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Social Media Censorship (beehaw.org)

submitted 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) by furrowsofar@beehaw.org to c/chat@beehaw.org

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I'll admit, I've been using Reddit some recently for certain things. Some experiences got me thinking. Over the years I've noticed that any actually honest discussion about certain things seems to either get your posts or comments deleted, or you banned. Things that tend to be counter to the myth of the virtuous 1% or of say the Trump myth, etc. seem to generally almost always end in this result. I've seen many examples. You can't post a vodcast calling out Trump pocketing $230 million of our money from the US Treasury based a bogus lawsuit to r/Politics of all things, and there's not much media coverage on it. You can't post anything about issues with the business model of many optometrists in the US to the optometrists subreddit even if someone asks a question about it. You can't even have a side discussion about economic and social policy when discussing the ACA. This is not recent either. I used to use Reddit a lot before the big exodus, and some of these are from years ago.

It got me thinking. People say that social media is bad because people don't actually discuss things except maybe in their own silo. It seems to be that even if people wanted to, it is banned on at least Reddit. Is this common on most platforms, or is this just a Reddit thing.

I love lemmy and Beehaw, but there are a few issues here too. In particular, scale, and the other is it tends to be a silo. So it is not actually usable for some things.

Thoughts?

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[–] PhilipTheBucket@piefed.social 4 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

This is 100% a problem. The whole moderation model for Reddit/Lemmy really invites this kind of censorship, whether intended or not (for example, prioritizing "civility" means that groups of users can start long, infuriatingly bad-faith arguments with anyone who expresses certain views, which will inevitably get them banned eventually when on one random day they manage to lose their temper about it). And even well intentioned things like banning "misinformation" can also feed into this silo-creating effect, yes.

For what it's worth, !politics@piefed.social does not delete comments based on viewpoint or civility, for exactly this reason. There is also !deleted@quokk.au; it was intended as a space to restart conversations or repost things that were getting deleted elsewhere. It pretty quickly evolved into my personal sandbox for griping about the moderation but it could in theory still be that other thing too lol.

[–] furrowsofar@beehaw.org 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

Yes I realize we need moderation. I support it in general. Lot of Reddit moderation though can end up very self serving to the point of absurdity. Not saying moderation is easy either.

Edit: Thanks for the links.

[–] PhilipTheBucket@piefed.social 1 points 1 month ago

Yeah. It's a necessary task, just I think the idea of parceling it out to overworked volunteers who are traditionally encouraged to create "rules" for the types of things that people are and are not allowed to say within their little domain, is a stinker of an idea.

Slashdot had a far better model for this: Duties pretty similar to what would be "moderation" in the current system got parceled out at random in tiny, tiny increments to well-established and active users. If it happened to be your day to take your 3 allotted mod actions (or whatever), and on that day you saw some spam or racism or something, you clicked to deal with it, end of story. Other than than, people just got to talk.

That model had some flaws (and I am oversimplifying a bit with that summary) but I think that now that we've had some experience with a variety of systems, that kind of idea showed itself to be infinitely superior to the Reddit model and pretty foresighted in a couple aspects of its construction.

[–] Powderhorn@beehaw.org 1 points 1 month ago

Scale is a double-edged sword. When there's more to moderate, it tends to get worse.

I've not been on any of the tentpole subs in years because it just wasn't a fun place to hang out. Hell, I was banned from /r/startrek in like Season 3 of Discovery under their rule of "any criticism of writing, pacing, CGI or acting means you're a racist transphobe bigot and not welcome here." (well, maybe if they were writing Trek for adults, we'd not have these complaints?)

So, local sub and hobby/van-related is all I'm there for. That's still a relatively lively feed, but also manageable. Finding news there is a signal:noise problem unless somewhere specialized, and I swear any given topic that very into politics has like four answers that are just cycled through and argued almost at if there's a script people will bring out as many times a day as they need to.