The problem with platforms advertising that they’re free speech platforms is that you’ll get a lot of people who gives no flying fucks about freedom of speech, they care about that specific discourse that got them banned from other platforms, and only a few people who actually care about free speech as a principle.
And that backtracks all the way into
- The false dichotomy that freedom of speech is binary (either you have it or you don’t). It’s quantitative - you have more or less of it, never full or empty.
- That nasty, robotic tendency of plenty social media users to stick to the words themselves, instead of the underlying concepts. Cue to “ackshyually”. In this case “free speech” makes them think about some random law of some random country, what it allows and what it doesn’t, instead of thinking on the principle itself.
- The incorrect belief that only people above you in a hierarchy can lower your freedom of speech, when we do it all the time. (For example: specially stupid users reduce the freedom of speech of the others, as they discourage their participation.)
Once you work around those three, you realise that, in a lot of situations, forbidding a discourse actually increases the freedom of speech of some other group; so sometimes you need to do it to maximise the overall freedom of speech of all parties involved.
In other words, “free speech platform” is not actually “free speech platform,” rather it is a dogwhistle.
In other words, “free speech platform” is not actually “free speech platform,” rather it is a dogwhistle.
Often, but not always. It’s a mistake to immediately assume that it is one (the reason is at #2). Because sometimes it’s just the result of cluelessness over the three things that I listed.
What will decide if Squabbles’ admins are genuinely dogwhistling are their future actions. The dogs will get on the garden; let’s see if they shoo the dogs or give them treats. (I think that there’s some chance that they shoo the dogs, based on “With the exception of racist content, the use of slurs (racial or otherwise), targeted harassment, and incitement of violence”).
I’d argue, it’s always a dogwhistle. You might not realize you’re using a dogwhistle, but you definitely are.
I disagree because any and all words and expressions can be used to bring the dogs to the garden. Coupled with your reasoning, this would mean that all words and expressions are always dogwhistles.
Instead I think that it’s better to see a word/expression as a dogwhistle if it’s within a certain context, and that context is mostly available to a hate group but not to outsiders. This has a bunch of consequences*, but in this specific case it means that we’d need to look for further actions and words from Squabbles’ admins to know if it’s a dogwhistle or not.
Or even a lack of actions/words. If transphobic and related content becomes commonplace in their site, and they do nothing against it, I think that their very silence would be already enough to label it as a dogwhistle.
*e.g. it explains why dogwhistles are often found alongside each other, or why they keep changing, or even how they actually work on a discursive level.
so I totally get your point. For example, a therapy group that says, “this is a free speech area” and has 8 members who are all queer, would probably not mean it as a dogwhistle, and in that case, it also probably would not be one. But also, they wouldn’t be saying it to anyone other than those 8 members.
The thing is, in this case it legit does not matter the intent, they are saying it on a public chat forum. That makes it a dogwhistle regardless of intentionality, and it will be recognized as such, because if you say that on a public platform on the internet, guess who will hear it.
And now no matter what their intention is, if they didn’t want it to be a dogwhistle, it was one, and now their moderation is 10000x as difficult, because look who they’ve attracted the attention of now - and chased away.
I don’t care about intent either, and I think that you’re right not caring. I think that our major point of disagreement is fairly small - if being a public area already offers enough context to make it a dogwhistle. I think that it’s still in the area where that implicature (“this is a free speech area” +> “rev up those hate discourses”) can be cancelled.
And now no matter what their intention is, if they didn’t want it to be a dogwhistle, it was one, and now their moderation is 10000x as difficult, because look who they’ve attracted the attention of now - and chased away.
Yeah - regardless of dogwhistle or not, it was a fucking stupid move. Someone mentioned in the thread that nicknames like “arian1488” are already starting to pop up; if they aren’t looking for this sort of user, they just made expurging them 2000% more difficult.
This is why when a social media site gets past a certain size, the admin team and the moderation need to be clearly defined, and siloed from each other’s core responsibilities, so the admin team focuses on running the site and the mod team focuses on making it sing.
Looks like the people actually moderating clearly had a handle on the situation. The admin was clearly overworked and didn’t agree with the direction the community was taking, and made a quick decision that was poorly thought out.
The reason admins are admins is because they’re good at running machines. You can turn a machine off if it’s broken, and change how it runs with the flip of a switch.
A community requires a much different approach, and never, no matter how wise the decision, reacts well to being told how to act. It takes a different skill set to properly moderate and run a community than it does to run a server - in fact most admins I know make notoriously bad moderators (myself included, although I’m no longer an admin).
To be honest, the admin here is acting exactly like your stereotypical libertarian tech-bro computer guy who pays lip service to the left while pocketing the more palatable pieces of the philosophy of the right. I’ve worked with a lot of them in tech. LGBTQ+ is hard stretch for these guys in general - they’ll declare gays have rights but won’t march in Pride, use slurs when in like company, and generally see LGBTQ+ as a lifestyle choice and not an inescapable biological state of being.
They don’t understand that it’s not a switch you can flick on and off.
Just glad I’m on the Fediverse where this particular admin’s meltdown doesn’t matter too much, but I have a feeling Squabblr’s fate is going to be the same as Voat (which was cool for about two weeks before the alt-right overran it).
Very good points, especially on siloing the admin from the mods. Like you said, the mods had been doing a great job performing damage control from the last few rounds of drama.
I’ve said this before, but I don’t envy an admin for a social media site. I certainly wouldn’t want to do it. So I get he was stressed, and had been getting a lot of backlash, but again he could have stepped back and let his team handle it.
I went on Squabblr.co to check the news out and one of the first posts I saw was from user “14ss8bb8” talking about how transphobia isn’t hate speech.
Yeah that place just became Voat 2.0. What a fucking idiotic decision.
Welp, looks like that’s the end for Squabblr. Most of the front page is people hating on this decision and announcing plans to go to Discuit (another non-fediverse Reddit alternative). Turns out that, if there’s an equal alternative to go to, people WON’T stick around when you let in fascists and bigots.
Gross. Once kbin stabilized after those first few days full of Reddit refugees, I stopped going to squabbles, but I made a point of deleting my account today. The dev was oddly secretive and non-collaborative, had a weird cadre of posters extolling his virtues, and his only presence on Reddit was half-baked shit in an entrepreneur subreddit. Now, I have to admit I was expecting a more mainstream enshittification as he tried to monetize, not a full-on (and super quick!) Voat situation.
my experience is eerily similar to yours. Used it a bit in the first few days, popped in on occasion. Deleted my account today. When I first went on, one of the questions I asked was “is this FOSS or privately owned” and got bombarded with that cadre of users explaining why it’s better and safer for it to be owned by one person and that Jake would never make bad decisions like this exact one. At one point a user was being so agressive about how I should just trust Jake that I said I must be talking to his mom.
I also briefly had a Voat account when I thought Reddit was cracking down too much/too arbitrarily, and quickly realized that I was not in good company. I’ve been very optimistic about this Reddit exodus because it really doesn’t have the same ideological bent to it, so the diaspora isn’t just the dregs of reddit.
I just checked it out after seeing this post.
I just don’t understand why most are dead set on moving to discuit (?). I have absolutley nothing against that site but…
Come on. Reddit kicked your balls. Squabblr just basically suddenly decided to fuck you in the ass. And now you’re moving to another centralized platform where things can drastically change at the whims of a few individuals who are in charge? Haven’t you had enough? Smfh.
Edit: oh it seems they also changed the TOS to be more reddit-like. IE: your data is theirs. Lol.
Can you provide more context? Maybe the posts that are being linked to in that screenshot?
Here’s the link: https://squabblr.co/u/jayclees/post/KB0LM3g1oy
That site is really difficult to use.
