For me I would hold the social media companies more to account when it comes to hate speech and harassment online and force social media companies to do more to stop online harassment and hate speech.
Hate speech and cancel culture are usually considered somewhat opposites - cancelling is usually a ‘weapon in the toolkit’ against hate speech or whatever else you don’t like.
It’s white washed hate speech “This person deserves to die/have no rights because of X!!!”
Not every cancelation is revoking right to live or other rights. And certainly not generally or commonly.
Cancelation is usually about revoking elevated positions or public platform. That’s very far from how you lay it out.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
We can cancel Nazis, racists, murderers, rapists, etc. We don’t have to tolerate everything
It’s capitalism that says if you boss discards you, you die
Hate speech is an actual problem for online entities to deal with. “Cancel culture” is a slightly vague term that usually refers to applying social pressure to disassociate from someone. This can obviously be good or bad depending on what it’s about, but the term is typically only used by right-wingers when said pressure is applied to them.
I believe that that “cancel culture” is really just “consequence culture.” At one point users could hold powerful entities to account. The flattening of the public sphere twitter provided was a feature.
Absolutely there have been people who got targeted who did not deserve it - regular folks who posted a shit take that caught the mobs attention. But I think one of the motivations for Elon acquiring twitter and threads’ non-chronological feed is to clamp down on this kind of of organizing and centralize power.
As for hate speech, the problem that is that any solution at scale means AI and that reveals the biases of those who wrote it. These solutions can’t serve everyone.
And outrage fuels engagement - these companies are incentived to allow that.
So basically I think large networks can’t solve the problem. What’s needed is a decentralized approach with small interoperable communities vetting their members. Even if you get a hate filled instance it can be locked off so it can’t spread. Hate-motivated jerks have always existed, they just had no real access to the discourse until the internet. I really think the answer is the fediverse of tomorrow - if we make it that far.
Wait, I though censoring hate speech was itself cancel culture?
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Not everything you disagree with is hate speech. I think eg Germany has pretty strict limitations on specifically hate speech, but there are still plenty of people voicing opposing views.
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Free speech doesn’t mean you are free of any speech you don’t like.
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Why would i want you silenced? Because you’re trans? I don’t care. I’m misanthropic. Sex, gender, race doesn’t matter to me at all. I recently lost a trans-friend to trans-hate.
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I would like you to be free of hatespeech too. And threats. And fantasies. I never said i would want transhaters to be in a transforum. Or nazis in a jew-forum or… Unless they’re there to inform themselves to re-evaluate their hate. Hate is often grounded on ignorance and missing knowledge. Only if you’re never willing to do that, you’re a dimwitted moron.
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That only really works if the government is preventing you from saying it, and it’s not something like slander or causing panic. If your lemmy instance banned talking about Pickles, it’s not a free speech issue. It’s a private instance who can have their own rules.
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You better be ready to own the consequences of that stance, which I assume you’ve been privileged not to need to. You can look up any number of mass shooters or terrorists who only got there due to online radicalization.
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I personally prefer spaces where everyone can voice any shit. Censorship is for lazy minds and a dull audience. IMHO.
I always find this take to be remarkably short-sighted.
Because if you actually want to hear diverse opinions, you have to cultivate a space where diverse people, with diverse experiences, feel free to speak.
Pretty much every space that tolerates open bigotry becomes deeply unpleasant for the targets of that bigotry. Which means those people tend to leave.
Which in turn means that those spaces soon turn into the dullest echo chamber, populated only by people unaffected the bigotry. Sure no views were censored. You just harass everybody different off the platform. The net effect is the same.
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@Dyskolos So you wouldn’t let bigots use threats and harassment to censor people, right? You would want to stop that from happening?
Free speech doesn’t mean free harassment or threats. What is wrong with you? I can say “i hate green hair” but i surely can’t say “i hate everyone with green hair. Let’s kill them!” Is that concept really so hard to grasp?
@Dyskolos This is a pro-censorship opinion. You just want to have plausible deniability while your Nazi friends do your censorship for you with death threats, doxing and stalking. Go away, pro-censorship troll.
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An opinion is one thing. Speech that has the intention of hurting others and/or inciting violence against others is another thing entirely.
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You see on one extreme you have people stifling legitimate opinion, and then on the other you have people advocating lynchings. There isn’t a simple answer, but the answer certainly isn’t to smugly sit in the middle and pretend you have it all sussed just because you have no skin in the game. Ultimately all you are doing is advertising that you are ok with lynchings or whatever other forms of bigotted violence because it doesn’t effect you.
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@Dyskolos and of course this kind of absolute crank bullshit comes from someone sporting a greek statue pfp. lmao. i know you fascist fucks when i see it
Lol. “a greek statue”. That is the basis for your assumption of my political position? What are you? 12? Such mental gymnastics looks like it.
Your version of hate speech is different from other people’s versions of hate speech.
“Hate speech” is protected speech. At least it is in the USA.
People really need to realize how to use block/mute buttons.
Protected by the government. Doesn’t mean businesses can’t ban you from their platform.
Yeah.
I hate censorship of all kinds. I try not to give my business to shitty censorship happy company’s and businesses
Cool. I hate bigots and assholes and would rather hang out in a place that doesn’t have any.
There’s a fine distinction between censoring someone’s ideas, and censoring someone being an asshole.
Everywhere meets that criteria if you just block people you consider bigots and assholes.
And yet if there’s no moderation, entire areas get so toxic that there’s only assholes left. Blocking only gets you so far.
It’s kind of telling that many people prefer a place without acceptable behaviour outlined. Is that because those people prefer being dicks? Or they prefer seeing others being dicks?
No moderation isn’t ideal on most sites, but I do not think moderation should be relied on more than people’s choice to block people. My response to areas becoming toxic is avoid those areas, or, assuming you mean community when you say area, they would moderate themselves.
The latter, they prefer for everyone to be able to be a dick.
I rather deal with a horrible piece of shit person than have some one tell me I can’t make my own choices. I don’t need a babysitter.
So you’re visiting almost unregulated forums like 4chan regularly?
So what if they are.
I’m on 4chan pretty often. Not perfect but I wouldn’t change it. They do the bare minimum to maintain order and remove the illegal shit, anything else is your choice and consequences.
I agree.
How is saying “if you’re a jerk, you aren’t wanted here” telling you you can’t make your own choices?
Or is it because your choice wouldn’t be wanted?
If you see a closed room full of rabid dogs eating shit, you shouldn’t go in there no matter how cozy the chair looks. If you decide to go in anyways, you have no reason to complain about the dogs.
But the room wasn’t always rabid dogs.
Like… without moderation everything turns into that.
Can you elaborate on how exactly we would hold them accountable? What mechanisms precisely would you use without violating reasonable expectations of privacy (and no, posting online doesn’t mean you should have your real identity tracked or exposed just because the post is publicly facing like on Twitter, YouTube comments, reddit, and especially Lemmy.)
As in banning the accounts that are constantly being used to harass people and perhaps maybe ip banning them if they continue to try doing this.
IP bans usually don’t work well on the modern internet. Many ISPs use CG-NAT with very rapidly changing IPs shared by many users. Places like college dorms are the worst.
Looking up which accounts stem from which IP is also a moderate invasion of privacy.
The usual issues with “banning the accounts that are constantly being used to harass people” are:
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Clearly defining harassment vs legitimate discussion
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Figuring out who’s actually being unreasonable - is one party being baited into responding, then that response is reported?
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Having enough staffing
Looking up which accounts stem from which IP is also a moderate invasion of privacy.
Not really. You can store the IP only when you actually have ban-worthy content from an account and then compare that to the IP for subsequent requests to enforce the ban. The IPs of everyone communicating with your service are required for that very communication so they will be on your system anyway and you are only really required to store it for the person who already demonstrated ban-worthy behaviour in which case this is the minimal step you can take as far as privacy invasion goes (as opposed to e.g. trying to figure out their identity from their IP) if you want to enforce the ban at all.
I agree that IP bans just aren’t effective any more though due to CGNAT and IPv6 Privacy Extensions among other things.
It depends on the exact choices made by the developers, but generally the IP used by a user to make a post will always be logged - I think that’s now moving into legally required in some jurisdictions.
Mods/admins seeing that is a potentially different matter.
Seeing the IPs a user has used and what others have used them, or at least some sanitized version, can be helpful and I would argue is necessary before considering an IP ban.
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Are there 50 other accounts on the same IP, and they all always post from that one IP? Either you have a really prolific sockpuppet, or you’re about to ban a whole college dorm or big office, and maybe generate a shitload of bad publicity.
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Does the user post from a wide range of IPs already? Then there’s no point in issuing an IP ban; they probably won’t even notice.
It’s too easy to bypass an IP ban. That’s why providers have moved to tying accounts to things that should be harder and harder to replace - and more and more invasive. Email > phone > government issued ID…
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This is already being done by most. You mistake the inability to keep up with the sheer volume with a platform taking inaction. Even with a paid full-time team of 10 people (about what a team size is at any corporation) doing nothing but content moderation, user reports, and even automated bans, you cannot keep up with the raw volume of bad actors. What you can do is keep trudging through it and keep it cut back so it doesn’t go wild.
perhaps maybe ip banning them if they continue to try doing this.
Ask 4chan how well IP bans work.
Realistically, the law forcing platforms themselves to moderate better is probably our best bet, but even that is a sloooow drag.
Look at Twitter. In Germany alone there are hundreds of cases of hate speech (probably beyond a thousand now) that the courts could use to really, and I mean really hammer down on Twitter.
All of these cases combined could amount to fines in the billions, making one single country capable of destroying that platform.
That’s old news by now, and nothing happened. So… yeah.
They said hold the platform accountable, they didn’t mention holding the poster accountable.
without violating reasonable expectations of privacy
I don’t see what needs to or is implied to change regarding privacy merely from increased accountability - and especially not the platforms as a whole.
I made a bit of a logical fast-forward in my statement. By holding the platforms accountable, you’re asking them to take action against their userbases. There is no other way for them to “take accountability.”
Internet websites aren’t the government.
Hate speech is bad for business. It only makes sense for corporations to ban hate speech.
You can make a nazi website, for nazis, by nazis. Those already exist.
I see one chud and I’ll block them. If the site is nothing but chuds I won’t use it.
If a website sucks, use a different one. Your attention is monetized, and if you want to say nazis are good to be around then give them space to exist. If not then do something about it. The website owners are not restricted by freedom of speech.
I personally feel like large enough public forms should be held to a higher standard, and if people said half the things they do online irl they’d get beaten and thrown in jail.
What’s my opinion on the way to stop online hate speech? The west needs a cultural revolution, anything else is dancing around the issue.
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going outside
It’s impossible
I think its dialectical formats/platforms like Lemmy. We do a decent job of keeping each other from totally going bonkers and I legit feel it later when I get involved in a discussion or topic I shouldn’t to the extent I feel embarassed even tho its all sort of anonymous.
But folks need to be able to anonymously sort and sift through ideas without having their name stamped or attached to it. In this way, evolution and elaboration can naturally take place and leave their imprint
Might depend on the platform/environment.
The combination of users being able to block users so they don’t see their input and general moderation are the first things that come to my mind.
Free speech is good as long as you’re out there to discuss even your opinions that are against other opinions in the civilized way, without the purpose of harming other people involved in the conversation..
Respect is key. (Generally, not just in hate speech) Even if you feel that someone is dumb beyond measure, or disagrees with you, you can always try to reason in a polite way and if the conversation jams there, then just drop it. No need to name-call or otherwise trying to make someone’s day worse. And if someone crosses the line of harming others just for the sake of it, report that person.
I think its dialectical formats/platforms like Lemmy. We do a decent job of keeping each other from totally going bonkers and I legit feel it later when I get involved in a discussion or topic I shouldn’t to the extent I feel embarassed even tho its all sort of anonymous.
But folks need to be able to anonymously sort and sift through ideas without having their name stamped or attached to it. In this way, evolution and elaboration can naturally take place and leave their imprint
I don’t know if this would have any effect, but splitting content distribution and content moderation, in the sense that all providers are free-for-all, but then users would subscribe to block-lists depending on their preferences (just like one does with an ad-blocker), is a notion that interests me. How resilient it is against bad-faith-actors depends on the implementation, but I believe that if you try to do more than just a naive blacklisting, and instead analyse networks, you could manage to get relatively far.
A funny notion I know from some image boards is having a list of substitutions, that replace frequent buzzwords with silly phrases. After a while, you get what someone wants to say, but they frequently get annoyed their messages don’t get posted the way they want it to, which is amusing.
