Based on concerns from both the admin team and most users here, the lemmy.ml admin team decided to add wolfballs.com to our blocklist. There is just too much reactionary content that breaks almost all the rules we have here.
It’s natural for open instances like this one to develop blocklists organically, and so far we’ve only felt it necessary to block 2 instances. If there’s any concerns about other instances that we should keep an eye on, let us know.
But that’s just it, that’s literally what free speech is. There’s a downside to it, sure sometimes ignorant morons do in fact use it to spread hateful shit, but this is 2021, “hate speech” can be as simple as a disagreement on ANYTHING at this point, so if we draw a line, where does it end?
If I go on a mainstream forum and say I don’t think my kid should get a vaccine that hasn’t proven itself in kids, I’m spreading “misinformation”, except I’m not, I’m stating fact. They haven’t been tested enough. My kid has 2 friends at school that had nice trips to the hospital after being vaccinated because their parents couldn’t get the needle in their arm fast enough. I’m not an anti-vaxxer, but I’m also not stupid. You’re not allowed to have an opinion that goes against mainstream without having a political buzzword attached to you and having your statement wiped out of existence. That’s a very dangerous line to walk just to shut up some ignorant trolls that would have been ignored anyways.
Bad faith actors weaponize liberal virtues like free speech to support the spread hate, toxicity and misinformation. This became a thing around 2014-2015 with gamergate and created a model that is followed by angry online mobs to this day.
One of beautiful things about federation is that it defangs these arguments. There’s no legal sense in which free speach claims actually apply here, and there’s no conceptual sense in which it’s being denied. There’s no actual legal entitlement to free speech on any particular federated server, and you nevertheless have access to the underlying technology and the freedom to express yourself on the platform.
This structure makes it easy to see when the mask falls off, because you give people what they claim they want, and it turns out that it’s not enough, because what they really want is access to a captive audience with no constraints on behavior.
There are also other inputs to cultivation of an atmosphere where interactivity and creativity flourish that have a lot to do with avoiding poison, hate and arguments, but this dimension tends to be totally ignored by people who claim they are trying to protect such values by invoking the principle of free speech. Which, again, is a mask-off indicator.
I think for complaints about free speech to be taken seriously, it is helpful to proactively demonstrate that you care at least as much about the phenomenon of bad faith weaponizing of liberal values, which is what these rules exist to address, and are coming from a place of shared concern and not just trying to open up new captive audiences to trolls.