• 47 Posts
  • 521 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: December 18th, 2023

help-circle

  • I think that tech companies taking a stand on what their employees and/or users believe in is a reasonable thing.

    How would that actually work? Like, you’d have pro-Trump and anti-Trump companies that only employ pro- and anti-Trump employees and only serve pro- and anti-Trump customers? What happens when someone who is basically pro-Trump thinks that ICE goes too far?


  • General_Effort@lemmy.worldtoFediverse@lemmy.worldBluesky just verified ICE
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    3
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    4 days ago

    To me, this feels like school politics.

    OMG! Jaden invited ICE to his birthday party! I’m never talking to him again!

    Oh No! ICE nabbed Julio! I’m telling the teacher and they will get suspended!

    Probably a good number of these people are actual children. I know there are adults who have broadly similar ideas. For someone living a very sheltered and privileged life, being trolled on the internet is the absolute worst form of aggression they ever experience. Particularly in Europe, activists and politicians talk about “digital violence”, which tells you that they have no sense of proportion.


  • General_Effort@lemmy.worldtoFediverse@lemmy.worldBluesky just verified ICE
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    6
    arrow-down
    32
    ·
    5 days ago

    Trump being able to clone Mastodon is not the same as letting Trump on Mastodon.social

    The Mastodon devs made a choice in releasing it as open source. They could have decided to pick and chose who is allowed to use it. It was completely foreseeable, that the software would be used for something like Gab or Truth.Social. When they release update, they know that these will also be used by such services.

    This is merely a statement of fact, not criticism. They chose not to exercise power or become arbiters of good and evil. That is laudable.

    Bluesky is a centralized platform and their mods don’t ban Nazis.

    I get it. You feel that tech companies should deny service to bad people. For example, to a government agency acting on behalf of a president elected by a solid majority of the popular vote.

    I agree that the voters got it wrong, but I don’t think that the rich and powerful vetoing voters will lead to good outcomes. Look at medieval Europe. Life got better with democracy, not with a supposedly more just king.

    The tech lord most in line with your ideas is Elon Musk, except that he’s kinda nazi. So, on a purely practical note, it doesn’t seem very likely that tech companies being more political would lessen racism.

    Do you think it would be better if all the billionaires, who are probably mostly non-nazi, were activist like him?


  • General_Effort@lemmy.worldtoFediverse@lemmy.worldBluesky just verified ICE
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    70
    arrow-down
    8
    ·
    5 days ago

    So, trying to parse what’s going on here.

    Bluesky has verified that an account claiming to belong to the US government agency ICE really is controlled by that agency. Somehow that shows that Mastodon is better. Because Trump has his own Mastodon instance and doesn’t need anyone to vouch for his goons?

    Looking at the comments, maybe the issue is rather that the Bluesky company provides services to ICE. Tech companies should refuse service. Huh. I guess there is more diversity of opinion on Lemmy than I had thought, regarding the power of tech companies, democracy, and law.





  • Similar to copyright, enforcement requires surveillance and empowers censorship. But worse than copyright, it is directly aimed at information about people. So that is what gets surveilled and censored.

    Of course, there are positive uses, such as disappearing revenge porn. But in practice, it will always favor the rich and powerful who have the resources to actively manage their image. I don’t believe it is worth the massive surveillance and censorship apparatus, even before one gets to the obvious potential for misuse.

    Have you heard of the recent Russmedia case?


  • How did free speech help when the Nazis humiliated jews publicly in the 1930s?

    How did it help taking “jew-baiters” like Julius Streicher to court during the Weimar Republic? Obviously it didn’t.

    It seems obvious that I want the state to prevent hate speech, especially against minorities.

    You want the state to act against hate speech coming from the elected head of state. What about that seems like a good plan?

    You can’t convince people that Trump is a bad guy, and so you want the state to go after the bad guys. Maybe you can convince people that the state should smash bad guys. It’s not hard. But Trump is in charge of the state and not you. He’ll decide who’s a bad guy.