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Protect me from what I want

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Re: Protect me from what I want

#191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

I think whether "be kind" is at odds with, or a criteria of, an intellectual discourse is left as an exercise for (possibly literally, in this case) the reader. One could imagine a smart person can figure out how to phrase a thought in a way palatable to an audience, or at least respectful of the notion that different individuals have different life experience. If failure to do so gets one's comment "censored" out of…

I understand that the reason people use the veneer of propriety to justify censorship is so they can do as you’ve done here: give a long self-righteous screed about how they’re upholding the good of the community when engaging in anti-intellectual censorship.

> One could imagine a smart person can figure out how to phrase a thought in a way palatable to an audience, or at least respectful of the notion that different individuals have different life experience

This is just an imagining — people say this when they’re upset that facts challenge dearly held delusions, eg the media is unbiased and informs you about the world, and then engage in ex post facto attacks on the form of your message to silence you and remove that cognitive annoyance. The anger is not at the phrasing, but in having their world view challenged at all.

I think you brought up that imagining because you need to reassure yourself that you’re calmly rational as a reader — and not lashing out with censorship due to emotions. That you’re not actually anti-intellectual, you just happen to be copying their mannerism — for good!

We’ve heard these arguments for millennia: can you name a historic (prior to 1900) example where those censoring in the name of decorum led to positive outcomes?

Re: Protect me from what I want

#192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Copyright violations are a violations against a legal abstraction. Deepfakes are a new form of deception (I didn't imply sexual deepfakes). I used the language of "minors" to explicitly reference those gray legal areas around boundaries and teens sexting each other (which has landed those children in legal quagmires). None of those examples are "abhorrent" as much as "complicated". > "Site deciding this or that polit…

> Copyright violations. Beheading videos. "Pornography" or pseudo-"pornography" involving minors. Direct threats of violence towards individuals or groups. Deepfakes generated without consent. Etc. Etc. > None of those examples are "abhorrent" as much as "complicated". Uhh, if you say so. They are your words after all, not mine. > So is violent revolutionary religious politics the boundary? I think the parent comment…

> Uhh, if you say so. They are your words after all, not mine

Was there a particular reason you ignored the elaboration and re-quoted the original comment? And if there is something you want to express about it please do. This is kind of a meaningless retort.

> I think the parent commenter's point was that you were both pretty much on the same page as far as being fine with illegal content

I don't remember a due process being followed for most of those ISIS accounts being banned. I don't remember the social networks restricting their bans to those people that had been convicted of illegal communications.

And yet I supported that move. I understood that the network would not want that sort of crap on its airwaves, and that might see a business interest in not having its platform associated with that movement, and want to eliminate the ability of that movement to use their platforms to further their aims.

As much as one might want to reach for "illegality" is some clearcut dividing line, that simply doesn't apply here. Most of us supported accounts getting banned with no due process, no oversight, or anything - when it was violent revolutionary religious politics that we disagreed with.

Re: Protect me from what I want

#193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do realize that both "paradox" and "hypocrisy" have the same basic definition, don't you? They both mean "self-contradictory", the biggest difference is in connotation, not meaning.

No. These words do not have the same basic definition. Hypocrisy: The practice of professing beliefs, feelings, or virtues that one does not hold or possess; falseness. [0] Paradox: A statement that seems to contradict itself but may nonetheless be true. [1] Every time I see someone here mentioning someone the paradox of tolerance, it is to support restriction of speech for someone else. (someone really bad , of cour…

I'm not sure how you can accuse people of hypocrisy for being intolerant of the intolerant when they just told you they're being intolerant of the intolerant.

Re: Protect me from what I want

#194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's still a hypocrisy, but so what. People say it like it's a damnation of the idea. Things in life are fuzzy, that's why it's literally called a paradox. The most tolerant people in the world are not going to be ok with a 20 year-old having a sexual relationship with their 12 year old daughter because of the danger involved. That's the paradox of intolerance, that everyone has a limit, and if you have no limit, som…

It's ok to be intolerant at some things. What's not ok is to be intolerant and still claim to be tolerant. That's hypocrisy. Also, do not equate actions and speech - and we're mostly arguing about free speech here, right?

When the only way for you to be "right" is to argue the absolutist version of the definition of a word (tolerant in this case), you've lost.

Furthermore, such black and white thinking is often a sign of mental illness.

Re: Protect me from what I want

#195
post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The main takeaway is that you care what other people read, not about what people are making you read. As do I, and you. I was pretty happy when all of those ISIS accounts that were spewing violence and hate got shut down. I'm sure you have your boundaries on what you'd want society to allow and restrict on public mediums. The specific details of what those boundaries are will depend on your personal notion of what…

Right but I don't want some wanker at Twitter or Facebook office decide that. If I want to press the ban/blacklist button on tag, account, group, or whatever social unit to not see it again that's my decision. Sure, some of them should be default (probably don't want people to get porn the second they sign up), but user should be in power to moderate and filter their own stream. > Copyright violations. Beheading vide…

The problem with your ban/blacklist option is that they first require users to be exposed to that content in order to personally ban it. Either you yourself will have to watch the beheading video in order to know to ban it, or another group of users will need to tag it as 'disturbing' and you will need to ban 'disturbing' content'.

Most people do not like casually being exposed to such content, and so any sort of soft policy against it results in users self-selecting out of the social ecosystem. It's no longer just your decision, but one that affects the entire platform. And soon the entire platform becomes dedicated to that disturbing content because everyone else has left.

You could go to Parler or Gab or whatever site right now to see the results of your experiment in action and see why user self-moderation leads to the destruction of the site. This is why users offload that mental stress to the owners of the site who then hire people to manually filter the cruft themselves (often for the worse of the people doing said filtering, but that's a whole 'nother thing).

Re: Protect me from what I want

#196
post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Define "public forum". Because both Facebook and Twitter have way more range than most of what would be defined as "public forum" does

Range doesn't make something a public forum. Generally, control of the space by the public (or their delegates) does. A letter to the editor of the New York Times has the potential to be seen by 343,000 households (a number down from 1.3 million). This never made the New York Times' letters page a public forum. Twitter, for example, was at least previously accountable to shareholders. Now, it's very much a private fo…

And New York Times have competition in the space.

There is no meaningful competition to what Twitter or Facebook does. If you stifle voices on that platform majority of the country won't hear them.

Them not being technically public is the problem in itself , they function like public forum for opinions but one that is manipulated by corporation.

Re: Protect me from what I want

#197
post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right but I don't want some wanker at Twitter or Facebook office decide that. If I want to press the ban/blacklist button on tag, account, group, or whatever social unit to not see it again that's my decision. Sure, some of them should be default (probably don't want people to get porn the second they sign up), but user should be in power to moderate and filter their own stream. > Copyright violations. Beheading vide…

The problem with your ban/blacklist option is that they first require users to be exposed to that content in order to personally ban it. Either you yourself will have to watch the beheading video in order to know to ban it, or another group of users will need to tag it as 'disturbing' and you will need to ban 'disturbing' content'. Most people do not like casually being exposed to such content, and so any sort of sof…

> The problem with your ban/blacklist option is that they first require users to be exposed to that content in order to personally ban it.

If you actually read my comment properly you'd notice that I explicitly said there should be a default ban list blocking that

> Either you yourself will have to watch the beheading video in order to know to ban it, or another group of users will need to tag it as 'disturbing' and you will need to ban 'disturbing' content'.

That's orthogonal problem; If you wanted to get rid of that entirely you'd have to pre-screen every content and that's just not feasible, nor any of the media does it aside from some automated filters on keywords.

Nor it is actual problem if you don't subscribe to people that post that; random nobody deciding to post that won't be featured in any feeds anyway because of how algorithms work so there is very little chance it will land on accident in someone's feed.

Of course someone could play the long con and get popular only to start publishing disturbing stuff, but none of current systems stop that and I'm not sure you even could.

Re: Protect me from what I want

#198
post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right but I don't want some wanker at Twitter or Facebook office decide that. If I want to press the ban/blacklist button on tag, account, group, or whatever social unit to not see it again that's my decision. Sure, some of them should be default (probably don't want people to get porn the second they sign up), but user should be in power to moderate and filter their own stream. > Copyright violations. Beheading vide…

The distinctions you're bringing up seem kind of perfunctory to me. The wanker at the twitter office that was presumably appointed by twitter management to do that, yes? And some people want to appeal to that particular seat of power to influence and limit discourse along some dimension, within twitter. And yet other appeals to higher powers, such as governments - control communication with deeper consequences across…

> The distinctions you're bringing up seem kind of perfunctory to me.

If you don't see distinction between posting pedophilia/beheadings and different political views that's entirely you problem.

"We don't allow what law doesn't allow, and moderate what is considering explicit by default, but you can opt out of that" I think is entirely fine line for platform to stand on. Anything above that is them fucking around with public opinion for their benefits.

>The wanker at the twitter office that was presumably appointed by twitter management to do that, yes? And some people want to appeal to that particular seat of power to influence and limit discourse along some dimension, within twitter.

> And yet other appeals to higher powers, such as governments - control communication with deeper consequences across broader domains.

Government is supposed to work toward interest of its people, not corporations, that's the difference here. And, well, the government is only entity that can tell corporation to behave. You can just not vote in the wankers to the office too.

Government (in first world countries) will only tell you to stop once you actually start to incite violence, not when you post some wrongthink on social media (except UK I guess...).

Are there governments worse than corporations ? Sure, but corpos can just not participate in their market. They will, for the money, and that's all there is to say about corporate goals.

> What's legal or illegal evolves with politics and culture. So there's no fundamental purchase there for the kind of moral conversation you were trying to elicit.

Sure, slavery was legal at some point. Doesn't really matter. That's not the point.

The point here that you are desperately trying to miss is that corporation should not have power to manipulate public opinion at will, because only target for corporation is to earn more money

And you can tell government to change the laws, that's how we got slavery banned, women getting rights to vote and minorities being not repressed. Can't do that to corporation. Of course you need to want government act in benefit of its people which US have hard time doing (the stuff your "lobbyists" are doing would get them arrested in EU...) but even that skewed system is still better than Zuck or Elon or other clown deciding what people should see or not see.

Re: Protect me from what I want

#199
post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with your ban/blacklist option is that they first require users to be exposed to that content in order to personally ban it. Either you yourself will have to watch the beheading video in order to know to ban it, or another group of users will need to tag it as 'disturbing' and you will need to ban 'disturbing' content'. Most people do not like casually being exposed to such content, and so any sort of sof…

> The problem with your ban/blacklist option is that they first require users to be exposed to that content in order to personally ban it. If you actually read my comment properly you'd notice that I explicitly said there should be a default ban list blocking that > Either you yourself will have to watch the beheading video in order to know to ban it, or another group of users will need to tag it as 'disturbing' and…

Your comment goes against what you originally said then, which is that you 'don't want some wanker at Twitter or Facebook office' to decide that. You're making a concession that you do want them to decide SOME content that is by default blocked, which then this becomes a matter of degrees. Some people would disagree with your stance and think that it still violates free speech, hence Parler/Gab etc. Plenty of disturbing content is not illegal, which is where the gray area of moderation comes into play.

Even if you don't subscribe to people that post that, there's still the issue of network effects. They subscribe to someone that subscribes to someone that subscribes to someone that posts a beheading video that gains popularity, and so the algorithm prioritizes that traffic because it's within your graph. You can easily notice these effects just on Twitter if you pay attention closely to what it decides to show you.

Re: Protect me from what I want

#200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Copyright violations. Beheading videos. "Pornography" or pseudo-"pornography" involving minors. Direct threats of violence towards individuals or groups. Deepfakes generated without consent. Etc. Etc. > None of those examples are "abhorrent" as much as "complicated". Uhh, if you say so. They are your words after all, not mine. > So is violent revolutionary religious politics the boundary? I think the parent comment…

> Uhh, if you say so. They are your words after all, not mine Was there a particular reason you ignored the elaboration and re-quoted the original comment? And if there is something you want to express about it please do. This is kind of a meaningless retort. > I think the parent commenter's point was that you were both pretty much on the same page as far as being fine with illegal content I don't remember a due proc…

>I don't remember a due process being followed for most of those ISIS accounts being banned. I don't remember the social networks restricting their bans to those people that had been convicted of illegal communications.

> And yet I supported that move. I understood that the network would not want that sort of crap on its airwaves, and that might see a business interest in not having its platform associated with that movement, and want to eliminate the ability of that movement to use their platforms to further their aims.

Again, you're missing the point, blocking proven terrorists is not the same as the politic you don't like.

You're trying to excuse blocking benign stuff by desperately trying to group them with stuff most people would agree is probably borderline illegal and harmful

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