I have not seen it yet, though I have no doubt that it exists.
I believe that in real life as in the fediverse, hate speech and bigotry of all kinds needs to be very firmly shot down. Immediately downvote and block that shit. It has no place here, or anywhere.
That being said, debating or even engaging with these pricks is worse than pointless because you’ll never change their minds and will only give them a platform.
To change someone's mind, the person needs to respect you. Bigotry largely comes from a place of disrespect, so the targets of bigotry cannot change that person's mind.
Now, when my mom was starting down a pretty homophobic path, I had the opportunity to talk to her, to explain that her misconceptions weren't what most gay people were like. Because she respected me more than she respected internet strangers, I was able to change her mind.
But to strangers, no matter how much I type, or how convincing I am, I'm never going to convince someone who's racist or homophobic to stop being that way. They simply do not respect me enough to believe what I say, to trust me over their own friends, family or news sources. I don't have the time to build the trust and rapport with someone to be able to change their mind, so the best thing to do is just minimize the trouble they can cause me by blocking them.
Yeah, and then once they are banned from the public places they find the hell holes with the other racists and form groups that dress as nazis and march on washington. We literally drive them into echo chambers where people will agree with them, whereas we should be heckling them and showing them that the general public at large disagrees with them. It's impossible to show that your community is the general public when you ban people right away. Then they think they aren't allowed to be there and it's not because they're wrong, it's because you're woke or whatever. You can't concentrate the evil, you have to dilute it.
The problem with this assessment is that we've tried the approach of reasoning with people like this and all it does is allow them to proselytise. They don't want a polite debate, they want a pulpit.
A neo-Nazi who's stuffed in a box talking to other neo-Nazis is a neo-Nazi who's not infesting some other place trying to spread shit about "race realism". They'll find it a lot harder to "march on Washington" when it's just a couple hundred Nazis and not a couple hundred Nazis plus thousands of others they've radicalised.
Sunlight's a shitty disinfectant. I prefer bleach.
No, you don't argue with them. You berate them. You harass them. Treat them with their own medicine. They aren't intelligent enough to get got with knowledge. That's why it hasn't worked. You've tried to outsmart people without brains.
Racist is racist. Fuck them. I have no interest in appeasing these people, and even if I did, it wouldn’t calm them down or make their hatred tolerable. Sexists, racists, homophobes and the lot should be shunned without compromise. As the saying somewhat goes, there should be no tolerance for intolerance.
Only caveat I'd add is to differentiate between A racist/homophobe/misogynist/whatever, and someone who just expressed an ignorant viewpoint. Whether or not there's actual malicious thinking behind things is important in figuring out if you can reason with someone or not.
Quickest example I can give off the top of my head: I'm gay, and one of my best friends is a straight man who, when I met him, had some reasonably-significant issues with his own masculinity, probably stemming from being short and slim and the resulting treatment he'd often get from both women and other men (which also lessened as we got older and out of the early 20s). That occasionally extended to things like worrying that other people would perceive him as gay because of hanging out with a bunch of LGBTQ+ people and women from work, or his slightly defensive reaction when I told him he looked good one day where he had a particularly nice outfit on and had styled his hair well, as if I'd propositioned him. Both things are a little insulting, but he also was never one of the types who views us as basically child-molesting mentally-ill deviants who don't deserve equal rights.
We got closer, enough that he was willing to open up on the subjects, and I was able to explain how that kind of thing looked from my perspective and, in turn, kinda figured out where it was coming from on his end, but it was always from a place where he just didn't understand why what he was saying or doing was wrong or hurtful, not because he intended to cause hurt. And he's significantly better about that sort of thing now in general, because it made him do some introspection, and he got better at doing that for other things as well. And in all fairness, I learned a bit, too; I knew short guys often got made fun of for it, but being average size myself it wasn't something I really had to deal with and I didn't understand just how pervasive and wearing it is, so now I better understand how he might have gotten there in the first place.
I wholeheartedly agree, and it was the use of the word “fool” that was my only minor problem with the article, which is also what I expressed in the thread by @Kupo_Knight, to whom I’m grateful for posting the article in the first place.
As for your experience with your friend, that’s a touching story and I think you’re both lucky to share such close bonds of friendship. You handled it perfectly. Congrats.
Yes, it's really unfortunate when I see people of a given oppressed group start attacking an ally simply because the person hasn't kept up to date on the latest preferred words. I know there is an angry subsegment of people that feel that everyone should spend all their time keeping completely up-to-date on the latest terminology, but it's a really unrealistic and damaging expectation.
There are often people who want to do the right thing and are simply out of date, or not well enough informed. These sorts of people can and should be educated as they generally want to help. When they get canceled for minor transgressions it's not constructive.
The internet has a big problem with people forgetting to read things with nuance, which leads to the behaviour you described. In the past decade, social media has convinced millions of people that all-or-nothing thinking is acceptable (because it causes conflict, and conflict is cash).
Tolerance is a peace treaty between society's sub-groups. When one group breaks that treaty it's moral and necessary to respond in kind and not tolerate them.
If a country rolls tanks into your country it's not immoral to respond in kind to defend yourself. Same idea applies to intolerance.
Oh I'm not saying about being offended by everything. There's a difference between disagreeing with someone's PoV, or even them saying something disagreeable without malice, vs. Someone being a plain old hateful bigot.
Like my Mum will say things that aren't necessarily PC, but I know she doesn't mean anything hateful by it. I wouldn't even think of reporting anything of that nature.
But someone disseminating hateful ideologies or being bigoted towards other people, then you need to shut that down.
this honestly. There's a huge difference between "waaah this person disagreed with me!!" and someone actually being fucking rude and hateful. People who are progressive in their politics tend to conflate them for whatever reason.
Like, yeah, no one likes when someone is going around shouting slurs at people and generally just saying blatantly hateful shit (death threats, slurs, etc style content). But so many people end up crying that "oh you're pro-life therefore you're a sexist and misogynist and pushing hate speech you bigot!" like wtf?
I get this a lot as someone who is transsexual. I'll merely talk about my transsexualism, explain the science and biology behind my condition, and then suddenly I'm a "hateful transphobic bigot" because I had the audacity to agree with the scientific literature rather than some random person's political beliefs. Like no, I'm not being hateful towards you simply by talking about my medical condition and the science around that. What's happening is that you're disagreeing with me.
Whenever people place huge emphasis on "combatting hate speech" unfortunately it's always this "disagreeing with me is hate speech" shit, and not actually dealing with hateful content.
Saying shit like "if you're a gay man who doesn't want to fuck someone with a vagina, you're a bigot and you're choosing to be like that" is blatantly homophobic and hateful (my phrasing here is nicer than some I've seen), yet it gets praised and rewarded and declared "not hate speech" because it happens to align politically with those constantly crying about "hate speech".
This is the great part of the fediverse - if one server isn't moderating a magazine well, another server can step in to help blacklist that other server's instance pretty easily.
You're phrasing this as if it's something great about the fediverse, but centralized sites can just ban the magazine-equivalent directly (since they only have what we'd call local magazines). In fact, the fediverse may be worse. What's stopping bad faith actors from constantly creating new servers pushing bad content? Centralized sites can generally do more to control who can use them with things like captchas, but federation can't have such measures.
Saw some in the comments of a post yesterday about Starbucks and Target. It'll likely pick up as more and more people come onto these spaces just by virtue of a larger population.
It also sucks that reporting it did nothing, and despite being heavily downvoted, it was at or near the top of the default sort. That wasn't a productive conversation, it was just a modern version of blood libel. I don't have high hopes for this platform if it can't nip overt bigotry in the bud.
Proverbs 26:4
"Do not answer a fool according to his folly, or you will be like him yourself. Answer a fool according to his folly, or he will be wise in his own eyes."
Sometimes the fool has a platform already, or starting to gather attention. It's important to diffuse inflammatory noise with truth. To handle it properly, we must be careful not to fall to their level by responding with an insult.
Responding with truth is the best path to expose their inflammatory deceit.
Ephesians 5:11
"Take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness, but instead expose them."
Proverbs 15:1
"A soft answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger."
I don't entirely agree it's pointless to debate or engage. While there's something to be said about not feeding trolls, at the same time, there is value in making sure trolls don't get an unopposed platform to spread bullshit.
If their posts aren't being quickly removed, then I think it's ideal if their post has a response that at least makes it clear that the troll post is bullshit. This isn't to convince the troll. You'll never convince them. This is for other readers. How does it feel for someone to read a homophobic comment? It feels like shit. But when there's comments opposing it, it gives it some feeling of hope. A reminder that there's people who not only disagree with the homophobia, but also don't just ignore it.
As well, while you're not gonna change the troll's mind, there are other, more reasonable people who are basically on the fence. They might agree with the troll, but can be persuaded against it. If the troll's comment is allowed to stay up unopposed, then only the bad opinion gets expressed, which allows that opinion to spread.
I'm not saying you or anyone else has to respond to trolls and bad faith actors. The ideal is that their comments are removed very quickly. But there is some value in replying to them, especially in places where the troll comment won't get removed.
PS: replying to trolls can be seriously bad for your mental health. I appreciate people putting up the good fight, but don't put others before your own mental health. It's entirely valid to not want to deal with that bullshit.
That being said, debating or even engaging with these pricks is worse than pointless because you’ll never change their minds and will only give them a platform.
1000x this. You'll see this all over twitter, IG, and FB. Outrage gets clicks. It's no longer about truth or informing people. It's about what will get clicks. And people abuse this system by saying outrageous things or doing crazy things, since it guarantees their content will be shared by people who agree and by people who don't.
tl:dr don't engage with clickbait, because that's exactly what they want you to do, and you will never "win."
Sure there's instances dedicated to being human trash as you've put it, but in the general discourse it's not an issue I've noticed, and I think there's a few reasons for that:
There are no "Agendas" here yet: Make no mistake there are people spending a lot of money to define the discourse on major platforms. An example people are fairly comfortable acknowledging is the existence of Russian content farms, - a lot of what stirs up bigotry on platforms isn't genuine users sharing their experiences or hobbies or whatever, it's people with an agenda astroturfing discontent so their backer can point to it and say "see, the ordinary people are revolting, they would prefer our regime/product/way of life". I'm not saying every racist on Reddit is a paid actor, I'm sayinga lot of people who haven't given things much thought are being prodded and goaded into being insensitive through consuming the fake bullshit those people put out.
There are no advertisers here: Again, look at the major platforms, they sideline content and spaces about sexuality or race because they see these as unpalatable to advertisers. YouTube faced a lawsuit last year for “unlawful content regulation, distribution, and monetization practices that stigmatize, restrict, block, demonetize, and financially harm the LGBT Plaintiffs and the greater LGBT Community.” On YouTube, content is separated not by target age, or [N]SFW status, but advertising palatability.
These spaces are not US centric. The US has some stupid laws, which Spez alluded to in relation to NSFW content, an example of which is FOSTA-SESTA. This is one of the reasons Tumblr and Only Fans attempted to go SFW. The laws claim to be anti sex trafficing but in reality they're just social conservatism for the internet age, you'll note in the link above regarding YouTube, the platforms defense of discrimination was that they were only abiding by the US Communications Decency Act, of which FOSTA-SESTA is an amendment.
The latter two points largely just hide or remove users from platforms, but that contributes to an overall atmosphere where bigotry goes unchallenged or bigot mods support bigot users. If people aren't seen as a valid part of the community things do go sour from there.
Personally I think kbin and @ernest should take a more backseat approach to this stuff, apart from very radical exceptions. If you don't like content/people/magazines that you see, simply block it. If you want to join a community that will outright ban people who disagree with you, check out Tildes (left) or SaidIt (right) which are more 1:1 Reddit replacements (not in the fediverse though)
Time will tell what the overall approach for this is on kbin, but the great thing about the fediverse is if things get out of hand or take a turn here you don't like, you can simply find another instance or a different fediverse site altogether and still interact with mostly the same people/content. But I personally very much like the relaxed and not-very-political space kbin has been so far
It's up to the owners of the magazines to build good moderation teams. And if the mods don't do well - switch to another instance's version of that magazine's topic.
I think individual instances should take whatever stance they want. If you don't like it, you can choose a different instance. And if you DO prefer a space without bigots (as most people do), you can use an instance which takes a hard stance against bigotry.
I personally couldn't engage long-term with any instance which doesn't stamp out bigotry. There's no reason to expose myself to bile like that on the regular.
I like to surround myself with non-toxic, chaotic good types. But, I'm also a huge proponent of education and see the value in looking in on toxic spaces to see where their head is at and what they are planning. It is the only way to stay safe-ish and not entirely caught off guard. Luckily, they like to be loud, so they aren't hard to find. Also luckily, they tend to prefer their own the best, so they are easy to avoid as well.
The problem instantly becomes "who decides what counts as a bigot?" to me, the "transgender movement" is filled with transphobic and homophobic bigots. but if you ask large social media companies, they think any opposition to that movement is bigotry. These are two conflicting views about who is considered a "bigot". They can't both be right.
@ernest can only control what happens on the instances he controls, i.e. kbin.social and the others. If you're on an instance, and find a magazine that is poorly moderated, that would be an issue to take up with That Instance and their Ownership/Moderation team. It's not an issue for the software developer to be stepping in on.
Ernest can still block people on other instances, and whole instances themselves. If hateful people from hateful instances are intruding, we shouldn't let that happen
No, he actually can't. You're confusing kbin, and kbin.social
He can absolutely choose to block people at the instance administration level, or defederate an instance, as the Owner and Administrator of kbin.social, or karab.in, or whatever other instances he might run.
There is no reasonable way, as the developer of the kbin software, that he can magically write into the source code that "nazis aren't allowed" for instance. How would you even test for that, when somebody downloads the software, and tosses it up on their own server? He can't control what people do with the software he writes, as long as they're otherwise complying with the license he releases it under.
Could he put "nazis, bigots, and other assholes aren't allowed to use this software" into the license? Probably, if he chose to, but it's basically unenforceable.
It sounds like @Kara is just talking about defederation. Any instance in the fediverse can block connections to/from any other instance that they find to be excessively problematic. It should be used sparingly, but there are definitely cases where it is appropriate.
I strongly disagree. If there are a bunch of magazines here with racist / anti-LGBTQ+ / etc content, the site as a whole will get a reputation for it, other instances will block it, and people who don’t want to deal with that stuff will go elsewhere
While I tend to agree with your opinion, that people should be allowed to express their political view of the world, I also think that intolerance is not a political view. It's just the heritage of a mob mentality that's more suitable for the dark ages, rather than the globalized world we live into.
So if you want to spout about dumb non-facts like "ethnic replacement" and such, you can take a walk and come back when you'll have a mindset more appropriate for this century.
At a certain point speech does become so trash it's illegal but it has to go pretty far. Instance owners would likely need to stop that just to avoid legal hassles. Instance owners may dip their toes into bans for things approaching that but people who want to engage in things like that will just run their own instances which cannot be controlled by devs. Other instance owners may choose to not federate with those instances. Although they might not actually notice much of a problem if it stays on those other instances. I could see those communities being blocked off preemptively when it becomes common for people from an instance to cause trouble.
Like other platforms instance owners will depend on mods to control what goes on. I think most magazines will have good enough moderation to ban things like racism or sexism as a lot of people aren't up for that. The instances owner probably won't be able to police within communities that much. For communities that don't ban for isms it will probably be fairly obvious after a certain point. It would be reasonable for the instance owner to choose not to host that kind of content. Some might choose a more wild west approach for whatever reason.
What people consider "intolerance" is not a consensus. I consider some people to be very intolerant, while they think they aren't intolerant at all. when you say intolerance shouldn't be allowed, you have to say which one of us is right. who is getting kicked off for their "intolerance"? because whichever one you pick, they'll be upset and think you are intolerant.
Dude we all know what "intolerance" or "racism" mean, don't build an elaborate system of mirrors and pulleys to fuck yourself in your own ass.
Playing devil's advocate on this matter is what allowed this kind of behaviour to exist in the first place
You say "we all know what they mean" but it really isn't clear. I've met people saying "racist" just refers to all white people. I've seen "intolerence" refer to transsexuals merely saying we exist, while hating on transsexuals is "tolerance".
Perhaps I've been in political discussions too long. The words on the surface are obvious. Be chill, don't attack people for the way they were born, etc. but people who strongly vocally oppose "intolerance and racism" often don't mean that. they take "racist" to mean "simply commenting on race in a way they disagree with" and "intolerance" to mean "disagree with them".
I'm always wary of when people are crying to censor someone, because historically those doing the censoring have not used their power fairly.
I agree with your first sentence and that's what I meant when I said "radical exceptions". I think the issue is many people coming from Reddit will equate anything that is right-leaning as racism or hate speech. Like I don't want ernest to be in here during the US elections banning magazines supporting the Republican candidate
Sure, get rid of the users talking about how the Jews control the world or are going on frequent racist tangents. But I think there's a lot more to gain about getting perspective from a place I might not necessarily agree with than just getting rid of it altogether. I hope people can be mature enough here to feel the same
Yeah for sure, political debate (done in a constructive way) is always helpful for both sides.
Extremism are to keep separated from political views, from both sides and that's why I don't hang out in Lemmy's main instance too: because (while most people in there are cool) there are a bunch of self proclaimed "communists" that takes the sides of Russia in the war of Ukraine or denies the genocide of the Uyghur ethnic groups operated by the Chinese government.
And they use the same catchphrase the far-right extremists use: "don't believe what mainstream media tell you".
That's because extremism is not a political problem, is a social issue. Extremists only use politics to have a justifiable outlet.
Like I don't want ernest to be in here during the US elections banning magazines supporting the Republican candidate
Just to be clear the last time this happened anywhere online was r/The_Donald, which was objectively a radical exception promoting racism and hate speech while also being a sub "supporting the Republican candidate". You are being misleading.
when you declare something "racist and hate speech" there's not a consensus on what that means. For example, I think affirmative action is very racist, yet people who strongly oppose "racism and hate speech" openly and happily support it.
My first move is to just block-- individuals, and whole instances if need be. Hell, I'm quick to block instances anyway! The Internet is vast; I don't need access to every instance nor give every one a chance. I'll report if I feel like it'll do anything.
It also helps when you're on an instance that takes this sort of thing seriously-- you need Mods That Actually Do Something. Furthermore, there are tags you can follow to keep up on what to block, at your discretion.
💯. Background radiation is a great framing — @shengokai’ The Whiteness of Mastodon has sent great perspectives on this. And agreed that being on a well-moderated instance — and blocking/reporting whenever necessary — is key to having a good experience
I don't think I've seen it on kbin, but I sort of encountered it in a community hosted on beehaw, iirc.
There was a thread in the lgbt+ community where the OP was asking why the average person hated lgbtq+ folks and one dude clearly explained why he hated them.
His explanation was basically "as a muslim", so as someone with the muslim identity, he was alright with "gays" first because he didn't care what other people did in their bedrooms, but "it didn't stay there" and the gays with their ideology started to show up everywhere and started cramming their ideology to everyone else.
So yeah, the guy thought islam was an identity but being lgbtq+ was an ideology.
Ultimately this is what happens when you try to decide that people's beliefs are "hateful bigotry". each side thinks the other are doing some ultimate moral wrong, simply for having different beliefs.
When it comes to governing and politics, you end up with clear philosophical divides depending on how you see existence itself and peoples' role within it. To the muslim guy, opposing lgbt isn't hateful, it's trying to help people. to lgbt people, it's seen as hateful. In reality, it's a disagreement over facts and governing.
Someone having a polite disagreement isn't hateful. They might be wrong, and their incorrect view may lead to harm, but such things are often not malice.
Mastodon is rife with it..... IF you're on a shitty instance. I just happened to join an instance with no moderators (absent or maybe they just like a free for all), and it comes through pretty regularly. The nice thing about the Fediverse is you can just block it immediately at a couple levels.
I'm looking for a new instance that blocks hate & illegal stuff, but is free-speech and open minded otherwise.
Yeah, the one I joined is 100% clean of that bullshit because they made it very clear in the description that the BS would not be tolerated and they apparently either enforce it accordingly or those folks just never joined because of it.
On Kbin specifically? Not sure, just made my account very recently. But on the Fediverse broadly (been on it since 2018)? Yeah I've experienced hate speech for sure. The more explicit hate speech was typically from your usual chuds who'd show up to troll under posts about trans rights, antiracism, etc, and their instances would usually get defederated very quick.
But outside of just explicit hate speech, there's the issue of normalized mistreatment of certain groups of marginalized users across the Fediverse, particularly Black users. Black Mastodon users were very open about the racist mistreatment they experienced from white Mastodon users during that initial Mastodon growth wave around November last year, and white Mastodon users mostly sat around going "huh??? But I'm not MAGA! I can't possibly be part of the problem!"
What sucks is that you can't just defederate antiblack attitudes when those attitudes are common on nearly every Mastodon instance. Like, I'm not Black (I'm Asian), but I think to myself: if I was a Black user trying the Fediverse and found myself surrounded by white Gen X techlords who love talking down to me, talking over my experiences with racism, telling me the social features I mostly used with other Black friends on Twitter were bad (and that only bad people like them) -- fuck no I wouldn't stick around! Not only would I leave, but I would warn my other friends not to waste their time with the Fediverse either!
So coming back to your original question: yeah I've experienced hate content, and I'm happy that the Fediverse offers options to help limit the reach of hateful instances. Yet bigotries as a whole (antiblackness as a prominent example) are still all over the Fediverse, and it'll take more than just existing moderation tools to fix that.
im trans so, the answer is yes. my first day here i saw a christofascist arguing for genocide. very Politely lmao.
ive seen some outbursts on mastodon as well. i was harassed once, and ive seen a bunch of trash on social. my own small mast instance tends to defed when that happens and mastodon has been mostly good for me since i, on an account level, blocked .social.
here i reported the christofascist and it didnt get moderated over the course of the day and tho i know numbers here have blown up, i have some serious concerns about kbin.social that run in line with the nightmare scenario ive seen on mastodon.social (prior to blocking the instance.) even if they bring up the mod count, i suspect we'll still see neolibs, fascists, and centrists dominate discourse while trans people get treated poorly with little recourse.
with that said, it cant possibly be worse than reddit or twitter so whatever i guess :/
im probably going to get harassed, see tankie shit, see fash shit, see centrists arguing that my right to access healthcare isnt important or shouldnt be prioritized ("its identity politics!!!") until i find spaces that defederate from "main instances" bc "main instances" tend to exclude minorities in favour of protecting violent or proveably false speech, regardless of the harm it causes. im not sure that will change here. or anywhere.
I have not seen something enough to get reported, but I did encounter a user that was very religious and not shy about how that informed their opinion on certain politically controversial subjects. They stopped short of advocating for violence, etc., but certainly that is not the kind of person I want to be included in any community I'm part of!
None so far. But I'm also for free speech and think mods should only block the worst of the worst like CP or extreme racism. Conspiracy theories and ordinary bigotry/extremism (not directed at a specific person) are fine.
Ironically I think "extreme racism" is fine for people to post, while "ordinary bigotry/extremism" aren't necessarily so. Often times, the super racist stuff isn't actually being hostile or antagonistic, they're just stating some super fucked up views (often in a polite way). Whereas run of the mill bigotry is often super heated, hateful, directed at someone, etc.
Conspiracy theories should always be allowed unless you're afraid of actual discussion and truth lol. like what you got to hide? conspiracy theorists just have some wacky beliefs, what's the problem?
Free speech is not a right to force people to listen to you. One of the good features reddit added was personal block lists. As a user, I should be able to completely ban and not see speech of people I don't want to engage with. If I could have my own personal AI filter assistant that would be even better, though I suppose that is best built client side.
I'm a fan of the self-censor model. If you don't want to see something, you should be able to remove it from your view. but you shouldn't be allowed to determine that someone else isn't allowed to speak.
There's plenty of it if you know where to look for. Just take any mainstream Mastodon instance for example and check the blocked instances. Yep, those ones are.
Add comment