Words can only have power in a relationship, and you can’t do that if you are anonymous (as opposed to pseudonymous).
Anyone can ATTEMPT to instill fear, but should paranoids get vetoes over every glance they interpret as sinister? Phobia is a class of neurosis. Just as I don’t spray my place daily with disinfectant, in case an OC drops over, I don’t measure my words beyond clarity.
It is fine for a prizefighter to beat up people IF they strap on gloves and strap on boxing gloves and the bell rings. If you don’t want to participate in a boxing match, stay out of the ring.
What you are trying to do is say that a boxing ring needs to be safe for a frail person and a heavyweight - but then no boxing will occur.
Is it “abuse” if stuff is taken from my home or car because I don’t want to bother with locking it or an alarm?
I don’t think “victims” deserve it in any way - but we live in a fallen, unjust world where evil prowls about. At some point negligence becomes culpable.
Take Sarkeesian. Please. Utah has a gun law that would allow her detractors access to the auditorium, but ALSO HER GUN TOTING SUPPORTERS. Sam Colt did more to make men and women equal than Susan B Anthony. One cannot unilaterally disarm then claim the problem is that they are defenseless.
If they want to go the Ghandi - MLK route that is laudable, but they WERE victimized, thrown in jail, etc. They didn’t whine or complain, and “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” has all the more force from where it was composed. He WAS a victim, writing from the center of the storm. Not like someone who flew to Arizona when hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans and complains about what happened to her house.
I don’t understand those who live in constant fear. How can that possibly be a life? If they aren’t really in fear, but using it to score political points, they are corrupt.
… was reported as violating Facebook’s community standards by someone in the community and Facebook’s response was: nope, we see no violation of our community standards.
So whose community is it, then?
And just to clarify for some of the previous commenters, we’re talking about stuff like in the picture, content that is clearly hateful by any reasonable community metric, not grey areas such as “oh I disagree with this opinion”. That’s not at all what this is about.
Is it even a question if the content is so absurd it’s clearly objectionable by any reasonable metric? I mean, even the most ardent (but sane) opponents of whoever this guy is attacking would deem this crazy talk or a troll. Like you said, Facebook is an open playground, not a private community though. Despite the word usage, it’s clearly not an ACTUAL community, just a facade of one.
In the context of this article, the community belongs to the people who set and enforce the rules. That would be the admins of Facebook and Twitter, and the admins of a Discourse instance. Moderators in Discourse have little power over users that moderators of Facebook groups don’t also have.
Penn Jillette also brings that point multiple times. Free speech only means you can’t be arrested just for speaking your mind. Nothing else. It makes legal to speak freely, in public.
I personally think Gerald Witt’s hate speech (that guy from fb) might be offensive but it’s actually a bad example of something that disrupts a good discussion or community.
Obvious trolls is obvious. Even if not intentional. And it does add to a conversation. Negatively, true, but life isn’t always pretty for a good reason. As a discourse mod, I personally would simply move a troll-feeder conversation to their own topic, and maybe even a category for that, instead of deleting them. Not that I have any experience with this…
I just hate much more comments that add nothing, such as first. Those I’d love to ban.
I think this “your house” thing is actually a pretty good metaphor, but perhaps not in the way you intended: It shows why relying solely on top-down moderation is a bad thing.
Think about this: would you let any random stranger who can work a doorknob waltz into your house and start chatting up your kids? Sure you can kick the creepers out when you spot them, but you can’t be home and awake 24/7/365. A true bad guy (and they are out there) will know that and time their worst behavior for when they know you are away. Also a vandal can cause you hours of aggravating cleanup work in only a few minutes of gleeful destruction while you aren’t looking.
If you allow people you don’t personally know into your online community, and you rely solely on top-down moderation from official moderators (like Twitter does), that’s effectively what you are doing.
The only manageable way to deal with these problems is not to run a house, but rather to house a community. That means the community needs tools to kick out the harassers and the creepers themselves. The community needs the ability to clean up damage themselves. This turns what was a nearly impossible job for a small team of moderators into a fairly easy task when amortized over the whole community.
A proper online community requires community moderation.
I can’t see any way in which the system you want for Discourse is better than the system you dislike in Facebook. I suspect you see some differences that don’t really exist, because you’re sitting in different seats for each.
In both cases:
The person controlling the community and setting its guidelines (addressed as ‘you’ in this post) has total control over what is posted.
1a) Designated moderators have that control so long as they are acting in accordance with the wishes of the person at the top.
Everyone else has no control over anyone else.
For Facebook:
Every user, though they can’t control anyone else, has some control over what they have to see/listen to.
You dislike the system at Facebook because you disagree with the moderation policy - do you think that you will be in complete agreement with the moderation policy everywhere Discourse is used? (When I first wrote that it was a rhetorical question, but now that I think about it, I’m wondering if maybe you really do?)
It looks like you believe Discourse is better in this regard solely because you get to be the person at the top, and because you expect that everyone else who uses Discourse will have a person at the top who exactly shares your values.
But you can’t magically make it so that every site is moderated by somebody who acts exactly how every user of the site wants them to. You can’t magically find a set of values that everyone can agree on. There is no possible set of criteria that can objectively sort a post into one of a) something everyone sane and reasonable agrees is appropriate to say, or b) something that everyone sane and reasonable agrees is not. The best you can hope for is to classify the obvious outliers - which is what Facebook do, only they happen to have chosen their cut-off point at a place you disagree with (as do I, for the record).
Every user who isn’t a moderator - ie. approximately all of them - is in exactly the same place as in Facebook, except now they can’t even block things they find offensive but the moderators don’t think crosses the line. Now we’re in a position where if we want to avoid things that we find offensive but some other people don’t, we have to visit only forums that are heavily policed by moderators who are exactly like us, because Discourse offers no room for disagreement. Unless we want to be upset all the time, we need to stick to places that offer us a perfect echo chamber.
For the user, there is absolutely no improvement at all. In fact, Discourse only has downsides.
This isn’t about what Jeff deems appropriate or the moderation policy at Facebook vs Discourse - it’s about the tools available to moderate a community, and how to best provide and implement those tools and to whom has access to them. To my knowledge Discourse has various user-level moderation tools, and that’s the difference between it and Facebook. Discourse allows you to specify what users and at what level these users get control. At Facebook, you can report a post, but have no real control other than that.
[quote=“davidzych, post:32, topic:2681, full:true”]
This isn’t about what Jeff deems appropriate or the moderation policy at Facebook vs Discourse - it’s about the tools available to moderate a community, and how to best provide and implement those tools and to whom has access to them. To my knowledge Discourse has various user-level moderation tools, and that’s the difference between it and Facebook. [/quote]
What I’m saying is that this difference is imaginary. It’s not like those tools don’t already exist at Facebook (or in vBulletin, or …). You correctly point out that the question of who has access to them is important, but my point is that, given the answer in both cases is ‘a tiny privileged minority’, the practical difference is zero. And that’s why it’s important to understand who the ‘you’ in the original post is targetted at: the tiny minority who are actively administering a forum. Most notably, not the users of that forum.
At least in most forums (including Facebook, if I’m reading this post correctly) I can choose to ignore somebody. It may not be much, but it’s something. When a site chooses to use Discourse, I don’t even have that one tiny bit of control, which makes Discourse strictly worse.
Not exactly. By default, if three users in a Discourse community find a post hateful or cruel, and flag it as such, that post is hidden. Which triggers this process:
It is also possible to mute topics and entire categories.
New users who get flagged a lot are also automatically blocked from future posts pending moderator intervention.
There’s a bunch of stuff like this in Discourse, but it isn’t immediately visible by design.
Could not agree more. I hate this idea that free speech somehow gives people a license to hurl abuse at others. That’s why I only ever really had serious discussions on forums where there were moderators and not on a comment thread for a video on YouTube or blog post or whatever.
I once Jason Manford (an English comedian) say that someone once advised him not to read the bottom half of the internet
P.S. Love discourse and its ideas of community. Here’s to the future of discuss where the bottom half of the internet can be read and participated in without fear
If you don’t like that twitter has their own policy of free speech that’s fine, but to say that it’s bad is really just an opinion.
Allowing “hateful”, “degenerate”, “dangerous”, “sinful”, content is comforting, because it means that the administration is open minded, in the sense that they realize that whatever their convictions might be, those convictions can possibly be wrong, and that they respect freedom above all else.
It actually makes for a better marketplace of ideas because it shows that the administrators can resist silencing someone even if they want to silence them.
I, personally feel comfortable in a free speech environment. It means that I get to stand up for controversial or unpopular things, like marijuana legalization for instance.
Interesting article. I agree with you on the point that free speech does not mean that you as the owner of a certain area are obliged to listen to someone. If it’s your property then it’s your right to make people leave your property, whatever the reason for it is.
I do also think that free speech is extremely important though. Quite a few people seem to hold the view that certain things should never be allowed to be said in any public domain just because it may cause them to take offense should they decide that it’s offensive to them. While you can see why people would want this, it simply cannot happen.
Who determines what is “hate-speech” or whatever you might like to call something you find highly offensive? You might say, the majority determines. Well, not so long ago, the majority may have determined that preaching the pitfalls and horrible nature of slavery is offensive and unacceptable. If people were unable to keep having these open discussions and arguments about the topic that was once considered obviously morally acceptable, how could it have ever become obviously morally unacceptable to the vast majority of people now?
Not disagreeing with anything said in this article, just spewing off my thoughts on the topic of free speech.
while you may be right about…EVERYTHING you wrote, there is indeed another option, which I like to nickname “the high ground”, which is where you try to communicate with this person, and find out why they are like they are, and what led them to such a life of hate and trollitude.
when you BLOCK them, they learn nothing.
when you ignore them, the same is true.
only by acknowledging them and approaching the issue, and trying to understand others do we ever actually grow as a people.
but we don’t do that. ever. and why? because who has time for that kind of lengthy dialogue? seriously…
