| > The places that aren't moderated are filled with political crap such as to tarnish their credibility, so that the people will stay away by their own will. well there's your problem Your post has a lot of political baggage - unchecked assumptions like "I want a free speech space but not the political crap" - embedded in it. Free speech is an inherently political concept, and stripping the "political crap" out of it is the heart and soul of censorship. Furthermore "political" as an adjective tends to be used by people (and, in my limited experience, right-wingers specifically) to complain about political speech they disagree with personally. Absent a coherent political ideology to agree with or refute, I'll instead substitute my own political baggage and hope you can take something out of it. There's a couple of different definitions of censorship that people use, but the one that tends to resonate well with hacker communities - "the EFF Consensus" - is that censorship is spicy packet loss. This is why we spend time and money on building infrastructure intended to obfuscate traffic from third-party routers as an anticensorship tool. This definition works well for, say, the Great Firewall of China and less so for, say, Kiwi Farms or extreme far-right blogs. The word "free" in English is overloaded; it can mean both "free of charge" and "freedom to do something". The "free speech" I've been talking about so far is freedom to speak; but we also need to talk about the actual costs of speaking. On the Internet, we have "Cheap as Free[0] Speech"; as in, all the various costs of distributing speech are low enough that such services can usually be provided on an unmetered basis. The problem with Cheap as Free Speech is spam. The rules of market-based resource allocation imply that offering something for no cost means anyone can take as much as they like. Markets are not the only way to allocate resources, but they are the easiest to enforce[1]. Absent that, however, Internet services have to invent other means of rationing access based on the information that they have. This is why spam filters exist. The problem is that, even if you're trying to be as even-handed as possible, you're going to fuck up and people aren't going to agree with every one of your filtering choices. This can read as censorship, because it kind of is, but it's also necessary for any of these services to work at all. The alternative - of not doing any sort of filtering - does not create a working platform. At the very least, nobody can speak because they are being talked over by spam. This is a paradoxical "censorship by free speech". Anyway, I have a pet theory about Nazi bars. The canonical explanation of the "Nazi bar" is that a platform with no moderation or an "apolitical" moderation policy will inevitably become far-right. You see, the far-right does not believe in or respect freedom of speech[2], they just see it as a stepping stone to seizing control. If they feel welcomed, everyone else leaves, either preemptively or reactively. My hunch is that most Nazi bars actually, y'know, decide to become Nazi bars. Because it's profitable. Nazis are whales. i.e. Donald Trump did not merely show up one day on Twitter, start pushing far-right ideology, and not get pushed out. Twitter management (a decade ago) saw Trump doing numbers on the platform and actively decided to give him special permissions and privileges[3]. Same goes for a lot of other far-right influencers; who spent a good decade radicalizing the rich into becoming far-right influencers. Of course, pre-Musk Twitter did not merely want to become a Nazi bar. They also wanted to become a Tankie Bar, a Libertarian Bar, an Anarchist Bar, a Zionist bar, an Islamist bar, a Christian Nationalist bar, etc. The very loudmouthed "anti-censorship" platforms (i.e. Gab) are more explicitly Nazis only; like I'm pretty sure I'd get banned off Gab or Truth Social if I started posting left-libertarian stuff there. The underlying idea is that... - Online platforms have to have moderation, or they don't work at all; - There are a lot of people who want to create online platforms to push their own ideology, some of which get mislabeled as "free speech"; - and all platforms have profit incentives to amplify extremist voices. The political baggage I'm referring to is that you appear to have bought into the kind of "free speech" that the far-right likes. That is, nothing stopping them from calling for the censorship of others. This is destructive to actual efforts to fight censorship. [0] http://www.hrwiki.org/wiki/Cheap_as_Free [1] Related historical point: the transition to money economies happens specifically because of the need of conquering armies to track taxation. [2] Which is why I don't consider it censorship when they get censored. Pick a political ideology that does not blatantly violate the 1st Amendment, then I will defend your right to speak with my life. [3] i.e. the World Leaders Policy |
Freedom of speech is when you see a problem and describe it exactly as what it is; no exceptions. Translate this into your long-post and come up with a single sentence to address it.