741–750 of 996 posts
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A reminder that F-Droid banned Gab from their store. https://reclaimthenet.org/f-droid-bans-gab-app/
A reminder that Gab is not a gray area edgecase, but a purpose-built platform for conspiracies and hate speech.
That's just false.
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I know you're just expressing a common curiosity. A friendly reminder that snuff film production is a thing and if a community creates a big audience/market for this stuff then the consequences are horrific.
Isn't this the justification for every kind of moral panic? If we let kids watch sex scenes they'll become prostitutes. If we let kids play grand theft auto they'll shoot up their school. Everything has the potential for negative externalities. I don't expect anyone to "think of the poor morbidly curious people" because it's strongly taboo in our culture but suggesting that - cause and effect: gore equals more murder…
To push the analogy to the extreme, consuming illegal pornography doesn't actually harm anyone, the production does, however the consumption drivers production, therefore the consumption does harm.
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> No. You need to explicitly connect in most fediverse apps. They're like browsers It's pretty egregious to ban an app like that. Still, I wonder if an innocuous default server (or set of them) might smooth things over with Google. That would increase the friction of accessing the content they don't like. Android's also relatively open, so if they only have issues with specific servers, maybe the app could just drop…
Appeasement isn't a good option here either when the ban is irrational at face value to begin with.
These apps might not have any good options.
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That's a clever trick. Make the medium you want to censor a private property than it's legal.
not really. it's just saying "this is mine, it's not public property or a public service, and thus i get to manage it how i want." I think MOST people would agree that that's a reasonable approach. just because a lot of people rely on the google play store doesn't mean it's a public service in the legal sense. It's a very private piece of software that is NOT open source and is very obviously owned and managed by a s…
I think that’s precisely what’s starting to be discussed now at national levels, with investigations into Apple, Facebook and Google in the EU and the USA.
In many countries, utilities are commercial entities, but they can’t refuse to serve customers because of what they say. I can see a future where we think the same of the big players on the web: commercial, but still public utilities.
Problem of course is that many countries also fear a completely open internet. Providers already have to filter pornography, hate speech, etc. So, would we end up with commercial entities that cannot filter the content published on their platform to suit their norms, but must filter it to suit the norms of the government? If so, would that apply to all sites, including, say, Hacker News, or pro- or anti-abortus sites, or just to large ones? If so, what’s ‘large’?
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It also wouldn't stand. Something like this would be too contradictory to the moral concept of free speech. I don't know. If Google decided to censor "hate speech" in GMail, could anyone stop them? Some people would applaud. Machine learning is good enough now that misspellings and euphemisms can be caught. So topic-based censorship could really work. Especially for Google, which has so much history on each sender, a…
Hey! I'm fiddling around with this right now for a submission. What I've found so far makes it look like hate speech is not easy to catch: 1) Slang evolves. 2) Combining two languages, especially under-resourced languages, mean that a chunk of words fall outside the range of a hate-speech lexicon. So maybe in languages which have huge resources devoted to it (English), its easy to figure out, but I don't know how wel…
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And yet. There's a certain "side" that wants to have that both ways Private companies can't censor "bad opinions" But private companies can also arbitrarily refuse service for say, making a "gay wedding cake" How is this disconnect rationalized?
Being a gay is not a choice, the same way as being a black, a minority etc. Being an asshole is a choice on the other way, the same as being radical left or radical right. The former is protected the latter is not.
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They are welcome to buy their own servers or even rent them. We don't have to subsidize their free use of internet resources.
You say that, but it's a well trodden argument. > We don't have to subsidize their free use of internet resources. We subsidize the FAANG's use of internet resources; the Internet was largely originally created with public money (military, academia, etc). > They are welcome to buy their own servers or even rent them. Are they? What if they get banned from there? What if they can't collect money from their community,…
This is slippery-slope nonsense, just where this conversation always ends up. You can "what if..." you're way to us banning these individuals from driving cars if you want, but it's not what's being discussed.
I am very, very, very in favor of reddit disallowing hate speech on their community as that is an active behavior on the site itself for a community they own. I am very, very, very against any organization barring access to things like domain name registration, hosting, etc. on the basis of their expressed ideas up to the point of them directly enabling clearly criminal behavior (e.g., directly organizing violent attacks, sharing revenge porn, etc.).
Private citizens kicking someone out of a restaurant for being rude is not the same thing as government actors barring them from ever owning a restaurant, or going somewhere else where their rudeness is welcome.
> The only way anyone should be okay with this continual incursion into free speech is if they have truly tied themselves to the idea of being 100% on board with whatever restriction is coming down the pipe next. Such a person has no principles, and it's hard to imagine defending them.
This is a false dichotomy built on the aforementioned slippery slope fallacy.
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Earlier footage indicates the first man shot was attempting to start a fight with the militiamen, but there's a gap in the timeline where nobody was filming before the fight broke out. The NYT has a very good article on the subject (and I'm a man who's very critical of the NYT) https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/27/us/kyle-rittenhouse-kenos...
OK I found a video showing the first fatal shooting [1]. It's not as clear as the video showing the mob chase (where it indeed looked like self defense) but from what I can tell the person who died got shot while running away from the shooter (it's hard to tell where the shooter is exactly during this time). Doesn't look like self defense to me. Hopefully there are better recordings of the whole incident. Warning: th…
Here's an interview with a reporter who was on scene throughout the entire first shooting.
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Fair. By my own admission, I don't know much about gab. I think the first time I ever heard about it was when Firefox banned Dissenter from their addons. Dissenter to me was a genius idea that has an ugly userbase. I'd love to have a version of Dissenter that isn't populated entirely by bigots. I think the idea of Dissenter really has some value, you walk along the web for all sorts of reasons, and then up in the cor…
That by itself implies that every URL you visit has to be looked up to see if there's a related discussion. No way I'd trust any add-on/startup/mega corp to do that. I barely trust Mozilla to keep my history on their servers, and that's only because they only keep the last few months and purge older data.
you could easily make this privacy safe.
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No, as others have said, you'd have to apply the same reasoning to a web browser. Google dominates the web search, so there's no need to prevent other browsers because it all drives Google's revenue anyway. Any app that allows you to break out of the garden is banned.
Viewed through the lens of "what will cause the most bad publicity" a browser is understood by 90% of the population. The "fediverse" isn't. It can be spun to cause damage in the way a browser cannot. Google don't care about the federated stuff because it's not big enough to bother them, in fact it probably siphons all the crap they'd rather not index off to a place they no longer have to worry about. They care about…
It seems their using their position to ensure this remains true.