I am thinking about creating an outpost in Lemmy for Reddit’s r/moderatepolitics subreddit. Briefly, the goal of the subreddit is to bring together a variety of viewpoints with rules that are mostly limited to not attacking other users and some operational rules (e.g. no editorialized headlines). These loose rules have allowed us to bring together voices from across the political spectrum for discussions that usually get stuck in echo chambers.
When I was looking through the Code of Conduct for the lemmy.ml instance, I noticed that it bans “oppressive” speech. That raised an immediate red flag for me. That term is so vague and broad as to leave an immense amount of discretionary power to an admin making a moderation decision. I know several of the admins on this instance are very left wing. Nothing wrong with that, but many on the left hold a rather expansive view of what oppressive speech is that includes even moderate or center-right discourse, never mind further right.
Is there any room to build this type of community on lemmy.ml? Or will we be forced to choose between our own instance or living with the threat of intervention that labels some elements of community discourse as oppressive?
I see how calling it “hate speech” is more intuitive for lots of people. It totally makes sense. However, “hate speech” is narrower than “oppressive speech” because it is limited to legally protected categories. This expands upon the phrase “the law is not necessarily moral”, adding “the law may ignore some categories and systems of oppression”.
For example, take the United States. Its supreme court has ruled that statistical evidence cannot be used in the court system to show that there are racial disparities, no matter how overwhelming that evidence is.
This only covers racial disparities, but you can expand that to see that many other categories of discrimination —no matter how overwhelming the evidence of their existence is— become invisible by not being considered or protected by the law and therefore not being considered hate speech.
This shows that “hate speech” covers certain categories, but it’s much narrower than “oppressive speech”.
That’s why “oppressive speech”, as a phrase, is necessary, but it doesn’t define it. The explanation given by @dessalines@lemmy.ml seems good!