- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- censorshipnews
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- censorshipnews
The Funkwhale music platform is alive and in active development, and they’re working on a feature to filter far-right artists off the network. Some Fediverse self-hosters are divided on letting a third party decide what should be allowed in their library.
Right, but for them to do so requires a level of monitoring what you use and open piece of software for, which is unacceptable to me. If you had an old style mp3 player that refused to play certain songs it would be seen as broken at best. If that selection of songs got updated at the discretion of some third party you start walking into ministry of truth territory.
This is different from something like YouTube or whatever hosted service refusing to platform content, this would cross into directly controlling personal consumption by forced removal. We call it bad when people start banning books, but it’s ok so long as it’s our person selecting the bans?
The existence of Mien Kamph in a library’s collection doesn’t make the librarian a Nazi, and it doesn’t force the content onto the public.
Nazism songs.
No but 100 copies of back issues of “Being A Nazi In 2025 The Magazine” probably would, and the present case is more like the latter.
And someone who is against Nazis might want to read Mien Kamph, not because they agree with Hitler, but because they want to understand the enemy so they can be better equipped to stop Nazis.
Indeed, the way to combat bad media is to dispute it with good media, not hide it away and pretend it doesn’t exist.
Somewhat harder to do in the context of music like the app in question, but still not wrong. I keep copies of some old wartime propaganda cartoons around just for the ability to put context when talking about past events, despite them being pretty tasteless by modern standards.
I would call this a marketplace of ideas fallacy. Rumor and misinformation rise to the top ever bit as much as good argument, and poisoning those conversations with bad faith is now part of an explicit ideological strategy to weaponize those spaces. That phenomenon is as real as thoughtful deliberation, I would say more so.
So if you believe "combat bad with good’ works as a matter of practice, I think that argument is obviously unsustainable. If it’s “bad things will happen but we should keep it that way as a matter of principle” it’s at least a more coherent argument. I wouldn’t agree with it but I can understand why someone would find it at least a respectable idea.
You call it a fallacy, but to propose that covering your eyes and ears makes the problem go away is hardly a solution.
My issue is not the removal of bad content from the community, but the enforcement of it at a software level.
Much like any other software in the fedi system there can be seen as three levels of the community:
1: The global fedi where instances communicate across to each other, or in the case of problem instances, don’t and they’re cut off.
2: The local instance (or pod as they’re called in this case) with a few to many thousand users each where local rules are enforced by community admins.
3: The individual where you have the choice to follow certain people/groups or not and block those you see as problems.
Now those three layers make for a pretty potent filtration system in themselves making the baked in decisions by the software author fairly redundant at best, but that’s not the end point. Say someone for whatever reason had a reason to store an archive of propaganda for studies, and they mean to share that with colleges in some project. They may set up a private pod or a few in a small collective to accomplish the goal. Forcing that filter at the software level makes it impossible to do in that way.
So there’s already a nazi filter around the system in the form of this multi step sieve for banning these things, doing so at the software level though puts a censors button in the hands of a single person or small group of people who then exercise control over even niche cases where private collections are affected.