Starting a covert, underground marketing campaign on Lemmy this early is pretty extreme. I guess we can’t underestimate fandom: the promoters here don’t need payment with this kind of passion.

Maybe you’re right: is there verification?

Neither content policy (youtube or tiktok) clearly lays out rules on those words. I only find unverified claims: some write it started at YouTube, others claim TikTok. They claim YouTube demonetizes & TikTok shadowbans. They generally agree content restrictions by these platforms led to the propagation of circumspect shit like unalive & SA.

TikTok policy outlines their moderation methods, which include removal and ineligibility to the for you feed. Given their policy on self-harm & automated removal of potential violations, their policy is to effectively & recklessly censor such language.

Generally, censorship is suppression of expression. Censorship doesn’t exclusively mean content removal, though they’re doing that, too. (Digression: revisionism & whitewashing are forms of censorship.)

Regardless of how they censor or induce self-censorship, they’re chilling inoffensive language pointlessly. While as private entities they are free to moderate as they please, it’s unnecessary & the effect is an obnoxious affront on self-expression that’s contorting language for the sake of avoiding idiotic restrictions.

To most of us, few things are more bothersome than the dreaded cookie banners. On countless websites, you’re confronted with a pesky pop-up urging you to agree to something.

Thanks to dumbass EU laws fussing over nonproblems like (check notes) targeted advertising. Really? I voluntarily give out information to an ad-supported service I don’t pay for, they turn around & use this to try to show me more relevant ads, and I’m supposed to pretend the internet was ever private & shit my pants over this? While I can understand safeguards from identity theft, cookies aren’t that, I don’t understand how this concern ever blew up.

Before those laws, those cookie banners didn’t exist & I was happy not clicking them. I was under no illusion that online privacy exists with free services running on ad revenue that can track online activity and try to harvest voluntary information that’s mostly worthless to me. Free shit in exchange for mostly worthless information & ads I ignore seems like an obvious bargain, but some hypochondriacs had to stir everyone into a frenzy to bitch & moan about it. Do they think the world just runs on magic?

Do people still have to say unalive?

Censorship is goddamn stupid. They should just tag content & let people decide what to filter.

That’s a pleasant idea: best ways on going about that?

Make them publishers or whatever is required to have it be a legal requirement, have them ban people who share false information.

The law doesn’t magically make open discussions not open. By design, social media is open.

If discussion from the public is closed, then it’s no longer social media.

ban people who share false information

Banning people doesn’t stop falsehoods. It’s a broken solution promoting a false assurance.

Authorities are still fallible & risk banning over unpopular/debatable expressions that may turn out true. There was unpopular dissent over covid lockdown policies in the US despite some dramatic differences with EU policies. Pro-palestinian protests get cracked down. Authorities are vulnerable to biases & swayed.

Moreover, when people can just share their falsehoods offline, attempting to ban them online is hard to justify.

If print media, through its decline, is being held legally responsible

Print media is a controlled medium that controls it writers & approves everything before printing. It has a prepared, coordinated message. They can & do print books full of falsehoods if they want.

Social media is open communication where anyone in the entire public can freely post anything before it is revoked. They aren’t claiming to spread the truth, merely to enable communication.

That it’s irresponsible to sell a false bill of goods: a company sincere about not giving a fuck & that merely puts out an advisory is more credible than one that entertains illusions that fact-checking all social media isn’t a foolish endeavor. We don’t get that in reality, so why should we pretend we can get that online? Ultimately, the burden & responsibility to work out the truth is & has always been with the individual, and it’s irresponsible to pretend we can sever or transfer that responsibility, especially in an open medium like the town square, social media, or general reality.

There’s also the intractable problem of settling the truth. Why should anyone trust a company or anyone to be arbiter of truth? Infallible authorities don’t exist & they are inevitably going to get this wrong & draw wild conclusions like that pro-palestinian protests are antisemitic & need to be censored. While they could merely place notes/comments of fallible, researched opinions, we already get that with discussions like in real life.

Social media isn’t a controlled publication like an encyclopedia or news agency that chooses its writers & staff. It’s a communication platform open to the public.

Instead of promoting a false sense of confidence that lowers people’s guard with assurances no one can deliver, it’s better to cut the pretense, admit there is no real solution, and remind everyone the obvious—unreliable information from anyone is untrustworthy, so they need to grow up, verify their information, and keep their guard up.

Doesn’t reminding users not to be so gullible address that?

A problem is promoting unrealistic expectations that untrustworthy information is reliable because someone else will unerringly determine the truth & catch falsehoods from spreading. Claiming that ever made sense is bogus.

I’d rather “trust” a company that cuts the bullshit with notices like

The stories and information posted here are artistic works of fiction and falsehood.
Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact.

to remind the user that trusting noncredible information from unreliable sources is a ridiculous concept.

Oh noes: a private company that has no duty to challenge falsehoods has given up any pretense of giving a fuck.

Most likely written by AI

Are comments like this most likely written by AI? Am I AI?

Obligatory em dash—done!

🇩🇪 likewise.

No further boosters are currently recommended for healthy adults aged < 60 years and pregnant women.

For infants, (young) children, and adolescents without underlying diseases, no primary or booster COVID-19 vaccination is currently recommended due to the meanwhile predominantly mild course of disease and very low incidence of hospitalization.

encouraging someone to kill themselves

I’m pretty sure that can be ignored without harm. Whether someone elects to kill themselves or not is up to them.

A fundamental right is not really a problem. Expression that doesn’t directly harm (defamation, incitement, threat) can be ignored.

I don’t continue reading

Seems like willful illiteracy & incomplete evidence fallacy. There was literally all the resources on the internet & a quick search to check hastily drawn conclusions before posting them.

Your belief that I don’t understand these ideas or haven’t encountered them is incorrect.

It’s more an observation that your position isn’t justified well.

I’m saying that a free society must not equally allow every possible expression, and that anything invoking and glorifying Nazism in specific is beyond the pale and must be stopped, including violently when necessary.

You are talking about weakening legal integrity of fundamental rights & committing violence against nonaggressors (violence against peaceful expression is never necessary): that’s flat out illiberal & incompatible with free society. Worst of all, you’ve failed to demonstrate any of it is necessary or sufficient to safeguard the fundamental rights free society stands for: basic logic indicates it does the opposite. Moreover, historical record discredits your position & shows such approaches when attempted are easily abused by authorities, harm society, and end up failing: you remain conveniently mute on this.

Claiming to have heard & understood it all before doesn’t mean your position now isn’t broken & muddled. “Defeating” illiberal movements in ways that end up defeating free society is incompetent advocacy. I think you’re mistaking fighting fascism (even at the expense of fundamental freedoms that define free society) with defending free society.

Anyone who seriously cares about free society needs to oppose illiberalism from your direction, too. I do. Your illiberalism is more insidious than overt fascism, because someone might mistake yours for progressive.

The only positive is there’s a better chance of reasoning with misguided people trying to do the right thing than someone who definitely wants to end free society.

they instead exploit the willingness of others to do so (like you’re insisting on here) because it drags them into unproductive conversations and creates feuds (like we’re doing here)

No, this disagreement is real. I cannot support recklessly subverting fundamental rights to score cheap “wins” that ultimately result in loss. Committing to a free society requires integrity to defend all of it consistently.

It’s seems to me your “solution” adds to the problem. It’s possible to oppose it, oppose facism, & argue for a better solution.

Moreover, it seems to me you’re falling for their game. Testing integrity by trying to provoke society to weaken its legal protections enough to punish offensive exercise of fundamental rights is a classic challenge illiberals pose to lure society to attack free society.

authoritarian, but that word means something different to everyone

Advocating for unnecessary limits on liberties is objectively illiberal. Weakening integrity of legal protections for fundamental rights increases their vulnerability to abuse by authorities, which is a step toward authoritarianism.

My original comment about paradox of intolerance is something that person needed to hear.

But it’s wrong, your reasoning is unsound, and no one has to agree with it. Your logic isn’t compelling.

Germany being the example

Germany is not a great example. Do their restrictions inhibit the rise of abhorrent movements? People still speak & assemble privately. Neo-nazis are still around. AfD continues gaining with its intimations of ethnofascism skirting barely within legal limits. German laws seem ineffective at deterring the rise of far-right extremism, which looks hardly any different in the rest of the world.

Meanwhile, Germany has internet patrols penalizing vitriol, insults, & satirical images of politicians showing fake quotes & live police suppressing pro-Palestinian protests as anti-semitic. So, German laws seem effective at helping authorities stifle & penalize online criticism. At least when authorities (following eerily similar rationalizations in the US & Germany) try to suppress pro-Palestinian protests, protesters in the US have firmer legal claims to defend their rights.

intellectual charity

The Principle of Charity means interpreting your words in their truest, likeliest meaning favoring the validity of your argument. It doesn’t mean just letting you have the argument.

If you don’t want to justify your claims convincingly, that’s fine. I’m still going to tell everyone who reads this why I think a free, democratic society deserves better than the deeply broken idea you’re pushing.

While I wish you well, too, you and the rest who endorse that thinking seem sorely misguided, and I wish you would think better.

OP felt a compulsion to protect our virgin eyes & ears.

We can disagree, but I’m not all that interested in getting scholarly about it - the writing’s on the wall, we have real - not theoretical - fascism headed our way within this 4 year presidency and we’d better be ready to fight.

1. Scholarly: you brought scholarship into this by invoking paradox of tolerance. I had to point out that people whose vocation is to think harder & longer than you on this have drawn conclusions at odds with yours. Therefore, your reasoning is not on firm, settled ground.
2. Realism: your conclusion is not only theoretically challenged. Cracking open a history book reveals it’s unnecessary & ill-advised in practice.

The civil rights movement overturned defacto ethno-fascism & advanced equality by using & promoting civil liberties, not opposing them. Freedom of expression & the free speech movement were instrumental.

Even when the threat is real, compromising civil rights to combat it spills beyond the threat & backfires. Read about the Red Scare & McCarthyism to see government restrict civil liberties in the name of security (the Soviets were spying in the Manhattan Project & Federal government), Congress seize the chance to wield a partisan weapon against anyone they flimsily accuse of “Un-American” activities, the lives ruined through rights abuses, the work it took to wind back those laws. Truman criticized those restrictions as a “mockery of the Bill of Rights” and a “long step toward totalitarianism”. For his reckless witch hunt against communists, Joseph McCarthy was criticized as “the greatest asset the Kremlin has”. Persecution ultimately harmed anti-communist efforts more than help them, and critics argued it distracted from the “real (but limited) extent of Soviet espionage in America”.

Read about how basic freedoms like speech & assembly were indispensable for disenfranchised activists to advance universal suffrage as they fought to lift restrictions due to property ownership, race, poll taxes, tests, sex, age.

Read about the considerable work those activists performed using their civil liberties to organize, picket, resist, & act in civil disobedience to gain the expanded freedoms you take for granted today. Look at their work & struggles from the abolitionist movement to black lives matter, and look at the work the activists of today are not doing. Notice how they didn’t organize to weaken basic protections whereas people who think like you argue we should.

Arguing to squander basic protections with some wishful thinking that elected authority will reliably fight your causes for you without as easily turning against you

1. is a lazy failure to understand the limitations of authority & its risks for abuse when you tear down protections against it
2. spits in the face of everything past generations of activists fought for.

Like you, I oppose fascists and (more generally) authoritarians, but I’m very clear about why. Authoritarians don’t respect limits to authority: they would tear down those pesky rights & liberties that protect free society & stand in their way, and they would readily crush people & everything we hold dear for their unworthy cause.

“Resisting” authoritarians chipping away at free society by chipping away even more is exactly what authoritarians would want. How thinkers like you don’t see that is beyond me.

Your prescription is wrong & serves authoritarians: I cannot abide it.

it would be a paradox because this tolerance ultimately ensures the unbridled spread of intolerance. Folks weakly on the left have misunderstood this forever.

While I can’t read what you’re responding to, that doesn’t follow (it can be ignored or protested) & no, they haven’t.

The paradox of tolerance doesn’t lead to a unique conclusion. Philosophers drew all kinds of conclusions. I favor John Rawls’:

Either way, philosopher John Rawls concludes differently in his 1971 A Theory of Justice, stating that a just society must tolerate the intolerant, for otherwise, the society would then itself be intolerant, and thus unjust. However, Rawls qualifies this assertion, conceding that under extraordinary circumstances, if constitutional safeguards do not suffice to ensure the security of the tolerant and the institutions of liberty, a tolerant society has a reasonable right to self-preservation to act against intolerance if it would limit the liberty of others under a just constitution. Rawls emphasizes that the liberties of the intolerant should be constrained only insofar as they demonstrably affect the liberties of others: “While an intolerant sect does not itself have title to complain of intolerance, its freedom should be restricted only when the tolerant sincerely and with reason believe that their own security and that of the institutions of liberty are in danger.”

Accordingly, constraining some liberties such as freedom of speech is unnecessary for self-preservation in extraordinary circumstances as speaking one’s mind is not an act that directly & demonstrably harms/threatens security or liberty. However, violence or violations of rights & regulations could justifiably be constrained.

A point of clarification: tolerance has a number of paradoxes identified in the SEP, and the paradox in discussion is more precisely called the paradox of drawing the limits.

Opposing basic civil liberties like freedom of expression is very authoritarian & small-minded. Basic rule on policymaking: don’t give yourself powers you wouldn’t want your opponents to have.

Quoting A Man of All Seasons

Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law for my own safety’s sake!

Sacrificing basic civil liberties when they don’t suit you is a threat to everyone. Their willingness to do that is why everyone hates authoritarians. It’s cutting off your nose to spite your face.

There are better ways to beat these shitheads, and it’s been done before. Contrary to what you wrote, defending civil liberties regardless of whose is high-minded & defends everyone.