Free speech absolutism is harmful. By remaining federated with them, you’re participating in distributing their content and giving them a platform. People do have a choice of what they want to see, they can choose to be a part of another instance without morals. I would hope that a programming instance of all places would understand the consequences of propaganda given so many programmers work in data collection and targeted advertising. If you show an ad to 1000 people and one of them buys the product, the ad worked. It’s no different for disinformation campaigns.
It’s not like they’re just sharing differing opinions or saying awful shit, they’re taking things out of context or making things up (or posting articles that make things up) and it’s very easy to prove if you do a tiny bit of googling. One article listed off a bunch of climate predictions that were wrong along with sources to look credible. If you checked the sources though, they were all wrong. Some of the predictions were actually made by humans (but not the claimed academic institutions) while others were straight up made up.
I hope the admins make the right decision here. Protecting free speech doesn’t mean allowing people to say whatever they want on your platform. It means allowing them to say it on their platform without being fined or put in jail.
My experience has often been the opposite. Programmers will do a lot to avoid the ethical implications of their works being used maliciously and discussions of what responsibility we bear for how our work gets used and how much effort we should be obligated to make towards defending against malicious use.
It’s why I kind of wish that “engineer” was a regulated title in America like it is in other countries, and getting certified as a programming engineer required some amount of training in programming ethics and standards.
How would a formal licensing system work for software engineering? How would they keep up with the rapid evolution in this industry?
I believe in better education in this field, but the standard “engineer” programs from other fields don’t translate to software. Having the government codify today’s standards would stunt the industry as a whole and kill innovation. Imagine if they had done that in the 90s and said all programming must be waterfall, monolithic, relational dbs, and using c/Fortran/Cobol.
Maybe I just don’t understand how other countries handle it though. I know my country would absolutely screw it up
Formal licensing could be about things that are language agnostic. How to properly use tests to guard against regressions, how to handle error states safely.
How do you design programs for critical systems that CANNOT fail, like pace makers? How do you guard against crashes? What sort of redundancy do you need in your software?
How do you best design error messages to tell an operator how to fix the issue? Especially in critical systems like a plane, how do you guard against that operator doing the wrong thing? I’m thinking of the DreamLiner incidents where the pilots’ natural inclination was to grab the yoke and pull up, which unknowingly fought the airport and caused the plane to stall. My understanding was that the error message that triggered during those crashes was also extremely opaque and added further confusion in a life-and-death situation.
When do you have an ethical responsibility not to ship code? What about Dark Patterns? How do you recognize them and do you have an ethical responsibility to refuse implementation? Should your accreditation as an engineer rely on that refusal, giving you systemic external support when you do so?
None of that is impacted by what tech stack you are using. They all come down to generic logical and ethical reasoning.
Lastly, under certain circumstances, Civil engineers can be held personally liable for negligence when their bridge fails and people die. If we are going to call ourselves “engineers”, we should bear the same responsibility. Obviously not every software developer needs to have such high standards, but that’s why software engineer should mean something.
Yeah, the goal is mainly to get everyone in the fediverse able to participate in the coding chats as long as they’re respectful about it rather than being a free speech absolutism instance. An ideal scenario would be allowing users to participate in here while limiting the posts in their communities to not show up in things like the all feed if their instance is problematic
Decision should be pushed out soon, just making sure we get everything sorted out before we push anything and been a bit slower due to vacations
Yeah thats why defederation isn’t as bad of a decision currently while things get coded. It ruins a bit of the fediverse mechanics though of only needing one account to interact with different sites which is why having them able to interact in the instance communities while their outside posts are hidden is ideal
The main sorts used in the instance are local new, local active, and subs which is what we are mainly optimizing for. Default sort when people make an account is local active which is a bit different from most other sites that default to all so it hasn’t been as big of a problem for us as other instances but since we’re growing more and more been working on some different guidelines for things like bots, federated instances, etc slowly on the side
False information is a global problem, but arguing against free speech absolutism sounds more dangerous to me.
I hear people say free speech absolutism is dangerous because it can lead to loud extremist voices overwhelm the more “moderate” ones, often referencing Nazi Germany and the success of their propaganda. However, any limiting of free speech can lead to censorship of voices falsely labeled extreme and fake. The entity regulating speech would need to be absolutely immune to corruption, which just isn’t possible.
Extremists voices often reach further because of how radical they are, but sometimes the radical ideas are the right ones, even if at the moment the general public disagree with them. After all, we have no idea of knowing that what we really hear is the general public opinion or bots deployed by a currently dominant entity, and the general public is not always correct. For example, in certain countries the general public still believe homosexuality is sinful and should be banned, which is horrible. In these places we need radical voices. If there is a regulatory system of speech, it could be skewing and mislabeling what is considered public opinion, and what is considered extreme views.
My views do not align with the right, but I am a strong advocate for free speech and privacy, especially on the internet. Free speech and privacy must be absolute, or it isn’t free speech or privacy.
I’m a very strong supporter of free speech. But free speech absolutism where you go out of your way to make all voices heard is not what free speech is about. It’s about the government not interfering. Just like people have a right to a gun, but Walmart has the right to kick you out for bringing one, rammy.site users have the right to say whatever they want, and other instances have the right to defederate.
If a teacher goes against the curriculum and teaches children that black people are all out to get them, I sure as hell hope the school would step in and stop or remove them.
That’s not a violation of free speech, but in your opinion above it would be.
I would argue that an instance is like a governing body for many communities, and defederation is censoring people of other nations.
“If you don’t like it, you can leave” is not as simple anymore because you cannot just migrate to a different instance (at least not fully)
Guns at Walmart is different, because you can’t just block a gun on a personal level, but on Lemmy you can block communities on a user level. (Blocking entire instances on a user level would be even better ). And guns pose a physical threat, while radical instances are more or less opinions people don’t agree with.
If a teacher has radical ideas, as long as he has overwhelming evidence, he should be allowed in my opinion. " Black people are out to get you" is very hard to agree with, but “gays shouldn’t be hanged” in a country like Iran isn’t.
Admins of course have a right to do whatever they want with their instance, and I’m not saying it shouldn’t be allowed, but I personally don’t agree with it and I’m voicing my opinion against it.
I have some instances in the fediverse that come to mind that I personally wouldn’t want to be defederated from but know that many others do. For example the mastodon instance pawoo where my favorite artists reside.
I strongly disagree with you and think you’re wrong. Especially that you would allow teachers to teach children that black people are out to get you, all to protect some made up ideal that was never intended when the first amendment was added.
If we didn’t allow for radical ideas to be discussed, we would still be in the dark ages, and criticizing the existence of God would be punishable by death.
I’m not American and the intention of the amendment doesn’t matter. Free Speech is a human right no matter what country or what definition they have. My definition is that it is absolute. Free speech is especially important when dealing with radical ideas. Free speech as long as it is moderate is nothing but a façade, propaganda to keep the population under control.
Let’s make up a scenario where it turns out there are vampires among us, and they’re all the same minority. Let’s say I have extensive research with DNA proof that any descendant from minority X is a vampire, and I’m trying to publish my research, but no publisher is willing to take me seriously. I try to speak in front of people, but I’m labeled a racist, and I’m banned from making public speeches or enter any university. I have the evidence, but cannot show it because people are so sure that it is absolutely impossible that there are vampires among us. In this scenario, I am a radical extremist, and by your argument, it is right for me to not have a voice.
Free speech is not what you think it is. In your scenereo you have the right to try to say what you’re trying to say. Just because your opinion is unpopular and people are unwilling to publish (freedom of speech and the press goes both ways, you can’t force someone to say something either) does not mean your rights are being infringed. This is universal and not just the US. There are no countries I’m aware of that say “all publishers must publish anything anyone says regardless of their credibility”. It would be ludicrous.
And if we go back to my example, that person who believes that they’re teaching children something true can go through the proper channels of society to change the curriculum. I’m also unsure if you’re actually giving the idea of “black people are out to get you” space or just hypothetically, I chose it as an example that’s obviously not true. Replace it with teaching them that strange white vans have candy in them and it’s okay to eat it. Or replace it with them explaining to the children sexual actions they desire in great detail. Your absolutism says they should be allowed by the school to do this, and if that doesn’t change your mind, I’ve made my case, you disgust me, and I choose not to engage further.
I’m not saying force people to listen. I’m just discouraging censoring them. And it doesn’t matter what examples you use. There could come out a study tomorrow saying talking to children about sexual desires in detail reduces sexual shame and clinical depression, and your example would fall flat. Should schools be forced to teach something like that? No. Should they be encouraged to? If it is evidently true, absolutely. Free Speech Absolutism is about allowing all free speech, and encouraging, not forcing, all to listen.
My point is, don’t just defederate without giving it a lot of thought, listen to opinions, and careful analysis. For all we know, that propaganda on that instance could turn out to be true and we were the ones who were wrong. Or maybe only one or two actors are bad, and the rest just like dark humor. Defederating means every single post on every single community on that instance goes, and I personally don’t think some propaganda or hate speech is enough to defederate. I think defederation should be for preventing spam bots, targeted harassment and distribution of illegal content, not to protect users from insensitive jokes or misinformation. That should be up to the individual users.
Take OP for an example. Without any real evidence op claims that the instance is full of baseless propaganda, but fails to give a single example. As someone who has never even heard of the instance before, for all I know, op could just as well be biased and just wants all conservative instances blocked. I did see the trans joke post on their page, and while I agree it is insensitive, is it “let’s have nothing to do with any user on that instance” insensitive?
Free speech absolutism is harmful. By remaining federated with them, you’re participating in distributing their content and giving them a platform. People do have a choice of what they want to see, they can choose to be a part of another instance without morals. I would hope that a programming instance of all places would understand the consequences of propaganda given so many programmers work in data collection and targeted advertising. If you show an ad to 1000 people and one of them buys the product, the ad worked. It’s no different for disinformation campaigns.
It’s not like they’re just sharing differing opinions or saying awful shit, they’re taking things out of context or making things up (or posting articles that make things up) and it’s very easy to prove if you do a tiny bit of googling. One article listed off a bunch of climate predictions that were wrong along with sources to look credible. If you checked the sources though, they were all wrong. Some of the predictions were actually made by humans (but not the claimed academic institutions) while others were straight up made up.
I hope the admins make the right decision here. Protecting free speech doesn’t mean allowing people to say whatever they want on your platform. It means allowing them to say it on their platform without being fined or put in jail.
My experience has often been the opposite. Programmers will do a lot to avoid the ethical implications of their works being used maliciously and discussions of what responsibility we bear for how our work gets used and how much effort we should be obligated to make towards defending against malicious use.
It’s why I kind of wish that “engineer” was a regulated title in America like it is in other countries, and getting certified as a programming engineer required some amount of training in programming ethics and standards.
How would a formal licensing system work for software engineering? How would they keep up with the rapid evolution in this industry?
I believe in better education in this field, but the standard “engineer” programs from other fields don’t translate to software. Having the government codify today’s standards would stunt the industry as a whole and kill innovation. Imagine if they had done that in the 90s and said all programming must be waterfall, monolithic, relational dbs, and using c/Fortran/Cobol.
Maybe I just don’t understand how other countries handle it though. I know my country would absolutely screw it up
Formal licensing could be about things that are language agnostic. How to properly use tests to guard against regressions, how to handle error states safely.
How do you design programs for critical systems that CANNOT fail, like pace makers? How do you guard against crashes? What sort of redundancy do you need in your software?
How do you best design error messages to tell an operator how to fix the issue? Especially in critical systems like a plane, how do you guard against that operator doing the wrong thing? I’m thinking of the DreamLiner incidents where the pilots’ natural inclination was to grab the yoke and pull up, which unknowingly fought the airport and caused the plane to stall. My understanding was that the error message that triggered during those crashes was also extremely opaque and added further confusion in a life-and-death situation.
When do you have an ethical responsibility not to ship code? What about Dark Patterns? How do you recognize them and do you have an ethical responsibility to refuse implementation? Should your accreditation as an engineer rely on that refusal, giving you systemic external support when you do so?
None of that is impacted by what tech stack you are using. They all come down to generic logical and ethical reasoning.
Lastly, under certain circumstances, Civil engineers can be held personally liable for negligence when their bridge fails and people die. If we are going to call ourselves “engineers”, we should bear the same responsibility. Obviously not every software developer needs to have such high standards, but that’s why software engineer should mean something.
Yeah, the goal is mainly to get everyone in the fediverse able to participate in the coding chats as long as they’re respectful about it rather than being a free speech absolutism instance. An ideal scenario would be allowing users to participate in here while limiting the posts in their communities to not show up in things like the all feed if their instance is problematic
Decision should be pushed out soon, just making sure we get everything sorted out before we push anything and been a bit slower due to vacations
That’s much more reasonable than I expected =D I’d argue they can make an account on another instance if they want to participate
Yeah thats why defederation isn’t as bad of a decision currently while things get coded. It ruins a bit of the fediverse mechanics though of only needing one account to interact with different sites which is why having them able to interact in the instance communities while their outside posts are hidden is ideal
The main sorts used in the instance are local new, local active, and subs which is what we are mainly optimizing for. Default sort when people make an account is local active which is a bit different from most other sites that default to all so it hasn’t been as big of a problem for us as other instances but since we’re growing more and more been working on some different guidelines for things like bots, federated instances, etc slowly on the side
False information is a global problem, but arguing against free speech absolutism sounds more dangerous to me.
I hear people say free speech absolutism is dangerous because it can lead to loud extremist voices overwhelm the more “moderate” ones, often referencing Nazi Germany and the success of their propaganda. However, any limiting of free speech can lead to censorship of voices falsely labeled extreme and fake. The entity regulating speech would need to be absolutely immune to corruption, which just isn’t possible.
Extremists voices often reach further because of how radical they are, but sometimes the radical ideas are the right ones, even if at the moment the general public disagree with them. After all, we have no idea of knowing that what we really hear is the general public opinion or bots deployed by a currently dominant entity, and the general public is not always correct. For example, in certain countries the general public still believe homosexuality is sinful and should be banned, which is horrible. In these places we need radical voices. If there is a regulatory system of speech, it could be skewing and mislabeling what is considered public opinion, and what is considered extreme views.
My views do not align with the right, but I am a strong advocate for free speech and privacy, especially on the internet. Free speech and privacy must be absolute, or it isn’t free speech or privacy.
I’m a very strong supporter of free speech. But free speech absolutism where you go out of your way to make all voices heard is not what free speech is about. It’s about the government not interfering. Just like people have a right to a gun, but Walmart has the right to kick you out for bringing one, rammy.site users have the right to say whatever they want, and other instances have the right to defederate.
If a teacher goes against the curriculum and teaches children that black people are all out to get them, I sure as hell hope the school would step in and stop or remove them.
That’s not a violation of free speech, but in your opinion above it would be.
Honestly, yeah I think it would be in my opinion.
I would argue that an instance is like a governing body for many communities, and defederation is censoring people of other nations. “If you don’t like it, you can leave” is not as simple anymore because you cannot just migrate to a different instance (at least not fully)
Guns at Walmart is different, because you can’t just block a gun on a personal level, but on Lemmy you can block communities on a user level. (Blocking entire instances on a user level would be even better ). And guns pose a physical threat, while radical instances are more or less opinions people don’t agree with.
If a teacher has radical ideas, as long as he has overwhelming evidence, he should be allowed in my opinion. " Black people are out to get you" is very hard to agree with, but “gays shouldn’t be hanged” in a country like Iran isn’t.
Admins of course have a right to do whatever they want with their instance, and I’m not saying it shouldn’t be allowed, but I personally don’t agree with it and I’m voicing my opinion against it.
I have some instances in the fediverse that come to mind that I personally wouldn’t want to be defederated from but know that many others do. For example the mastodon instance pawoo where my favorite artists reside.
I strongly disagree with you and think you’re wrong. Especially that you would allow teachers to teach children that black people are out to get you, all to protect some made up ideal that was never intended when the first amendment was added.
If we didn’t allow for radical ideas to be discussed, we would still be in the dark ages, and criticizing the existence of God would be punishable by death.
I’m not American and the intention of the amendment doesn’t matter. Free Speech is a human right no matter what country or what definition they have. My definition is that it is absolute. Free speech is especially important when dealing with radical ideas. Free speech as long as it is moderate is nothing but a façade, propaganda to keep the population under control.
Let’s make up a scenario where it turns out there are vampires among us, and they’re all the same minority. Let’s say I have extensive research with DNA proof that any descendant from minority X is a vampire, and I’m trying to publish my research, but no publisher is willing to take me seriously. I try to speak in front of people, but I’m labeled a racist, and I’m banned from making public speeches or enter any university. I have the evidence, but cannot show it because people are so sure that it is absolutely impossible that there are vampires among us. In this scenario, I am a radical extremist, and by your argument, it is right for me to not have a voice.
Free speech is not what you think it is. In your scenereo you have the right to try to say what you’re trying to say. Just because your opinion is unpopular and people are unwilling to publish (freedom of speech and the press goes both ways, you can’t force someone to say something either) does not mean your rights are being infringed. This is universal and not just the US. There are no countries I’m aware of that say “all publishers must publish anything anyone says regardless of their credibility”. It would be ludicrous.
And if we go back to my example, that person who believes that they’re teaching children something true can go through the proper channels of society to change the curriculum. I’m also unsure if you’re actually giving the idea of “black people are out to get you” space or just hypothetically, I chose it as an example that’s obviously not true. Replace it with teaching them that strange white vans have candy in them and it’s okay to eat it. Or replace it with them explaining to the children sexual actions they desire in great detail. Your absolutism says they should be allowed by the school to do this, and if that doesn’t change your mind, I’ve made my case, you disgust me, and I choose not to engage further.
I’m not saying force people to listen. I’m just discouraging censoring them. And it doesn’t matter what examples you use. There could come out a study tomorrow saying talking to children about sexual desires in detail reduces sexual shame and clinical depression, and your example would fall flat. Should schools be forced to teach something like that? No. Should they be encouraged to? If it is evidently true, absolutely. Free Speech Absolutism is about allowing all free speech, and encouraging, not forcing, all to listen.
My point is, don’t just defederate without giving it a lot of thought, listen to opinions, and careful analysis. For all we know, that propaganda on that instance could turn out to be true and we were the ones who were wrong. Or maybe only one or two actors are bad, and the rest just like dark humor. Defederating means every single post on every single community on that instance goes, and I personally don’t think some propaganda or hate speech is enough to defederate. I think defederation should be for preventing spam bots, targeted harassment and distribution of illegal content, not to protect users from insensitive jokes or misinformation. That should be up to the individual users.
Take OP for an example. Without any real evidence op claims that the instance is full of baseless propaganda, but fails to give a single example. As someone who has never even heard of the instance before, for all I know, op could just as well be biased and just wants all conservative instances blocked. I did see the trans joke post on their page, and while I agree it is insensitive, is it “let’s have nothing to do with any user on that instance” insensitive?