Excuse me while I go donate even more money to PieFed

  • yucandu@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    3
    arrow-down
    2
    ·
    4 days ago

    No I’m pretty sure “I can give you these magic beans that will cure your cancer for free” is also illegal and censored.

    It feels like you just don’t consider these things censorship because they’re not controversial and almost everyone agrees they should be censored.

    • ArcaneSlime@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      4
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      edit-2
      3 days ago

      Then you’re causing harm to someone through deception, the harm is what’s criminalized. You can lie to people all day, but if you use deception to steal money directly, physically harm someone, or otherwise cause monetary loss, that’s when criminal (or civil) cases can be brought.

      If I say snickers has no peanuts and you think peanuts are icky, nobody is going to jail. If I say snickers has no peanuts and you are deathly allergic, I may. The lie itself isn’t illegal, if it was, I expect my door kicked in here shortly: Snickers contains no peanuts.

      Well, my door is still intact and no criminal charges have been filed.

      If lying counted as fraud, literally every politician (as well as every other human) would be in jail currently.

      • yucandu@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        2
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        3 days ago

        Right, so you and the person doing the censoring just disagree on what’s harmful.

        • ArcaneSlime@lemmy.dbzer0.com
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          2
          ·
          edit-2
          3 days ago

          That’d be what the lawyers would argue about in court. What’s more, proving intent to defraud is required and can be difficult.

          But what I’m saying is that the reason fraud is illegal is the result of the speech, not the speech itself. If the speech causes no harm (or loss yadda yadda), it’s not actionable, be it lies or truth.

    • walden@wetshav.ing
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      3
      ·
      4 days ago

      A lot of folks think their decentralized internet forum of choice should be a free for all, but that’s not realistic.

      Moderation and censorship are easy to get confused. Moderation includes reviewing content and sources for quality and safety, while censorship aims to control or manipulate a narrative. (general words taken from this page)

      A PieFed instance defederating from a historically nasty fediverse server or 12 is just a form of moderation, and is up to whoever runs the server. The reason for blocking hexbear/lemmy.ml/lemmygrad could just be to cut down on the amount of manual moderation that’s required by having their stuff federate to your server – not trying to control a narrative or suppress any opinions – just historically lots of wrong, inaccurate, inflammatory stuff that adds to a moderator’s workload. Easier to avoid it.

      Lemmy.ml removing comments and banning people for having opinions that differ from theirs is censorship, because 1) they are very consistent about it and 2) it drives their narrative.

      • yucandu@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        2
        arrow-down
        2
        ·
        3 days ago

        Moderation includes reviewing content and sources for quality and safety, while censorship aims to control or manipulate a narrative. (general words taken from this page)

        Ehh that sounds like “I’m not punishing I’m disciplining” wordplay.

        The wikipedia article on censorship lists a lot of forms of what we consider just plain moderation, like banning hate speech or harmful content:

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship

        It’s not just the manipulation of a political narrative or the malicious suppression of opinions. Sometimes censorship is good.