It’s been nice to see ordinary Americans open up to life in China but everyone is acting blind to their censorship. Makes me thankful for the fediverse and being able to self host my own instance.
Fully agree! Thanks for putting my thought into much better words.
The only issue I see now is how to surpass bad mods and admins? The balance between filtering off topic or bad content versus anything goes but then nazis come out seems to be a challenge plus power tripping.
I just don’t understand why it’s a problem that the nazis come out. Would we not rather they utter their opinions in the open so they can be refuted? That way people can also just ignore that user if they don’t like viewing what he has to say.
It’s not like they don’t exist just because we ban them here… They’ll go somewhere to discuss where only other people who agree with them is allowed to be.
Unless we’re talking direct threats or doxing I’m always an advocate for free speech online.
I used to think this way, but no. Nazis should be shunned and banned and feel unwelcome everywhere. No one should ever think their rhetoric is harmless or ignorable. Those who tolerate Nazis enable them.
And yeah, folks can wring their hands about slippery slopes and where we draw lines, but the beauty of federation is that if someone is too loose or too draconian, we can go somewhere with more agreeable policies. We can decide as a society where the line is drawn, and it’ll be fuzzy but as speech gets closer to Naziism, it will be rejected more and more places, as it should be.
I never said to tolerate them or not let them know why their ideology is fucked up.
The problem with your statement or at least how other people act on those same thoughts is that the cut off for when someone is a nazi becomes less and less.
I was called a nazi sympathiser and banned from a sub lemm.ee for asking if being against DEI equals being a nazi now.
Nobody wanted to even discuss it. They just assume the very worst of you, call you a nazi and then ban you.
That’s how you end up with echo chambers.
Would we not rather they utter their opinions in the open so they can be refuted?
It’s far easier to lie than it is to correct a lie. When the Nazis come out into the open they spew a stream of lies in minutes that can take months to refute, leaving the field to the lies to spread and fester.
And that’s even assuming you think refutation works at all. (Protip: it works so rarely that you can treat instances where it did as statistical aberration.)
Try one of their lines and I’ll refute it in 2 sentences…
None of what you said is a good argument for censorship in my opinion.
