Gab also used Mastodon but they don't anymore anymore. They did run as a Mastodon instance[1], but after being blocked from most instances and even at the software level by most Mastodon apps, they stopped using Mastodon and wrote their own new backend that does not federate.
This is actually pretty disheartening honestly, being blocked by other instances is one thing, but everything else solely for political reasoning, especially F-Droid, is further evidence of diminishing integrity in this space.
That was achieved by the instance level blocking. Clients breaking protocol to antagonize instances the developers don't like and F-Droid arbitrarily kicking apps despite them following the inclusion policy is where this breaks down.
Nonsense. F-Droid kicking apps is still freedom of association, as is Clients changing their protocol. They are also run by entities that have freedom of association.
Just as you have the freedom to not use those apps if you don't like them.
If I was the developer of a chat client app, I certainly wouldn't want to see screenshots with my app branding in them alongside alt-right content and I would do the same to prevent it from being used for such things.
I will point out that Facebook has just as abhorrent discourse yet the third party clients for it still exist on F-Droid. Which of course they should, F-Droid is a platform that encourages the proliferation of free and open source software. To block access to an open source Facebook client would be antithetical to it's mission.
Yet when a rising social media company chooses to deliberately use an open source project as their first party platform, this is when F-Droid decides an exception has to be made? I thought we wanted the world to embrace FOSS, but apparently not.
F-Droid doesn't need to be consistent or explain their desire to dissociate in any way (legally speaking).
So let's speculate: perhaps they agree with you that Facebook has abhorrent discourse but also felt that FB had some beneficial content as well so decided to not ban it not to mention it's popularity. Association with Gab clearly provided no such benefits.
Legally speaking F-Droid can do a lot of things, but the law has no bearing on the discussion of whether it was the right thing to do, if it will help with FOSS adoption or finally if they are somehow absolved from criticism for their inconsistent and politically biased policy enforcement.
I see no reason why we should restrict FOSS adoption to only people within an arbitrary and unrelated political sphere. Everyone wins when everyone is using FOSS, even the people we don't like. Unfortunately F-Droids decision on this matter hurts FOSS adoption from conservatives who will only continue to associate FOSS with the left-wing.
Sophist nonsense, I am critiquing them on a public forum for breaking their own policies and for what I perceive as harm to the FOSS movement. If you choose to rely on vague trust in authorities in lieu of an actual discussion, then don't reply at all.
To the extent that Facebook does have such discourse (and it does), it's mostly failure in their implementation of their community standards policy, not a laissez-faire community standards policy.
This exists currently. Many web browsers block third-party cookies. I say, let the developers develop as they must, let the users use as they must, and let us all be free to choose.
Personally, I find it very annoying that clients block these alt-right instances. It feels like a layering violation.
you could alternately classify their reasoning as 'basic humanity' rather than political. When we are discussing the value or humanity of certain groups the discussion goes well beyond the label of 'political'
but everything else solely for basic humanity reasoning...doesn't have the same ring.
Tearing down freedom of speech values doesn't scream pro-humanity to me, but I'm sure the project has justified it to themselves using some political arguments.
Freedom of speech is with respect to the state, not other people. If you can show that these platforms are acting on behalf of the state — sure. But, I suspect they’re not.
Freedom of speech has always included the right to choose not to give a platform to speech with which you disagree. Compelled speech by definition is not free speech.
The ACLU sued in order to force the local government to allow the marches to take place. They were quite literally demanding that a platform (the city streets) be provided for the speech they wanted to have.
> The ACLU sued in order to force the local government to allow the marches to take place.
Your examples refer to government not being able to prohibit the exercise of free speech.
Yet, you're using that example to try to justify forcing specific private companies and organizations to provide services to a specific political group, against their own will and even terms of service, just because it's convenient to the political group and it suits their political goals.
This line of reasoning also sounds very hypocritical given that said political group has been advocating for the right of said private companies and organizations to deny service based on political views, and going as far as publicly praising the companies that enforce that blend of politically-motivated denial of service.
The argument you are arguing with is predicated now on what free-speech is it isn’t but on situating one side as the victim of free speech crimes. It is a typical fascist argument that is characteristic of pretty much every version of fascist ideology that has come into existence
> The argument you are arguing with is predicated now on what free-speech is it isn’t but on situating one side as the victim of free speech crimes.
No, not really. I've pointed out the mistake of conflating the right to free speech, as in the governments not being allowed to stop people from expressing their ideas and opinions without fear of retaliation, with the privilege of using (and abusing) someone else's services or infrastructure to advance your political ideals.
Convenience and rights are not the same thing, and not being able to benefit from the services provided by someone else does not mean your right to free speech is infringed upon.
To put it differently, just because you can say whatever you want that doesn't give you the right to grab someone else's megaphone to do it.
When it comes to platforms, meaning something with a network effect and limited equivalent substitutes, the difference between a government and a private service is academic at best. The reality is both can have lots of power and influence and the impact of their limits on civil liberties such as the freedom of speech are similar. Your interpretation of that freedom seems to stop at what the first amendment provides. But freedom of speech is a much more fundamental concept.
>"who’s entire belief structure relies on not understanding it."
That's rather pompous, how do you know your interpretation / understanding is objectively correct and theirs is objectively wrong? Why is your personal understanding the correct one that other people are unable to grasp?
The First Amendment prevents governments' ability to abridge the freedom of speech, not private citizens.
As a private citizen, I do not have to allow the KKK a platform on my property, nor would I have to publish their speech as the owner of a newspaper, or broadcast it as the owner of a television station.
>The ACLU sued in order to force the local government to allow the marches to take place. They were quite literally demanding that a platform (the city streets) be provided for the speech they wanted to have.
Operative terms: Government and City streets.
In the US, the government may not restrict you from speaking (with some very narrow exceptions). City streets are public and under the control of the government.
F-Droid is not a government. Nor is its private property (its servers and infrastructure) in any way public.
As such, your analogy is flawed.
If what you appear to be advocating were true, I could come to your house, project (duly licensed, of course) gay, midget furry porn on your walls at max volume and you would have no recourse.
Private entities (specifically, those that are not the government) are under no obligation to host or promote the speech of others. And that's a good thing.
If you wish to stand on some sort of principle over this, I'll be by your place later with the foulest legal content I can find.
tl;dr: In the US, restrictions on speech only apply to the government. If you disagree, then you, me and everyone else would have to allow any content (whether you agree with it or not) on your private property.
> You can't force people to sell your shit in their store.
I think this is actually the crux of it. Almost all communication now takes place on privately owned platforms in applications with curated availability. Metaphors comparing it to someone else's store (or someone in thread mentioned protests on your own lawn) are useless. They are so far removed that they aren't even wrong.
Why? Because there is vanishingly less space for public speech/press. We have a problem where what we mostly agree is a human right is now heavily under the control of private interests, and you are not going to like it when the pendulum swings the other way.
they've actually stopped doing this recently because they're getting "canceled" via loss of donations every time they do. people don't want defenders of freedom of speech anymore. they want internet points for virtue signaling.
You could declare that the only way to show basic humanity is to precisely agree with the political zeitgeist in the correct left-wing circles and that the only reason to disagree with any of their political prescriptions is becaues you see certain groups as subhuman. I've seen plenty of activists do so; in a lot of circles it seems to be mandatory in order to actually be seen as human. Of course, there's the small problem that often the members of those groups don't actually support the political prescription, that it destroys the ability to actually challenge the people pushing those political views - who, by definition, have substantial power compared to the minorities they're claiming to help - and that it's lead to horrendous bigotry like TERFism. But that's not worth contemplating, because to qustion the righteousness of all this is to ignore the humanity of the people we conveniently don't have to listen to if it gets in our way.
Your comments have many characteristics of a bad faith argument, for example confusing well defined and easy to separate concepts in an effort to create ambiguity. The best way to address a bad faith argument is to label it as such and not engage with it because it is not a meaningful contribution to discourse about a topic. That’s what I’m gonna do from here on out, and I suggest other, Commenters do the same.
There is no reasonable confusion between compelling an individual to host speech and preventing the government from interfering by with individuals speech. I suspect you know that.
> but everything else solely for political reasoning, especially F-Droid, is further evidence of diminishing integrity in this space.
Supposedly F-Droid is 'Free software' but also violated the first freedom on how a user should user their software as they wish.
So does that mean F-Droid is NOT free software and on top of that FLOSS (Free Libre Open Source Software) Facebook, Twitter, Telegram, Mastodon or Matrix clients should also not be packaged because there are bad actors on those platforms who are harassing other users?
There are some big misconceptions about FOSS software here. F-Droid is FOSS, this means that the source code for both the client and server are available, can be copied, modified, and used by anyone for any purpose.
This does not mean that f-droid.org and the official f-droid android app — a particular installation and distribution of the software has to do… well anything really outside of complying with the license terms [1]. That’s kinda the point. They’re not obligated to host any content they don’t want for any reason no matter how inconsistent, they’re allowed to build or not build additional features as they see fit, and provide or refuse service to anyone — at least as far as the license is concerned.
Absolutely no software freedoms were violated by fdroid.
[1] And even then since they’re also the copyright holders they technically don’t even have to do that.
1. What does gab have to do with "truth social"? From a skim of the article it doesn't look like they're related, aside from them both being right wing social media apps.
2. being a hypocrite is bad, sure, but I don't see how it's a "get out of jail free card" when it comes to having integrity. If your principle is "always tell the truth", and you encounter a pathological liar that calls other people out for lying, does that mean you can suddenly start lying to the guy and still claim you're a man of integrity?
> What does gab have to do with "truth social"? From a skim of the article it doesn't look like they're related, aside from them both being right wing social media apps.
It's a proto-fascist/full-blown fascist political movement that advocates the subversion of free and democratic elections to install a dictatorship, not to mention the prevalence of racism in their views and policies.
Also, I feel that labeling this particular political movement as merely "right-wing" is a blatant attempt to white-wash extremist views and push for a "us-vs-them" mentality. What this particular political group advocates has absolutely nothing to do with the typical right-wing political tropes of fiscal conservatism, small government, individual freedom. In fact, some of the policies they advocate goes completely against some of these core right-wing values.
>It's a proto-fascist/full-blown fascist political movement that advocates the subversion of free and democratic elections to install a dictatorship, not to mention the prevalence of racism in their views and policies.
That doesn't answer the question. Even they're both doing the same unsavory things, it doesn't follow that you can accuse one of them of being a hypocrite because the other is a hypocrite.
>Also, I feel that labeling this particular political movement as merely "right-wing" is a blatant attempt to white-wash extremist views and push for a "us-vs-them" mentality.
I feel like this violates the HN guidelines:
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
> Eschew flamebait. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents.
For the record, I went with the generic "right wing" label because I wasn't sure whether a more precise label (eg. alt-right) would apply to both. A quick skim of wikipedia confirms this. The page for gab straight up says it's far-right/alt-right, but the page for truth social only has a passing mention of it being "alt-tech" in the reception section.
You're trying way too hard to ascribe malice where there isn't any.
> That doesn't answer the question. Even they're both doing the same unsavory things, it doesn't follow that you can accuse one of them of being a hypocrite because the other is a hypocrite.
You're being disingenuous if you're trying to pretend that Gab and Truth Social's targeted userbase, and the political movement driving their adoption, is not the same.
Just to make it very clear, Gab was the social networking service initially adopted by this proto-fascist/fascist political movement to serve as a stopgap solution to being kicked out of Twitter due to their prevalence of hatespeech and disinformation, as well as supporting a coup to overthrow a democratically elected government to install a dictatorship.
The same political movement is now organizing themselves to adopt their leader's Mastodon-based social networking service, Truth Social, as the official social networking service.
> For the record, I went with the generic "right wing" label because I wasn't sure whether a more precise label
It's not a matter of precision, it's a matter of trying to whitewhash extremist political movements by bundling them with mainstream innocuous political groups, particularly when they have barely any ideological common ground.
>You're being disingenuous if you're trying to pretend that Gab and Truth Social's targeted userbase, and the political movement driving their adoption, is not the same.
I am? What makes you think that?
>The same political movement is now organizing themselves to adopt their leader's Mastodon-based social networking service, Truth Social, as the official social networking service.
Okay, but what does that have to do with accusations of hypocrisy? If marxist group #1 is complaining about getting deplatformed/supressed, and why does marxist group #2's moderation policies invalidate their concern?
>Care to point out which guidelines?
I literally quoted them.
>It's not a matter of precision, it's a matter of trying to whitewhash extremist political movements by bundling them with mainstream innocuous political groups, particularly when they have barely any ideological common ground.
Again, you're ascribing malicious intent where there isn't any. Not every commenter who mislabels that political movement is doing so as part of a conscious effort to "whitewash extremism".
> What does gab have to do with "truth social"? From a skim of the article it doesn't look like they're related, aside from them both being right wing social media apps.
They were both formed as a response to prominent users being kicked off of other platforms, they both forked Mastodon, and they're both having bumpy launches for similar reasons. Regardless of what argument you're making, it seems perfectly reasonable to bring up Gab as part of the conversation. If we were talking about Rivian trucks, I don't think it would be off topic to mention Tesla.
[originally replied to the wrong comment; reposted here]
>Regardless of what argument you're making, it seems perfectly reasonable to bring up Gab as part of the conversation.
It is? I took the comment to argue something along the lines of "well they're hypocrites, therefore it's totally okay to censor them in return". For that to work, you'd need them to be the same entity. Having two sites that operate independently, and having separate policies doesn't seem hypocritical to me. In that context, bringing up gab is a total red herring.
I'm likely confused. The next parent above your question that mentions Gab is currently this one:
> Gab also used Mastodon but they don't anymore anymore. They did run as a Mastodon instance[1], but after being blocked from most instances and even at the software level by most Mastodon apps, they stopped using Mastodon and wrote their own new backend that does not federate.
...which seems like a pretty plain statement of facts? Is there some encoded animosity there I'm missing? The comment you replied to was a link to a Rolling Stone article that also doesn't mention Gab. (As an aside, I think Rolling Stone is a terrible source of news or information).
Whoops, I got the two companies confused. My original objection was with this comment[1], which was talking about the moderation policies of another company, truth social. That part seemed irrelevant to me, because the moderation policies of one site (truth social) shouldn't make the grievances of another site (gab) less valid.
There's an idea floating in some internet circles that because you aren't tolerant of some speech you disagree with, you're assumed to not be tolerant of all speech you disagree with. It is quite obviously fallacious.
Strong is not the same thing as absolute. One of my strong ethical values is that neo-nazis and fascists should be deplatformed to the greatest extent possible.
"strong" is a modifier for "moral and ethical principles and values", not for "consistent and uncompromising adherence". If you swore to support and defend the constitution, and then subsequently violated it to torture terrorists, I doubt you'd be called a man of integrity. This applies even if your other "strong ethical values" is "protecting the american people", or that you think that "terrorists are really bad people so they totally deserve it".
>One of my strong ethical values is that neo-nazis and fascists should be deplatformed to the greatest extent possible.
I have a feeling that's not the ethical value that OP was talking about, nor was it the ethical value f-droid founders had in mind when creating it.
Freedom of speech should include the freedom to not speak on behalf of others. And then there’s freedom of association, which one might consider far more fundamental — it’s what you lose when you go to jail.
Please don't post canned arguments to HN. They point to super-repetitive/generic places, and those usually get nasty, as indignation rushes in to fill the curiosity vacuum.
I think many people are perfectly content with being called intolerant, if that's what it takes for others to understand nuance. There is nothing wrong with not supporting hateful jerks and bigots.
> Toleration doesn't imply support. That's the whole point of toleration.
Except that in this case we're seeing people who feel entitled to everyone else's support demanding it under the guise of tolerance.
Think about it. We're talking about a federated self-hosting social networking service, and how a group renowned for a political leaning that lies somewhere between authoritarian and full-blown fascist, not to mention the significant amount of racism, is not benefiting from being able to freely connect to each and any node made available by anyone in the world. It's not tolerance that's being expected, but benefiting from having free access to everyone else's services.
Well yes. But if say Nazi Germany were annexing Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland and finally France, should the USA do something about it?
Because popular opinion in the 1940s (even after France's collapse into pro-German "Vichy France") was "Stay neutral and don't join the war". That is to say, we were "tolerating" the events and trying to keep our hands clean of it, and we ultimately only joined after Pearl Harbor forced our hand.
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Its not hypothetical. There were other groups who "tolerated" the Nazis. IIRC, its a common criticism of the Catholic church for not going more anti-Nazi than they did (they were more neutral as well). Hard to criticize them IMO when the US tried to be neutral for so long though!
Eventually, there's a line that is crossed and we must become "intolerant" of other people's actions. Nazi Germany is perhaps the last example where the country truly unified itself against that threat, but... even as late as 1941 (well after the fall of France), USA was nominally neutral in the conflict. Was that the correct move? Should we have "Become intolerant" of the Nazis sooner?
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Don't believe me? Look up Charles Lindberg (yes, "Spirit of St. Louis" pilot for the first Trans-Atlantic flight). Look up the speeches he gave for the "American First Committee", a popular antiwar group in 1940 and 1941. USA was 100% willing to give up on France and Britain back then, and it was incredibly popular despite the atrocities that continued in Europe.
It all of course changed when Japan made a strategic blunder on December 7th, 1941. But remember: USA was largely reacting to Hitler's rise with a big "should we even care" ?? If it weren't for Japan, I don't think we would have joined the war in earnest.
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"Tolerance", keeping neutral, etc. etc. is the wrong answer sometimes. I think we can all look back with shame upon the US's reluctance to kick Hitler's ass. Like, we Americans make fun of Chamberlain's appeasement, but its not like our country did much about the situation until a few years later.
Funny note: under the Tripartite Pact, because Japan was the aggressor in Pearl Harbor, Germany didn't have to declare war on the USA.
Of course, politics overrides contracts. Hitler wanted close relations with Japan, and gave them his word that Germany had Japan's back on Dec. 4th. So Japan used that to attack the USA (knowing Germany would help). Germany, much like Japan, underestimated the strength of the USA and didn't expect them to be a big deal.
But WW2 could have just had US vs Japan, but kept "neutrality" vs Germany ... if circumstances lined up just right. Apparently there were many German advisors who were trying to push for this scenario, and didn't think Germany had anything to gain for keeping its verbal agreement with Japan. We can imagine an interesting parallel-world where maybe some Advisor managed to convince Hitler of this plan and Germany going down this path instead.
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USA wouldn't get first-hand witness accounts / pictures of the Holocaust for years. The Holocaust was happening, but US citizens wouldn't know about it. (The first whispers of the Holocaust were given to the US State department in 1942, but were written off/ignored)
New York Times had the Holocaust discussed on its 10th page in December 1942. (Not even front-page material). So once again, news of this genocide was largely met with a shrug. War-plans to bomb concentration camps were discussed, but pushed out as a low-priority. Some rescues happened, but it was clearly not a focus of the war effort.
I think people greatly underestimate the USA's capability to be isolationist. Yeah, we play the world's policemen at times, but we also don't like doing it.
In any case, by the time our soldiers found the concentration camps and gave first-hand accounts of them... the Holocaust was largely accepted as fact. But we weren't exactly proactive at stopping it.
Because there is no principled way to draw the line.
One side says not using someone's preferred pronouns is intolerant to their gender identity. The other side says being forced to use them is intolerant to their religious beliefs. Now what? Tie goes to the one with the most guns?
If you don't allow censorship, nobody gets censored. If you do allow censorship, there will always be somebody who wants to censor you.
> Because there is no principled way to draw the line.
In this case the line is pretty clear, and very crisp.
You're talking about a political group that advocates overthrowing the results of free and fair elections aimed at subverting a democratic regime by installing a dictatorship whose supporters are very adamant in their embracing of racist world views.
Challenging election results is not the same as “overthrowing elections”. The Democrats literally challenged the election formally in 2000, 2004, and 2016. For anyone keeping track, that is all the recent presidential elections in which they lost. They even had legislators voting against certification. Polls showed that after the 2016 election, most Democrat voters believed (and probably still do) that Russia literally altered the votes of the 2016 election. Hillary Clinton claimed for months that this election was illegitimate. Yet to you, challenging an election result is only a problem now? That seems oddly one-sided.
As for your claims about dictatorships, racist world views, and so on - all of these are vague attacks that generalize an entire half of the country. There’s little evidence to support such claims.
Well, I'd argue that the one imposing on others more loses.
Proselytizing religions have no moral leg to stand on from an imposition point of view.
Plus, let's be honest here, your example is just people being jerks with each other. The real debates are about physical harm, economic harm, etc., in which case it's far less fuzzy figuring out who's wrong.
> Well, I'd argue that the one imposing on others more loses.
For the preferred pronoun question, which one is more imposing? Getting other people to call you by your preferred pronoun, or refusing to call people by their preferred pronoun? You can make plausible arguments for either side.
>One side says not using someone's preferred pronouns is intolerant to their gender identity. The other side says being forced to use them is intolerant to their religious beliefs. Now what? Tie goes to the one with the most guns?
Except the paradox of tolerance clearly states that simple disagreement isn't intolerance, nor does it prefer censorship in all cases of disagreement, so your scenario isn't a refutation of it:
In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress
the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational
argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly
be most unwise.
What the paradox of tolerance considers to be intolerance, and thus open for censorship, are views which do not allow for rational debate, or respect the existence of opposing viewpoints, but which resort to violent suppression of those viewpoints and the people who hold them:
But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it
may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational
argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to
listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer
arguments by the use of their fists or pistols.
This is a classic motte and bailey. The motte is that "intolerance" only means the denunciation of rational argument and calls to violence. The bailey is that this justifies blocking the entire opposition because they are declared to be violent criminals who have abandoned rational argument, or expanding of the definition of "violence" to mean (warning: irony) any rational debate about sacred cows.
>The bailey is that this justifies blocking the entire opposition because they are declared to be violent criminals who have abandoned rational argument, or expansions of the definition of "violence" to mean (warning: irony) any rational debate about sacred cows.
I never made or implied any such claim, you're not arguing in good faith here.
Then your response was a non-sequitur because the context here is that entire platforms are being blocked and the "paradox of tolerance" was put up as a justification.
You claimed the paradox of tolerance allowed no principled way to draw the line between what should and shouldn't be censored, I quoted the principle as stated verbatim. And rather than make an argument against the paradox of tolerance as written, you decided to switch to ad hominem.
If you want to actually convince anyone of anything, you're going to need to argue against what people actually say and believe, rather than strawmen.
Erm, we are talking here about virtual villages and whether intolerant people should have the right to have one. And since I am sanely tolerant, I say yes.
Even though there exist no tightly sealed boxes and everything is connected to everything in the long run - I do not want to impose my ideology on others, I can tolerate people I despise, as long as they leave me in peace. And my experience is, that they often think like that, too. Except for the fanatics with world conquering motives, sure. But planning for a coup d'etat is no longer free speech btw., but preparation of a crime.
>Any sane person would support free speech principles. Harm from restrictions of free speech far outweighs harm from hate speech, etc.
A reasonable position. And one I, for the most part, support.
However, the other side of that coin is that private actors (i.e., not the government, at least in the US) have free speech rights too. And that includes the right not to allow or support speech on their private property.
As such, if you attempt to force private actors to host/support speech they do no wish to host/support, then you are violating the principles you espouse.
There are no victims of hate speech. There are victims of hate crimes, like murders, rapes and beatings. Speech doesn't cause physical harm, violent actions do. Thus, violent actions must be stopped, not words.
Oh, and if you will claim that speech insites actions, i ask you one thing: who determines what hate is? In Russia, talking about corruption and opposing Putin is extremism and hate speech.
If you want to argue that some spoken words can be prosecuted in some jurisdictions, chose another opponent. I state my personal opinion that anything spoken should be protected under free speech rights, and even the death threats. Yes, because words do not kill. Killing requires action, and actions must be stopped, not screaming.
You didn't say "shouldn't be a crime" you said "is not a crime". And I'm not saying that words directly kill. I'm saying words have their own power that can absolutely hurt. Speaking words is an action and it can cause harm.
Politicians can declare anything a crime, and same act can be legal and criminal in places spaced 2 meters apart, that's why there is no point arguing about that. Regarding speech "crimes", see my earlier comment about Putin's Russia.
Thus, sane people MUST fight against criminalising any kind of speech, because speech is not a crime. Just like sane people fought against slavery, segregation and Holocaust, all of which were legal.
Are you of the belief that words can never hurt? It wouldn't bother you to have a crowd of protestors making untrue accusations about you loudly and vocally, where your family and employers could hear, ruining your reputations and relationships?
Nobody argues with that. Just don't call yourself tolerant if you fight Taliban for their views. It's perfectly normal to NOT be tolerant, but simultaneously claiming to be tolerant is hypocrisy.
I don't know, and in the airless vacuum of a message board debate, that's a good question to noodle about. But in the case of Gab, it's not hard to make the call. Maybe it's more difficult in the case of "Truth" or Parler or MeWe or whatever, but we can all be pretty clear on the intolerance baked into the site on which the Tree of Life shooting was planned and cheerled. Gab is a site where even the person who posts inspirational cat and landscape photos turns out, if you scroll down far enough, to be an overt white supremacist.
The laws shouldn't be different for sites like Gab than they are for sites like Twitter. But in communities based on free association, it's praiseworthy not to associate with Gab.
This whole thing about who draws the lines as to what's acceptable speech is like saying "who decides what a legitimate political party is?" It's a good question. But regardless of the answer to it, we can all agree that the American Nazi Party is not a legitimate political party (or, if it is, we need to change our definition of "legitimacy").
I think philosophers have done an amazing job [1] already but in the end each individual and community will have to decide for themselves; there's really no alternative.
This kind of thinking requires you to absolutely set aside the human ability to make "reasonable" judgments. That free speech is so unassailable that nobody is justified in declaring an expression or utterance to be dangerous. Our justice system is built on setting standards of proof like "reasonable doubt" with the implicit expectation that humans can, in fact, make reasonable judgments and those judgments can be of what is and isn't within their legally protected freedom.
As a reasonable person, I think that overt racism, opposition to public health measures, attacks on voting and democracy and unwillingness to accept responsibility for damage to the environment we all share are simply not reasonable points of view. I think the consensus for what is unreasonable is actually quite a bit narrower than that (no one has ever been deplatformed for climate denial). A lot of pro-Trump forums have devolved into exhortations to violence that lead to a deadly insurrection. No digital platform out there wants to be responsible for something like that and it's not just because of politics.
By all measures you are characterizing something like a 4chan. Why do we put up with 4chan? I suppose they are hilarious that’s why.
Look, the alt-right has a right to spew their bullshit on the internet. I really believe this, and it’s important we protect this right. Now, if we find a case where they coordinated something like the Jan 6 capitol riots, then we also expect places like Gab and Truth to cooperate with authorities.
I’m not sure what the big deal is here. I’m never going there, and I actually never go to 4chan either. If we come to a situation where sites like these don’t cooperate with the law, we’ll handle that. But, give them a chance to exist at least.
Incoming pretentiousness:
I know human beings a little bit. They are bored, and love gossip, and shit talking, and lamenting about something. Every subgroup, subculture, this kind of thing is a cheap escape that many many people enjoy. My own mother (getting super anecdotal now) can’t stop gossiping, her friends can’t, they looove to talk shit about this and that and who.
The alt-right, like the woke-left, love this fight, like a terrible couple that has great sex. And that’s all it is mostly, a bunch of shit talkers.
————-
The vigilance necessary is to see that it doesn’t spill into the streets. I know what I’m advocating for is the precursor to such an event, but I really hope it’s just plain old human nature at work here. A bunch of bored assholes, on both sides, picking on each other in a digital mma fight. Neither can exist without the other. The woke-left needs this Truth app to exist.
>As a reasonable person, I think that overt racism, opposition to public health measures, attacks on voting and democracy and unwillingness to accept responsibility for damage to the environment we all share are simply not reasonable points of view.
That's a reasonable position to take, IMHO.
However, that position is irrelevant to the law in the US. In the US, the government (except in very narrow circumstances[0]) may not censor or restrict speech.
However, private actors are not restricted from censoring or restricting speech on their private property.
That's how the law in the US works. If someone doesn't like it, they can try to get the law changed. For those who advocate that, good luck -- you're gonna need it.
Actually there are a lot of restrictions and requirements when it comes to speech on private property. For example telecommunication services are treated as common carriers and must allow speech to transit even if they disagree with it. It is clear that big tech platforms behave more like utilities and should be regulated like common carriers. In this case with an open source project restricting use via its license, maybe that’s not applicable. But I would argue that F-droid, as a platform with network effects, should be subject to the same requirement to not censor.
>It is clear that big tech platforms behave more like utilities and should be regulated like common carriers.
The operative term there is "should." I don't agree (and not for the reasons you probably think), but if you think that's how it should be, I respect that.
But that's not the law here in the US. As I said, [i]f someone doesn't like it, they can try to get the law changed. For those who advocate that, good luck -- you're gonna need it.
Edit: Clarified my thoughts about current law and the likelihood of changing it.
For one, exhortations to violence are an explicit exception to free speech. And secondly the amendment only prevents laws being passed to prevent speech. Not private businesses from disallowing content.
> As a reasonable person, I think that overt racism, opposition to public health measures, attacks on voting and democracy and unwillingness to accept responsibility for damage to the environment we all share are simply not reasonable points of view.
One of these things is extraordinarily not like the others.
You don’t think it’s reason to have debate about public health measures.
That is definitely something I strongly disagree with. Now look, I’m double mRNA vaccinated against COVID19, and I gently advocate for others to do so.
Do I think governments should mandate COVID19 vaccination? Absolutely not, and there’s a massive amount of health debate to back up my, what I consider, reasonable position.
I’m Australian, so found this podcast between Canadian psychologist Jordan B. Peterson and former Australian Deputy Prime Minister from 1999 to 2005 John Anderson, intellectual heavyweights railing against mandatory vaccination and lockdowns particularly relevant
At the beginning of the pandemic the Spanish authorities literally said that masks not only were not useful but they could be harmful because they gave a false safety feeling.
Since then it has been proved over and over again that masks, even when misused, stop the spreading of the virus.
So I absolutely agree with you. We should be able to question them.
The odds are that mandating covid vaccination starting in the first month of availability would have saved somewhere between thousands and hundreds of thousands of lives including vulnerable individuals who died despite vaccination.
I don't agree that you shouldn't be able to have that conversation but I don't think its a hard argument that people ought to have been forced to vaccinate. People would have freaked out and still be bitching today but they would be alive.
I think you’re deeply misunderstanding something here.
Nothing good can ultimately come from that sort of scenario.
What it directly results in is a massive mistrust of government authority.
Make the vaccine available at no cost to the individual, and it’s effectiveness data available for scrutiny. That’s the only justifiable course in my opinion.
This more forceful approach has considerable long term negative consequences on trust in government authority that will most certainly have arse-biting consequences for those who wield this power.
They are free. And the data is published. Been that way since the start. You're not accounting for the relentless disinformation being spread. That's the whole point of this thread.
My wife is vulnerable despite vaccination. I would venture to guess most people have a relationship with someone who is thus. I would happily sacrifice your freedom for her life. Given a completely free choice I would venture to guess we would ultimately have 60% of those over 18 and 35% under 18 by preference.
If 74% are over 18 the most we could reasonably hope for is around 53% of the population vaccinated despite the data being overwhelmingly in favor of vaccination. If we make it challenging to work or go to school we might hope for 80-90% ultimately based on only 9% being dead set against vaccination no matter what according to pew.
In such an environment my family will be vastly safer. When your health choices aren't a reasoned choice but an expression of political fealty I give it less weight.
No I'm not saying that. Obviously not all policies are above reproach but you know full well that a lot of opposition is based purely on disinformation. "Government mandate of COVID-19" is hopefully a typo but vaccine mandates for government employees is well within their right as are the myriad private mandates. The efficacy and safety of the various approved vaccines are well studied and the benefits to everyone far outweigh the dangers. Anyone spreading deliberately incorrect information like covid is fake or vaccines cause autism (remember that one?) are simply not reasonable.
And Jordan Peterson is a professional snowflake who makes fragile white males feel good about themselves. He is supposedly trained in psychology and has no idea what he's talking about when it comes to epidemiology but is unencumbered by his lack of expertise due to his monumental ego.
I’m arguing that forcible mandates (get it or lose your job) is a preposterous method to convince an already doubting person. Note, I’m not the person that needs convincing, I’ve already had two doses and am now actively asking when I can have a third.
The goal isn't to convince. It's to keep your workers safe. My company nearly revolted to get the CEO to put a mandate in place because the vast majority didn't want to be in an office with unvaccinated people.
I honestly think that is the cause of half of arguments that occur, not that the same people wouldn't disagree even if they paid attention to this, but it's certainly where they seem to get stuck.
F-Droid's repository excludes several projects because it might cause them trouble. For example, they block forks of the Signal client that connects to Signal's servers, a violation of Signal's TOS but not F-Droid's.
Hosting projects in their repository causes work for them and they are right to exercise pragmatism in what they choose to host. There's more freedom with F-Droid than Google Play, because F-Droid allows its users to use rival repositories as well as its own.
Why? Most of the junk gab is famous for would get you banned here on HN too. Content moderation is... just content moderation. Gab has an absolute right under the first amendment to be able to speak. No one has an obligation to repeat what they say.
Freedom of speech is the concept, and 1st amendment is an implementation. The maximal possible implementation given the rest of constitution that came before it. So it's not just government in principle, only in practice.
At best, it's against government intervention and in public spaces.
If you come to my house and start shouting nonsense you will be very unceremoniously and quite authoritarianly be kicked out and not much anyone can do about that :-)
It's a fun metaphor but there are so many ways in which it does not apply to the topic at hand. This isn't about an individuals autonomy on their own property, it's more about a societal contract and expectations over civil liberties / human rights. Comparing it to kicking people out of your house is not even on the same level.
"We have to platform Nazis because otherwise bad things will happen to gay people" is not an especially compelling approach, given that Nazis won't grant gay people the same rights if they do ever take power.
If sane people are in power, we can simply protect gay rights.
If fascists are in power, they won't hesitate to take rights away from people they don't like.
- It's the best method for approaching truth (for several reasons, one being challenge)
- It allows disputes to be settled ("fought" might be a better term:) without recourse to violence.
If Nazis are willing to fight their corner without using violence then I'm happy because their arguments are easily beaten (hence, why they needed to use violence to gain power in the past).
The problem that social media companies have wrought is not giving people too much free speech, it's siloing opposing views away from each other because it makes some people uncomfortable. Without challenge, speech becomes dangerous, it is not free it is restricted. It's essentially a form of blasphemy law, its effects are just the same, but now we can have several different streams of negative thought growing unchallenged alongside each other because social media has been chopped up into silos.
Insane people can't get into power as long as they can be challenged, that requires free speech. As long as these silos exist there is not free speech and we are in greater danger of insane or authoritarian government.
Nazis are only willing to fight without violence (generally) now because they currently aren’t able to use violence without retaliation. I don’t believe that this “commitment to non-violence” would hold any sway whatsoever were they to hold real power.
I also think it is just observably false that insane people cannot get into power if there is sufficient speech to resist them.
This is true, but I’m trying to give the poster a steel man since I don’t really think that nazis behaving nicely is a justification for platforming hate speech.
You haven't steel manned anything - which part was the steel man? Was it this?
> Nazis are only willing to fight without violence (generally) now because they currently aren’t able to use violence without retaliation.
So what? That doesn't affect my argument in the slightest (as I've already pointed out[1]). I won't be taking up your offer of taking the strongest interpretation of my argument, thanks, because you're either creating a straw man (how ironic) or you've misunderstood the argument presented.
Further, I would suggest that if someone were really steel manning an argument they wouldn't be telling others about it, they'd have continued to respond to the challenges put to them. I don't see such a continuance. What could you be waiting for?
Where? And if so, what relevance does that have to those that refrain from violence? If the United States government sanctions an attack by its forces does that make all United States citizens liable for retaliation? If some Muslims commit an act of terror does this mean that all Muslims must be held accountable for those acts?
Or do we, quite rightly, separate out those who commit violent acts from those who don't?
You don't have to trust their commitment to non-violence, it's beside the point. As long as they are being non-violent and as long as we all have free speech then whatever problems National Socialism might bring if implemented cannot come to pass.
> I also think it is just observably false that insane people cannot get into power if there is sufficient speech to resist them.
If Trump was re-elected tomorrow, do you want him to have these same powers? Do you trust your political opponents to use these same powers wisely?
Humans are terrible arbiters of truth. The Hunter Biden laptop story was censored and now it's been confirmed. Was that "good" censorship?
No man is fit to play the censor, regardless political party. Even Biden was anti-gay until the Obama administration and that was well past when many of us were arguing for LGBT acceptance and equality.
> If Trump was re-elected tomorrow, do you want him to have these same powers?
Uh... what powers? There's no government action at work here. We're talking about the refusal of a bunch of Mastodon services to federate with Gab. I wouldn't expect that to change at all under a different administration, precisely because the first amendment severely constrains the government's ability to regulate speech. Trump can't make Mastodon clients carry Gab any more than Biden can force them to ban it, and for exactly the same reason.
> The Hunter Biden laptop story was censored and now it's been confirmed.
This one I thought was hilarious. That story was covered full time for like six weeks on the most watched news network in the country! "Censored", pfft.
I don’t believe that Trump particularly cares about what I think.
This is the entire point of my argument. “But we didn’t censor you when we were in power” is not a real argument because people will just say “tough shit” and throw you in prison.
It's really disappointing to hear F-Droid is just as censorious as the Google Play Store. I guess I assumed they'd be beyond the politicization of Google policies.
But that's not what happened at all - you can add custom repositories to F-Droid and use them just fine, just like you can use a web browser to visit other websites. It would be more like if Google kicked them off of Blogspot but you could still use Chrome to visit their website.
I disagree - I think we've pushed the website metaphor a bit too far anyway. Let's compare it to a more similar application, the apt package manager. It's a reasonable to debate, but I think a legitimate position for Ubuntu or Debian to not include Gab in their main repository, but allow you to add it as a PPA if you want.
Yeah. If people don't have a problem with gab being blocked on fdroid for essentially dressed-up political reasons, then they also shouldn't have a problem with the play store or apple's app store blocking stuff for political reasons.
This doesn't follow unless you allow the sneaking in of the idea that all political positions must be granted the same affordances regardless of their character. I will not allow that sneaking-in because the idea is nonsense. It's quite reasonable to criticize a company for treating gay people poorly and to also nod in approval when they tell fascists to leave and to not let the door hit them on the way out.
It's also not meaningfully inconsistent for one to do the reverse, but it's telling on yourself.
> all political positions must be granted the same affordances regardless of their character
Sneaking in? That's my point, plain and simple. If anything, you're sneaking in the implication that it's a shameful thing to claim, so I have to "sneak it in".
There's this idea that we should respect the opinions of others, and even defend their right to express them, no matter if we disagree ourselves. In my mind, it's a matter of intellectual honesty. It does seem telling that you might disagree.
Platforming fascists is shameful, yes. It does require a sneaking in of a profound false equivalency to let that kind of assertion stand and I refuse to do so. It, like the fascists in question, can get right out of a functioning body politic, because if it doesn't it won't be functioning much longer.
That is a mendacious lie. You can say what you want, even if it pleases you to empower fascists. I can use my freedom of association to have nothing to do with you or your fellow travelers with similar sympathies. That is how a functioning body politic works.
> Yeah. If people don't have a problem with gab being blocked on fdroid for essentially dressed-up political reasons, then they also shouldn't have a problem with the play store or apple's app store blocking stuff for political reasons.
I actually don't. They're private businesses and it's clearly true that they already do whatever the heck they want.
My problem is that they make it hard for people to opt in to alternative marketplaces. That is what should be fixed.
The privileged position the Play Store and the App Store have WRT their respective platforms (the App Store in particular) make a fairly strong argument in favor of requiring them to behave as 'common carriers' for apps, but even an extreme version of that view has little to say about a 3rd-party store like fdroid, which really is just one publisher among many.
You'll find this often – lots of SoHo routers comply with GPL2 by tossing a tarball of the software they run on a crusty FTP site somewhere. Download it and pop it open and you'll often find README.txt and a .tar.bz2 of Linux 2.6 whose SHA matches what you'll find on kernel.org... because they didn't actually modify any GPL2 code.
Compliance doesn't mean they don't have to make it easy for you ;)
You are already using Github. Someone tells you you need to publish exactly the source code that your company's deploying. The repo containing that code is not on Github. The easiest way to get ahold of that code, with any certainty that it's exactly what's actually running, but nothing else, is to grab the archive that's sent to the production servers for deployment.
Here you are with a hammer, and a screw. You just need to get this done so you can go back to doing the dozen other things you'd hoped to get done this week. You could find some file hosting somewhere. You could unzip the file. You could do a lot of things. But here's this hammer, and here's this screw. You already have the hammer. It's free. You don't even need to walk across the room to get it, you're already holding it.
What’s hilarious about that? Seems like a pretty simple way to do it. Especially for a file that isn’t going to be downloaded enough to require a real CDN.
It's just funny because they're removing it from a source code repo, packaging it up into a zip, and adding it to another source code repo. If they didn't mind including the change history they could've just published the code as-is as a clone. If they did want to strip the change history they could've published it as a shallow clone or an artifact. But instead they chose to push a ZIP file into a repo with a single branch. I guess at least they'll have a history of their ZIP files.
They do have it. They used to publish it. Then someone found a vulnerability in a commit of theirs (6e42e3b1eca73c306db1580719a3a1bfb715f6d8 if you're interested in looking it up in a mirror), exploited it, and took all data Gab ever had.
This current approach is just a deliberate obfuscation in an attempt for it not to repeat. By just providing a zip you can't really look at their changes on top of Mastodon with git log, you have to put in slightly more effort.
I posted this yesterday in the Mastodon discussion, but the thread had long since lost its steam, so I'll put it here in hopes of an answer:
Are there any actively maintained Activitypub/Mastodon clients that don't integrate their own blacklists? Someone recommended Husky to me, but it's been dead for a minute.
I wasn’t aware that F-droid banned Gab. That is very disappointing. I am not sure why I need F-droid if they’re going to practice the same censorship and political bias that the walled gardens of big tech offers.
F-Droid allows you to add your own repositories! I think that's the best of both worlds - you're free to add whatever software sources you like, and F-Droid's not obligated to host content they disagree with, and it all works together nicely in one place.
Yep, that's the idea! I don't know if Gab ended up making a F-Droid repository though, they said they were going to but the tweet seems to have been removed
i can only speak for myself but i'm always glad to support competition and open platforms and if they throw racists off their platform that's a plus for me
Many economic and software freedom related things wrong with proprietary stores or Google but that they deplatform reactionaries isn't one of them as far as i'm concerned
It seems you’re against people having a freedom to express themselves and exchange ideas. Historically denying this freedom accompanies authoritarian societies where propaganda and echo chambers make it seem like these actions are virtuous when they are actually not. Even the word “reactionary” is pejorative and was used widely in Soviet Russia and in China during the cultural revolution. Isn’t it better to let ideas be heard and debated even if controversial or disagreeable?
People have their limits. Most people aren’t absolutists, taking their philosophy to the extreme and utterly unable to make exceptions to their rules when egregious examples show up.
Turns out, most people don’t just dislike gab, they think it’s dangerous not to take action and don’t want to be on the eventual wall of people who Did Nothing when retrospection comes.
That’s not really bias, it’s called having a moral compass. You’re free to disagree with its tuning of course.
>People have their limits. Most people aren’t absolutists, taking their philosophy to the extreme and utterly unable to make exceptions to their rules when egregious examples show up.
If your morals don't hold up when pushed to their limits, it's that you have a poor understanding of what your morals are. A lot of people like free software because it's hip, but when faced with the very reason free software exists they turn back on it very fast.
That's a very simplistic way of looking at the world. It turns out that things are frequently more complicated than absolutist rules allow for, and the world isn't a series of black and white with bright lines between them. Most people are actually very much okay with "Thou shalt not kill" being quite a bit more nuanced in reality, because it turns out most real-world moral questions are a little more complicated than single questions.
>Most people are actually very much okay with "Thou shalt not kill"
I don't think that's true. Most people are very vengeful and do not hold that view.
>It turns out that things are frequently more complicated than absolutist rules allow for
imo "absolutist" is mostly used pejoratively. It's dissonance to believe both "People should be able to express themselves however they way" and "Racists should be ostracized." The logical consequence of the second is to disallow racists to speak. It might be OK according to your moral compass, but that's antithesis to free speech and more akin to "people should be able to express themselves if what they say is something I allow."
> If your morals don't hold up when pushed to their limits
I think you're missing the point here that their morals aren't your morals and they can be entirely self-consistent and do what they're doing if they don't share your exact priorities. They obviously prioritize other concerns above freedom of speech absolutism and they aren't hiding that, thus remaining entirely consistent within their frame of reference.
I don't doubt they have their own morals, but these same people say they hold free speech as moral. The whole point of free speech is to allow for speech you find reprehensible. If not, what's the point?
> The whole point of free speech is to allow for speech you find reprehensible
No one is stopping Gab from speaking.
FDroid is just refusing to amplify their speech.
Since when did "free speech" == "freedom to force other people to publish my speech"?
But you know what, here's an idea: I have a sign I want to put on your lawn. I'm afraid it's an incredibly offensive sign and you and your neighbours might not like it. But I wanna put it on your lawn anyway.
Judging by your comments here, I assume you're totally cool with that, right? I mean, according to you, denying my request to put my incredibly offensive lawn sign in front of your house would be an abridgement of my freedom of speech, right?
But my lawn is not a platform. And even then, FDroid is a small enough platform that they should be allowed to do whatever they want. But then it's OK to point out the perceived hypocrisy in having a free software platform that censors apps they disagree with.
Free software is not really about free speech, but usually both philosophies are held together since they are somewhat related.
Or are you now saying these rights kinda depend? If so, what's the threshold? What makes your lawn special? Does it need to be a particularly big lawn? Do you need to have control of a lot of different lawns? I'm really confused. You seemed so certain that free speech was an absolute right, and that I can force others to amplify my speech, but now here you are suggesting there may be caveats...
> Free software is not really about free speech, but usually both philosophies are held together since they are somewhat related.
According to you. I certainly don't see them as being connected whatsoever.
Maybe your real problem is you and FDroid see the purpose of open source and free software differently.
I think you're being disingenuous, I don't use my lawn to distribute other people's apps/signs, it's not its purpose, and I don't advertise it as such.
Also:
>FDroid is a small enough platform that they should be allowed to do whatever they want. But then it's OK to point out the perceived hypocrisy in having a free software platform that censors apps they disagree with.
>I think you're being disingenuous, I don't use my lawn to distribute other people's apps/signs, it's not its purpose, and I don't advertise it as such.
That's irrelevant, at least under US law. If your daughter sells lemonade on that lawn, is it more of a platform? Can I then post signs all over your lawn about the dangers of lemonade or citrus?
Of course not. Because on your private property, you exercise your own free speech rights by allowing/disallowing what ever you choose.
Why should it be any different on F-Droid's private property? Do the people who own F-Droid have less free speech rights than you do? If you believe so, please explain your reasoning, as I don't see the difference.
> I don't use my lawn to distribute other people's apps/signs, it's not its purpose, and I don't advertise it as such.
And I suppose somewhere FDroid advertises itself as an open, censorship-free site for app distribution with no caveats or restrictions?
If so, please, point me to your evidence.
If it's just because "but they claim to value free software", see my reply (which included ninja edits): free software != free speech. No, they are not in fact related in any way. One can be supportive of free software without being an absolutist regarding freedom of expression.
Of course, that's understandable confusion. Free (as in no cost), free (as in I can control my own systems and products), and free (as in I can speak without government censorship) are all very different uses of the word "free", and I can see how folks might get them mixed up.
>If it's just because "but they claim to value free software", see my reply (which included ninja edits): free software != free speech.
I agree with you on this. The reason I believe they're somewhat related is that free software ensures users always have access to a software and can modify it if they disagree with the author. The spirit of that I think concedes that users should be allowed to use the software whoever they are/whatever they say/etc.
Now of course free software doesn't require you to provide them with the platform to run the software, but in spirit it definitely enables a discrimination-free permission to use it. EDIT: So having a platform deny access when it values such spirit is somewhat disagreeable.
"free software ensures users always have access to a software and can modify it if they disagree with the author."
IMO this is a really terrible reason to use free software/open source, and not a positive point in its favor. Forking is a really costly process and leads to fragmentation and most of the time is unnecessary. To me the main benefit of open source is that it leads to a global collaboration and cooperation, and it gives new avenues for people to be able to agree with each other. From what I've seen, projects where the maintainers are just disagreeable all the time usually don't even tend to get off the ground at all.
> So having a platform deny access when it values such spirit is somewhat disagreeable.
If Android required a platform for software distribution, I might agree, but Gab can (and does) post their APK right on their website. So Gab is experiencing no curtailment of their speech rights by FDroid refusing to traffick in their speech, nor are the users experiencing any curtailment in their right to use their device, or the software, as they see fit.
You'd have more of a leg to stand on if this was about iOS and the Apple store, which doesn't allow for any kind of sideloading.
But Android? Sorry, I have no sympathy and I see no hypocrisy in FDroid's actions.
They don't think that's the point, which is what matters. They clearly have limits to free speech that you don't have because they are not free speech absolutists (like most people) while you are a free speech absolutist. They probably draw a limit at speech that they consider harmful[1], as most people do. If most people didn't have these limits, then harassment, death threats and so on would all be generally acceptable and legal, but they aren't.
>If your morals don't hold up when pushed to their limits, it's that you have a poor understanding of what your morals are.
No, that's not the case. Morals don't have to be black and white because the world isn't black and white.
Nuance is the name of the game in morality. The world is shades of gray, everything has more context than you can imagine. Morals isn't mathmatics, you can't put it on an equation and say "X always equals Y in all situations"
Here's an example. Stealing is wrong. But what if you're stealing bread because that's the only way you can get food, and you're stealing it from Jeff Bezos who was just going to let it rot. Is that still wrong? Even if it has no value to Jeff B? Even if it means your death if you don't?
>Stealing is wrong. But what if you're stealing bread because that's the only way you can get food, and you're stealing it from Jeff Bezos who was just going to let it rot. Is that still wrong? Even if it has no value to Jeff B? Even if it means your death if you don't?
Which is a misunderstanding of what you really mean by "stealing is wrong."
In that example, Bezos doesn't care about the sandwish, so perhaps you mean "stealing is wrong if it deprives someone of something they cherish." Or maybe you hold your life above your morals, but then you have to recognize what you're doing is amoral.
People are either for free speech or against it. If a site that states "supporting free speech" as reason for their existence decides against free speech, it is disappointing.
Of course everybody can decide what they want, but it can still be disappointing and a betrayal of trust.
>Turns out, most people don’t just dislike gab, they think it’s dangerous not to take action and don’t want to be on the eventual wall of people who Did Nothing when retrospection comes.
The vast majority of people who support this deplatforming have been whipped up into a hysteria by their peers and media and unironically believe that half the country belongs to the party of racism and white supremacy and anti-science, and that platforms like gab are merely hangouts for extremism and insurrection plotting.
Ironically, this sort of treatment is going to breed extremism, and if I may say, rightly so. You don't demonize and dehumanize half the country by associating them with "whiteness" and nazism, especially while claiming to be anti-racist.
At best, this path leads to construction of a parallel society, with it's own infrastructure. At worst, genocide, but which side will do the genociding is hard to predict, the way things are going.
There's no excuse for this blatand politicization of all of our institutions, and the way that they all implicitly and explicitly collude to effectively deny voices to half of the country while worshipping SCIENCE! as though it were some unreproachable religion.
I agree that demonizing and “othering” people on the Other Side is a bad idea for the reasons you state. I also agree with your overall point.
I disagree that deplatforming gab is demonizing anybody. It’s tackling an absolute cesspool of a community. It’s among the worst of the worst that’s available out there. I’m sure they’ll survive without it.
That's only because our media does not scrutinize the other side with the same intensity. You have literal communists LARPing about the coming revolution on reddit alongside entire subreddits dedicated to celebrating deaths among so called "plague rats", on a platform where the TOS ostensibly state that there is no tolerance for such behavior. But it's not surprising given that for a brief period last year the TOS explicitly stated that hate against the "majority group" (i.e. white people) is totally fine.
If this were legitimately about extremism it'd be one thing, but the way it is shaping up, one side's extremism gets a pass, and that bias is toxic to a functioning society. The same way that excuses were made by all of our institutions for the nationwide, year long protests during a pandemic. Our institutions have clearly chosen a side.
And I'm not necessarily saying that the act of deplatforming gab is demonization, but what I am saying is that this one sided demonization/dehumanization is used as an excuse to target platforms like gab.
Your problem is not with the actions taken against gab but with the lack of consistent actions taken against similar cesspools.
There’s nothing I can do about that. Nothing will be achieved by hooking onto this in a whataboutist format, it’s just irrelevant.
I read your post as a hopeless grievance but rest assured that I have concerns of my own about how much leeway is given to left leaning platforms as well. But that doesn’t invalidate how bad Gab is. This world view is consistent.
It might be considered unkind to make fun of the dead and dying but arguably such examples are made after the persons own stupidity killed them and the point of the example isn't merely to glory in their death but prevent others from joining them in the grave.
Anyone who can't tell the difference between look at suzy she's made sarcastic comments about vaccines every day up until the day she died of covid don't be like suzy and keep your powder dry pretty soon we shall all get together and murder the libtards isn't looking very hard.
One encourages death and violence the other mocks the harm that has already come about and will continue to come about. The former is against most civil discussion forums rules and the latter is allowed many places. Before they decry uneven enforcement they might do well to understand the rules.
>It might be considered unkind to make fun of the dead and dying but arguably such examples are made after the persons own stupidity killed them and the point of the example isn't merely to glory in their death but prevent others from joining them in the grave
You're talking about a virus with a 99.99%+ survival rate in healthy people under 40, not the damn plague. And I know we're not allowed to discuss it, but can you explain why cases are as high as they've ever been in, say, Israel and England, when they're 70-80%+ vaccinated, if these vaccines are so safe and effective? Why does media continue to push the lie that the majority of deaths are in the unvaccinated when official UK data shows vaccinated and unvaccinated death rates at approximate parity with vaccination rate? I.E. the DATA clearly shows that vaccines are not nearly as effective as claimed.
Don't you think it's a little ridiculous that there is effectively no platform outside of 4chan where such questions can even be asked? How is that good for society, to unquestioningly follow the same institutions that have repeatedly and massively blundered while pursuing their own personal financial interests? Do you deny that the authoritarians making this policy are humans like you and I, subject to the same errors and temptations as anyone else?
Informed consent is predicated upon freedom of discussion, of which there effectively is none, because suddenly citizens across the western world are cheering on mass censorship and suppression of the very dissent that is required for a functioning society.
And just as you don't need to be an expert in astrology to understand that it is bunk, you don't need a PHD in virology to see the glaring institutional issues in academia/industry/regulation which cause incentives to align perversely. If it is in fact true that the vaccines are innefective and/or dangerous, there is now the momentum of billions of dollars and tens of thousands of careers and reputations on the line, potentially keeping this fact under wraps. It's not a conspiracy, its emergent pressure. In such a case it is up to laypeople to hold their governments accountable, but instead we are welcoming our own censorship. Something is going to break.
You seem to have gotten sidetracked by an example.
Regardless there are plenty of platforms outside of 4chan where you can discuss this. You just need to have some initial trust that people are having good faith discussions. Even here unfortunately almost all the time I’ve seen people bringing up the effectiveness of vaccines, it was to make an antivax point. That’s not good faith, it’s agenda driven trolling.
> You just need to have some initial trust that people are having good faith discussions
>That’s not good faith, it’s agenda driven trolling.
Your self-contradiction is an example of part of the problem. There's an assumption that any "anti-vax" (also a dishonest conflation, people are arguing about the covid vaccine, not all vaccines) is automatically in bad faith/part of an agenda/trolling.
You only see "anti-vax" posts because pro vax is the default and is the only allowed perspective among submissions. This is what dissent looks like, its not "trolling" or "bad faith".
>Regardless there are plenty of platforms outside of 4chan where you can discuss this
Nonsense, exactly because of the attitudes like yours. Anything not in line with "safe and effective" propaganda is banned/deleted as "misinformation" or dismissed as "bad faith trolling".
You're applying the same bias to my posts, that you're accusing me of.
I've myself been plenty critical of the COVID vaccines and/or rules when it was warranted, and I was able to make my point pretty safely and discuss it without it being dismissed as trolling or deleted as misinformation.
So maybe, just maybe, the stuff that is deleted/banned/dismissed is in fact a duck. Because most anti-vax points as argued today on HN are misinformation-driven. If you disagree with that, you've been the victim of misinformation. And if you disagree with that, I can't do anything for you, you have to be open to being wrong sometimes.
(And it's easy to turn that last sentence into "yeah well what if YOU'RE wrong". If I am, that is my cross to bear, but I'm absolutely open to it being the case. It doesn't change the above.)
What about death threats? What about organizing a lynch mob? What about someone else posting your personal info and browser history? What about extortion attempts? What about copies of anything you've ever written?
And we can't just draw the line here when considering the ramifications of absolute free speech. Basically everything that involves human art of creativity is free speech. If that's absolute then any depths of depravity is free. One could fake horrible, violent, traumatizing acts being performed by people on other people and then claim it is in fact those people, spread it on billboards and across from schools, and that's all under the purview of free speech.
> My point of view is: let everybody say whatever they want. Doesn't get more unbiased than that.
That assumes the individual’s right to speak is greater than the community’s right to shut them up, and is therefore biased in favour of the individual.
What is "the community's right to shut somebody up"? If a country elects a dictator, it is fine if that dictator then shuts people up?
Mastodon (afaik) already has the feature that communities can decide what outside content can enter their servers. What is the point on making it impossible for others to use the software at all? It doesn't server the purpose of protecting that community from nasty speech, because that is already accomplished by not communicating with the evil servers.
> > My point of view is: let everybody say whatever they want. Doesn't get more unbiased than that.
>That assumes the individual’s right to speak is greater than the community’s right to shut them up, and is therefore biased in favour of the individual.
I completely disagree. The individual's right to speak is greater (at least in the US) than the government's right to shut them up.
However, other individuals (or a group of individuals, such as a corporation like F-Droid) have the same right to speak, as well as the right to control the speech on their private property.
There is an important distinction there. From a legal standpoint, the government are restricted from (except in very narrow circumstances) limiting an individual's speech.
However, private actors have no such restrictions on their private property.
a "community" of individuals can absolutely express their dislike/dissatisfaction with the speech of others by banning them from their private property.
It's only the government that's restricted from doing so.
My comment is not about the best way to organise society. It’s pointing out that if you believe that view, you still have a bias. The OP’s comment sounded like “I’m not biased, because my view is objectively correct”.
>My comment is not about the best way to organise society. It’s pointing out that if you believe that view, you still have a bias. The OP’s comment sounded like “I’m not biased, because my view is objectively correct”.
My misunderstanding. Apologies.
Upon reflection, I think my comment dovetails nicely with your point.
"Most people," huh? You sure are an expert on what "most people" think. Maybe just replace that phrase with "I" if you want to stop being intellectually dishonest.
Gab has also been banned from Fdroid[2].
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/12/20691957/mastodon-decentr...
[2] https://reclaimthenet.org/f-droid-bans-gab-app/