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We need more than deplatforming

blog.mozilla.org

71–80 of 83 posts

Re: We need more than deplatforming

#71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Deplatforming isn't censorship.

Yes it is! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship "Censorship is the suppression of speech, public communication, or other information, on the basis that such material is considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, or "inconvenient." Censorship can be conducted by governments, private institutions, and other controlling bodies." Anything that "suppresses" or controls speech is censorship, no matter who does it. T…

He's still able to speak. If this is censorship then I should be able to force any publisher to produce my ramblings and drawings.

Re: We need more than deplatforming

#72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes it is! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship "Censorship is the suppression of speech, public communication, or other information, on the basis that such material is considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, or "inconvenient." Censorship can be conducted by governments, private institutions, and other controlling bodies." Anything that "suppresses" or controls speech is censorship, no matter who does it. T…

He's still able to speak. If this is censorship then I should be able to force any publisher to produce my ramblings and drawings.

> He's still able to speak

Does not matter. This is still the definition of censorship, according to the relevant authorities on definitions of words.

Basically every definition that you find will agree with me that private companies can censor people.

> should be able to force

Who said anything about force? I am just saying that private companies can censor people, according to basically every definition of the word. You can have whatever opinions that you want on if censorship is good or bad.

Re: We need more than deplatforming

#73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's still able to speak. If this is censorship then I should be able to force any publisher to produce my ramblings and drawings.

> He's still able to speak Does not matter. This is still the definition of censorship, according to the relevant authorities on definitions of words. Basically every definition that you find will agree with me that private companies can censor people. > should be able to force Who said anything about force? I am just saying that private companies can censor people, according to basically every definition of the word…

I'm not arguing that private companies can't censor people. An employer can definitely censor an employee. A group of publishers can embargo an author. Twitter and Trump had a consensual relationship and Twitter ended it. That's not censorship.

Re: We need more than deplatforming

#74
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would prefer left-wing biased factual reporting over right-wing biased lies. The equation is pretty simple from my perspective. Most of my Facebook time is pointing out to family members that the “news” they are sharing is lies and misinformation, such as “cosplay guy at the Capitol invasion was Antifa” — the evidence was pictures of certain individuals being on an Antifa web site, despite the pictures clearly bein…

And many others would prefer right-wing biased factual reporting over left-wing biased lies. See the problem here?

Left wing lies don’t come from people looking to hang the Vice President or kill my friends for not being the right shade of white.

Re: We need more than deplatforming

#75
post #33

This is probably an unpopular opinion on this forum, but it seems like repealing section 230 would accomplish this just fine. Then large platforms would either have to: 1. Completely relinquish any editorial controls (which means advertising money goes bye-bye). 2. Completely sanitize things. Smaller platforms are at lower scale and can manually moderate (as they often do currently thanks to trolling and spam) Sounds…

Now you know exactly why they were willing to do anything to keep rule 230, including overriding a Trump veto.

I think Trump's obsession with 230 was clearly retributive. In top of that he spent very little effort trying to gather consensus.

I'd like to see it debated on its own merits, but that seems unlikely in the current climate

Re: We need more than deplatforming

#77
post #54
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think shifting the emphasis and amount of representation of different kinds of speech and different prevailing opinions, without actually blocking speech, is not censorship as it is classically meant. Otherwise you might as well say that every form of debate, persuasion and promotion are censorship, because they have that effect. Calling that censorship is to miss the point of the more serious thing that is widely…

Eumemics

Nice. Upvoted by me, because that's an interesting word I haven't seen before, it's interesting to see people argue for and against it, and I think your point of view is a reasonable thing to argue for even though I think it's weakly argued because it doesn't appear to weigh up consequences of alternatives.

Put in eumemics terms, the argument I've presented in this subthread is that you can't avoid it, you can only pretend to avoid it and/or decide not to be deliberate about it, thereby having the effect of eumemics anyway but with different parameters.

That might be the better decision, to commit to not being one of the actors significantly influencing global dialogue, but there's no point pretending it isn't a decision or that it doesn't have consequences, or that the outcome is neutral, or that the outcome is what most people actually want. (Or that it isn't a paradox.)

One way or another there are powerful actors in the system, and if there weren't it would create them. I suppose if you commit to the underlying principle of respect for people in a democratic manner, you might want to be neutral about which consequences "the people" can pursue, for example if they want war than war it is, if they want peace then peace it is. However by and large what most people say they want at large, and what they actually get as a result of their actions, are quite disconnected due to very complex chains of consequences. This is well known and people complain about it all the time.

As a result, even if trying to be neutral and respectful towards all people with regard to what the people want, it is not clear (to me anyway) that neutral communications platforms lead to what people actually want (collectively, democratically) any better than non-neutral platforms. Perheps we should build things that are designed to find out what people actually want, in a robust and evolvable manner (collectively, democratically) and choose the biases that then provide it.

A well known example is moderation: Unmoderated platforms end up causing many people to leave them or to avoid speaking up, with the result that any unmoderated platform is dominated by highly unrepresentative viewpoints of the collective of people.

Moderated platforms are accused of censorship, "view-promoting" platforms are accused of censorship in your meaning of it (as long term bias), yet unmoderated and un-promoting platforms are also censorship by that meaning because they also quiet so many voices in a systematically biased fashion. There is simply no escape from this dilemma and no honesty in pretending it doesn't exist.

Re: We need more than deplatforming

#78

Pushing people off Twitter is liable to just send them to the fever swamps of voat, parler, gab, 8chan, etc.

This has been litigated many times. That’s still better than polluting the agora, as Reddit found when banning r/fatpeoplehate and others.

It doesn't take a very large number of exiles from the agora to cause a large amount of damage if they are determined terrorists.

Re: We need more than deplatforming

#79
History shows clearly that such mass demonization of normal citizens ends very badly, with millions killed for no good reason.

The rhetoric used portrays an evil which speakers want to exist so they can oppose it, with no room for clarification by those targeted.

Please stop.

Re: We need more than deplatforming

#80

Man posts like this (and their updates which always remove features I use) are why I switched to Brave. Mozilla has been circling the drain for a while now, kept alive only by googles grace. Despicable call to arms from a zombie company coasting off its earlier innovation.

Same, I got very tired of Mozillas woke bs so I stopped my financial support and switched to Brave. Basically no one uses Firefox anymore anyway, so this just cements it.

At work we don't even care to support firefox since no one uses it lol. Sad af, but true.

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