Now that this community has mods, I think we should come to something approaching a consensus on whether there should be a rule against posting “nice” comics from transphobic and other kinds of bigoted artists. People like Stonetoss and Jago who have a lot of innocent-looking relatable comics, but also post the most mean, bigoted propaganda.
And I’d like to present a third option besides yes and no: one might post comics from bigoted artists after removing the artist credit, if the mods think that’s a good compromise.
after removing the artist credit
Oh god, please not. This is a whole different can of worms that does not need to be opened in this particular discussion.
We personally agree in removing their comics, though should never remove credits even to a bigoted artist. We personally would rather not like a comic and it’s from a transphobic bigot -a fellow trans person
I think if we require artist name in the title, people can easily filter it out.
Do not remove artist credit, people have the right to know who made the art. For the question of “can you separate art from the artist”, everyone is going to have a different stance on it, and even then it may vary depending on the severity of the artist’s action. Removing the artist credit removes people’s autonomy in that regard.
It also opens the door for people to claim “Billy made one off hand joke 17 years ago, so now we must crop out all their credit because it’s an advertisement”.
Consistent rules will be best. Making exceptions and attempting to maintain a blacklist gets messy to manage and can get out of hand.
This is the only workable option. Anything else is just asking for trouble in one form or another.
Anthropologists observe societies, writing about them dispassionately and adopting a non-interference, non-judgement policy.
At some point a group of academics decided they wanted to include moral discussions (particularly about their own society), on how things come to be a certain way, and how they could develop differently. Thus Sociology was born.
Anthropology still exists, Sociology eclipsed it, it didn’t kill it. They’re aspects of each other, not in competition.
This is the censorship debate in a nutshell. A community picks a side, and the other side is free to branch off. The choices here are: Comics can be anything, even 3D printed gun files, or porn! No limits! We’re all here to just observe.
Or; we need to advocate some limits, some values. Some values are better for the world, and some are worse.
I believe the no-limits crowd have the less considered standpoint. No group is free from having standards and values. We already moderate, it’s the nature of social groups with implicit rules and ideals.
In my opinion, we’re here to do more than just observe the chaos. We adopt a stance. Improving the world as best we can. So we must decide what improves it, and what doesn’t.
I don’t think totally uncensored free speech improves the world. It still imposes a set of values that impact the world - even if advocates pretend that no choice has been made.
I am a firm believer in “There is no better disinfectant than sunlight.”
I want to see the most vile aspects of people, I want it to be on full display so we know who they are, and we can counter them directly.
I think the algorithm has done a MASSIVE amount of damage by cordoning things off and creating little pockets of filth festering in darkness out of view until it overflows and spills out on us all.
You’re mistaken in thinking “The Algorithm” is some objective equation. I can’t stress this enough -
It’s not.
It’s a lever, a programatic tool billionaires can adjust to control public opinion. What’s more there’s evidence of this. Internal leaks from Facebook/Meta reported that they were fully aware certain types of commercial beauty standard promotions embeded in social media in an unmoderated fashion on their sites were inadvertently causing young girls to display suicidal ideation.
They didn’t stop it (because of the ad profit). There’s a whole two part podcast on this (and other forms of confirmed algorithmic damage here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIR0Kd27RhI ).
Likewise, YouTube prior to Trump’s election were very much aware that their algorithm was leading young men through a pipeline to far-right ideas and Nazi content (again, this podcast episode discusses the news and facts of this case: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IekScPTekz8 )
I CANNOT STRESS THIS ENOUGH, the idea that Sunlight will disinfect our views, is no-longer (and I believe the sources cited in those two podcasts show this), is no longer a viable opinion. It’s really an abdication to a higher power, without anywhere NEAR enough awareness of what that “higher power” really is: A loaded version of free speech, where the richest promote and demote views that best suit their interests.
I’m not saying I have a solution, but it’s really fucking important that we all strongly recognize the gravity and extent of the problem. Because people are now growing up in, and entire social circles are being actively politically groomed by these algorithms in a way that’s never happened to this extent before.
The free market of ideas is a convenient LIE which benefits the wealthy and most people do not push back on at all (they see it as objective and impartial). We need far left radicalism but there are no billionaires interested in allowing that into their algorithmically walled gardens - where they control the “sunlight” of what your feed thinks is popular.
They aren’t accusing the left of indoctrinating the young because it was happening. They were accusing them, because they were doing it themselves already, algorithmically.
The “indoctrination” is just another Satanic Panic, the dumbest things you have ever heard being repeated enough by “trusted” sources it becomes fact to them.
It’s Meta and Xitter now, though, not James Dobson on AM radio.
the algorithm has done a MASSIVE amount of damage by cordoning things off and creating little pockets of filth festering in darkness out of view until it overflows and spills out on us all.
This describes how society in general has handled all vices, since long before the Internet.
Sadly accurate, but it has been wilful ignorance, now it is enforced by what the machines think we want to see.
I think it is worse now, than before, it was a lot easier to pick up that “other” newspaper than it is to break out of your algorithm.
After reading the comments here I have been convinced we should create a list of these artists, and none of their content is welcome in this community.
Main points being:
- allowing their “nice” content creates a pipeline for users to their bigotry
- having it signals to new users we are ok with content from bigots
- it should make moderating easier because there is no need to deliberate what is ok by that creator
Nazis, racists, transphobes, homophobes are not welcome here under any context!
There are many comics in the world. Banning a handful of horrible creators won’t starve the community for content. It will create space for non-horrible artists.
Allowing the “nice” comics by horrible people just creates a funnel for people to click though and be exposed to hateful ideas.
If in several months the ban list has grown monstrous in size, we could revisit, but that seems unlikely.
It’s not book burning or censorship. The horrible creators remain entitled to host their own websites or their own instances.
Can you explain to me how censorship of problematic artists is not really censorship?
Because a comics sub on Lemmy is not the government or a church or any other powerful organisation that has any reach beyond itself
It’s a small community of people who are allowed to decide not to welcome bigotry
Ohhhhh so when its just a few people its okay to ignore things they dont like. Quick, hid that info from billion dollar fossil fuel advocates! They must never know the power of ignoring inconvenient reality. Imagine how well they’d sleep at night
Will you write “I’m an idiot” on your forehead for me? If not, am I being censored? Why or why not? Should you be obligated to carry my message anywhere I desire?
Nobody should be obligated to parrot your mouth diarrhea, no. But that does not mean its okay for an entire community to discourage your mouth diarrhea simply for being distasteful.
That’s censorship, just in case you were having trouble identifying the concept we are discussing.
Nobody is obligated but the community is obligated?
Personal preference is not censorship. Banning an artist from an artistic community because the community can’t regulate their own emotions is censorship.
So the individuals running a forum cannot moderate the forum. It must be open to any and all content. Otherwise that is censorship, and bad.
Well, I infer from your tone you think censorship is always bad. Maybe you’re just splitting a hair about how in a sense content moderation is censorship.
because the community can’t regulate their own emotions is censorship.
The biggest eyeroll
My big problem with censorship is that it dulls the mind. Safe spaces do the same thing. If your thoughts and beliefs are never questioned, you can never grow as a person. Echo chambers are breeding grounds for ignorance. Our world is not tolerant of ignorance. Being unable to react appropriately to emotionally inflammatory bait makes us all weaker on an emotional level.
If you want to coddle yourself, make a safe space to do so. Don’t take an open forum and limit it to suit your preferences. The internet is infinite. Make a new space with your own rules.
I support this rule. If I see comics I enjoy I will often go look them up. It’s awful to dive into a new comic and find hateful content that I didn’t expect. Prohibiting comics from known hateful bigots would help avoid that.
I’d rather this place doesn’t turn into a Nazi bar, I’m in favor of banning hate
I was at a shitty crustpunk bar once getting an after-work beer. One of those shitholes where the bartenders clearly hate you.
So the bartender and I were ignoring one another when someone sits next to me and he immediately says, “no. get out.”
And the dude next to me says, “hey i’m not doing anything, i’m a paying customer.”
and the bartender reaches under the counter for a bat or something and says, “out. now.” and the dude leaves, kind of yelling. And he was dressed in a punk uniform, I noticed
Anyway, I asked what that was about and the bartender was like, “you didn’t see his vest but it was all nazi shit. Iron crosses and stuff. You get to recognize them.”
And i was like, ohok and he continues. “you have to nip it in the bud immediately. These guys come in and it’s always a nice, polite one. And you serve them because you don’t want to cause a scene. And then they become a regular and after awhile they bring a friend. And that dude is cool too.
And then THEY bring friends and the friends bring friends and they stop being cool and then you realize, oh shit, this is a Nazi bar now. And it’s too late because they’re entrenched and if you try to kick them out, they cause a PROBLEM. So you have to shut them down.”
And i was like, “oh damn.”
and he said “yeah, you have to ignore their reasonable arguments because their end goal is to be terrible, awful people.”
And then he went back to ignoring me. But I haven’t forgotten that at all.
- Michael B Tager
This.
I loved some of what was available on Reddit years ago. What really made me leave was exactly this problem, the fact that the same platform that allowed things I was interested in also allowed Nazi stuff, things like fatpeoplehate and jailbait. If you have a Nazi section of your bar and a pedo section of your bar it is a bar I don’t want to be in, it is a Nazi pedo bar.
Also, to be super clear, I am absolutely making the strong claim that fatpeoplehate was a Nazi subreddit along with jailbait. Nazis see people as less human when they don’t fit their narrow definitions of human, thus the term useless eaters. They also see women as breeding capacity without humanity and have strong tendencies towards younger and younger girls over time. These are solid links and part of the ideology, not incidental. If you have a Nazi bar it will be a pedo bar too, and they will also hate on people with disabilities and those who are lgbt+.
I’m about to drop a really hot take: The freedom to choose your body includes the freedom to choose to be fat. Now, most people won’t understand why anyone would want to be fat, and that’s okay. You don’t have to understand something to accept it. But going around saying that wanting to be fat can only be a fetish or a mental disorder, like people say about being trans, is not acceptable. We’ve got a tremendous diversity of different people here on this planet Earth, and I think that’s a good thing, because it means I’m never gonna run out of interesting people to get to know.
100% agree. I actually fit this well. I am a tall and fairly muscled dude. My body responds well to keto and I can drop fat fairly easily. I choose to carry some extra weight because I prefer how people treat me at this weight. I am seen as less threatening and less likely to judge which are important things to me.
Also, replacing pants is so expensive. In this economy?
already is
I hate this book burning mentality. It’s not because the person is bad that the content is nessarly bad. Like, if war and peas’s author turned out to be transphobic, would that automatically turn all of their comics bad?
Although it doesn’t mean that hate and bigoted comics shouldn’t be banned. That part is the actual offensive part.
And removing credits is actually scummier than posting bigoted comics imo
For reference, this is not to shill those persons. I’m literally trans and bi. I’m actually concerned with what those are artists are against.
This isn’t book burning. This is more like we’re refusing to print and distribute more copies of their books for them.
You know, the books the Nazis burned were from the library of Magnus Herschfeld, the director of the Berlin Sexology Institute. He was gay, and much of the library was ABOUT queerness, and transgender studies.
The comic strips we’re talking about aren’t being destroyed. But a lot of trans people in the world are, and they risk themselves simply by being who they are.
That is more worthwhile than access to edgy comics on a public forum like this. Better that far-right stuff gets blocked, than trans people getting burned.
It’s okay for a forum to have a political position. I’d prefer it to be left of center.
deleted by creator
no. I have a block button if I don’t like how a person submits. why would I want this type of thing done at the community level? Ultimately its the federation so it won’t matter as there are other comic communities.
why would I want this type of thing done at the community level?
I have an RSS feed for my unfiltered comics.
I read here for the community.
I don’t use rss but I agree im here for community engagement but not for community censorship.
I don’t think propaganda is a matter of personal responsibility. I think we should protect other people from propaganda, not just ourselves.
See to you its propaganda. From your viewpoint. You should not be making that call for others. You are not protecting them you are inflicting your way of thinking on them. They are not defenseless. They can block for themselves. This for me comes down to a thing I have not talked about in a awhile but what I would like to see in the federation. I would like no defederation or unreversable domain blocking. Im fine if it blocks stuff by default but I should be able to go into my user config and turn off any of the default blocking. I, and others, should have 100% control of our experiences and it should not be dictated by others.
They can block for themselves. This for me comes down to a thing I have not talked about in a awhile but what I would like to see in the federation. I would like no defederation or unreversable domain blocking.
This will never ever happen.
I don’t think its completely impossible but I totally realize its highly unlikely. never know though. that is the magic of community things as you never know who will take up something. imma peanut gallery though but it surprises me how many folks prefer some sort of on high authority over individual control on something like this. How can anarchist principles work if they can’t even work in 100% virtual and grass roots community endeavour?
It is 100% impossible lol. Rimu won’t do it. Lemmy devs won’t do it.
I don’t know them well enough to know that but they are not the alpha and the omega of all things free/libre or social media. Ten years ago I would not even imagine something like this is now would exist.
You can speculate another platform might come up that some hardcodes in it the impossibility to deplatform other instances, but all I’m saying is that Lemmy and Piefed will not do it.
But even then, it’s a stretch because the tools required to remove seriously illegal content are the part of the same tools that would function as defederation tools. So it probably can’t be hardcoded out.
Wait so let’s say a bunch of pedophiles make a Lemmy instance at the url child.porn. If you have an account on My instance, and I’ve defederated child.porn, you want the option to override defederation and view their posts from My server?
sorry. the one exception to defederation (which can’t be reversed like blocking) is legal reasons.
What if it’s an ambiguous case where I think the content is illegal but you don’t?
The legality of content is not based on what one person thinks or another. It either is or isn’t but the domain owner ultimately has to make the call based on the coutnry they are in and their interpretation of the law.
Well I’ll give you an example. My instance defederated fedinsfw because they have a community that’s called fauxbait. Faux jailbait. Faux child porn that looks like adult porn.
According to the laws of Australia, fake child porn is still child porn. So I defederated them. Some people agree, some people disagree. Do you think I have the right to make that call?
Now let’s say I decide that Hexbear’s habit of sending pictures of filthy porcine testicles to people they don’t like is harassment. Can I defederate them?
Let’s say I think lemmy.world has too much transphobia (because it’s the biggest instance and they don’t have enough mods), and that’s illegal hate speech. Can I defederate them?
Fun fact: lemmy.world hosts its servers in Nederland, where it’s illegal to promote illegal activity. Can they defederate dbzer0 for promoting piracy?
Fact is, every instance hosts illegal content. You’ve got an excuse for every single instance, except the tiny ones with next to no users. So I don’t go by laws. I go by My ethics. I think fedinsfw and Hexbear are too much. Lemmy.world has a lot of problems, but I think it’s as good as it is bad. Same for dbzer0. It’s an ethical judgement call. That’s what I use defederation for.
I’m against censorship, but I’m pro for curated content. I would be happy to make a rule in which after reaching a certain amount of downvotes, a post has to be removed. I also think it is reasonable to ban someone if they consistently post content that keeps getting downvoted. This is no different than spamming or trolling.
PieFed has offered a full suite of these features for years now, as have some 3rd party apps.
e.g. not only does it offer automatic removal of content (posts or comments) based on downvotes, but it can alternatively collapse it based on a different, more lenient threshold, requiring an additional click to see it.
There are also keyword filters, and what I like most are the visual icons placed next to certain usernames - this does not “filter” their content but does let me see what I am getting into, so that I know e.g. that replying is probably not going to turn out like I may have hoped.
All of the above puts both the control and also the responsibility into the hands of the end-user, without requiring that a mod team constantly do extra work for other people. Which among other things will necessarily involve a delay before community rules can be applied.
I’ll voice in favor of a banlist for bigoted artists. Letting bigots and other hateful people in with “relatable” content just normalizes their hateful material, even playing into possibly intentional “onroading” on their part to their prejudiced platform. It also reinforces the idea that targets of that hate need to “play nice” if they’re not being targeted right then and there, and perpetuates the falsehood that these positions are a matter of “opinion” rather than an existential threat to the targeted.
A banlist would present a higher workload on the part of the mods, which is not something I feel can be demanded, but it would be helpful to have if the goal here is to create a welcoming environment.
MissesAutumnRains also brings up a good point (https://lemmy.ca/post/63256113/22736751) - Leaving it up to users to block bad content does nothing for new users who will have no such curation, and who will be left to assume the community is accepting of such content. Platforming hateful creators will silently push away those who find their content distasteful and entice users that agree with it to stay.
That’s the only way for comics or anything else because you can’t really expect users to research the whole ideological history of the author every time they see a funny picture and want to repost it.
I’m not sure I have a strong opinion either way on the censorship vs not supporting bigots debate, but, to the extent the community decides to ban any authors/artists, there needs to be a quick and concise list that posters can consult.
A mod in this thread stated that people already submit a lot of reports on Jago’s comics. With a banlist, mods wouldn’t need to spend time thinking and debating the issue every time a Jago comic is posted. They can just check if Jago is on the banlist. It might add up to less work overall.
Perhaps. I’m gonna leave that determination up to the people doing the work, though. I don’t think it’s fair to try and convince a volunteer that an additional rule is or isn’t too much work to manage.
Bigotry belongs in the bin. Denial of platform is nice too. Banned creator list feels appropriate
No thank you to censorship.
you can leave
If I leave, that doesn’t help me see the things you want to censor. If you leave, that does help you not see the things you don’t want to.
Weird.
I’m happy to just skip the work of bigots, and have mostly blocked the users who routinely post that stuff.
That saif, if we’re going to remove credit with intent, i have a request:
let’s be clear and cedit “some random bigot”, so I’ll know i might not want to seek out the artist.
