A community for progressive issues, social justice and LGBT+ causes in media, gaming, entertainment and tech.
Official replacement for Reddit's r/GamerGhazi
Content should be articles, video essays, podcasts about topics relevant to the forum. No memes, single images or tweets/toots/... please!
Community rules:
Be respectful and civil with each other. Don't be a jerk. There is a real human being on the other side of your screen. See also the Blahaj.Zone Community Rules
No bigotry of any kind allowed. Making racist, sexist, trans-/homo-/queerphobic, otherwise demeaning and hateful comments is not ok. Disabilities and mental illnesses are not to be used as insults and should not be part of your comment unless speaking of your own or absolutely relevant.
No gatekeeping and being rude to people who don't agree with you. Leave “gamer” stereotypes out of your comment (e.g. sexless, neck bearded, teenaged, basement-dwelling, etc). Don't compare people to animals, or otherwise deny their humanity. Even if you think someone is the worst human on the planet, do not wish death or harm upon them.
No "justice porn". Posts regarding legal action and similar is allowed, but celebrating someone being harmed is not.
Contrarianism for its own sake is unnecessary and not welcome.
No planning operations, no brigading, no doxxing or similar activities allowed.
Absolutely no defense of GamerGate and other right-wing harassment campaigns, no TERFs and transphobia, racism, dismissing of war crimes and praise of fascists. This includes “JAQing off”, intentionally asking leading questions while pretending to be a neutral party. This also applies to other forms of authoritarianism and authoritarian or criminal actions by liberal or leftist governments.
NSFW threads, such as ones discussing erotic art, pornography and sex work, must be tagged as such.
Moderators can take action even if none of the rules above are broken.
Conservatives screeching about being cancelled in three... two...
No screeching. Just a sad realization that our 1st Amendment rights will slowly be whittled away by big-tech censorship. All while the unsophisticated masses (excited at the thought of a short-term culture war victory) cheer along the restriction of free expression.
Everybody knows that these claims are bullshit. "1st Amendment rights" is the biggest dog whistle for bigots that they claim whenever their disrespectful conduct has consequences. You don't give a flying fuck about other people's "1st Amendment rights" when it isn't your racist, sexist or transphobic friends. Otherwise you'd be up in arms against book bans, but your kind cheers for them and every other effort to silence people you don't like.
Regardless of your claimed allegiance, your interpretation of 1A is still incorrect.
As a private entity, Discord is allowed to decide what content it permits and what it prohibits on its own platform. Especially in the case of online harrassment, a "let's talk it out" attitude will get you nowhere.
Honestly, I don't care what you think you are. When you react to the news that there are consequences for transphobia with Fox News-style whining about the end of "freeze peach", says pretty much everything anyone needs to know about you: You are a hypocrite who is A-OK with transphobia, bullying and harassment, but attempts to hide the obvious behind a veneer of plausible deniability, ie. the usual slew of right-wing talking points. John Stewart, my ass.
"I have black friends" is what you sound like lol
He’s probably nodding his head unironically now.
/me scratches “Bernie bro” off his bingo card.
There it is.
1A is irrelevant, it only protects against censorship by the government. Discord is a private entity, they can do whatever the hell they want on the platform they own. They aren't obligated to host your opinions, and neither are conservative outlets obligated to host liberal opinions. Get it right next time.
dont even need to read past the first line, how many times do i have to say this for anyone like you to get it in your head
THE FIRST AMENDMENT ONLY PROTECTS YOU FROM GOVERNMENT SILENCING
no, discord, the private chat service, that you must agree to their terms to use is not a government service. they can ban you for whatever they fuck they want, and are not liable.
Please detail to me how discord, a private company, banning people who intentionally misgender or dead name others is a violation or the first amendment right in the United States?
It doesn't say 'intentionally' as you've pointed out, but the wording is clear and pretty reinforced throughout the article, just below the following quote in the article is another 3 'targeted' explanations:
"The update explicitly addresses behaviors considered violations of its hate speech policy, including targeted misgendering and deadnaming of transgender individuals."
You can't say bomb in an airplane. You can't shout fire in a building. You can't shout removed in a Walmart. No one's saying you can't THINK whatever you feel like and SAY whatever you want in your own spaces, but you don't own discord or the plane or the building or the Walmart so you gotta follow other people's rules. Woe is you
Wait - I’m out of the loop. What the heck happened at Walmart?
Turns out the homophobic slur that shares similarities to British cigarettes is banned from use here or on the client side, not sure which. Which, I'm fine with, just using it to make a point on what "censorship" looks like.
WHY IS LEMMY OPPRESSING THOSE OF US WHO LIKE OUR BUNDLES OF STICKS?
Just a reminder. What private companies do has nothing to do with your first amendment rights.
Grow up or shut up.
There are already protections for bullying on Internet platforms. Intentionally misgendering is a form of bullying.
The right to life should supercede someone's right to free speech to undermine said life.
Just once in my life, i would like an American to actually know what the first amendment to the US constitution actually says.
Discord isn't the government, FYI
what is it with kbin users and having the worst/most transphobic fucking takes?
Kbin.social is a very poorly moderated Server, so the worst of the worst users tend to congregate there, and it's a general purpose instance which is the face of Kbin so many instances will choose not to defederate it which would hurt the Kbin project.
It's crazy calling people unsophisticated when you're this dumb. But crazy kinda fits your style.
Lmao are you governed by discord?
Regardless of the first amendment rights or US law, centralised unfree communication silos do govern more information than government.
The claim that private corporations shouldn't be subjected to the same ethical scrutiny (i.e: freedom of speech) as governments is invalidated once only very few people are exposed to other forms of communications than what these private corporations control.
That being said, I am glad Discord is explictly banning the most obvious forms of transphobia. I will remind the privilaged white people here that none of these rules actually apply to most users on these platforms. Just go to any language or region where they won't/can't get sued or bad press.
Big tech censorship? I mean the police are using pretty big tech to make sure only one side can protest safely. 1st amendment amirite.
Actually cry about it they just enumerated what they meant by harassment and this makes the rules explicitly more clear and not up to interpretation and abuse.
The rights of a business are more important than your own. Isn't that what you guys want?
I won't deny that Big Tech and Media companies do undermine our freedom in many ways (things like weaponizing copyright and anti-repair or anti-circumvention laws), but this isn't an example of that, this is just Discord expanding on rules against hate speech and harassment which they already were against.
Oh good, so they plan to actually start enforcing their policies? Because I've never seen it happen, and I've reported users who explicity called for violence against LGBT+ people and black people.
Yeah, I understand your scepticism. At least, they have a system in place for enforcement now. If they have the moderators to actually use it is a different question...
I was a moderator of a gaming server with 2k people. I quit modding and left the server over this.
I've not once seen Discord enforce their policies. In fact, I can still look back in my DM history and see active users who have made clear and explicit threats with a side of slurs to black and LGBT+ people. No action whatsoever on their part, even though I did my diligence by reporting them.
Yo those messages might also be crimes btw 😊
Obligatory XKCD for the folks who keep citing the 1st Amendment 🙄:
If you want to be a hatful person online or in person, there's nothing stopping you from starting your own little online utopia- VPSs are pretty cheap, after all. You'll quickly find, however, that you probably attract a large number of assholes and, in all likelihood, either find yourself moderating content or shutting down just like every other "free speech" bastion.
Which is fine. I'm a firm believer in free speech. If bigots want to have a place to talk to one another, that's their prerogative and their right. What they don't have is a right to force others to host or listen to their bullshit, which appears to be what they want.
Content-based moderation is neither new nor pernicious, folks. So long as those doing it don't hold a monopoly on the use of force, you remain free to vote with your feet, wallet, eyeballs, and ears.
Telling diet Nazis to go fuck themselves is an appropriate use of power, but any power can be abused. You have an underlying moral right to free expression. That's the reason behind the first amendment. It is not a gift from the state.
What makes Discord's choice okay is freedom of association. Most people don't want to deal with diet Nazis. It is fine for most businesses to exclude diet Nazis, whether or not anyone asked them to.
But nobody would tut 'Discord's not a government' if they'd banned trans-rights advocacy. And that's fine. There's no hypocrisy in it. You understand businesses can do harm, individually and in bulk, through their decisions. Silencing reasonable opinions, expressed politely, is almost always censorship we should fight. There's just nothing reasonable or polite about being a goddamn fascist.
I mean, I'm a trans woman and I would indeed say "Discord's not a government" if they adopted such an asinine policy. I'd also probably be fairly critical of those continuing to use it.
I agree that silencing speech is a bad thing. I'm just not sure that I agree that moderation on any particular site is silencing speech. We're all free to use the sites we like. While I might think your putative policy of banning trans advocacy is imprudent, I would still respect the right of a host to have such a policy (while maintaining my own right to boycott/criticize).
Discord never had freedom of speech to begin with, but isn't this extreme? People should be able to say what they want privately in their own servers. Brigading and harassment in DMs is already banned.
You do not have a right to free speech on the property of a private business. A restaurant can kick you out for being an asshole. A tech company can kick you off their servers for being an asshole.
Private servers are moderated all the time. Just look at the piracy prevention that goes on.
It only seems that way because their enforcement is so poor, I'm kind of wondering myself if this is going to change anything or if they're not enforcing anything and just putting this up as a front it doesn't mean a whole lot.
Discord does not use e2e encryption meaning they can do whatever they want with the content you share not only with your friends but with the company. They can use the guise of safety (eg we found a private server planning terrorism) to extend this access to everything. Since the company can read everything on the platform, they’re carrying a serious set of risks and liability with all of that potentially bad or illegal content. By creating policies like this, they can sidestep litigation (to an extent) when bad content is found by pointing to policies and handwavy enforcement. It might not be illegal to deadname (at least in the US); that does not stop civil litigation.
Given that fuck all is going to change, I view this primarily as a risk reduction strategy that most people will misconstrue as social good. That’s a really cynical take. I’m pretty cynical about the motives of massive orgs beyond risk management.
I hope that doesn't include Twitter :D