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I think most of the discussion around free speech on social media is a red herring. The concept itself is rather nebulous, beyond being a restriction on the state to not restrict speech of the people (and even that seems to have vaguely defined exceptions).I think the important thing is not free speech, but effective free association. I don't care if I have 'free speech' when going to my friends house, I care about being with my friends. If I'm too offensive to them, they can kick me out. Otherwise, we're free to hang out together and talk in ways which are mutually acceptable to each of us.But it's also important to be able to close the door to people who don't belong. If I'm at a rave, I don't want people there who are trying to grill steaks on the dancefloor, even if there's nothing wrong with dancing or grilling. The answer (in a social media setting) can't just be 'just block them'. In the example above, not every raver should have to tell the griller that they don't want them there. There should be a sign at the door and a bouncer. This is the 'effective' part of the free association. If you constantly have to worry about people you don't want to see barging in (or even harassing you), it's not free association. So we need good admins and moderators to help you with that and keep a good community going on a server.A centralized system can not effectively handle this. It's as if I went to my friend, put on a kpop song, and then someone from the association for the advancement of classical music busts in and throws me out because they think it's trash. This is what happens at twitter, currently.There's no way for them to handle this without splitting up in multiple fluid communities, something we already have in the fediverse. You will never make everybody happy, but with the twitter kind of centrally planned moderation, you don't make anybody happy.So that's what I think is what makes the fediverse great: It's an effective way to stay in contact with the people you want, and to keep out the people you don't want, without removing access for anyone globally.
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@guizzy @lain throwing giant rocks at people is obviously illegal and hurting peoplecurrent us law *already* holds sites responsible for things posted their sites that are obviously illegal and hurting people (e.g. child porn) (and some not-hurting-people illegal stuff too, copyrightit doesn't hold them responsible for having a legal team around to handle every single spurious slapp "defamation" suit (e.g. he called me a poopoo head!), and expecting it to is unreasonable
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@lain Within the metaphors of free association, if someone goes to your backyard, sets up a catapult and starts lobbing rocks at the neighbors, you can expect to get some grief from the neighbors. If you have a reasonable explanation, such as that you are alone, it's a big backyard and were on vacation and could not have possibly noticed and stop the catapult before it started throwing rocks, then I expect they would understand. But if you have a large staff, security cameras everywhere and in the same time period you've expelled tens of people who weren't setting up catapults in your yard, then I think it's not unreasonable to start thinking maybe you should be held responsible for allowing the catapult guy to setup on your land.
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@lain I agree in the sense that free association is the superior principle here, but with one caveat that I simply do not think the current hypocrisy of "we can't be expected to be responsible for user content, it's impossible without drastic measures!", and then proceeding to heavily curate user content anyway should be tolerated. Within the context of the state and legal system being here and probably being here for the foreseeable future, I expect and demand consistency.
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@guizzy @lain going from "you're not responsible" to "you might be responsible" means people have to plan for and be scared of it
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@shmibs @lain We're not talking current law but preferable laws; spurious civil suits don't need a blanket immunity to be dismissed, they could be dismissed on other grounds, such as not enough notice being given considering the resources of the defendant, no demonstrated harm, etc.
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@guizzy @lain the risk is that small communities who can't afford a legal team will just shut down, because they're scared of lawsuit spammers or people with vendettas
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@shmibs @lain And the risk of them doing that is that they might stop inviting everyone on their land to have parties. Which they already do, as they already have clearly discriminatory moderation.
lain
バツ子（痛いの痛いの飛んでけ;;
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