631–640 of 996 posts
A reminder that F-Droid [1] is a free software app store that can be used to download free/open source software, including Mastodon clients. [1] https://f-droid.org/
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You're mixing up two different things: sites removing illegal content because they're mandated to do so, and sites removing legal content because they choose to do so.
Not all of the examples I gave were illegal content.
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All of those alternatives seem full of hate speech though
We live in a time of extreme devaluation of terms. The Democratic Republic of Congo is a hardcore dictatorship. The People's Republic of China is run by a close circle of elites. Likewise, "Hate Speech" is used far too often to shut down fairly reasonable criticism against the "equal outcome, not equal opportunity" policies bundled together with original sin and Orwellian struggle sessions.
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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…
The real world contains public spaces. It contains within it the recognition that some part of all of this around us, belongs to everyone.
And while that has been the center of much of the rhetoric about the internet since its inception, that rhetoric has never actually been true IN FACT. It's a mishmash of private entities controlling their piece of the puzzle.
I think, as another poster mentioned, if democracy is to survive, the concept of "some part of the internet and its services are a public good" must take hold.
Now, that's a scary-ass thing to say because unlike a piece of land, or drinking water, these things don't just "exist". They exist only as long as some entity pays for them, which means that such a statement implies things about who pays (government? subsidies? you pay but it isn't yours? special kinds of taxes?).
And yet I think avoiding dystopia requires going that way. I have no idea what it would look like.
Of course, there's an alternative.
Google/Twitter/FB/etc. can agree that they don't censor anyone unless that person breaks the law. That puts the discussion right back where it should have been in the first place: In the public, political sphere, where The People have the ability to influence the outcome.
But then, why would Google etc. do that? Too enticing, all that power.
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That's a clever trick. Make the medium you want to censor a private property than it's legal.
It's the side effect of allowing a small number of largely unregulated companies to control so much of our communications. TV and radio using public right-of-ways like radio bands are much more tightly regulated to ensure "equal time". That's not the case for social media or mobile platforms and I suspect any attempt to regulate those would be met with a great deal of resistance. Not the least complaint would be that…
As for alternatives, I think we just need people to collectively decide that some other platform (ideally a decentralized one) is better than the incumbent. Facebook depends on its inertia. Suppose every Facebook use went cold turkey and switched to something else instead (let's say Mastodon for the sake of argument). In a year, nobody would be talking about Facebook's monopoly.
Where I think things get sticky right now, though, and I'll even say -the- reason we haven't seen innovation in social media, is that incumbents on the scale of Facebook have the capital sufficient to either buy or sue any plausible competition into the ground before the competition has a chance at taking their market share. Imagine a world where Facebook had been blocked from burying Instagram and WhatsApp with money!
I think I would be in favor of greater regulation against these winner-takes-all tactics on a more economic level, although exactly how that regulation would work in a way that was both fair and non-trivial to evade I don't know.
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I'm not deeply versed in Gab's history... But lets hypothetically say that Gab was not created for that purpose, but for precisely the purpose it claims it was created for: To be an open platform for free speech, no censorship. Wouldn't it have ended up in the exact same state it is now? Any service that guarantees no censorship is going to have the majority of its userbase be the runoff from other major websites. Wh…
"Any service that guarantees no censorship is going to have the majority of its userbase be the runoff from other major websites" Exactly, which is why you are wrong here: "When voat was created, I 100% believed that they were not attempting to create extremist havens" It is not as if the major websites are quick to censor their users. If anything they are too cautious and have only banned terrorists after widespread…
This is nowhere close to what reddit/twitter have been doing however.
> then you are creating an extremist haven
...of people interested in anime porn after reddit banned them.
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Well a bunch of people are running around now saying speech is violence...so in the not too distant future we might be saying someone was murdered by words.
It is interesting that you say that. In English, we do use phrases like "X was destroyed by Z" ( I forget the exact idiom, but kids seem to be using it -- god I feel old ), where no actual destruction beyond verbal attack took place. I know you were referring to something else, but it got me thinking that we are already using the phrase. Our legal system just does not allow a lot of 'word damage' to be adjudicated.
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The highest profile one is /r/piracy. The illegal sharing part of the subreddit spawned a forum for good general piracy discussion. It was at serious risk of being deleted and had to go to extreme lengths to preserve the community that formed around the actual illegal sharing part. https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/qvygwq/reddits-piracy-sub... /r/datahoarders and /r/opendirectories are a couple other I personally ha…
Interesting. Thanks for sharing. I suppose these are the results of the gap between technology and legislation.
Luckily most of these groups are tech savvy enough to run their own IRC servers.
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Evidence suggests that the fairness doctrine worked really well until we ended it. Until it’s elimination mass media news in the US was pretty middle of the road.
I feel there should be some laws for when someone calls themselves news or journalism. So no monopoly for news, but when does call themselves this, there should be some ethical and truth finding considerations attached.
But who decides what's true? And why should we let them? Majority consensus is an easy answer, but we'd need something else if we were to regulate truth at a level we could enforce on journalists.
I'm personally more worried about that question spiraling out of control than I am about offering equal air time.
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> 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…
> actually already shot someone This is the issue. There is ZERO video of this (only the aftermath). We don't know why that first guy got shot in the head, or if it was this kid that did it (forensics will show) and that guy he shot had a criminal records. It could have been a self defense shot too. His ability to control himself after the two he shot on video goes to enforce that idea. The kid had zero record. It's…
> The kid had zero record.
That can’t really be used as proof of innocence. You wouldn’t be able to convict anyone, since everyone starts off with zero record. He’s only 17, so hasn’t managed to avoid serious trouble for very long.