Skip Navigation
Remote View
Controversial - the place to discuss controversial topics @sh.itjust.works
Hastur @sh.itjust.works

Calls for defederation - Is the idea of the open marketplace of ideas outdated?

Lately I see a lot of calls do have specific instances defederated for a particular subset of reasons:

  • Don't like their content
  • Dont like their political leaning
  • Dont like their free speech approach
  • General feeling of being offended
  • I want a safe space!
  • This instance if hurting vulnerable people

I personally find each and every one of these arguments invalid. Everybody has the right to live in an echo chamber, but mandating it for everyone else is something that goes a bit too far.

Has humanity really developed into a situation where words and thoughts are more hurtful than sticks and stones?

Edit: Original context https://slrpnk.net/post/554148

Controversial topic, feel free to discuss!

143 comments

  • Is the idea of the open marketplace of ideas outdated?

    Yes, it is. We ran this experiment with 8chan already. I consider Frederick Brennans opinion on internet moderation pretty well-tested by reality, unlike the 'free speech absolutists' I meet. Musk is a classic poster boy for that mindset and the instant he was given power his convictions really amounted to 'hide the stuff I don't like, boost the stuff I do'. So I think we should all be suspicious of people who claim this at this point.

    8chan exists, as do lots of deeper, darker unmoderated boards. If they are superior, why aren't the majority of people there? Why are they almost universally despised and shamed?

    Has humanity really developed into a situation where words and thoughts are more hurtful than sticks and stones?

    No, humanity lives in reality where thoughts lead to actions and pretending like there's a firewall between the two is unrealistic. 8chan is routinely linked to mass shootings, and NOT JUST IN THE USA

  • Has humanity really developed into a situation where words and thoughts are more hurtful than sticks and stones?

    What a ridiculous question. "Is a stabbing really more hurtful than a gunshot?"

    They're both hurtful!

    We can't stop physical abuse in the real world by defederating with a hateful instance, but we can stop the hate speech from having an audience here.

    Hateful content is routinely disguised as memes, "just asking questions", "just a joke", etc. Humans are human, and many of us are suggestible. There's a reason Holocaust denial is literally illegal in Germany. If people hear something often enough, from enough people, it doesn't matter what it is. They'll start to wonder if it's true.

    It's super easy to teach a child to hate, for instance. They believe everything they hear, and it's very human to hate things and certain people. This doesn't just go away when they hit the legal age to have an account here. Reddit allows 13 year olds to have an account. (Or is that Facebook? Whichever.) I don't know what the official policy is of this instance or Lemmy in general, but the fewer 13 year olds we have reading literal hate speech, the better. It's a black hole that it's easy to get sucked into.

    If every "good" instance blocks the hateful ones, then no one will see their content unless they go out of their way to sign up for that specific instance. That's a good thing. It keeps the hate locked away where it's hard to stumble into.

    Now, what counts as hate? Whatever the admin decides. If the admin chooses to delegate that decision to the users, it's still the admin choosing to do that. If you don't like that, find a different instance.

    Fuck hate. Fuck Nazis. Fuck the alt-right. Defederate them.

  • Maybe the disconnect is what is meant by open market. You might actually be complaining that people have too much choice and are free to start an instance, using their own resources and choose to disassociate from some others users. If someone sets up a roadside stand and lets their friends sell things there but refuses to let a friend of a friend sell his swastika stickers there, that isn't censorship if the guy is allowed to open his open stand. It's just not being overly helpful. If no one wants to go to swastika guy's stand, and everyone makes fun of him, or even discourages other people from going there, that isn't censorship either. It's only censorship if he isn't allowed to set up his own stand by someone in charge of that sort of thing.

    What it sounds like you want isn't a censorship-free platform, but a platform that is restricted from not choosing to give everyone the exact same voice. That may sound more fair to you, but when it costs person A money to facilitate person B's access, and you don't allow person A the choice to opt out of that (basically raising the bar for person A to participate), you're actually restricting A instead of being fair to B.

    In the case where person A is actually a public resource, that's where it becomes censorship to block person B's access, because then it's a position of authority determining who gets to say what. But when person A is a regular guy, hog-tying him into helping person B blather about something hateful, or even just annoying, to person A is actually infringing on rights instead of promoting them.

    • I think you nailed it. These instances can be started by anyone, for any reason, ran any way you want. Just as it is nazi guys right to be nazis on their instance, it's everyone elses right to say no. That is not censorship, it's freedom of speech. The owners of other instances are enacting their freedom of speech by saying "no", and possibly even "fuck you". To cry and piss yourself when other people don't want to talk to you and say "wah wah you want a safe space" is pathetic. If you want a place where you can be as much as a douche you want, go start it! No one's stopping you!

  • Everybody has the right to live in an echo chamber, but mandating it for everyone else is something that goes a bit too far.

    Here's the thing though: nobody's mandating it for everyone else. The admin has the final call. If you don't like it, find an instance with an admin that runs things the way you like. If you have the skills and/or money, make your own instance and run it the way you like.

    This isn't Reddit/Facebook/Twitter where if you don't like the way things are run, your options are suck it up or cut yourself off from the network. Things are more nuanced here.

    All of those arguments are not objective, they're subjective. This means that the idea of invalid/valid is irrelevant. To use an analogy, saying that "I like apples" is an invalid argument is pretty ridiculous, how is "I like/don't like this content" any different? To push that a bit farther, how is "I don't want to associate with these kinds of people, and I don't want to interact with people who find that ok"? This is all personal, subjective, messy stuff.

    • First of all: Thanks for your contributions, I appreciate you participating in this discussion.

      While you're right with the assessment that the final call is for the admin(s) to make let me rephrase it a little bit:

      Isn't the immediate call for censorship/defederation as soon as some views are challenged a bit too entitled? It looks like centralised platforms like FB and Twitter allowed this mindset to flourish and I'm not really comfortable with this.

      • Isn’t the immediate call for censorship/defederation as soon as some views are challenged a bit too entitled?

        There's a big difference between "views are challenged" and either active misinformation (vaccines = gene therapy?!?) or rampant bigotry. As a half-jewish person, I'm especially (again, subjectively) keen to avoid interacting with people like that. There's so many dog whistles crammed into that unformatted wall of text that I'm surprised my whole neighbourhood isn't filled with the sound of howling.

      • Isn’t the immediate call for censorship/defederation as soon as some views are challenged a bit too entitled?

        To some extent, YES, but I think it’s a bit more nuanced and comes down to where you draw that line. Everyone is going to draw it in a different place.

        I moderated an academic listserv with membership in 5 digits back before the html protocol even existed. That was huge for the time. And, as you would think, in academia at the time the idea of cronterversy, free speech, and engaging in items you disagreed with was pretty comprehensive. Even so, we still had to moderate, primarily for spam and obvious trolling as well as the occasional personal attacks.

        I was an active participant in Usenet in the 90’s. Usenet was federated servers hosting posts and comments from participants on that entire federation. I know a server admin could control what Usenet groups they carried. I have no idea what other levels of moderation were available. Discussions were definitely more freewheeling and challenging than you see today, but they also had a higher content level and a greater respect for intellectual argument, even in trolling. Again, I suspect that was because the bulk of the participants were coming from higher ed institutions.

        I was active in Internet forums when SCO sued IBM. There were active attacks on communities and successful attempts to splinter communities based in part on what side of the very question you are asking participants came down on. Again, though, there was a strong respect for intellectual engagement. And, I came down strongly with the same opinion you are expressing back then.

        I think that strong respect for engagement exists here in the fediverse, particularly when compared to something like FaceBook or Reddit. As the fediverse grows, I think that will go away.

        I don’t have much respect for low content trolling, for active attacks via brigading, for manipulation. I think the ability to upvote is important, but I also think the ability for bot accounts to manipulate that is a very difficult thing to combat, particularly in something as young as Lemmy that is experiencing exponential growth.

        I also have a much better awareness of how subtle that manipulation can be in influencing individuals and society, including my own views.

        I no longer have the absolutist attitude I once had. I agree with your own concerns about echo chambers, because that leads to its own manipulation of views and the splintering of society. However, I’m also more willing to support the idea of not providing a platform for some of the more odious content than my older self would have supported.

        I’m probably in a position to piss off nearly everyone. I disagree with your view that there should be almost no lines drawn, but I disagree with the majority that the lines should be drawn where they want it to be.

  • I think people who feel this is controversial are missing the entire point of federation and should consider going to a platform that doesn't use it.

    Nobody is 'mandating [an echo chamber] for everyone else' by defederating from a different instance, as many other instances are open registration. The largest problem here is that, in my opinion, the design is not well suited for overlarge instances such as lemmy.world or sh.itjust.works. We should all be on reasonably small instances that can smoothly choose who to federate/defederate and thus impact only a group of likeminded people. People with differing opinions can then just go to a different instance if they disagree. This is quite a democratic approach to problems like this, as it allows people who feel strongly about these things to 'shop around' for an instance that suits their needs and which will react favourably to further recommendations. If particular instances start hosting particularly disgusting opinions, they'll see a democratic process wherein a large plurality of instances all defederate from them.

    In other words, you are seeing it as "defederation allows person X to determine what person Y can read" when in fact it should be "all people who feel the same as X are welcome on server lemmy.x". This problem is perpetuated not by people wanting instances that suit their needs, but by having a few specific very large instances that did not clearly lay out their philosophies (no fault of theirs I think, we're all learning this for the first time). They can no longer adapt with any agility due to a very heterogeneous and large user base.

    On another note:

    Has humanity really developed into a situation where words and thoughts are more hurtful than sticks and stones?

    You really should study the lead-up to world war 2 if you think platforming dangerous beliefs is a simple matter of "words will never hurt me". I don't intend this as a 'gotcha' or anything, it's both fascinating and disturbing, and something every human should understand. The argument of 'we should at least let these fringe weirdos say their piece, what harm could it have' is, without exaggeration, how we wound up with ww2.

  • I've been on the internet for a minute... if you think unmoderated free speech works in a primarily text based medium then I have a bridge in Queens that just popped on the market. Oh look that's a statement, i should defend that right with logically consistent arguments and citations and draw my conclusions from that and oh my God is anyone still reading this?

    The most concise reason I have is that respect is a two-way street, and I haven't met a lot of folks online who actually understand what it means to respect an argument. The barrier to entry for me is the ability to think critically, and that involves regulating your own speach and not having to rely on others to do it for you.

    So let's see... statement, some bullshit evidence, appeal to critical thinking, one more to go ...

    This is a falsifiable and testable theory ... find me a site that promotes this and I'll look and see how long it takes for it to fail my one simple criteria.

  • OG context: https://sh.itjust.works/comment/451211

    I agree that it could be easier and personally don't think defederation is the answer (outside of bad actors).

    Exploding heads was simple enough since it is like... two people or something lol

    However, I'm also not very fond of beehaw which, to me, looks like the opposite extreme to exploding heads, and I'm personally not looking for communities like that.

    Do I think this means I should push for instances to defederate beehaw? No. I do think admins with very specific political views turning their instance into an echo chamber of those views is worse than Reddit, however, but I'm also not going to sit and rant at/about admins doing what they want with their own instance. If that's what they want their instance to be, great, just not a place for me.

    It was simple to get around beehaw, for the time being, by joining a level-headed instance they defederated, although I know I am missing some good links. This is not a permanent solution (I've been told the beehaw defederation is temporary, but am not following along), and am trying to figure out things like still seeing the good links posted to beehaw without the temptation of commenting things that don't fit in the echo chamber and pissing off the admins further to the point they deem whatever instance I'm on a spam instance and defederate it, ruining it for everyone else on my instance. (I'm a leftist, but apparently not far enough left for beehaw admins)

    I'm torn between building tools that allow easier echo chamber like feeds en masse or forcing people to individually think for themselves of what kind of content/communities they do/don't want in their personal feeds.

    I don't think it's great to start down a generic "this is the content you should have in your feed (dictated by random person X)" type path (not that you are saying that, I've just been thinking about this topic a lot, and that is what I see both beehaw and exploding heads as).

    Push lemmy

    Lemmy devs are already working extremely hard. I personally don't like this terminology.

    Actively develop contribute into

    This is the way. I am learning Rust for this purpose. It takes some time, however, to familiarize with both a language and a large codebase like Lemmy (during personal free time). I'm also semi cheating by learning jerboa code at the same time, but I am a Kotlin dev by trade, so it is a bit easier.

  • There's no requirement that every site running Lemmy is part of the same network. It's also perfectly fine to use more than one yourself if a certain server doesn't have content you want.

  • I wonder if this could be an opportunity for the Lemmy to address the social media bubble in a way that other advertising and profit driven social media platforms had not. Groups like Qanan presumably got stronger and more radical by being in an echo chamber full of their own ideas. There has to be a way to tackle this problem, not just for this platform but for society in general. Perhaps there's a compromise or new solutions we can work out other than the dichotomy of ban or don't ban.

    I'd like to imagine that some people on the verge of becoming radicalized into a cult-like group could be redeemed by a socratic conversation with someone who offers differing opinions while validating them. I think many of these people have personal issues and insecrutities going on, then turn to a hateful community merely because they finally feel they belong.

    • I'd like to imagine that some people on the verge of becoming radicalized into a cult-like group could be redeemed by a socratic conversation with someone who offers differing opinions while validating them. I think many of these people have personal issues and insecrutities going on, then turn to a hateful community merely because they finally feel they belong.

      There are more examples that do seem to validate this theory. In Germany you can see that calling everybody right from the SPD party a Nazi has led people to come ti6the conclusion that if they marginalized anyway they can join the far right party and accept the political identity they were given by the exclusionists. Same happened in France with Reassemblement National and in Spain with Vox. Hungary seems to somewhat love Orban for the same reason, despite EU and especially Germany's effort to undermine his power and position.

      Ignoring facts doesn't help, excluding people doesn't make these people go away.

  • I think probably the problem is that people think they can just attach a label to someone and that's actually an argument. "They're Nazis!" No they aren't. I mean, maybe somewhere there are some nazis, but just cause you call someone a thing does not make them that thing. After all, are all trans people groomers just because a lot of people are calling them groomers? (The answer is no)

    The most controversial instance on lemmy right now was here long before most of the instances that are complaining about it. They do have critical things to say about a lot of things that are considered sancrosanct. But there is an underlying appreciation of freedom underneath it All. A Nazi website wouldn't have an entire community associated with crony capitalism, corrupt politicians, racism (just using that word implies it's a bad thing).

    This doesn't end in the end of the marketplace of ideas. The decentralized nature of the Fediverse means you can have an unlimited diversity of ideas because there's absolutely nothing stopping anyone from just spinning up their own instance. Over on Mastodon et al, there are instances that are basically 4chan with usernames, and there are other instances that are locked down to only people with their exact ideological standpoint on anything. Then there are lots of instances that don't act like either of those, but are happy to participate with both. In this sense, it really is a marketplace.

    Reddit was one of the groups to come across, but they won't be the last. I expect we're going to see some very spicy instances in the next couple months. There will definitely be more defederation, but there will also be more federation. On a monolithic website such as reddit, you can't really have both these groups of people in the same space, but you can here. Admins on different instances can each pick the level of spice they're okay with for their communities, and users can pick the instances that fit with their level and flavor of spice.

    There's a reason why Lemmy world ended up becoming the number one instance despite other instances being bigger to start with. I don't really expect and the spicier instances that show up to put a ding in that. If you go to a restaurant with different flavors of hot wings, the ghost pepper suicide wings sell for some people but they don't sell a lot compared to their other flavors.

  • People don't always engage in good faith. Such people are not bringing ideas to the marketplace, they are trying to manipulate people.

    In order to really engage with each other, we have to have some common ground on which we can work from. If that base ground is not established, there is no discussion to be had. If I'm trying to talk about how to make grocery stores more efficient, but you're talking about how to get to Jupiter, we can't have a conversation that has any point.

    A similar thing can happen at the instance scale.

    Defederating for the reasons you said are, by themselves, poor reasons I agree. But sometimes I think they are trying to say they aren't engaging in good faith, or that enough of the basic point of that instance is at odds with the basic point of this instance that defederating makes sense.

  • Exploding Heads guy here...

    I'd like to say that the Exploding Heads admin, Kapow, is first & foremost anti-censorship. He's going to let anyone post things - there are lines in the sand not to be crossed, but the general belief of Kapow and many of the core contributors is that free speech doesn't hurt anyone.

    Kapow is not far right. Many of the EH members are just Libertarians. Another large amount are Trump-type "populist right." Call them fascists, I don't care. It's fine. A rose by any other name... But there aren't any Nazis on Exploding Heads. We banned one just the other day.

    The topic here is free speech & the marketplace of ideas and I can tell you that... man changes and grows throughout his life, and that people grow and change more through education, free exchange of ideas, exposure to the truth, than they do through isolation, shame, hatred...

    In fact, the quickest way to make an asshole act like an asshole and become incapable of change is to treat him like an asshole.

    I think if you are actually pro-peace, you must be pro-liberty, beause you would deny yourself the ability to coerce.

    I think if you are actually pro-democracy, you are 100% supportive of free speech, because you would not use coercion and censorship to manufacture consensus and have a stranglehold on society.

    I think anyone who believes in any value we can call "progressive" must first believe in the right of the individual to express themselves freely, and they should be secure enough in who they are to allow themselves to be challenged and to be ready to interact in good faith with others.

143 comments