i really don’t understand this perspective. we aren’t talking about the ability for anybody to silence anyone for any reason, we’re talking specifically about rhetoric calling for the death of human beings. is that not a well defined category of speech we should at least keep an eye on? should we let people actively call for the death of other people, when we know historically that that specific kind of rhetoric can lead to people being put in camps?
like, if somebody’s sole contribution to an platform is doxxing anybody they don’t like, they should be stopped. if they shout death threats in a public forum, they shouldn’t be in that forum. we don’t need to give platforms unchecked power over our lives to put reasonable limitations on conduct for public platforms.
really don’t understand this perspective. we aren’t talking about the ability for anybody to silence anyone for any reason, we’re talking specifically about rhetoric calling for the death of human beings. is that not a well defined category of speech we should at least keep an eye on?
There is a difference between speech and violence. “Calling for the death of a human being” is violence, not speech. The speaker making that call should not be silenced; they should be jailed. And we have a process for doing just that. That process involves far more than someone unilaterally deciding to take away their microphone or ban them from a platform.
That process involves judges, either elected directly, or appointed by elected officials. It involves the community in the form of a jury of one’s peers. It involves open processes and procedures, an appellate process, and a wide variety of protections for the accused.
Banning them from the platform is not a sufficient response to such an act of violence.
riiiight, because the legal system is the perfect tool to deal with social disputes, and we should definitely rely on the slow, expensive, and often deeply flawed rulings of politically appointed officials to manage social media platforms. feeding people into the prison-industrial complex is definitely a more just and effective way of dealing with interpersonal conflict.
of course, that’s ignoring the many far right figures that are currently spreading explicit calls to violence on most major social media platforms, encouraging people to doxx private citizens and weaving elaborate conspiracy theories that position queer people, jewish people, democrats, and people of color as satanic pedophiles that are coming for your kids. we can quibble about what might lead to fascism all we want, but when people start pulling out the swastika and parroting talking points the literal nazi party used in the lead up to their genocide, how can that be anything but fascism? and it doesn’t seem like the legal system is in any way equipped to deal with these kinds of threats, seeming as most of these people are still spreading their bullshit without meaningful consequence to this day.
so you’re basically just asking people not to use systems developed for use within a community, and instead entrust their safety to an outside authority with a terrible track record of actually taking action on threats of violence. cool.
the reality is, that bans, defederations? these things are tools a community can use to manage itself and its relationships autonomously. appealing to some outside force to impose order while insisting that we allow bigots to be bigots on our platforms regardless of the circumstances? nah. not gonna happen. not only is it a bad idea, its just plain not going to happen. if you decide you want to be all buddy buddy with the bigots, defend their right to call me a slur or whatever, you go do that over there, and have fun with your bigot friends. the rest of us will be fine without y’all.
Correct. I am not defending death threats or threats of violence in any way, and I will not allow you to portray me as doing so. Please confine your arguments to forms of speech that do not rise to the level of violent criminality.
Fascism arises when dissent is silenced. Death threats are not dissent.
that’s the thing, we don’t live in a world where death threats and threats of violence are being dealt with in the way you seem to think they are, and community tools like bans are sometimes the only recourse people have that isn’t ruinously expensive, glacially slow, and uncertain to work.
but sure, lets say we aren’t talking about explicit death threats or threats of violence. instead, they just… post the account information of queer tiktok creators, and spend most of their time calling queer people groomers and pedophiles. its not directly a threat of violence, but every time they post something, the accounts they post get harrassed by tons of anonymous followers, one of them figures out where they live, and then start bombarding a real human person with death threats. everybody doing the death threats is anonymous, there’s no way for the legal system to touch them. what do we do? nothing? or somebody’s whole online presence is talking about the great replacement, how the anglo-saxon race is being exterminated, and somewhere down the line we start seeing mass shooters pop up saying nearly the exact same thing in their manifestos. stochastic terrorism. using speech to motivate anonymous observers to take violent action, without calling for violence explicitly. should nothing be done about that? is that not concerning to you?
i think you have a very simplistic definition of what fascism is, and what can or cannot be defined as a threat of violence. there is nuance to what should and should not be considered hate speech, and if you’re defending the institution of slavery, implying queer people are groomers, really doing any sort of bigotry, it can meaningfully cause harm to people even if it isn’t in and of itself a threat of violence. what do we do then? either nothing or put them in jail? because i think that having more than one way of mediating and enacting punishment for misbehavior is a good thing. i think that being able to respond proportionately to assholes without waiting for them to reach the threshold of illegality is a more healthy way of maintaining a community than putting a firm barrier between “dissent” and “actual crime”.
that’s the thing, we don’t live in a world where death threats
I am not interested in discussing death threats.
I will not discuss criminal speech, let alone defend it. I refuse to take the position you are attempting to assign to me. I do not accept your red herring and strawman arguments.
The overwhelming majority of bans, blocks, and other fascist, silencing behaviors are in response to non-criminal speech. Please confine your arguments to such speech.
in any case, i think i’m basically done with you. the world isn’t made of neat little blocks you can arrange to your liking. the barrier between criminal and non-criminal speech is socially constructed, and the conduct of individuals doesn’t go from perfectly fine to absolutely unacceptable in an instant. its more nuanced than that, and the way we interact with each other should reflect that nuance. like it or not, we have to be the ones to determine what is and is not a threat, it cannot be deferred to an authority unquestioningly.
On the other hand, calling for the death of capitalists or Billionaires, and the politicians that enable them should be protected speech. I’d go so far as to say that anything up to with the exception of actually committing physical violence directly upon them and their family should be the most protected speech.
If you are exploiting society so completely, so wantonly that people want to actually kill you, then you SHOULD feel uncomfortable in that society. You should feel the need to hire an army of private security, going outside should be a burden for you because of what you have done.
i really don’t understand this perspective. we aren’t talking about the ability for anybody to silence anyone for any reason, we’re talking specifically about rhetoric calling for the death of human beings. is that not a well defined category of speech we should at least keep an eye on? should we let people actively call for the death of other people, when we know historically that that specific kind of rhetoric can lead to people being put in camps?
like, if somebody’s sole contribution to an platform is doxxing anybody they don’t like, they should be stopped. if they shout death threats in a public forum, they shouldn’t be in that forum. we don’t need to give platforms unchecked power over our lives to put reasonable limitations on conduct for public platforms.
There is a difference between speech and violence. “Calling for the death of a human being” is violence, not speech. The speaker making that call should not be silenced; they should be jailed. And we have a process for doing just that. That process involves far more than someone unilaterally deciding to take away their microphone or ban them from a platform.
That process involves judges, either elected directly, or appointed by elected officials. It involves the community in the form of a jury of one’s peers. It involves open processes and procedures, an appellate process, and a wide variety of protections for the accused.
Banning them from the platform is not a sufficient response to such an act of violence.
riiiight, because the legal system is the perfect tool to deal with social disputes, and we should definitely rely on the slow, expensive, and often deeply flawed rulings of politically appointed officials to manage social media platforms. feeding people into the prison-industrial complex is definitely a more just and effective way of dealing with interpersonal conflict.
of course, that’s ignoring the many far right figures that are currently spreading explicit calls to violence on most major social media platforms, encouraging people to doxx private citizens and weaving elaborate conspiracy theories that position queer people, jewish people, democrats, and people of color as satanic pedophiles that are coming for your kids. we can quibble about what might lead to fascism all we want, but when people start pulling out the swastika and parroting talking points the literal nazi party used in the lead up to their genocide, how can that be anything but fascism? and it doesn’t seem like the legal system is in any way equipped to deal with these kinds of threats, seeming as most of these people are still spreading their bullshit without meaningful consequence to this day.
so you’re basically just asking people not to use systems developed for use within a community, and instead entrust their safety to an outside authority with a terrible track record of actually taking action on threats of violence. cool.
the reality is, that bans, defederations? these things are tools a community can use to manage itself and its relationships autonomously. appealing to some outside force to impose order while insisting that we allow bigots to be bigots on our platforms regardless of the circumstances? nah. not gonna happen. not only is it a bad idea, its just plain not going to happen. if you decide you want to be all buddy buddy with the bigots, defend their right to call me a slur or whatever, you go do that over there, and have fun with your bigot friends. the rest of us will be fine without y’all.
Threats of violence are not social disputes.
The rest of your argument is predicated on this fallacy, so I will ignore it.
oh that’s why you’ll ignore it, huh?
Correct. I am not defending death threats or threats of violence in any way, and I will not allow you to portray me as doing so. Please confine your arguments to forms of speech that do not rise to the level of violent criminality.
Fascism arises when dissent is silenced. Death threats are not dissent.
that’s the thing, we don’t live in a world where death threats and threats of violence are being dealt with in the way you seem to think they are, and community tools like bans are sometimes the only recourse people have that isn’t ruinously expensive, glacially slow, and uncertain to work.
but sure, lets say we aren’t talking about explicit death threats or threats of violence. instead, they just… post the account information of queer tiktok creators, and spend most of their time calling queer people groomers and pedophiles. its not directly a threat of violence, but every time they post something, the accounts they post get harrassed by tons of anonymous followers, one of them figures out where they live, and then start bombarding a real human person with death threats. everybody doing the death threats is anonymous, there’s no way for the legal system to touch them. what do we do? nothing? or somebody’s whole online presence is talking about the great replacement, how the anglo-saxon race is being exterminated, and somewhere down the line we start seeing mass shooters pop up saying nearly the exact same thing in their manifestos. stochastic terrorism. using speech to motivate anonymous observers to take violent action, without calling for violence explicitly. should nothing be done about that? is that not concerning to you?
i think you have a very simplistic definition of what fascism is, and what can or cannot be defined as a threat of violence. there is nuance to what should and should not be considered hate speech, and if you’re defending the institution of slavery, implying queer people are groomers, really doing any sort of bigotry, it can meaningfully cause harm to people even if it isn’t in and of itself a threat of violence. what do we do then? either nothing or put them in jail? because i think that having more than one way of mediating and enacting punishment for misbehavior is a good thing. i think that being able to respond proportionately to assholes without waiting for them to reach the threshold of illegality is a more healthy way of maintaining a community than putting a firm barrier between “dissent” and “actual crime”.
I am not interested in discussing death threats.
I will not discuss criminal speech, let alone defend it. I refuse to take the position you are attempting to assign to me. I do not accept your red herring and strawman arguments.
The overwhelming majority of bans, blocks, and other fascist, silencing behaviors are in response to non-criminal speech. Please confine your arguments to such speech.
in any case, i think i’m basically done with you. the world isn’t made of neat little blocks you can arrange to your liking. the barrier between criminal and non-criminal speech is socially constructed, and the conduct of individuals doesn’t go from perfectly fine to absolutely unacceptable in an instant. its more nuanced than that, and the way we interact with each other should reflect that nuance. like it or not, we have to be the ones to determine what is and is not a threat, it cannot be deferred to an authority unquestioningly.
right… did you read the rest of it? because i did make a relevant argument like right below that.
On the other hand, calling for the death of capitalists or Billionaires, and the politicians that enable them should be protected speech. I’d go so far as to say that anything up to with the exception of actually committing physical violence directly upon them and their family should be the most protected speech.
If you are exploiting society so completely, so wantonly that people want to actually kill you, then you SHOULD feel uncomfortable in that society. You should feel the need to hire an army of private security, going outside should be a burden for you because of what you have done.