"Oh, this is calamity! Calamity! Oh no, he's on the floor!"
Welcome to MoG!
Meanwhile On Grad
Documenting hate speech, conspiracy theories, apologia/revisionism, and general tankie behaviour across the fediverse. Memes are welcome!
What is a Tankie?
(caution of biased source)
Basic Rules:
Sh.itjust.works Instance rules apply! If you are from other instances, please be mindful of the rules. — Basically, don't be a dick.
Hate-Speech — You should be familiar with this one already; practically all instances have the same rules on hate speech.
Apologia — (Using the Modern terminology for Apologia) No Defending, Denying, Justifying, Bolstering, or Differentiating authoritarian acts or endeavours, whether be a Pro-CCP viewpoint, Stalinism, Islamic Terrorism or any variation of Tankie Ideology.
Revisionism — No downplaying or denying atrocities past and present. Calling Tankies shills, foreign/federal agents, or bots also falls under this rule. Extremists exist. They are real. Do not call them shills or fake users as it handwaves their extremism.
Tankies can explain their views but may be criticised or attacked for them. Any slight infraction on the rules above will immediately earn a warning and possibly a ban.
Off-topic Discussion — Do not discuss unrelated topics to the point of derailing the thread. Stay focused on the direct content of the post as opposed to arguing.
You'll be warned if you're violating the instance and community rules. Continuing poor behaviour after being warned will result in a ban or removal of your comments. Bans typically only last 24 hours, but each subsequent infraction will double the amount. Depending on the content, the ban time may be increased. You may request an unban at any time.
Excuse me while I go donate even more money to PieFed
You had me in the first half, NGL.
There is never any excuse for censorship, ever. Full stop. End of debate.
What about the guy saying "I can sell you magic beans to cure cancer", can we censor him? Can we find some common ground here?
Fraud is already against the law and doesn't require censorship.
The law is censoring fraud.
Sure... But only if you redefine what "censorship" is. 🤦♂️
No redefinition necessary. A lot of people consider removal of hate speech to be censorship.
"A lot of people consider something that isn't censorship as censhorship."
Yes, that's why I said it only means what you and many others think it means if you redefine what it is.
Fraud is theft through deception. It's the theft that is criminalized, not the deception.
No I'm pretty sure "I can give you these magic beans that will cure your cancer for free" is also illegal and censored.
It feels like you just don't consider these things censorship because they're not controversial and almost everyone agrees they should be censored.
I can give you these magic beans that will cure cancer for free
Then you're causing harm to someone through deception, the harm is what's criminalized. You can lie to people all day, but if you use deception to steal money directly, physically harm someone, or otherwise cause monetary loss, that's when criminal (or civil) cases can be brought.
If I say snickers has no peanuts and you think peanuts are icky, nobody is going to jail. If I say snickers has no peanuts and you are deathly allergic, I may. The lie itself isn't illegal, if it was, I expect my door kicked in here shortly: Snickers contains no peanuts.
Well, my door is still intact and no criminal charges have been filed.
If lying counted as fraud, literally every politician (as well as every other human) would be in jail currently.
Right, so you and the person doing the censoring just disagree on what's harmful.
That'd be what the lawyers would argue about in court. What's more, proving intent to defraud is required and can be difficult.
But what I'm saying is that the reason fraud is illegal is the result of the speech, not the speech itself. If the speech causes no harm (or loss yadda yadda), it's not actionable, be it lies or truth.
A lot of folks think their decentralized internet forum of choice should be a free for all, but that's not realistic.
Moderation and censorship are easy to get confused. Moderation includes reviewing content and sources for quality and safety, while censorship aims to control or manipulate a narrative. (general words taken from this page)
A PieFed instance defederating from a historically nasty fediverse server or 12 is just a form of moderation, and is up to whoever runs the server. The reason for blocking hexbear/lemmy.ml/lemmygrad could just be to cut down on the amount of manual moderation that's required by having their stuff federate to your server -- not trying to control a narrative or suppress any opinions -- just historically lots of wrong, inaccurate, inflammatory stuff that adds to a moderator's workload. Easier to avoid it.
Lemmy.ml removing comments and banning people for having opinions that differ from theirs is censorship, because 1) they are very consistent about it and 2) it drives their narrative.
Ehh that sounds like "I'm not punishing I'm disciplining" wordplay.
The wikipedia article on censorship lists a lot of forms of what we consider just plain moderation, like banning hate speech or harmful content:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship
It's not just the manipulation of a political narrative or the malicious suppression of opinions. Sometimes censorship is good.
But why? If people are going to be stupid enough to believe such a guy, that's on them. Censoring someone just because they're stupid is a slippery slope. Eventually it leads to the government censoring entire websites that they don't agree with. Just look at what happened with China and their Great Firewall.
The problem with China is that they're not a democracy. So they're censoring entire websites that one guy doesn't agree with.
Here in Canada we censor websites for hate speech, for example, because that's what we voted for.