That’s just basic human decency right there.
And people keep saying, over and over and over, that doing this is against "freedom of speech".
If you go by that definition then there is no country on Earth that has freedom of speech.
And that's a good thing because that definition is completely and utterly insane; Absolute freedom of speech would be a catastrophe.
To be clear, it is freedom to be a bigot, or at least to say bigoted things, just not freedom to have anyone else listen to those things (or, as hopefully goes without saying, for any action based on those bigoted things that goes beyond words).
This implies freedom to remember you say bigoted things and proactively avoid you.
Certainly. Freedom of speech, not freedom from consequences, as they say.
― Idi Amin
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/9082497-there-is-freedom-of...
Since you refer to them as "my beliefs", I assume that yours are different. With no sarcasm, what are your beliefs? If you argue against the claim that freedom of speech does not entail freedom from consequences, is your position that freedom of speech should come with freedom from consequences? Surely it's not hard to imagine how that, too, can be a dangerous position to take.
Freedom of speech is freedom from consequences:
- of government reprisals
- of corporate reprisals
- of criminal reprisals
- of employment risks
- of relationship risks.
Pick and choose which matter to you. To me, freedom of speech applies to all, but other rights such as freedom of association sometimes override it. (And sometimes not.)
I don't think people generally want a lack of response to their speech (if they did, they're saying nothing... Just making babbling noises best ignored). People want freedom from negative consequences. In short, people want to eat their cake and have their cake.
This is why every country ends up with laws that carve out some spectrum of consequences as inappropriate, but those laws are not all-encompassing... It is functionally impossible to eliminate all the consequences you've listed from the table while still giving listeners freedom to be their own independent agents and modify their behavior in reaction to speech. In particular, the last category you listed is a huge infringement on personal liberty of generally applied... I assume you don't expect a person in a committed relationship, hearing their partner say "I hate everything about my partner and I wish we'd never met," to not modify or end the relationship? Any legal infringement on their right to do so is an obvious curtailment of their rights.
In short, sometimes freedom of speech and freedom of association collide. One is a freedom of the speaker, the other freedom of the listener.
Wait, seriously? If I choose whether to have a relationship with someone based on the things they say, then you regard that as an infringement on their freedom of speech? You do later say:
> … other rights such as freedom of association sometimes override it. (And sometimes not.)
… but I don't really understand this as a statement of position. It seems to be saying that freedom of speech should not have consequences, except when it does, except when it doesn't, and I wind up not really sure what position is being espoused.
"If you're an asshole, I won't broadcast your stuff."
People are still free to be assholes, but the platform is free to not associate themselves with the assholes.
Very simple.
To my mind, the correct response to violations of decency is giving people strong tools to screen and filter out content they don't like. The wrong response is centralized enforcement. Inasmuch as centralized enforcement would be better at enforcing "basic decency", I will confirm that I place its priority at a lower level than avoiding centralized enforcement.
I hold this view because in my opinion, I am far more likely to be harmed by attempts to enforce some unilateral definition of "basic decency" than the very indecency they aim to prevent. (I believe this is called the "paradox of tolerance", though few know it in that formulation.)
I find imposing censorship on others a denial of their basic rights to free expression, and is itself an indecent act.
So you agree the Mastodon project should be able to decide not to publish certain instances in the list it maintains. Cool.
Freedom is not meaningful without the freedom to not do something. If they're compelled to publish things they don't agree with, then they don't really have free speech.
This need to paternalistically protect other adults from online content "for their own good" is authoritarian and rude and I hope it goes out of fashion right soon.
It's extra bothersome when instance admins (unrelated to the mastodon project) decide for their users what they should be allowed to read.
Imagine if your email service decided you couldn't send or receive email to certain domains they decided were "bad people".
Almost every email provider does something like this - it is called a spam filter. If email of a certain type comes in, it doesn’t go into your inbox. Is that censorship?
Sure, you can go into your spam folder and see it, just like mastodon users can connect to an instance not listed on the main mastodon list.
Curating content is not a sin.
Can Mastodon servers not choose to federate with other servers outside the central Mastodon service?
While free speech is not a goal of Mastodon the technology is very conducive to it and many of the admins are reasonable people.
It's a big problem in the fediverse, because one has to be a little bit of an activist in the first place to exit twitter, and these days popular activism and censorship overlap a lot.
It of course contained qoto and fosstodon due to their being pro free speech.