• Synthead@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    32
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    Yeah, free speech simply means that you won’t get arrested for being an asshole. It doesn’t mean you’re entitled to be bigoted on a service someone else is hosting. This could be a single person hosting a pet as a hobby, or a corporation at a large scale. It doesn’t matter as long as it’s a third-party that you don’t own.

    If people want to be jerks on purpose without others getting involved, they can find their own place to share ideas or host a service themselves. And if they don’t like people challenging their ideas, they can block them too, because they have that right on their own stuff.

    Some people believe that hate and discrimination is the new normal and should be condoned by everyone. If it’s a religion thing, perhaps they should reconsider what aspects of “blind” is important in blind faith? Regardless, it’s incredible how people find these unfounded hills to die on.

    Besides, their hate is directed towards what’s fashionable at the time. “Owning slaves” and “owning women” was once something people fought for. Later, when human rights started getting voted into law, their disagreement started to be expressed through bigotry.

    But now that society doesn’t have much room to be racist or sexist, they are migrating to other groups they don’t like. Did they generally decide that they were wrong about their previously-targeted groups? And they’re positive that the new groups are the right groups to hate? Or perhaps some people just have a chip on their shoulder and want to hate using whatever mental gymnastics are necessary to validate themselves?

    Regardless, social media is just a way for people to talk to each other, hosted by a person or a group. In terms of what’s allowed to be said, technology is irrelevant. If someone invites you to dinner for the first time, and you’re blatantly racist, you’ll probably get kicked out. Social media, hosted by others, presents exactly the same set of circumstances, no matter if your voice goes through a webserver and a database first or not.