- cross-posted to:
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- 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.
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How decentralized is Funkwhale? Does everything go through their website, or do you host your own version and you get the music directly from the artists?
I thought funkwhale was dead. Well thats neat.
Also I think it’ll be pretty interesting what they deem as alt-right. Lotta country music’s gonna get banned.
i think they’re only banning explicitly nazi and ws shit
I support that fight against Nazi content, but hard-coded blacklists in a open-source Fediverse software? Something is off here.
Hope they find a better way. Make it the default behaviour, include it in all tutorials, defederate.
Yeah I like being able to opt-in to a specific block list, or having it enabled by default but individual instances can disable it (more to neutralize bad faith arguments from trolls who want to normalize nazism), even though I want it effectively banned.
On the other hand, open-source software enables one to disable or edit those blocklists with a simple patch. It’s just an extreme way of making it the default behavior, and therefore making their political statement stronger.
There might be a better way, but I’m not really concerned with this implementation.
Not just a patch, you also have to set up the build chain to compile it.
Ah yes, I forgot about that (I’ve mostly been using scripting-langage web apps)
So all I have to do to fuck with Funkwhale users is tag some popular artists on a different site?
It’s like 6 or 7 tags that all have the word “nazi” or “white power” in the tag. As long as Sam Hunt tracks are not being encoded that way he should be good.
is it the app like lemmy or the servers moderated by diff people
Are they blocking illegal content (such as content that promotes violence or issues threats) and content against the terms of service (like hateful, trolling, or disrespectful content)?
Or are they banning people based on their political beliefs or who they voted for, even if their content is not political in any way whatsoever?
And how are they defining alt right? A literal Neo Nazi? Or someone who voted Republican?
based on their political beliefs
Nazism being the political belief.
And how are they defining alt right?
It’s music tags that literally have phrases like nazi or white power in the phrase.
For the time being, it seems like they’re primarily targeting White Supremacist and Neo-Nazi content, but it’s one of those things where the scope could open up to include a lot of different music subgenres. That being said, the mechanism is purely genre-based, it doesn’t directly target individual artists.
And how are they defining alt right? A literal Neo Nazi? Or someone who voted Republican?
Why repeat yourself?
It is one of these cases where that “OR” approaches a singular circle.
Because despite the insistence for years, those are not the same thing. Full stop.
No shit. They are not the same thing, they are heavily overlapping adjacent sets of people. You draw the line at alt-right, you are left with less than 20% of Republican voters, but a 100% of MAGA hat-bearers. This distinction is more theoretical than practical.
They’re not nazis, just NSDAP voters concerned about the state of the economy
This is what I suspected. I can get behind blocking actual Neo Nazis and hate groups, and illegal content, but when it becomes “blocking anyone who disagrees with me” that can easily be abused, especially if the people running the list can’t tell the difference between Nazis, MAGA, Republicans, Centrists, and Libertarians. Or someone who can’t tell the difference between a tankie, a communist, a socialist, a democratic socialist, or an anarchist. Contrary to some people’s beliefs, all of these things are not the same.
People are welcome to block whomever they wish and have the power to curate their own feeds, but when someone else does it, and there is no way to opt out of that, then it becomes censorship or suppression of information.
The article does explain some of these. Look at the list of banned genres, it’s literal neo-Nazism.
@deadsuperhero Laughing in MONO 🔊
Yeah, I don’t even know how you would do that but if a platform I’m hosting and managing tries to tell me what content is or isn’t permissable it’s going in the bin.
Don’t need some big brother crap on my system controlling what I do with my hardware.
tell me what content is or isn’t permissable
Nazism being the content
it’s going in the bin
oh no! anyway.
they aren’t controlling what you do, though. they’re just refusing to enable far-right content. software isn’t a natural right that is taken away when someone refuses to help you do what you want. it is a fruit of labor that enables you to do something you wouldn’t be able to do otherwise
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.
that refused to play certain songs
Nazism songs.
The existence of Mien Kamph in a library’s collection doesn’t make the librarian a Nazi,
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.
Indeed, the way to combat bad media is to dispute it with good media, not hide it away and pretend it doesn’t exist.
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.
