- 18 Posts
- 211 Comments
every base is base
10
46·8 days agoModeration = not showing things to people who do not want to see these things. If you are an LGBT person and do not want to ever see people calling you and people like you mentally ill, then hiding those things from you is moderation, completely legitimate, an important part of making the platform a more welcoming place. I don’t usually want to see people doing that either in my feed (and in fact I don’t, because I follow entirely different things on Facebook).
Censorship = not showing things to people even though they want to see these things. If a group of people who believe that LGBT people are mentally ill are talking to each other about these beliefs, then preventing them from doing so is censorship, it doesn’t make the platform a more welcoming place because the people it would make feel unwelcome weren’t seeing it anyway.
That is what I (and the linked blog post) am trying to say. You may still think censorship is in some cases a good thing, but I think it’s important to make the distinction.
I wasn’t actually expressing a substantive opinion on whether this policy change of Meta’s is a good thing or bad thing. The rules there are as arbitrary as anywhere else on the Internet; this slight shift does not make much of a difference.
But moderation is different from censorship: if you (or I or anyone else) do not want to read people writing about LGBT people being mentally ill, or calling me an idiot (and I certainly don’t, most of the time), or literally making any statement at all in the world, then none of us should have to. That doesn’t mean people who want to say these things to each other (necessarily) need to be prevented from saying them to each other; there are arguments for that too, but it’s a different issue.
That doesn’t contradict what I’m saying (“default behavior”), and also moderation is different from censorship.
Seriously, this is how the media is spinning this? “Facebook now allows people to post that LGBT people are mentally ill”?
The default behavior of any social media platform is to allow people to say anything they want. That’s what social media is for, to allow people to talk to each other. The things it doesn’t allow are, and ought to be, exceptions. Facebook has now decided that one of these exceptions will be slightly loosened. I somehow fail to see the big deal in this.
I strongly agree with the point made in the linked article that censorship is when a sender wants to send something, the receiver wants to receive it, but a third party (government, social media platform, whoever) keeps them from doing so.
If I want to see “weird little ideas of rightwing weirdos” (or of leftwing weirdos or any others), I should be allowed to. If I don’t, I shouldn’t have to.
Personally I follow slightly more than 100 accounts plus less than 10 hashtags and feel I’m already getting plenty of things into my feed, nowadays I tend to unfollow things that post too many irrelevant things more than I follow new ones.
I mean in principle this is just a matter of moderation being different from censorship.
But really, an “algorithm tweak”? I am still wondering when or why who decided that we needed to have “algorithms” that someone could “tweak” on the Internet at all. The first kind of “social media” I ever used was web forums where the entire “algorithm” was thread bumping, and even if you insist that we need to have the structure of a microblog: Mastodon does fine without an “algorithm” beyond reverse-chronological sorting.
it’s so easy to host an ActivityPub server oneself, there’s really no excuse for a government agency not to be doing that instead of relying on ex-Twitter
YouTube’s content moderation policies forbid “content praising or justifying violent acts carried out by violent extremist, criminal, or terrorist organizations.”
well so since Luigi Mangione isn’t an organization, sounds like that isn’t covered by these “content moderation policies”? Right?
Obligatory reading:
This has to do with how copyright laws changed over time, for example there used to be a requirement in the US for works to have a copyright notice, or for copyright to be renewed, so some things that didn’t meet those requirements became public domain earlier than they could have if the copyright holder had cared about all the formalities.
Why was it previously allowed, one may ask.
Mike Masnick is usually right about most things, but in this case section 230 is just the wrong defense to use. That really is meant for hosting providers, not software providers. Doesn’t mean they will be held liable, or should be, but it has nothing to do with section 230 as I understand it.
That definitely sounds like a problem. I am not familiar enough with WordPress, is that store not FOSS or are the plugins not or what is going on?
The point of free software is that it doesn’t have owners and you (individually or collectively) can just create an “alternative” yourself by forking it if you disagree with anything its maintainers do.
thanks, the first one helped me understand it
Is there a good ELI5 what this entire dispute is about anywhere? I have been reading many news stories about it, but they all seemed to assume I already knew about it.
3·1 month agoWhen and where was that? I have never seen cherry on pizza before, nor do I remember reading about it.
did someone call me
If the links in the article are accurate, this doesn’t seem to be a “law”, but this thing: https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/code-practice-disinformation
Anyone know more about it than I could quickly find? Is this in any way legally enforceable?
Obviously, I believe that governments have no legitimate business whatsoever telling us on the Internet what we can talk about, say to each other, etc.; but I would still like to know more about this particular attempt by the EU to do so anyway, so would appreciate more information.