Some might argue that calling what happens in Gaza a genocide might be hate speach against Israel, and it should be censored. So who decides what is “hate” and what is not?
In your example, there is clear, observable evidence of genocide occurring. They are killing civilians and demolishing critical civilian infrastructure. So, saying Israel is committing genocide has a certain amount of truth/accuracy in it, and the intent isn’t to smear Israel, it’s to point out what they are actively doing, while the world is receiving constant updates. In other words, there is objective evidence behind the claims.
Hate speech is the opposite. It has no objective evidence behind it, and the intent is to make specific people/groups look a certain way. We can typically infer the intent of hate speech by the words they choose to use, and the way they frame their “argument”. We employ critical thinking to do this. This process can also be peer reviewed for further accuracy.
In your example, there is clear, observable evidence of genocide occurring.
I’ve seen many denying the evidence which seems so obvious to you. Even my government is denying it.
Who decides about objectivity?
We have footage of them bombing schools, hospitals, shooting up aid convoys… What is there to deny?..
Schools, hospitals, and aid convoys that are hijacked and used by Hamas for conducting military operations, which makes them valid military targets under international law.
Except, in all cases, there were a lot of dead doctors, teachers, and children. The UN investigated each instance and found war crimes. The aid convoys were with registered international aid organizations and, upon investigation, they were found to be legitimate, had no weapons, we have footage of the attacks happening, they were not entering legitimate Israeli territory, and Israel has not shared any evidence of hamas operating out of these locations or via aid convoys.
If I take the time to back this up with sources, would you be receptive to the information? Don’t want to waste my time if you’re not willing to assess evidence that disproves your currently held beliefs.
Those arguing objective facts when the point is clear tend to argue from a position of bad faith, and should be ignored. Hence the critical thinking.
Look at what those who are denying genocide in this example have to gain from such a claim. If it’s much, those individuals have a vested interest in denying the truth and as such, should no longer be allowed a seat at the table.
There is plenty across history that defines a genocide. Leaders arguing there aren’t exact parallels this time around, makes them despot. Complicit is too kind a word.
I think the difference is between protecting wealth and power vs protecting basic human rights.
It’s censorship one way or the other. The paradox of tolerance comes into play. We can’t ignore hate, it needs to be visible so people can be on guard, but we also can’t let it take over by letting it run roughshod and unchecked. Those in charge of media and social media are in the first camp - protecting wealth and power, letting hate run rampant. It drives profits and engagement, the extremes of politics they support give them control.
It IS censorship and they should stop saying it isn’t, but they should clearly say “we will censor X because Y” and be transparent about it. Censorship where the majority of population agrees with it is still censorship, but approved and accepted for the greater good.
Now, the question is what does “hateful” mean? And where does “hateful” start and begin? Is saying “I hate my neighbour” and “I hate Nazis” the same? Is “I hate gay people” and “I hate Manchester United” the same? Why not focus on violence instead of hate. We should have the freedom to hate (hear me out…) but in the end it is a feeling and a preference and no censorship will change that. What should be prevented at all costs however, is violent content. People can love or hate whoever, but they shouldn’t be allowed to call upon any type of violence towards them.
Someone hating someone doesn’t change a thing, but someone calling for attacks against someone - this is a whole new dimension and deserves total censorship.
Censorship isn’t policing people’s feelings, you’re allowed to hate. Why should you be allowed to express hate, and make those people feel unwelcome?
Your questions are also not as morally grey as you think. Manchester United isn’t hated for a core part of their being, they’re not victims of violence, they’re not a class of person who has been enslaved or erased or mistreated throughout their existence.
Individual freedom needs to take a back seat to collective freedom, and the freedom to self expression, identity, and well being for all. Freedom to oppress isn’t freedom. Nobody is free unless we’re all free.
It’s simple. If your rights infringe on my rights, and there is no way for me to avoid the “you”, whatever it may be at the moment, it should be regulated.
Go ahead and hate gays, but on a multicultural/multi-national platform that over a 3rd of the population use, you shouldn’t be allowed to project that because it makes gay people feel unsafe. It infringes on their humanity.
Just because a group is immune to the intricacies of this, re: straight and white, shouldn’t be a license for them to say and do whatever they want.
Try a group of gay people against straights, see how long that group lasts. Why the double meaning
Well, it is censorship.
People just wake up to a realization that some censorship should exist, and it makes many uncomfortable.
Other than that, don’t be tolerant of the intolerant, and you’ll be fine.
I mean it is, but it’s also not a bad thing in moderation (heh)
It actually is. It’s making the online space feel sterile and unnatural IMO. It’s purposefully hiding the complexities of human experience/perception and expression. You don’t have to agree with something or think it’s good - but you should be allowed to be aware of it. You should be able to “feel how people breathe” online and if there is censorship and sterilization - you can’t. You don’t get the full picture.
Ok Elon
Suddenly they care. One dead CEao and a bunch of whiny scared Billionaires is enough to stop 10 years of hateful content. Interesting lesson right there. Censorship is only good if it protects the rich.
I mean it is censorship. But not all censorship is bad.
There will be no protection under the social contract for those who wish to violate it.
Who decides when the content is “hateful”? The perpetrators of genocide characterize themselves as marginalized and their victims as a force seeking to eradicate them. That is the problem with censorship. Those are the people who end up with the control of speech. You end up with an Orwellian inversion of concepts like hateful speech for the exact reason that they can be weaponized for profit and power.
You show me which fascist government is going to censor the fascists living under it. It’s a paradox. They will not. They will censor the resistance.
We’ve come to decide ‘hate content’ on ideological basis that the question of ‘who decides’ arises. If people could be more realistic than idealistic, that would’ve never been the issue. In this situation, what’s in your head becomes more important than what you really need because something didn’t go your way.
Advertising is hateful content. Ban the entire marketing industry now please.
The majority of advertising we see in the US should be banned for sure. It is just thinly veiled psychological fuckery designed to manipulate us. Not cool.
Agreed. Let everyone be free to decide. I don’t want something shoved to my face 24x7, its inorganic and harmful.
If in a work of fiction I have a villain call my hero the n-word to demonstrate that the villain is an unapologetic racist, and I am told that I can’t have that because the word is bad in and of itself and that racist behavior cannot be tolerated even in fiction…
That is censorship, even if your goals are noble they are also ignorant, as showing disgusting things in fiction is often done in order to condemn similar behavior in real life.
If you call a black person the n-word in real life, and he stomps your ass.
This isn’t censorship, this is comedy.
If one goes onto an online community and calls its members radical insults in an unfriendly clearly non-joking hostile manner. Then the guilty party should be removed from that community,
Censorship or not, tolerance is a social contract, and those who want to undo this system must be stopped by any means possible. Content moderation is actually the compromise.
Tolerance is tolerance and it can break any time. You just keep tolerating until you can’t anymore, as simple as that. Its artificial.
We don’t have a social contract. It’s everyone for themselves.
Just to put some perspective over here:
Pretty much the exact same thing in pretty much the exact words is being said on the other (right wing) side of things. Its just the things being tolerated are different
I honestly think that the bigger issue here isn’t so much tolerance but certain parties that keep pointing out relatively small things to the common people (mostly on the right side of the political spectrum) and go “ooohhg my God can you believe these evil fuckers and they will do that to children too and won’t anyone think of the children”. Basically I’m talking trump, musk, Fox news, that sort of shit.
I’ve long held the believe that Trump did untold damage and harm to millions, but the biggest harm he has done is the division he’s sown. There has always been a rather steep divide in the US, but that divide has grown into a fucking ocean between the two sides.
I think most people in the US, when receiving the actual proper facts, would really not think and feel that different. Nobody would rage against universal healthcare, why would they? You only do that when you’re misinformed.
Not trying to excuse anyone, not trying to say that most trump supporters aren’t insufferable assholes, but the vast majority of them wouldn’t be as bad had they have access to actual news sources, had they not been constantly lied to.
Now with what you said, please understand that there are loads of highly armed militia groups out there in the US that would love to go into detail of that “any means necessary”. Were this to happen, you’re basically talking civil war. once that happens, everyone loses, you will too.
I think that the only way to repair this divide is to keep building bridges, keep talking, keep listening, because once it gets too far, then that’s it. One only has to look at Yugoslavia as an example of what happens when neighbor starts massacring neighbors. There is no winning for anyone.
The biggest issue is, those who divide us make those people untrusting of said bridges.
That depends on who’s doing the moderation. If it’s a government entity, that’s censorship, and the only time I’m willing to accept it is if it’s somehow actively harmful (i.e. terrorist plots and whatnot). If it’s merely disgusting, that’s for private entities to work out, and private entities absolutely have the right to moderate content they host however they choose.
Why is a private entity significantly different from a government entity? If a coalition of private entities (say, facebook, twitter, youtube, … ) controls most of the commons, they have the power to dictate everything beyond the fringes. We can already see this kind of collusion in mass media to the extent that it’s labeled a propaganda model. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_model
I just don’t think the private/gov dichotomy is enough to decide when censorship and moderation is valid.
It’s because of the power imbalance. If a private entity decides LGBT content is inappropriate for kids, you can find something on the fringe because someone will fill that gap. If a government makes the same decision, they can prosecute any service that doesn’t follow the law, which chills smaller services from offering it.
On the flipside, if a large tech company does it, it affects nearly everyone on the planet, whereas if a government does it, it should only impact people in that country. However, with larger countries, impacts often bleed into other countries (e.g. I see EU cookie banners in the US).
Likewise, it’s less likely for a government to rescind a bad law, whereas a bad policy can be easily reversed if it hurts profits.
The government is supposed to be representing voters’ best interests and have a monopoly on force to enforce rules. We can’t trust anyone to decide for us what speech we can listen to. A government should have no say on restricting speech (sadly, even if that speech does cause harm to people in our LGBT family).
A business should not have power comparable to a government. You probably have to interact with the government to some degree, you shouldn’t have to interact with a specific business at all.
These points both make sense given ideal conditions. People and businesses should have liberty over themselves, with the government serving as a neutral foundation representing the interest of voters.
Unfortunately, these ideal conditions don’t exist. The government isn’t neutral, but that’s not because of themselves or a democratic decision, but because businesses have more power to influence politics than you and me. Look at the major shareholders of mass media and social media, look at fundraisers for political parties, look at the laws made to bias the system. The government is evidently not a neutral foundation or a representative of the common people, but a dictatorship of the owning class (I’m using the term dictatorship not to imply one person ruling, but rather, that business owners as a class dictate the actions of politicians and therefore the government). And while it’s easy to consider this a crony capitalism or corporatocracy, it’s ultimately just capitalism itself taking its logical course, as business owners generally have a common class interest and the government cannot work without the complicity of business owners. We see this consistently in capitalist states, all the way back to the first ones. It’s not a fluke, it’s the power of capital.
We also see the trend of monopolization emerge - more money makes more money, more resources makes more resources, so small businesses are generally muscled out or incorporated into larger companies unless the government can force them to stop. So while you technically don’t have to interact with a specific business at all, there are many industries where you are effectively forced to interact with a small collection of the most powerful businesses or even a duopoly, even more so if you don’t have enough money to be picky.
So, while I agree, the government is supposed to be representing voters’ best interests, and business should not have power comparable to governance, they don’t represent us and businesses do govern, and history shows this won’t be changed through the electoral system they control. It has only changed when the worker class, as opposed to the businesses, has become the class directing the government.
the only time I’m willing to accept it is if it’s somehow actively harmful
Oh, like the dissemination of propaganda originating from the troll farms of hostile powers? Good idea.
Harmful meaning things like harassment (defined as continued and targeted use of speech intended to harass an individual) or credible threats of violence (i.e. a threat to kill a specific individual, attack an area, etc).
Harmful doesn’t mean “ideas I don’t like.”
Delete the data on my device and let me in control of the sliders and ban words. Make the defaults reasonnable to stop hate. This would not be censorship anymore, just deamplification and no one is a martyr now.
Simple as. Why censor when you can just let the users have the power to see what they want to see? In voyager I have all of the annoying headline keywords filtered. Makes browsing the fediverse much more pleasant.
The reason to say not but will not admit. This strips the owner class for the power to shape discourse and control the means of communication. This dynamic also exists on open source communication platforms such as lemmy and mastodon.
Imagine if we could simply subscribe to the content filters of fellow users. If I could just click your username, see you filter keyword list and click to add to mine the ones I like or subscribe to your named filters and their future changes.
Well it depends on the definition of censor.
If you define censor as, “to suppress or delete as objectionable” (Webster) then it fits just fine.
Here on Lemmy, people who claim to advocate for freedom of speech and information, demanding for social networks to be shutdown and people to be censored based on unknown and ambiguous criteria, without even understanding the implications of it.
Details at six
in a year Lemmy will be a cesspool of extremist thoughts and opinions. left, right, doesn’t matter.
the average Lemmy user is become far more caustic towards any differing opinions and that directly increases the toxicity of the platform.
this is why mods are trying to be pedantic about the rules in communities, but unfortunately they’re only accelerating it.
for a truly free and moderated platform a mechanism must be put in place that allows the community itself to self-moderate. unfortunately every new platform wants to start out as Twitter or Meta or Reddit. All three of these platforms failed in their goals of becoming a better socialmedia platform while exceeding expectations for financial viability.
IMO communities should have a cap limit of members that can grow over time of positive growth. if there’s negative growth the community must resolve the issues together or be forced to shrink and lose members.
this doesn’t mean the community blocks access, it just means you can’t post content or comments.
Yes, but just deleting without comment, as if it never existed, isn’t the solution either.
Are you saying it should be required by law to have a comment regarding removal of content?
Law is per country, web is international, i don’t think that’s gonna work.
