cross-posted from: https://discuss.online/post/14195662
This is in regards to the brand-new [email protected] community.
And by more serious discussions I mean e.g. the legality of the recent jury nullification issue, which I don’t want to allow if I were a moderator in it.
If you say yes you will be granted the community “ownership” as the sole moderator. I’ve only been a mod myself on Lemmy for less than a day but we’ll figure out how to transfer it to you. You can ofc always add new mods and change it however you like after that. The advantage here is chiefly that you get the community “name” AskUSA, whereupon I could later create e.g. a CasualUSA but you would have the privileges of that specific name, to match the style of e.g. AskUK or AskLemmy (or AskScience or AskMen or AskElectronics or AskAndroid etc. - there are so many here using that style:-).
I don’t want to be involved in something that is going to constantly be depressing to me, though I do recognize the need for such and am offering the community “name” if someone else wants to pick up that mantle.
While if nobody says yes then I suppose I’ll just keep it going in the more CasualUSA light-hearted style, until such time as someone does. Either way I’ll offer to help grow it by posting and commenting to it regularly - unless you want me to stop b/c I tend to be really bad at guessing what people want to see (e.g. personally I love John Oliver and also got involved in the Reddit protests, so why people are downvoting sexy pics of JO on Lemmy of all places… I seriously have no clue).
The community also needs moderators to help in general - so even if you don’t want to take it over, would you like to help moderate it if it were to remain a more casual, light-hearted community?
I could be very wrong here, but I get the feeling that you are kinda chaffing about the restrictions that Germany is imposing upon LW, and wishing to go outside of those bounds, but aren’t quite realizing the enormous extent that the EU protects people’s privacy.
Here in the USA, we have far fewer rights, and we know it. First, be aware that when bad-faith people use bad-faith words to that effect, they are lying (in bad-faith:-D): it’s “for your protection tho”, and “for your convenience” (bull shit!). And as we continue the slide into fascism, I fully expect people to end up in literal and actual and irl jail as a result of what they said. “Freedom of speech” is just mere words - probably within a minute of me hitting send on this, these very words as well as yours will get sucked into a government-funded datacenter that records and analyzes just about literally all words on the internet, hoping to stop “terrorism” or whatever (which it probably does help, but what will happen when the new administration finds out that this capability already exists - to what ends will they put this “weapon” that lies solely within their hands to use, as they see fit, “for our protection” and all that?).
“Freedom of speech” is what a toddler cites as their defense after they’ve run up and punched you in the face. Never mind how one has little to nothing to do with the other - it’s words that they’ve heard spoken elsewhere, by people acting as bullies, and it halfway worked for those other people (or at least it took YEARS for e.g. the Alex Jones situation to go through the courts), so perhaps worth trying out for themselves as well?
I agree with lazyguru and to expand upon their words: what you seem to be wanting - ACTUAL freedom of speech - is something that I feel like exists far more in various EU nations (granted, perhaps a bit less in Germany now, or if not now then like the USA, expected to change more towards that direction in the near future as a result of the election results?) than the USA. We talk about it here, like a LOT, but the actual reality of making it work has happened elsewhere. Also, things change over time and at the dawn of the internet, the web really was a different place, where places like 4chan (sorry to keep using that extremist example, fwiw here I don’t mean to imply that what you want is a toxic hellscape, but rather I’m trying to highlight its focus on being a purely “free speech” platform) were allowed to exist - but this is a different world now, and especially it will become a much more different one still in the near future.
So saying things like your hypothetical scenario presented in https://feddit.org/comment/3562325, that is pushing things to quite an extreme degree imho. Akin to hosting links to pirated or CSAM content even if not hosting such content directly, i.e. still something that could get DO in actual legal trouble, even if nobody were to go to jail for such (although realitistically, someone very well could, if they say it first and then they were to go out and do it?). I presume that you are wanting the more purist hypothetical form of argumentation, divorced from practical reality - but such does not exist, least of all in the United States (possibly, probably even, it might in the EU?).
And in any case - not that it matters b/c the DO admins have declared that such as your hypothetical example is not tolerable on this instance - I don’t want to be anywhere near that kind of discussion, above and beyond issues of legality or morality. Tbh I am already uncomfortably weirded out and have had to halt / take a break from reading all the variety of posts seemingly everywhere on Lemmy as it is now - like I get that people are upset and they need a place to talk and even vent, but my own preferences are valid as well, and it’s a bit much for me to handle, you know? Though I would not mind helping to mod (I’ll give up the top mod spot if someone volunteers to receive it from me) a community that has a more “fun” focus:-).
I mostly wanted to point out that at this very moment, DO’s only rules are the Lemmy Code of Conduct, which has been written by the Lemmy devs, and you know enough about Lemmy.ml to know what it allows.
The legal side of DO is limited to https://discuss.online/legal
As we know, the legal framework of the USA allows free speech.
If we compare with lemmy.zip, for instance (https://legal.lemmy.zip/docs/terms_of_service/#our-governing-laws)
European laws are much stronger regarding hate speech, as several people have commented on the LW announce.
I am not advocating for DO to become a free speech instance.
I am suggesting to add rules, be it at the community or instance level, to prevent comments like the one I gave
I guess that does not solve the question of people wanting a place where they can talk about jury nullification of future crimes, but that’s something they can solve on their own.
I can tell you with around 100% certainty that once that AskUSA will become popular enough, it will have at least one or two depressing topics per day.
Again IANAL, but the legal notice does not look airtight, at least to me at a <1 minute glance. e.g. it points to the GDPR for usage by children, somehow defining those as age 16? That’s an EU provision, and in the USA “children” is generally considered to be up to age 18. So I very much get the sense that the admins of DO are very much not wanting to push the legal boundaries of anything at all - which is what they both literally said as well in the discussion (which jgrim unlocked btw, if you wanted to respond to him).
So then with that in mind, I am not sure what language would be “necessary”, beyond what they have already said? Also yours was very much a hypothetical and delivered entirely in good faith so I would have thought it would be fine? The worry I suppose would lie in someone else perhaps saying identical words, but NOT be delivering in good faith. At which point by the rules of the instance it would need to be removed. I do agree that in an ideal world it could be clarified - you can tell from my writing style that I am very much a detail-oriented person:-) - but on the other hand, in such matters it always seems to be the case that the more that is written, the more that people will hyper-focus on the boundary conditions and ignore the spirit of what was written?
“discovery, fun, & sharing” is fairly general, but if someone gets their comments or post removed b/c they said that murder is good, will they really be all that shocked? Especially keeping in mind that said person is extremely likely to have felt whatever they feel regardless of what rule had been cited or why. And like, rule #2 is literally “Be respectful. Everyone should feel welcome here.” - but would a healthcare CEO feel comfortable here? That’s the thing about being liberal, when people say that EVERYONE should feel comfortable, that truly does mean EVERYONE - the exception (requiring intolerance to such) being those who break the rules (i.e. who are themselves intolerant of such). I may not like someone’s creed, gender, race, able-bodiedness, sexual preference, or nationality (+ in this case choice of career path), but I am bound to at least act in a tolerant manner of them regardless.
Mind you, I feel like it is obvious (though perhaps it is not) that we can say that when a CEO does actions that lead to the deaths of people, that such actions are not okay? And should be punishable in the usual way, as in via a court of law where he is entitled to a jury of his peers, the same as every other citizen would be? “Innocent until proven guilty (beyond a shadow of a doubt)” But that is so extremely obvious that why would anyone even bother saying that? I guess emotional venting? But while “he (the CEO) should himself be on trial for murder!” seems totally fine to me, as your phrasing implied “he should receive vigilante justice!” is not, b/c the former is obvious (if less so that he would actually receive that penalty) whereas the latter is flagrantly illegal, by design. Yeah it’s a dance isn’t it, but the former doesn’t land anyone in jail whereas the latter literally might, plus as a matter of conscience I would not want to encourage thoughts that could eventually lead to such a horrific outcome, as in the breakdown of all law & order in the USA society where anyone could be gunned down at any time for any reason, just b/c the shooter felt that they had no legal recourses to vent their frustrations, or more likely that they did but that they did not want to bother going through the arduous process of proving guilt beyond a shadow of a doubt in an expensive legal courtroom (or arbitration) setting.
To help handle depressing topics it would indeed help to have another mod - fortunately we now have 3 additional ones, and AP even has a DO account, though refuses to be the top (and yet we would need a top mod with a DO account as we said earlier?). I wouldn’t mind handing over “ownership” to m_f, although at this point with clarification from the admins that the most extreme topics as you were asking about aren’t allowable in any case - at least, not on DO (it would have to go to some other instance if you wanted such, like midwest.social or perhaps something in the EU would work better for that?) - I am also convinced that I won’t be hindering any conversations that would be helpful to have, like non-light-hearted but otherwise non-DO-rule-violating ones. So I removed that from the sidebar text, and am happy to help out that other team, if they’ll help pick up especially that kind of slack. We’ll shuffle the order if need be, but as that’s a pain and only AP has a DO account so far, I don’t even see the need to bother with that. Or if m_f wants to migrate the community elsewhere I’m supportive of that too, but that’s an ongoing conversation nowhere near finalized yet.
Anyway, you can respond now to the post in Discuss, if you want to suggest any particular language for jgrims to use? Though despite how the USA allows “free speech”, DO itself is limiting that to be for “discovery, fun, & sharing” and to “Be respectful. Everyone should feel welcome here.”, which seems to me (naively, not having researched this topic in the slightest!:-P) to be even more narrow than legal notices about “hate speech”?
I did: https://discuss.online/post/14151634/12675745