this post was submitted on 13 Dec 2024
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Moderation is broken because there is no longer a consensus on what is "right" or "wrong". The very term implies that there is a moderate position that is allowed, and you cull the extremes.
That consensus in moderating used to be simple in most adult spaces - no aggression/abuse/fighting, no porn. Everything else was fine.
Now things have drifted - you have corporate censorship in social media to respond to some perceived need not to "endorse" views. But you also have users deciding some topics are not allowed to be discussed and certain view points are censored just because some people disagree with them. There seems to be a notion that you have to "protect" people from being offended or that certain ideas are just dangerous or wrong.
I've even seen a moderator on Lemmy describe "freedom of speech" as nothing more than a right wing wolf whistle and banning someone.
This whole CEO murder is just highlighting how a complex and multifaceted nuanced case cannot be reduced into a simple good vs evil narrative. The old mainstream media consensus that everyone shows "sympathy for victim, condemnation for the bad guy" is just restricting debate and discussion on something that raises complex and fundamental questions about our society.
The "consensus" on what viewpoints are allowed is breaking down and people are mistaking them personally being offended as a barometer of what is right or wrong.
We do need to protect people from the wrong opinions clearly. I was a free speech absolutist for most of my life because I was working on the false assumption that most other people thought like me. That people as a group were dumb but an individual person was smart. Or at least, reasonable and compassionate. It’s clear now that the idiots will just shout nonsense and if they do so loud enough and for long enough the ‘normal’ people in the middle listening on the sidelines will adopt it into their core values and be immune to reason or rationale otherwise.
These people can be convinced to think and do anything using logic which is barely coherent. Centralised moderation isn’t going to fix it but we need to figure out how to collectively censor this poisonous mind virus or it’ll tear us to shreds.
A minor point (but maybe English is a second language): what right wingers do is "dog whistle," as in a sound so high-pitched only dogs can hear it. A "wolf whistle" is, funny enough, a kind of non-verbal cat-call. That is, it's a sound expressing interest or approval, specifically its the hi-lo whistle like Phwooooot- WOOooooo.
https://youtu.be/eLbyGJgc7Uk