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Calls for defederation - Is the idea of the open marketplace of ideas outdated?
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this post was submitted on 27 Jun 2023
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Challenge others opinions and be challenged on your own.
This is not a safe space nor an echo-chamber, you come here to discuss in a civilized way, no flaming, no insults!
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, "trust me bro" is not a valid argument.
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Here's the thing though: nobody's mandating it for everyone else. The admin has the final call. If you don't like it, find an instance with an admin that runs things the way you like. If you have the skills and/or money, make your own instance and run it the way you like.
This isn't Reddit/Facebook/Twitter where if you don't like the way things are run, your options are suck it up or cut yourself off from the network. Things are more nuanced here.
All of those arguments are not objective, they're subjective. This means that the idea of invalid/valid is irrelevant. To use an analogy, saying that "I like apples" is an invalid argument is pretty ridiculous, how is "I like/don't like this content" any different? To push that a bit farther, how is "I don't want to associate with these kinds of people, and I don't want to interact with people who find that ok"? This is all personal, subjective, messy stuff.
First of all: Thanks for your contributions, I appreciate you participating in this discussion.
While you're right with the assessment that the final call is for the admin(s) to make let me rephrase it a little bit:
Isn't the immediate call for censorship/defederation as soon as some views are challenged a bit too entitled? It looks like centralised platforms like FB and Twitter allowed this mindset to flourish and I'm not really comfortable with this.
There's a big difference between "views are challenged" and either active misinformation (vaccines = gene therapy?!?) or rampant bigotry. As a half-jewish person, I'm especially (again, subjectively) keen to avoid interacting with people like that. There's so many dog whistles crammed into that unformatted wall of text that I'm surprised my whole neighbourhood isn't filled with the sound of howling.
I would first start with the definition of gene-therapy and take it from there to start with, but if we keep in on a layman level:
The above is current scientific status quo and not controversial at all. So could you call is agend therapy? Yes using the term just bit more broadly this would still fit.
Is it misinformation? Maybe. But don't we have a right to decide for ourselves what is and isn't misinformation? Shouldn't misinformation be challenged and ridiculed when exposed? I'd like to be able to do that but I can't if it's behind walls or hidden in dark corners, where it festers and attracts the wrong people.
Again: Dont they have a right to be bigoted?
I understand if you don't want to be associated with them, this is legit. But shouldn't other be allowed to debate them, confront them or even partially agree with them?
If you're hiding or prohibiting open debate you will only get more of it, we can see this over and over, again and again. Prohibited fruits are the interesting ones.
Make it uncool to be a bigoted Nazi and only a marginalized group will associate with them. Demonize and censor them and see them grow exponentially in number, influence and power.
If that counts as gene therapy, then the term becomes meaningless as the majority of medicine is now counted as gene therapy. They use it in this way to make it sound scary and dangerous. All medicine has side-affects and risks, but the vague use of scary language is the point.
Sure, I'm not the thought police and I'm never going to claim to be always right, all the time. That way leads to a complete and utter inability to engage with new information that challenges worldviews. Where that ends for me is judging people based on parentage and ethnicity. I have no interest talking to a person like that.
Debating a racist isn't normally a productive experience. You can't logic your way out of a position that you started believing for emotional reasons. Also, they normally don't treat words and arguments with the same care as their interlocutors. Consequently, if somebody wants to go engage with them and try and convince them they're wrong, I wish them all the luck in the world, I just think it's a waste of time most of the time. For me, I just want to share links and have conversations with people who don't think of me as sub-human or inherently evil.
Wholeheartedly agreed! And that is the point from where we can look at things we have in common despite, maybe, some opposing views:
We both want to read, share and comment on interesting stuff we expect to find here on Lemmy in the Fediverse.
It also seems that we're both interested in civilised exchange of views and arguments.
The only key difference I see, and correct me if I'm wrong here, is that you wouldn't want to see/engage stuff you define as bigoted/racist or hateful, correct?
Which I can understand and even agree upon. The only thing that makes me doubt is: Is defederation and the call for authorities (admins) the right way to deal with this? Or should the recipient decide what the filters should be? Like in the email approach, the recipient decides if he wants to receive an email and even then it might get filtered out and land in spam.
A blacklist, to keep using the email protocol as example, is a tool used sparingly and only when other filtering methods are unsuccessful or when greater damage is prevented that way.
What do you think?
There's a key difference with email: that's opt-in communication. Generally speaking (outside of botspam which does get blacklisted) you have to sign up for a newsletter or ask someone to email you. It's opt-in, not opt-out. Lemmy/Kbin are by definition opt-out: a new user, browsing All, will see everything they haven't blocked.
An admin, attempting to make the kind of user that they want to see on their instance feel welcome, does have a duty to curate it. If the first post they see on their New feed is a screed calling for the death of all LGBTQ+ people (for example), do you think a brand new user will calmly block the community and move on, or decide that this instance isn't the one for them? And a user that agrees with that hateful message, they have now gotten the message that this instance is friendly to their worldview.
Curation determines userbase which determines content. I know which side of the coin I fall on there.
Good point!
And here I disagree with you. The world is a horrible, dangerous, wonderful, exciting , murderous, funny, sad, depressing, manic place. Hiding that some people hate gays will not change the fact that some people hate gays. It will also not make these people disappear. Isn't it better to know reality and accept it as it is, deal with it as it comes?
I think that this has been a surprisingly productive debate. I may not agree with you on this, but I do understand where you're coming from and can respect it. I think I'll answer this and leave it at that:
I don't need to read hateful things to know that hateful people exist. I've had plenty of people say far worse to my face IRL. I don't come to Lemmy and didn't go to Reddit to get into shouting matches with people who think me or my friends are less-than. My goal here is not changing the world, it's entertainment and discussion. Neither am I seeking some safe space with a strict blocklist and careful vetting of each user. All I want is a medium place where I can have good conversations without someone questioning my right to exist.
Thank you and likewise.
Questioning your right to exist sound quite stupid, you obviously exist (Let's not go full Descartes now) and that settles any discussion in my POV.
As you just said: I can see where you come from and I can respect that, however I don't fully agree with it.
Nonetheless it has been a great pleasure to disagree with you and learn about your POV, thanks for stepping up to the task and giving me food for thought.
It's not questioning their existence, it's questioning their right to do so in the way they choose.
Thus the "to" in right to exist. It's a different argument entirely and you're casually merging it the same way you did the vaccines are gene therapy nonsense.
Where was I wrong with my, simplified, explanation? Because you're just shouting "Fake News!" without providing any argument.
I provided my argument. There is a difference between "someone exists" and "allowing someone to exist as they are". By conflating the two you ignore all the people that are determined to prevent the second from happening while allowing for the first within a set limit. Usually those limits may be sound (no pedophiles, no murderers, etc), but a significant (alt right/religious/conservative) group are pushing that a subset of people aren't allowed the second because it goes against their morals for whatever reason. Accepting that there are hateful communities in the lemmyverse and allowing them access under terms (no brigading, no hatespeech on other instances) is the first option while defederating from hateful communities is the second option, if you needed an example of the difference.
The only difference between lemmyverse and the real world in this case is that defederating doesn't remove anyone's right to exist as they are in their own space, whereas many of these hateful groups want to eliminate the right for people to exist as they are anywhere.
That's a non-argument. Just because someone says: "Being gay is a sin" this doesn't deny any gay person the right to be gay or the right to exist. Unless you go to Iran or Dubai and try be be openly gay there, there you can for sure experiments how denial of existence looks like in reality.
I also asked you to disprove my simplify explanations of why an argument could me made about mRNA COVID vaccines being genetic treatments. You haven't said a word about that apart from: This is wrong. Well prove me wrong, please. Where did I fail?
That's a bold claim, do you have bold evidence to substantiate that?
"These vaccines do not enter the nucleus of the cell where our DNA (genetic material) is located, so it cannot change or influence our genes."
From the cdc website.
All the mRNA vaccine does is feed a blueprint in to the cells protein synthesizer (not modify the genes or add new genes, or interact with them in any way). This new protein is similar to the protein on the surface of the targeted virus and triggers an immune response that will then give the immune system a memory for the targeted virus. It's like feeding a template into a 3d printer. The new template doesn't change or alter the printer in any way.
Nothing here contradicts what I wrote. Can you please quote my post and tell me what exactly is wrong? Please see how mRNA works and then look at my postz if you find anything wrong with it and evidence where I was wrong, I'm happy to correct.
Right now you're parrotting the CDC website which doesn't contradict me in the slightest.
Here look at this first https://youtu.be/TbaCxIJ_VP4
If you think that doesn't contradict your vaccines= gene therapy point, you need to recheck the definition of gene therapy.
It modifies the genetic structure in the HOST through one of a few methods, none of which are : provide modified RNA genetic material to produce a specific compound, unless said modified RNA also introduces desired genes into the host cells.
https://www.fda.gov/vaccines-blood-biologics/cellular-gene-therapy-products/what-gene-therapy#:~:text=Gene%20therapy%20is%20a%20technique,healthy%20copy%20of%20the%20gene
Now if you wanted to be obtuse and say that anything that has any sort of genetic material in it designed to interact with the human body, then you could argue that mRNA vaccines are gene therapy. By the definition and by method of interaction they are at best adjacent, not gene therapy.
You haven't read what I wrote or you haven't understood it. I did not say: It is gene therapy.
I did not say: I think it's gene therapy. I haven't made any statement about my opinion on that matter.
I said: Given the, simplified, explanation of how mRNA vaccines work an argument could be made to call it gene therapy.
I did NOT say that this is my argument. I did NOT say that calling mRNA vaccines gene therapy is right (or wrong, I did NOT make ANY judgment on that matter).
So either you're intentionally misreading my statements or you're not able to understand that even if I don't agree with an opinion I might be able to follow it's inherent logic which is what I did.
In any case I don't see value in further engaging on that topic with you.
Have you ever run a mail server? If so, have you looked at your logs? The RBL’s on the managed mail gateway for my work turns away 70% of the attempts. This is even before spam scoring kicks in on the 30% initially accepted. A significant percent of that is considered spam. Email has a complex set of automated tools to reject content without even viewing it.
I still think email, even though federated, is a poor analogy to make for Lemmy.
Actually I do have my own mailserver and for obvious reasons I do not longer use most of the big IP based blacklists because they just don't work well enough, some are basically blackmail+systems with pay-for-removal.
It's something else when you rely on third party (in my analogy the call for a filtering authority) than you being the one who makes the call and what is being filtered and why.
As with spam filtering: If you rely on someone else to filter out stuff for you, you hand over control about what you get and what you see. The potential for abuse of this power is a greater danger in my opinion that having to do some extra work to set up filters myself.
This is, BTW, the main reason my I deGoogled and set up my very own server.
Yep, my personal domains have always been on my own mail server. My IP has been on the UCE-Protect blocklist for years. I believe it’s now up to an IPv4 /17. Luckily no one reputable uses them since it’s one of the biggest fake pay-to-remove out there.
Like you, I want that full control and don’t want to trust (or pay) a big player.
At work, where we have thousands of mailboxes, interacting with people on all continents, I’d much rather outsource that. It’s cheaper in the long run and takes up less of my time.
If you want to get backs to email as a analogy for the fediverse, and I already think it’s a bad analogy, someone running their own mail server has the full right to block anyone, including all AWS ip address space if they want. Why shouldn’t someone running a Lemmy server have that same right?
Somebody running (!) or administrating an email sever can of course make this call! I expect a lemmy admin to make reasonable decisions.
But let's keep that analogy: You're an email sever admin and one of your users asks you to block everything coming from Amazon/AWS and affiliates, because they dislike how this company is run. Would you block the traffic or tell the user how to use filters at his disposal?
See, you’ve got another false choice here. /s
What I’d do is ignore them and not engage, which is what I’d expect most Lemmy admins to do for most degeneration requests. By the same token if a user shows me clear evidence that the only content we’ve gotten from another mail server is spam or phishing that’s making it through our filters, I’d probably block it. Of course, no mail user is going to do that.
Apologies, I make enough mistakes to not shame anyone but your typo made my day and I had a good laugh at it. Thanks! I will keep "degeneration request" in my list of favourite quotes.
Seems that we don't disagree that much. Thanks for engaging and joining in!
What are you talking about? Email admins use blacklists (usually in the form of DNS RBLs but there are others) all the time.
To some extent, YES, but I think it’s a bit more nuanced and comes down to where you draw that line. Everyone is going to draw it in a different place.
I moderated an academic listserv with membership in 5 digits back before the html protocol even existed. That was huge for the time. And, as you would think, in academia at the time the idea of cronterversy, free speech, and engaging in items you disagreed with was pretty comprehensive. Even so, we still had to moderate, primarily for spam and obvious trolling as well as the occasional personal attacks.
I was an active participant in Usenet in the 90’s. Usenet was federated servers hosting posts and comments from participants on that entire federation. I know a server admin could control what Usenet groups they carried. I have no idea what other levels of moderation were available. Discussions were definitely more freewheeling and challenging than you see today, but they also had a higher content level and a greater respect for intellectual argument, even in trolling. Again, I suspect that was because the bulk of the participants were coming from higher ed institutions.
I was active in Internet forums when SCO sued IBM. There were active attacks on communities and successful attempts to splinter communities based in part on what side of the very question you are asking participants came down on. Again, though, there was a strong respect for intellectual engagement. And, I came down strongly with the same opinion you are expressing back then.
I think that strong respect for engagement exists here in the fediverse, particularly when compared to something like FaceBook or Reddit. As the fediverse grows, I think that will go away.
I don’t have much respect for low content trolling, for active attacks via brigading, for manipulation. I think the ability to upvote is important, but I also think the ability for bot accounts to manipulate that is a very difficult thing to combat, particularly in something as young as Lemmy that is experiencing exponential growth.
I also have a much better awareness of how subtle that manipulation can be in influencing individuals and society, including my own views.
I no longer have the absolutist attitude I once had. I agree with your own concerns about echo chambers, because that leads to its own manipulation of views and the splintering of society. However, I’m also more willing to support the idea of not providing a platform for some of the more odious content than my older self would have supported.
I’m probably in a position to piss off nearly everyone. I disagree with your view that there should be almost no lines drawn, but I disagree with the majority that the lines should be drawn where they want it to be.
Thanks, very interesting contribution. I have a fair share of Usenet experience myself and before that FidoNet and other Mailboxes so I've seen my fair share of flame wars.
I just want to point out one thing: I'm not at all against moderation or the ability to filter, block, ban or mute individual participants or communities, I was referring to a trend I've seen growing more and more: The call for a (central) authority to serve prefiltered, bland content, it should not offend anyone.
And here's my problem: Offense is more often taken than given.