7mo ago

Funkwhale Wants to Filter Out Far-Right Music

wedistribute.org Funkwhale Wants to Filter Out Far-Right Music

Funkwhale is building a new mechanism to filtering out music from Nazis and White Supremacists. In doing so, this opens a can of worms.

The Funkwhale music platform is alive and in active development, and they're working on a feature to filter far-right artists off the network. Some Fediverse self-hosters are divided on letting a third party decide what should be allowed in their library.

Fediverse @lemmy.zip

Funkwhale Wants to Filter Out Far-Right Music

wedistribute.org /2025/02/funkwhale-filter/

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Fediverse @lemmy.world

Funkwhale Wants to Filter Out Far-Right Music

wedistribute.org /2025/02/funkwhale-filter/

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32 comments

Are they blocking illegal content (such as content that promotes violence or issues threats) and content against the terms of service (like hateful, trolling, or disrespectful content)?
Or are they banning people based on their political beliefs or who they voted for, even if their content is not political in any way whatsoever?
And how are they defining alt right? A literal Neo Nazi? Or someone who voted Republican?
- And how are they defining alt right? A literal Neo Nazi? Or someone who voted Republican?
  Why repeat yourself?
  
  It is one of these cases where that "OR" approaches a singular circle.
  
  Because despite the insistence for years, those are not the same thing. Full stop.
  
  No shit. They are not the same thing, they are heavily overlapping adjacent sets of people. You draw the line at alt-right, you are left with less than 20% of Republican voters, but a 100% of MAGA hat-bearers. This distinction is more theoretical than practical.
  
  They're not nazis, just NSDAP voters concerned about the state of the economy
  
  This is what I suspected. I can get behind blocking actual Neo Nazis and hate groups, and illegal content, but when it becomes "blocking anyone who disagrees with me" that can easily be abused, especially if the people running the list can't tell the difference between Nazis, MAGA, Republicans, Centrists, and Libertarians. Or someone who can't tell the difference between a tankie, a communist, a socialist, a democratic socialist, or an anarchist. Contrary to some people's beliefs, all of these things are not the same.
  People are welcome to block whomever they wish and have the power to curate their own feeds, but when someone else does it, and there is no way to opt out of that, then it becomes censorship or suppression of information.
  
  We've seen this happen a lot with Mastodon instances, where people have various beefs and disagreements, and it sometimes results in people advocating everyone blocks an instance regardless of what actually happened. Unfortunately, people are more likely to hit the block-button based on hearsay than they are to do research on whether the instance is actually a bad actor.
  It gets super ugly sometimes, and has been abused in the past.
  
  And I have seen block lists where most of the stuff is toxic and should be blocked, but then mixed in there are people who pissed off the person maintaining the block list, usually over some petty dispute or the fact that they voted for the wrong guy in the last election. Unfortunately a lot of these distributed block lists wind up becoming the maintainer's personal weapon against enemies.
- For the time being, it seems like they're primarily targeting White Supremacist and Neo-Nazi content, but it's one of those things where the scope could open up to include a lot of different music subgenres. That being said, the mechanism is purely genre-based, it doesn't directly target individual artists.
- based on their political beliefs
  Nazism being the political belief.
  And how are they defining alt right?
  It's music tags that literally have phrases like nazi or white power in the phrase.
- The article does explain some of these. Look at the list of banned genres, it's literal neo-Nazism.

32 comments