The Agora

I don’t see why I or other any SJW member should be subject to bad faith, corporate spam.

Then don't sub to their communities, or even block the whole instance.

I do not believe in “safe spaces” or “echo chambers”. The latter in particular is a loaded, polemical term that means nothing.

I think it's pretty clearly defined. Here's the Wikipedia definition, which fits my understanding perfectly:

In the context of news media and social media, an echo chamber is an environment or ecosystem in which participants encounter beliefs that amplify or reinforce their preexisting beliefs by communication and repetition inside a closed system and insulated from rebuttal.

It's the equivalent of what Trump does by surrounding himself with yes-men and eliminating dissent. It's what happens on lemmy.ml and lemmygrad.ml when moderation decisions are made to ban people critical of China or Russia, or sympathetic to western liberalism.

I personally am proactive about avoiding echo chambers. I consider myself libertarian, I live in a conservative area, and I spend a lot of time on liberal Lemmy, all so I get exposure to a diverse set of ideas. I watch and listen to liberal, conservative, and libertarian media I consider high quality, so I don't silo myself into one way of looking at things.

I want social media to reflect my ideals, which means every idea is subject to challenge by providing good information and reasoned arguments. So, when there's a suggestion that an instance be defederated, I default to "no" and must be convinced of ill intent before changing that to a "yes". Differing ideals does not automatically mean they have ill intent, even if vocal people in the media with those ideals have ill intent.

There is a beautiful irony that US conservatives claim to oppose echo chambers when they are the biggest enablers of this concept

Projection is a well known trait of narcissists, and has very little to do with political bias (source, conclusion: "Overall, we find those on the left and right are equally narcissistic. However, liberals and conservatives differ in which dimensions drive their narcissism").

Am I acting in bad faith by stating...

No, that's an opinion.

However, I think both liberals and conservatives in power oppose "real action" (arrests and whatnot) because they want power. In essence, they get more political capital by slapping companies like Meta on the wrist instead of actually holding them accountable.

If a side opposes one group more than the other side, that's because they think it'll harm the other side more than their side. It's rarely about doing the right thing, it's about doing the thing that makes them look good and their opponents look bad.

When you ignore such things, you get russia.

Hence why we have protests, lawsuits, and media coverage. In Russia, you won't get far doing any of those things. People know what's going on with ICE because of those freedoms, we don't really know what's going on in Russia or with the Uyghurs in China because they don't have the same freedoms.

The day the opposition to ICE stops is when we've become similar to Russia.

Trump has negative political support (approval is below 50%), he isn't like Putin.

There are parts of the country where people aren’t allowed to vote

That's just not true, do you have a source?

To vote, you need to be a citizen and register to vote before the deadline. The deadlines are clearly posted, and the process is very easy (just fill out a form and either mail it or drop it off). You only need to register once, and you're good for life, though you'll need to update registration if you move (at least for mail voting or between states, not sure about within states for in-person voting, I've never voted in person). The stages I have lived in all do registration online as well, so it's trivial to do on a work break or something. There are even non-profits who go around to help people sign up.

There are problems, such as not every state allows mail voting (which helps for busy people, e.g. those who work multiple jobs) and no day off to vote, but the voting registration process is simple and accessible.

The approach to districting is also clearly malicious and strongly suggests US conservatives oppose real democracy

Gerrymandering isn't unique to conservative, liberals do it too. It's a problem nationwide, not just in red states. Both parties like the status quo, otherwise we'd see legislative action.

You can be a conservative in other countries and not support security services setting up check points for non-whites, beating up people and deporting your own citizens.

And you can be a liberal in the US or elsewhere and support it. The TSA was expanded under Obama, and Obama could have ended it entirely and returned security to airports and airlines. But he didn't. Why? Both parties like having more power.

To believe this is impossible in the US is how you get putin and your country turning into russia.

I 100% agree. The book It Can't Happen Here is about exactly that, fascism happening in the US.

The closest we got was actually a Democrat: FDR. He famously broke the pattern of serving two terms and won four terms, and is the reason we have the 22nd amendment limiting presidents to 2 terms. He also incarcerated ~120k people in the Japanese internment camps, about 2/3 of which were US citizens. That's far worse than the handful of US citizens ICE has wrongly arrested (most of which were quickly releases).

I'm not saying this to imply Trump is less bad (IMO, he's worse in many ways), but to demonstrate that we've been close to fascism before from the opposite direction, so it could totally happen here.

And that’s why I think it is legitimate to preemptively ban oligarch propaganda

Thanks for the honest perspective.

I too agree that propaganda should be eliminated, but that should go through the community/instance it's on. So the proper process is:

1. Report problematic content to community mods, explaining why it's problematic
2. If no action from 1, report to the admins of the instance the community is hosted on
3. If no action from 2, report to your instance's admins to see if they can get a response
4. If none of the above work, recommend defederation

AFAIK, we skipped all of those steps and went straight to 4.