@ska @dalias @futurebird @mattmcirvin Deplatforming is really important to reducing the availability of bad information. Big impacts around Twitter decisions, for example: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/01/16/misinformation-trump-twitter/
@Emilyy @ska @dalias @futurebird @mattmcirvin
Deplatforming is great until it happens to you
"Deplatforming is great until it happens to you"
This assumes you are speaking to a group of people who have never been deplatformed. But this is far from the case.
There isn't any politics free abstract solution. Deplatforming a fun video game forum because "video games cause violence" is bad.
Deplatforming nazis is good.
It's very messy and we will need to have discussions about the boundary forever.
"Just allow everything" isn't a solution and it doesn't even really do what it claims
@futurebird I agree that “just allow everything” isn’t a good sentiment, but individuals should be allowed to sort out a majority of information for themselves and be able to openly debate why someone is incorrect.
You lose both of those things when you remove a a person’s ability to speak.
Additionally, you encourage others to move into echo chambers which I personally think makes things far worse.
Deplatforming doesn't "remove a person's ability to speak".
What it does is change their audience: initially usually to be smaller, sometimes indirectly in the long run to be bigger, depending on what happens next.
(Some people get a lot of publicity for their claims of being "cancelled".)
@unchartedworlds @futurebird
If I have been “deplatformed” from twitter I can no longer speak on twitter.
Obviously someones ability to “speak” isn’t removed. I still have my mouth and my brain…I can still talk to people. But my ability to speak, in this case on a specific website, is ultimately limited.
I’m still not sure why its okay to do this when, if its so obvious why we should deplatform someone, that we can just tell others why they are wrong.
@Unit @unchartedworlds @futurebird It's okay because you agreed to it when you joined Twitter. These are private spaces that exist by invite only, and those invites can be rescinded.
And that rule applies to every private space, even your residence. You can see why it would be especially useful in, for example, a women's shelter or an alcoholics anonymous meeting.
Also, "telling others why [the user] is wrong" just *elevates* their speech, while deplatforming them makes their message less accessible. When you think about trolls and spammers, the benefits of that route become obvious; few bad actors argue in good faith.
A group choosing to disassociate with certain individuals is one of the ways a group defines itself, and is itself a form of speech.
@LouisIngenthron @Unit @unchartedworlds @futurebird
The deplatforming question is an interesting question to me. If we set aside legitimate targetted harassment, intimidation and threats, I cannot work out good first principles for deplatforming on social media. For one, if you don't like what someone is saying, you can just ignore them, block them, dont follow them or whatever. Deplatforming is only done to limit other peoples access to a certain individuals ideas. In the case of children I could understand having parental controls on what ideas they come into contact with since they are not yet mature in their thinking. But for adults I can't come up with a non-paternalistic reason why I should be allowed to limit what other people see online and I also don't trust other people to make these types of decisions for me.
@LouisIngenthron I do understand why deplatforming happens in a lot of cases in the real world. I was just saying that I could not think of a *principled* reason to do so. Clearly I am not the one making these decisions at Twitter or anywhere else. But also I would not think it correct to participate in protest deplatforming, where some people go to public lectures or presentations and make a rukus to prevent the genuine guests from hearing what the speaker has to say; or petition public institutions to refuse spaces to certain people based on their ideas (and usually very skewed views of their ideas at that).
@Clementulus @LouisIngenthron it's like why there's both basketball and baseball, and the rules are different at each. People are there for a reason, both as players and audience. The decisions oan who to promote, who to allow to speak, etc, is all part of creating the experience everyone has come for.
The principle is the creation of different experiences for different tastes with different rules. Maybe there will be a social media site that makes you cite every claim, maybe there's one that lets anybody say anything but one false statement and you're permabanned.
Or if you're talking about per issue
@thesquirrelfish @LouisIngenthron
Exactly. And from what I have observed it seems to me that there are a lot of people who would like a social platform that is similar to real life where you go to a public space and engage with ideas that you are interested in and ignore the ones that you are not. Its part of the reason I like the Fediverse, there is no algorithm, I just go and search for ideas that pique my interest. If the fediverse was full of Nazis and lets assume no content moderation for a moment, I would not really expect to ever come across those posts or ideas because I dont search them out and if for some reason I did see them I would just block those users and move on. I understand that content moderation is good for lots of other reasons (like preventing harassment and such) and I can understand that there are probably many people who would not mind outsourcing their content moderation to a trusted 3rd party; but there are a great many people like me who are perfectly happy to have an open space where we can craft our experience to our wishes, even if it means seeing some despicable content now and again (excluding those horrific things like child porn which should of course be wiped from the face of the earth)
@Clementulus @thesquirrelfish You should look at the unfiltered replies to my first pinned toot if you really think that you "[do] not really expect to ever come across those posts or ideas because [you] don't search them out".
An unmoderated forum is nice in theory, but in practice, it always, *always* inevitably turns into a swamp of shit.
@LouisIngenthron @thesquirrelfish I did follow that statement with the caveat that if I did come across stuff I didnt like then *I* would decide how to handle it. Its not that people should always have completely unmoderated platforms but more that it should be as easy as possible for people to craft their own experience and not have their agency taken away from them by others who claim to want to make your own experience safer. If people want to outsource to 3rd party moderators, perfectly fine, but it would be nice to have the option to do it yourself.
@Clementulus @thesquirrelfish But you do have that option, especially with the fediverse: You can start your own instance. You can do that with a home computer and an internet line yourself, or purchase a server already configured and ready to go.
By choosing to join an existing server, you *are* choosing to let someone else moderate your experience, at least to an extent.
@LouisIngenthron @thesquirrelfish Completely agree! Another reason why I like it here. In an ideal world most people would do just that, however, most users of social media would find that a barrier to entry and would rather find a home on an existing server and as I said I think that a lot of them would not mind having the greater part of their content moderation in their own hands.
Moral philosophy & free speech ickiness
@Clementulus okay but you're already making a value judgement there right? Your claim is that Nazi recruitment is tolerable but child pornography isn't ...
@thesquirrelfish In terms of what I see when I look at my screen yes it is tolerable. Seeing child porn and then needing to block it after the fact would be unacceptable and I would never use social media if that was the case. Seeing someone spout nazi ideology might make me shake my head in disgust but its not gonna scar me for life. Maybe other people feel differently but lile i said before there are tons of moderated communities that block every instance where they believe nazis to be so if that stuff scares you, you are perfectly free to join those communities.
Free speech ickiness
@Clementulus yeah I think that's an unhealthy mindset I disagree with on multiple levels.
The idea that advocating & admiring killing millions of people is harmless is wrong.
The idea that the reason that child porn isn't acceptable is that the viewer will be harmed is also a problem.
The idea that content isn't impactful unless it makes a sudden huge shift in beliefs is also incorrect.
@thesquirrelfish Child porn is obviously wrong on so many levels and needs to be stopped and obviously we agree that it is harmful to view such imagery so we completely agree that it should not be allowed to exist anywhere regardless of ones views of free speech.
But if you think that merely seeing an ideology is harmful to thinking adults then I would find that a very paternalistic mindset. I have studied nazi ideology in various university settings, listened to lectures about the psychology behind it and even read excerpts of Mein Kampf for similar purposes; i probably know the ideology more thoroughly than most actual neo-nazis and yet I somehow find myself still in disagreement with everything it stands for and am still disgusted by people who espouse even portions of its tenets. Did any of that study harm me? No. Would seeing some random person online foolishly supporting those doctrines harm me? No. Do ignorant people exist who will fall for these foolish ideas? Yes there are, but the solution to this is education, not just trying to make them even more ignorant which is itself a supremacist idea.
Free speech ickiness
@Clementulus disagree on all levels. I feel you have been negatively influenced by studying nazi ideology, including putting whether someone being converted by Nazi content as non-harmful *for you* and viewing child pornography as harmful because of its impact *on you*.
This shows a lack of compassion and empathy and understanding of society as a collective where harm to a child or a minority is a harm to us all.
I think you've made my point better than I ever could, so I'm done.
@thesquirrelfish Thats ok. I dont really think you have understood what I have previously written at all and I am not sure how I could word it so that you would but if thats what you choose to take away from this conversation, all the power to ya. Cheers
I think the mistake is looking for "first principles" in the first place-- a social media site is a kind of community, and there are probably some shared values. You hold open discussion and find a consensus.
Companies running social media should think about their image, what sort of place are they creating? Who would want to be there?
Now universities and other public institutions probably have the hardest questions. But again: these places have mission statements, what are your values?
What should reddit do?
Like you they initially tried to reason this out in an abstract way.
This meant that some very toxic people took over parts of the site. Other people left.
That's the thing about community standards: it's not just what you are excluding, but it's also about who you choose to value.
As for if people running their own social media can decide these things for adults? Obviously we can. And we do.
@futurebird reddit is a decent example of an open structure that in some ways mirrors reality, you can try to find communities that interest you and then participate in those communities and yes, they have shares values that are reflected in their moderation but the platform itself is neutral. Did I ever choose to go on rpolitics? No. But when I wanted a good chuckle at goofballs throwing all their money into gamestop stock, rwsb was the place to be. I think that I just use social media differently where I mostly look at OPs and rarely the comments, which I put zero stock in since its mostly just people trying to be obnoxious.
@Clementulus It sounds like you feel a degree of ownership over the social spaces provided by the social media servers.... but that's an illusion.
You're in somebody else's house, and they can ask you to leave if you offend them, whether or not they think that's good for the rest of the guests at their house.
Sure, sometimes moderation decisions are made with the community in mind, but it's much easier to think of it as "Ew, I don't want to pay to host this crap on my server." With that context, the right to do so seems perfectly fair.
As users, if we don't agree with the decisions of the server's owners/administrators, we're free to find greener pastures from someone who more closely aligns with our values.