Hamas is used as a byword for the paramilitary organisation Al Qassam in foreign media. The Hamas government outside of Al Qassam is almost boringly normal. Like the Gaza Health Ministry is part of the Hamas Government.
I wish more people volunteered to moderate online communities. Especially political ones.
It’s taking way too long for normal people to realize they have a stake and imperative to be part of these communities. Speech is shaped here, and many God awful decisions have to be made at scale.
There is no cost to holding the position you stated, and no one wants to get their hand dirty, or see how the sausage is made. You have to regular decide if this comment is actually hate speech, actual debate, or someone “asking questions”. Who knows what the actual false positive/negative rates are.
The sheer amount of filters, regexes and slur lists needed to stay abreast of toxicity and hate speech are absurdism at its best.
Nothing happens without an informed citizenry. The foundations of speech online are collapsing and weak. There need to be more citizen view points from the ground, deciding how they want this domain to operate.
> It was a 2021 case involving Andy Grote, a local politician, that captured the country's attention. Grote complained about a tweet that called him a "pimmel," a German word for the male anatomy. His complaint triggered a police raid and accusations of excessive censorship by the government.
A police raid for calling a politician a dick. Let it sink.
That was a overall very rarely occurring abuse of power of a politician in charge of leading local law enforcement. It was declared illegal later. And you take that as a proof for what about the whole of Germany?
> > His unit has successfully prosecuted about 750 hate speech cases over the last four years.
> But sure, abuse of power is so rare. Nothing to see here.
This would make your point if those hate speech cases were all the same as your Andy Grote example.
Otherwise it's like pointing at one defendant winning a road traffic law case due to dashcam footage showing the police were making things up, as evidence that all road traffic law prosecutions are abusing power.
You're missing the point. That's exactly how democratic governments cloak fascist behavior everywhere: The punishment IS THE PROCESS.
People in Germany (and the UK and other places) have to self censor because they don't want to be visited by the police and then dragged through courts for months/years, even though it eventually gets thrown out and you get to walk away innocent, you still had to suffer the entire prosecution process, which nobody wants to, so they keep their mouth shut.
The stress toll of having to go through all that annoying grind through the legal system, even though you did nothing wrong and what the government is doing will be considered illegal, is how the government preemptively keeps people in line.
>That was a overall very rarely occurring abuse of power
Very rare?! Unless there's direct consequences with actual punishment on government officials for illegally abusing the legal system on citizens just because they hear stuff they don't like, then they will keep throwing prosecutions at innocent people just to keep them in check since currently they have nothing stopping them from this abuse turning from rare to being the norm.
Except for the Grote case you can very well criticize politicians, even in somewhat questionable language without LE raiding your home. That one case was an exception.
Just look at any political thread in any social media in German language. There is plenty of criticism or even insults regarding government officials, without them getting raided. It is only extreme cases (often with calls for violence) which trigger LE. So the chilling effect is missing or at least it has little influence.
A little bit like a country's leader calling for the death penalty for a decorated pilot and astronaut who reminded service members of their duty to reject unlawful orders.
In Italy there's a politician named Gasparri who has made a career (30+ years) of barring himself behind Parlamentary immunity and insulting on citizens/journalists. When they respond he sues them for libel or similar asking moral damages.
It does. That's why GrapheneOS left France; Signal is considering doing so to if ChatControl passes. Von Der Leyen and Breton clearly mentioned the possibility of banning X. And there are many other "signals".
But yeah we get it, there's bad censorhip (Iran, China, Russia), and there is the good censorhip, sorry, i meant "protection of children", when it's the EU. :o)
> there's bad censorhip (Iran, China, Russia), and there is the good censorhip
I understand that you're being facetious here, but this is literally true.
Words kill people sometimes, and in the same way that my right to swing my arm stops where your nose begins your right to say whatever you want stops where my safety begins.
Or to rephrase it, nobody can have free speech at all if others are allowed to threaten your health and safety for it, which automatically implies that violent and hateful speech must be curtailed. It is a variation on the paradox of tolerance.
Yes, there is room to debate exactly where the line is, but the fact that there is a line is fairly well settled except amongst the rabid.
I dont need Thierry Breton or Van Der Leyen to tell me which podcasts I am allowed to listened to, but thanks for the well-intentionned thoughts for my safety anyway.
I dont care at all for your safety, I care for mine and that of my family and I think it's fair to insist that you don't get to put my life in jeopardy because you feel like you should be immune to the consequences of your speech.
I would be very interested in hearing some of these words capable of killing. I have only heard of such words in fiction so I am quite surprised to learn they are real.
In the 1950s, the Reverend Ian Paisley would organise rallies in the streets of Belfast and when speaking at those rallies, read out the addresses of Catholic homes and businesses on those streets. The crowd would then attack those homes and businesses.
If there is a direct call to action then they should be held responsible, but like I said I don't know what the context is or what was said in the Belfast situation.
The words the Nazis said were irrelevant. They directed people to kill and as such they were guilty.
I think someone who goes and attacks somebody is guilty. They cannot use the excuse they were following orders. The words didn't take control of them like a spell. They made the conscious choice to commit violence and as such the guilt is on them, not the bat.
We've had several World Wars (so far) thanks largely to words. I'm not sure what your contention really is, except that maybe you dont like the idea of freedom coming with responsibility for the ways in which you use it.
Nobody died from the words? Did Hitler say millions should die and millions dropped dead? It was the war, the concentration camps, etc that killed people.
Yes, words led to that, but the onus of the deaths are on those who did the killing, not the words. Could the Nazis in the Nuremberg trials have used the excuse that it was actually the words doing the killing and as such they were innocent?
If you want to say words kill, in the way you are saying, then words have killed most people that have been killed. If we take an example where somebody gets turned down and then gets killed for it, would you say words killed that person? Should we ban turning people down? You do want words that kill to be banned after all.
I'm reminded of a phrase I leaned as a kid that starts with sticks and stones...
Ahhh. Another of Elon's absolutists? Fine all words are ok now. So we make all these things legal:
Obscenity in any context - Won't someone not think of the children?
Child sexual abuse material - Fine in the new regime as long as you didn't record it yourself, right?
Incitement to imminent lawless action - You only told them who to murder, right?
True threats and harassment - All those people can just die. Speech is the ONLY freedom that matters. Serious expressions of intent to commit unlawful violence be damned.
Fighting words - Sure - Bait them till they hit you then the cops can come arrest THEM. Aren't you clever! And totally free from consequences for your actions! Ideal!
Defamation - Why CAN'T we just make stuff up about our enemies, friends, and loved ones? Those suckers rights are far less important than ours after all!
Fraud and false commercial speech - All legal now! Finally the freedom to rip off old ladies and the mentally unwell! Thank god for liberty!
IP violations - Again, free speech is absolute now so nobody can own anything that can be conveyed via language. Yay!
Or... we could just be reasonable about it and say that the limit's of free speech are where they start to impinge on other peoples liberties. Your call.
First, let me start off saying I don't like Elon and think he is a terrible person.
Next, my issue is primarily on your issue with hateful speech, I should have been more clear. I wrote it on my phone and didn't feel like expanding upon what I was trying to say. I should have conveyed my thoughts better.
I will explain my position more clearly.
I think pushing what you are when it comes to hateful speech is dangerous. Using your own logic the comment I am replying to could be illegal. You said "hateful speech must be curtailed". What you said about Elon is clearly derogatory and could easily be considered hateful. If the laws were in place, I think with how petty Elon is, he would go after people who are critical of him like yourself.
Having emotional harm is not really something that can be determined which is the primary harm that hate speech causes. Every person is different so you wouldn't have a way to know what you could say. The only way to know if something is hateful is to ask the person if they were intending it to be hateful or if the recipient found it hateful.
When you have vague terms that could be determined by emotion rather than an objective measure you are going to run into issues. Obviously sometimes there will be subjective measures, but we need to minimize them whenever possible.
If somebody is directing somebody to kill somebody that is causing physical harm towards an individual and should be illegal.
Going back to the world war examples. Hitler would be guilty of directing people to cause physical harm.
If Hitler said to kill somebody I don't consider that to be different than if Hitler just pointed and somebody and then turned his finger into a gun. The issue wasn't what he said or didn't say, it was what he was directing somebody to do.
If Hitler said something like we have economic issues and Jews run the banks, that would probably be considered hateful by many people. I don't think it should be illegal. If Hitler added let's kill the Jews, that would be directing people to commit violence and would not be legal.
Hitler hating the Jews in the first statement doesn't mean he should go to jail. It didn't cause a normal person to go out and commit the Holocaust.
> What you said about Elon is clearly derogatory and could easily be considered hateful.
It was from an actual quote of his in which he claimed to be a "free speech absolutist." I did mean it in a derogatory way, because just repeating it makes him seem silly, but it's an actual quote so not slanderous or anything.
That said, I agree that nobody has the right to live a life free of criticism and some folks need thicker skin (including myself from time to time).
>If somebody is directing somebody to kill somebody that is causing physical harm towards an individual and should be illegal
Well there you go. We both agree that some speech has to be illegal, we just disagree as to exactly where that line is. I think it's perfectly reasonable for us to disagree about *exactly* where the line is, as long as everyone understands that there is a line.
To me that line is very simple: My rights end where yours start, and vice versa. As far as I can tell it's the only sensible basis for any kind of society. You can make it more complicated if you want, but the only way to get more "freedom" than with my plan is to take away someone else's and I'm not cool with that.
>"[...] But we should claim the right to suppress them [intolerant ideologies] if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols."
The paradox of tolerance is not about censoring others. If anything, censorship lands on the side of the intolerant of this paradox.
How do people keep track of all these versions and releases of all these models and their pros/cons? Seems like a fulltime hobby to me. I'd rather just improve my own skills with all that time and energy
Unless you're interested in this type of stuff, I'm not sure you really need to. Claude, Google, and ChatGPT have been fairly aggressive at pushing you towards whatever their latest shiny is and retiring the old one.
Only time it matters if you're using some type of agnostic "router" service.
> I'd rather just improve my own skills with all that time and energy
That's what I would recommend, it's time better spent. I use AI occasionally to bounce some questions around or have some math jargon explained in simpler terms (all of which I can verify with external sources) using the free version of chatgpt or gemini or whatever I'm feeling that day, without caring about whatever version the model is. I don't need an AI to write code for me because writing the code is not really the hard part of solving a problem, in my opinion.
For me it's simple. I did my research, settled on Anthropic and Claude and got the Pro plan at ~$20/month. That way I only have to keep track of what Anthropic are offering, and that isn't even necessary as the tools I use for AI-supported development (Claude Code for VS Code extension, Xcode Intelligence and Claude Desktop) offer me to use the newsest models as soon as they are released.
Same as when the EU puts a ton of restrictions on farmers within the EU countries -- Co2, fertiliser requirements, etc. -- making food so expensive to produce many go out of business and the remainder become practically luxury food, and then countries just end up having to import food from countries outside the EU _without_ those restrictions, simply offloading the environmental burden on "some other countries somewhere".
Food is actually pretty cheap in the EU (in absolute prices compared to the US and relative to income compared to most other places), so I don't know what you mean.
EU is a net food exporter and the only agricultural products the EU isn't self-sufficient in are animal feed, sugar, and tropical fruits & vegetables.
So, no, EU farmers are struggling at the moment because they aren't as competitive on the global markets as they used to. Not because Europeans aren't buying their food anymore.
I would love to know why it's considered a feature for you.
I remember messing with bouncers and reading the backlog from a 3rd party page. Bots that would ping other members when they come online. It was cumbersome.
Because I prefer online conversations to work like IRL ones: Ephemeral. Sure each individual might keep their own log if they want but the server itself doesn’t and setting aside all the issues with modern datasets being used for training all sorts of algorithms, just the concept of stepping into a digital room without all the baggage of the last twenty hours of conversation is _mentally refreshing_. It also changes people’s behaviour for the better IME.
Saving logs is gross, chats should be ephemeral. In any case there's HistServ and IRCv3 /chathistory nowadays, so if you really want it you can have it.
That all the minute garbage everyone posts is preserved forever in an unfiltered state I think is a root cause of the mental degradation that results from using Discord: kids don't have anywhere to 'post into the void' anymore. Preserving past events and relationships through oral history as opposed to a big monolithic search engine entails a far more human element to IRC.
But on IRC you had your own log, and sometimes the server made the full logs public. It was just cumbersome to access. What I said and you said in my presets was still logged.
It's a muddy middle ground where neither you are I are satisfied. Far from perfect.
I wanted to disagree but I really miss IRC internet. Saving everything we ever said online was a mistake. We need to focus on ephemeral chat making a comeback.
Saving logs has been essential for work, in the past, because we were always to write real documentation when necessary. Mind you, this was local to our machine.
Nitro cancelled, all boosts for my servers cancelled, have recommended my communities all do the same. It'll be a lot less smooth but we can go back to IRC + Mumble.
Enshittification and profit-maxing strikes down yet another decent piece of software. Rest in piss.
Bringing up net zero in a thread about semiconductor manufacturing is a complete non sequitur. Fabs run on electricity which is quite easy produce without emitting any CO2.
They may be but that doesn’t make them wrong. I don’t keep track of what everyone on any “side” tall about and how many percentages do what. That’s noise. The arguments are valid regardless of who says them.
I must be misreading.
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