There was a thread on twitter recently about how app stores would have rejected the first web browser, asking what future innovations might not happen due to them. Guess federated social media is a part of the answer.
I have never seen a shopping mall with a sex shop. Maybe lingerie or some novelty items at a Spencer’s, but I doubt mall operators would want to deal with people complaining about their kids walking by a store selling pornography and sex toys.
They usually end up in undesirable locations or in rundown strip malls.
I go past a mall with a dildo shop inside it on my current walking commute to work.
I saw another one of the same chain in the main train station of… I think it was Hannover? I was travelling a lot by InterRail and the places are blurring together.
Zürich has (or had) a sex shop with the wares clearly visible from the outside in the expensive bit of the city centre.
Cambridge (UK) has an Ann Summers in its main shopping centre. Thinking of the UK, I’ve seen vibrating cock rings openly stocked in Tesco, which is the largest supermarket chain in the UK.
Attitudes to such topics are surprisingly flexible.
I think most of the comments here are US-centric, which also happens to be where the app stores are mostly implemented, so they come with the same source values.
Why do people find a corner-case of an analogy, and somehow think it negates the analogy?
It's just an analogy.
Of course 'some malls have sex shops' - but obviously, most of them don't.
The vast majority of corps don't want their brands anywhere near porn, sex, guns, politics, hate/contentious speech etc..
Most decent malls are actually selective of who they want in there, and the 'other residents' of the mall have a say as well.
There are an infinite number of places porn/guns/politics can be sold, so that's not a problem, it's just not going to be in a system wherein the other players are wary of it.
It's actually good reason why we need a lot of alternative points of distribution.
I wonder if there should even be some legislation around that, in terms of the kinds of app stores that are preloaded must be more 'open' and that alternative options must be provided very easily.
Thinking about them in terms of the mall or a shopping plaza is good. However, you mistakenly compared the app store with the Gap.
The app store is the mall space, numerous apps abound, as do shops. The gap might not sell porn, but Victoria secret, Spencers, Hollywood (nights?? I can't recall) exist in the mall and might not be porn but... Some retail plazas might have an adult section. Best buy or Fry's at one point had adult magazines and videos.
Some retail plazas even have other things progressives and democrats find offensive, like guns and old classic literature. Occasionally you can also find a pawn shop in a retail plaza.
There was a point where you would rent out your mall or retail space to anyone with the money to cover the cost plus a small profit. The decadence, wealth inequality, and unrealistic valuations from government interference have led to a world where it's fairly easy for some to cherry pick who they want renting from them based upon their ideological, political, or racial spectrum or beliefs. The same now occurs in our app stores.
High end malls never had any of those things, anywhere I’ve been in the US. Victoria’s Secret and Spencer’s are pretty far from sex shops or pornography in my opinion.
Not that I agree the policies of app stores to restrict items solely because they are pornography or sex related. But high end mall operators might reject sex shops for many of the same reasons.
These threads make it obvious that most people would be okay with malls being the only place where shopping is allowed to happen.
"Our local mall is great, I don't see a need for any other malls or standalone stores. Malls provide an air conditioned space, on-site site security, and even refreshments while you shop."
I think it stems from a lack of empathy for others. I don't buy dildos so I see no reason to allow dildo stores to exist.
I know about them. But I would have to root my phone to install them. And that means trusting some binary blob from someone on the internet. So I would not do it.
On iOS maybe, but there's no problem installing 3rd party app stores on Android without rooting. See for example F-Droid.
Recent versions of Android have also improved the permissions model... you can specify what apps (e.g. F-Droid) are allowed to install other apps. You don't need to add a blanket allow forever.
While true for early adopters, this won't hold true as the network grows.
Moreover, if you can access the very same content from Google Chrome, should Google remove their own browser too? The same happened to Podcast Addict, police all the podcasts in the world or we will remove your app.
The concern is Mastodon app developers are small one-man shops, less likely to be able to bring reason to bear and get Google to review these warnings. These app devs cannot possibly be held responsible for every post on the entire Mastodon network.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fediverse
" The Fediverse (a portmanteau of "federation" and "universe") is the ensemble of federated (i.e. interconnected) servers that are used for web publishing (i.e. social networking, microblogging, blogging, or websites) and file hosting, but which, while independently hosted, can communicate with each other. On different servers (instances), users can create so-called identities. These identities are able to communicate over the boundaries of the instances because the software running on the servers supports one or more communication protocols which follow an open standard. As an identity on the fediverse, users are able to post text and other media, or to follow posts by other identities. In some cases, users can even show or share data (video, audio, text, and other files) publicly or to a selected group of identities and allow other identities to edit other users' data (such as a calendar or an address book)." (wiki)
Fediverse isn't an acronym, nor is it a term "no one's heard of". You haven't heard it before, and it's great to explain it, but don't project that either.
First, don't assume that just because you've never heard a word, that means no one has heard of it. There are quite a lot of us who know what the fediverse is.
Second, and this is a little pedantic, fediverse is a portmanteau, not an acronym.
I feel you’re being overly literal to the point where I’m not entire sure you understand English as well as you think. Hyperbole is an acceptable literary device. To say “No one has heard of this band” is colloquial to English, but obviously other people have heard of the band, the hyperbole is used to emphasize how few people have heard, not that no people have. To correct someone here isn’t correct, it’s suggests a sheltered existence.
Without getting into the details of this - yeah I disagree with it - but, Android allows side loading. Isn’t that what everyone wanted from Apple?
On a higher level, what’s the problem and what should be changed? Google has a policy that people don’t like, Android can side load, isn’t that exactly what people want?
Sorry to go off-topic, but the entire existence of the word 'side-loading' is some 1984-level language manipulation. As if installing applications without getting the permission of some abstract corporate owner is the weird thing. No, having to get permission is the weird way to install things.
as a computer moves ever more towards a white-label appliance with a single purpose, the act of "installing" becomes more and more alien. It sucks, but a majority of the computer-using population cares not for it, and only want it to work. Think washing machine - have you ever seen people want to install apps into their washing machine?
If the singular fucking purpose of the washing machine was to run apps, I sure as fuck would expect to see people wanting to install apps on their washing machine.
You can call of whatever you wish. But how did loading from any untrusted source work out for the average consumer for the last 30 years? Viruses, malware, ransomware, etc?
Yes outside of the little HN/geek bubble, it’s way too easy for the average consumer to install malware on their computer.
HN users have been whining about not being able to side load on iOS devices for years. What they really seem to want is to force the app stores to carry anything.
You must get really tired after destroying straw men all day.
1. It worked out great by fostering tons of invention.
2. Untrusted code with sandboxing works well for the web/javascript ecosystem.
3. Yes "HN users" want the freedom to run software of their choice. Discussing a single aspect where one system is better is not some total endorsement of the whole system.
Regarding #3 Android gives you that choice. The open source community didn’t just complain about proprietary software they created something. Linux wasn’t easy to install along side Windows on PCs. But they made a product that some people wanted and advocated for their position until Linux is now the most widely used OS on phones and on servers - including Azure.
So what do you propose? You want the government to come in and enforce fairness? The HN talking point has been that users should be able to install whatever they want - with Android they can.
I think this is really interesting. You hit the nail. A lot of the discussions nowadays on app stores is about having the cake and eat it. The app store providers are doomed if they do and doomed if they don't. What I hear is: "I like your platform for reach, but I would like to use my own policy"
Google should be prohibited from pressuring device creators into not including other app stores and apps. While they do allow side loading, they still maintain an effective monopoly by making it difficult to use any other app store.
(Or at least that's the most reasonable argument/step that I've seen from an anti-trust perspective)
> This is particularly worrisome because for most people Google Play is the only way they understand to install apps at all.
So this hurts discoverability and credability ("if it's not bad software, why isn't it allowed in the Google store like all the other apps?") of fediverse apps and networks.
If you read HN you might know what sideloading is and how to do it. If you're anyone else and you even get as far as trying it (which isn't likely) you get a big scary warning about how obviously everything sideloaded is a virus and Google won't be able to scan it and you should use the play store (I don't actually know what it says, but the point is that it's a big scary warning).
The point is that sideloading presents several barriers to entry and at every extra step you'll lose a few more users. very few people will get all the way through enabling sideloading, figuring out how to actually do it with ADB or something, ignoring the scary prompts, and get all the way to actually installing and running an app. This is a nice workaround for a few people, not a solution to Google applying their policies in an aggressive way to remove apps they don't like that clearly aren't themselves dedicated to hate speech.
If you're anyone else and you even get as far as trying it (which isn't likely) you get a big scary warning about how obviously everything sideloaded is a virus and Google won't be able to scan it and you should use the play store (I don't actually know what it says, but the point is that it's a big scary warning).
So now you want both side loading and you don’t want warnings about the possible risks of doing so?
So on one hand you’re arguing that users are too ignorant to figure out side loading but they are smart enough to not download apps that may be malware?
It’s not like any mainstream vendors have had side loading and introduced a security vulnerability....
I did not say we should get rid of the warning, I said it will scare some users off. That's the point of the warning, and it's a good thing, but it means sideloading isn't a viable solution.
It is said that sideloading in Android will essentially be disabled in an upcoming release. It will still be possible for that small handful of nerds who know how to enable developer mode and install an .apk via ADB, but for the vast majority of people, the Google Play store is only going to become further entrenched as their sole source of apps.
Here the main issue complex is IMHO that a) the ability to access is counted, b) this is penalized despite the system shipping with apps doing that too and c) the policy isn't consistently applied.
Roughly, web browsers, podcast players and Fediverse clients (and probably a bunch of other apps, those are just obvious examples) all fetch contents from a user-supplied source over HTTP(S) and display it. As long as they are not specifically promoting "banned" sites, they should all be treated the same in that regard.
So what do you propose? Not only have most HN users been advocating that the platform vendors allow alternate means of installing apps and being forced to do so by the government, now do you also want the government to make rules about what is allowed in the App Store?
I propose for Google to apply their guidelines consistently and fairly. Ideally on their own. If it takes a shitstorm every time, that's very annoying (but helped last time they tried to play this game with podcast apps) but at least fixes the problem for a bit. Maybe there is grounds for a lawsuit if they apply it massively unfairly, I'm not a legal expert on that.
Looking back at our last discussion, you have a serious problem of equating everything with a call for government intervention.
and why does that matter? They later switched to ActivityPub/Mastodon for a bit. They still run a Mastodon fork, but defederated back in May.
Gab was also banned explicitly by URL by any app makers and in many ActivityPub libraries (you can find checks where it hashes the URL and compares it to known Gab URLs).
> a purpose-built platform for conspiracies and hate speech
We're in a bizarre world right now where you can label any opinion you don't agree with as hate speech, dehumanize police and call every conservative a literal Nazi and that's all okay now for some reason.
At some point we have to remember that historically, a lot of people who thought they were right, about slavery, homosexuality, war, abortion, polygamy, and other controversial topics, eventually came down on the wrong side of history.
The attack on speech and ideas has never been more profound. If you don't like an idea, you don't have to listen, but people are going to continue to go to fringes whenever their voices are silences. That will create more extreme platforms and more extremism, not less.
There is holocaust denying, calls to kill blacks and rape fantasies about female politicians and movie stars. There are literal calls for the rise of the white race to eradicate everyone else on the front page of gab daily. If you want to defend shit like this on the merit of free speech the probability that you are in fact a white nationalist are not to far.
And the history is plastered with censorship the world was never more free than it is now you are just repeating non facts without even doing a hint of research.
Ah, the delicious irony of attacking certain types of speech and ideas as "attacks on speech and ideas". What they are doing and what you are doing are no different; it's all just politics. There's not even anything new about what's happening today. How do you think people's minds were changed on all those "controversial" topics you cite? A whole lot of social pressure. You don't get to make lofty statements about free speech, and then turn around and grumble that other people's speech somehow isn't "playing fair".
Just decide for yourself. Literally the first post I get at the moment comes from "QAnon and the Great Awakening" and is in support of that right-wing vigilante shooter in Kenosha, calling the district attorney who's prosecuting him "evil".
The next few posts I see mention either "arresting the dems", some anti-vax stuff and so many crypto-fascist dogwhistles that I'm getting tinnitus.
If you need more proof I'll let you ding into this.
The line of thinking seems to be: "Gab's target demographic is users that have been banned from the mainstream platforms for hate speech and conspiracies. Therefore by targeting those users, it's 'purpose built' for hate speech and conspiracies.". My question is, can't you apply this to basically anything that's "free speech"? The mechanism seems to be that most people are content with the mainstream platforms, and therefore the only people who go for the "free speech" platforms end up being the people who were banned from the mainstream platforms. By that logic, is tor "purpose built" for criminals, since basically only people with stuff to hide use it? How is it different than gab?
If your site has been overrun by ultra-far-right types for basically its entire existence and you do nothing to mitigate this then you're very clearly complicit.
But you're right, most of the "no moderation, anything goes" online communities tend to be overrun by extremists but it's easy to see why: you only need a minority of very dedicated trolls posting outrageous content 24/7 to ruin a community. It takes time and effort to post insightful content and analysis, meanwhile you can throw shit at the walls at a large scale very easily.
That's why it's pretty obvious to me that if you want to actually have interesting discussions online and a plurality of opinions you need moderation, otherwise the low effort bullies take over.
>If your site has been overrun by ultra-far-right types for basically its entire existence and you do nothing to mitigate this then you're very clearly complicit.
How do you mitigate without running counter to the original idea of "free speeech"?
It's not at all clear what "the original idea of 'free speech'" even was. In the US, the wording of the First Amendment is quite vague.
I think people have a mental model that social media sites and apps are like a communication medium. They are a neutral carrier that transmits an idea X from person A to B. The site itself is not "tainted" by the content of X or get involved in the choices of A and B.
But a more accurate model is that they are amplifiers and selectors. The algorithms and ML models at the heart of every social media app often determine who B is. A is casting X out into the aether and the site itself uses its own code to select the set of Bs that will receive it—both who they are and how large that set is. From that perspective, I think it is fair that apps take greater responsibility for the content they host.
Here's an analogy that might help:
Consider a typical print shop. You show up with your pamphlet, pay them some money, and they hand you back a stack of copies. Then you go out and distribute them. The print shop doesn't care what your pamphlet says and I think is free from much moral obligation to care.
Now consider a different print shop. You drop off your pamphlet and give them some money. Lots of other people do. Then the print shop itself decides how many copies to make for each pamphlet. Then it also decides itself which street corners to leave which pamphlets on. That sounds an awful lot to me like they have a lot of responsibility over the content of those pamphlets.
The latter is much closer to how most social media apps behave today.
but does gab use "algorithms and ML" to determine what gets shown? Doesn't it use a upvote/downvote model like hn or reddit? Is a site that uses a "order by upvotes" ranking system closer to the first print shop or the second? What about bulletin boards that ranks by last post?
> Doesn't it use a upvote/downvote model like hn or reddit?
Is that really any different? If your print shop counts the user-submitted tallies on a chalkboard to decide which pamphlets to print, the print shop is still choosing to use that rule to decide what to print.
Because then you can't make any sort of public facing site with UGC without being burdened with the responsibility of what's being posted. Come to think of it, the distinction is entirely arbitrary. Run a bulletin board that sorts by last reply? You are responsible for the user content. Run a mailing list that forwards every message to the end user, and the end-user implements the same sort by default? You're off the hook, even though the end result is the same.
> Because then you can't make any sort of public facing site with UGC without being burdened with the responsibility of what's being posted.
Now you've got it.
> Run a bulletin board that sorts by last reply?
There is maybe an argument that your level of responsibility somewhat depends on the complexity of the algorithm you use to decide how much amplification to apply to any given piece of content.
I don't think responsibility is black and white.
> Run a mailing list that forwards every message to the end user, and the end-user implements the same sort by default? You're off the hook, even though the end result is the same.
The end result is the same but the agency is not. The end-user chose to apply that sorting, so they have accepted some of the responsibility for what they consume.
If I shoot someone with a gun, I'm totally responsible. If I give you the gun and you shoot them, you are responsible. Maybe I still bear some responsibility for giving you the gun. But you certainly have taken on more responsibility than you would have if I shot them.
Here's maybe another way to think about it. If you're choosing to run a bulletin board, presumably you're doing so to get something out of it for yourself. Is it fair for you to receive that benefit while taking no responsibility for anything that happens on it?
Is that a net benefit for society? The last thing I want is for google (or other tech giants) to be even more trigger-happy about banning people because they view you as a high risk user. "decentralizing the web" isn't a good excuse, as most people don't have to know how to set up their own hosting, and only shifts the liability from the host to the search engine (because you have to find the content somehow).
>The end-user chose to apply that sorting, so they have accepted some of the responsibility for what they consume.
Don't we already have that? On reddit you can sort by "hot", "new", "rising", "controversial", and "top". On gab you can sort by "hot" and "top". I'm not sure how that would change things, other than forcing yet another modal that users have to click through.
>If you're choosing to run a bulletin board, presumably you're doing so to get something out of it for yourself. Is it fair for you to receive that benefit while taking no responsibility for anything that happens on it?
Not every website has to be a for-profit venture. Many (small) forums run essentially on donations, or are low maintenance side projects attached to a bigger project.
By having more than a middle school understanding of what "free speech" is about. There is no "original idea" of free speech, there never has been, it is a concept that is used to refer to a wide variety of legal frameworks across different times and places. In Germany a person's free speech rights do not include holocaust denial. For most of the history of the United States free speech has been more limited than it is today; it was not all that long ago that we had the "equal time" rule that required media outlets to host both liberal and conservative commentary. You generally do not have a right to organize an insurrection against any government and whining about free speech will not convince anyone otherwise.
>it was not all that long ago that we had the "equal time" rule that required media outlets to host both liberal and conservative commentary
That only ever applied to broadcast media (and maybe only to prime-time TV). Publishers of the written word have never been required by the US government to grant equal time.
>For most of the history of the United States free speech has been more limited than it is today
I don't know what you could mean by that unless you are referring to the fact that before the internet became mainstream, you had to own a printing press or something like that to reach a mass audience.
A century ago in the United States the phrase "shouting fire in a crowded theater" was used in a Supreme Court ruling upholding the censorship of anti-draft activists during World War I, and within living memory the United States had various laws censoring pornographic photos and videos. There was even a time when it was illegal to have the Post Office carry written information about contraception:
In case anyone tries to claim that the founders intended for the most expansive possible understanding of freedom of speech, the fact is that one of the earliest laws passed in the United States was a law that censored criticisms of the Federal government (in an attempt to crack down on foreign misinformation campaigns):
>In case anyone tries to claim that the founders intended for the most expansive possible understanding of freedom of speech, the fact is that one of the earliest laws passed in the United States was a law that censored criticisms of the Federal government (in an attempt to crack down on foreign misinformation campaigns):
I'm not sure whether that proves your point. The wikipedia article says that it was controversial, caused the federalist party to lose the following election, and ultimately expired after 4 years.
The fact that the law was passed by the same men who ratified the constitution says a lot about their concept of freedom of speech, even if it was controversial and short lived. If the founders really meant for free speech to be as expansive as it is today it is hard to see how such a law could have been passed in the first place.
>The fact that the law was passed by the same men who ratified the constitution says a lot about their concept of freedom of speech
You can also argue that it was defeated by the same men who ratified the constitution, and that the "free speech" side ultimately prevailed, therefore they really did mean free speech to be that expansive.
OK, but the topic is hate speech in particular, and there has never been a time when hate speech modulo calls to violent action (and possibly calls on landlords or employers to discriminate) has been unlawful in the US.
>Hate speech in the United States is not regulated due to the robust right to free speech found in the American Constitution. The U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that hate speech is legally protected free speech under the First Amendment. The most recent Supreme Court case on the issue was in 2017, when the justices unanimously reaffirmed that there is effectively no "hate speech" exception to the free speech rights protected by the First Amendment.
Hate speech in the United States is not regulated by any government. Google is considered by the courts to be non-governmental, so the courts will not prevent Google from regulating hate speech on the platforms it owns as Google sees fit.
I'm not deeply versed in Gab's history... But lets hypothetically say that Gab was not created for that purpose, but for precisely the purpose it claims it was created for:
To be an open platform for free speech, no censorship.
Wouldn't it have ended up in the exact same state it is now? Any service that guarantees no censorship is going to have the majority of its userbase be the runoff from other major websites. When voat was created, I 100% believed that they were not attempting to create extremist havens, but their userbase was all the people expelled from reddit for targeted harassment campaigns.
I hate this dynamic. We need a way to break this cycle, because right now it's actively killing competitors to existing social networks.
If they didn't intend it, they were being incredibly naive. If your defining characteristic is that you don't censor things that are banned on Reddit, then your site is only attractive to people who want to do things banned on Reddit.
I agree with your point - it is hard to tell the difference generally, and it is an important point to remember, but the behaviour of the company itself shows that it is not an issue this time.
This is a useless hypothetical. We know what Gab was and why it was taken down.
If you want to know how a healthy alternative would have turned out, go looking for one. It almost certainly exists, there have been at least a dozen twitter competitors in the past and I know a few people who tried them out. (I can't remember their names, though.)
Gab bans people openly and credulously discussing marxism. I have experimented with and experienced this directly. So, it fails my litmus test for "an uncensored platform."
And it's a bit comical, because Gab as a community experience is much smaller (in my perspective) from even weird sites like minds or funky social blockchain plays. Why they felt the need to ban discusions of marxism or a general strike is beyond me.
Fair. By my own admission, I don't know much about gab.
I think the first time I ever heard about it was when Firefox banned Dissenter from their addons. Dissenter to me was a genius idea that has an ugly userbase. I'd love to have a version of Dissenter that isn't populated entirely by bigots.
I think the idea of Dissenter really has some value, you walk along the web for all sorts of reasons, and then up in the corner in your toolbar you see "oh, someone from my community has said something about this". Rather than the social network taking you to a site, the site takes you to the network.
That by itself implies that every URL you visit has to be looked up to see if there's a related discussion.
No way I'd trust any add-on/startup/mega corp to do that. I barely trust Mozilla to keep my history on their servers, and that's only because they only keep the last few months and purge older data.
Because you'd still know everyone who went to a specific site because they'd be sending you unique hash. Even if you ignore that, you'd know what clusters of people all use the same sites, how often and when.
That was the intent of the bloom filter. Configured properly it would actively filter out the need to endlessly send the server requests like "Hey, have anything for this hash?"
However I suppose that if the site does have comments, then you do have to make requests to the server to get them...
Still, I believe you're being overly pessimistic here. I think there may be some solutions to this. Maybe not perfect, but better. Lets say our social network "Ascenter" has become corrupt and is looking blackmail its participants. What about this?:
The design currently requires you to send a sha(URL+salt) to the server to look up comments. This prevents Ascenter from directly knowing what site the comments refer to, but the comments themselves will be a big clue. What if to look at the comments you have to decrypt them using sha(URL+salt2)? Ascenter will have no means to derive this key, it will only be able to determine how many comments have being placed and how large they are. That improves things a bit...
But Ascenter might be able to crawl the web to discover conversations. Particularly for salacious sites if it's looking for blackmail. So... What if the salts are the answer to that? If you had your own set of salts you could use them to create your own private groups, Ascenter would have no way to access that conversation. Or even figure out that they have occurred.
With the presence of public and private salts, what if the browser plugin itself could be configured with a blacklist of sites not to send requests for? You could still have private channel comments, but not public. I could see the community per-generating a black list...
One last note I'd end on here is that the level of trust we are expecting right now is a huge bar lower than the level of trust we give general social networks
Consider what HackerNews could do if it went rogue like like Ascenter? To blackmail you all they would need to do is go to one of your old comments, rewrite it as something salacious, then blackmail you with it. Comments on HackerNews arn't signed, and arn't encrypted. We're quite vulnerable to them.
edit: sorry for the long post. This was a bit of a stream of consciousness.
TL;DR: The bloom filter limits the risk, and I think there are cryptographic solutions that reduce the level of user exposure to below that of current social networks.
The bloom filter wouldn't stop you from confirming folks gathered around any specific page that has content, and would have a fixed probability of leaking data even if there was no data there.
And that ignores the problem that you're not going to be able to sync the bloom filter in real time, so now you're going to need to have a very merge-friendly design for these annotations.
No, I'm not being pessimistic. This is just a candid analysis of the difficulties of doing this competently. If you'd like to do it incompetently, feel free.
> Gab bans people openly and credulously discussing marxism. I have experimented with and experienced this directly.
I find that extremely hard to believe.
It is also inaccurate, because Gab lets you connect to any community. What you're saying they banned you from theirs.
As for being in favor of a ban on Gab's own app (other comments): any app can acess Gab's instance, and Gab's own app lets users access any instance including Gab's own so a ban on Gab's app doesn't work, you annoying busybodies.
Likely because the intended audience is not people who see it as a viable alternative or something worth even entertaining. The irony of the situation being someone took the time to make their own platform for like minded individuals, and people in other spaces who've been known to tow the "you're free to make your own platform" line get extraordinarily bent out of sort when people actusally go and do just that.
The hilarious part being that by having the censorship in the first place and not just letting folks work it out amongst themselves, you just increase the echo chamber factor, which at some point, you have to come to terms with in real life on the basis these people exist in the real world. The very act of technically enforced societal marginalization in and of itself is an "extremism" amplifier/polarization catalyst. What confuses me is why I feel like I'm the only one who regularly brings it up. It's not that hard of a realization to reach From first principles. Especially if you spent any time in your life as a social misfit.
Well, you don't see me make fun of Parler as much because they're honest about their intentions. Gab originally claimed they were about "freedom" so it seems pretty fair to me to call them out on moderation that is clearly political.
Yes, any large no-censorship platform for humans will be swamped by Nazis.
You could avoid being large — small, high-trust groups work perfectly fine without censorship.
You could add more moderation (aka censorship), both platform-wide and within communities. Reddit seems to be heading in that direction.
You could avoid being a platform. Some sites are inherently platforms, but does every site need comments?
Or you could genetically engineer humanity into a kinder, better species. This would also be the way to make anarcho-communism work — the economic system with the greatest freedoms, but also the most susceptible to bad actors. The Culture series shows you a glimpse of what this future could be.
I've got to finish going through The Culture series. I thought it was bold stroke to write a book series about a future where humans are domesticated by their own AI.
I think the "fully automated gay space luxury communism" depicted in the Culture series is the best future we can hope for. I wouldn't mind welcoming new robot overlords if it makes that possible.
Maybe that's a sign you should pause. Sometimes it is okay to admit you don't know about a subject. It is okay to sit and listen instead of voicing an opinion.
Well... I mean really I was not trying to say Gab was innocent. I really didn't know until others provided some helpful context. I was speaking more to the original topic of this HN submission.
I never know how to handle topic shifts in the conversation trees in Reddit, Hacker News, and others.
Do you speak only to the comment you're responding to? Do you speak as if that comment is in the context of the submission? Do you keep the context as on topic as possible? Do you indicate which one of the three you're doing when you start your comment off? I feel like this is an internet rule I have not sussed out on my own. And I can see its caused some trouble for others. Sorry.
"Any service that guarantees no censorship is going to have the majority of its userbase be the runoff from other major websites"
Exactly, which is why you are wrong here:
"When voat was created, I 100% believed that they were not attempting to create extremist havens"
It is not as if the major websites are quick to censor their users. If anything they are too cautious and have only banned terrorists after widespread pressure and threats of advertiser boycotts. If you set up a platform that is open to the few people who were so extreme that even Reddit or Twitter banned them, then you are creating an extremist haven, no matter what language you use to describe your intentions.
One could argue that intentions don't really matter, ether. "The Purpose Of A System Is What It Does" [1]. If your system ends up being a forum for a certain type of posts, then that's kind of what it is, regardless of what you originally wanted it to be.
>To be an open platform for free speech, no censorship.
Unfortunately this kind of rhetoric is frequently coded language meaning "Hey Nazis, we won't kick you off of our platform for threatening to shoot up a synagogue". I think people should still legally be able to create unmoderated platforms, but the majority of people won't participate in them because they quickly become cesspools of hatred and harassment. Gab is the newer, shinier tech startup version of this, but it's existed before in the forms of 4chan, 8chan, and probably other platforms that I'm not familiar with.
From my perspective we still need other information, do they also ban other apps that are purpose-built for hate speech? Was it just this app because of the controversy over banned Twitter users going to it?
That article was written with such blatantly bad faith language it had the opposite of the intended effect and made me start distrusting whatever Gab is (I had no idea before this thread)
> F-Droid won’t tolerate oppression or harassment against marginalized groups. Because of this, it won’t package nor distribute apps that promote any of these things
If this accurately describes Gab, I don't have sympathy for Yet Another Racist Community pretending that they're defending freeze peach.
Gab is a platform, ergo the judgement is about what the users publish on that platform. It's the exact same point Google seems to be making: that platform hosts content we wouldn't host, ergo the app must not be on our app store.
I'd be more worried that they apparently do tolerate harassment and oppression against non-marginalized groups. That's a pretty whopping double standard!
Even if an app is banned from the play store, the developer can distribute it through f-droid.
Even if an app is banned from the F-droid main repository, its developers can distribute it through their own F-droid repository
Even if the app is banned from their own f-droid repository, the dev can distribute his source code and users can build the app with Android Studio.
Even if Google bans your Android Studio account, you can use another compiler.
Even if the internet bans you, you can mail the code via a handwritten letter to your users, who will copy the code line by line and build it using their own compiler.
Alternative repositories are a first-class feature of F-Droid. Alternative app stores aren't really a first class feature of Android (though they are obviously possible, in contrast to iOS)
> bans your Android Studio account
Don't give them ideas. (there's thankfully no such thing as an Android Studio account)
> there's thankfully no such thing as an Android Studio account
I meant Google Account. Isn't a google account necessary for anything on developer.android.com? Sorry if I am wrong. Any url on that domain used to redirect me to a Google Login page.
A google account is not required for using the android SDK.
You have to agree with the TOS if you download the prebuilt SDK from google, yes. Building the SDK from source is unfortunately quite hard but Debian has made some progress with this.
Anyone who wants to, including the gab maintainers, can create an Fdroid repository containing any apps they want it to, including gab, with or without the permission of the app maintainers. I run a few Fdroid repositories myself for apps that aren't on the play store or in the main Fdroid repository. The Fdroid server tool is open source. You can host your repository on GitHub or gitlab, and update it using their ci/actions/etc. It doesn't require much technical knowledge.
pip3 install --user fdroidserver # or install with package manager.
fdroid init # first run only. Now edit URLs and descriptions in config.py
cd fdroid/repo
wget gab-latest.apk
cd ..
fdroid update # on first run, add --create-metadata and then edit the files in the metadata folder and run update again.
git add repo archive
git commit -m update
If the gab devs were somewhat competent they'd create their own F-droid repo and distribute their app through that - F-droid allows this, and cannot stop this.
This will work for the people reading this here or who would otherwise already do this. I think decentralization is something we should aspire to promote more broadly than within the community using alternative app repositories.
Hopefully it will. Although, Google engages in anticompetitive behavior by hindering 3rd party apps' abilities to autoupgrade, install in the background or batch install apps.
Those intentional limitations mean that F-Droid will never have feature parity with the Play Store.
Hopefully Epic Games with their antitrust lawsuits against Google and Apple will succeed and we'll see some positive changes.
For now, the best everyone can do is to promote F-Droid. Many users never heard about YouTube without ads, so getting NewPipe might be a good motivation to try F-Droid.
There were some people who were pushing for the mentioned apps to be removed from fdroid but at the end the fdroid maintainers decided to not remove them.
The rationale they gave is that hate speech appears on these apps, because some of the microblogging sites that can be accessed via Fediverse have this kind of content. Based on this rationale, I look forward to Google Play removing Chrome, Firefox, and all other web browsers from the store as well.
Well, we asked for this. We demanded Twitter and FB censor their content, we applauded Cloudflare* for deplatforming websites. Now those monopolies can use the precedent to control more of the web.
Well, we didn't. Did we say that apps that give ubiquitous access to generally positive content should be removed? No, not really. Did we say that apps that contain user content should consider a bit what behaviour they enable and promote? Yes, and they have done so for a long while, remember, there's illegal content other than what people would call "hate speech".
Asking a platform to moderate the content on its website isn't the same as asking an app distributor to ban apps which could conceivably be used to communicate objectionable ideas. Those are completely different.
The only way they can define and enforce "hate speech" policies is by torturing the language, the definitions, and hoping no one looks closely at the resulting policies.
In the US, beyond explicit calls for illegal behavior (usually illegal) and kiddie porn (always illegal), we don't have many restrictions or even a legal definition of "hate speech." But even those laws aren't consistently applied. For the most part, it's up to the judgement of the viewer or based on the "reasonable person" rule and "reasonable people" seem to be getting rarer and rarer..
>>The rationale [Google] gave is that hate speech appears on these apps
>The only way they can define and enforce "hate speech" policies is by torturing the language, the definitions, and hoping no one looks closely at the resulting policies
The rest of your comment is about the first amendment to the US constitution, which constrains governments (US Federal and state governments), not private parties such as Google.
Google would be well within its rights in the US to ban all hate speech from all the platforms it owns.
Similar things happened to some android reddit clients a few years ago and it was resolved by removing certain subreddits from menu of pre-filled subreddits. So maybe these apps just need to remove any problematic pre-filled servers.
This is not the case. Don't assume goodwill from Google.
> The rationale they gave is that hate speech appears on these apps,
So does in countless app on the store, and not in the third party content, but app themselves pretty much, and Google don't touch it.
A much more rational assumption is that Google sees the Fediverse as something that can come to steal their cattle (eyeballs,) and they have a plan to subplant it.
You will very soon see them turning even more picky, and eventually remove even censored fediverse apps.
They are repeating the trick they did with uBlock. First, they say do a purge, with an option for the most resistant to "play along," and a few month later, they pull the rug again. This way, they evade an immediate backlash.
> The rationale they gave is that hate speech appears on these apps, because some of the microblogging sites that can be accessed via Fediverse have this kind of content.
Do the apps connect by default to a server that allows hate speech? If that's the case, is this an instance of bad defaults? Maybe the apps could work around this by just connecting to a server that's moderated to be acceptable to Google, but leave it configurable.
> No. You need to explicitly connect in most fediverse apps. They're like browsers
It's pretty egregious to ban an app like that.
Still, I wonder if an innocuous default server (or set of them) might smooth things over with Google. That would increase the friction of accessing the content they don't like.
Android's also relatively open, so if they only have issues with specific servers, maybe the app could just drop a text-file blocklist on the filesystem that a user could tecnically edit to change it (but just not via the app).
My favorite app is Tusky and is still available from F-Droid [0]. I think Tusky will be fine since they block Gab and so they won't be affected by this ban.
As much as I hate Gab, I hate the possible extension of "unwanted content" especially considering Google's possible interests in China. I would not be surprised if next up to be removed are apps that allow access to instances that discuss the Uighurs or 天安门大屠杀 freely.
Been looking for a good client. Can you disable the block on Gab? I know the place is a cesspool, but I don't like the idea of missing content because an app developer doesn't like an instance.
The worst thing of censorship is they always can find some new targets after they have censored their old targets. They do it one by one Until you find out every word you said is illegal, it is too late.
Shouldn't this policy apply to all communication apps? Web, IRC, SMS, and even phone calls can connect you with a hate speech provider if you know the right address to dial.
This sets a dangerous precedent and highlights why we should continue removing Google/etc as dependencies in our lives.
This happens all the time--recently, a podcast app was removed from the Play Store because it could be used to listen to content which didn't meet Play Store guidelines. The only way to fix it is to post about it and generate enough outrage that Google hears about it and can undo the ban.
When you say that's the only way to fix it, you are literally correct. There is no real ticket or support mechanism, no appeals process, nothing. The fastest way to raise an issue with Google is to email a journalist or hitup your twitter followers.
Apps being rejected was a talking point for the anti-trust investigations for Apple. I don't think Google is quite so famous for its rejections but they were part of that investigation for other abuse, hopefully any changes that come about will apply to them too.
Perhaps the FTC should have an office dedicated to overseeing policy enforcement for the largest store platforms. There could be a mechanism for saying "hi, I was banned by store X under policy Y but I believe my app was unfairly targeted because Z circumstance and Q other apps should all be treated equally here, including the first party app they're trying to protect..."
A better fix is barring by law tech companies that control important platforms from using those platforms to censor legal speech. It simply should be illegal for Google to down an app because it contains legal words that blaspheme against Google's California values.
The thing that isn't being mentioned is that Google allow apps that make "reasonable" attempts to block content that violates their anti-hate speech policy. Reddit has shown that they're willing to ban the very worst content. No idea about 4chan.
In the case of the Fediverse apps they can't block anything because firstly there's no resources to police it, and secondly it's kind of the whole point of federation to let the user see what they want without getting in the way.
It has been a while since I went to 4chan, but for /b/, besides very few exceptions like child porn, the rule was "no rules, it also applies to mods".
So they can allow the worst kind of hate speech, porn and gore, but ban a harmless meme because mods find it annoying. So the only rationale from banning images from "Cuties" may be "because mods don't like it".
I always found the "normalizing" argument to be odd. Society has never been more against pedophilia and the likelihood of it becoming "legal" or "normal" is so low as to be laughable. I don't feel threatened by fringe groups with no power, only by censors willing to exploit these feelings for their own gain.
It has never been normal and the idea it could ever be is a delusion. It is a tactic to censor content moral guardians don't like. Look at the bar of perceived "pedophilia" which keeps rising every year.
Big 4chan apps like Clover got banned off the play store long ago. The reason given was nsfw content, but in the app you had to manually add nsfw boards, much like Reddit's nsfw communities. Picking and choosing which social media platforms to ban has already been a thing.
I used to use chanu years ago, and I vaguely remember it installing with no imageboards registered to it. You had to go into the settings and tell it which imageboards you wanted it to access.
8 years ago "Reddit Is Fun" was removed from the Play Store because it included "sexually explicit" material and it was related to the inclusion of NSFW and hate subreddits in the app's default subreddit list. Google was fine with people adding that stuff on their own, they just didn't want the app to be promoting or pushing it. The app was adjusted and updated and it was reinstated.
yes. husky in particular is a fork of another app called tusky, that internally implemented a login blacklist of explicitly-nazi instances and instances with lolicon content, after the author decided they didn't want those users running their software. husky's explicit sole purpose is to be tusky without that blacklist. tusky has not been removed from the play store.
i'm not familiar with the other apps on the list but i expect it might be some issue like promoting such instances in their registration screen.
also interestingly, the instance OP links to qoto.org is known within the fediverse for being full of creepers, because they've implemented a partial defederation and block circumvention. if you have an account on qoto.org, you can follow users who've blocked you, on instances that have blocked you, because it will recognize such, pull a list of posts via RSS instead of via activitypub, and fake an activitypub actor internally to generate posts for your feed. in their defense they have said that the posts are public anyway, and the user could just browse the public feed with a web browser, but it's clearly a bit different when posts from a person who has tried to block you appear in your feed normally as an item you can interact with. it's certainly against the spirit of consent.
Does anyone know the US case law on the 1st amendment being applied to corporate actors?
I see the argument often that things like this are a free speech violation but the 1st amendment says “Congress shall pass no law...”. It doesn’t apply to actors other than the state.
I’m not defending Google’s actions here but I also don’t think it’s technically a free speech violation at least as the amendment is written, so I’m wondering if there are any cases addressing this sort of censorship w.r.t. the 1sr amendment.
There's the first amendment and there's the concept of free speech. This absolutely violates free speech but does not violate the first amendment.
The only current framework to protect freedom of speech from private companies is to designate them as common carriers, e.g. phone companies legally cannot police what is said over their wires.
I don't think it's necessarily anti-free-speech. The idea of free speech is that everyone should be able to express their opinions without being prosecuted for it, not that everyone is entitled to a platform for those opinions. You should be able to write an article about absolutely anything, but you're not entitled to put it in my newspaper.
I of course agree that the mastodon ban is a bad move because it sets a double standard where browsers can access arbitrary web content but other apps can't, and because it grossly limits the things that the average user can do with their device. However, these are consumer rights issues, not free speech issues.
I think what a lot commenters are saying is that within their conception of the bigger idea of free speech they do consider themselves entitled to have their thoughts distributed by established platforms. Or put more mildly, platforms like Google ought not ban people for their content because it's the right thing to do. But I don't see many people advocating for government intervention, not with specifics anyway.
I think that's kind of a strange take. Like, if you are entitled to put an article in my newspaper no matter what the article says, doesn't that unduly restrict my speech by forcing me to endorse your ideas by using my platform to distribute them?
If Google doesn't want to distribute your ideas, I think it's odd to say that that's wrong of them. I do think that it's a problem that they get to act as a gatekeeper like that in the first place. I think the solution is to break up larger platforms and create a diverse ecosystem of smaller options, not to forbid platforms from ever moderating their content.
The rationale they gave is that hate speech appears on these apps, because some of the microblogging sites that can be accessed via Fediverse have this kind of content. Based on this rationale, I look forward to Google Play removing Chrome, Firefox, and all other web browsers from the store as well.
There is a specific exception to web browsers, so Mastodon app(s) could probably classify as one by prominently displaying the web url of a post above the post.
That was a mistake, presumably. It's likely this is too. The deep desire on the part of posters here to assume malice and scream CENSORSHIP is really off-putting.
I actually don't know anything about fediverse, but if it's like other pseudoanonymous obscure communications media it's probably filled with awful stuff. It's not that hard to imagine a naive reviewer who doesn't understand the architecture to be confused if they get a report showing screenshots of the app with the content available in it.
Honestly it's somewhat telling that Automation for app review can get messy fast and that Google should invest in Apple's approach to app review (but I also agree that the poster is extrapolating the app denial into something much more than what it is)
It's not a desire to scream about sensorship. It's more about how the rules are arbitrarily enforced. And how every app's fate is in the hand of two big players, so you're sol if they ban you. Even if the ban is a mistake, good luck getting it reversed unless you're going viral.
The only reason Podcast Addict has been restored (multiple times) is that it's high-profile, and the owner raised enough stink to cause widespread (enough) outrage about this. Otherwise, whether through malice or incompetence, it would be gone forever.
>The only reason Podcast Addict has been restored (multiple times) is that it's high-profile, and the owner raised enough stink to cause widespread (enough) outrage about this. Otherwise, whether through malice or incompetence, it would be gone forever.
This is my concern. These apps are not content hosts, they are akin to Web browsers or RSS readers, but they are small, one-person endeavours that don't have the clout to get Google to notice the difference between the content providers (the individual Mastodon servers) and the ActivityPub client app that these apps represent.
I know one of the devs is thinking to not push the issue as he's worried about his other apps on the same developer account.
The discussion has veered off into censorship issues, but this is a simple 230-ish problem, these apps are not the Mastodon servers that (presumably) some people have had issues with. They are agnostic client readers of the ActivityPub statuses.
There is no way, nor any legal requirement, for a browser like these apps to be held responsible for the million possible bits of content it could consume.
The fediverse is very split, you have some servers that are run by people who post straight up Nazi symbolism on their admin accounts, and you have some servers that have admins who will happily participate in piling on someone for appearing Insufficiently Woke. I block both kinds on my server because I just want a nice quiet place to talk with my friends, and that's a definite segment of the Fediverse too.
This much is key to observe: this isn't a partisan maneuver by Google, as much as people may want to slot it into that. It smells much more like a control maneuver: a perceived competitor.
To the big tech cartel, period. Don't think for one second that Google, Apple, Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft, Adobe, and their friends aren't having one big handshake party over this kind of crap.
Really? It's not okay to say it's censorship when it is? I'll admit I'm wrong iff the apps are reinstated without having to impose additional restrictions.
Exactly. This is Google drawing the line on where this "hate speech" is from and they believe that such "content" can be accessed via the Fediverse.
To see how ridiculous this sounds, Google might as well completely take down the entire social media and internet browsing category on the Play Store since I keep seeing the same content from both extremes on all these platforms.
Just wait until you tell them to take down their own browser since you can find this "content" with a simple search. They will soon realise that "drawing the line on hate speech" is more tougher than solving leetcode CS questions.
I get what you're saying, but I don't think this is because Google cares about hate speech. Google is simply using hate speech as an excuse to get rid of apps that it doesn't like. Deciding which apps you like and which you don't isn't that hard of a line to draw.
Not allowing a parties political ads would be clear favoritism in a political situation. You might not like Trump, but it's quite the jump to say republican ads are "hate speech." .. in fact that's quite literally weaponizing the word "hate speech" to censor political opinions you don't like.
Which is the whole point of hate speech laws. Can't market censorship of one party, but who could ever oppose censoring hate... then redefine hate to be anything you'd like censored, and ... that's what we have now.
Any time anyone complains about censorship, roll out the excuse of holocaust denial, regardless whats actually being censored.
Yes it's why freedom of speech is a thing. Ideas are meant to compete and the power to decide which ideas are acceptable is an absolute power that completely corrupts a society.
> it's quite the jump to say republican ads are "hate speech."
It is not a jump when they have used Nazi symbols in their campaign ads, promoted antisemitic conspiracy theories in their campaign ads, made transparently racist statements about their opponents, etc. It is not that "hate speech" is being weaponized to censor political position (the Republican party is not even promoting a specific policy agency in this election cycle), but rather that the term "censorship" is being weaponized to legitimize the extremist ideologies of domestic terrorist groups (classified as such by the FBI).
To put it another way, if one of your coworkers was carrying on about how wealthy Jews were conspiring to spread civil unrest as part of a broad plot to destroy the United States, you would call it "hate speech" and you would be right to report them to HR. Yet that is just one of the many extremist conspiracy theories the Republican party has promoted in this election cycle, which follows the previous two cycles that featured similar antisemitism and other expressions of racism. Some Republican politicians have publicly stated that George Floyd was killed in order to start a race war in America, which only a few years ago is a statement that you would have only found on a website like "the daily stormer." The current Republican president has endorsed a candidate who said Muslims marry their siblings, and another candidate who said Muslims are a cancer on humanity and should be forbidden from holding office. None of that is "political opinion," it is extremist ideology that is on par with the kind of things that ISIS claimed about the Yazidis.
Trump just negotiated a peace deal between Israel and UAE and the tired old Nazi trope is still being paraded out.
Trump's son in law is Jewish.
Your ignorance is astounding, but not surprising given the level of propaganda that's out there today.
Conservatives are regularly attacked, marginalized, deplatformed, intimidated, shot at, and baselessly called all sorts of things when they pretty much just stand for family, God, and loyalty to the country and ideals of individual freedom. There are over 100 million Americans that identify as conservative and you are spewing hate speech about them right now. You've flattened an extremely large diverse group of individuals into your caricature viewpoint. I recommend you apply some empathy and go and try to learn from them. Ask them why they think the way they do. It might surprise you.
> Trump just negotiated a peace deal between Israel and UAE
There are lots of Christians who favor Israel but ultimately hold anti-Jewish opinions. This is weird, yes, but support of Israel should not be mistaken for support of Jews (the reverse is also, but only incidentally) true.
> Trump's son in law is Jewish.
So were Emil Maurice and Erhard Milch, at least according to German law. Didn't stop Hitler and Goering from making exceptions for them.
I have quite a few conservative friends. Most of them don't support Trump, because Trump isn't a conservative. He doesn't stand for God or individual freedom, nor does he stand for loyalty to the country. Don't conflate conservatives and Trump supporters. They're not the same thing, and trying to present a bait and switch between classical conservatism and Trumpism is a bad faith argument. This is why you see so many conservative politicians that are no longer in office supporting Biden over Trump. Because Trump doesn't extoll conservative values. Instead he represents a populist and proto-fascist wing with more than a couple white supremacist tendencies.
I travel all over the country. And I'm from a highly conservative area in Florida. Trump has 95% support in the Republican party. He's got tremendous support and enthusiasm.
Trump isn't racist at all. He was friends with Michael Jackson, Jesse Jackson, Whitney Houston, etc. He actively tried to help Whitney from overdosing (https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/mike-love-to-t...). He calls as many victim's family members as he can, regardless of race. He calls every fallen soldier's family, regardless of their race or creed. He just pardoned a black woman who was put away for a non violent drug crime in the 90s. He signed criminal justice reform established opportunity zones in poor neighborhoods to encourage business investment. He supports school choice to help poor communities who are stuck with broken schools. He's got 11 members of his cabinet who are Jewish (Mnuchin, Friedman, etc).
I said pretty much to underscore I was generalizing and that there are many nuances there. But that is how conservatives self identify. You will find that in their music and their art and their culture in general. I'm not inventing hateful terms to turn you against them as OP was.
Google is politically very very left. I'm guessing that someone at Google may have browsed these apps, decided they didn't like what they saw, and pressured to have the apps banned. Obviously they can't do that to large players like Facebook, but small apps, they can easily crush, and nobody's going to do anything about it.
Image if Google decided to just block certain websites on Chrome, or if big tech got domain registrars to drop 4chan, or whatever humor websites they don't find amusing.
The fascinating part of this is that Google has officially claimed the mantle of arbiter of what is allowed on the internet ( they are not exactly a gate keeper yet, but given how people have trouble accessing information outside FB, Apple, Google gardens, they are well on their way ).
edit: Trouble in a sense that it is inconvenient for them.
No, and there are laws and tomes of case law that reinforce that no matter how much curation they do, an interactive computer service will not be held liable for user generated content.
> Just wait until you tell them to take down their own browser
Well, they're taking the address bar away, bit by bit; they have SafeSearch; and they have AMP. It's a very slow erosion, but there will come a point at which going outside of the list of officially acceptable sites will become more difficult - first with mandatory warnings, then maybe with mandatory reporting to law enforcement or whomever, and eventually not at all.
Yes, it sounds like a "slippery slope" argument, but we're a few steps down the slope now, and any argument that encourages us to climb back up has to point out where things may go if we don't resist.
It sucks that this requires us to defend the rights of people to speak whom we may intensely disagree with, but that's the crux of the matter. Either we become mature enough to understand that people will have discourse we dislike, and avoid it or engage with it as we see fit, or we continue to hide behind authority figures who will purport to keep us safe by controlling what we can say and think.
one of the problems we have in Tech (as an industry and on social media) is to allow individuals who make poor and bad decisions to hide behind the collective of a company/organization. And we continue applauding them for their great work they do in areas that are removed from the political. But these days innovation acts as a shield where we let the innovators get away and reap praise as individuals (the inventors of golang, the teams who standardized QUIC, the guys doing netflix propaganda about their simian-devops-army, facebooks React, Amazon's DSSTNE...) all of them have engineers who wear these things like a badge and are proud to give talks. Yet when they are responsible for projects that violate human rights, remove the Taiwanese flags from their app, or censor speech as in this case then we're never talking about people but it's always the opaqueness of the firm that hides these abuses.
We need a list of these lizards so we know when to throw tomatoes and rotten eggs at them whenever they give a talk or share feel-good posts on LinkedIn.
people should be ashamed instead of proud when they write "disclaimer I work at X"
The tech industry is a place where people generally prefer to talk things out rather than yelling and shaming. I think that's worth protecting, even if we see short term gains that might be available from defection. After all, once Google realizes the norms have changed, won't they be able to leverage their resources to find people who yell louder and shame more frequently than you?
The old days were never as controversy-free as most people remember. There was a time not that long ago when common techie opinions like "Internet piracy isn't a big deal" or "shooter games are fun and kid-friendly" were seen as quite immoral in some circles, and calling your forum "Hacker News" was kinda subversive. If we're headed back to that kind of environment, just with a different set of moral issues enforced by a different set of people, that seems solidly OK.
When the hell has that /not/ been the case in society? Institutions have always been shields and your dehumanization and desire for shaming ironically shows exactly why they serve that function - they don't want to be subject to the whims of random mobs who aren't a part of them.
Guess they should ban Chrome, since hate speech appears on the web. All these Fediverse things can be accessed via web apps and progressive web apps (PWAs) too.
This sort of decision by Google does make me rather uncomfortable (the entire situation is uncomfortable... https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/12/20691957/mastodon-decentr...). But it's worth understanding why the situation may be a bit more complicated than is described above. What seems to be happening is not an absolute ban on Fediverse apps, but a ban on specific implementations that make it easy to join specific communities which encourage hatred and real-world violence. Other implementations block these instances, and I believe are not banned.
Whether or not this is a good thing is a complex question. If you happen to be the target of this hatred and violence, and feel it is an existential threat to your livelihood, you might believe that it is a good thing to make it more difficult for those who are engaging in this behavior to enlarge their communities. On the other hand, if you believe eliminating communities by platform fiat is an existential threat to your livelihood, this may seem like a very bad thing.
(You might also think it's hypocritical, since you can access most of these communities via a browser. Google also controls the browser, and does make it difficult already to access some sites https://developers.google.com/safe-browsing/v4 . However, it does seem to have a higher bar for browsers than for social apps (e.g. malware, csam, iirc); some have suggested that there are legal reasons for this, I'm curious to learn more on this, but I have not seen any substantiation yet.)
So Google somehow knows which apps block certain instances, which generally get reputation among other instances & are quickly blocked? That's not believable.
And right after that we can remove any FTP client that uses the FTP protocol to download content Google doesn't like. We should scan all apps that use a common, published protocol to make sure the protocol is not being used to consume objectionable content. /s
The app is not the service; the protocol is not the platform.
I think you might have misread my comment; I wasn't suggesting whether a course of action was correct or not, but just explaining how it could technically be feasible. I interpreted the comment I responded to as not understanding how it would be possible for Google to have done this a certain way, and I was theorizing one possible way they might have done it.
Ah, then yes, apologies -I did not mean to put words in your mouth. Technical feasibility is likely easier than imagined; most Mastodon services use the auto-generated list that appears on their "about" page - easily scraped if not available through the API - here's the list on the instance I moderate on for example:
> If you happen to be the target of this hatred and violence, and feel it is an existential threat to your livelihood, you might believe that it is a good thing to make it more difficult for those who are engaging in this behavior to enlarge their communities.
I’m indeed being threatened by various hate groups (one of them actually tried, and almost succeeded, to kill an acquaintance), but strangely enough they are never removed by Google or any other big corporations. Worst, each time I voice any slight complain about them, I am the one being censored. Some of those groups are even sometimes getting official support by the GAFAM. This is a really odd and unfair world.
I think it matters because sadly I’m at the point where I need to evaluate the death threat for whether it is reasonable to fear from it.
It’s really unfortunate when someone fears for their life and I don’t want that for anyone.
However, lots of people fear for reasons that I don’t think are actually from threats of violence.
I had a friend explain how they literally feared for their life. When trying to console them I learned that the thing that was making them afraid was a friend’s Facebook post about a restaurant that supported some Bible group. Their reasoning was that the Bible group was anti-gay, and they might end up killing them for being an ally of gay friends.
Because of this they feared for their own life and wanted the friend to stop talking about it.
Now of course, there are multiple lame things about Bible groups being jerks, but certainly nothing to make this person think their life was in danger or directly threatened.
I’m not sure how to specifically help that person, but after several episodes like this, I don’t pay much attention to them when they say that they get death threats.
Maybe I’m just jaded but lots of people talk about death threats and I’m sure they perceive them as such. But having the details of the threat helps to differentiate the really dangerous people trying to kill others from the plentitudes of people saying “DIAF” who aren’t trying to kill, just being jerks.
This isn't quite safe harbor. It's not like the app was removed for one user posting one bad content. If what the poster above said is true, it's closer to if an app had a user who regularly broke the rules, and the app refused to ban said person.
I disagree about your comparison. This app can connect to arbitrary domain names. This is getting blocked because you are not filtering the list of domains a user can connect to proactively.
That's wild & I can think of zero precedent for it.
I'm not sure what you mean by justification. I think I simply lay out some context and a set of conflicting perspectives.
That said, if you don't want Chrome and Firefox to be content aware, then you should argue that safe browsing should be eliminated from Firefox and Chrome. That is a self consistent position, but it may not be consistent with e.g. avoiding dramatic growth in botnets, ransomware, organized crime etc.
Actual safe browsing comes from content-unaware tools like NoScript. And yes, I did spend half a hour going through about:config and neutering everything related to 'Safe' Browsing(R)TM(C)LLC.
Safe browsing doesn't include sites for encouraging hatred and violence, etc. Only malware, social engineering, and "harmful"/"unwanted" applications. If they start including those sort of sites in their safe browsing lists, that would make your point here more relevant.
(Of course, some people get hit by safebrowsing unfairly. But I think in most cases, it is because someone compromised their site and used it for a malicious purpose, and then they struggle to get Google to remove it within a timeframe which is reasonable.)
When the cathedral supports real-world violence it's good. When you support real-world violence it's bad. They want you dead, but will settle for your submission.
>but a ban on specific implementations that make it easy to join specific communities which encourage hatred and real-world violence.
As you state, one can access these specific communities in a number of ways, including Google Chrome. If the community is the issue, go after the community, not an ActivityPub app that can access content from these and other communities.
Should Google also ban RSS reader apps that don't actively block RSS feeds from sites Google doesn't like?
Oh, please don't suggest banning RSS apps - Apple is already doing that, they removed Pocket Casts and Castro because they allow access to Podcasts that offend Chinese censorship, while Apple's own podcast app remains because it blocks those particular podcasts:
Free Speech Extremist. Shitposters Club. No Agenda Social. Lets all love Lain.
There are ton of instances which much of the Fediverse blocks, but if you set up your own server and follow people on those instances, it's not 80% hate speech and racism as others would have you believe. Yes there is some of that, but there's also weebs, and anime and political discussion and weird gaming discussion and videos not posted anywhere else and memes and the great diversity of through we use to have on Reddit before it became a monoculture.
There are also straight up anarchist instances that justify violence and destruction of the state like Rage Love, Anticapitalist Party, and others.
It's a very big space, with new players entering and leaving every month.
Banning apps because they do or don't have block lists greatly misunderstands how the Fediverse works.
Which i have always suspected was the real reason they killed off Google Wave in such a hurry, even thou we were told they found it useful for collaboration within Google.
It's a bit silly to emphasize specific communities if this results in a ban of the entire app or network. ~all apps and networks have some communities like that. I don't think this is a complex question at all, this is just bad.
In other words, the developers of these apps need to all run their own Fediverse nodes, _but not federate them to any others_ because otherwise users may be able to access content from nodes that Google doesn't like! Because each dev having to vet every instance out there is the only other option and that's practically impossible.
i think the reason would be that with browsers they don't control the ecosystem enough to get away with it. I actually agree with the ban if your framing is correct (not having looked into it any further), but if they did this in chrome, people would just use another browser to access these sites. you can sideload apps as well of course, but it's much more of a hassle than doing it on PC, where people are used to software distribution not being as centralized
It concerns me that the company taking down the apps also owns my entire mobile OS from browser to network stack, as well as the DNS resolver, the search engine, and the email client I use.
It wasn't that long ago when virtually everyone understood that "hatred" was completely subjective. Trying to remove all communication channels because of the potential for "hatred" means nothing but total silence.
> but a ban on specific implementations that make it easy to join specific communities which encourage hatred and real-world violence
So basically, Google only supports the Fediverse if, like itself, it engages in censorship. The Fediverse exists not to encourage hate speech, but to discourage censorship. Hate speech is the inevitable result of allowing humans to say what like they like. Some people will choose to be nasty. Many people believe the greater good is the free flow of information, and that adults are more than capable of filtering out and avoiding those information sources which make them uncomfortable. Instead, Google wants to treat everybody like children, and be the helicopter parent that swoops in and removes anything objectionable.
They do it with youtube now as well and demonitize ANYTHING with firearms in it. Doesn’t matter if you’re a hunter or trying to sell people on a new product.
All these disparate media sources that we yearned for back in the cable-only days have finally turned to dogshit.
It's pretty rich that Google claims to be removing these apps for hate speech when their own search engine returns results from sites like Kiwi Farms and Encyclopedia Dramatica on their victims so prominently.
(throwaway since the former name searches themselves to find new targets.)
You joke about that, but I wouldn’t be surprised if in 5 years (or maybe 1 year?) open browsers are banned and only “allowed” browsers are used that allow access to “allowed” websites and content.
That's needlessly confusing. Half the posts on https://www.reddit.com/r/TIHI/ are "hated speech" while being miles away from anything that would get called hate speech.
> Holy crap, google is apparently taking down all/most fediverse apps from google play on the grounds that that some servers in the fediverse engage in hate speech.
Good thing you can't find any hate speech on Play Store–promoted corporate behemoths Twitter and Facebook!
This is a bad faith argument. Twitter and Facebook do a lot to take down hate speech from their platforms (with exceptions made for "public interest" cases like high level politicians).
Some servers on the fediverse specifically allow unfettered hate speech.
No, it's bad faith to pretend that some random Fediverse server that allows unfettered hate speech has the same societal impact as the mountains of misinformation and bigotry that flourish on Twitter and Facebook, despite their half-hearted efforts to look like they're fighting it.
Have any of the Fediverse apps that were banned from the app store done anything to prevent the issues that you say Facebook and Twitter have? I'll take the simple banning of a harmful server on their app as a way to change my mind on this issue.
I'm not defending these hypothetical Fediverse apps that don't moderate. I'm saying that compared to Fediverse apps exposing a few thousand people to hate speech, Facebook and Twitter actively promoting bigotry, propaganda and conspiracy theories to tens or hundreds of millions of people is far more harmful — even if they make a nominal effort to prevent it from happening.
And, more to the point, I'm alleging that the reason Google is taking down the Fediverse apps and not Facebook or Twitter has nothing to do with their moderation policies, and everything to do with money.
They have done exactly that multiple times. For example, the app Tusky has a hardcoded list of hate-speech instances for which the login is blocked, to just give you one example.
Other than that, the instances themselves simply choose not to federate with questionable instances. This happens in an almost organic way where if an instance refuses to block federation with another questionable instance, other instances will then also refuse to federate with that instance.
The result is a network where hate-speech and undesirable content has been almost organically filtered out.
But keep in mind that the (client) apps themselves are more like web browsers. Anyone can host their own website and access its content through one of these apps. This also means that instances which are blocked by an app can very easily circumvent that as well.
(Sorry for my bad english and repeatedly using the word "instances")
I asked about the apps that were banned from the play store. Tusky is still available on play store. Maybe their hardcoded list of hate-speech instances were enough for Google to keep them on the play store?
But the authors of these apps have no influence over what servers you connect with. It doesn't feel much different from visiting a hate speech website using your web browser, and they (luckily) do not get banned either.
For the most part, yes I believe the blocking is for malware sites. The current list I am aware: malware sites, deceptive sites, suspicious sites, sites with possible harmful programs, sites that load scripts from unauthenticated sources, sites that chrome believes were typed incorrectly.
I didn't intend to imply that chrome currently, intentionally blocks sites on other criteria. However, the framework is already there.
History shows that the ego of people always takes over if left unchecked. When it is possible to restrict something, that will eventually get restricted. This is especially true when discussing large companies, such as Google.
I was agreeing with you and not correcting you :-)
For anyone else concerned with the recent Big Tech censorship, people are actively building alternative social medial platforms and they are taking off. The RedditAlternatives subreddit [0] provides a fairly good overview of them. Some are rather extreme, others are more reasonable, but there are alternatives, and it's up to us, the reasonable people, to choose where we want to spend our time and money.
Honestly such a brazen step might be good in the long run. People are all to happy to be boiled frogs, and an overreach like that might jolt some off their ecosystem.
There’s a difference between “has some of it” and “is full of it”.
As SSC says, even if witch hunts are genuinely bad, if you found a town with the founding principle of having no witch hunts, you will end up with a town with 5 genuine civil libertarians, and 100 witches.
I think an interesting strategy would be to found a site with an initially high level of censorship, but a public commitment to reduce the amount/degree of censorship on the site over time with a particular timetable.
No, there's no difference between "has some of it" and "is full of it". Where could the line possibly be drawn between those two? Why should your values in particular control other people's speech? If you don't want to participate on a discussion because it's full of something you dislike, that's your call. But big tech companies have no business shutting down other people's legal conversations.
I think you guys agree. You are free to not participate. The point of contention is: are you free to deny others ability to participate if they want? (if you had that ability)
That's where idea of public platforms as infrastructure (and actual infrastructure like DNS and carriers) if coming from.
This reminds me of people wanting to ban or filter torrent protocol itself, instead of illegal content on it.
Unless there's a limitless supply of witches somewhere, the more witch-hunt-free towns there are, the more the witches will be distributed among those towns, because witches aren't a homogeneous group either.
So in theory, voat & co should either shrink or get less radical the more reddit-alternatives there are. That is, unless reddit is turning normal people into witches that will then populate the new alternative platforms.
This is an interesting point!
However, I also note that there is a limited number of “genuine civil libertarians” (or, of people in general I guess), so I am not sure that having more of these would necessarily improve the ratios between the two within any particular town/site ?
Also if people are spread sufficiently thin, some of the sites will die from “no one is using this”, I think.
I don’t know how this all balances out, but what you brought up does seem like an important force/mechanism to take into account.
So, I’ll say “Further work is needed in order to understand the behavior in this area.”, haha.
I'd guess that the need for genuine civil libertarians would go down with the witch density. The super majority of people is probably fine with seeing one witch per day, but they really don't want to live anywhere where they feel surrounded by witches.
The dynamics involved in city districts rising and falling and rising again might be similar. Online communities lack the rent-dynamic however. A "difficult" part of town gets more attractive because the rent is much cheaper. I don't know whether there's anything equivalent in online communities that would "gentrify" a toxic community.
Normal as in "average" or normal as in some kind of healthy & moral?
The average person puts their pitch fork back down and enjoys the bonding experience that a successful hunt brings to the community. The out-group isn't just persecuted because they are different, the whole process also helps confirm the unity of the in-group.
I think you just described TikTok. There is an extreme level of censorship due to how many children use the app. They've achieved a level of family-friendlyness that YouTube is trying very hard to get. Regarding politics, TikTok has often said that they just aren't a place for politics, and now they are being pressured to let up on political censorship because of issues about China and the coming US presidential election.
I was imagining an organization which from the outset planned to be very permissive in what they eventually allowed, with initial restrictions just being in order to cultivate a desirable community to start with, but now that you mention it, perhaps the motivation behind the policies don’t matter so much as the policies themselves. Good point.
That being said, I don’t imagine that TikTok will become quite as permissive in the end as I was imagining?
Well, because I don't want to join communities where hate speech is common, much less the prevailing type of content. I don't think that speech should be outlawed, but that doesn't mean I want to be where it is. So if reddit helps remove hate speech and it funnels to these alternatives, that only makes reddit more attractive to me.
Plainly: I want reddit to censor hate speech on their site, but I don't want hosting companies to disallow those alernative sites to exist, nor do I want Chrome to disallow any user to visit any of those alternatives in their browser.
Ok. But when you start denying basic infrastructure to those with viewpoints you dislike --- domain names, DDOS protection, app store distribution --- you're no longer trying to just maintain some particular community's culture, but instead eradicate certain speech from public life.
It should be illegal to deny fundamental infrastructure to someone on the basis of his philosophy or point of view. That's what a free society means.
> We don't have to subsidize their free use of internet resources.
We subsidize the FAANG's use of internet resources; the Internet was largely originally created with public money (military, academia, etc).
> They are welcome to buy their own servers or even rent them.
Are they? What if they get banned from there? What if they can't collect money from their community, because all the donation sites ban them? What if their donation sites are killed because all the payment processors drop them?
Your argument leads to the logical end of "they're welcome to make their own internet".
What happens when something you like to discuss falls into the category of hate speech? You think it couldn't happen, but plenty of topics that were totally reasonable subjects of discussion, plenty of totally reasonable publicly-held opinions from 20 years ago are now in this basket. It's totally plausible to imagine some newer topic you feel strongly about eventually becoming so, and you ending up on the side of wanting to have honest discussion about it and being locked out.
Can't imagine it happening to you? Well, maybe you don't like pedophilia, or the huge push of incest porn that seems to be everywhere. Maybe you have legitimate, non-racially-oriented concerns about the riots around the country? Maybe you're worried about some particular changes coming to your children's education, or you're worried about the impact of ideas like UBI? Well, your opinions that are acceptable to post in polite places today might not be in 2030.
The only way anyone should be okay with this continual incursion into free speech is if they have truly tied themselves to the idea of being 100% on board with whatever restriction is coming down the pipe next. Such a person has no principles, and it's hard to imagine defending them.
> Are they? What if they get banned from there? What if they can't collect money from their community, because all the donation sites ban them? What if their donation sites are killed because all the payment processors drop them? Your argument leads to the logical end of "they're welcome to make their own internet".
This is slippery-slope nonsense, just where this conversation always ends up. You can "what if..." you're way to us banning these individuals from driving cars if you want, but it's not what's being discussed.
I am very, very, very in favor of reddit disallowing hate speech on their community as that is an active behavior on the site itself for a community they own. I am very, very, very against any organization barring access to things like domain name registration, hosting, etc. on the basis of their expressed ideas up to the point of them directly enabling clearly criminal behavior (e.g., directly organizing violent attacks, sharing revenge porn, etc.).
Private citizens kicking someone out of a restaurant for being rude is not the same thing as government actors barring them from ever owning a restaurant, or going somewhere else where their rudeness is welcome.
> The only way anyone should be okay with this continual incursion into free speech is if they have truly tied themselves to the idea of being 100% on board with whatever restriction is coming down the pipe next. Such a person has no principles, and it's hard to imagine defending them.
This is a false dichotomy built on the aforementioned slippery slope fallacy.
You can't claim slippery slope if it already happened. Payment processors, domain name registrars, hosting providers, and anti-DDoS services already ban people they dislike. If we slide any further down this slope, the deplatformed will have to lay their own optic fibre.
You're arguing a point that the parent poster never made.
The parent poster simply said that they want to join communities free of (or, mostly free of) hate speech and that being free/mostly free of hate speech is an attractive quality for them.
Not once did they advocate for denying infrastructure or any of the other things your entire comment is based on. In fact, they stated the opposite.
Engage in whatever wordplay you want: reddit is a website built on community content and interaction. That there are user-created communities within the larger community does not turn it into some sort of "infrastructure" of internet expression. The infrastructure to build one's own site, and communities that go with it, are and should continue to be made available to all regardless of viewpoint. Given Voat's existence and the fact that people do use it, I do not see a problem.
The danger here is viewpoint based discrimination. It should be illegal for a big platform to shut down certain points of view when these points of view are legal and expressed in a normal manner. You can shut down spam without harming the principle of free expression because you can express any idea in a way that isn't spam.
The law gives you a legitimate and stable line that you can draw between allowed and disallowed speech. It's fine for a platform to censor what's illegal, because in a sense, we all agree on the law and have a say in its content. But we have no say in big tech content policy, and that's what makes it illegitimate.
My basic point is that it's infuriating and wrong for big tech to impose its values on the public. A public space that's privately owned is still a public space. A free society is one where you don't get barred from public spaces because of your opinions.
> [An Act] To regulate interstate commerce by imposing limitations and penalties on the trans-mission of unsolicited commercial electronic mail via the Internet.
> It should be illegal for a big platform to shut down certain points of view when these points of view are legal and expressed in a normal manner.
Platforms aren't public venues, they're private businesses offering access to a service under terms that serve their interests and business needs first and foremost... terms that everyone agreed to before being able to use the platform.
>The law gives you a legitimate and stable line that you can draw between allowed and disallowed speech. It's fine for a platform to censor what's illegal, because in a sense, we all agree on the law and have a say in its content. But we have no say in big tech content policy, and that's what makes it illegitimate.
The law also allows for private ownership of businesses, contracts and freedom of association. The law says Google's platform is Google's property and Google can do whatever it darn well likes with it.
>You can shut down spam without harming the principle of free expression because you can express any idea in a way that isn't spam.
Who gets to define what spam is? Free expression isn't free if someone has the ability to define any arbitrary speech they don't like as "spam" and censor it. All of the slippery slope arguments applied to censorship of any other form of speech also apply to spam.
Given that they are not operating as neutral public venues then they should also not be afforded protection under Section 230. If they actively moderate they should be fully liable.
The very point of section 230 was to protect companies even if they did moderate. What you are suggesting is that section 230 should be repealed, and let the courts sort it all out.
Its not possible to do that. Nodes cant know whats in a chunk of data that comes by and from whom it comes. But freenet is to host website like sites called freesites. You cant really spam anyone with sites you can create as many as you want but if no one visits them they will eventually just "fall out" of the de central storage.
Technically you could probably bring it down if you simulate a massive amount of users who only access spam sites but that would probably become rather expensive because you would attack your own nodes and your own nodes would try to help the network. It would also need to persist forever else everything would simply go back to normal shortly after the attack is stooped.
Censorship not related to government always strikes me as just complaining. Private entities, whether they be individuals or businesses should be free to determine what is an acceptable uses of their services, and what is not.
Do you allow any form of speech in your house or is your house a platform that censors speech?
A home is not a platform at all, let alone a public one open to everyone, anonymously and without needing an invitation. It's a personal and intimate place.
Most service platforms are not public, either, requiring, at minimum, a way to identify the content creator, even if only to the admins. While consuming the content may be anonymous, production is not. The platform itself is only acting as a publisher. In this specific instance, Google is n the wrong.
4chan, being the obvious exception, since content can be created anonymously.
There’s a huge difference. The government has to let you speak. The corresponding duty on your part is that you won’t do harm (eg., shouting Fire, etC.)
That right, and duty, does not exist on a private platform that you don’t own. You are limited by the TOS and license that you, like most, willfully skip over. A private, non-government platform can tell you to STFU and Get Out and they don’t even need a reason, because it’s their platform.
You can easily set up your own free speech platform, but nobody is required to listen. That’s the main attraction of social media, a more-or-less guaranteed audience. At least until someone tells you to GTFO if you’re not hosting.
I think comparisons between trillion dollar companies, counties, and houses make for weak arguments.
Counties can imprison or kill you for speaking incorrectly.
Companies? Only have the power to cause me trouble when they are oligopolies, e.g. big tech right now. It can be quite severe trouble, even if it isn’t literal imprisonment.
A house? I am aware that poverty (and being a minor) forces some people to live with abusive persons who can give them a choice of silence or homelessness. That kind of evil doesn’t scale up to affect everyone (perhaps if it did we might try harder to fix it?)
to be clear, I believe they will be defederating from instances that push over content against the flagship instance's ToS; those instances will still be able to run Lemmy software.
I think that's a natural selection bias. Most people are either fine with reddit and therefore don't care about finding alternatives, or they aren't interested in what Reddit has to offer, in which case they ignore it. Even if they'd be open to an alternative that's better, spending a lot of time on a subreddit focused on alternatives, shopping through curated lists of them to try them all out is a pretty high investment of time and energy.
The kinds of people who are going to spend a lot of time doing that are likely to be people who like how reddit works a lot, but have an ax to grind against some aspect of it, and usually that aspect is moderation. Most normal people who interact inoffensively have very few interactions with moderators. It's only going to be controversial people who gravitate to that sort of thing, and any platform that's full of people who frequently court controversy is bound to fill up rather quickly with insane freaks.
I think them being full of "hate speech" is a consequence of them being deplatformed - they were forced to find a new home (I put "hate speech" in quotes because even saying "Make America Great Again" qualifies with some people).
Unless you have been deplatformed, then there is a lot of inertia stopping a community from upping and moving to a new platform.
We live in a time of extreme devaluation of terms. The Democratic Republic of Congo is a hardcore dictatorship. The People's Republic of China is run by a close circle of elites. Likewise, "Hate Speech" is used far too often to shut down fairly reasonable criticism against the "equal outcome, not equal opportunity" policies bundled together with original sin and Orwellian struggle sessions.
Places like voat consistently have holocaust denial and calls to actually murder jewish and black people at the very tippy top. There are few places that can be more accurately called "filled with hate speech" than voat.
OK, but to be fair, it's hard to suggest a meaningful alternative to "hate speech" to describe the conversations happening on Voat and other such platforms.
Yes, if the only defense of your content is that it isn't literally illegal to produce and distribute, maybe choose something better to do with your time.
In the context of a lot of Reddit alternatives, the argument of 'not literally illegal' isn't always what is being made. Sometimes it's more along the lines of 'stop interfering with our law breaking' or 'let us openly promote real workd violence'. Sometimes people have migrated to sites where the administration is either legally insulated by strong local laws (ie: Voat in Switzerland), or otherwise ambivalent attitudes towards actually following regulations (Chan sites, self-hosted forms). The incel communities, and many other violent communities come to mind right away.
Reddit is plenty cancerous, depending on how you define that. Certainly in the sense that people aren't arguing in good faith, aren't actively engaging, but are just firing talking points or insults at one another... the sort of thing good moderation used to help limit so that the quality of discussion remained high.
I'd way rather read a good-faith, well written exploration into a controversial topic, than someone who toes the mainstream line of acceptable opinions entirely while being rude and belligerent.
A good rule of thumb, but it's worth noting that content banned from reddit isn't necessarily 'too cancerous', it can also be 'the wrong kind of cancerous'.
Reddit recently dramatically revised their moderation policy and has generally been banning a lot of subs. Reddit very much wants to be a profitable business, and has no problem elimiting non-profitable subreddits.
"When your content is too cancerous for church, maybe the issue isn't the church".
Feel free to replace church with whatever is appropriate to your situation, but there have always been censors and there will always be people who resist the censors. The censors have acted against homosexuals, trans folk, hippies, anti-war demonstrators and many others who we no longer see fit to censor today and I will continue to be in the camp of people who work to thwart the censors.
This site listes Parler and Voat which have rampant, unchecked antisemitism and racism. I would love to see a non-censorious site that takes hate speech seriously but they don't seem to exist for some reason...
The thing is, any service that offers a "censorship-free" alternative will instantly attract mostly by those whose content is garbage for everyone else: usually it's pedophiles until the operators get a couple not-so-nice letters or a police raid and then at least introduce modest moderation, and then come Nazis, antisemites and conspiracy myth peddlers.
And said hate peddlers then complain that they don't have the reach they enjoyed on Twitter, Youtube and Facebook... well d'oh. Turns out one who is not a Nazi, a journalist reporting about them, or an antifa activist collecting information wants to spend their free time on a platform dominated by Nazis.
Last time I checked, Voat was a bunch of people letting the n-word rip in every comment like they're 10yo and discovered a bad word for the first time.
There was very little sign of intelligence. I had no urge to go back.
Hitler salutes, calling for gassing Jews, or "out with migrants" have been illegal in Germany since 1945 - for obvious reasons, one might add. That is illegal content under German laws, but "muh free speech!!!11" for Americans.
This is a tricky problem even to define, because there's "Reddit" which is the owners and paid moderators, then there is "reddit" which is the universe of its subreddits and its unpaid, unaccountable moderators.
For example, it's been well known for awhile that if you subscribe to any of the men's rights subs, you are auto-banned from several of the feminism ones (including TwoXChromosomes). That kind of thing certainly isn't lenient but also isn't under Reddit's control.
Just a slight correction - nobody knows what subs you subscribe to on Reddit, it all works by looking at you commenting in these "wrong" subs.
It does not matter what the content of the comment was, of course. What matters is the fact you left the bubble and interacted with a different one, you traitorous scum.
This sort of sloganistic un-logic that constantly gets up-voted here is a great reminder that most tech people aren't mature enough to make decisions about how the rest of the society communicates.
Well, I can tell you what's bugging me personally about this. There's a growing divide in our society between the "equal opportunity" and "equal outcome" camps. And while the "equal opportunity" people mostly have the "just let me grill" attitude, "equal outcomers" are pushing increasingly harder, while doing their best to silence any opposing voices. It's now getting to a point where raising one's kids to be proud of their achievements, seek self-improvement, and pick friends based on shared values, is considered sinful and is being pushed back against.
As a person who was born in a country that tried implementing equal outcomes for 70 years, and ended up with extreme corruption, poverty and social distrust, I don't want to see another round of this happen here. So I am hoping that if enough reasonable people acknowledge the problem, the society will reach some sort of a compromise before the lives of several generations are completely wasted, like they were in the USSR. And having platforms where this sort of discussion is not considered "cancerous" is a very important step IMHO.
Any evidence at all that self-improvement is under attack, or are these all euphemisms for something else? Maybe "pick friends based on shared values" means "I wouldn't let my kids play with kids from the other side of the tracks", which should indeed get some pushback.
Here's one for you [0]. That's an infographic from the Smithsonian museum that attributed Enlightenment-age values, like individualism, family structure, and work ethic to "whiteness" and implied that it should be opposed. They removed it after pushback (search archive.org for more).
That's the tip of the iceberg though. There's a whole industry of wrapping this narrative into struggle session-like training while charging 7 figures to various-level budgets. You can find many examples like [1] if you search for Chris Rufo. Except adults sort of understand that it's a kickback-driven nonsense and don't take it seriously. So now they are taking the Critical Race Theory with very similar postulates into schools.
It's not about helping minorities learn from the more successful, and reach for the stars. That's purely about making kids hate what their parents did for them, rather than building on top of that.
I don't see anything that indicates these values should be opposed. I've seen controversy over this before and to be honest it mostly seems to be people projecting their own idea of what the left thinks - that "white values" implies they are not "black values" and that all whiteness = bad. Then they conclude from a decent summary of dominant values in America something like /r/conservative's take: "#DefundSmithsonian ... We are paying for white genocide with our tax dollars."
Maybe I should just let this just let this comment stand for its own inanity, but dammit, someone is wrong on the internet.
That poster was at the National Museum of African-American History and Culture, where you might expect to learn the differences between African-American culture and the dominant White-Anglo-American Culture. Context is important. In no way it implied that "Enlightenment-age values ... should be opposed." Also, it's kind of ironic to be cheering for the takedown of speech you didn't like on a thread where you complain about the silencing of the speech you do like. If you don't like what the poster said or how it said it, maybe oppose it with more speech.
About the whole industry of "training while charging 7 figures" isn't that just how the pendulum swings right now? Before it was prayer meetings and then survivalist tactics for team-building. Plus most employment in the US is at-will, so I suppose if employees don't like it, they are free to find other employers. Freedom cuts both ways too. Also, what's wrong with 7 figures? I thought the free-market and entrepreneurs charging for the value they bring to willing buyers were all good things.
When you conclude it's "purely about making kids hate what their parents did for them", well, that's the kind of hyperbole that's hard to take seriously. It is totally free of argument or evidence, and it sounds so much like the conservatives of the 50's and 60's about how the peace-activists, civil rights leaders, and hippies were going to turn their sons and daughters against their parents.
"Equal outcome" is a term created by the right to dismiss liberal policies that are about equal opportunity.
The equal opportunity people, aka liberals, mostly just want people to have the same access to schools that whites have had for decades.
The "equal outcomers," aka the right, have decided that minorities having equal access to schooling is a conspiracy theory at the highest levels, and have been attempting to silence the opposition. (See, e.g. Glen Beck and Tucker Carlson urging their followers to doxx and threaten their critics.)
It's now getting to a point where raising one's kids to be proud of their achievements, seek self-improvement, and pick friends based on shared values, is considered sinful and is being pushed back against.
Again, this is something to take up with the right, which is dismissive of science, academic performance, or the general use of one's brain (see e.g., the current administration), and which has instituted ideological purity tests for leadership positions (see e.g., the NRA, the Federalist Society, the current administration, etc.).
On the left, academic, athletic, cultural and artistic treatment are celebrated, but not at the expense of values. See, for example, Hollywood, the NBA, the music industry, etc. Compare to the NFL, the most popular sport among conservatives, where athletic achievement is the only thing that matters--cheating, drug use, physical violence, and other personal misbehavior is acceptable by athletes and coaches as long as they're winning).
>mostly just want people to have the same access to schools that whites have had for decades.
I would disagree with that. Kids from the families with inherited wealth always enjoyed their hilltop mansions, gated communities, private schools and Ivy League admissions by donation. And they continue doing that, they're above the rules. Nobody is going to put a low barrier social housing in their backyard, or force their kids to network with us, the plebs.
It's the middle class that made their own wealth is under attack now. Doctors, engineers, small business founders. Apparently, we can't have in a community with no used needles near the playgrounds. Because poor homeless. I can't apparently spend time teaching my pre-school kids to read and to write, so once they go to school, they can focus on more advanced stuff with other like minded kids. For the sake of social justice, the class has to be diluted by a few troublemakers whos parents didn't care. But, of course, not the class where the Governor's kids go.
Mind you, nobody will mind if you go and help the affected people directly. Go offer free counseling to homeless. Go teach Python to kids from poor families. Go do lemonade stand projects with underrepresented minorities. But do it in your own free time and at your own expense. I am pretty certain, many reasonable people will follow, since our society generally values being generous and positive. Except that's not what the activists are doing. They don't want to solve the problem in their free time, they want others to somehow find time and solve the problem for them.
>See, e.g. Glen Beck and Tucker Carlson urging their followers to doxx and threaten their critics.
I've seen the piece from Tucker Carlson. NYT journalists threatened to publish his home address. He stated that it already happened before, leading to threats to his family, and said that if they do it again, he will retaliate. He didn't mention any personal details there, so the NYT pulled back and they've reached a stalemate.
>See, for example, Hollywood, the NBA, the music industry, etc.
Hollywood has deteriorated to releasing heavily engineered comic book films. The art aspect is gone, the creativity is gone, many genres like parody/comedy are gone. Mainstream music isn't at it's peak either. It's pretty consistent with the left-leaning big tech, that focuses on making people replaceable drones following procedures, because they have much less bargaining power this way. I am not into sports, so no clue on NBA/NFL.
As a part of a minority, I heavily disagree. The new push for diversity create self doubt. am I really achieving on merit, or just the result of this new social justice movement? I tend to think the people of the left are politicians. They haven’t done much to help me as a student, business owner, or parent. Rather, they just want me to be a victim, someone who they can rely upon to keep themselves employed.
Yep. You know the trick of surviving 10+ years in a corporate managerial position? You pick your subordinates out of slightly underqualified mediocrities. Not only they will be completely helpless without you (let alone, challenge your position), but they will also be infinitely loyal to you, as they won't get another chance under anyone else.
Well, that kind of people now want to run our entire society this way. They want you to be that loyal mediocrity, infinitely thankful for the handout, and supporting their cause without questioning.
Believe me, it's a road to nowhere. Corporate mediocrities end up taking antidepressants for life, or killing themselves after the boss gets fired and they have zero shot at paying that mortgage. The life of self-improvement, hard work and achievement is 1000x more rewarding and I'm glad more people are starting to realize that.
We need more people like you speaking up though. Because virtually every criticism from outside the minorities is now almost unconditionally labeled racist.
I'm confused about this response. A powerful authority is how you enforce those "equal outcomes." You can have authoritarian left (communism) or authoritarian right (fascism), but both are authoritarian. Let me put it this way: Fascism is authoritarianism but authoritarianism isn't fascism.
Edit: Can someone explain the downvotes? Is the argument that there isn't an authoritarian left? I'm referring to this basic model [0]
Once you have a strong central authority, you are not equal by definition. The stronger and more centralized the power is, the easier it is for the ruling class to pass the status to their kids. So ambitious people won't dream of starting companies and changing the world. Their only route to success will be to join the party ladder and play political games. USSR in a nutshell.
That's a noxiously inaccurate caricature of what people in each "camp" believe (to the extent there even are two camps). Practically nobody believes in strict communist-style equal outcomes. The most any significant number want is more equal outcomes, because the distribution of outcomes has clearly diverged from the distribution of any real merit. What the majority want is equal opportunity, just like they say. That's something we don't have, and it's disgusting to appropriate that phrase for those whose beliefs are more accurately described as discriminatory and/or segregationist. It's equally disingenuous to imply that pride in achievement or desire for self-improvement are either distinguishing characteristics of or unique to that group. The vast majority of those you deride as "equal outcome" believers also have those characteristics. If anything, it's the "OK for heritage to determine outcome" crowd who don't believe in achievement and improvement.
People call that kind of twisting of facts and words "cancerous" because it is. You could argue reasonably that attempts to address current inequity are misguided or have gone too far, but not by misrepresenting what people believe.
The distribution of outcome in one generation is, rather explicitly, the distribution of opportunity granted to the next one. Policies like progressive taxation and universal welfare programs that can be cast as equal outcome initiatives are, in the minds of their proponents, often about checking this runaway feedback loop that might otherwise leave all the opportunity (wealth, by another name) piling up with fewer and fewer people.
Soviet Union was never about equal outcome. It was proclaimed, but worked around in every way possible. Jews were limited in access to education, ex-nobility was limited in rights, the party members were given all kinds of preferential treatment and nomenklatura living in relative luxury while the peasants were starving. Hey, even the city dwellers were privileged compared to peasants who were tied to the land and required visas for inner travel. And access to Moscow and its opportunities was tightly controlled.
>It was proclaimed, but worked around in every way possible.
It always does. Each time someone proclaims equity, they carve out some sort of exception for themselves and their family. Like the mayor of Chicago that mysteriously had heavy police presence around her home, while ordering them to stand down everywhere else.
I know you're just expressing a common curiosity. A friendly reminder that snuff film production is a thing and if a community creates a big audience/market for this stuff then the consequences are horrific.
Isn't this the justification for every kind of moral panic?
If we let kids watch sex scenes they'll become prostitutes. If we let kids play grand theft auto they'll shoot up their school.
Everything has the potential for negative externalities. I don't expect anyone to "think of the poor morbidly curious people" because it's strongly taboo in our culture but suggesting that - cause and effect: gore equals more murder for snuff - is a stretch.
You got it the wrong way around. If a lot of people consume a type of content, there are going to be people wanting to produce it for <money, fame, kicks, ...>.
To push the analogy to the extreme, consuming illegal pornography doesn't actually harm anyone, the production does, however the consumption drivers production, therefore the consumption does harm.
Yeah but we're not talking about "the knockout challenge" or destroying milk jugs in the supermarket. Most people don't murder for the lulz and they also enjoy not being in prison for decades. Despite the FUD pushed by popular media there aren't going to be that many people producing it for money/fame/kicks. The vast majority of gore on the internet is a product of security cameras or otherwise hidden cameras.
They recently banned every popular Marxism/Leninist subreddit. They claim it was for advocating violence but I know for a fact it didn't happen with any more regularity than any other political subreddit, including /r/politics.
There are some non cancerous communities that aren't welcome on reddit.
Lots of legal gray area ones that revolve around data hoarding / archiving are constantly threatened and sometimes taken down for piracy. The subreddits try to police the most blatant piracy but due to the nature of why people archive/hoard data it can be difficult.
The highest profile one is /r/piracy. The illegal sharing part of the subreddit spawned a forum for good general piracy discussion. It was at serious risk of being deleted and had to go to extreme lengths to preserve the community that formed around the actual illegal sharing part.
/r/datahoarders and /r/opendirectories are a couple other I personally have seen similar things happen. In my opinion they're a couple of the greatest subreddits out there so the fact that they could be banned out of nowhere on a technicality is a little concerning.
I was an early adopter of Voat during the first Reddit purge but it turned into a racist cesspool. I'm wondering how many of these alternatives will follow that trend.
They typically get addicted to advertising dollars and clean their sites up
Opening an opportunity for someone else to sell the same "my fictional private sector free speech assurances that I imagined were part of the constitution are being upheld here" story to build a community
I was in the same boat. I ended up bouncing because it was so bad I couldn't stand it. But to me, that should be the solution- if you don't like it, don't participate in it.
We live in an age where people seem to think in very black and white terms and if your beliefs don't align you shouldn't have them or be able to voice them.
Aside from inciting violence, your beliefs are yours. If they aren't breaking the law, you do you. I don't have to agree with them or support them, essentially 'don't tread on me'.
But people need to remember when you deplatform these racist, ugly thoughts and words, you push those people together, galvanizing them and their beliefs. As others in this thread have stated, I believe that's why voat got so bad so quickly.
As they say, sunlight is the best disinfectant.
I don't know what the end all solution is here, but I know I deal with racism on an almost daily basis in real life, and I'm Hispanic, so I can't imagine how bad it must be for some others. Pretending it doesn't exist won't fix it. Pushing it to the furthest corners of the internet won't make it go away in real life.
look, i'm not trying to cut down alternative platforms by any means, however these alternative platforms are failures waiting to happen. the reason is that although they start low cost, eventually, if they grow, they need some form of income in order to continue. at that point, they need some form of advertising which, cause of their content, they cannot get and as such, they close up.
Pretty much all the subs like the the_donald, republicans, conservative, asktrumpsupporters that are against the big tech censorship will censor (ban) you for just showing their hypocrisy.
I clicked on few links or r/RedditAlternatives, and they look like Facebook pages of rural Ohio.
They're not unique in this behavior. Basically every political subreddit that exists, and even some that arn't innately political but get taken over, do the same thing.
I remember there were a bunch of posts in /r/zerowaste about someone explicitly advocating to be made a mod so that they can moderate the subreddit as an anti-capitalist. I really had to credit that person for the bravado of saying: "I'll ban people I disagree with, voooote for meeeeee".
In fact, the ONLY political subreddit I'm aware of that does not engage in this behavior is r/Libertarian. Credit to them for putting their money where their mouth is.
/r/libertarian went through a brief period not too long ago where a mod (or mods) took over and started banning a ton of people for their beliefs (mostly socialists).
To be fair the creator of the sub came back and fixed it.
This problem is common to nearly every subreddit, on every side of the political spectrum. Unaccountable moderators will ban you in a heartbeat for arbitrary reasons, such as disagreeing with the sub's majority opinion.
I was banned from my (very liberal) U.S. state's subreddit for quoting Martin Luther King. I quoted a passage from one his speeches that denounced political violence, such as the arson and vandalism we've seen in Kenosha recently. The subreddit moderator banned me within minutes, called me a Nazi, and immediately denied the appeal.
> Pretty much all the subs like the the_donald, republicans, conservative, asktrumpsupporters that are against the big tech censorship will censor (ban) you for just showing their hypocrisy.
This is like saying:
> Pretty much all the discussion groups that are against government censorship will censor you (throw you out) just for showing their hypocrisy.
It's not hypocritical to moderate one forum, on a platform where everyone can create his own forum, while also demanding that the platform itself doesn't censor discussions, anymore then it's hypocritical to moderate a discussion group, while also demanding that the government doesn't censor your discussions.
Moderation happens at the lowest level possible. Any content removal at a higher level is censorship.
Can't the same offending toots be viewed in Google Chrome? Just screenshot their own browser with the same content they are reporting and ask when they will turn the lens inward. Or, find similar content in Twitter, or Facebook, etc. This sets a dangerous precedent.
I'm glad I degoogled. This kind of thing is why.
It wasn't even hard after I got email switched over. If they didn't have a video monopoly, I would never have to use their stuff.
Not sure why this comment was dead, but I vouched for it. I've been slowly separating from Google for a while now for slightly different reasons, namely that I've grown increasingly distrustful of surveillance capitalism on the whole.
Any other mail service is already better than Google's. You don't have to host your own to get off Google, if that's what you're aiming for! There are a lot of other trustworthy providers. As someone who hosts their own email, I'd thank you for diversifying.
While, one the one hand, I don't have a lot of trouble with delivery even from a residential IP address and I'd recommend self-hosting, I understand anyone who's hesitant. My mail lands in Google spamboxes much more often than it should (I don't send any automated mail these days, i.e. not even website notifications or anything: everything is hand-written or at least triggered by the person receiving the email; my sending IP has been stable for a decade). Another downside of Google is that they hide the existence of the spam folder and many people will simply never see it and be able to update its filters by replying to me or marking it as not-spam. Heck, some Google-for-corporate mail service even blocks your email at smtp level and there is no recourse. By diversifying receiving servers, at least Google doesn't get to set one standard: if your mail doesn't arrive in a Google inbox, it's currently extremely hard to argue that "but it's google's fault" (when it totally is). Clearly I as an individual have an issue and the big google doesn't.
This does highlight how important the relative freedom of Android is. This is unfortunate but it does not stop the ability for people to load the APKs or get them off of F-Droid.
That being said, imagine if this happened on the Apple App Store...
I hate how terribly locked down all modern operating systems are. I recently started using a PinePhone. It's up to people in tech to show that regular/ordinary people can get away from these mega corps that seek to control everything about the tech we use.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 307 ms ] threadThink of them as retail outlets, in a mall. Do you see shady stuff going on there?
Would 'The Gap' sell porn to increase profits by 15%? Of course not. And for obvious reasons.
We shouldn't think of 'App Stores' as some kind of truly open marketplaces, any more than a shopping mall is.
What we need is just more independent means of distribution.
They usually end up in undesirable locations or in rundown strip malls.
I saw another one of the same chain in the main train station of… I think it was Hannover? I was travelling a lot by InterRail and the places are blurring together.
Zürich has (or had) a sex shop with the wares clearly visible from the outside in the expensive bit of the city centre.
Cambridge (UK) has an Ann Summers in its main shopping centre. Thinking of the UK, I’ve seen vibrating cock rings openly stocked in Tesco, which is the largest supermarket chain in the UK.
Attitudes to such topics are surprisingly flexible.
Why do people find a corner-case of an analogy, and somehow think it negates the analogy?
It's just an analogy.
Of course 'some malls have sex shops' - but obviously, most of them don't.
The vast majority of corps don't want their brands anywhere near porn, sex, guns, politics, hate/contentious speech etc..
Most decent malls are actually selective of who they want in there, and the 'other residents' of the mall have a say as well.
There are an infinite number of places porn/guns/politics can be sold, so that's not a problem, it's just not going to be in a system wherein the other players are wary of it.
It's actually good reason why we need a lot of alternative points of distribution.
I wonder if there should even be some legislation around that, in terms of the kinds of app stores that are preloaded must be more 'open' and that alternative options must be provided very easily.
Thinking about them in terms of the mall or a shopping plaza is good. However, you mistakenly compared the app store with the Gap.
The app store is the mall space, numerous apps abound, as do shops. The gap might not sell porn, but Victoria secret, Spencers, Hollywood (nights?? I can't recall) exist in the mall and might not be porn but... Some retail plazas might have an adult section. Best buy or Fry's at one point had adult magazines and videos.
Some retail plazas even have other things progressives and democrats find offensive, like guns and old classic literature. Occasionally you can also find a pawn shop in a retail plaza.
There was a point where you would rent out your mall or retail space to anyone with the money to cover the cost plus a small profit. The decadence, wealth inequality, and unrealistic valuations from government interference have led to a world where it's fairly easy for some to cherry pick who they want renting from them based upon their ideological, political, or racial spectrum or beliefs. The same now occurs in our app stores.
Not that I agree the policies of app stores to restrict items solely because they are pornography or sex related. But high end mall operators might reject sex shops for many of the same reasons.
"Our local mall is great, I don't see a need for any other malls or standalone stores. Malls provide an air conditioned space, on-site site security, and even refreshments while you shop."
I think it stems from a lack of empathy for others. I don't buy dildos so I see no reason to allow dildo stores to exist.
I think most people understand there are many places to buy stuff.
Shopping malls are 'one kind of place' and they have special rules.
I haven't set foot in a Mall in a few years literally, they can't be that important.
Recent versions of Android have also improved the permissions model... you can specify what apps (e.g. F-Droid) are allowed to install other apps. You don't need to add a blanket allow forever.
Moreover, if you can access the very same content from Google Chrome, should Google remove their own browser too? The same happened to Podcast Addict, police all the podcasts in the world or we will remove your app.
The concern is Mastodon app developers are small one-man shops, less likely to be able to bring reason to bear and get Google to review these warnings. These app devs cannot possibly be held responsible for every post on the entire Mastodon network.
https://twitter.com/PodcastAddict/status/1261651512947691520...
First, don't assume that just because you've never heard a word, that means no one has heard of it. There are quite a lot of us who know what the fediverse is.
Second, and this is a little pedantic, fediverse is a portmanteau, not an acronym.
On a higher level, what’s the problem and what should be changed? Google has a policy that people don’t like, Android can side load, isn’t that exactly what people want?
Yes outside of the little HN/geek bubble, it’s way too easy for the average consumer to install malware on their computer.
HN users have been whining about not being able to side load on iOS devices for years. What they really seem to want is to force the app stores to carry anything.
1. It worked out great by fostering tons of invention.
2. Untrusted code with sandboxing works well for the web/javascript ecosystem.
3. Yes "HN users" want the freedom to run software of their choice. Discussing a single aspect where one system is better is not some total endorsement of the whole system.
There’s plenty of hate speech on Facebook, but their app remains. Chrome allows you to access sites with hate speech too, but it’s not going anywhere.
(Or at least that's the most reasonable argument/step that I've seen from an anti-trust perspective)
So this hurts discoverability and credability ("if it's not bad software, why isn't it allowed in the Google store like all the other apps?") of fediverse apps and networks.
The point is that sideloading presents several barriers to entry and at every extra step you'll lose a few more users. very few people will get all the way through enabling sideloading, figuring out how to actually do it with ADB or something, ignoring the scary prompts, and get all the way to actually installing and running an app. This is a nice workaround for a few people, not a solution to Google applying their policies in an aggressive way to remove apps they don't like that clearly aren't themselves dedicated to hate speech.
So now you want both side loading and you don’t want warnings about the possible risks of doing so?
So on one hand you’re arguing that users are too ignorant to figure out side loading but they are smart enough to not download apps that may be malware?
It’s not like any mainstream vendors have had side loading and introduced a security vulnerability....
https://www.cnet.com/news/just-as-critics-feared-fortnite-fo...
Roughly, web browsers, podcast players and Fediverse clients (and probably a bunch of other apps, those are just obvious examples) all fetch contents from a user-supplied source over HTTP(S) and display it. As long as they are not specifically promoting "banned" sites, they should all be treated the same in that regard.
Looking back at our last discussion, you have a serious problem of equating everything with a call for government intervention.
[1] https://f-droid.org/
https://reclaimthenet.org/f-droid-bans-gab-app/
Gab was also banned explicitly by URL by any app makers and in many ActivityPub libraries (you can find checks where it hashes the URL and compares it to known Gab URLs).
> a purpose-built platform for conspiracies and hate speech
We're in a bizarre world right now where you can label any opinion you don't agree with as hate speech, dehumanize police and call every conservative a literal Nazi and that's all okay now for some reason.
At some point we have to remember that historically, a lot of people who thought they were right, about slavery, homosexuality, war, abortion, polygamy, and other controversial topics, eventually came down on the wrong side of history.
The attack on speech and ideas has never been more profound. If you don't like an idea, you don't have to listen, but people are going to continue to go to fringes whenever their voices are silences. That will create more extreme platforms and more extremism, not less.
And the history is plastered with censorship the world was never more free than it is now you are just repeating non facts without even doing a hint of research.
Can you elaborate on this?
Just decide for yourself. Literally the first post I get at the moment comes from "QAnon and the Great Awakening" and is in support of that right-wing vigilante shooter in Kenosha, calling the district attorney who's prosecuting him "evil".
The next few posts I see mention either "arresting the dems", some anti-vax stuff and so many crypto-fascist dogwhistles that I'm getting tinnitus.
If you need more proof I'll let you ding into this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gab_(social_network)
But you're right, most of the "no moderation, anything goes" online communities tend to be overrun by extremists but it's easy to see why: you only need a minority of very dedicated trolls posting outrageous content 24/7 to ruin a community. It takes time and effort to post insightful content and analysis, meanwhile you can throw shit at the walls at a large scale very easily.
That's why it's pretty obvious to me that if you want to actually have interesting discussions online and a plurality of opinions you need moderation, otherwise the low effort bullies take over.
How do you mitigate without running counter to the original idea of "free speeech"?
I think people have a mental model that social media sites and apps are like a communication medium. They are a neutral carrier that transmits an idea X from person A to B. The site itself is not "tainted" by the content of X or get involved in the choices of A and B.
But a more accurate model is that they are amplifiers and selectors. The algorithms and ML models at the heart of every social media app often determine who B is. A is casting X out into the aether and the site itself uses its own code to select the set of Bs that will receive it—both who they are and how large that set is. From that perspective, I think it is fair that apps take greater responsibility for the content they host.
Here's an analogy that might help:
Consider a typical print shop. You show up with your pamphlet, pay them some money, and they hand you back a stack of copies. Then you go out and distribute them. The print shop doesn't care what your pamphlet says and I think is free from much moral obligation to care.
Now consider a different print shop. You drop off your pamphlet and give them some money. Lots of other people do. Then the print shop itself decides how many copies to make for each pamphlet. Then it also decides itself which street corners to leave which pamphlets on. That sounds an awful lot to me like they have a lot of responsibility over the content of those pamphlets.
The latter is much closer to how most social media apps behave today.
Is that really any different? If your print shop counts the user-submitted tallies on a chalkboard to decide which pamphlets to print, the print shop is still choosing to use that rule to decide what to print.
Now you've got it.
> Run a bulletin board that sorts by last reply?
There is maybe an argument that your level of responsibility somewhat depends on the complexity of the algorithm you use to decide how much amplification to apply to any given piece of content.
I don't think responsibility is black and white.
> Run a mailing list that forwards every message to the end user, and the end-user implements the same sort by default? You're off the hook, even though the end result is the same.
The end result is the same but the agency is not. The end-user chose to apply that sorting, so they have accepted some of the responsibility for what they consume.
If I shoot someone with a gun, I'm totally responsible. If I give you the gun and you shoot them, you are responsible. Maybe I still bear some responsibility for giving you the gun. But you certainly have taken on more responsibility than you would have if I shot them.
Here's maybe another way to think about it. If you're choosing to run a bulletin board, presumably you're doing so to get something out of it for yourself. Is it fair for you to receive that benefit while taking no responsibility for anything that happens on it?
Is that a net benefit for society? The last thing I want is for google (or other tech giants) to be even more trigger-happy about banning people because they view you as a high risk user. "decentralizing the web" isn't a good excuse, as most people don't have to know how to set up their own hosting, and only shifts the liability from the host to the search engine (because you have to find the content somehow).
>The end-user chose to apply that sorting, so they have accepted some of the responsibility for what they consume.
Don't we already have that? On reddit you can sort by "hot", "new", "rising", "controversial", and "top". On gab you can sort by "hot" and "top". I'm not sure how that would change things, other than forcing yet another modal that users have to click through.
>If you're choosing to run a bulletin board, presumably you're doing so to get something out of it for yourself. Is it fair for you to receive that benefit while taking no responsibility for anything that happens on it?
Not every website has to be a for-profit venture. Many (small) forums run essentially on donations, or are low maintenance side projects attached to a bigger project.
That only ever applied to broadcast media (and maybe only to prime-time TV). Publishers of the written word have never been required by the US government to grant equal time.
>For most of the history of the United States free speech has been more limited than it is today
I don't know what you could mean by that unless you are referring to the fact that before the internet became mainstream, you had to own a printing press or something like that to reach a mass audience.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comstock_laws
Just a decade ago free speech rights were expanded to include corporations:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._Federal_Ele...
In case anyone tries to claim that the founders intended for the most expansive possible understanding of freedom of speech, the fact is that one of the earliest laws passed in the United States was a law that censored criticisms of the Federal government (in an attempt to crack down on foreign misinformation campaigns):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_and_Sedition_Acts
I'm not sure whether that proves your point. The wikipedia article says that it was controversial, caused the federalist party to lose the following election, and ultimately expired after 4 years.
You can also argue that it was defeated by the same men who ratified the constitution, and that the "free speech" side ultimately prevailed, therefore they really did mean free speech to be that expansive.
You can't have anti-semitic, racist, homophobic speech without breaking some laws
>Hate speech in the United States is not regulated due to the robust right to free speech found in the American Constitution. The U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that hate speech is legally protected free speech under the First Amendment. The most recent Supreme Court case on the issue was in 2017, when the justices unanimously reaffirmed that there is effectively no "hate speech" exception to the free speech rights protected by the First Amendment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech_in_the_United_Stat...
Hate speech in the United States is not regulated by any government. Google is considered by the courts to be non-governmental, so the courts will not prevent Google from regulating hate speech on the platforms it owns as Google sees fit.
In what jurisdiction? In the US, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imminent_lawless_action is a very high bar to clear, compared to other countries.
To be an open platform for free speech, no censorship.
Wouldn't it have ended up in the exact same state it is now? Any service that guarantees no censorship is going to have the majority of its userbase be the runoff from other major websites. When voat was created, I 100% believed that they were not attempting to create extremist havens, but their userbase was all the people expelled from reddit for targeted harassment campaigns.
I hate this dynamic. We need a way to break this cycle, because right now it's actively killing competitors to existing social networks.
So again... Reddit and Twitter are already a cesspool of hate. If you are bad enough to be banned there...
I agree with your point - it is hard to tell the difference generally, and it is an important point to remember, but the behaviour of the company itself shows that it is not an issue this time.
If you want to know how a healthy alternative would have turned out, go looking for one. It almost certainly exists, there have been at least a dozen twitter competitors in the past and I know a few people who tried them out. (I can't remember their names, though.)
And it's a bit comical, because Gab as a community experience is much smaller (in my perspective) from even weird sites like minds or funky social blockchain plays. Why they felt the need to ban discusions of marxism or a general strike is beyond me.
I think the first time I ever heard about it was when Firefox banned Dissenter from their addons. Dissenter to me was a genius idea that has an ugly userbase. I'd love to have a version of Dissenter that isn't populated entirely by bigots.
I think the idea of Dissenter really has some value, you walk along the web for all sorts of reasons, and then up in the corner in your toolbar you see "oh, someone from my community has said something about this". Rather than the social network taking you to a site, the site takes you to the network.
No way I'd trust any add-on/startup/mega corp to do that. I barely trust Mozilla to keep my history on their servers, and that's only because they only keep the last few months and purge older data.
you could easily make this privacy safe.
However I suppose that if the site does have comments, then you do have to make requests to the server to get them...
Still, I believe you're being overly pessimistic here. I think there may be some solutions to this. Maybe not perfect, but better. Lets say our social network "Ascenter" has become corrupt and is looking blackmail its participants. What about this?:
The design currently requires you to send a sha(URL+salt) to the server to look up comments. This prevents Ascenter from directly knowing what site the comments refer to, but the comments themselves will be a big clue. What if to look at the comments you have to decrypt them using sha(URL+salt2)? Ascenter will have no means to derive this key, it will only be able to determine how many comments have being placed and how large they are. That improves things a bit...
But Ascenter might be able to crawl the web to discover conversations. Particularly for salacious sites if it's looking for blackmail. So... What if the salts are the answer to that? If you had your own set of salts you could use them to create your own private groups, Ascenter would have no way to access that conversation. Or even figure out that they have occurred.
With the presence of public and private salts, what if the browser plugin itself could be configured with a blacklist of sites not to send requests for? You could still have private channel comments, but not public. I could see the community per-generating a black list...
One last note I'd end on here is that the level of trust we are expecting right now is a huge bar lower than the level of trust we give general social networks
Consider what HackerNews could do if it went rogue like like Ascenter? To blackmail you all they would need to do is go to one of your old comments, rewrite it as something salacious, then blackmail you with it. Comments on HackerNews arn't signed, and arn't encrypted. We're quite vulnerable to them.
edit: sorry for the long post. This was a bit of a stream of consciousness.
TL;DR: The bloom filter limits the risk, and I think there are cryptographic solutions that reduce the level of user exposure to below that of current social networks.
And that ignores the problem that you're not going to be able to sync the bloom filter in real time, so now you're going to need to have a very merge-friendly design for these annotations.
No, I'm not being pessimistic. This is just a candid analysis of the difficulties of doing this competently. If you'd like to do it incompetently, feel free.
https://hacks.mozilla.org/2018/11/firefox-sync-privacy/
Because it was built to be a fascist recruitment channel, and the talk of 'free speech' is just a smoke screen that they don't care about at all.
I find that extremely hard to believe.
It is also inaccurate, because Gab lets you connect to any community. What you're saying they banned you from theirs.
As for being in favor of a ban on Gab's own app (other comments): any app can acess Gab's instance, and Gab's own app lets users access any instance including Gab's own so a ban on Gab's app doesn't work, you annoying busybodies.
The hilarious part being that by having the censorship in the first place and not just letting folks work it out amongst themselves, you just increase the echo chamber factor, which at some point, you have to come to terms with in real life on the basis these people exist in the real world. The very act of technically enforced societal marginalization in and of itself is an "extremism" amplifier/polarization catalyst. What confuses me is why I feel like I'm the only one who regularly brings it up. It's not that hard of a realization to reach From first principles. Especially if you spent any time in your life as a social misfit.
You could avoid being large — small, high-trust groups work perfectly fine without censorship.
You could add more moderation (aka censorship), both platform-wide and within communities. Reddit seems to be heading in that direction.
You could avoid being a platform. Some sites are inherently platforms, but does every site need comments?
Or you could genetically engineer humanity into a kinder, better species. This would also be the way to make anarcho-communism work — the economic system with the greatest freedoms, but also the most susceptible to bad actors. The Culture series shows you a glimpse of what this future could be.
Maybe that's a sign you should pause. Sometimes it is okay to admit you don't know about a subject. It is okay to sit and listen instead of voicing an opinion.
I never know how to handle topic shifts in the conversation trees in Reddit, Hacker News, and others.
Do you speak only to the comment you're responding to? Do you speak as if that comment is in the context of the submission? Do you keep the context as on topic as possible? Do you indicate which one of the three you're doing when you start your comment off? I feel like this is an internet rule I have not sussed out on my own. And I can see its caused some trouble for others. Sorry.
Exactly, which is why you are wrong here:
"When voat was created, I 100% believed that they were not attempting to create extremist havens"
It is not as if the major websites are quick to censor their users. If anything they are too cautious and have only banned terrorists after widespread pressure and threats of advertiser boycotts. If you set up a platform that is open to the few people who were so extreme that even Reddit or Twitter banned them, then you are creating an extremist haven, no matter what language you use to describe your intentions.
This is nowhere close to what reddit/twitter have been doing however.
> then you are creating an extremist haven
...of people interested in anime porn after reddit banned them.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...
Unfortunately this kind of rhetoric is frequently coded language meaning "Hey Nazis, we won't kick you off of our platform for threatening to shoot up a synagogue". I think people should still legally be able to create unmoderated platforms, but the majority of people won't participate in them because they quickly become cesspools of hatred and harassment. Gab is the newer, shinier tech startup version of this, but it's existed before in the forms of 4chan, 8chan, and probably other platforms that I'm not familiar with.
Fdroid banned this particuliar app (and maybe others, that's not the point) from their own official repo.
I'm not taking a side either way but am curious.
"Google is censoring apps"
"It's because those apps can access hate speech"
"You can use this other app store"
"They ban this app, though"
"But that's because it's for hate speech"
Come on, this is peak comedy.
> it's for hate speech
There's a big difference here and you seem to know it
That's just false.
> F-Droid won’t tolerate oppression or harassment against marginalized groups. Because of this, it won’t package nor distribute apps that promote any of these things
If this accurately describes Gab, I don't have sympathy for Yet Another Racist Community pretending that they're defending freeze peach.
It's entirely populated by people who were banned from Reddit, Twitter or Facebook for harassment or spreading hate.
> bans your Android Studio account
Don't give them ideas. (there's thankfully no such thing as an Android Studio account)
I meant Google Account. Isn't a google account necessary for anything on developer.android.com? Sorry if I am wrong. Any url on that domain used to redirect me to a Google Login page.
Well, atleast you have to accept a Google TOS.
You have to agree with the TOS if you download the prebuilt SDK from google, yes. Building the SDK from source is unfortunately quite hard but Debian has made some progress with this.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
If the gab devs were somewhat competent they'd create their own F-droid repo and distribute their app through that - F-droid allows this, and cannot stop this.
Those intentional limitations mean that F-Droid will never have feature parity with the Play Store.
For now, the best everyone can do is to promote F-Droid. Many users never heard about YouTube without ads, so getting NewPipe might be a good motivation to try F-Droid.
In the US, beyond explicit calls for illegal behavior (usually illegal) and kiddie porn (always illegal), we don't have many restrictions or even a legal definition of "hate speech." But even those laws aren't consistently applied. For the most part, it's up to the judgement of the viewer or based on the "reasonable person" rule and "reasonable people" seem to be getting rarer and rarer..
Ref: https://www.thoughtco.com/hate-speech-cases-721215
>The only way they can define and enforce "hate speech" policies is by torturing the language, the definitions, and hoping no one looks closely at the resulting policies
The rest of your comment is about the first amendment to the US constitution, which constrains governments (US Federal and state governments), not private parties such as Google.
Google would be well within its rights in the US to ban all hate speech from all the platforms it owns.
Or at least the general principles that would make it obvious to a "reasonable person" are..?
> The rationale they gave is that hate speech appears on these apps,
So does in countless app on the store, and not in the third party content, but app themselves pretty much, and Google don't touch it.
A much more rational assumption is that Google sees the Fediverse as something that can come to steal their cattle (eyeballs,) and they have a plan to subplant it.
You will very soon see them turning even more picky, and eventually remove even censored fediverse apps.
They are repeating the trick they did with uBlock. First, they say do a purge, with an option for the most resistant to "play along," and a few month later, they pull the rug again. This way, they evade an immediate backlash.
Do the apps connect by default to a server that allows hate speech? If that's the case, is this an instance of bad defaults? Maybe the apps could work around this by just connecting to a server that's moderated to be acceptable to Google, but leave it configurable.
It's pretty egregious to ban an app like that.
Still, I wonder if an innocuous default server (or set of them) might smooth things over with Google. That would increase the friction of accessing the content they don't like.
Android's also relatively open, so if they only have issues with specific servers, maybe the app could just drop a text-file blocklist on the filesystem that a user could tecnically edit to change it (but just not via the app).
These apps might not have any good options.
[0] https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.keylesspalace.tusky/
This sets a dangerous precedent and highlights why we should continue removing Google/etc as dependencies in our lives.
All depends on who the companies consider a hate group.
This happens all the time--recently, a podcast app was removed from the Play Store because it could be used to listen to content which didn't meet Play Store guidelines. The only way to fix it is to post about it and generate enough outrage that Google hears about it and can undo the ban.
https://www.macrumors.com/2020/08/26/antitrust-investigation...
In the case of the Fediverse apps they can't block anything because firstly there's no resources to police it, and secondly it's kind of the whole point of federation to let the user see what they want without getting in the way.
https://www.newsweek.com/4chan-bans-images-netflix-film-cuti...
So they can allow the worst kind of hate speech, porn and gore, but ban a harmless meme because mods find it annoying. So the only rationale from banning images from "Cuties" may be "because mods don't like it".
It has never been normal and the idea it could ever be is a delusion. It is a tactic to censor content moral guardians don't like. Look at the bar of perceived "pedophilia" which keeps rising every year.
https://old.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/r3dhg/reddit_is_fu...
So the issue isn't so much that content is accessible, it's when the content is more integrated with the app.
i'm not familiar with the other apps on the list but i expect it might be some issue like promoting such instances in their registration screen.
also interestingly, the instance OP links to qoto.org is known within the fediverse for being full of creepers, because they've implemented a partial defederation and block circumvention. if you have an account on qoto.org, you can follow users who've blocked you, on instances that have blocked you, because it will recognize such, pull a list of posts via RSS instead of via activitypub, and fake an activitypub actor internally to generate posts for your feed. in their defense they have said that the posts are public anyway, and the user could just browse the public feed with a web browser, but it's clearly a bit different when posts from a person who has tried to block you appear in your feed normally as an item you can interact with. it's certainly against the spirit of consent.
This is not true. It is just the personal fork of tusky by a1batross. It also contains improvements to the pleroma integration.
I see the argument often that things like this are a free speech violation but the 1st amendment says “Congress shall pass no law...”. It doesn’t apply to actors other than the state.
I’m not defending Google’s actions here but I also don’t think it’s technically a free speech violation at least as the amendment is written, so I’m wondering if there are any cases addressing this sort of censorship w.r.t. the 1sr amendment.
The only current framework to protect freedom of speech from private companies is to designate them as common carriers, e.g. phone companies legally cannot police what is said over their wires.
I of course agree that the mastodon ban is a bad move because it sets a double standard where browsers can access arbitrary web content but other apps can't, and because it grossly limits the things that the average user can do with their device. However, these are consumer rights issues, not free speech issues.
If Google doesn't want to distribute your ideas, I think it's odd to say that that's wrong of them. I do think that it's a problem that they get to act as a gatekeeper like that in the first place. I think the solution is to break up larger platforms and create a diverse ecosystem of smaller options, not to forbid platforms from ever moderating their content.
It's not obviously in the Restricted Content policy page: https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/topi...
The rules there are extremely general, and technically cover all sorts of things which are currently let into the Store.
Edit, found it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23219427
And well, they should probably remove the apps of Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, etc as it's plenty of hate speech there too.
That was a mistake, presumably. It's likely this is too. The deep desire on the part of posters here to assume malice and scream CENSORSHIP is really off-putting.
I actually don't know anything about fediverse, but if it's like other pseudoanonymous obscure communications media it's probably filled with awful stuff. It's not that hard to imagine a naive reviewer who doesn't understand the architecture to be confused if they get a report showing screenshots of the app with the content available in it.
This is my concern. These apps are not content hosts, they are akin to Web browsers or RSS readers, but they are small, one-person endeavours that don't have the clout to get Google to notice the difference between the content providers (the individual Mastodon servers) and the ActivityPub client app that these apps represent.
I know one of the devs is thinking to not push the issue as he's worried about his other apps on the same developer account.
The discussion has veered off into censorship issues, but this is a simple 230-ish problem, these apps are not the Mastodon servers that (presumably) some people have had issues with. They are agnostic client readers of the ActivityPub statuses.
There is no way, nor any legal requirement, for a browser like these apps to be held responsible for the million possible bits of content it could consume.
The app is not the service.
To see how ridiculous this sounds, Google might as well completely take down the entire social media and internet browsing category on the Play Store since I keep seeing the same content from both extremes on all these platforms.
Just wait until you tell them to take down their own browser since you can find this "content" with a simple search. They will soon realise that "drawing the line on hate speech" is more tougher than solving leetcode CS questions.
This is justification to get rid of apps they don't like.
Any time anyone complains about censorship, roll out the excuse of holocaust denial, regardless whats actually being censored.
It is not a jump when they have used Nazi symbols in their campaign ads, promoted antisemitic conspiracy theories in their campaign ads, made transparently racist statements about their opponents, etc. It is not that "hate speech" is being weaponized to censor political position (the Republican party is not even promoting a specific policy agency in this election cycle), but rather that the term "censorship" is being weaponized to legitimize the extremist ideologies of domestic terrorist groups (classified as such by the FBI).
To put it another way, if one of your coworkers was carrying on about how wealthy Jews were conspiring to spread civil unrest as part of a broad plot to destroy the United States, you would call it "hate speech" and you would be right to report them to HR. Yet that is just one of the many extremist conspiracy theories the Republican party has promoted in this election cycle, which follows the previous two cycles that featured similar antisemitism and other expressions of racism. Some Republican politicians have publicly stated that George Floyd was killed in order to start a race war in America, which only a few years ago is a statement that you would have only found on a website like "the daily stormer." The current Republican president has endorsed a candidate who said Muslims marry their siblings, and another candidate who said Muslims are a cancer on humanity and should be forbidden from holding office. None of that is "political opinion," it is extremist ideology that is on par with the kind of things that ISIS claimed about the Yazidis.
Trump's son in law is Jewish.
Your ignorance is astounding, but not surprising given the level of propaganda that's out there today.
Conservatives are regularly attacked, marginalized, deplatformed, intimidated, shot at, and baselessly called all sorts of things when they pretty much just stand for family, God, and loyalty to the country and ideals of individual freedom. There are over 100 million Americans that identify as conservative and you are spewing hate speech about them right now. You've flattened an extremely large diverse group of individuals into your caricature viewpoint. I recommend you apply some empathy and go and try to learn from them. Ask them why they think the way they do. It might surprise you.
There are lots of Christians who favor Israel but ultimately hold anti-Jewish opinions. This is weird, yes, but support of Israel should not be mistaken for support of Jews (the reverse is also, but only incidentally) true.
> Trump's son in law is Jewish.
So were Emil Maurice and Erhard Milch, at least according to German law. Didn't stop Hitler and Goering from making exceptions for them.
I have quite a few conservative friends. Most of them don't support Trump, because Trump isn't a conservative. He doesn't stand for God or individual freedom, nor does he stand for loyalty to the country. Don't conflate conservatives and Trump supporters. They're not the same thing, and trying to present a bait and switch between classical conservatism and Trumpism is a bad faith argument. This is why you see so many conservative politicians that are no longer in office supporting Biden over Trump. Because Trump doesn't extoll conservative values. Instead he represents a populist and proto-fascist wing with more than a couple white supremacist tendencies.
Trump isn't racist at all. He was friends with Michael Jackson, Jesse Jackson, Whitney Houston, etc. He actively tried to help Whitney from overdosing (https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/mike-love-to-t...). He calls as many victim's family members as he can, regardless of race. He calls every fallen soldier's family, regardless of their race or creed. He just pardoned a black woman who was put away for a non violent drug crime in the 90s. He signed criminal justice reform established opportunity zones in poor neighborhoods to encourage business investment. He supports school choice to help poor communities who are stuck with broken schools. He's got 11 members of his cabinet who are Jewish (Mnuchin, Friedman, etc).
He is pulling the troops out of Afghanistan: https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/26/politics/us-troops-afghanista...
There are more black Republicans running for office in 2020 than in 100 years. Trump has endorsed most of them, if not all of them.
Your tired talking points are just a symptom of a coordinated hit job and misinformation campaign.
> You've flattened an extremely large diverse group of individuals into your caricature viewpoint.
I think you might've done that yourself.
Image if Google decided to just block certain websites on Chrome, or if big tech got domain registrars to drop 4chan, or whatever humor websites they don't find amusing.
edit: Trouble in a sense that it is inconvenient for them.
Absolute fear.
Well, they're taking the address bar away, bit by bit; they have SafeSearch; and they have AMP. It's a very slow erosion, but there will come a point at which going outside of the list of officially acceptable sites will become more difficult - first with mandatory warnings, then maybe with mandatory reporting to law enforcement or whomever, and eventually not at all.
Yes, it sounds like a "slippery slope" argument, but we're a few steps down the slope now, and any argument that encourages us to climb back up has to point out where things may go if we don't resist.
It sucks that this requires us to defend the rights of people to speak whom we may intensely disagree with, but that's the crux of the matter. Either we become mature enough to understand that people will have discourse we dislike, and avoid it or engage with it as we see fit, or we continue to hide behind authority figures who will purport to keep us safe by controlling what we can say and think.
We need a list of these lizards so we know when to throw tomatoes and rotten eggs at them whenever they give a talk or share feel-good posts on LinkedIn.
people should be ashamed instead of proud when they write "disclaimer I work at X"
If this is the Google policy they may want to bake that policy into the way Chrome operates.
Don't give Google ideas.
Whether or not this is a good thing is a complex question. If you happen to be the target of this hatred and violence, and feel it is an existential threat to your livelihood, you might believe that it is a good thing to make it more difficult for those who are engaging in this behavior to enlarge their communities. On the other hand, if you believe eliminating communities by platform fiat is an existential threat to your livelihood, this may seem like a very bad thing.
(You might also think it's hypocritical, since you can access most of these communities via a browser. Google also controls the browser, and does make it difficult already to access some sites https://developers.google.com/safe-browsing/v4 . However, it does seem to have a higher bar for browsers than for social apps (e.g. malware, csam, iirc); some have suggested that there are legal reasons for this, I'm curious to learn more on this, but I have not seen any substantiation yet.)
The app is not the service; the protocol is not the platform.
https://toot.wales/about/more#unavailable-content
[1]: https://github.com/tuskyapp/faq bottom of the page
I’m indeed being threatened by various hate groups (one of them actually tried, and almost succeeded, to kill an acquaintance), but strangely enough they are never removed by Google or any other big corporations. Worst, each time I voice any slight complain about them, I am the one being censored. Some of those groups are even sometimes getting official support by the GAFAM. This is a really odd and unfair world.
If op is lying, he or she is lying.
But are some groups ok to threaten? Are some people ok to threaten?
It’s really unfortunate when someone fears for their life and I don’t want that for anyone.
However, lots of people fear for reasons that I don’t think are actually from threats of violence.
I had a friend explain how they literally feared for their life. When trying to console them I learned that the thing that was making them afraid was a friend’s Facebook post about a restaurant that supported some Bible group. Their reasoning was that the Bible group was anti-gay, and they might end up killing them for being an ally of gay friends.
Because of this they feared for their own life and wanted the friend to stop talking about it.
Now of course, there are multiple lame things about Bible groups being jerks, but certainly nothing to make this person think their life was in danger or directly threatened.
I’m not sure how to specifically help that person, but after several episodes like this, I don’t pay much attention to them when they say that they get death threats.
Maybe I’m just jaded but lots of people talk about death threats and I’m sure they perceive them as such. But having the details of the threat helps to differentiate the really dangerous people trying to kill others from the plentitudes of people saying “DIAF” who aren’t trying to kill, just being jerks.
There's a huge difference.
This is grossly unacceptable. Apps need some safe harbor too. Apps can not be responsible for every possible use of the app.
I disagree about your comparison. This app can connect to arbitrary domain names. This is getting blocked because you are not filtering the list of domains a user can connect to proactively.
That's wild & I can think of zero precedent for it.
That said, if you don't want Chrome and Firefox to be content aware, then you should argue that safe browsing should be eliminated from Firefox and Chrome. That is a self consistent position, but it may not be consistent with e.g. avoiding dramatic growth in botnets, ransomware, organized crime etc.
Safe browsing doesn't include sites for encouraging hatred and violence, etc. Only malware, social engineering, and "harmful"/"unwanted" applications. If they start including those sort of sites in their safe browsing lists, that would make your point here more relevant.
(Of course, some people get hit by safebrowsing unfairly. But I think in most cases, it is because someone compromised their site and used it for a malicious purpose, and then they struggle to get Google to remove it within a timeframe which is reasonable.)
Yet.
As you state, one can access these specific communities in a number of ways, including Google Chrome. If the community is the issue, go after the community, not an ActivityPub app that can access content from these and other communities.
Should Google also ban RSS reader apps that don't actively block RSS feeds from sites Google doesn't like?
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/jun/12/apple-rem...
In china. That is an important note that you left out to make Apple seem worse.
Edited to clarify: this was a description of the oppressive political rulers of China, not Apple or Chinese citizens in general.
You can't reasonably defend Apple's actions on the grounds that they were just following orders from the Communist Party of China.
There are ton of instances which much of the Fediverse blocks, but if you set up your own server and follow people on those instances, it's not 80% hate speech and racism as others would have you believe. Yes there is some of that, but there's also weebs, and anime and political discussion and weird gaming discussion and videos not posted anywhere else and memes and the great diversity of through we use to have on Reddit before it became a monoculture.
There are also straight up anarchist instances that justify violence and destruction of the state like Rage Love, Anticapitalist Party, and others.
It's a very big space, with new players entering and leaving every month.
Banning apps because they do or don't have block lists greatly misunderstands how the Fediverse works.
The problem is the fact that Google banning these apps borders on state censorship because of the monopolistic position Google has.
Busting up Google solves the correct problem.
So basically, Google only supports the Fediverse if, like itself, it engages in censorship. The Fediverse exists not to encourage hate speech, but to discourage censorship. Hate speech is the inevitable result of allowing humans to say what like they like. Some people will choose to be nasty. Many people believe the greater good is the free flow of information, and that adults are more than capable of filtering out and avoiding those information sources which make them uncomfortable. Instead, Google wants to treat everybody like children, and be the helicopter parent that swoops in and removes anything objectionable.
All these disparate media sources that we yearned for back in the cable-only days have finally turned to dogshit.
Because if it's "user types in the server URL and tries to log in", blaming the app is ridiculous.
(throwaway since the former name searches themselves to find new targets.)
When can I expect gmail to be removed too?
The far more likely reason is that they know we have an issue. They've been monitoring and they don't like what they've been hearing.
Good thing you can't find any hate speech on Play Store–promoted corporate behemoths Twitter and Facebook!
Some servers on the fediverse specifically allow unfettered hate speech.
Just look at the scale at which Facebook enables the distribution of right-wing propaganda: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/27/technology/what-if-facebo...
Twitter actually hosts the trashpile, they're more responsible for it than some app that just lets you access trashpiles on third party servers.
I'm not defending these hypothetical Fediverse apps that don't moderate. I'm saying that compared to Fediverse apps exposing a few thousand people to hate speech, Facebook and Twitter actively promoting bigotry, propaganda and conspiracy theories to tens or hundreds of millions of people is far more harmful — even if they make a nominal effort to prevent it from happening.
And, more to the point, I'm alleging that the reason Google is taking down the Fediverse apps and not Facebook or Twitter has nothing to do with their moderation policies, and everything to do with money.
Other than that, the instances themselves simply choose not to federate with questionable instances. This happens in an almost organic way where if an instance refuses to block federation with another questionable instance, other instances will then also refuse to federate with that instance.
The result is a network where hate-speech and undesirable content has been almost organically filtered out.
But keep in mind that the (client) apps themselves are more like web browsers. Anyone can host their own website and access its content through one of these apps. This also means that instances which are blocked by an app can very easily circumvent that as well.
(Sorry for my bad english and repeatedly using the word "instances")
I didn't intend to imply that chrome currently, intentionally blocks sites on other criteria. However, the framework is already there.
History shows that the ego of people always takes over if left unchecked. When it is possible to restrict something, that will eventually get restricted. This is especially true when discussing large companies, such as Google.
I was agreeing with you and not correcting you :-)
Wait, Gmail is made „by us” and not „by pesky them”. Gmail is sure ok.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/hi97fz/...
https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=4chan.org
As SSC says, even if witch hunts are genuinely bad, if you found a town with the founding principle of having no witch hunts, you will end up with a town with 5 genuine civil libertarians, and 100 witches.
I think an interesting strategy would be to found a site with an initially high level of censorship, but a public commitment to reduce the amount/degree of censorship on the site over time with a particular timetable.
My preferences determine what communities I prefer to be a part of.
I prefer to not be part of a community where the majority says super racist garbage.
As such, I choose not to join such a community/website.
That's where idea of public platforms as infrastructure (and actual infrastructure like DNS and carriers) if coming from.
This reminds me of people wanting to ban or filter torrent protocol itself, instead of illegal content on it.
So in theory, voat & co should either shrink or get less radical the more reddit-alternatives there are. That is, unless reddit is turning normal people into witches that will then populate the new alternative platforms.
Also if people are spread sufficiently thin, some of the sites will die from “no one is using this”, I think.
I don’t know how this all balances out, but what you brought up does seem like an important force/mechanism to take into account. So, I’ll say “Further work is needed in order to understand the behavior in this area.”, haha.
The dynamics involved in city districts rising and falling and rising again might be similar. Online communities lack the rent-dynamic however. A "difficult" part of town gets more attractive because the rent is much cheaper. I don't know whether there's anything equivalent in online communities that would "gentrify" a toxic community.
The average person puts their pitch fork back down and enjoys the bonding experience that a successful hunt brings to the community. The out-group isn't just persecuted because they are different, the whole process also helps confirm the unity of the in-group.
I was imagining an organization which from the outset planned to be very permissive in what they eventually allowed, with initial restrictions just being in order to cultivate a desirable community to start with, but now that you mention it, perhaps the motivation behind the policies don’t matter so much as the policies themselves. Good point.
That being said, I don’t imagine that TikTok will become quite as permissive in the end as I was imagining?
Plainly: I want reddit to censor hate speech on their site, but I don't want hosting companies to disallow those alernative sites to exist, nor do I want Chrome to disallow any user to visit any of those alternatives in their browser.
It should be illegal to deny fundamental infrastructure to someone on the basis of his philosophy or point of view. That's what a free society means.
> We don't have to subsidize their free use of internet resources.
We subsidize the FAANG's use of internet resources; the Internet was largely originally created with public money (military, academia, etc).
> They are welcome to buy their own servers or even rent them.
Are they? What if they get banned from there? What if they can't collect money from their community, because all the donation sites ban them? What if their donation sites are killed because all the payment processors drop them?
Your argument leads to the logical end of "they're welcome to make their own internet".
What happens when something you like to discuss falls into the category of hate speech? You think it couldn't happen, but plenty of topics that were totally reasonable subjects of discussion, plenty of totally reasonable publicly-held opinions from 20 years ago are now in this basket. It's totally plausible to imagine some newer topic you feel strongly about eventually becoming so, and you ending up on the side of wanting to have honest discussion about it and being locked out.
Can't imagine it happening to you? Well, maybe you don't like pedophilia, or the huge push of incest porn that seems to be everywhere. Maybe you have legitimate, non-racially-oriented concerns about the riots around the country? Maybe you're worried about some particular changes coming to your children's education, or you're worried about the impact of ideas like UBI? Well, your opinions that are acceptable to post in polite places today might not be in 2030.
The only way anyone should be okay with this continual incursion into free speech is if they have truly tied themselves to the idea of being 100% on board with whatever restriction is coming down the pipe next. Such a person has no principles, and it's hard to imagine defending them.
This is slippery-slope nonsense, just where this conversation always ends up. You can "what if..." you're way to us banning these individuals from driving cars if you want, but it's not what's being discussed.
I am very, very, very in favor of reddit disallowing hate speech on their community as that is an active behavior on the site itself for a community they own. I am very, very, very against any organization barring access to things like domain name registration, hosting, etc. on the basis of their expressed ideas up to the point of them directly enabling clearly criminal behavior (e.g., directly organizing violent attacks, sharing revenge porn, etc.).
Private citizens kicking someone out of a restaurant for being rude is not the same thing as government actors barring them from ever owning a restaurant, or going somewhere else where their rudeness is welcome.
> The only way anyone should be okay with this continual incursion into free speech is if they have truly tied themselves to the idea of being 100% on board with whatever restriction is coming down the pipe next. Such a person has no principles, and it's hard to imagine defending them.
This is a false dichotomy built on the aforementioned slippery slope fallacy.
You can't claim slippery slope if it already happened. Payment processors, domain name registrars, hosting providers, and anti-DDoS services already ban people they dislike. If we slide any further down this slope, the deplatformed will have to lay their own optic fibre.
And their own app stores.
And their own apps.
And their own domain name registrars.
And their own payment processors.
The parent poster simply said that they want to join communities free of (or, mostly free of) hate speech and that being free/mostly free of hate speech is an attractive quality for them.
Not once did they advocate for denying infrastructure or any of the other things your entire comment is based on. In fact, they stated the opposite.
Banning illegal content, spam, harassment, etc (which even the most hardcore "censorship free" platforms do) are also forms of censorship.
The law gives you a legitimate and stable line that you can draw between allowed and disallowed speech. It's fine for a platform to censor what's illegal, because in a sense, we all agree on the law and have a say in its content. But we have no say in big tech content policy, and that's what makes it illegitimate.
My basic point is that it's infuriating and wrong for big tech to impose its values on the public. A public space that's privately owned is still a public space. A free society is one where you don't get barred from public spaces because of your opinions.
You’re not actually against lines being drawn through legal speech — you just don’t like where they fall.
That's a somewhat bold claim. At minimum, CAN-SPAM makes the worst of it illegal.
> [An Act] To regulate interstate commerce by imposing limitations and penalties on the trans-mission of unsolicited commercial electronic mail via the Internet.
[1] https://www.ftc.gov/sites/default/files/documents/cases/2007...
Platforms aren't public venues, they're private businesses offering access to a service under terms that serve their interests and business needs first and foremost... terms that everyone agreed to before being able to use the platform.
>The law gives you a legitimate and stable line that you can draw between allowed and disallowed speech. It's fine for a platform to censor what's illegal, because in a sense, we all agree on the law and have a say in its content. But we have no say in big tech content policy, and that's what makes it illegitimate.
The law also allows for private ownership of businesses, contracts and freedom of association. The law says Google's platform is Google's property and Google can do whatever it darn well likes with it.
>You can shut down spam without harming the principle of free expression because you can express any idea in a way that isn't spam.
Who gets to define what spam is? Free expression isn't free if someone has the ability to define any arbitrary speech they don't like as "spam" and censor it. All of the slippery slope arguments applied to censorship of any other form of speech also apply to spam.
Technically you could probably bring it down if you simulate a massive amount of users who only access spam sites but that would probably become rather expensive because you would attack your own nodes and your own nodes would try to help the network. It would also need to persist forever else everything would simply go back to normal shortly after the attack is stooped.
Do you allow any form of speech in your house or is your house a platform that censors speech?
4chan, being the obvious exception, since content can be created anonymously.
That right, and duty, does not exist on a private platform that you don’t own. You are limited by the TOS and license that you, like most, willfully skip over. A private, non-government platform can tell you to STFU and Get Out and they don’t even need a reason, because it’s their platform.
You can easily set up your own free speech platform, but nobody is required to listen. That’s the main attraction of social media, a more-or-less guaranteed audience. At least until someone tells you to GTFO if you’re not hosting.
Counties can imprison or kill you for speaking incorrectly.
Companies? Only have the power to cause me trouble when they are oligopolies, e.g. big tech right now. It can be quite severe trouble, even if it isn’t literal imprisonment.
A house? I am aware that poverty (and being a minor) forces some people to live with abusive persons who can give them a choice of silence or homelessness. That kind of evil doesn’t scale up to affect everyone (perhaps if it did we might try harder to fix it?)
If they deleted the apps already installed on your phone, then I'd agree.
The kinds of people who are going to spend a lot of time doing that are likely to be people who like how reddit works a lot, but have an ax to grind against some aspect of it, and usually that aspect is moderation. Most normal people who interact inoffensively have very few interactions with moderators. It's only going to be controversial people who gravitate to that sort of thing, and any platform that's full of people who frequently court controversy is bound to fill up rather quickly with insane freaks.
Unless you have been deplatformed, then there is a lot of inertia stopping a community from upping and moving to a new platform.
Other places on the list are much more reasonable.
I can think of no faster way to stifle innovation, research, and the human spirit.
I'd way rather read a good-faith, well written exploration into a controversial topic, than someone who toes the mainstream line of acceptable opinions entirely while being rude and belligerent.
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/9a33ep/orlando-shooting-r...
"When your content is too cancerous for church, maybe the issue isn't the church".
Feel free to replace church with whatever is appropriate to your situation, but there have always been censors and there will always be people who resist the censors. The censors have acted against homosexuals, trans folk, hippies, anti-war demonstrators and many others who we no longer see fit to censor today and I will continue to be in the camp of people who work to thwart the censors.
And said hate peddlers then complain that they don't have the reach they enjoyed on Twitter, Youtube and Facebook... well d'oh. Turns out one who is not a Nazi, a journalist reporting about them, or an antifa activist collecting information wants to spend their free time on a platform dominated by Nazis.
You're describing illegal content. Nobody is objecting to taking that down. Everyone else is talking about censoring legal content.
There was very little sign of intelligence. I had no urge to go back.
You’re either a censor or you’re not. If you want a censored platform, say it; if you want an uncensored site, say that.
For example, it's been well known for awhile that if you subscribe to any of the men's rights subs, you are auto-banned from several of the feminism ones (including TwoXChromosomes). That kind of thing certainly isn't lenient but also isn't under Reddit's control.
It does not matter what the content of the comment was, of course. What matters is the fact you left the bubble and interacted with a different one, you traitorous scum.
As a person who was born in a country that tried implementing equal outcomes for 70 years, and ended up with extreme corruption, poverty and social distrust, I don't want to see another round of this happen here. So I am hoping that if enough reasonable people acknowledge the problem, the society will reach some sort of a compromise before the lives of several generations are completely wasted, like they were in the USSR. And having platforms where this sort of discussion is not considered "cancerous" is a very important step IMHO.
That's the tip of the iceberg though. There's a whole industry of wrapping this narrative into struggle session-like training while charging 7 figures to various-level budgets. You can find many examples like [1] if you search for Chris Rufo. Except adults sort of understand that it's a kickback-driven nonsense and don't take it seriously. So now they are taking the Critical Race Theory with very similar postulates into schools.
It's not about helping minorities learn from the more successful, and reach for the stars. That's purely about making kids hate what their parents did for them, rather than building on top of that.
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20200715192955im_/https://nmaahc...
[1] https://christopherrufo.com/cult-programming-in-seattle/
That poster was at the National Museum of African-American History and Culture, where you might expect to learn the differences between African-American culture and the dominant White-Anglo-American Culture. Context is important. In no way it implied that "Enlightenment-age values ... should be opposed." Also, it's kind of ironic to be cheering for the takedown of speech you didn't like on a thread where you complain about the silencing of the speech you do like. If you don't like what the poster said or how it said it, maybe oppose it with more speech.
About the whole industry of "training while charging 7 figures" isn't that just how the pendulum swings right now? Before it was prayer meetings and then survivalist tactics for team-building. Plus most employment in the US is at-will, so I suppose if employees don't like it, they are free to find other employers. Freedom cuts both ways too. Also, what's wrong with 7 figures? I thought the free-market and entrepreneurs charging for the value they bring to willing buyers were all good things.
When you conclude it's "purely about making kids hate what their parents did for them", well, that's the kind of hyperbole that's hard to take seriously. It is totally free of argument or evidence, and it sounds so much like the conservatives of the 50's and 60's about how the peace-activists, civil rights leaders, and hippies were going to turn their sons and daughters against their parents.
The equal opportunity people, aka liberals, mostly just want people to have the same access to schools that whites have had for decades.
The "equal outcomers," aka the right, have decided that minorities having equal access to schooling is a conspiracy theory at the highest levels, and have been attempting to silence the opposition. (See, e.g. Glen Beck and Tucker Carlson urging their followers to doxx and threaten their critics.)
It's now getting to a point where raising one's kids to be proud of their achievements, seek self-improvement, and pick friends based on shared values, is considered sinful and is being pushed back against.
Again, this is something to take up with the right, which is dismissive of science, academic performance, or the general use of one's brain (see e.g., the current administration), and which has instituted ideological purity tests for leadership positions (see e.g., the NRA, the Federalist Society, the current administration, etc.).
On the left, academic, athletic, cultural and artistic treatment are celebrated, but not at the expense of values. See, for example, Hollywood, the NBA, the music industry, etc. Compare to the NFL, the most popular sport among conservatives, where athletic achievement is the only thing that matters--cheating, drug use, physical violence, and other personal misbehavior is acceptable by athletes and coaches as long as they're winning).
I would disagree with that. Kids from the families with inherited wealth always enjoyed their hilltop mansions, gated communities, private schools and Ivy League admissions by donation. And they continue doing that, they're above the rules. Nobody is going to put a low barrier social housing in their backyard, or force their kids to network with us, the plebs.
It's the middle class that made their own wealth is under attack now. Doctors, engineers, small business founders. Apparently, we can't have in a community with no used needles near the playgrounds. Because poor homeless. I can't apparently spend time teaching my pre-school kids to read and to write, so once they go to school, they can focus on more advanced stuff with other like minded kids. For the sake of social justice, the class has to be diluted by a few troublemakers whos parents didn't care. But, of course, not the class where the Governor's kids go.
Mind you, nobody will mind if you go and help the affected people directly. Go offer free counseling to homeless. Go teach Python to kids from poor families. Go do lemonade stand projects with underrepresented minorities. But do it in your own free time and at your own expense. I am pretty certain, many reasonable people will follow, since our society generally values being generous and positive. Except that's not what the activists are doing. They don't want to solve the problem in their free time, they want others to somehow find time and solve the problem for them.
>See, e.g. Glen Beck and Tucker Carlson urging their followers to doxx and threaten their critics.
I've seen the piece from Tucker Carlson. NYT journalists threatened to publish his home address. He stated that it already happened before, leading to threats to his family, and said that if they do it again, he will retaliate. He didn't mention any personal details there, so the NYT pulled back and they've reached a stalemate.
>See, for example, Hollywood, the NBA, the music industry, etc.
Hollywood has deteriorated to releasing heavily engineered comic book films. The art aspect is gone, the creativity is gone, many genres like parody/comedy are gone. Mainstream music isn't at it's peak either. It's pretty consistent with the left-leaning big tech, that focuses on making people replaceable drones following procedures, because they have much less bargaining power this way. I am not into sports, so no clue on NBA/NFL.
Well, that kind of people now want to run our entire society this way. They want you to be that loyal mediocrity, infinitely thankful for the handout, and supporting their cause without questioning.
Believe me, it's a road to nowhere. Corporate mediocrities end up taking antidepressants for life, or killing themselves after the boss gets fired and they have zero shot at paying that mortgage. The life of self-improvement, hard work and achievement is 1000x more rewarding and I'm glad more people are starting to realize that.
We need more people like you speaking up though. Because virtually every criticism from outside the minorities is now almost unconditionally labeled racist.
Edit: Can someone explain the downvotes? Is the argument that there isn't an authoritarian left? I'm referring to this basic model [0]
[0] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/9c/Po...
People call that kind of twisting of facts and words "cancerous" because it is. You could argue reasonably that attempts to address current inequity are misguided or have gone too far, but not by misrepresenting what people believe.
It always does. Each time someone proclaims equity, they carve out some sort of exception for themselves and their family. Like the mayor of Chicago that mysteriously had heavy police presence around her home, while ordering them to stand down everywhere else.
[0] https://chicago.suntimes.com/city-hall/2020/8/20/21377608/li...
To push the analogy to the extreme, consuming illegal pornography doesn't actually harm anyone, the production does, however the consumption drivers production, therefore the consumption does harm.
I agree.
Lots of legal gray area ones that revolve around data hoarding / archiving are constantly threatened and sometimes taken down for piracy. The subreddits try to police the most blatant piracy but due to the nature of why people archive/hoard data it can be difficult.
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/qvygwq/reddits-piracy-sub...
/r/datahoarders and /r/opendirectories are a couple other I personally have seen similar things happen. In my opinion they're a couple of the greatest subreddits out there so the fact that they could be banned out of nowhere on a technicality is a little concerning.
Luckily most of these groups are tech savvy enough to run their own IRC servers.
Opening an opportunity for someone else to sell the same "my fictional private sector free speech assurances that I imagined were part of the constitution are being upheld here" story to build a community
We live in an age where people seem to think in very black and white terms and if your beliefs don't align you shouldn't have them or be able to voice them.
Aside from inciting violence, your beliefs are yours. If they aren't breaking the law, you do you. I don't have to agree with them or support them, essentially 'don't tread on me'.
But people need to remember when you deplatform these racist, ugly thoughts and words, you push those people together, galvanizing them and their beliefs. As others in this thread have stated, I believe that's why voat got so bad so quickly.
As they say, sunlight is the best disinfectant.
I don't know what the end all solution is here, but I know I deal with racism on an almost daily basis in real life, and I'm Hispanic, so I can't imagine how bad it must be for some others. Pretending it doesn't exist won't fix it. Pushing it to the furthest corners of the internet won't make it go away in real life.
Pretty much all the subs like the the_donald, republicans, conservative, asktrumpsupporters that are against the big tech censorship will censor (ban) you for just showing their hypocrisy.
I clicked on few links or r/RedditAlternatives, and they look like Facebook pages of rural Ohio.
I remember there were a bunch of posts in /r/zerowaste about someone explicitly advocating to be made a mod so that they can moderate the subreddit as an anti-capitalist. I really had to credit that person for the bravado of saying: "I'll ban people I disagree with, voooote for meeeeee".
In fact, the ONLY political subreddit I'm aware of that does not engage in this behavior is r/Libertarian. Credit to them for putting their money where their mouth is.
To be fair the creator of the sub came back and fixed it.
I was banned from my (very liberal) U.S. state's subreddit for quoting Martin Luther King. I quoted a passage from one his speeches that denounced political violence, such as the arson and vandalism we've seen in Kenosha recently. The subreddit moderator banned me within minutes, called me a Nazi, and immediately denied the appeal.
This is like saying:
> Pretty much all the discussion groups that are against government censorship will censor you (throw you out) just for showing their hypocrisy.
It's not hypocritical to moderate one forum, on a platform where everyone can create his own forum, while also demanding that the platform itself doesn't censor discussions, anymore then it's hypocritical to moderate a discussion group, while also demanding that the government doesn't censor your discussions.
Moderation happens at the lowest level possible. Any content removal at a higher level is censorship.
The amount of Google employees here on HN who enjoy surveillance capitalism salaries and bonuses might be the reason.
While, one the one hand, I don't have a lot of trouble with delivery even from a residential IP address and I'd recommend self-hosting, I understand anyone who's hesitant. My mail lands in Google spamboxes much more often than it should (I don't send any automated mail these days, i.e. not even website notifications or anything: everything is hand-written or at least triggered by the person receiving the email; my sending IP has been stable for a decade). Another downside of Google is that they hide the existence of the spam folder and many people will simply never see it and be able to update its filters by replying to me or marking it as not-spam. Heck, some Google-for-corporate mail service even blocks your email at smtp level and there is no recourse. By diversifying receiving servers, at least Google doesn't get to set one standard: if your mail doesn't arrive in a Google inbox, it's currently extremely hard to argue that "but it's google's fault" (when it totally is). Clearly I as an individual have an issue and the big google doesn't.
That being said, imagine if this happened on the Apple App Store...
Most people won't put in the effort though.