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this post was submitted on 08 Jun 2024
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Blocking and not calling out bullshit is actually a problem because it allows malicious users to freely spread their bullshit without any opposing views. This makes those views seem more widespread and legitimate than they actually are.
You seem very quick to want to censor, and not too concerned with whether the content is malicious or just bullshit. Making baseless positive claims about Russia (for example) is certainly not hate speech. I don't see how it's malicious. I agree there's a good chance it's bullshit. Wanting to censor rather than block what's seen as bullshit to some also carries problems for growing a democratic community.
This thread has conflated a legitimate question of whether our sidebar rules are appropriately worded with do we like the community in question or not.
Perhaps a good focus is on misinformation. Can we define it, do we want to handle it in a certain way on this instance? Perhaps imagining how we'd want to handle a community/user/mod that posts baseless conspiracy theories in general is a good thought experiment
Ah. Just to clarify, I was not talking about this specific community in OP's post, but the practice of blocking in general. There have been studies showing the negative effects of blocking on communities by allowing negative / malicious content to go unchecked
"Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice."
I'll post a longer reply later when I have time, but I agree with you.
I don't think his posts are Russian troll farm style, they're just not anti russian. I personally am strongly anti censorship, and would rather people engage in discussion instead of just being "ban this community cause I don't agree with them". If that's the way someone feels, they can block at the account level. I don't want lemmy.ca to turn into yet another echo chamber, we all win when diverse ideas and opinions come together.
Sidebar rules are something we're talking about now as a result of this, I think the "no misinfornation" rule is a good idea but I worry about how difficult it may be to implement.
I didn't see any misinformation in the geopolitics community when I looked, but if I missed something then please feel free to flag it to me.
Your comments about anti censorship in the past have helped me form my thoughts about what makes the most sense on Lemmy. Banning certain ideas here that aren't hateful or malicious is not a decision that should be taken lightly.
Reminding people that they can ban communities and users is a good idea.
I imagine there could be a pre-existing taxonomy for online moderation of what's misinformation vs low-quality posts vs hate speech that we might be able to use. If I find something useful, I'll share it.
I don't know if there's any value to this, but would a stickied thread about the community in question where people can hopefully describe their objections a little better help? Like, what beyond being pro-Russian and having low-quality information do you find problematic with the community? Is deception involved? If the content is just YT videos that others (ie, not the community mod) have created, I don't see that as deception. Even though I would block it, I wouldn't be in favour of banning a pro-Donald Trump community (as an example).
If 50, 75, or 90% of users on an instance block a community, would that hinder moderation to catch instances of misinformation that did pop up? (I'm just asking as some have raised that as a concern, and I don't know if that's legitimate or not)
All I'm going to say is: Does having this community/content around, on Lemmy.CA (the defacto Canadian instance), make this a better community? Is this going to attract the audience we want on the site? Is this the type of content we want to expose that audience to?
I don't think the lemmy.ca admins or most of it's users want the instance to take on the responsibility/experience of being an instance where there's a prescribed view of acceptable and unacceptable (banned) content, above and beyond objectively objectionable stuff. Curb appeal as an argument doesn't sway me. But if curb appeal or who we're attracting is a concern, I'd point out that most of the posts in that community are very downvoted, so to some extent Lemmy's existing checks and balances are working as intended to limit newcomers' exposure to a less popular community
I can respect this take. I do worry that burying problematic content isn't enough these days though. Even if only 2% of the visitors on this site see the content, all it takes is one person to believe there's a demonic child trafficking ring and then you have someone shooting up a pizza joint. Not everyone who uses the internet has all their faculties and I think that's an argument for going further than just burying the content. (I suspect we'll start seeing more pressure on YouTube and Facebook to go further than they have too with regards to problematic content like this.)
Edit: I also think that as platforms have become more strict about their community guidelines, the effectiveness of grand, overt disinformation campaigns has diminished, so bad actors' strategies are switching to more subtle, softer disinformation campaigns.
Some random thoughts on this for a second....
Is lemmy.ca a community? Or is it just a grouping of communities?
Is lemmy.ca the community or is it all of federated lemmyverse that's the community?
I would lean towards all of lemmy being the community, since a users likely lean towards browsing all rather than local. I know the regular users I interact with are global, not just our users. They all contribute to the sense of community in a larger sense than just our instance.
Given the community feeling is maybe not specific to an instance, does every /c/ needs to contribute to that specific instances sense of community?
Here's a test somebody performed on Reddit. While not 100% the same mechanics, it illustrates how lack of opposition affects how a post is perceived.
https://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/sdcsx3/testing_reddits_new_block_feature_and_its_effects/
The problem isn't about moderation, the problem is with moving the Overton window, as neutral parties start seeing a lack of viewpoints from one side of the discussion, and viewpoints from the other side getting upvoted and significantly more visibility.
We can agree to disagree. I don't want to see any policing of an Overton window on Lemmy. I just want hate speech and credibly malicious actors removed
Your hate speech is somebody else's Overton window
There are hundreds of legal documents from around the world (with a fair amount of consistency) that we could use to define hate speech with legal precision. Overton window is a political concept a few decades old that is not without its criticism. "It's all relative" doesn't meaningfully apply here.
Hearing your thoughts has given me ideas on how personal characteristics relate to a preference of leaning in favour of removing content over protecting free speech. So, I appreciate the dialogue. You might enjoy this related paper: https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2210666120