were forced to backpay my unemployment.
That said, many people don’t realize that and are “chilled” (pretty sure that’s the legal term) from taking action about it.
I believe we should change contract law to actively push back on this. Contracts should be as simple as possible, understandable by someone with an 8th grade education, and only include terms necessary to provide the service. I shouldn’t have to scroll through 30 pages of technical jargon to find out if my rights are being violated, that’s unreasonable and should invalidate the entire contract.
individuals create echo chambers: if someone spouts intolerant garbage, and the people who fight that garbage block the speech, there’s nobody to oppose it and without voices speaking out against it, it becomes mainstream
if society doesn’t enforce rules around hate speech, it places a burden on minorities to defend themselves from hate, otherwise hate becomes the mainstream viewpoint
You have it backward. Censorship is what creates echo chambers.
MonkderVierte@lemmy.ml
on 11 Jan 2025 12:21
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Yes, but just deleting without comment, as if it never existed, isn’t the solution either.
walden@sub.wetshaving.social
on 11 Jan 2025 18:12
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Are you saying it should be required by law to have a comment regarding removal of content?
MonkderVierte@lemmy.ml
on 12 Jan 2025 12:20
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Law is per country, web is international, i don’t think that’s gonna work.
cupcakezealot@lemmy.blahaj.zone
on 11 Jan 2025 14:14
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a belief held by most reasonable people and only opposed by Nazis
Mr_Blott@feddit.uk
on 11 Jan 2025 15:40
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And those that still think fReE sPEECh is an acceptable concept in the modern world?
Bakkoda@sh.itjust.works
on 11 Jan 2025 15:57
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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.
Ulrich@feddit.org
on 11 Jan 2025 18:21
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Yes that’s why the Chinese are such big proponents of free speech!
Bakkoda@sh.itjust.works
on 13 Jan 2025 11:01
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Post free speech. They have already finished their objective.
forrgott@lemm.ee
on 11 Jan 2025 16:41
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The freedom to speak has nothing to do with being heard.
Ulrich@feddit.org
on 11 Jan 2025 18:22
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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.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
on 11 Jan 2025 18:30
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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.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
on 11 Jan 2025 22:10
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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.
Ulrich@feddit.org
on 11 Jan 2025 22:16
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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.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
on 11 Jan 2025 22:59
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And what was that point? My point is that freedom of speech has nothing to do with private platforms.
I stated my point very bluntly in the comment you replied to above. Freedom of speech is not “merely a restriction on government”. It is a concept that exists outside of government entirely. And it has everything to do with anywhere speech is expressed, including private platforms.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
on 12 Jan 2025 00:47
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Rights only make sense in the context of governments, which have the power to strip my rights through imprisonment. I have no right to speech on a private platform or on private property, I am there at the pleasure of the owner. So talking about rights (esp freedom of speech) makes no sense outside the context of government.
That’s why I argue that rights are a restriction (or a check) on the power of governments. Only a tyrannical government will attempt to abridge my rights.
Yes, it exists outside of government as a function of your nature, but that means nothing outside the context of an authority with the power to strip it away.
We weren’t talking about the “right” to free speech. We were just talking about free speech.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
on 12 Jan 2025 01:33
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Ok, and what does that mean if not the right to free speech?
Just because the far right tries to change the definition to forcing private platforms to letting them say what they want doesn’t change anything. That’s not free speech, that’s restricting the platform owner’s speech. Free speech is a restriction on the types of laws governments can pass regarding speech (i.e. forcing a major platform to accept a user’s speech would certainly be a violation).
The political right can’t change that definition for the same reason the political left can’t force deplatforming of “hate speech.”
what does that mean if not the right to free speech?
It just means being allowed to say what you want. It has nothing to do with rights or laws.
Just because the far right tries to change the definition
Uhhhh that’s the opposite of what’s happening. The UN is the one trying to change the definition to pretend it means something other than what it does.
letting them say what they want doesn’t change anything. That’s not free speech,
Yes. That is the very definition of free speech.
that’s restricting the platform owner’s speech.
The platform is not the one being censored. The users are.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
on 12 Jan 2025 02:11
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It seems we’re arguing the same thing.
The far right in the US argues that “free speech” means forcing large SM orgs to give them a platform, and this UN goon seems to think it means silencing “hate speech” (I guess freedom from speech?).
The far right in the US argues that “free speech” means forcing large SM orgs to give them a platform
Yes that’s what it means. The platforms are under no obligation to give it to them, but if they don’t allow certain types of speech, that is the definition of censorship (the opposite of free speech). It is their prerogative as a private platform to censor speech.
and this UN goon seems to think it means silencing “hate speech” (I guess freedom from speech?).
The UN goons think silencing hate speech is not censorship. It is. Let’s stop playing senseless semantics games and just own it. Say “yes we are censoring hate speech” because arguing that it’s not is dishonest.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
on 12 Jan 2025 02:24
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Exactly, and I argue censorship is only a problem when it comes from the government. If a private platform censors my speech, I can either accept it or go elsewhere. If the government censors my speech, I’m screwed.
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.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
on 12 Jan 2025 01:42
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Agreed. In fact, the whole concept of inalienable rights, specifically the phase “all men are created equal” in the Declaration of Independence, was used to justify the American Revolution. In essence, people are endowed with certain rights from their creator, one of which is deciding which powers to be subject to. If your government doesn’t represent your interests, you have the moral right to reject it and seek to replace it with one that does.
So yes, we absolutely need to fight to protect the rights we do have, and reestablish those we lost. Giving up even more rights in the process is counter-productive. We need more movements like the Civil Rights movement to demand change. We’ve given up too much power to the police, intelligence agencies, and more, and we should absolutely actively resist and demand restoration of our full rights.
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.
surph_ninja@lemmy.world
on 11 Jan 2025 16:06
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So the ACLU are Nazis now?
cupcakezealot@lemmy.blahaj.zone
on 11 Jan 2025 16:20
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i mean they’ve historically defended nazis yes
surph_ninja@lemmy.world
on 11 Jan 2025 16:26
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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.
surewhynotlem@lemmy.world
on 11 Jan 2025 16:33
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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.
surph_ninja@lemmy.world
on 11 Jan 2025 16:38
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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?
surewhynotlem@lemmy.world
on 11 Jan 2025 19:47
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That’s up to the owner of the megaphone.
If the megaphone owner doesn’t want you to use it, create your own.
futatorius@lemm.ee
on 12 Jan 2025 01:20
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Barriers to entry and the first-mover advantage make that impossible.
surewhynotlem@lemmy.world
on 12 Jan 2025 13:19
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Only if you have a profit motive. Otherwise Lemmy wouldn’t work
surph_ninja@lemmy.world
on 12 Jan 2025 16:35
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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.
surewhynotlem@lemmy.world
on 12 Jan 2025 20:23
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Sorry, I was busy gagging on a boot or I would’ve responded sooner.
The rise of fascism across the United States is partially because they’ve been allowed to coordinate, and are public and loud with their normalization of hate.
Free speech absolutionists quickly run up against the paradox of tolerance. And at that point you get to choose. Do you want the most tolerance society or do you want full freedom of speech?
If you think you want full freedom of speech, then you don’t understand how people will abuse that to take it away from you anyway.
surph_ninja@lemmy.world
on 13 Jan 2025 14:26
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No, fascism is on the rise to power because it has the financial backing of capitalists who are trying to counter the rise of leftism in the broader population. And you are being a “useful idiot” by helping them to establish the political and systemic tools to snuff out contrary speech under the guise of fighting the fascism they are in reality entrenching with those powers.
If you think you can hand the rich & powerful the power to limit speech, and that it will be used by them to limit the very speech they are funding, you are seriously not paying any attention.
They do not curate the content that’s posted there. Just because someone wrote something on Facebook does not mean Facebook endorses their opinion, just like sending someone an e-mail does not mean that your e-mail host endorses whatever you sent.
surewhynotlem@lemmy.world
on 11 Jan 2025 23:03
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So they’re an Amazon level publisher. No curation. Just publish.
cupcakezealot@lemmy.blahaj.zone
on 11 Jan 2025 16:34
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no it makes them defenders of nazis. if youre at a table with ten nazis, youre at a table of eleven nazis
surph_ninja@lemmy.world
on 11 Jan 2025 16:42
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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.
zoostation@lemmy.world
on 11 Jan 2025 18:07
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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.
surph_ninja@lemmy.world
on 11 Jan 2025 18:08
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Sounds like you’re the one mixing it up.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
on 11 Jan 2025 18:26
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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.
Doomsider@lemmy.world
on 11 Jan 2025 21:55
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Meta pushes opinions, advertisements, and engagement. The government can and should regulate their bullshittery. Our privacy has been violated along with our rights.
Your view of these platforms and what they do is completely disconnected from reality. They are advertising platforms that are used to influence elections not a “platform for speech”.
You can’t ignore the reality of what they have already done and we are past pretending it is in any way altruistic.
There is no moving onto other platforms when they they use their profits to buy up all their competitors. You can look at the current dating site situation to see how without government regulations monopolies have formed.
Your hands off approach is unetainable and also ignores that other free countries have things like anti-hate laws and they are doing way better than we are.
The solution is to fix the government and then regulate the hell out of these fuckers. This is the way.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
on 11 Jan 2025 22:57
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Our privacy has been violated
And we should have laws protecting that. Ideas:
hold them criminally liable for PII lost in breaches that’s not necessary to provide the service (and the customer has explicitly opted in) - they’ll be extra careful about what data they hold onto
require them to remove customer data upon request
require explicit approval from and compensation for customers when sharing data with another org
pretending it is in any way altruistic.
Why would we pretend that? They’re a business and they exist to make money, and it turns out it’s profitable to impact elections.
I think this is a symptom rather than the problem. The root is that elections are largely determined by the candidate with the most funding and media exposure, not the candidate with the most attractive ideas. There are a lot of ways to address that, and giving government power (and platforms justification) to silence critics ain’t it.
To solve the problem of election interference, we need to get money out of politics. That’s hard, but it’ll be a lot more effective than regulating something as nebulous and abusable as “hate speech.” I say we ban all advertising for candidates and issues within 6 months of an election and force candidates to rely on debates (which would be fact checked; each candidate would select a group). We should also have public funding for debates, where the top 5 candidates who are registered in enough states to win are allowed to debate.
The solution is to fix the government
Depending on your definition of “fix,” you’ll probably just give ammunition to the next opposition administration. Be very careful about this.
A social site doesn’t publish anything, it’s just a medium for users to communicate.
walden@sub.wetshaving.social
on 11 Jan 2025 18:10
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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.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
on 11 Jan 2025 18:23
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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.
surph_ninja@lemmy.world
on 11 Jan 2025 18:25
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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.
ZILtoid1991@lemmy.world
on 11 Jan 2025 15:49
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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.
interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.ml
on 11 Jan 2025 16:49
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Delete the data on my device and let me in control of the sliders and ban words. Make the defaults reasonnable to stop hate. This would not be censorship anymore, just deamplification and no one is a martyr now.
Simple as. Why censor when you can just let the users have the power to see what they want to see? In voyager I have all of the annoying headline keywords filtered. Makes browsing the fediverse much more pleasant.
interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.ml
on 12 Jan 2025 01:45
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The reason to say not but will not admit. This strips the owner class for the power to shape discourse and control the means of communication. This dynamic also exists on open source communication platforms such as lemmy and mastodon.
Imagine if we could simply subscribe to the content filters of fellow users. If I could just click your username, see you filter keyword list and click to add to mine the ones I like or subscribe to your named filters and their future changes.
phoenixz@lemmy.ca
on 11 Jan 2025 17:11
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Just to put some perspective over here:
Pretty much the exact same thing in pretty much the exact words is being said on the other (right wing) side of things. Its just the things being tolerated are different
I honestly think that the bigger issue here isn’t so much tolerance but certain parties that keep pointing out relatively small things to the common people (mostly on the right side of the political spectrum) and go “ooohhg my God can you believe these evil fuckers and they will do that to children too and won’t anyone think of the children”. Basically I’m talking trump, musk, Fox news, that sort of shit.
I’ve long held the believe that Trump did untold damage and harm to millions, but the biggest harm he has done is the division he’s sown. There has always been a rather steep divide in the US, but that divide has grown into a fucking ocean between the two sides.
I think most people in the US, when receiving the actual proper facts, would really not think and feel that different. Nobody would rage against universal healthcare, why would they? You only do that when you’re misinformed.
Not trying to excuse anyone, not trying to say that most trump supporters aren’t insufferable assholes, but the vast majority of them wouldn’t be as bad had they have access to actual news sources, had they not been constantly lied to.
Now with what you said, please understand that there are loads of highly armed militia groups out there in the US that would love to go into detail of that “any means necessary”. Were this to happen, you’re basically talking civil war. once that happens, everyone loses, you will too.
I think that the only way to repair this divide is to keep building bridges, keep talking, keep listening, because once it gets too far, then that’s it. One only has to look at Yugoslavia as an example of what happens when neighbor starts massacring neighbors. There is no winning for anyone.
ZILtoid1991@lemmy.world
on 11 Jan 2025 17:30
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The biggest issue is, those who divide us make those people untrusting of said bridges.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
on 11 Jan 2025 18:21
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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.
futatorius@lemm.ee
on 12 Jan 2025 01:11
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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.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
on 12 Jan 2025 01:36
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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).
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.
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.
tabular@lemmy.world
on 12 Jan 2025 11:03
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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.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
on 12 Jan 2025 15:35
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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.
Dupree878@lemmy.world
on 12 Jan 2025 03:29
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We don’t have a social contract. It’s everyone for themselves.
b1tstremist0@lemmy.world
on 12 Jan 2025 08:08
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Tolerance is tolerance and it can break any time. You just keep tolerating until you can’t anymore, as simple as that. Its artificial.
surph_ninja@lemmy.world
on 11 Jan 2025 16:08
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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.
los_chill@programming.dev
on 11 Jan 2025 17:28
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Why is this not as simple as adding a setting button for moderation of hateful content? The user can decide to filter it out.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
on 11 Jan 2025 18:21
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And who decides whether content is hateful?
berno@lemmy.world
on 11 Jan 2025 19:01
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O’Brien, he’s trustworthy
los_chill@programming.dev
on 11 Jan 2025 20:15
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los_chill@programming.dev
on 11 Jan 2025 19:16
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Content moderators per community guidelines. Why is this so hard?
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
on 11 Jan 2025 19:44
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And who do you select as moderators? Who ensures their moderation is consistent with community guidelines? What are the consequences if they moderate unfairly?
los_chill@programming.dev
on 11 Jan 2025 20:12
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If we are talking platforms, then the employees of that platform. If we are talking federation, then the community and groups leading the communities. The consequences are the same as always. Bans for rule violations, and the freedom we all share to use or not use these platforms.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
on 11 Jan 2025 21:22
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As long as we’re keeping the government out of it, I’m happy. People need the ability to vote with their feet and use other platforms, and that’s not feasible if the moderation comes from government rules.
Platforms can and will use the law as an excuse to push their agenda. “Oops, that looks like hate speech, it’s out of my hands” to any content they don’t like. A law like that justifies bad behavior and silence of dissent.
los_chill@programming.dev
on 11 Jan 2025 22:20
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Solid points. I’m with you. I admit I am skeptical of all platforms. I operate from the assumption that we only hear about moderation when these platforms want to control content for other reasons. Moderation for hate speech could be as simple as moderation for porn, but it is not because it isn’t about hate speech, it is about what the platforms can and can’t control. Which was the point I was trying to make. Sorry if that got lost.
Moderators elected by real users would be a positive development. Choosing between groups of mods is second-best but better than nothing.
blazeknave@lemmy.world
on 11 Jan 2025 17:58
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Some might call it a… what’s that word? Responsibility?
Like that whole neighbor and community upstanding injustice and leveraging their privilege for the have nots thing that has defined modern human society up until Cambridge Analytica?
PromptX@lemmy.zip
on 11 Jan 2025 18:12
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brown567@sh.itjust.works
on 11 Jan 2025 19:34
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I feel like it is still censorship, but a degree of censorship required for public safety is tolerable…
Unless he’s saying that social media sites policing content on their platform isn’t censorship, because it’s not. It’s only censorship if it’s a government doing it, you have the right to control what is said on a platform you own
Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In@lemmy.world
on 11 Jan 2025 20:01
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It’s only censorship if it’s a government doing it
The amount of public space, both real and virtual, is decreasing dramatically. I think limits on private censorship should definitely exist.
brown567@sh.itjust.works
on 11 Jan 2025 20:32
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Or do these limits only kick in for platforms above a certain size?
That’s how it’s in the EU, the DSA only applies to large providers. It’s kinda like the fairness doctrine in broadcasting but in the digital domain, e.g. TikTok is currently in hot waters over the Romania elections because they did not take sufficient precautions to make sure that everything’s fair and square.
And in that case, why would the same principle not apply?
Because size obliges. If I want to smelt some cans in my backyard I can just do that provided I have a “fireplace” – which is just an area set up to be suitable to have a fire. If I want to build an industrial-scale aluminium smelter I have to get permits and everything. The public interest in the latter is much larger, that’s why I have to jump through hoops and follow regulations.
(I can’t burn garden waste though, gotta give it to the municipality to compost. A matter of waste of perfectly fine organic material and unnecessary emissions).
Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In@lemmy.world
on 12 Jan 2025 08:58
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If I make sandwiches and people decide to eat my sandwiches then why should the government require me to follow basic health and safety.
Service offered to the general public should expect to be regulated.
xigoi@lemmy.sdf.org
on 11 Jan 2025 19:59
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If we don’t believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don’t believe in it at all. —Noam Chomsky
Mongostein@lemmy.ca
on 11 Jan 2025 20:22
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I mean, sure, but does that mean people get to express themselves everywhere all the time?
I go to work and there’s always a couple fuckers who bring up their hateful opinions in a “I’m not racist but,” way.
It affects my productivity when I have to hear that bullshit all day while trying to get them to stop in a diplomatic way.
I can’t say it so directly, but it’s not censorship to say “shut up and let me work”
If they’re disturbing you from working, that’s an issue independent from the message they’re expressing, so freedom of expression does not apply.
Mongostein@lemmy.ca
on 11 Jan 2025 23:32
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Ok, now I argue that the constant bombardment of misinformation and hate speech we face online and through the media clearly affects people’s ability to live their lives, and is no different than the guy talking my ear off at work.
I’m not saying they can’t express themselves. I’m just saying that we don’t have to listen, but with the current state of things we’re being forced to listen.
No, but we’re on the receiving end of the consequences of those comments.
When they come for you because they’re acting on some shit that Zuckerberg’s algorithm amplified, your shallow moralizing won’t make any difference.
Mongostein@lemmy.ca
on 12 Jan 2025 02:21
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It’s not just comments and I’m not talking just about me.
You and I and Mel Brooks all know that the common person is a moron.
Algorithms push misinformation. Bots push information. Are we limiting free speech by saying “you can’t use algorithms and bots to spread lies”?
Does lying count as free speech?
For example: I used to like Facebook for seeing what my friends are up to. It’s not that any more. I would be rid of it but I’m a freelancer and a lot of my clients insist on using it.
Now it’s a constant feed of shit I didn’t subscribe to designed to stoke the culture war. Even the shit I did follow way back when I still used it a lot now shows me posts designed to make people argue. It’s like 5 posts I didn’t ask for to every one that did. I’m smart enough to see it, but is everyone?
Dupree878@lemmy.world
on 12 Jan 2025 03:31
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By this logic they should ban all religious speech from every platform
That’s not what the distinction is about. The important thing is whether you want to shut them down because of what opinion they’re expressing, or how they’re expressing it.
LengAwaits@lemmy.world
on 12 Jan 2025 08:48
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Less well known [than other paradoxes] is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal.
goodboiii@lemmings.world
on 11 Jan 2025 21:02
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That is why we should defederate from lemmy.ml. They are nazis.
UltraGiGaGigantic@lemmy.ml
on 11 Jan 2025 21:04
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Why do you have to wait for your admins to do so when you could just block us today yourself?
UltraGiGaGigantic@lemmy.ml
on 11 Jan 2025 21:03
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Advertising is hateful content. Ban the entire marketing industry now please.
Doomsider@lemmy.world
on 11 Jan 2025 21:33
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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.
b1tstremist0@lemmy.world
on 12 Jan 2025 08:04
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Agreed. Let everyone be free to decide. I don’t want something shoved to my face 24x7, its inorganic and harmful.
los_chill@programming.dev
on 11 Jan 2025 21:50
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These are platforms. It isn’t censorship because they are private for-profit entities. They can host or deny any speech they want. And we can post on them or not and take our content elsewhere.
The same people with toddler brain and “it’s not fair!!!”
Shardikprime@lemmy.world
on 11 Jan 2025 22:06
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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.
Propaganda is just some speech that has a political agenda. Most propaganda isn’t false.
MITM0@lemmy.world
on 12 Jan 2025 03:12
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It is censorship, PERIOD
HawlSera@lemm.ee
on 12 Jan 2025 03:33
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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,
Zementid@feddit.nl
on 12 Jan 2025 03:41
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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.
b1tstremist0@lemmy.world
on 12 Jan 2025 08:14
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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.
Allero@lemmy.today
on 12 Jan 2025 07:03
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Well, it is censorship.
People just wake up to a realization that some censorship should exist, and it makes many uncomfortable.
Other than that, don’t be tolerant of the intolerant, and you’ll be fine.
b1tstremist0@lemmy.world
on 12 Jan 2025 07:44
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And we say we are living in a democracy. Mark my word, there is not a SINGLE democracy in the world. It sounds good on paper but the technicalities are far from theory.
True democracy (Direct Democracy) can’t happen - you’d need to vote in every single decision. Without everyone’s decision, nothing could get done. It’s bad enough for a family of four to agree what movie to watch, let alone a whole country. It would be democratic if most people watched what they wanted, but the logistics for a country ain’t gonna work.
That’s why most Western countries in the world have Representative Democracy - we elect people to do that stuff on our behalf, and are aware of affecting factors. And by and large, it works. Sure, there are always failings and scandals and someone can point these out, because human beings like to cheat and have their own agendas, and of course, power corrupts. Sadly, there is no form of government that is safe from subversion.
If you don’t like a decision, vote for a representative that you think will do more of what you want. Or form an effective protest.
b1tstremist0@lemmy.world
on 12 Jan 2025 10:25
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That’s the problem. You can elect any representative but you can’t ensure its a good one if the voters themselves are the choke-point, maybe you decide not to vote, vote based on trends, vote in panic or vote for some ideology rather than what should really matter to everyone in a long term.
I wonder how is US a true democracy. Its a two-party system, you can argue its better than China’s one-party system or Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (ahem!) but that’s all there is to it.
The voting system used is important. “Pick the one you want, most votes wins” sounds perfectly usable but it trends towards two main parties. There is undue pressure on the voter to choose the main party they dislike the least so avoid the main party they dislike the most. It gets worse the deeper we look at the “winner take all” (first past the post) voting system (used in the USA, UK).
I don’t know what an effective protest would look like but that’s probably the better option. People tend to get insulted or bored if you try to explain how their vote doesn’t really matter.
Live_Let_Live@lemmy.world
on 12 Jan 2025 08:19
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leftists have become what they hated the most, horsehoe theory is real people, call it horseshoe fact
mortemtyrannis@lemmy.ml
on 12 Jan 2025 11:48
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And what exactly have leftists become and what do they hate?
b1tstremist0@lemmy.world
on 12 Jan 2025 13:00
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Freedom of speech, rationality, pragmatism to name a few. What else, lolz!
Zero22xx@lemmy.world
on 14 Jan 2025 16:34
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Because they’re evil, fascist, thought police for wanting to take away our god given right to tell entire groups of people that they’re subhuman on the internet. Unlike those valiant and heroic free speech and freedom of expression warriors that burn and ban books, police other people’s identities and cheer as a handful of conservative billionaires buy up all the free press and social platforms.
Edit: /s just in case.
Kusimulkku@lemm.ee
on 12 Jan 2025 09:17
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I mean it is, but it’s also not a bad thing in moderation (heh)
Fedditor385@lemmy.world
on 12 Jan 2025 16:04
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It IS censorship and they should stop saying it isn’t, but they should clearly say “we will censor X because Y” and be transparent about it. Censorship where the majority of population agrees with it is still censorship, but approved and accepted for the greater good.
Now, the question is what does “hateful” mean? And where does “hateful” start and begin? Is saying “I hate my neighbour” and “I hate Nazis” the same? Is “I hate gay people” and “I hate Manchester United” the same? Why not focus on violence instead of hate. We should have the freedom to hate (hear me out…) but in the end it is a feeling and a preference and no censorship will change that. What should be prevented at all costs however, is violent content. People can love or hate whoever, but they shouldn’t be allowed to call upon any type of violence towards them.
Someone hating someone doesn’t change a thing, but someone calling for attacks against someone - this is a whole new dimension and deserves total censorship.
leftytighty@slrpnk.net
on 12 Jan 2025 19:09
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Censorship isn’t policing people’s feelings, you’re allowed to hate. Why should you be allowed to express hate, and make those people feel unwelcome?
Your questions are also not as morally grey as you think. Manchester United isn’t hated for a core part of their being, they’re not victims of violence, they’re not a class of person who has been enslaved or erased or mistreated throughout their existence.
Individual freedom needs to take a back seat to collective freedom, and the freedom to self expression, identity, and well being for all. Freedom to oppress isn’t freedom. Nobody is free unless we’re all free.
Mushroomm@sh.itjust.works
on 12 Jan 2025 21:27
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It’s simple. If your rights infringe on my rights, and there is no way for me to avoid the “you”, whatever it may be at the moment, it should be regulated.
Go ahead and hate gays, but on a multicultural/multi-national platform that over a 3rd of the population use, you shouldn’t be allowed to project that because it makes gay people feel unsafe. It infringes on their humanity.
Just because a group is immune to the intricacies of this, re: straight and white, shouldn’t be a license for them to say and do whatever they want.
Try a group of gay people against straights, see how long that group lasts.
Why the double meaning
Fedditor385@lemmy.world
on 17 Jan 2025 19:15
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Well, I partly agree. Collective freedom does come before personal freedom. But, not everyone hates just because of the “being”.
For ex. a lot of refugees in Germany are hated not because they are from middle east, not because they are islamic, but for the sole reason that they are abusing the welfare system. They get free social apartments with monthly allowance that is higher than some peoples pensions, from which they still need to pay their apartment. It’s not hate because of what they are, but because of what they do. And that is ok, because we hate pedophiles not because of the person, but because what they do or did in the past.
Also, there is no freedom from feeling offended and unwelcome. It is a feedback. A boy can feel unwelcome in a girls locker room, no problem there really. Feeling unwelcome probably has some reason behind it. You either should not be there, or you should be or not be doing something.
leftytighty@slrpnk.net
on 17 Jan 2025 19:23
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Although you have the start of a point here all you’ve done is stereotype a class of people. Hate people that abuse welfare, whether immigrant or not.
I hate welfare abusers -> some immigrants are welfare abusers -> I hate immigrants as a class of person
That’s not rational
Fedditor385@lemmy.world
on 18 Jan 2025 20:12
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Of course it’s not rational, why would you expect it to be at this point? When an issue starts, at that point, before it escalates, thats when people still have rational thoughts and think through things. But now, where the economy is falling apart, people are losing jobs and homes, or barely making it through, why would you expect anyone to be rational and not emotional? How do you expect such people, who contributed their whole life to the states welfare system when it was working, to now at this point be left in the dark while some random people, who just got here, never put a penny into that system, get everything on a silver pladder? Of course people will get emotional, and in this case, the emotion is hate, remorse, fear, disappointment.
I really don’t know what would else you expect from people in this desperate situation.
leftytighty@slrpnk.net
on 18 Jan 2025 21:24
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it can be expected and even understandable to some degree but that doesn’t mean it needs to be accepted and normalized. It’s wrong, objectively. Emotion needs to be put aside when deciding policy and action.
We can understand hate without giving in to it
Fedditor385@lemmy.world
on 19 Jan 2025 10:22
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The time of rational discussions is over. THAT is what needs to be accepted. Being rational was tried and it failed, thats why we are here where we are in the first place, remember? If being rational was of any help, we wouldn’t have the problem that we had today. We rationally told we can’t accept so many migrants, provide them with basic stuff, without it affecting ourselves. But no, nobody listened. Why would anyone wanna be rational now? We tried and it failed. Nothing else left but to be emotional.
NutinButNet@hilariouschaos.com
on 12 Jan 2025 18:59
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Who decides what is hateful and worthy of removal? How is it not censorship? This is such a dumb article lol
You don’t have to be a free speech advocate. It’s fine if you want censorship, just quit changing definitions to make yourself sound less authoritarian.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
on 13 Jan 2025 15:01
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There’s a fundamental Americanized understanding of censorship as de facto BAD. So in order to justify doing what is very obviously a form of censorship, we don’t establish a justifiable and transparent process for censoring content. We just redefine the thing we’re doing as “Not Censorship”.
At the same time, with so much of social media in the hands of a tiny minority of mega-advertisers, the debate is pointless. We don’t get to decide what is or is not censured. The advertisers do. Smears against ethnic groups or religious movements or people of a particular gender or persuasion are only prohibited when they interfere with the distribution of marketing materials.
Now that advertisers have sufficiently A/B tested their marketing material, there’s no reason to explicitly prohibit bigoted content because you can simply cloister particular communities into atomized walled gardens of advertising media.
I can sell Bud Light Fuck The Trans cans to the evangelical chuds, I can sell Bud Light Israel Did Nothing Wrong to Zionists, and I can sell Bud Light Communism Will Win to the Tankies. Everyone can have their own boutique Bud Light experience and sales of piss beer can keep going up forever.
RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world
on 12 Jan 2025 19:16
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I think the difference is between protecting wealth and power vs protecting basic human rights.
It’s censorship one way or the other. The paradox of tolerance comes into play. We can’t ignore hate, it needs to be visible so people can be on guard, but we also can’t let it take over by letting it run roughshod and unchecked. Those in charge of media and social media are in the first camp - protecting wealth and power, letting hate run rampant. It drives profits and engagement, the extremes of politics they support give them control.
rimjob_rainer@discuss.tchncs.de
on 12 Jan 2025 19:22
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Some might argue that calling what happens in Gaza a genocide might be hate speach against Israel, and it should be censored. So who decides what is “hate” and what is not?
timmy_dean_sausage@lemmy.world
on 12 Jan 2025 19:45
nextcollapse
In your example, there is clear, observable evidence of genocide occurring. They are killing civilians and demolishing critical civilian infrastructure. So, saying Israel is committing genocide has a certain amount of truth/accuracy in it, and the intent isn’t to smear Israel, it’s to point out what they are actively doing, while the world is receiving constant updates. In other words, there is objective evidence behind the claims.
Hate speech is the opposite. It has no objective evidence behind it, and the intent is to make specific people/groups look a certain way. We can typically infer the intent of hate speech by the words they choose to use, and the way they frame their “argument”. We employ critical thinking to do this. This process can also be peer reviewed for further accuracy.
rimjob_rainer@discuss.tchncs.de
on 12 Jan 2025 20:54
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In your example, there is clear, observable evidence of genocide occurring.
I’ve seen many denying the evidence which seems so obvious to you. Even my government is denying it.
Who decides about objectivity?
Mushroomm@sh.itjust.works
on 12 Jan 2025 21:21
nextcollapse
Those arguing objective facts when the point is clear tend to argue from a position of bad faith, and should be ignored. Hence the critical thinking.
Look at what those who are denying genocide in this example have to gain from such a claim. If it’s much, those individuals have a vested interest in denying the truth and as such, should no longer be allowed a seat at the table.
There is plenty across history that defines a genocide. Leaders arguing there aren’t exact parallels this time around, makes them despot. Complicit is too kind a word.
timmy_dean_sausage@lemmy.world
on 12 Jan 2025 21:31
nextcollapse
We have footage of them bombing schools, hospitals, shooting up aid convoys… What is there to deny?..
spyd3r@sh.itjust.works
on 12 Jan 2025 22:23
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Schools, hospitals, and aid convoys that are hijacked and used by Hamas for conducting military operations, which makes them valid military targets under international law.
timmy_dean_sausage@lemmy.world
on 12 Jan 2025 23:07
nextcollapse
Except, in all cases, there were a lot of dead doctors, teachers, and children. The UN investigated each instance and found war crimes. The aid convoys were with registered international aid organizations and, upon investigation, they were found to be legitimate, had no weapons, we have footage of the attacks happening, they were not entering legitimate Israeli territory, and Israel has not shared any evidence of hamas operating out of these locations or via aid convoys.
If I take the time to back this up with sources, would you be receptive to the information? Don’t want to waste my time if you’re not willing to assess evidence that disproves your currently held beliefs.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
on 13 Jan 2025 15:19
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Schools, hospitals, and aid convoys that are hijacked and used by Hamas
The “human shields” rhetoric is traditionally used as a reason why you can’t target a militant, not a reason why you can kill a civilian.
Israel has inverted the narrative, both by asserting that a dozen dead Palestinians are justified if one Hamas militant is killed, and by asserting that anyone in proximity to a Hamas militant is a collaborator.
The end result is a free-fire zone, wherein nobody an Israeli bomb or hit squad targets is exempt from the status of “military target”. This is a legal claim that Israel makes independent of international legal courts, and has resulted in the Israeli government being repeatedly sanctioned and threatened with prosecution by those same courts.
So no, they are not
valid military targets under international law
Just the contrary. The IDF is implicated in war crimes by engaging in these rampant and lawless slaughters.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
on 13 Jan 2025 15:13
collapse
Who decides about objectivity?
In principle, you don’t need anyone to decide. The facts speak for themselves.
In practice, people get the overwhelming majority of their information third-hand. So the people who decide on objective reality are the people who manage the media infrastructure that provides information of the outside world to their audience.
As audiences become more fractured and information streams more selective (particularly in political media), the different viewpoints provided by various news outlets and propaganda firms can create the illusion of multiple competing objective realities.
But lying and denial and selective reporting don’t change reality. Eventually, the reporting begins to produce contradictions - images and statements that don’t line up with one another, because they are so busy trying to reframe a momentary narrative or shape a shifting popular opinion. That dissonance is a big warning sign of an illusion at play.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
on 13 Jan 2025 15:03
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Some might argue that calling what happens in Gaza a genocide might be hate speach against Israel
“Texas’s anti-boycott law is both constitutional and, unfortunately, increasingly necessary as the radical left becomes increasingly hostile and antagonistic toward Israel,” said Attorney General Paxton. “Though some wish to get rid of the law and see Israel fail, the State of Texas will remain firm in our commitment to stand with Israel by refusing to do business with companies that boycott the only democratic nation in the Middle East. In this case, I’m pleased to see the court recognize that the plaintiff lacked any standing to bring this challenge. Thus, our important law remains in effect, and I will continue to defend it relentlessly.”
threaded - newest
Are we redefining words now?
I mean there has always been illegal speech, we just don’t usually call it censorship.
“BAAAHHH!!! YOU’RE CENSORING MY HATE SPEECH, RACIST SLURS AND DEATH THREATS!!! WAAAAAAHHHHH!!!”
That CANNOT be the arguement you stand behind.
No one said it had to be platformed, but call a spade a spade
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.
Censorship will attract scrutiny, they prefer term "modding" and they do it as charity, boy, take off your pants...
The argument is the dictionary.
Which one?
We’re always redefining words, that’s how language works. This isn’t even close to the most egregious within the last couple decades.
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.
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.
Which is an excellent example of how stupid this is because this word has literally lost all meaning, thank you.
My argument is that manipulating definitions to suit an agenda is stupid nonsense.
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.
No, that’s not what “censorship” means.
You have probably not heard of the heckler’s veto
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.
Also block the source of speech.
But they don't care to block, the goal is to suppress the speech.
The problem with blocking is this. It’s not a communally accepted part of any website. Here’s what I mean by that. Lots of websites say they allow you to block people. What they mean is they allow you to mute people. This can mean something as simple as you can still see their posts but you can’t interact (but they can see and interact with your posts (upvote/downvote etc), but can’t talk to you. That’s problematic. I feel like a block should mean block. I. E. The web host or platform completely isolated you from one another so that it appears on the user side of things as if you never existed. But that’s problematic too. On Lemmy, if I block someone I lose all post history related to that section of the post where the interaction took place. I can’t go back to my own comments. I cannot see my own comments.
Then there’s the problem of block or mute lists having a finite number. If you have a ten year old account somewhere and you have been muting or blocking people for all ten of those years, eventually you will run out of available space on the block list and there’s no good way to purge the list. You very often can’t back it up, can’t auto purge accounts that are dead or no longer in use, can’t even generally see if the people you blocked are still active in a way that insulates and protects you.
If the goal is to suppress speech that implies that the person/entity doing the suppression is in a position of authority and not following the will of their constituency. So if a mod gets hundreds of reports about a post or comment, some action is warranted because the community is speaking out against it.
That’s important to what we’re talking about here.
It’s only censorship if it’s something I personally agree with.
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.
A tolerant society can not tolerate intolerance.
Sure, but there’s an lot of people classifying disagreement as hatred and using that to stamp out the discourse we need to have as a society.
Take positive discrimination. Some see it as corrective action for historical injustices. Some see it as newspeak it for just another form of discrimination and two wrongs don’t make a right. There’s a societal discourse that needs to happen there.
Nobody is preaching hatred, but I expect I’ll get shit for even suggesting there’s a ethical argument against DEI.
It would help if you re-thought your argument from the perspective of a person with the intelligence to understand the difference between discourse and intolerant hate speech. Yes. We are discussing hatred.
No, don’t drag DEI into this. There is no equivalency in this discussion. It just shows your biases to even remotely associate it.
You are proving the parent’s point and you don’t even realize it.
It is intolerant hate speech targeted at people who are specifically targeted by racist, genderist, ableist, and sexist double standards, going against the very pillars of democracy and modern science, to serve a religious and corporatist agenda. What was your point, mfer?
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Running a company with people who are all exactly the same is such a stupid idea that it doesn’t even merit a discussion. How are you going to understand your market, your demographics, cultural changes? Dumbest shit I’ve heard in awhile.
You’re talking about equality vs equity. DEI is equitable.
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.ca/pictrs/image/0f53a387-80ea-4363-a66a-08462980b6a8.png">
DEI, when applied in the real life, usually means if there’s two people with similar enough skillsets, one hires the more disadvataged one. Some programs use a scoring system, where being marginalized grants you extra scores on top of what you get on the tests, sure, but it’s usually pretty low (10-20 max for a 450+ max score system). It also involves training for the HR, so their prejudices can be overwritten with actual fact.
However, when I first heard about DEI in 2012 (!), it was that people told me I could get fired for being white just so the workplace can expand its “diversity”, while the guy telling me its existence told me how can I help Fidesz to win the next elections, and that I should become a hardcore conservative ASAP because I would grow out of leftism.
And society != government.
The law should tolerate intolerance, outside of credible threats of violance/restrictions of others’ rights. However, society shouldn’t tolerate intolerance, meaning we should shut down intolerance in all privately controlled spaces, and confront intolerance in all public spaces.
This is extremely wrong. The government is most definitely our society. Trying to pretend the government is not made up of us is ridiculous and reeks of othering.
I have read several of your posts and they all rely on government bad private sector good methodology. It reminds me of good old fashioned anti-government propaganda pushed by corpo bootlickers.
The government is and always will be a tool of society. I can certainly appreciate your apprehension with our current government in the US. I also appreciate your diligence in defining the difference between public and private spaces.
That’s absolutely not true. To use a sports analogy (any sport), the government is the referees, and society is the culture around the game (cheers, rituals, etc). If nobody shows up to the stadium, the refs have nothing to referee, yet society carries on.
We try to set up rules that match the values we hold (i.e. no dangerous tackles), but if we try to rig the game in our favor, the other team will use those same rules against us. If we give the referees too much leeway in interpreting the rules, we open ourselves up to bribery and unfair game calling.
As you rightly said, government is a tool of society, but it’s also a dangerous tool. The same tool can guarantee equal protection under the law like the civil rights movement in the US, or it can guarantee unequal protection like in Nazi Germany. The difference comes down to what powers we let the government have.
You can throw “fascists” (general term for the right wing these days it seems) in there as well. Once you give the government power to regulate speech, it becomes very easy to abuse. If you can control the narrative, you can hold on to power.
While I do most closely align with libertarians than either major party (who are stereotypically pro-private sector), I don’t think this is a good summary. I think government is a dangerous tool and we should be very careful in using it to solve problems. However, I also think large corporations are also dangerous, and we should have tools to keep them in check. For example:
We absolutely need checks on both the private and public sectors, the first to prevent any one individual or group from having an outsized influence, and the second to prevent weaponization of the state’s monopoly on force. I believe government should be decentralized, but powerful in the limited roles it has.
If they’d come for the Nazis first, the remainder of that over-repeated list would not matter.
I know people who have ran for office and been successful on the city/county level. They made a difference in our communities. The people in government are not any different than you or I.
On a local level there is not even a doubt that we have a lot of control. I have “lobbied” local, state level, and federal level and I can tell you we have less control over the federal side. This does not mean we have no control though.
We are literally the government. The government has the power to regulate speech and exercises it’s authority regularly. The judicial branch is well known for regulating free speech in the public sector. We have a lot of laws for things like broadcasting or radio in the private sector.
Unfortunately our government never really caught up with the Internet age quite yet. The regulations they have wrote heavily favor corporate interests. Concepts like Net Neutrality were politicized instead of embraced. We still lack basic privacy protections. We gave hundreds of billions of dollars to telecom to provide fiber throughout the country and they squandered it.
We are forced to use shitty private companies for communication. We have to go through third parties for all our banking needs. Meanwhile these companies lie, cheat, and decieves us. Truly a libertarian hellscape where private interests control everything.
The very reason you dislike the government is the very reason we are here today. Our government is so ineffective it has basically given into private interests. This is particularly noticeable in the Tech sector.
I think it is past time to write a new constitution that actually works for everyone. We need to shed the “for the rich by the rich” part of our government and basically grow up. Governing should be highly regulated and designed to resist corruption.
Yup, and I’ve thought of challenging my state rep because he always runs unopposed. I honestly don’t have time for the job, but my rep is such an idiot that maybe it’s worth risking the very remote chance that I’ll win. I doubt I’d get >20%, and that’s including all the protest and pity votes in my district.
It’s also not at all what it says on the tin.
Ideally, something like that wouldn’t be necessary at all because nobody owns the internet. Yet for some reason everyone wants to regulate it. If I pay for service, I should get the advertised speed, regardless of what I’m accessing. If someone like Netflix wants to host a cache at my ISP, go for it, but it should only be hit if my DNS resolves to that cache (and I control my DNS).
Yet ISPs, governments, and big tech companies all think they own it. Just back off.
More like a nightmare for libertarians. Everywhere I look there’s cronyism, and that’s distinctly anti-libertarian. Banks get bailed out when they get caught with their hand in the cookie jar instead of the execs serving jail time. ISPs violate their contracts and nobody holds them to task.
I think the opposite is true. Our government is so effective that special interests rarely need to lobby, because our reps sell us out on their own. If you want to see who representatives are loyal to, look no further than their campaign contributions.
The problem is that we keep expecting government to solve our problems without ensuring that they’re actually loyal to us, the people. And why should they? It’s not like we’re going to vote them out next time, we’ll keep voting with our tribe because maybe this time they’ll listen (they won’t).
No, for government to actually be worth trusting, we need massive reforms to realign the federal government with the interests of the people. State governments are often better (esp in smaller states) because there’s less to get from buying those reps, though that’s not exactly true in my area (Utah, where the predominant church largely calls the shots on important legislation). Some options:
In general, get money out of politics as much as possible, and attack the two party duopoly. That probably won’t fix it, but it’s a start.
Maybe. I’m not sure what I’d change that couldn’t be fixed with an amendment or two though, and that’s likely way easier than replacing the Constitution (which I largely like).
Oh, the incoming US government is made up of us? There is no “us” that includes both me and those thieving, murderous, lying pieces of shit.
And as the man said, if my thought-dreams could be seen, they’d probably put my head in a guillotine.
Yup it is, you must understand the incoming administration is just a fraction of the actual government.
I totally agree with you that Aotus and his handlers along with a lot of our representatives are pieces of shit. We definitely need to vote them out. Hopefully we will still be able to when it is all said and done.
Really though we need some serious reforms to restore our confidence.
It’s literally censorship, but I argue it’s acceptable - even desirable and laudable - censorship
@Ledivin @Sunshine having constitutional rights and limitations, would figure under 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?
More UN bullshit.
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 doesn't do parma bans generally speaking....
While I still think their over zealous daddy sheepooh and pootin speech policing is rather clown, their mod style is more reasonable vis-a-vis.World mods who are just same as reddit lol
Poor reading comprehension and regime narrative weaving...
Never forget how they handled Saint Luigi
.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.
Lemmy is fine. It will blow up in the next 2-5, guaranteed. We will also learn new ways disinformation techniques will evolve in that time frame to adjust.
Unless the government outlaws federating/VPNs and forces ISPs to block instances.
We had the chance in the last five elections to secure net neutrality. What can I say, people are fucking stupid.
People don’t even understand what those two words even mean. The chronically stupid will stay stupid. My own mother is a prime example of this. Her brain is warped by whatever Fox News, Facebook, and health guru podcasts she listens to tell her how to think and feel. The majority in this country are just like her.
Unfortunately, yeah. It was remarkable that for some amount of time america was unique and maybe a decent place to live. All be it 10-20 years cumulatively, maybe. Best you can do now is look out for yourself; give the finger to your mom and people like her every chance you get; and hold tight while these idiots organizing leads to their idiotic demise.
Because we are the few, we can slip between the cracks and find plenty of places to live where the fasicists can’t breathe down our necks.
Thankfully my Mom and I still have a good relationship. I just don’t talk politics with her, however I am willing to sacrifice my privileged place in society to fight fascism if it comes down to a civil war.
Oh, I don’t talk to my dad and avoid my mom. I have love for them but I can not tolerate their ignorance and I make sure they know it. Fuck them. They are not good people.
Big doubt. People will flock to something like BlueSky before they flock to Lemmy.
Bigger doubt.
Right, but they gave everyone their own platform which can compete with .ml in the same space
Don’t made judgements about everybody based on one guy. I’m on an instance that doesn’t defederate lemmygrad or lemmy.ml, so I commonly see utterly insane tankie takes in popular, and of course also in various comments - and yet I don’t want those people to not have a platform. Because I trust just about noone to decide whether my opinions should be censored, and if that means also not censoring the opinions of people who I think are very wrong, I’m willing to take that trade.
There’s a big difference between utterly insane tankie takes and hateful content.
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.
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.
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.
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’ve never gendered someone wrong before? Never seen a boy with long hair and called him a girl by accident? Never got someone’s gender wrong because of how they looked? Do you interact socially with other people very often?
But I’ll ask again. Every time you talk about another person, either directly or indirectly, do you demand to see biological evidence of past or present pregnancy, or the ability to become pregnant, before you can agree they are a girl or a woman? If the answer to that question is no, then how do you know that they are a girl or woman? What is it that tells you that? What are you assessing that tells you that they are a girl or woman?
No I’ve never gendered someone wrong. Pretty easy thing to differentiate
Haha, I don’t believe that for a second. Whether you have or not doesn’t matter, because it happens all the time. And as someone who was an androgynous kid I got called a girl all the time. I certainly didn’t do anything to dissuade that. People used to ask my mom who her little sister was cause my mom was a young mother. And she’d have to awkwardly correct them both on the fact that I was her child and that I was a boy.
Are you going to actually respond to the rest of that comment though? Come on, let’s see some reading comprehension skills and critical thinking. Defend your views.
No I don’t ask those questions. I can see that they are a boy or a girl. You make it sound like it’s a complex thing. It’s not.
I am absolutely not the one making it sound like a complex thing haha you’re the one who brought up pregnancy as though that’s how we determine how to gender someone.
Perfect, so you agree that how someone looks to you is how you gender them. It isn’t their ability to reproduce, it isn’t their chromosomes, it isn’t their genitalia, it’s how they look. Like someone might be wearing clothes considered feminine in your culture, they might be wearing makeup or have visible breasts or a frame or facial structure associated with femininity in your culture. They might carry themselves in a way considered feminine by your culture, have a voice in a higher range or speak in a cadence and tone associated with femininity by your culture.
You would be inclined to gender that person a woman and use pronouns she and her for them. Pretty simple right, you’ve seen girls your whole life you know what they look like. You know how they talk how they move what they wear. Same with boys. You know the way boys look and how they move and talk, what clothes they wear, how their hair is cut, how they’re built and what their faces look like.
But you’ll note that none of these things are hard-line biological rules. Women are still women without breasts, with deep voices, with squarer builds and heavier facial structures. Women are still women with facial hair from PCOS. Womanhood is not something determined by biology. Otherwise, you’d ask for concrete proof every single time you had to refer to someone. It also exists whether or not someone completely matches what you expect women to look like or not. And if you gender a cisgender person wrong, if you call a girl a boy, she can correct you, and you will apologize and refer to her as a girl. She looked like a boy to you from that angle, but you were wrong.
Gender is a social class. It is how we treat people socially. It defines certain rules and conventions for how you think about someone and how you interact with them. Transgender rights is liberating people to determine what their own gender is. It’s allowing gender identity to be self determined instead of assumed by other people. It’s pointing out, correctly, that gender is not defined by biology. It is defined by convention by what other people call you. That men and women are not biologically hardwired towards gender. Dresses are not a part of women’s biology, nor long hair, nor push-up bras. Those things are culturally and socially determined. Assigned gender is defined by restriction, boys can’t do that girls can’t do this. Liberating people from assigned gender allows them to define who they are.
In short, gender is something you assign by what you see. What you see can be wrong. And when it’s wrong you trust the person speaking when they correct you (unless you’re an asshole). This has always applied to cis people. But it is restrictive, it forces people to be and act a certain way even if they don’t want to. And it doesn’t have to be that way. Your gender should be up to you. Everyone’s should be.
See that’s where we’re not seeing eye-to-eye
I see a dude/kid/teenager have long hair act feminine or vice versa
A person may be more masculine or feminine in whatever way. But you are still the gender/sex that you were born with. Whatever you do in life based on who you are that’s up to you! Cool you made yourself happy. But bottom line. You’re still a dude or a girl at birth.
In what way are you “a dude or a girl at birth” if “dude or girl” is something people decide by how you look and not by your biology? And how do you explain masculinity or femininity being culturally relative? Men hold hands and kiss each other on the cheeks in some cultures. Those expressions of affection are masculine, as are skirts and well manicured nails in other cultures. There are some culture where being thin and vain are considered masculine. And some cultures where being stocky and blunt are considered feminine.
Femininity and masculinity are 2 words that essentially mean “of men and women”. It’s just a roundabout way of referring to genders. A feminine man is gender non-conforming, their femininity goes against their assigned gender. They are presumed to be masculine because of their assigned gender, and therefore discouraged from being feminine. Allowing people to self determine their gender directly liberates them from this process.
If you’re willing to allow someone like me to exist, someone with a vagina and estrogen and breasts who was nonetheless assigned male at birth, what functionally is preventing you from respecting my identity as a woman? Why is that unacceptable to you? What is being damaged by acknowledging my gender? Language isn’t sacred, and I feel like I’ve more than pointed out already that the word woman is not determined by someone’s biology. So what is the reason why you insist that society affirm and uphold the right of other people to tell me what gender I am? If it’s not biology and it is restrictive, literally giving me rules for who I am and who I’m allowed to be and how people must treat me, like it’s demonstrably severely damaging to my mental well-being, then why is it necessary for assigned gender to still be upheld? Why is it okay for you to continue to assert that about me? You disrespect me and my experiences when you continue to call me a man.
You also say that you’re glad I made myself happy, but earlier said “9 more days ❤️”. A clear attempt to make me feel threatened and unsafe because of political persecution at the hands of the upcoming change in presidency. If you’re actually glad I myself happy, if it actually matters to you that I am healthy and have good quality of life, why do you promote support and endorse misinformation that is a direct threat to my safety? Why do you insist that society should take actions that would directly harm me? How can my well-being matter to you if in the same breath you disrespect my dignity as a person?
A penis or vagina at birth.
You should respond more to what I said there. I added more at the end. Actually try and respond to what I’m saying. If your position is defensible and you are competent at defending it then prove it.
We already established that gender is not determined by biology. We determined that a dozen times over at this point. You assign gender based on what you see, and it’s up to people to correct you if you got it wrong. This works fine when the person is cisgender, but you have decided is unacceptable when they’re trans.
Gender is absolutely determined by biology. Remember I said I’ve never misgendered someone? You just chose not to believe a fact, remember?
I don’t dispute the fact, I pointed out that I don’t believe you. It’s fine if that’s true though, because i then shared my own experience of being mistaken for a girl many times as a child and teenager. I was assigned male at birth, so at the time saw myself as a boy and I think you’d agree at the time that I was. I still was called a girl all the time. When I corrected people, they accepted the correction.
I stated a lot more about how gender isn’t biologically determined in the above. If you want to challenge individual points I’ve made, I’d like it if you could actually respond to those points. Instead of just blindly state that you’re right despite all the challenges I’ve made that you haven’t responded to.
Just stop taking the pills and tell me what happens.
I used to be a very focused person and that’s who I thought I was. But know what happened? I stopped taking ADHD medication and Whataya know I wasn’t always so focused.
I also have ADHD. No argumentative points to that. I just thought I’d point that out.
As I said in my other comment, nothing, as I have had gender reassignment surgery. And even if I hadn’t it wouldn’t matter. My gender is not determined by my hormones.
Listen I got things to do and we’re not gonna see eye to eye. Good luck to ya
We’re not going to see eye to eye because you won’t consider my perspective. You’ve already decided that you’re right and that I’m wrong before the conversation even starts. You’re not open to the idea that maybe you aren’t right about this. I’d ask you to consider that. Just open yourself to that one thing, that one possibility that maybe you’re wrong about this. Consider that maybe you haven’t thought of every possible challenge to your view of gender. I am absolutely willing to consider your perspective, and I feel I more than have throughout this conversation. Afford me the same dignity and treat my ideas as legitimate points worth considering. If you’re definitely right and I’m definitely wrong, then considering my arguments shouldn’t matter, right? Because if I’m wrong anyway, then my arguments shouldn’t change that.
I don’t think you’re really a bad person. You said some shock value troll comments at the start of all this but then actually spent like 2 hours of your time talking with me. The good thing to do, the morally right thing to do, when faced with information that challenges our worldview, is to consider whether we are right or not.
Oh I’m gonna watch that video when I have some free time. Always try to consider and educate myself on the other side ya know
I think it’s great that youre willing to engage with content that challenges you. I think that you should think about some of the stuff you said today. What if I was a kid, what if children read your comments. What you said was very damaging and made others feel unsafe. Not just like an insult but actually like the threat of insitutional violence against people for who they are. That’s really serious. You shouldn’t want to make people afraid that they will be harmed because of who they are.
.
And sorry because I still would address as ma’am or ms.
But still in my head you are a man. You were born with a penis. Take the pills away and what happens?
I highly doubt you would agree that I’m a man if we met. Even if you could tell I was trans id still be willing to bet you wouldn’t be able to internally conceive of me as a man. I am very conventionally feminine and dress and present myself in a way that is very in line with how other women my age dress and present.
I have had reassignment surgery, so nothing would happen if the pills were taken away. My body does not produce any more testosterone than a cisgender woman’s does. Even if I hadnt had reassignment surgery, biology still isn’t how we determine gender. My gender wouldn’t change in the absence of medication.
Yeah okay buddy
I can’t tell what you’re responding to here. Are you saying you know how I look? I never said I was pretty, nor did I say that you definitely wouldn’t be able to tell i was trans. I said that actually speaking with and interacting with me I feel you’d have a hard time conceiving of me as a man. I do not fall in line with western masculinity in really any way. I’m also very confident in my identity. You calling me a man doesn’t make me feel uncomfortable, just disrespected.
Here I am, going to get downvoted into oblivion, but you already speak about the topic so I want to ask.
Trans people have the cure for their condition - that being surgery. Why shouldn’t being trans (before actually transitioning!) considered being ill?
Sorry if I come as rude but in today’s hellscape there’s really no way to ask that without sounding like a douche.
First, surgery is not sth every trans person seeks, nor the first thing that they seek.
Equating trans with surgery shows that you know next to nothing about the topic.
Again, if you want to educate yourself here
Being trans is a reality not a condition. Like (some) veterans have PTSD, that does not mean being a veteran is mentally ill.
World Health Organization lists gender incongruence under “conditions related to reproductive health” not mental conditions. American Psychiatric Organization has “gender dysphoria” under mental conditions, but clearly states this is to get access to care, being trans in itself is not a mental condition.
Finally, the fact that there is a “cure”, does not mean there must necessarily be an illness, for example abortions are health care for unwanted pregnancy this does not mean pregnancy is an illness.
gender dysmorphia is the illness, and transitioning is the cure.
.
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?
You claim in your username you are a guy. I respect your pronouns, sorry if this is confusing.
Valid lol
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
Okay, I mean you haven’t really respected my rights to be “called a chick” in this conversation but I’m glad you’re willing to respect my right to be identified with whatever terminology I feel best describes me.
What I’m saying I am is a woman, a transgender one who was assigned male at birth and transitioned as a young adult. I’m not claiming to be anything else.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sealioning
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
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/38aeeeed-cd4d-422a-b7ec-fe1b105216d5.png">
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
The First Amendment exists to protect controversial speech. No one is getting jailed for discussing the weather or the latest Marvel movie (well, except maybe in North Korea). When governments and corporations can arbitrarily classify things as “hate speech” you better believe they’re going to use it to silence dissent.
These mods are around fedi too, can't tell who their handlers are or they are just generic bootlicker labouring for free.
The biases are so obvious lol
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? Where were you when bigots banned books? Did you protest for First Amendment when three racist groups banned books all over the country? Did you protest when these same platforms shadow banned lgbt voices? So you don’t care about First Amendment, you are just against LGBT lives in particular.
Your first amendment protects you from the government. It does not protect you from actions taken by companies or other people based on your speech.
Exactly. I can say disgusting things all I want in public, and I can absolutely be shut down on private platforms like SM for saying the exact thing without there being a violation of free speech.
When government is coercing companies to censor information it is censorship, and a violation of the 1st Amendment.
I guess that primarily depends on whether or not you understand the definition of coercion.
What do we call it when companies coerce government into enacting policy that’s detrimental to the general welfare of the country?
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.
I’m looking forward to whenever someone decides that your beliefs are “hate speech” and suddenly you’ll be the one supporting free speech.
“Free speech” is a morally neutral thing. Most leftists don’t go on about “free speech” because it’s not a value we hold. We value tolerance of people of different races, genders, sexualities, and so on. The issue is not speech in general – it’s the content of speech that matters. “Free speech” sidesteps the issue of what is actually being said.
Well, at least you’re honest about being against free speech.
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.”
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.
Yes:
Adding more laws that we’re not going to enforce fairly isn’t going to help, and will probably make it worse.
I’m sorry, when did I ever give the impression that I’m a conservative? I’m about as liberal as they come, in the apparently old fashioned definition of the term that prioritizes individual rights.
For president, I have voted Republican once (McCain), Libertarian once (Gary Johnson; I hated Clinton and Trump near equally), and Democrat once (Biden). I abstained in 2012 because I had recently moved and didn’t feel comfortable enough with local politics to vote (and I didn’t know if I’d stay), and the Presidential candidate was a near guarantee in my new state (Mitt Romney in Utah, no way he loses there).
I’m a left leaning libertarian, and depending on who you ask, I’m simultaneously a dirty commie, a fascist, or an anarchist, none of which remotely describe me. I am in favor of liberalizing all parts of society and helping the poor. I believe firmly that the ends do not justify the means, and will spend a lot of effort looking for solutions to problems that don’t violate my principles.
Hitler was elected my guy. There’s no evidence that his electoral victory in 1933 was in any way tampered with. He was democratically elected. He ran on a campaign of ending democracy. Same deal as Trump pretty well. He also served prison time. He was punished by the law. That didn’t stop the people for voting for him to end democracy. He campaigned on genocidal authoritarian fascism. He bought media companies and proliferated fascist ideology over radio and newspaper. He had movies made to promote fascism. But he broke no laws doing any of that. He was elected.
You are essentially saying that the government of Weimar Germany did nothing wrong. They prosecuted him legally for crimes he committed during an insurrection attempt. Then when he was free he ran about talking about how great fascism is and how awful the jews are and how great it’d be if he got elected cause he’d take all the jews out of the government and the schools and the media. All of those were actual campaign points of his. People readily voted for it. They practically worshiped him before he was even elected.
Nazis don’t deserve fairness. Nazis should be met with a fist. They advocate the destruction of liberty and crimes against humanity. They indoctrinate others into genocidal bigotry. Tolerating their presence at all is unacceptable, and they should be forcefully removed from society by legal frameworks.
I also never said you were a conservative but that you were convinced by conservatism. Liberalism is also not a left-wing ideology. Individual rights is mostly a buzzword for unfettered and unrestricted capitalism. Elon Musk loves talking about individual rights and freedom of speech from his billionaire fascist pulpit where he silences anyone arguing against him lol.
Ironically this conversation always comes up in conversation about how “we really need to let Nazis speak you guys. No don’t silence them it’ll hurt democracy’s feelings :( yes they’re convincing everyone to kill the minorities but no no no we need to let them talk, yes i know they recruit regardless of whether we tell anyone their fascists because their entire ideology is based on non-falsifiable conspiracies about minorities secretly controlling the world but no it’s okee we just need to let them talk and everyone will reject them im sure” aaaaaaaaaaand fascists have taken over your country. The same way they did in the 30s. And the 20s. The same way they have time and again over and over and over, proving without any shadow of a doubt that history will endlessly repeat itself specifically because everyone seems hellbent on refusing to learn from it.
Yeah you’re a liberal. You’re not a leftist or a progressive. I’m an anarchist, ironically as you listed that there lol Nazis can get bent, and the government should’ve had them all sentenced to life in prison without outside contact. If, you know, the government actually cared at all about preventing a fascist uprising. Kinda too late now, there’s probably a good 10 million totally indoctrinated american fascists, at least.
He absolutely was, and no hate speech law would’ve stopped that because his speech was popular at the time. Don’t forget that.
Not the same at all.
They do, under the law.
This is also true. And you have my blessing to punch the next Nazi you see.
That really depends on your definition of left vs right.
The original definition was based on the seating arrangements in the French National Assembly, with those on the left espousing liberalism (revolution, democracy, and secularisation, all liberal concepts) and those on the right preferring the monarchy.
I personally prefer the two axis “political compass” with economic policy on the left (socialism) vs right (laissez faire capitalism), and government authority on the top (authoritarian) vs bottom (libertarian). US politics is in the top right quadrant, I’d place classical liberalism in the bottom center-right, and I believe I straddle the left/right line in the bottom third.
And he wouldn’t know what those are even if they hit him in the face. All he seems to care about is the same thing as Trump does: seeing his name everywhere. He sort of hitched his wagon to the left when it was convenient getting Tesla visibility, and now he’s hitching to the right now that he’d like to keep out Chinese competition and get his Tesla compensation package approved.
He doesn’t care about individual rights, he only cares about himself. At least that’s the Musk I see.
We need to let everyone speak, but we don’t need to give them a platform. I like this quote:
Let them out themselves, and move on with your day.
Exactly. Thanks for recognizing the difference.
I don’t see how this can possibly follow. An anarchist wouldn’t support the institution of prison, at least not one run by a central authority. Anarchists reject the idea of a monopoly on force.
I doubt it, but even if true, that’s <3% of the total population. It looks like >7% of the population identify as LGBT, so why fear a group that’s half the size?
Well because 10 million people is more than enough to commit crimes against humanity on a frankly ungodly scale. You can commit genocide with those numbers.
I’m an anarchist, so ideally I’d advocate no government whatsoever in which case we could… shall we say do away with the nazis the way God intended. But we don’t, do we. We live in a society with prisons that currently house millions of people who shouldn’t be there. Nazis should be there, or dead. Either is fine but the least we could do is lock them up and prevent them from interacting with other humans.
Barrack Obama did nothing to prevent fascism. He was an American imperialist who was directly involved in the mass murder of innocent people in the middle east. I also just honestly love that you defended my strawman version of your arguments, genuinely incredible.
Saying that you’re not a progressive is as good as saying you don’t really care if Nazis take over again. You’re not invested in it enough to actually try and change anything.
You also ignored 90% of what I had to say about Hitler. I guess because you have no legitimate response to that? Do you believe that Hitler just came along to find a Germany that was already genocidally bigoted towards queer people and jews? If so you were given a seriously poor education. Germany was arguably the most liberal country in the world leading up to his rise to power. Your failure to understand that Trump played into the exact same political strategies that Hitler did belies your poor understanding of how Hitler came to be democratically elected. The world was not that dramatically different from today. People relied on mass media in much the same ways they do today, just at the time that was print and air waves. Radio stories and misinformation can be broadcast on the same day they happen though, much like social media stories can today. The media is and has always been inherently intertwined with fascism. It’s how you can indoctrinate someone into genocidal bigotry. Tell them everyone is lying to them and secretly jews control everything, and make it so that’s all they hear all the time from birth, and you have created a mass indoctrination machine and predisposed all those people towards genocidal violence.
Preach!
Not sure I agree with your next statement which smacks of genocide, but I guess I’d need to see your definition first (with specific examples). That’ll likely get both of us on a list, so perhaps leave it at that.
In fact, he arguably made things worse. But the man has some good quotes, even if he didn’t seem to live them.
I’ll defend good arguments, regardless of the source or original intent. I’m not here to win an argument, I’m here to discuss ideas, and ideas don’t take sides.
Non-sequitur much?
My post was long enough, so I cut some corners. I don’t really see the point in rehashing the pre-WW2 German political and social situation.
I think he succeeded because Germany was already primed for it. The people were destitute, desperate, and felt wronged, and Hitler channeled and focused that into a single, tangible enemy.
Socialists use “capitalists,” US conservatives use “woke,” and progressives use “hate speech,” though none seem nearly as effective as Hitler’s marketing, unless conditions are right. Lenin and Stalin succeeded because everyone hated the Tsar, but Trump succeeded because Democrats completely dropped the ball despite largely missing why people were pissed (and it’s not because of LGBT folk, it’s because stuff is expensive). The options in 2024 were more of the same or Trump’s promise to grow our way out. The former was probably the better deal, but the latter sounds better on paper.
Hitler won because he tapped into a common frustration (poverty and anger at reparations), and was able to redirect it at a latent concern that he could alleviate. People like simple solutions like “it’s their fault, if we take them out, our problems will be fixed.” Look at the messaging here on Lemmy, “eat the rich,” “Luigi was right,” etc. It’s the same kind of redirection Hitler and Lenin used to get power.
Trump kind of had that in 2016 with “drain the swamp” (people hate corrupt politicians), but he failed to deliver. He didn’t seem to find that same mark this time, but Harris fumbled so hard (said she wouldn’t have changed anything about Biden’s term) that he was able to win. People here like to blame Twitter/X, but I really don’t think that was a significant contributor.
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.
That’s obviously assault and should be prosecuted regardless of the content of the victim’s speech (i.e. even if he deserved it). I’d probably offer to help the aggressor post bond though if the victim was spouting Nazi nonsense.
Exactly, and that’s why voting is so important, as well as party norms. Parties are our first line of defense, primary elections are the second, and general elections are the third. If a wacko gets in power, we also have impeachment and other similar checks.
If all of those break down, I guess we need to resort to revolution if the person in power is dangerous enough, because the system obviously can’t be rescued.
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.
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.
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?
What is tiring about this conversation is that you have to balance real historically documented dangers of tolerating fascists, versus the theoretical dangers of whatever some internet person thinks might happen in an imaginary future.
I mean, it’s a tough call, right? “Regulating food sounds nice in theory but what if it gives some future government the power to ban pizza haha gotcha”.
Nobody is born a Muslim either, yet pointing out the hatefulness of Islam is considered racism.
Why is this just about “minorities” and what is a “minority”? Who is going to define this definition? Why is this not also for hate of any kind such as calls for violence to “non-minorities”?
I have a problem with idea of gov sayimg what goes. Whatever gov. If it’s your site - whatever goes, goes. You set the rules. Sheesh.
But I admit I am nos so sure when it comes to giants like FB or X. If they were like that from the get go, sure, but sudden switch is iffy as hell.
“iffy” isn’t the same as “illegal.” They can change their policies whenever they want, provided that doesn’t violate any contracts, express or implied, with their customers. If they do violate a contract, they need to make fair restitution as per whatever the enforceable terms of the agreement are.
Contracts are only meaningful between parties with more or less equal power. When the power asymmetry is extreme, contracts are just a form of coercion. Consider the case of binding arbitration clauses.
I 100% agree, and there’s a very good chance those binding arbitration agreements will be thrown out by a court. In law, there’s a concept of equal compensation, and if a contract heavily favors one party over another, it is treated as null and void.
For example, at my last job, I pissed off my boss for standing up for myself, but my boss knew I was indespensible, so he transitioned me to a full remote contractor from a salary position. My job was the same, and I was expected to join regular team meetings, but I no longer had my benefits. Anyway, when COVID happened, they “eliminated my position” (probably cost cutting), so I applied for unemployment. It’s not available for contract employees, but they said it would be if I was a de-facto employee (I think that’s the right term). They investigated, my employer fought it, and they determined that I was, in fact, a de-facto employee because of how I and they saw the agreement. In other words, our contract was voided because it was one-sided and only benefitted the company, and they were forced to backpay my unemployment.
That said, many people don’t realize that and are “chilled” (pretty sure that’s the legal term) from taking action about it.
I believe we should change contract law to actively push back on this. Contracts should be as simple as possible, understandable by someone with an 8th grade education, and only include terms necessary to provide the service. I shouldn’t have to scroll through 30 pages of technical jargon to find out if my rights are being violated, that’s unreasonable and should invalidate the entire contract.
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.
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individuals create echo chambers: if someone spouts intolerant garbage, and the people who fight that garbage block the speech, there’s nobody to oppose it and without voices speaking out against it, it becomes mainstream
if society doesn’t enforce rules around hate speech, it places a burden on minorities to defend themselves from hate, otherwise hate becomes the mainstream viewpoint
You have it backward. Censorship is what creates echo chambers.
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
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.
Yes that’s why the Chinese are such big proponents of free speech!
Post free speech. They have already finished their objective.
And it’ll only be their speech that’s free.
The freedom to speak has nothing to do with being heard.
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.
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.
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.
You ignored the point I was making to argue about semantics. Still are. That’s a strawman.
And what was that point? My point is that freedom of speech has nothing to do with private platforms.
I stated my point very bluntly in the comment you replied to above. Freedom of speech is not “merely a restriction on government”. It is a concept that exists outside of government entirely. And it has everything to do with anywhere speech is expressed, including private platforms.
Rights only make sense in the context of governments, which have the power to strip my rights through imprisonment. I have no right to speech on a private platform or on private property, I am there at the pleasure of the owner. So talking about rights (esp freedom of speech) makes no sense outside the context of government.
That’s why I argue that rights are a restriction (or a check) on the power of governments. Only a tyrannical government will attempt to abridge my rights.
Yes, it exists outside of government as a function of your nature, but that means nothing outside the context of an authority with the power to strip it away.
We weren’t talking about the “right” to free speech. We were just talking about free speech.
Ok, and what does that mean if not the right to free speech?
Just because the far right tries to change the definition to forcing private platforms to letting them say what they want doesn’t change anything. That’s not free speech, that’s restricting the platform owner’s speech. Free speech is a restriction on the types of laws governments can pass regarding speech (i.e. forcing a major platform to accept a user’s speech would certainly be a violation).
The political right can’t change that definition for the same reason the political left can’t force deplatforming of “hate speech.”
It just means being allowed to say what you want. It has nothing to do with rights or laws.
Uhhhh that’s the opposite of what’s happening. The UN is the one trying to change the definition to pretend it means something other than what it does.
Yes. That is the very definition of free speech.
The platform is not the one being censored. The users are.
It seems we’re arguing the same thing.
The far right in the US argues that “free speech” means forcing large SM orgs to give them a platform, and this UN goon seems to think it means silencing “hate speech” (I guess freedom from speech?).
Both are wrong.
Yes that’s what it means. The platforms are under no obligation to give it to them, but if they don’t allow certain types of speech, that is the definition of censorship (the opposite of free speech). It is their prerogative as a private platform to censor speech.
The UN goons think silencing hate speech is not censorship. It is. Let’s stop playing senseless semantics games and just own it. Say “yes we are censoring hate speech” because arguing that it’s not is dishonest.
Exactly, and I argue censorship is only a problem when it comes from the government. If a private platform censors my speech, I can either accept it or go elsewhere. If the government censors my speech, I’m screwed.
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.
Agreed. In fact, the whole concept of inalienable rights, specifically the phase “all men are created equal” in the Declaration of Independence, was used to justify the American Revolution. In essence, people are endowed with certain rights from their creator, one of which is deciding which powers to be subject to. If your government doesn’t represent your interests, you have the moral right to reject it and seek to replace it with one that does.
So yes, we absolutely need to fight to protect the rights we do have, and reestablish those we lost. Giving up even more rights in the process is counter-productive. We need more movements like the Civil Rights movement to demand change. We’ve given up too much power to the police, intelligence agencies, and more, and we should absolutely actively resist and demand restoration of our full rights.
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.
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.
Only if you have a profit motive. Otherwise Lemmy wouldn’t work
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.
Sorry, I was busy gagging on a boot or I would’ve responded sooner.
The rise of fascism across the United States is partially because they’ve been allowed to coordinate, and are public and loud with their normalization of hate.
Free speech absolutionists quickly run up against the paradox of tolerance. And at that point you get to choose. Do you want the most tolerance society or do you want full freedom of speech?
If you think you want full freedom of speech, then you don’t understand how people will abuse that to take it away from you anyway.
No, fascism is on the rise to power because it has the financial backing of capitalists who are trying to counter the rise of leftism in the broader population. And you are being a “useful idiot” by helping them to establish the political and systemic tools to snuff out contrary speech under the guise of fighting the fascism they are in reality entrenching with those powers.
If you think you can hand the rich & powerful the power to limit speech, and that it will be used by them to limit the very speech they are funding, you are seriously not paying any attention.
A social media site is not a publisher.
Why not?
They do not curate the content that’s posted there. Just because someone wrote something on Facebook does not mean Facebook endorses their opinion, just like sending someone an e-mail does not mean that your e-mail host endorses whatever you sent.
So they’re an Amazon level publisher. No curation. Just publish.
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.
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.
Meta pushes opinions, advertisements, and engagement. The government can and should regulate their bullshittery. Our privacy has been violated along with our rights.
Your view of these platforms and what they do is completely disconnected from reality. They are advertising platforms that are used to influence elections not a “platform for speech”.
You can’t ignore the reality of what they have already done and we are past pretending it is in any way altruistic.
There is no moving onto other platforms when they they use their profits to buy up all their competitors. You can look at the current dating site situation to see how without government regulations monopolies have formed.
Your hands off approach is unetainable and also ignores that other free countries have things like anti-hate laws and they are doing way better than we are.
The solution is to fix the government and then regulate the hell out of these fuckers. This is the way.
And we should have laws protecting that. Ideas:
Why would we pretend that? They’re a business and they exist to make money, and it turns out it’s profitable to impact elections.
I think this is a symptom rather than the problem. The root is that elections are largely determined by the candidate with the most funding and media exposure, not the candidate with the most attractive ideas. There are a lot of ways to address that, and giving government power (and platforms justification) to silence critics ain’t it.
To solve the problem of election interference, we need to get money out of politics. That’s hard, but it’ll be a lot more effective than regulating something as nebulous and abusable as “hate speech.” I say we ban all advertising for candidates and issues within 6 months of an election and force candidates to rely on debates (which would be fact checked; each candidate would select a group). We should also have public funding for debates, where the top 5 candidates who are registered in enough states to win are allowed to debate.
Depending on your definition of “fix,” you’ll probably just give ammunition to the next opposition administration. Be very careful about this.
A social site doesn’t publish anything, it’s just a medium for users to communicate.
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.
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.
Delete the data on my device and let me in control of the sliders and ban words. Make the defaults reasonnable to stop hate. This would not be censorship anymore, just deamplification and no one is a martyr now.
Simple as. Why censor when you can just let the users have the power to see what they want to see? In voyager I have all of the annoying headline keywords filtered. Makes browsing the fediverse much more pleasant.
The reason to say not but will not admit. This strips the owner class for the power to shape discourse and control the means of communication. This dynamic also exists on open source communication platforms such as lemmy and mastodon.
Imagine if we could simply subscribe to the content filters of fellow users. If I could just click your username, see you filter keyword list and click to add to mine the ones I like or subscribe to your named filters and their future changes.
Just to put some perspective over here:
Pretty much the exact same thing in pretty much the exact words is being said on the other (right wing) side of things. Its just the things being tolerated are different
I honestly think that the bigger issue here isn’t so much tolerance but certain parties that keep pointing out relatively small things to the common people (mostly on the right side of the political spectrum) and go “ooohhg my God can you believe these evil fuckers and they will do that to children too and won’t anyone think of the children”. Basically I’m talking trump, musk, Fox news, that sort of shit.
I’ve long held the believe that Trump did untold damage and harm to millions, but the biggest harm he has done is the division he’s sown. There has always been a rather steep divide in the US, but that divide has grown into a fucking ocean between the two sides.
I think most people in the US, when receiving the actual proper facts, would really not think and feel that different. Nobody would rage against universal healthcare, why would they? You only do that when you’re misinformed.
Not trying to excuse anyone, not trying to say that most trump supporters aren’t insufferable assholes, but the vast majority of them wouldn’t be as bad had they have access to actual news sources, had they not been constantly lied to.
Now with what you said, please understand that there are loads of highly armed militia groups out there in the US that would love to go into detail of that “any means necessary”. Were this to happen, you’re basically talking civil war. once that happens, everyone loses, you will too.
I think that the only way to repair this divide is to keep building bridges, keep talking, keep listening, because once it gets too far, then that’s it. One only has to look at Yugoslavia as an example of what happens when neighbor starts massacring neighbors. There is no winning for anyone.
The biggest issue is, those who divide us make those people untrusting of said bridges.
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.
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.”
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. 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.
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.
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.
Why is this not as simple as adding a setting button for moderation of hateful content? The user can decide to filter it out.
And who decides whether content is hateful?
O’Brien, he’s trustworthy
Conan? Days Gone? Waterskis?
Orwell
Content moderators per community guidelines. Why is this so hard?
And who do you select as moderators? Who ensures their moderation is consistent with community guidelines? What are the consequences if they moderate unfairly?
If we are talking platforms, then the employees of that platform. If we are talking federation, then the community and groups leading the communities. The consequences are the same as always. Bans for rule violations, and the freedom we all share to use or not use these platforms.
As long as we’re keeping the government out of it, I’m happy. People need the ability to vote with their feet and use other platforms, and that’s not feasible if the moderation comes from government rules.
Platforms can and will use the law as an excuse to push their agenda. “Oops, that looks like hate speech, it’s out of my hands” to any content they don’t like. A law like that justifies bad behavior and silence of dissent.
Solid points. I’m with you. I admit I am skeptical of all platforms. I operate from the assumption that we only hear about moderation when these platforms want to control content for other reasons. Moderation for hate speech could be as simple as moderation for porn, but it is not because it isn’t about hate speech, it is about what the platforms can and can’t control. Which was the point I was trying to make. Sorry if that got lost.
Moderator groups that users can choose between.
That’s my ideal as well.
As long as what’s allowed is not in the hands of the government, I’m happy. If it is, once the leadership changes, those laws don’t look so good.
Moderators elected by real users would be a positive development. Choosing between groups of mods is second-best but better than nothing.
Some might call it a… what’s that word? Responsibility?
Like that whole neighbor and community upstanding injustice and leveraging their privilege for the have nots thing that has defined modern human society up until Cambridge Analytica?
It’s all about control
Not in the way you’re implying, it isn’t.
I feel like it is still censorship, but a degree of censorship required for public safety is tolerable…
Unless he’s saying that social media sites policing content on their platform isn’t censorship, because it’s not. It’s only censorship if it’s a government doing it, you have the right to control what is said on a platform you own
The amount of public space, both real and virtual, is decreasing dramatically. I think limits on private censorship should definitely exist.
Excellent point
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That’s how it’s in the EU, the DSA only applies to large providers. It’s kinda like the fairness doctrine in broadcasting but in the digital domain, e.g. TikTok is currently in hot waters over the Romania elections because they did not take sufficient precautions to make sure that everything’s fair and square.
Because size obliges. If I want to smelt some cans in my backyard I can just do that provided I have a “fireplace” – which is just an area set up to be suitable to have a fire. If I want to build an industrial-scale aluminium smelter I have to get permits and everything. The public interest in the latter is much larger, that’s why I have to jump through hoops and follow regulations.
(I can’t burn garden waste though, gotta give it to the municipality to compost. A matter of waste of perfectly fine organic material and unnecessary emissions).
If I make sandwiches and people decide to eat my sandwiches then why should the government require me to follow basic health and safety.
Service offered to the general public should expect to be regulated.
If we don’t believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don’t believe in it at all. —Noam Chomsky
I mean, sure, but does that mean people get to express themselves everywhere all the time?
I go to work and there’s always a couple fuckers who bring up their hateful opinions in a “I’m not racist but,” way.
It affects my productivity when I have to hear that bullshit all day while trying to get them to stop in a diplomatic way.
I can’t say it so directly, but it’s not censorship to say “shut up and let me work”
If they’re disturbing you from working, that’s an issue independent from the message they’re expressing, so freedom of expression does not apply.
Ok, now I argue that the constant bombardment of misinformation and hate speech we face online and through the media clearly affects people’s ability to live their lives, and is no different than the guy talking my ear off at work.
I’m not saying they can’t express themselves. I’m just saying that we don’t have to listen, but with the current state of things we’re being forced to listen.
Nobody is forcing you to read anyone’s comments on Facebook.
No, but we’re on the receiving end of the consequences of those comments.
When they come for you because they’re acting on some shit that Zuckerberg’s algorithm amplified, your shallow moralizing won’t make any difference.
It’s not just comments and I’m not talking just about me.
You and I and Mel Brooks all know that the common person is a moron.
Algorithms push misinformation. Bots push information. Are we limiting free speech by saying “you can’t use algorithms and bots to spread lies”?
Does lying count as free speech?
For example: I used to like Facebook for seeing what my friends are up to. It’s not that any more. I would be rid of it but I’m a freelancer and a lot of my clients insist on using it.
Now it’s a constant feed of shit I didn’t subscribe to designed to stoke the culture war. Even the shit I did follow way back when I still used it a lot now shows me posts designed to make people argue. It’s like 5 posts I didn’t ask for to every one that did. I’m smart enough to see it, but is everyone?
By this logic they should ban all religious speech from every platform
This is a stupid distinction to make. There is no speech that doesn’t affect people materially.
That’s not what the distinction is about. The important thing is whether you want to shut them down because of what opinion they’re expressing, or how they’re expressing it.
That is why we should defederate from lemmy.ml. They are nazis.
Why do you have to wait for your admins to do so when you could just block us today yourself?
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.
These are platforms. It isn’t censorship because they are private for-profit entities. They can host or deny any speech they want. And we can post on them or not and take our content elsewhere.
The same people with toddler brain and “it’s not fair!!!”
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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Well it depends on the definition of censor.
If you define censor as, “to suppress or delete as objectionable” (Webster) then it fits just fine.
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.
Also, propaganda is not speech.
Propaganda is just some speech that has a political agenda. Most propaganda isn’t false.
It is censorship, PERIOD
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,
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.
Well, it is censorship.
People just wake up to a realization that some censorship should exist, and it makes many uncomfortable.
Other than that, don’t be tolerant of the intolerant, and you’ll be fine.
And we say we are living in a democracy. Mark my word, there is not a SINGLE democracy in the world. It sounds good on paper but the technicalities are far from theory.
Democracy isn’t about getting your own way.
True democracy (Direct Democracy) can’t happen - you’d need to vote in every single decision. Without everyone’s decision, nothing could get done. It’s bad enough for a family of four to agree what movie to watch, let alone a whole country. It would be democratic if most people watched what they wanted, but the logistics for a country ain’t gonna work.
That’s why most Western countries in the world have Representative Democracy - we elect people to do that stuff on our behalf, and are aware of affecting factors. And by and large, it works. Sure, there are always failings and scandals and someone can point these out, because human beings like to cheat and have their own agendas, and of course, power corrupts. Sadly, there is no form of government that is safe from subversion.
If you don’t like a decision, vote for a representative that you think will do more of what you want. Or form an effective protest.
That’s the problem. You can elect any representative but you can’t ensure its a good one if the voters themselves are the choke-point, maybe you decide not to vote, vote based on trends, vote in panic or vote for some ideology rather than what should really matter to everyone in a long term.
I wonder how is US a true democracy. Its a two-party system, you can argue its better than China’s one-party system or Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (ahem!) but that’s all there is to it.
The voting system used is important. “Pick the one you want, most votes wins” sounds perfectly usable but it trends towards two main parties. There is undue pressure on the voter to choose the main party they dislike the least so avoid the main party they dislike the most. It gets worse the deeper we look at the “winner take all” (first past the post) voting system (used in the USA, UK).
I don’t know what an effective protest would look like but that’s probably the better option. People tend to get insulted or bored if you try to explain how their vote doesn’t really matter.
leftists have become what they hated the most, horsehoe theory is real people, call it horseshoe fact
And what exactly have leftists become and what do they hate?
Freedom of speech, rationality, pragmatism to name a few. What else, lolz!
Because they’re evil, fascist, thought police for wanting to take away our god given right to tell entire groups of people that they’re subhuman on the internet. Unlike those valiant and heroic free speech and freedom of expression warriors that burn and ban books, police other people’s identities and cheer as a handful of conservative billionaires buy up all the free press and social platforms.
Edit: /s just in case.
I mean it is, but it’s also not a bad thing in moderation (heh)
It IS censorship and they should stop saying it isn’t, but they should clearly say “we will censor X because Y” and be transparent about it. Censorship where the majority of population agrees with it is still censorship, but approved and accepted for the greater good.
Now, the question is what does “hateful” mean? And where does “hateful” start and begin? Is saying “I hate my neighbour” and “I hate Nazis” the same? Is “I hate gay people” and “I hate Manchester United” the same? Why not focus on violence instead of hate. We should have the freedom to hate (hear me out…) but in the end it is a feeling and a preference and no censorship will change that. What should be prevented at all costs however, is violent content. People can love or hate whoever, but they shouldn’t be allowed to call upon any type of violence towards them.
Someone hating someone doesn’t change a thing, but someone calling for attacks against someone - this is a whole new dimension and deserves total censorship.
Censorship isn’t policing people’s feelings, you’re allowed to hate. Why should you be allowed to express hate, and make those people feel unwelcome?
Your questions are also not as morally grey as you think. Manchester United isn’t hated for a core part of their being, they’re not victims of violence, they’re not a class of person who has been enslaved or erased or mistreated throughout their existence.
Individual freedom needs to take a back seat to collective freedom, and the freedom to self expression, identity, and well being for all. Freedom to oppress isn’t freedom. Nobody is free unless we’re all free.
It’s simple. If your rights infringe on my rights, and there is no way for me to avoid the “you”, whatever it may be at the moment, it should be regulated.
Go ahead and hate gays, but on a multicultural/multi-national platform that over a 3rd of the population use, you shouldn’t be allowed to project that because it makes gay people feel unsafe. It infringes on their humanity.
Just because a group is immune to the intricacies of this, re: straight and white, shouldn’t be a license for them to say and do whatever they want.
Try a group of gay people against straights, see how long that group lasts. Why the double meaning
Well, I partly agree. Collective freedom does come before personal freedom. But, not everyone hates just because of the “being”. For ex. a lot of refugees in Germany are hated not because they are from middle east, not because they are islamic, but for the sole reason that they are abusing the welfare system. They get free social apartments with monthly allowance that is higher than some peoples pensions, from which they still need to pay their apartment. It’s not hate because of what they are, but because of what they do. And that is ok, because we hate pedophiles not because of the person, but because what they do or did in the past. Also, there is no freedom from feeling offended and unwelcome. It is a feedback. A boy can feel unwelcome in a girls locker room, no problem there really. Feeling unwelcome probably has some reason behind it. You either should not be there, or you should be or not be doing something.
Although you have the start of a point here all you’ve done is stereotype a class of people. Hate people that abuse welfare, whether immigrant or not.
I hate welfare abusers -> some immigrants are welfare abusers -> I hate immigrants as a class of person
That’s not rational
Of course it’s not rational, why would you expect it to be at this point? When an issue starts, at that point, before it escalates, thats when people still have rational thoughts and think through things. But now, where the economy is falling apart, people are losing jobs and homes, or barely making it through, why would you expect anyone to be rational and not emotional? How do you expect such people, who contributed their whole life to the states welfare system when it was working, to now at this point be left in the dark while some random people, who just got here, never put a penny into that system, get everything on a silver pladder? Of course people will get emotional, and in this case, the emotion is hate, remorse, fear, disappointment.
I really don’t know what would else you expect from people in this desperate situation.
it can be expected and even understandable to some degree but that doesn’t mean it needs to be accepted and normalized. It’s wrong, objectively. Emotion needs to be put aside when deciding policy and action.
We can understand hate without giving in to it
The time of rational discussions is over. THAT is what needs to be accepted. Being rational was tried and it failed, thats why we are here where we are in the first place, remember? If being rational was of any help, we wouldn’t have the problem that we had today. We rationally told we can’t accept so many migrants, provide them with basic stuff, without it affecting ourselves. But no, nobody listened. Why would anyone wanna be rational now? We tried and it failed. Nothing else left but to be emotional.
Who decides what is hateful and worthy of removal? How is it not censorship? This is such a dumb article lol
You don’t have to be a free speech advocate. It’s fine if you want censorship, just quit changing definitions to make yourself sound less authoritarian.
There’s a fundamental Americanized understanding of censorship as de facto BAD. So in order to justify doing what is very obviously a form of censorship, we don’t establish a justifiable and transparent process for censoring content. We just redefine the thing we’re doing as “Not Censorship”.
At the same time, with so much of social media in the hands of a tiny minority of mega-advertisers, the debate is pointless. We don’t get to decide what is or is not censured. The advertisers do. Smears against ethnic groups or religious movements or people of a particular gender or persuasion are only prohibited when they interfere with the distribution of marketing materials.
Now that advertisers have sufficiently A/B tested their marketing material, there’s no reason to explicitly prohibit bigoted content because you can simply cloister particular communities into atomized walled gardens of advertising media.
I can sell Bud Light Fuck The Trans cans to the evangelical chuds, I can sell Bud Light Israel Did Nothing Wrong to Zionists, and I can sell Bud Light Communism Will Win to the Tankies. Everyone can have their own boutique Bud Light experience and sales of piss beer can keep going up forever.
I think the difference is between protecting wealth and power vs protecting basic human rights.
It’s censorship one way or the other. The paradox of tolerance comes into play. We can’t ignore hate, it needs to be visible so people can be on guard, but we also can’t let it take over by letting it run roughshod and unchecked. Those in charge of media and social media are in the first camp - protecting wealth and power, letting hate run rampant. It drives profits and engagement, the extremes of politics they support give them control.
Some might argue that calling what happens in Gaza a genocide might be hate speach against Israel, and it should be censored. So who decides what is “hate” and what is not?
In your example, there is clear, observable evidence of genocide occurring. They are killing civilians and demolishing critical civilian infrastructure. So, saying Israel is committing genocide has a certain amount of truth/accuracy in it, and the intent isn’t to smear Israel, it’s to point out what they are actively doing, while the world is receiving constant updates. In other words, there is objective evidence behind the claims.
Hate speech is the opposite. It has no objective evidence behind it, and the intent is to make specific people/groups look a certain way. We can typically infer the intent of hate speech by the words they choose to use, and the way they frame their “argument”. We employ critical thinking to do this. This process can also be peer reviewed for further accuracy.
I’ve seen many denying the evidence which seems so obvious to you. Even my government is denying it.
Who decides about objectivity?
Those arguing objective facts when the point is clear tend to argue from a position of bad faith, and should be ignored. Hence the critical thinking.
Look at what those who are denying genocide in this example have to gain from such a claim. If it’s much, those individuals have a vested interest in denying the truth and as such, should no longer be allowed a seat at the table.
There is plenty across history that defines a genocide. Leaders arguing there aren’t exact parallels this time around, makes them despot. Complicit is too kind a word.
We have footage of them bombing schools, hospitals, shooting up aid convoys… What is there to deny?..
Schools, hospitals, and aid convoys that are hijacked and used by Hamas for conducting military operations, which makes them valid military targets under international law.
Except, in all cases, there were a lot of dead doctors, teachers, and children. The UN investigated each instance and found war crimes. The aid convoys were with registered international aid organizations and, upon investigation, they were found to be legitimate, had no weapons, we have footage of the attacks happening, they were not entering legitimate Israeli territory, and Israel has not shared any evidence of hamas operating out of these locations or via aid convoys.
If I take the time to back this up with sources, would you be receptive to the information? Don’t want to waste my time if you’re not willing to assess evidence that disproves your currently held beliefs.
The “human shields” rhetoric is traditionally used as a reason why you can’t target a militant, not a reason why you can kill a civilian.
Israel has inverted the narrative, both by asserting that a dozen dead Palestinians are justified if one Hamas militant is killed, and by asserting that anyone in proximity to a Hamas militant is a collaborator.
The end result is a free-fire zone, wherein nobody an Israeli bomb or hit squad targets is exempt from the status of “military target”. This is a legal claim that Israel makes independent of international legal courts, and has resulted in the Israeli government being repeatedly sanctioned and threatened with prosecution by those same courts.
So no, they are not
Just the contrary. The IDF is implicated in war crimes by engaging in these rampant and lawless slaughters.
In principle, you don’t need anyone to decide. The facts speak for themselves.
In practice, people get the overwhelming majority of their information third-hand. So the people who decide on objective reality are the people who manage the media infrastructure that provides information of the outside world to their audience.
As audiences become more fractured and information streams more selective (particularly in political media), the different viewpoints provided by various news outlets and propaganda firms can create the illusion of multiple competing objective realities.
But lying and denial and selective reporting don’t change reality. Eventually, the reporting begins to produce contradictions - images and statements that don’t line up with one another, because they are so busy trying to reframe a momentary narrative or shape a shifting popular opinion. That dissonance is a big warning sign of an illusion at play.
Paxton Wins Major Case Defending Texas’s Anti-Boycott-of-Israel Law
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Ok Elon