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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

#411

Post by Causality1 »

croes wrote: post #206
thomascgalvin wrote: post #169

> Like hate speech is bad and it’s not censorship if it’s not mandated by the government. To be fully accurate, this is absolutely censorship , but it's not a violation of anyone's First Amendment rights. People often conflate the two. We can argue about whether or not Google should ban certain opinions on their platform, or where the line should be drawn, but it is arguable that hey have the legal right to do so. An…

That's a clever trick. Make the medium you want to censor a private property than it's legal.

That's the problem of the all-private internet. There is no virtual street corner at which to protest. There is no internet post office to handle your mail. There is no internet water utility who isn't allowed to shut off your service no matter how many people complain about you.

There is only profit. The moment you become unprofitable for whatever reason you will lose everything. If tomorrow 51% of the world decided they hated left-handed people they would all find their accounts disabled, their website registrations suspended, their entire online presence forced into secrecy.

So far that's only happened, to my knowledge, to terrorists and white supremacists, but there is absolutely no legal reason why it can't happen to anyone else.

Re: Google is apparently taking down all/most Fediverse apps from the Play Store

#412

Post by travisoneill1 »

claudiawerner wrote: post #205
brightball wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The is what I believe is the goal of placing restrictions on people based on “mental health”. It’s so open ended and not easily verifiable that it becomes a sliding scale.

If I'm understanding you right, the idea is that some harms, physical ones, are fair game for the law to cover, but other harms (mental ones) or a collection of boundary cases are less (if at all) within the purview of legislation. I think there's a good conversation to be had as to what in particular makes physical harms so special as compared to others, and how existing law in every country (including the US) can c…

You can prove physical harm beyond a reasonable doubt. Mental harm is frequently concocted as a bullying tactic, e.g. the recent NY Times editorial controversy where employees said running an editorial they disagreed with made them "feel unsafe." https://www.npr.org/2020/06/08/871817721/head-of-new-york-ti...

Re: Google is apparently taking down all/most Fediverse apps from the Play Store

#414

Post by luckylion »

drdeca wrote: post #325
luckylion wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 p…

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 bala…

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.

Re: Google is apparently taking down all/most Fediverse apps from the Play Store

#415

Post by GoblinSlayer »

luckylion wrote: post #266
drdeca wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/d…

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 p…

What do you think a normal person thinks when he sees a witch being burned?

Re: Google is apparently taking down all/most Fediverse apps from the Play Store

#416

Post by _v7gu »

humanistbot wrote: post #47

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.

Not even web browsers, Twitter should go first

Re: Google is apparently taking down all/most Fediverse apps from the Play Store

#417

Post by mike00632 »

drdeca wrote: post #110
quotemstr wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So? Any platform free of censorship is going to have some speech you dislike.

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/d…

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.

Re: Google is apparently taking down all/most Fediverse apps from the Play Store

#418

Post by archgoon »

jwalgenbach wrote: post #402
kbenson wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's worth noting that there's also a side that wants the opposite of that, to censor bad opinions, but not be able to refuse making a gay wedding cake. Hypocrites are not limited to specific groups, they're universal.

Yeah, not so much. The difference is in the legal definition of protected class. It is illegal to discriminate against someone based on their membership of a protected class -- ethnicity or disability for instance. Removing an opinion or banning a user based on violation of an agreed upon term of service is not the same thing. Having an opinion does not make you a member of a protected class, and a private corporatio…

I don't see the word 'law' showing up anywhere in kbensons comment. It's disingenuous to claim that kbenson was making a legal argument.

Re: Google is apparently taking down all/most Fediverse apps from the Play Store

#419

Post by jmull »

djsumdog wrote: post #331
jmull wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Every person he shoots attacked him or had a gun. You're suggesting that having a gun is justification for someone to shoot you? I'm sure you can see the problem with that logic.

Watch the actual video. Dude pulls the gun and it bringing it around to shoot the kid. This is after the kid gets kicked in the head. The guy is also a convicted felon. I do believe what he did was straight up self defense.

> Dude pulls the gun and it bringing it around to shoot the kid.

But the kid had already pointed his own gun and actually already shot someone.

If seeing someone pulling a gun and starting to point it at you is justification to shoot in self defense, then the guy who got shot was acting in self-defense, according to you. I guess the only thing he did wrong was not shoot quicker than the kid.

How can your self-defense logic only apply to the guy doing the shooting but not to the guy not shooting?

Re: Google is apparently taking down all/most Fediverse apps from the Play Store

#420

Post by dencodev »

viro wrote: post #91
john_moscow wrote: post #64

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…

When your content is too cancerous for Reddit ...maybe the issue isn't Reddit.

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.
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