Apparently there’s an issue with some instances banning users for criticizing authoritarian governments. Is lemmy.world a safe place to criticize governments?
Apparently there’s an issue with some instances banning users for criticizing authoritarian governments. Is lemmy.world a safe place to criticize governments?
My thought process is that if you’re overtly rude and crude and lump one type of people into one group indiscriminately that’s not free speech. Also this is not the US government or run by the US government. So Free Speech doesn’t necessarily apply.
I’m the first one to say that an uncritical and crassly-applied “free speech” ideology is deleterious, but it’s the First Amendment that doesn’t apply, not the concept of Free Speech itself. Under the Constitution, you are free not to apply the concept of Free Speech yourself since the First Amendment doesn’t apply to your moderation, but that does not answer the question of whether you should or not.
Of course, my answer is that some speech is worth protecting and some is not and questions of natural rights have nothing to do with that, so the chauvinistic redditors posting social credit score memes that were tired years ago and thoroughly debunked don’t need a platform, but that’s just my take on the matter.
Oh yeah, and the “orc” meme is clearly racist, but that’s why I worded my original question the way I did.
Thank you for your time and have a good day.
Whose definition of natural rights are you enforcing? Because your definition might not be as broad as mine, and if that’s the case I want you banned for questioning natural rights
(Obviously I’m not serious, this is an illustration of why enforcing ideology is not a good idea)
This reminds me of people saying the government shouldn’t “legislate morality,” i.e. be involved in or have a stance on moral issues. In both cases, it seems to me to be oblivious to the status-quo that ideology/morality are already enforced in those respective domains and there is no end in sight for that.
The admin who kindly gave me some of his time indeed already shared the basic ideological tenets of the administration policy. The deplatforming of rudeness, of crassness, and of, uh, “lumping one type of people into a group indiscriminately” are all ideological concerns unless you want to look at it merely as market concerns, as though that changes the fact.
It’s also common practice to at least nominally ban the spreading of misinformation, though our host gave no indication of doing that, and this again is also a highly ideological tenet. If misinformation drives engagement – and we know it can – why ban it? Presumably because it is also a social ill, or because you want to have a positive reputation, etc.
But these are things that are obfuscated in the “Discourse,” thanks in part to the wonderful legacy of classical liberal authors who wanted to find a way to make their ideology look like non-ideology (see Locke using faux a priori arguments to protect the property rights of monopolists).
If you want a comparison, I’ll use the Republican whipping-dog because you are probably familiar with it. Repubs talk a big game about “Small government.” “The government that governs best governs least.” “The most terrifying sentence in the English language is: ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’” And yet, though they are not alone in this, they are perhaps the most enthusiastic supporters of increasing the power and funding of police and the military! That doesn’t seem like “small government” to me! But that’s because when they talk about “government” in this context, that’s not what they mean, they mean a very narrow subset of laws mostly connected to austerity and corporate deregulation that they want to promote. This kind of double-talk is a rhetorically powerful tool for derailing critical thinking by essentially baiting the listener into conflating cases that are very different.
The blanket denouncement of “enforcing ideology” reminds me of that. Sure, there are bad ways to do it, and you provided an example, but that does not mean it cannot be done well and it obfuscates that it is already being done! The question is not about whether or not to enforce ideology, but what ideological lines to enforce and how. The status quo is not neutral just because we have been habituated to it!
Edit: Total aside, but I don’t believe in natural rights (I think human welfare is better advanced by other frameworks), I was just speaking in terms of the ideology of the Constitution, which does support that idea.
Well said tbh
I appreciate you magnanimity :)
Difference between enforcing democratically accepted ideology and enforcing that which is not. You mentioned that you thought speech that questions natural rights should not be given a platform. I pointed out that you’re applying an ill-defined and subjective term, and so it’s just not wise
Please read what someone writes a little more carefully before trying to do gotchas. I said:
i.e. natural rights are not relevant to useful questions about moderation. I only use the term to call the concept irrelevant. Then I said:
My complaint is letting people post low-effort* memes and misinformation isn’t worthwhile, and if your concept of “Free Speech” conflicts with that, then that concept should be replaced by something better because you’re just caping for garbage.
*please don’t get debate club about this term, it’s a waste of time. Shit that is just a jpeg copied and reproduced endlessly so you can get updoots to the left because winnie the pooh is evil is low-effort. If someone does their own bespoke photoshop of the bear copulating with a tank, it is not low-effort, though you should ban that person for other reasons (obscenity, etc.)
You say “thoroughly debunked” but this is what your article says:
In other words, there isn’t literally a singular social credit score for everyone in China, but the government does indeed collect vast amounts of surveillance information about your compliance with its draconian laws and obligations from a wide range of agencies and compile that into a list of services you should be blocked from and so on. So it “doesn’t exist” in a very narrow literal sense, but definitely does practically speaking. This is hairsplitting technicalities to get away from reality.
It’s also an article by Foreign Policy because I didn’t want to get into a spat about sourcing. Mostly it applies to businesses, not people, and unsubstantiated words like “draconian” are doing a lot of heavy lifting. FP likes to obfuscate that fact, but you can see even in what you quoted that they tip their hand on the rhetorical contortions they are doing when they list:
hmm, what do these things all have in common? They all apply overwhelmingly or virtually-exclusively to businesses! E-commerce can, without further elaboration, apply to peer-to-peer interactions like on ebay, and “court judgement” is a similarly vague term, but you don’t get some normal private citizen on charges related to “food safety,” “foreign economic cooperation,” or – based on it not being titled “traffic law” or whatever – “transportation”, and the overwhelming majority of both tax payment and tax fraud is done by the rich.
There is a social credit system for businesses, and their should be. Reddit memes about “-20 billion social credit score” for posting a meme with lego tanks has no place in reality.