Reddit clone Voat, home to hate speech and QAnon, has shut down
arstechnica.comThe platform was a haven for communities deemed too racist or hateful for Reddit.
This community is meant to advocate privacy, security and freedom in an concise manner, free of prejudice bias, free of politics, free of cultist thoughts.
Arguing that you don’t care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don’t care about free speech because you have nothing to say. - Edward Snowden
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READ THE RULES
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Opinions are welcome, facts more so. Attack arguments, not people. Hating, baiting, trolling, flaming will be dealt with strictly.
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Discuss closed source software with caution. Advocating for it strongly (cult brigading) can be treated as violation of this rule.
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Editing titles of article links is strictly prohibited, unless and until the summarisation remains accurate to the context of the article or paper. Such link post will be removed without questioning.
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Targeting of any country, person or nation is strictly prohibited without valid reasoning. Evidence if not presented against the specific company/corporation/individual will be treated as personal attack and/or hate speech. This will result in a warning, then ban system.
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NO PERMA BANS! Ban system will work as follows:
1 day --> 3 day --> 1 week --> 2 weeks --> 3 weeks --> 1 month --> 3 months --> 6 months
Severity of the ban system will be dealt with based on degree of violation and circumstances.
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NO FACT-LESS EVIDENCES, NO FALSE RHETORIC Evidence has to be credible. The onus of this lies on the claimant. The same applies on the user who questions proven evidence. Violation of this rule will be dealt with strictly.
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Copycat posts serve to litter the community, increasing quantity and decreasing quality of posts. As such, posts will be removed. Repeated attempts will receive warning.
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I’m not really sure why free speech is coming up in the comments here in the context it is unless people aren’t reading and are assuming it was shut down by some external force.
Voat shut down because nobody was willing to foot the bill. They’re free to pay to continue hosting it just like every other site online, but they apparently don’t care enough about it to do so.
It’s about co-opting rational talking points to wedge in their extremist ideology into mainstream dialog. It’s a central tenet of contemporary fascism.
It has proven to be such an effective mechanism. For some reason people fall for it 99 times out of 100 they’ll allow the script to be flipped so they find themselves defending their morality against neo-nazis.
Really? A free society tolerates all speech, even hateful speech. But it does nor tolerate all actions. What’s the flaw with that?
There are still exceptions, like blackmail is not normally permitted as freedom of speech. But that’s a different issue.
Really.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech_laws_by_country
Gee…
Shucks.
What will all those hateful ignorants do? :face with rolling eyes:
They have Gab, Dissenter and Parler. TRUE AUTHENTIC AMERICAN FREE SPEECH ™
Yup, and they could create new sites any time they like, too.
Seems like the haters are astroturfing even here nowadays. Not surprised. Free speech is a meme.
Show yourselves cowards ! lol
They are hiding behind the firewall of our lives.
Heh, kind of is, isn’t it?
I really love these attempts at extreme, free speech alternative sites. They quarantine extreme people off away from mainstream sites. They fail to reach mainstream acceptability they are trying for, and they eventually die, scattering the trolls to the wind to try and formulate their next plan.
I’m not going to miss 'em
well, not all of their userbase was alt-right. so it kinda sucks to label them.
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nazi’s hide under the excuse of “free speech” because it’s the only way for their dangerous ideas to have a chance of spreading.
To drill down on this a little bit, there’s a specific thing that they do. Any time their ideas get disputed because the substance of what they say is horrific, other fellow nazis will rush to their defense by only talking about free speech, trying to change the subject to whether their speech is allowed.
I agree with iszomer. I think each argument must be judged on their own merit rather than falling to groupthink, which is a right wing and/or nazi orangutan level of trait.
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A majority of people on these platforms are extremist right wingers, to be fair. Extremist left exists on Twitter and does not need things like Gab.
Universal Declaration of Human Rights Article 19:
As far as I see it, alt-right speech is as protected under these rules as any other. Don’t get me wrong though, I do not support Nazi ideology at all. But I do support free speech, and the right to recieve and impart information and ideas through ANY MEDIA without interference is not really how the world works right now.
Yes, but that doesn’t third parties have any responsibility to provide you with the media. If you want to spread your idea, and nobody wants to welcome you on their media platforms, you have to build your own. Imagine if newspapers published anything that was sent to them. When using lemmy, I’m using the dev’s servers, their code and their time as moderator. They have every right to be selective on the time of content they pay to host. If someone wants to host alt-right content, they can, but they will have to to host it or find someone willing to do it. Voat wasn’t capable of that.
If governments (or any other entity) were to force them to shut down, it would be an infringement of free speech, but it’s not what happened. You should also note that no moderation at all would leave the door open to political and corporate interference in public discussion to spread discord or at the benefit of some people.
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fair, but most of them aren’t actually dangerous.
Freedom of speech does not imply equality of speech. Voat’s users are allowed to have hateful beliefs, and they are allowed to spread those hateful beliefs. When Voat shut down this was not a blow to the institution of free speech, it was a blow to the network of far-right extremism. Voat’s users are still allowed to hold their beliefs, and still allowed to spread those beliefs, but now they will have to find new ways to re-connect to each other.
The Centre for Humane Technology coined the phrase “Freedom of speech is not freedom of reach”, just because someone must be allowed to have an idea does not mean their idea must receive equal representation.
I’m not sure lemmy is supposed to be a free speech forum. I get the impression the devs want it to be a space for good non-confrontational discussion. **Not ** a place where all topics are welcome. Above all they want to exclude potentially offensive discussions.
Actually this is clearly stated by the devs. Have to five them credit for being clear and transparent about the free speech / censorship issue.
I mean, I’ve been an openly unrepentant asshole on here periodically. Haven’t been banned yet. The issue isn’t “potentially offensive conversations,” but bigotry.