Does lemmy.world allow criticism of the CCP?
Does lemmy.world allow criticism of the CCP?
Apparently there's an issue with some instances banning users for criticizing authoritarian governments. Is lemmy.world a safe place to criticize governments?
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i mean lemmy.world server is in germany, but the guy who runs it is dutch so probably has a pretty open policy with freedom of speech i would imagine. And i mean real freedom of speech not the dog whistle for being a dick/racist/phobe
As one of the Admins of Lemmy.World we're pretty open but if you're a dick and unnecessarily a troll we'll kick ya.
Does that mean that you find everything in this thread that hasn't yet been removed to fall within those bounds? (excluding very new stuff that you might not have gotten to)
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.
You say "thoroughly debunked" but this is what your article says:
It’s true that, building on earlier initiatives, China’s State Council published a road map in 2014 to establish a far-reaching “social credit” system by 2020. The concept of social credit (shehui xinyong) is not defined in the increasing array of national documents governing the system, but its essence is compliance with legally prescribed social and economic obligations and performing contractual commitments. Composed of a patchwork of diverse information collection and publicity systems established by various state authorities at different levels of government, the system’s main goal is to improve governance and market order in a country still beset by rampant fraud and counterfeiting.
Under the system, government agencies compile and share across departments, regions, and sectors, and with the public, data on compliance with specified industry or sectoral laws, regulations, and agreements by individuals, companies, social organizations, government departments, and the judiciary. Serious offenders may be placed on blacklists published on an integrated national platform called Credit China and subjected to a range of government-imposed inconveniences and exclusions. These are often enforced by multiple agencies pursuant to joint punishment agreements covering such sectors as taxation, the environment, transportation, e-commerce, food safety, and foreign economic cooperation, as well as failing to carry out court judgments.
These punishments are intended to incentivize legal and regulatory compliance under the often-repeated slogan of “whoever violates the rules somewhere shall be restricted everywhere.” Conversely, “red lists” of the trustworthy are also published and accessed nationally through Credit China.
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:
These are often enforced by multiple agencies pursuant to joint punishment agreements covering such sectors as taxation, the environment, transportation, e-commerce, food safety, and foreign economic cooperation, as well as failing to carry out court judgments.
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.
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 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:
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,
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:
so the chauvinistic redditors posting social credit score memes that were tired years ago and thoroughly debunked don’t need a platform
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.)
I still feel like I need a new term for this. Yet another word co-opted by idiots.
Freedom of speech with consequences?
Nah. I want to defederate from people sharing racial slurs, because I cba with them. If they don't consider that a 'consequence' then I don't really care.
I definitely don't want consequences for people sharing negative opinions about governments.
So I guess I just want freedom of speech + personal curation.
I think the crucial thing that's missing from traditional social media is actual freedom of association, and I think thats the underlying thing that causes all these issues around "free speech." Freedom of association is the natural counterbalancing mechanism for "freedom of speech" in any form, and without the former the latter must either become incredibly toxic and damaging or be suppressed.
One of the interesting things we've lost (up till now) compared to physical, offline communities is that if someone was being a never-ending dick or a sealion, the rest of the community could just start naturally avoiding them and not inviting them of their own individual accord, and over time that would lead to the person being excised from the group — unless there was a reasonably sized contingent of the group that disagreed with that, at which point the two groups would just split, all without totally banishing anyone.
Or you could yourself choose to leave the group and find another one, if they consistently refused to deal with or helped bad actors, while still maintaining access and contact with some people from that group, and the common social setting and contacts you and the group exist in.
In other words, you'd have a natural, gradiated, and horizontal system of social self-policing that could take care of these kinds of things in a distributed manner. There's a natural outlet besides just trying to shut someone down entirely by removing their access to any community in the area at all or trying to shout over them.
These mechanisms are very hard to implement on centralized social media because it is essentially one gigantic social group that you are either fully a part of or fully separated from. Thus any decisions made about who is and isn't part of this social group are made unilaterally for everyone, and there is no room for diversity in norms and expected behavior, because everything is technically this one giant group, so there has to be this centralized compromise set of one size fits all rules. And because of the unilateral and centralized nature of everything, you need a unilateral and centralized decisionmaking procedure, which in practice and up just being faceless top-down moderation either descending to band someone or ignoring people's pleas.
So it ends up being very difficult for social media communities to self-police in a coherent way, because the platforms operate at two coarse-grained a resolution to see those communities, and it's difficult for people to disengage from toxic stuff they don't want to interact with.
This has created all of the problems we see with speech on social media now, where people who want to be dickheads perceive themselves as being oppressed, victims of authoritarian censorship, because community policing has to come centrally from above, instead of happening naturally and horizontally by a bunch of people either telling someone to leave or leaving themselves; meanwhile people who just want to live in peace and share their joy and interests online find themselves with a very little recourse to reliably avoid such dickheads and find places that feel right for them.
Reddit has this problem to less of a degree because it lets you create different smaller subunities of the social network that all have different moderators and different rules, but it's imperfect.
I think the solution to this is partly decentralization and federation, because they allow people to naturally associate and disassociate with one another on a very individual level that more naturally mirrors how communities and social groups work in real life. Communities can form their own rules, norms, and cultures, and push people out in a meanongful way without having to totally banish them from the entire social world, and people can also naturally move between them until they find one that aligns with what they need and their values, with the right degree of openness and closedness to the rest of the Fediverse, without losing contact with everything else and thus avoiding network effects and isolation effects. The fact that instances can de-federate or mute other instances creates this really interesting ability to partially fragment the network without fully fragmenting it so that you can get truly different experiences on different instances.
You've got real points here, but there's also an issue with sectarians deliberately pillarizing the lemmy fediverse, which can only end up producing other sorts of garbage seen on social media with siloed interaction.
you continue to use freedom of speech and dont give them the satisfaction of coopting it
Doesn't Germany have laws against certain hate speech? Would those laws apply to lemmy.world and it's hosted content?
[IANAL] In Germany only specific types of hate speech are criminal. These are:
- Use of Nazi symbols and slogans for other than artistic or educational purposes (things like the Swastika, the SS logo, or the Nazi salute, but not more modern versions like the "white power" guesture and similar)
- Direct calls for violence against groups or individuals
- Denying that the Holocaust happened or trivializing it's extend
Other forms of hate speech might be cause for civil suits or may oblige the platform provider to remove your speech, but do not rise to a criminal offence.
Again: I am not a lawyer.
Also this only really applies to German citizens. We saw a recent study in this when a Ukrainian diplomat went on a German podcast and denied part of the Holocaust, and no criminal proceeding followed (consistent with established law). I think the platform itself was fine because the host firmly pushed back on it with historical evidence instead of idly platforming him, though he was still allowed to express his views to his content.
You can't cite a diplomat not being punished as an example of a law only applying to German citizens.
Diplomats almost always have extra protections compared to regular residents.