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“If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all.” —Noam Chomsky (lemmy.sdf.org)

submitted 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) by [email protected] to c/quotes

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 day ago (1 children)

They can both be true.

Part of fascism is that the exercise of "speech" operates in such a way that it drowns out opposing speech. There's a tendency to threats, deliberate deception, and mass-scale propaganda that by its structure is difficult to counter with "opposing" speech.

The original concept, that we can't ban Nazis from publishing Nazi newsletters to be read by other consenting Nazis, and making the effort to ban that will be a counterproductive waste of time, is still true in my opinion. People might disagree. There is a necessary corollary, though, that you do need to ban certain types of "speech" that, because of their structure (and not their content), are distorting the machinery that democracy needs to have in place to function.

Have a Nazi rally where you hit any counterprotestors with a baseball bat? Not speech, banned.
Have a Nazi rally where you carry signs saying Hitler was great? Speech.
Post a Lemmy comment saying that Biden did some good things? Speech.
Run 100 Lemmy accounts batching up comments saying Biden did good things, flooding them into related stories, to distort the overall narrative of conversation in ways no individual could ever match or counter-argue? Not speech, banned.
Run a news channel which contains neo-fascist content? Speech.
Buy up hundreds of local news channels so that you can create a unified appearance of a consensus in favor of neo-fascism, in a variety of stories that come up, while disguising your ownership so it's not obvious what's happening? Not speech, banned.

Of course, some people could disagree with some of those, I'm just saying my opinion on it. And there are grey areas in the blurry section between the obvious-to-me extremes. But that's my feeling on it: "Speech" in terms of communicating your message to a consenting audience isn't something the government can ever even make the attempt to ban, nor should it. "Speech" in terms of using machinery or power relationships to distort the conversation so that your point of view gets a leg up so you can win struggles for power, needs to be banned. A lot more than it is right now.

And this is all irrespective of the conversation about censorship by the government versus moderation by the private owner of a server somewhere. The private server owner obviously "can" do whatever they want, and I would support their right to do so, I'm just saying my feeling on the ethics of the situation and what they "should" be doing in terms of the values they uphold when they do moderation on their server. In my opinion.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

The bullshit assymetry principle (it's much faster to come up with bullshit than to refute it) means that lots of stuff that would fit a pretty reasonable definition of speech is still disruptive enough be a problem. You can distort the conversation to give your side an unjustified leg up through things like oversimplifications and cherry picking evidence while what you're doing is blatantly only speech, and plausibly in good faith (you can't tell if someone's coming up with things themselves or repeating what they've read elsewhere and believe to be true). Speech can, on its own, be used to make people see fascist content as the rational centre ground, and then seek it out on contexts where it goes entirely unchallenged, and become full-fledged nutters.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

All completely correct.

On a very related note, I wish that the moderation culture on Lemmy tended a lot more to something like Something Awful. They've had a thriving culture for several internet generations now, and I think a lot of it is because of two things:

It costs money to be able to participate. Not a lot (a one-time $10 fee), but enough to combat the "army of anonymous accounts" problem and the "okay ban me lol I'll be back on another account" problem.
The moderators have an extremely strict code with some very interesting features: Among them, as I understand it, is that if you are strawmanning someone else's argument or arguing with them while refusing to engage with what they're saying, out you go. That is radically different from Lemmy's moderation style, where any kind of bad-faith bullshit goes, but if you get mad and call someone a dick because they're doing that, out you go.

I think there is probably a big space to be filled, to combat what you are talking about, by good moderation of the space. The press used to do that, by at least nominally making an effort that the lazy and laughable claims wouldn't get published and periodicals that published them would start to get laughed out of the room, but it's not really that way anymore, and it's formed a breeding ground for all sorts of toxic propaganda. I just think there's a lot of room to deal with that at the platform and reputational level, instead of the "what is allowed vs not allowed to express" type of level.

That's sort of what I was meaning about limiting speech based on the structure, instead of based on the content. But it starts to fall into a gray area where it's a lot more hard to make determinations. I do agree with you though.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 26 minutes ago

Beehaw has a complicated signup process (it at least used to require you to write an essay), which makes accounts more valuable without having to charge money. They ended up defederating from a lot of other instances, though, as obviously, letting anyone bypass the registration requirements by just using another instance would undermine them.