I know, the maturity standard isn’t too high, but I still think that Lemmy is going rather well given where the userbase is from.
By “witch hunting” I mean “to claim that someone, a group, or a piece of content belongs to a socially undesirable group, without rational grounds to do so.”
Here’s a made up example. Let’s say that Bob uses a picture of Richard Stallman as his avatar. Alice sees it, and…
- [Alice] Bob! Why do you use that sick fuck as your avatar? You must be a paedophile!
- [Bob] Nah. I use this avatar because I agree with Stallman’s views on software freedom, and nothing else. I don’t agree with his opinions on sex and sexuality, specially not about children.
- [Alice] That’s bullshit, I bet that you abuse little children! MOOOODS!
- [Bob] No, Alice, I don’t. Stop lying.
- [Charlie] Alice, please, stop making shit up. Pleeeease.
- [Alice] CHARLIE YOU DISGUSTING PIECE OF SHIT WHY ARE YOU DEFENDING A PEDO???
Alice here is witch hunting. Alice has no grounds to claim that Bob is a paedophile, but she’s still doing it.
The “witches” often do exist, mind you - they’re racists, bigots, sexual offenders, paedophiles, incels, transphobes, fascists, so goes on. They are socially undesirable, and need to be kicked out. Even then, witch hunting should not be tolerated in online communities: what they do is intrinsically unjust, it makes their target feel like shit, it makes the whole community walk on eggs (because anything that they say or do might get distorted into “witch behaviour”), and it numbs people against the issue with the actual witches (just like the boy who cried wolves unwillingly protected the wolves, witch hunters unwillingly protect the actual “witches”).
I saw this plenty, plenty times in Reddit. But here in Lemmy it’s surprisingly more common, given the smaller userbase.
But I would argue that it is as true now as it was then: people don’t enjoy being on the receiving end of intolerance, hence tend to be intolerant right back, and yet that is as it should be.
Fighting back is good. Punching random people isn’t. Witch hunters do the later, not the former.
OpenStars@discuss.online 3 weeks ago
Speak for yourself! I want it known that *I* for one, am *very* immature!:-P
Ah, that part “without rational grounds to do so” makes such a huge difference doesn’t it? :-D
Like e.g.:
img
Ignoring all the genocide done by Russia, and China, and North Korea, but hyper-focusing on the not even direct but mere indirect aid to the actual genocide-doing people, and even then painting with an extremely broad brush and saying that nobody who thinks otherwise exists within the group on that “other side”.
I disagree though that it is directed at “random” people. Hexbears yes (it’s kinda their whole thing!:-P), perhaps Lemmygrad.ml too (whose content definitely appears on your instance) - though importantly, Lemmy.World (which this community is based in) defederates from both of those, and has ~80% of the monthly active users btw (thus the userbase “here” only partially but mostly may not be thought of to include those 2 instances, depending on how you look at it?) - and yes also that mod of Lemmy.ml who told the person to kill themselves seemed fairly random as well (yet all the more troublesome since lemmy.ml is federated by nearly every instance, the only exceptions being tiny single-admin ones). But the above image, note from the URL that it is from lemmy.ml, seems not entirely “random” to me - it is instead very much “directed”, at a particular group. As that style of propaganda tends very much to be… not “random” at all!
Although conservative Alt-Right sources appeared on Reddit as well, so both sites have a hefty amount of “alternative fact” sources. Moderation efforts are a more limiting resource on Lemmy so it makes sense that there is more of it here, overall. So long as we allow the lure of communities such as !firefox@lemmy.ml to sway us as we retain federation with those instances that not only allow but propagate that content, from the very site instance admins themselves, the situation will remain - the only recourse being for people to either leave their instances and go somewhere that allows defederation (either instance-wide such as the tiny lemmy.cafe or quokk.au; or switch to Mbin or PieFed that allows full content blocking of any instance that any user specifies, without needing admin approval).