what free speech means in the context of a somewhat anonymous internet?
what free speech means in the context of a somewhat anonymous internet?
My current view is that while I want to promote openness and free speech that can really only work in a context where the person exercising their speech feels some necessity to use it responsibly and in an honest way.
On the internet that takes a lot of self control because the social norms of every day life don’t always apply because:
- no one knows who you are
- there is not a human being right in front of you that you might feel empathy for
- there are no consequences to anything you say
- not all posts are even by humans.
With all these taken together there is a compelling argument that speech may need to be more highly regulated on the internet than in face to face interactions. However there are people with legitimate ( beliefs and ideas honestly held that they wish to discuss ) views that I worry are going to be silenced and further marginalized.
This is bad for society because if people get dismissed or pushed aside it just breeds resentment, distrust, and more misunderstanding. I think as we start defederating and making decisions we are setting up a dangerous situation where it becomes potentially easy to defederate for the wrong reasons.
For instance "we think they are being racist" or "they are spreading misinformation" could have unintended consequences. Some religions and communities might have beliefs that appear to be pseudoscience or even discrimination. However if these are honestly held beliefs that they are willing to engage in civil discourse around I don't think it's right to actually block them.
This is likely just the beginning of a much larger discussion so what are your thoughts?---
I think as we start defederating and making decisions we are setting up a dangerous situation where it becomes potentially easy to defederate for the wrong reasons.
Mastodon has operated this way for years and it's worked out really well. They're currently at 12 million or 13 million users right now. Read my comment I wrote on it here. Basically all the Nazis flee to the Nazi servers because they can't follow or subscribe to their fellow Nazis or talk about Nazi stuff. So they leave. This makes it safer for users and easier for mods to keep their users safe.
And like... sure, there's drama. People defederate for dumb reasons. But Mastodon accounts are portable and you can hop around from server to server easily. And 99% of the time people don't defederate for no reason.
Some religions and communities might have beliefs that appear to be pseudoscience or even discrimination.
This is often because they are. My old fundamentalist Christian cult I grew up in was incredibly homophobic. They 'looked' like they had beliefs that were discriminatory because they were. You do not get a 'be a bigot free' card because your religion says you are one. You can change your shitty religion (conservative fundamentalist religions have done so tons of times in the past). Minorities cannot change who they are. There are tons of other religious communities that do not discriminate against minorities so that standard is not unreasonable.
Based take. Just to add to this, despite the Mormon heads of church trying to undo MANY years of super problematic viewpoints, many members still believe that Black people are cursed by God and are inherently evil for something that happened thousands of years ago. It's extremely prevalent, especially in Utah
At the end of the day, you are what you do.
My opinion is that we live in a world that's more and more divided and that stems from extremists being given platforms to easily spread their message and pull people in. Extremist terrorism is on the rise and people (especially social conservatives) are frequently seen assembling in huge numbers to protest, something that hadn't happened in decades (not in the number of times or the number of people anyway) in most of the the western world.
It's better to allow them to exist in their corner with little interaction with the rest of the world like they used to during the 80s to early 00s than to give them a platform to find gullible people in search for easy answers to recruit.
However there are people with legitimate ( beliefs and ideas honestly held that they wish to discuss ) views that I worry are going to be silenced and further marginalized.The vast majority of them don't wish to discuss because their beliefs aren't built upon rational foundations. If proven wrong with facts they use irrational arguments to defend their point of view. If experts intentionally don't argue with them then what are we doing arguing with them as laymen? Heck, arguing with them just gives them more space to share their message and convince people.
I worry that this "banish them to the corner" policy will combine with rapidly changing limits on acceptable speech and thought to hand the extremists a growing captive audience of resentful exiles. Is it really worth banishing Jane Churchlady if the price is making Gab a mainstream social network?
Much easier to "capture" an audience if you're given a platform to speak to said audience.
I've mentioned this example before so pardon me if you've read it already. We had a far right party getting covered by medias in Canada during last federal election because our laws made it an obligation to give them coverage. They didn't win a single seat and media don't have to give them any attention anymore. The leader went from doing live sessions with thousands of watchers and tweets getting thousands of likes to getting a couple hundreds of each with numbers constantly going down.
Stop giving extremists a public and only the small percentage that's truly extreme will keep supporting the movement, give them a public and you'll have people that are on the fence that will fall on their side.
Heck, the USA had the KKK in the streets decades ago, that didn't go away by trying to compromise with them! But now that people who hold the same beliefs have a platform (Facebook, Twitter, Gab...) they're back in the streets, just not dressed with a white hood!
I'd argue that we're not more divided because of extremists being given platforms, but rather the opposite:
Because we build comfortable echochambers for ourselves (by algorithmically, or manually, cutting off contrary opinions) that succumb to groupthink, which by nature develop to be more and more extreme. The same is true for the "others" that get sent to their corner of the internet because they're wrong and not welcome.
Social media algorithm push extreme opinions because they generate more clicks and involvement from users, they also divide people a lot more because generating a debate about "gender vs sex" is much more controversial than if government subsidies for farmers are ok if it's too generate corn that's used to produce fuel.
The problem is that people are sick of having the same arguments over and over. I'm going to use trans people as a example. They don't want to see people denying their existence or calling them mentally ill every day.
In my opinion free speech is very important part of the internet and its 100% been lost. Places like 4chan are good because you know it's going to be a cesspit so if you go there and complain about what you see then you're the fool.
However with lemmy we have the expectation of civil dialog that doesn't offend. So if someone saw something that was offensive they have the right to complain as to why thay speech is allowed here.
4chan is a great example of what places that consider free speech an indelible right will turn into
People who have the most vile and hostile opinions will flock there and push most of the reasonable people out
Talking to a band of brainwashed idiots who hide their hate behind a thin veneer pseudointellectualism gets old pretty fast and, as /pol/ likes to point out, those opinions color their view of reality and will seep into discussions of seemingly unrelated topics
Most of us don't want to have to deconstruct some non-sensical ideology every time we make a statement. They think this means their opinions are some hidden truth that we can't handle.
The reality is that we can prove them wrong, but they can't or won't accept it so we give up on them and go where there are more reasonable people to interact with
Are there also unintended consequences of letting in people who are being openly and unabashedly racist?
It gives an air of legitimacy to those thoughts.
Those people are LOUD but they aren't nearly as numerous as we, or they, think.
Most people, by and large, just want to do their little thing and want to be nice to others, and want others to be nice to them. Most people don't care that their neighbors are a black gay couple, as long as they're nice.
When we let 10 people who post a 100 racist memes a day drown out the 100 regular people who post 10 times a day gives everyone the impression there is more racism than there really is, which breeds more racism, and drives out regular people who don't want to be on a racist platform.
(Using racism here as a stand-in for whatever form of bigotry you feel passionate about)
work in a context where the person exercising their speech feels some necessity to use it responsibly
Nice phrasing
However there are people with legitimate ( beliefs and ideas honestly held that they wish to discuss ) views that I worry are going to be silenced and further marginalized.
Sounds kind and charitable. It is not clear to me how universal this is given your opening paragraphs. I would agree that is they way it should be but I don't think that reflects how it is. We need to react based on the actual reality we live in.
However if these are honestly held beliefs that they are willing to engage in civil discourse around I don't think it's right to actually block them.
But what if there is a significant number of people who are just awful humans, or don't have a thought for learning, or are not being open or honest etc.
I support the idea of engagement and discussion but let's be honest there are people who aren't interested in that. There are people who are racist. There are people who really do think you and I are going to hell and they are happy to know that. Sorry there is a reason I don't associate with people like that in real life and I don't want to on line either.
It is not my mission to discuss this kind of thing with all those people. Trolls and awful humans sometimes do need to be ignored. Otherwise we cannot have interesting or productive conversations with anyone.
I say, let those that want to engage and learn find a server or community with standards that we can tolerate. Any community that doesn't have standards to keep reasonable order we should block.
I am pretty sure we either agree in full or mostly agree with each other.
But what if there is a significant number of people who are just awful humans, or don’t have a thought for learning, or are not being open or honest etc.
Yeah I agree at this point if people are being systematically terrible then they should get banned or if there is a whole instance of them that instance should be defederated. I say systematically because maybe someone just brought up a hot button issue or maybe they just had a bad day. Like if it's 90% posts are normal and then just now and then they have a rage post I don't think that makes them a terrible person. If for example out of a whole instance there is one or two slightly problematic communities but as a whole that instance is fine then it probably shouldn't be defederated.
I support the idea of engagement and discussion but let’s be honest there are people who aren’t interested in that. There are people who are racist. There are people who really do think you and I are going to hell and they are happy to know that. Sorry there is a reason I don’t associate with people like that in real life and I don’t want to on line either.
Right I get that but I think we already have a fix for that. We can already block people and block communities we don't like so we don't need to associate with people we don't like if we don't want to. However we also don't need to shut down their voice entirely if they are doing nothing else then posting horrible memes now and then. However that might not always be true some instance might want to focus on a certain type of advocacy like Open Source and so a meme community for racists might just make no sense for a instance like that.
It is not my mission to discuss this kind of thing with all those people. Trolls and awful humans sometimes do need to be ignored. Otherwise we cannot have interesting or productive conversations with anyone.
Yeah I think that makes total sense there is no need for anyone to do anything they don't want to do in their free time. I do just wonder for the people who are not terrible but maybe just fallen into an ideology or have been radicalized. Would banning them and pushing them into a corner of the internet with only other radicalized people make them ever figure out they are wrong? How are they going to realize that they are wrong unless they are allowed to participate in a wider discourse where someone can challenge them on their beliefs? Does banning and defederating actually the problem in the case of people we just disagree with or does it make the divides worse and more entrenched?
Weren't there studies done on how deplatforming Nazi communities help deradicalize vulnerable people. Also its good to keep in mind that people who dont think they are wrong don't care to hear other people out. They would rather call you slurs than admit being wrong. You can't help someone who doesnt want help unfortunately. I saw a good video by "that dang dad" on if the left neglects "wbite cis men." And I think contrapoints is a good resource for helping people deradicalize.
Free Speech Radicalism on the internet would be great in some places. It would be like 4chan but using I2P or Tor. I agree. Ideas need to be included so that people can be told how wrong they are and shown as idiots to the public. The internet is a good media for Free Speech Radicalism because you can always block someone and that's the end of the harrassment.
https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/R0jvd1Ck4y.jpg
Link is broken? Here's a Google one:
Edit: deleted for brevity, helped with readibility
thanks for the suggestion the post has been updated.
