Technology

Substack can host nazis given the legal framework in the US. But why shouldn’t I speak up about their platforming of evil?

Oh, yeah, you can say whatever you like.

I think you're right that I was a little fuzzy when I talked about things that were illegal versus things I personally don't like, yeah. You should obviously be able (legally and what-I-think-is-right wise) to say anything you like about Substack. And, they are legally able to do whatever they want with their servers, whether that involves allowing or banning or demonetizing Nazis or whatever. Most of my conversation was about what I think they should do with their servers, but it's just my opinion. And yes I think you should be able to state your opinion and I should be able to disagree with it and all that.

You asked before what I meant about the "spirit" of the first amendment. What I meant was, there's a specific purpose why it was enshrined into law, and the same principles that led to that legal framework also produce some implications for how the operator of a communication network "should" treat that network, in my opinion, especially as it grows to the size of something like Facebook and starts to wield power similar to a government in terms of deciding how people should be able to communicate with each other. But yes, this is all just what I feel about it, and you're free to disagree or say fuck Substack or organize a boycott or whatever you like.

Once it gets into, we need to pressure their advertisers and try to force them to run their servers in a more Nazi-hostile way, I really don't like that. It is legal, yes. But it's coercive. It's like a high-pressure salesman or a slimy romantic partner. All perfectly legal things. But I think that's crossing a whole new line into something bad, much worse than Substack just doing something with their moderation I personally think they shouldn't be doing.

A web forum I used to frequent banned pro-trump and pro-ice posts. The world didn’t end. They didn’t ban BLM. It helps that it was a forum run by people, and not an inscrutable god-machine or malicious genie running the place.

Sure. So, I actually don't like that type of thing (although it is, of course, legal, and I'd defend the rights of those forum operators to do it if they chose). I got banned from a few different subreddits, both left and right wing which was funny to me, because people didn't like what I said. That's, honestly, pretty infuriating. I've also talked with conservative people who got suspended temporarily from Facebook, or had their posts taken down because they were antivax or whatever. Did I agree with those posts? Absolutely not, and I argued with them about it. Do I agree they should have had their posts removed? No. I started out thinking that yes, removing the posts is fine, and told them that more or less Facebook could do whatever they wanted because it was their network, but after having the argument a certain number of times I started to sympathize a lot more with the point of view of "dude fuck you, I'm a human being, just let me say what I want to say." I don't think that simple removal of the post, or chasing people off the "main" shared network completely, and onto a Nazis-only network like Truth Social, is the answer. I'll say this, it definitely didn't make them less antivax when that happened, or make it at all difficult for them to find antivax propaganda.

That's different from actual Nazi posts, of course. Just saying some of my experience with this. I actually don't like a lot of lemmy.world culture that's developing now because it is starting to become this sort of monoculture, where only a particular variety of views are allowed. Like it really irks me that pro-police or conservative viewpoints get shit on so relentlessly that it basically chases those people away. I liked that reddit had both /r/protectandserve and /r/badcopnodonut. It's fine. Let people talk, and don't start yelling at them that they have the "wrong" view (although of course you can always tell them why you think they're wrong). I have plenty of "wrong" views from the POV of the Lemmy hivemind, so maybe I'm more invested in it as an issue because of that.

I’m also not sure I understood your answer to my question. Is there a line other than “technically legal” that you don’t want crossed? Is the law actually a good arbiter?

Fair question. I mean, at the end of the day each server operator can do what they like. Some people will say that Nazis or MAGA people are so frequently trolls that they just don't want to deal with them. Some people don't want porn. Some people want to run a forum that's explicitly pro-conservative and just get tired of left-wing people coming in and jeering at them. All those things sound fine to me (what-I-like wise as well as legally). I don't think it's my business to tell people where to draw that type of line.

To me, though, that principle "I may not agree with what you say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it" is super important. If you start saying only certain viewpoints are welcome, and dismiss the others not with open debate but with loud jeering or technical restrictions, it hurts the discourse on your server. Of course you're legally allowed to restrict people's access however you like. But to me, I would draw the line by disallowing illegal things or things that hurt the discourse (because of trolling or brigading or deceptive bot posts or whatever). But if someone's just coming in and saying something you think is absolutely dead wrong (e.g. that the holocaust didn't happen), I don't think it's your place to remove or ban them. I think you should allow that.

Does that better answer the question? That's just my take on it. I've never been a modern Lemmy-instance operator, so maybe seeing it first hand and dealing with child porn from angry MAGA people or bomb threats from Nazis and things like that would make me less sympathetic.

I don’t think they’ve actually been trying very hard. They make a lot of money by not doing much. Google’s also internally incompetent (see: their many, many, canceled projects), Facebook is evil (see: that time they tried to make people sad to see if they could), and twitter has always had a child’s understanding of free speech.

I can only say what I've observed in terms of restrictions on Facebook posts from people I know, or Youtube creators I know who got demonetized or otherwise chased off Youtube. All of that, I think sucks. I agree, it's kind of heavy-handed and brainless the way they're doing it. I think that's an additional issue in addition to the fact of censoring the ability of people to post being the wrong approach in the first place.

I think one of the core issues is that a huge for-profit company running a huge content network, where they don't have bandwidth to put much attention into moderation and where most of the architecture of the network is designed to extract revenue from it, is just wrong from start to finish. That's why I'm here right now as opposed to Facebook or wherever. When I talk about free speech issues I'm mostly talking about it in terms of things like Lemmy or Substack. But yeah, maybe you're right that issues of profit motive and moderation bandwidth mean that we can't draw much of any conclusion by looking at how things played out on the big networks.