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. [0] https://w…
Weird to see HN just four links away from 4chan.
Google is apparently taking down all/most Fediverse apps from the Play Store
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Re: Google is apparently taking down all/most Fediverse apps from the Play Store
#192For 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. [0] https://w…
All of those alternatives seem full of hate speech though
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.
Re: Google is apparently taking down all/most Fediverse apps from the Play Store
#193Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are few if any platforms on the open web free of censorship, they just draw their line in the sand in a different arbitrary place than others. Banning illegal content, spam, harassment, etc (which even the most hardcore "censorship free" platforms do) are also forms of censorship.
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 disall…
Why should e.g. hate speech be allowed but not spam? Spam is perfectly legal.
You’re not actually against lines being drawn through legal speech — you just don’t like where they fall.
Re: Google is apparently taking down all/most Fediverse apps from the Play Store
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are few if any platforms on the open web free of censorship, they just draw their line in the sand in a different arbitrary place than others. Banning illegal content, spam, harassment, etc (which even the most hardcore "censorship free" platforms do) are also forms of censorship.
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 disall…
> 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.
Re: Google is apparently taking down all/most Fediverse apps from the Play Store
#195[deleted]
Re: Google is apparently taking down all/most Fediverse apps from the Play Store
#196Okay, so take down twitter, reddit, and facebook too?
Re: Google is apparently taking down all/most Fediverse apps from the Play Store
#197Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 c…
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 s…
You can also get banned from payment processors and Uber as well.
Re: Google is apparently taking down all/most Fediverse apps from the Play Store
#198Original post combined with this one, so just for completeness' sake here's the original toot from the lead Mastodon dev @Gargron: https://mastodon.social/@Gargron/104763960269049818
Re: Google is apparently taking down all/most Fediverse apps from the Play Store
#199There's racist stuff all over Google's biggest properties. Racist results on Google, videos on youtube, sites hosted on GCP. Give me a break with your fake trashy virtue signalling Google. This is nothing more than a monopoly stomping out a platform it doesn't like. Probably because federation is a threat to Google's position as the central hub of the internet.
Indeed. The real story is federated applications undermine their search monopoly.
Re: Google is apparently taking down all/most Fediverse apps from the Play Store
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
>It always starts like that. many places have cultures and also law that for decades has worked perfectly fine reigning in the very worst forms of hate speeech (say holocaust denial in my country) while not descending into a sort of activism that starts to get silly. There's no automatic mechanism that turns sensible rules into insensible ones, and it's also need not be the case with sensible hate speech rules. With…
Your suggestion sounds nice in principle, but how would you propose to create mandated democratic control of a corporate entity? The only mechanism which exists I can think of would be to nationalize the corporate entity and have the folks controlling it be elected positions. That seems pretty extreme though as a response to a corporate entity becoming successful and growing enough that it influences the zeitgeist.
That does not sound extreme at all to me. It would not need to be controlled by people in elected positions - it could just be mandated that employees have to follow a specific charter and be as neutral as possible. A bit like many national news services, like the BBC. Considering how much influence Alphabet's products (especially Search) have gained over everyone's lives, I think something like that is much overdue and the only reasonable solution. That, or extreme regulation. At the very least, the search algorithm should be made fully public.