We’re closing this thread. Everything that could be said has been said. Thank you
Original Post:
Today, we want to inform everyone that we have decided to defederate from https://exploding-heads.com/. We understand that defederating should always be a last resort, and individuals can certainly block communities. However, blocking alone does not prevent potential harm to vulnerable communities.
After carefully reviewing the instance, reported posts, and multiple comments from the community, we have concluded that exploding-heads is not adhering to the Lemmy or Citizen Code of Conduct. Therefore, we cannot, in good faith, continue to federate with an instance that consistently promotes hate, racism, and bullying.
Examples:
https://lemmy.world/post/577526 - Community Moderator Harassment
https://exploding-heads.com/post/92194 - Systemadmin Post
https://exploding-heads.com/post/90780 - Systemadmin Post
https://exploding-heads.com/post/91488 - Systemadmin Post
https://exploding-heads.com/post/93725 - Community Moderator Post
Again, deciding to defederate from an instance is not taken lightly. In the future, we will continue to review instances on a case-by-case bases.
As for our community, please refrain from posting or commenting with hateful words as well. Arguing back and calling people names is not the solution. The best course of action is to report the posts or comments violating our server rules.
Lemmy Code of Conduct
https://join-lemmy.org/docs/code_of_conduct.html
Citizen Code of Conduct https://github.com/stumpsyn/policies/blob/master/citizen_code_of_conduct.md
“We are committed to providing a friendly, safe, and welcoming environment for all, regardless of level of experience, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, disability, personal appearance, body size, race, ethnicity, age, religion, nationality, or other similar characteristic.”
One thing that bothers me is that “freedom of speech”, at least from an American perspective, just protects someone from retaliation from the government. That means that you can’t go spouting off garbage and expect people to not call and/or kick you out for being a turd.
Instead, the point was that you could be critical of the governing body without fear of being locked up. Good examples of this would be what’s happening in Russia.
In EU as well, freedom of speech means they can’t arrest you for what you say, it’s about the government, not private companies/entities.
Freedom of speech is not the first amendment. The first amendment is a protection of that right in the US legal system, limited in scope to actions of government agencies.
That does not mean private citizens or corporations (which are actually not the same in reality) cannot infringe of free speech with harmful consequences. It’s just legal for them to do so. Corporate social media do it all the time.
So you have a system where speech is regulated not based on it’s merits (or harm caused in case of hate speech) but on the whims of whoever owns major media, where the majority of discourse occurs in the modern world.
Arguments based on compelled speech infringing the social media’s right to free speech or it’s right to freedom of association make no sense. The law already provides them with protections for hosting users’ illegal material (whether copyright infringements or far worse) precisely because it’s not the social media itself that posts it.
With that said, I do not think defederation infringes on their right to free speech (the moral right, not a legal right). Their message is still online and frankly lemmy.world is not really the public space in the way things like facebook or twitter are. Thus they are not really affecting their ability to get their message to people.
I agree. If you are being a turd to people without committing any crimes the government should do nothing but other people can