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Comment by angrycontrarian | Hacker News Reader

I am still struggling to understand how migrating to a censorship-resistant platform will mitigate concerns about a lack of strict content moderation at twitter.

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I think Scott Alexander's recent post about this made a good point. (https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/moderation-is-differen...) He draws the distinction between censorship (stopping people from getting messages they want to recieve) and moderation (stopping people from getting messages they don't want to recieve). With those definitons censorship is bad and moderation is good.

Mastodon isn't as simple as the model he imagines (simple click-boxes to select what kind of messages you want) but it does give you moderation (on your local instance) while still letting you avoid censorship (by moving instances if necessary).

The only correct answer to that should be that you let people maintain their own filters (blocklists and allowlists) so they can see messages they want to receive and not see what they don't want to. Also, you might let people apply such community created lists, that they can subscribe to.

Unfortunately, Mastodon rather than doing that, gives complete control to the server administrator to "moderate" their instance. The result is that you end up having isolated echo-chambers, with each server blocking all other servers that don't agree with their viewpoint.

That solves almost no problem. Libel and slander will continue to affect you, there will continue to be toxic communities who instigate violence and violate local laws, and the feature encourages echo chambers and fragmentation. The worst system is when other people can see comments to your posts that you cannot see when you've blocked the commenter. It's the best system for smear campaigns and targeted character assassination. You'll never get a job and everybody hates you, and you'll have have no idea why.

It’s ironic that the top comment to that post was removed.

You can see censorship as about being able to control what people is allowed to say. The fediverse is highly resistant to that.

You can also see censorship as about being able to control what people will be able to say to you. The fediverse is not at all resistant to that.

That is, nobody can stop you from setting up your own instance, or write your own ActivityPub implementation, or find one that tolerates whatever thing you want to say.

But we can band together and prevent you from making us party to your conversations against our will, and we can prevent you from being part of our conversations against our will.

The structure of the fediverse supports that by letting groups pick instances whose moderation fits what they want, and different groups with different moderation requirements or even contradictory moderation requirements can co-exist without all being beholden to the vagaries of policies set by a third party we have no control over.

> But we can band together and prevent you from making us party to your conversations against our will, and we can prevent you from being part of our conversations against our will.

This is Robber's Cave experiment [1] all over again: A society that does no longer talk with each other and is segregated (e.g. along political lines) will at first become hostile between different factions within it, and eventually break.

Filter bubbles ultimately destroy civil society and democracy.

[1] https://www.simplypsychology.org/robbers-cave.html

I guess we've got to include some flat earthers in our space programme or we'll never get to Mars. Can't be in a filter bubble, after all.

No one questions that segregated groups with tight information and communication control can result in more efficiently reached results. History has shown us several examples of such highly efficient societies where what can and cannot be said where tightly enforced. But history also has shown us how such societies eventually break from unresolved conflicts within it.

Talking to someone with another viewpoint, even if that viewpoint is a stupid or hateful one, does not mean endorsing. This is not about "fair and balanced", it is about communication and providing ideas outside of their peer group. Now, if you decide to just block flat earthers individually, or as a group (even for non-flat-earth-related communication), you will just create a filter bubble for them in which they can strengthen their now-unchallenged beliefs in.

If someone can come at me with a different opinion that isn't just sealioning/JAQing off, I'll usually listen. The people who are capable of doing that generally aren't on the instances that get blocked. They're normal people on normal people instances who really are curious, and you can usually figure that out with a skim of their timeline.

There really are flat-earthers out there who are easily persuaded by just walking them through an ancient math problem. I've seen it. It's the same way someone who has really bad opinions on marginalized people they've never actually encountered can quickly change their tune by meeting the subject of their ignorance. They're not the ones who collect on the instances that feed off deep, unmovable ignorance.

> The people who are capable of doing that generally aren't on the instances that get blocked.

How would you know, given that those other instances are, you know, blocked?

> who really are curious

Trying to guide the neutral ones into your camp is not a discourse - it's campaigning. In a perfect world we can disagree on topics, and everyone leaves the interaction still disagreeing, but maybe just understand the train of thought of the opposing side.

> with a skim of their timeline.

I've stopped doing that, because all too often, what I find is easily taken out of context and will make people look too "nice", or too "bad". And creating a complete dossier on everyone I interact with online is just too time-intensive.

> They're not the ones who collect on the instances that feed off deep, unmovable ignorance.

Funny how all the blocked ones always seem to be the undesirables, the ignorant, the weird, the stupid, the evil, the ugly, the disease-bearers, isn't it? Of course, wherever we are, the sun shines, everyone is reasonable and happy and friendly to each other. Of course, more often than not, that's not the case. We like to paint the other side as demonic caricatures, because it helps with in-group cohesion.

I don't think guilt by association is a concept that we should keep reviving again and again and again... especially since it appears to me - after having gone through several Mastodon instances - that there are no "normal people instances", that any instance is either radically "free-speech", or it is radically "safe-space".

Filter bubbles have always existed in every society, and always will. People have always chosen communities and groups within them with behavioural norms, and those who defy the norms are ostracised or made to comply.

If anything, having means by which communities can separate partially without needing to fully isolate (e.g. if you don't like Twitter's moderation policies your choice is to cut yourself off from Twitter; if you don't like fediverse instance X's moderation policy, you can pick from several thousand other instances with varying degrees of concordance with or opposition to X's moderation policies, most of which can still federate with X) gives an opportunity to reduce those bubbles.

Mastodon as a whole is "censorship-resistant". Individual servers very much have rules. My home is on FOSStodon, and it's very, very far from an anarchy:

https://fosstodon.org/about/more#rules

It's also selective about which other servers it will interoperate with and how much:

https://fosstodon.org/about/more#unavailable-content

Nice to see the granularity of moderating servers; had not look at the subject and was kind of afraid that if it was only on/off then you might end up with a disconnected fediverse.

But now your post won't be taken down by a paid employee of a corporation with actual contractual obligations and custom made moderation tools to limit collateral damage, instead a 17yo Discord friend of the admin will have complete access to your account!

I hate to break it to you, but Elon Musk himself and all of his friends have full access to your Twitter account, with no protections whatsoever. You don't own your account, Musk does.

I hate to break it to you, but Elon Musk and Twitter at large have more to lose from a reputational damage caused by blatant moderation misuse than an anonymous kid with an anime profile picture has

Looking at the last events, Musk sure seems unaware of that.

First he whined about advertisers leaving. Then he threatened to publicly shame them. Then he asked for feedback, got some constructive feedback from some huge ad exec, and promptly blocked him.

He appears to have messed with AOC's account because he didn't like her arguing with him.

He already seems to be reversing on his free speech ideals and is instituting permanent bans that he said he was opposed to.

I don't know what's up with him, but it's hardly a shining example of reputation management that's for sure.

And it's been what, a week?

As if Musk had any reputation left to save. We're talking about somebody who has canceled the Tesla order of a blogger who criticized him…

It's only censorship-resistant as in, nobody apart from LE can force you to take your instance down. Otherwise the network is still highly moderated. Both at the local instance level (people get banned) and at the federation level (whole instances are either silenced or disconnected from others).

Mastodon is, IMHO, more tightly moderated than Twitter, depending which side of the split-fediverse you are on.

See my other comment in this thread for my story.

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