A bit over a month ago, a user posted in !main@sh.itjust.works to propose defederating from maga.place. That post was followed by a discussion in !agora@sh.itjust.works a week ago, which seems to have gained some traction. In response, we’re going to hold a vote on the matter. Voting will be open for one week, through Friday, November 7.
The Agora discussion post is here:
https://sh.itjust.works/post/48420886
Only sh.itjust.works accounts created prior to today (October 31) may cast a vote.
Vote by commenting either yes/aye/oui or nay/no/non.
Any further discussion should happen in the Agora post linked above.
Additional Context/Discussions
Similar discussion at lemmy.ca: https://sh.itjust.works/post/46502305
Other fediverse instances are also defederating: https://sh.itjust.works/post/48111431
The instance’s page at Fediseer: https://gui.fediseer.com/instances/detail/maga.place
VOTE RESULT
yes/aye/oui: 363
nay/no/non: 43
There’s two main responses to dealing with someone who believes a conspiracy theory:
The first is exactly what you’d expect from a conspiracy trying to cover something up, whereas the second is more likely to be genuine.
If this instance is preventing the latter, we should defederate, and that’s what happened with the_donald. But if they’re open to good faith discussions and their users and mods are respectful of our rules, we should stay federated. I don’t think we have enough evidence to say which it is.
The nature of bad faith is that there is no right answer. Some asshole going ‘Ah-HA!’ does not matter, if they’ll do that in response to aaanythiiing. Preventing their nonsense from spreading is the correct answer. You have to protect people from abuse that works.
Abuse that works forty percent of the time, apparently. Thank god a mere plurality is insufficient to ever cause problems.
TD was a successful propaganda megaphone that only got shut down after it shit up millions of people’s feeds for most of a decade. It successfully radicalized god knows how many politically interested young minds. The right answer was to ban that shit, immediately. And when they try mewling about how calling reactionary bigots Nazis makes you the Nazi, ban them again.
Some questions have these things called “answers.” We do not need to endlessly discuss them, with assholes, on sites by and for their specific brand of reality-denying assholes. Sometimes “both sides” is the right side and the wrong side - and contrarian chin-stroking is poorly distinguished from frothing wackadoodle denialism.
This god damn website is named heil.hitler and you wanna take a wait-and-see approach to whether they’ll cause problems. Frothing wackadoodle denialism is their brand. We don’t need to federate with flat.earth, or thejews.did.it, or hexbear. You are allowed to recognize when people openly cause problems on purpose, and not sit around waiting for problems to happen, like it’s a fucking surprise.
If someone is arguing in bad faith, report them. If mods don’t address it, escalate to the admins. If the admins can’t resolve it, then we discuss defederation.
Jumping to defederation because an instance seems to share beliefs with groups that use that tactic isn’t right.
No, we must always question what we think we know for certain, but also always use the best information we have. Maybe 99% of the time the answer is unchanged, but that 1% of the time makes the exercise worthwhile.
I know that’s not quite what you were getting at, I just think it’s important to take the contrarian perspective periodically and see where that leads.
Whether that’s useful comes down to execution. Basically, is there quality evidence to back up that view? If not, how can we test it?
It’s not, and a lot of the MAGA crowd is criticizing the current administration. Look at Marjorie Taylor Greene, she had been a long-time mouthpiece for the MAGA movement, and now she’s pushing back (see the recent Daily Show piece by Desi Lydic for a comedic summary). She’s the last I’d expect to question the president and other Republicans, yet here we are.
Going based on the domain name isn’t enough IMO, unless it is literally something like you mentioned. Let the admins show if they’ll side with truth or messaging, if it’s the former, stay federated, and if the latter, defederate.
We must always question whether woman are people. What if the answer’s different, this time?
We must always debate which race is best race. We must always entertain the idea trans people cause hurricanes. We must always seriously consider and politely discuss the blood libel.
If you know that kind of open-ended wank wasn’t what I was talking about, why did you fucking say it?
We’re not talking about academic criticism of open-ended questions with troubling loose ends. We are discussing bigots. This is a forum of bigots, by bigots, for bigots. The questions they ask are not worth your time or mine, even when they are sincere.
If you’d still split hairs about ‘real conservatives’ like they’re not marginal fair-weather whiners when the horrifying shit they proudly voted for harms them - this site is not for them. This site is for the rest of the assholes, the diehards, the reactionary extreme. Hence the fucking name.
Based on what evidence? The name? A handful of posts, that could likely be randos posting to trigger others? It’s a small instance with very few posts, we don’t have much data on what the users and admin(s) there want.
If it’s not worth your time, just ignore them. Block the instance and move on. Until they actually cause harm, there’s really no reason to defederate. That’s my point.
How aggressively does someone have to announce they’re a right-wing crank, before you’ll believe them? My guy - if a site tolerates posting reactionary shit “to trigger others,” that’s the line you want. That’s what you think is beyond the pale. That’s moderation failure that was entirely predictable by just looking at the site.
We do not need abundant examples of what this niche shitpost factory is about, when it is named shitpost dot factory. Their fucking brand is in the fucking name and I’m yelling this at my screen as I’m typing this because dealing with denialist horseshit is only marginally less tolerable than dealing with denialist horseshit apologism.
Christ.
There was a point where the actual Nazis were just a political party. Where the local consensus on the label, Nazi, was that it was pricks in bad outfits loosely associated with violent agitation. Would you have told me, a century ago, that Der Sturmer should be judged on its merits, until we have sufficient evidence they’re not merely biased? I mean surely everyone’s biased. Perhaps we should write in to Herr Streicher with corrections, and see if staff writers walk back their vitriolic rhetoric. We should eat the whole turd to be sure it’s not a crab cake.
Yes we do. Names don’t mean anything.
Look at our instance’s name, what does that say about our instance? Should others have defederated because we have profanity in the domain name? No, that’s ridiculous. I’m guessing the admin thought the name was funny. That’s it.
I’m guessing “maga.place” was picked because it was available, the creator is conservative, and they thought it would annoy the liberals on Lemmy. All of that is fine, and none of it indicates that they’re nazis or extreme right-wingers or anything like that.
Yes, and I say that today. I don’t dislike The Blaze, Breitbart, or Fox News because of their bias, I dislike them for their poor credibility. Likewise for various leftist “news” sites that we see posted here with dubious credibility. I would similarly reject that rag probably the first time I look at it, because it’s obvious that sourcing assertions is not on its priority list.
I believe in free speech, and if Lemmy is going to be an actual competitor to Reddit, it needs to attract people from all ends of the political spectrum, with the caveat that bad behavior is not tolerated. I don’t care if someone is from the left wing, the right wing, or some other wing, they should have a seat at the table as long as they’re respectful and bring evidence to support their assertions when in communities that expect that.
And that’s the thing. If you don’t like what maga.place posts, you don’t have to sub to their communities. You can even block the entire instance so you don’t see their content. That’s exactly the same as not buying Der Sturmer, and not shopping at places that sell copies of Der Sturmer. Defederation is more like banning Der Sturmer from the country, and I think that’s a violation of the basic expectation of free speech.
Bigotry and swearing are not the same thing, and you fucking know it. A site named We Are Racists™ does not get the benefit of the doubt, unless it’s instantly evident that’s some kind of joke. This site named for extremist conservative rhetoric proudly declares it’s for extremist conservative rhetoric and exclusively contains extremist conservative rhetoric.
They’re not acting fascist because it’s funny.
Reactionary conservatives ‘owning the libs’ is fascist behavior. It is extreme right-wing rhetoric. It is rooted in a worldview that’s all bad faith, campism, and proudly intolerable behavior. Why the fuck would you ever excuse it.
Why the fuck don’t you dislike racist blogs, for their racist bias? They could be doggedly accurate in the specific details of their reporting - and they’d still be doing it from a hateful and divisive worldview, with intent to spread and deepen that over bigotry. Accurate statistics about gang violence and birthrates don’t make hyperfixation on those things any less racist!
You are defending the honor of a literal Nazi newspaper, on the basis of ‘hey, maybe they did good field work.’ We are talking about people tried at Nuremberg. “Don’t buy it” was obviously not a solution, despite your diehard libertarian bent. Sometimes problems come and find you.
Nobody needs “all ends of the political spectrum,” when that includes Nazis. We don’t need Nazis. Bigotry, as a political worldview, is explicitly forbidden on this server, and good fucking riddance. No service needs to be all things to all people, and hey guess what, most people choose services based on what they don’t include. Reddit being cool with fascists was a world-changing problem, and a big part of why I fucking left.
You are why bigots spread. ‘Nazis should get a voice so long as they act polite and bring evidence’ is a literal invitation for bad-faith “scientific racism” horseshit. Free speech means the government won’t arrest you for being asshole - not that assholes deserve any better response than “fuck off, asshole.”
I didn’t claim it was, I also don’t claim “maga” is bigotry. I’m saying both are something someone could take offense to.
What matters is the content and the admin/moderation team. Our instance has fantastic admins IMO, and I haven’t had issues with mods either. I don’t know what the mods/admins look like on maga.place since nobody seems to be interested in that, only the name of the instance and the posts in their conservative community.
I think it’s just saying the quiet part out loud. That type of behavior happens all the time from the left side of the aisle as well.
Look at all the people calling anyone remotely conservative “fascist,” do you think that comes from a careful review of the facts, or more from tribalism? I think it’s the latter. Yes, there are fascists on the right, but that doesn’t mean everyone on the right are fascists, just like there are communists on the left but not everyone on the left is communist.
Sure, and the same can be said for leftist content with high factual accuracy (e.g. Mother Jones). I read both, as well as “neutral” news (minimal overall bias) to get a good idea of the facts. Spin is fine, provided I’m aware of it and can find the opposite spin with similar factual reporting.
I’m not talking about honor, I’m talking about freedom of speech. I’ll also defend the right for communist, tankie, and other far left content to exist on the same grounds. One of my favorite musical artists is Rage Against the Machine despite never agreeing with their political message, because I love that they can be so blatantly against our current system. I want more speech that I disagree with, not less, because challenging closely held ideas is how we make progress, because we’re forced to elucidate why we hold them.
But we do. Nazism was a popular movement, and we need people to understand it or we’re doomed to repeat that era of history. If we hide it, people will forget why it was so bad and it’ll fester until it gains enough power to cause problems.
I recommend watching some of Peter Thiel’s talks, because he makes interesting points, while doing the thing he warns of. It’s incredibly interesting to see how blind he is to what he’s doing. Basically, he says people are so obsessed with security that they’ll give more power to the state, which will bring about the Anti-Christ (i.e. someone like Hitler), who sells “safety” in exchange for absolute control. And then you look at his company, Palantir, which provides the tools to the government to do that exact same thing, provide security in exchange for absolute control.
Being so scared of fascism that we won’t allow publication of fascist works is a huge part of this obsession with security in exchange for freedom. I reject that.
I believe the safest society is one where people feel so uncomfortable that they take that responsibility on themselves instead of outsourcing it to someone in power. I believe we need to strip entities from centralized control and provide tools for individuals to make decisions for themselves. I avoid fascist content because I find the ideas bankrupt, not because it’s unavailable to me. In the context of Lemmy, it’s a decentralized system, so we should be trying to decentralize moderation as much as possible instead of relying on admins to defederate when something looks scary.
That’s not why I left. I left because they removed choice by closing their API, which meant I was forced to use their clients. I stayed away because they cracked down on moderators who protested. I was never really happy with the way moderation worked, but I was able to vote with my subscription and move to subs whose moderation I liked, so it worked well while Reddit stayed out of it. The moment they asserted top down control is when I left.
This is also why I like sh.itjust.works. The admins have a very hands off approach and only step in when there’s actual abuse, and leave the rest to the users. That’s how platforms should work IMO.
I am just curious, what do you mean by cause harm?
The big names we defederated from in the past violated some or all of the rules above, such as hexbear and explodingheads.
I see, so on-site behaviour.
Is there any situation where MAGA as a movement more broadly can be qualified as causing harm (I get the impression that you don’t believe that’s the case currently)?
Or is it more that we shouldn’t treat a random MAGA supporter as intending to do harm?
I’ve lived in both russia and the US for multiple years. We left russia as soon our situation allowed us to. We were constantly harassed by police and had to deal with pretty harsh racism (even though our papers were in order and we all speak fluent russian and understand the interpersonal culture very well).
The US has become just like russia with security services harassing non-whites, beating people and jailing people even if their documents are in order (and even jailing and deporting citizens!). My mother is in shock that this is happening in the US (she hasn’t lived there, but she has visited many times and has been to multiple cities) and it’s becoming like russia.
In this context, why is it wrong to treat MAGA and its supporters as causing harm? Or do you disagree with the framing of the above paragraph?
Then there is the international context; promotion of corruption, promotion of far right parties (including criminals and open racists).
Why shouldn’t that qualify as causing harm?
One could argue that the rank and file MAGA supporters don’t know about this or didn’t intend to cause harm. But my answer would be that alleged intent or lack of knowledge is not important. It’s outcomes that count.
Mind you, this is not meant as a gotcha. I have friends of 15-20 years that I am still very close with from both sides of the US political aisle (i.e. one group supports Trump, albeit with exceptions on some issues).
I’ve had people on Lemmy call me a bad person for continuing to be close with the group that supports Trump. To which I replied that they are not bad people, they are not fascists or nazis or whatever (it would make no sense considering my mixed ethnic background) and they will come about.
So there is a measure of nuance to my perspective. I will add that MAGA is not the same thing as conservative in the broader context. The fact that most people who call themselves conservatives in the US are supporters of the MAGA movement speaks more about the US than conservatism in general.
Conduct should be the only measure we use for deciding whether to federate. And not even just conduct of their users, but conduct of their admins and mods. If their users are consistently causing problems, but their admins and mods are consistently banning them, then we should stay federated because we can work with them. The moment we can’t work with them is when we defederate.
Maybe that’s the case right now, IDK, I haven’t seen evidence either way, just people disagreeing with what little content they have and the domain name they used. I’m against this petition because it and the comments seem to day we should defederate purely based on political ideology.
You’ll need to expound on this a bit. What exactly does this say about America? All this shows, IMO, is that people are tribalistic (what country isn’t?) and don’t trust the establishment (who does?).
If you ask conservatives if they agree with the way Trump is going about things, they’ll likely say no, buy he has the right objectives in mind. They don’t like how ICE is acting, but they do want illegal immigrants to leave and only return through legal means. They don’t like that Trump is unilaterally setting trade policy, but they do want to see manufacturing jobs return and for the US to have a dominant trade position. They don’t want the government to be shut down, but they seem to believe that Republicans actually want to cut spending. All “MAGA” means in their eyes is ths slogan Trump uses to pursue policies that will make their lives better.
I personally disagree both with Trump’s priorities and the way he goes about them, but that doesn’t mean I think his supporters should be shut out of the conservation. I believe the opposite, in fact. I want to talk to Trump supporters to understand what they think and why, and to have the opportunity to show how that doesn’t match what Trump says and does. I used to be registered Republican and left when it became clear that they never do what I want (smaller, fiscally responsible government) and prioritize what I don’t want (e.g. anti-immigration). I didn’t join the Democratic Party for the same reason, they prioritized big government spending initiatives instead of expanding personal freedoms; we still don’t have legalized gay marriage, we’re relying on a court decision just like Roe V Wade…
No, the difference is we still have the freedom to criticize the government and we actually have free and fair elections. So whatever you don’t like about the US can change. The downside is it probably won’t because you need to break through the tribalism to get people to agree on anything.
Russia became the way it is because of authoritarianism (Putin wanted control), the US became the way it is due to fear. The first can’t be solved with conversation, the latter can.
How can we solve the problems in our democracies if we shut down conservation between tribes?
@sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
Apologies for pinging you, you made a lot of arguments for why we should give MAGA movement member the benefit of the doubt. Those argument don’t align with reality in my opinion.
IMO, this is how we get echo chambers. I understand wanting a safe space, but that should be something community moderation should provide, not instance-level defederation.
To be clear, I disagree with the MAGA movement on pretty much everything. I used to consider myself Republican back when I thought Republicans actually want smaller, fiscally responsible government, and I didn’t join the Dems because they never seemed to prioritize civil liberties (e.g. gay marriage became legal by court decision, not statute, much like Roe V Wade).
I left largely due to conversations and content online (mix of Reddit and YouTube), and that wouldn’t be possible if popular social media sites cut out chunks of the conversion. In fact, I very much disagree with the aggressive stance YouTube took WRT COVID misinformation, not because I think misinformation is acceptable, but because it shut out anyone who was critical of the government’s policies. I want to live in a society that values differences in opinion and is okay with that being uncomfortable.
There’s a balance to be struck here, and I think that balance point is whether we can work with the admins of an instance to remove problematic content and users. I haven’t seen anyone saying that’s an issue, the arguments all revolve around the domain name and sometimes posts in communities that are obviously biased.
We defederate Hexbear not because they’re tankies, but because their admins refused to take action against trolling. IMO, that should be the standard.