this post was submitted on 30 Jun 2023

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what free speech means in the context of a somewhat anonymous internet? (sh.itjust.works)

submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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My current view is that while I want to promote openness and free speech that can really only work in a context where the person exercising their speech feels some necessity to use it responsibly and in an honest way.

On the internet that takes a lot of self control because the social norms of every day life don’t always apply because:

no one knows who you are
there is not a human being right in front of you that you might feel empathy for
there are no consequences to anything you say
not all posts are even by humans.

With all these taken together there is a compelling argument that speech may need to be more highly regulated on the internet than in face to face interactions. However there are people with legitimate ( beliefs and ideas honestly held that they wish to discuss ) views that I worry are going to be silenced and further marginalized.

This is bad for society because if people get dismissed or pushed aside it just breeds resentment, distrust, and more misunderstanding. I think as we start defederating and making decisions we are setting up a dangerous situation where it becomes potentially easy to defederate for the wrong reasons.

For instance "we think they are being racist" or "they are spreading misinformation" could have unintended consequences. Some religions and communities might have beliefs that appear to be pseudoscience or even discrimination. However if these are honestly held beliefs that they are willing to engage in civil discourse around I don't think it's right to actually block them.

This is likely just the beginning of a much larger discussion so what are your thoughts?---

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[–] [email protected] 29 points 2 years ago (2 children)

I think as we start defederating and making decisions we are setting up a dangerous situation where it becomes potentially easy to defederate for the wrong reasons.

Mastodon has operated this way for years and it's worked out really well. They're currently at 12 million or 13 million users right now. Read my comment I wrote on it here. Basically all the Nazis flee to the Nazi servers because they can't follow or subscribe to their fellow Nazis or talk about Nazi stuff. So they leave. This makes it safer for users and easier for mods to keep their users safe.

And like... sure, there's drama. People defederate for dumb reasons. But Mastodon accounts are portable and you can hop around from server to server easily. And 99% of the time people don't defederate for no reason.

Some religions and communities might have beliefs that appear to be pseudoscience or even discrimination.

This is often because they are. My old fundamentalist Christian cult I grew up in was incredibly homophobic. They 'looked' like they had beliefs that were discriminatory because they were. You do not get a 'be a bigot free' card because your religion says you are one. You can change your shitty religion (conservative fundamentalist religions have done so tons of times in the past). Minorities cannot change who they are. There are tons of other religious communities that do not discriminate against minorities so that standard is not unreasonable.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 years ago

Based take. Just to add to this, despite the Mormon heads of church trying to undo MANY years of super problematic viewpoints, many members still believe that Black people are cursed by God and are inherently evil for something that happened thousands of years ago. It's extremely prevalent, especially in Utah

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

At the end of the day, you are what you do.

[+] [email protected] 14 points 2 years ago (1 children)

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 2 years ago (1 children)

4chan is a great example of what places that consider free speech an indelible right will turn into

People who have the most vile and hostile opinions will flock there and push most of the reasonable people out

Talking to a band of brainwashed idiots who hide their hate behind a thin veneer pseudointellectualism gets old pretty fast and, as /pol/ likes to point out, those opinions color their view of reality and will seep into discussions of seemingly unrelated topics

Most of us don't want to have to deconstruct some non-sensical ideology every time we make a statement. They think this means their opinions are some hidden truth that we can't handle.

The reality is that we can prove them wrong, but they can't or won't accept it so we give up on them and go where there are more reasonable people to interact with

[+] [email protected] 13 points 2 years ago (2 children)

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I worry that this "banish them to the corner" policy will combine with rapidly changing limits on acceptable speech and thought to hand the extremists a growing captive audience of resentful exiles. Is it really worth banishing Jane Churchlady if the price is making Gab a mainstream social network?

[+] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (2 children)

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago (3 children)

I think we might be arguing two slightly different things here. You're worried about the consequences of not shunning extremists hard enough to keep groups that are already down, down. I'm worried about the consequences of shunning people who are neither bien-pensants nor extremists as extremists, because it's a strong incentive for the mal-pensants to support the extremists if not become extremists.

Also, your argument turns on the assumption that the extremists are incapable of making their own platforms and must rely on platforms offered by others. My argument is that if you deplatform anyone within eyesight of an extremist, it's a matter of time before you've deplatformed so many people that they build their own successful platform. And the platform of the deplatformed will be ugly.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

not to mention that as times change, you may eventually find yourself deplatformed as well

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

Yeah, it's called Gab

[+] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago (1 children)

You deeply misunderstood my argument and threw in gratuitous insults. So I'll try to explain it again with a character.

Jane Churchlady is a social conservative. She believes that God disapproves of homosexuality. She thinks same-sex marriage shouldn't have been made legal, and she says so. She votes for the local right-wing party, but she can't bring herself to vote for the racist far right party. Jane Churchlady will not change her belief that God disapproves of homosexuality, and isn't willing to lie about it to stay on a social network.

What do you do when Jane Churchlady registers for Lemmy?

If you let Jane Churchlady stay, she says that while she prays for gay people, they are sinful in the eyes of God.
If you ban Jane Churchlady, she's out of your feed, but she registers for Gab instead and starts voting for the racist far right party after reading the posts there. Because you tried to deplatform her, she has been radicalized. If you hadn't tried to deplatform her, she wouldn't have switched to Gab and wouldn't have been radicalized.
If you've got a third scenario, tell me what happens to Jane Churchlady.

[+] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago (2 children)

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

If you've already concluded that Jane Churchlady, a figure I constructed to be a social conservative who isn't an extremist, is in reality an extremist then we've been talking past each other for quite a while.

So you're very worried that if Christian bien-pensants are exposed to Jane Churchlady saying that gay marriage is against the will of God and she's praying for gay couples, several of them will think she has a point and drift rightward, and preventing that is worth driving Jane Churchlady herself into extremism? I'd discounted the possibility that Jane Churchlady would convert anyone rather than be a nuisance. I can follow your logic now, although your conclusion that building a fence around bien-pensants is worth outright handing a 10-20% market share to extremists is a hard pill to swallow.

But the way, if you felt insulted it might be because the hat fits, my last paragraph was purely rhetorical.

Your answer to being called out making a backhanded accusation is to make another backhanded accusation?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (2 children)

Ah yes, the good old "if I insinuate or say something awful about you and it offends you, it's because you're guilty."

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Actually, it is legal to be in the kkk, or organize as the kkk, assemble and spread those ideals. It is not legal for them to commit crimes like arson (cross burning) or murder (lynching), or conspiring to do those crimes, but simply existing, calling yourselves the kkk, wearing hoods, and saying racist shit is legal.

In fact:

that didn't go away by trying to compromise with them!

Actually, it kinda did. More accurately, it "went away" by convincing their potential converts (mostly their kids) that those old fashioned ideals are stupid and untrue, it was actually exactly through conversation and exposure to other cultures and their arts that the kkk saw their numbers dwindle to their meager membership levels of today.

I'm not saying we need to follow that playbook, just because it worked once doesn't mean it will again I suppose, but it was through discussion that their membership suffered, not through "bans" (or in this context making being in the kkk illegal. Since it isn't illegal, they can't have done that.)

[+] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

I believe that part is what one would consider "crime."

It is still, currently, not illegal to be in the kkk or be a racist POS no matter what either of us think about that. It still exists actually, remember 2016? David Duke, the leader of the thing, who is a real person who's name and location is known, has not been arrested for being the leader of the thing, supported trump on the news? They do get arrested for crimes they commit all the time of course, since they often do commit crimes, but putting on a hood and saying stupid shit is simply not one of them.

There have actually been three separate KKKs btw. The first one was actually made illegal, but that was declared unconstitutional in the 1880s. Making it illegal actually isn't what killed it either, it continued on even as people got locked up, the leader disbanded it because it was becoming generalized violence and he "only" wanted racist violence, he basically said "look how they massacred my boy" and pulled the plug. And then the supreme court case said it was unconstitutional.

The second one in the 20s had somehow convinced it's members they were upstanding members of society, until their leader got convicted of rape and murder, and all the protestants they had recruited said "are we the baddies?" So they splintered and declined for years, until the organization literally got sold, and the IRS hit them with a lein for back taxes, and they shuttered their doors like a failed company.

Then from there they tried to immediatly start a new one a few years later from what was left, but it was outed in superman comics and books, more splintering and low membership as a result, the civil rights movement won, more splintering and low membership, and now we're at today, where historians attribute the decline to the Klan's lack of competence in the use of the Internet, their history of violence, a proliferation of competing hate groups, and a decline in the number of young racist activists who are willing to join groups at all.

Again, though the klan has been in decline steadily since like 1945, it is still legal, so "making it illegal" clearly isn't what caused the decline. The decline was caused by Superman..

..Or you know, that stuff I said earlier about exposure to other people, culture, and art making them not want to be racist against those people. Don't minimize the role desegregation and the civil rights movement played in all of that, it wasn't just the FBI (who killed MLK btw) prosecuting the criminals in the kkk, it was people of different races playing together on the playground, eating lunch together in the cafeteria, and becoming the next generation of kkk "recruits" that wanted fuck all to do with them since they already knew how dumb it was due to those experiences. Literally, people like MLK "won," unless you count "winning" complete destruction, but I'd count 3,000 total members (down from 4-6 million peak) out of 334,967,580 total US population low enough to call a win, personally, and again that isn't because the FBI made the klan "illegal."

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I'd argue that we're not more divided because of extremists being given platforms, but rather the opposite:

Because we build comfortable echochambers for ourselves (by algorithmically, or manually, cutting off contrary opinions) that succumb to groupthink, which by nature develop to be more and more extreme. The same is true for the "others" that get sent to their corner of the internet because they're wrong and not welcome.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 years ago (1 children)

work in a context where the person exercising their speech feels some necessity to use it responsibly

Nice phrasing

However there are people with legitimate ( beliefs and ideas honestly held that they wish to discuss ) views that I worry are going to be silenced and further marginalized.

Sounds kind and charitable. It is not clear to me how universal this is given your opening paragraphs. I would agree that is they way it should be but I don't think that reflects how it is. We need to react based on the actual reality we live in.

However if these are honestly held beliefs that they are willing to engage in civil discourse around I don't think it's right to actually block them.

But what if there is a significant number of people who are just awful humans, or don't have a thought for learning, or are not being open or honest etc.

I support the idea of engagement and discussion but let's be honest there are people who aren't interested in that. There are people who are racist. There are people who really do think you and I are going to hell and they are happy to know that. Sorry there is a reason I don't associate with people like that in real life and I don't want to on line either.

It is not my mission to discuss this kind of thing with all those people. Trolls and awful humans sometimes do need to be ignored. Otherwise we cannot have interesting or productive conversations with anyone.

I say, let those that want to engage and learn find a server or community with standards that we can tolerate. Any community that doesn't have standards to keep reasonable order we should block.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I am pretty sure we either agree in full or mostly agree with each other.

But what if there is a significant number of people who are just awful humans, or don’t have a thought for learning, or are not being open or honest etc.

Yeah I agree at this point if people are being systematically terrible then they should get banned or if there is a whole instance of them that instance should be defederated. I say systematically because maybe someone just brought up a hot button issue or maybe they just had a bad day. Like if it's 90% posts are normal and then just now and then they have a rage post I don't think that makes them a terrible person. If for example out of a whole instance there is one or two slightly problematic communities but as a whole that instance is fine then it probably shouldn't be defederated.

I support the idea of engagement and discussion but let’s be honest there are people who aren’t interested in that. There are people who are racist. There are people who really do think you and I are going to hell and they are happy to know that. Sorry there is a reason I don’t associate with people like that in real life and I don’t want to on line either.

Right I get that but I think we already have a fix for that. We can already block people and block communities we don't like so we don't need to associate with people we don't like if we don't want to. However we also don't need to shut down their voice entirely if they are doing nothing else then posting horrible memes now and then. However that might not always be true some instance might want to focus on a certain type of advocacy like Open Source and so a meme community for racists might just make no sense for a instance like that.

It is not my mission to discuss this kind of thing with all those people. Trolls and awful humans sometimes do need to be ignored. Otherwise we cannot have interesting or productive conversations with anyone.

Yeah I think that makes total sense there is no need for anyone to do anything they don't want to do in their free time. I do just wonder for the people who are not terrible but maybe just fallen into an ideology or have been radicalized. Would banning them and pushing them into a corner of the internet with only other radicalized people make them ever figure out they are wrong? How are they going to realize that they are wrong unless they are allowed to participate in a wider discourse where someone can challenge them on their beliefs? Does banning and defederating actually the problem in the case of people we just disagree with or does it make the divides worse and more entrenched?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago

Weren't there studies done on how deplatforming Nazi communities help deradicalize vulnerable people. Also its good to keep in mind that people who dont think they are wrong don't care to hear other people out. They would rather call you slurs than admit being wrong. You can't help someone who doesnt want help unfortunately. I saw a good video by "that dang dad" on if the left neglects "wbite cis men." And I think contrapoints is a good resource for helping people deradicalize.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Are there also unintended consequences of letting in people who are being openly and unabashedly racist?

[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 years ago

It gives an air of legitimacy to those thoughts.

Those people are LOUD but they aren't nearly as numerous as we, or they, think.

Most people, by and large, just want to do their little thing and want to be nice to others, and want others to be nice to them. Most people don't care that their neighbors are a black gay couple, as long as they're nice.

When we let 10 people who post a 100 racist memes a day drown out the 100 regular people who post 10 times a day gives everyone the impression there is more racism than there really is, which breeds more racism, and drives out regular people who don't want to be on a racist platform.

(Using racism here as a stand-in for whatever form of bigotry you feel passionate about)

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/R0jvd1Ck4y.jpg

Link is broken? Here's a Google one:

https://images.app.goo.gl/JMhtumiiPvmjvUQaA

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 years ago

Free Speech Radicalism on the internet would be great in some places. It would be like 4chan but using I2P or Tor. I agree. Ideas need to be included so that people can be told how wrong they are and shown as idiots to the public. The internet is a good media for Free Speech Radicalism because you can always block someone and that's the end of the harrassment.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

Edit: deleted for brevity, helped with readibility

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

thanks for the suggestion the post has been updated.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 2 years ago

Nigger faggot chink