this post was submitted on 10 Jan 2025
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Censorship or not, tolerance is a social contract, and those who want to undo this system must be stopped by any means possible. Content moderation is actually the compromise.
Tolerance is tolerance and it can break any time. You just keep tolerating until you can't anymore, as simple as that. Its artificial.
We don’t have a social contract. It’s everyone for themselves.
That depends on who's doing the moderation. If it's a government entity, that's censorship, and the only time I'm willing to accept it is if it's somehow actively harmful (i.e. terrorist plots and whatnot). If it's merely disgusting, that's for private entities to work out, and private entities absolutely have the right to moderate content they host however they choose.
Why is a private entity significantly different from a government entity? If a coalition of private entities (say, facebook, twitter, youtube, ... ) controls most of the commons, they have the power to dictate everything beyond the fringes. We can already see this kind of collusion in mass media to the extent that it's labeled a propaganda model. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_model
I just don't think the private/gov dichotomy is enough to decide when censorship and moderation is valid.
The government is supposed to be representing voters' best interests and have a monopoly on force to enforce rules. We can't trust anyone to decide for us what speech we can listen to. A government should have no say on restricting speech (sadly, even if that speech does cause harm to people in our LGBT family).
A business should not have power comparable to a government. You probably have to interact with the government to some degree, you shouldn't have to interact with a specific business at all.
Oh, like the dissemination of propaganda originating from the troll farms of hostile powers? Good idea.
Harmful meaning things like harassment (defined as continued and targeted use of speech intended to harass an individual) or credible threats of violence (i.e. a threat to kill a specific individual, attack an area, etc).
Harmful doesn't mean "ideas I don't like."
Just to put some perspective over here:
Pretty much the exact same thing in pretty much the exact words is being said on the other (right wing) side of things. Its just the things being tolerated are different
I honestly think that the bigger issue here isn't so much tolerance but certain parties that keep pointing out relatively small things to the common people (mostly on the right side of the political spectrum) and go "ooohhg my God can you believe these evil fuckers and they will do that to children too and won't anyone think of the children". Basically I'm talking trump, musk, Fox news, that sort of shit.
I've long held the believe that Trump did untold damage and harm to millions, but the biggest harm he has done is the division he's sown. There has always been a rather steep divide in the US, but that divide has grown into a fucking ocean between the two sides.
I think most people in the US, when receiving the actual proper facts, would really not think and feel that different. Nobody would rage against universal healthcare, why would they? You only do that when you're misinformed.
Not trying to excuse anyone, not trying to say that most trump supporters aren't insufferable assholes, but the vast majority of them wouldn't be as bad had they have access to actual news sources, had they not been constantly lied to.
Now with what you said, please understand that there are loads of highly armed militia groups out there in the US that would love to go into detail of that "any means necessary". Were this to happen, you're basically talking civil war. once that happens, everyone loses, you will too.
I think that the only way to repair this divide is to keep building bridges, keep talking, keep listening, because once it gets too far, then that's it. One only has to look at Yugoslavia as an example of what happens when neighbor starts massacring neighbors. There is no winning for anyone.
The biggest issue is, those who divide us make those people untrusting of said bridges.
Delete the data on my device and let me in control of the sliders and ban words. Make the defaults reasonnable to stop hate. This would not be censorship anymore, just deamplification and no one is a martyr now.
Simple as. Why censor when you can just let the users have the power to see what they want to see? In voyager I have all of the annoying headline keywords filtered. Makes browsing the fediverse much more pleasant.
The reason to say not but will not admit. This strips the owner class for the power to shape discourse and control the means of communication. This dynamic also exists on open source communication platforms such as lemmy and mastodon.
Imagine if we could simply subscribe to the content filters of fellow users. If I could just click your username, see you filter keyword list and click to add to mine the ones I like or subscribe to your named filters and their future changes.