ON A PLATFORM ADVOCATING FREE SPEECH - TROLLING IS LIKE THE FLU BUT CENSORSHIP IS CANCER
I've recently completed a clinical workup on our beloved platform.
In my opinion the prognosis isn't looking good.
Symptoms:
Some people are causing grief, resulting in feelings being hurt.
These bad feelings get reciprocated
This breeds a negative feedback cycle. It makes it "ok" to hurt others.
People feel "threatened" by this and want to encourage additional censorship options, in order to feel "safe".
Others just want to make people feel as bad as they do inside.
Hard feelings are starting to permeate discourse, and the community is egging it on, rather than shutting it down.
Diagnosis:
This is what cancer looks like in a social network.
Some people support those who spew messages of hatred & divisiveness.
Others point at it and say See! We need to censor this!!! I need to censor this! Please censor because it offends me!
Censorship in any form is a cancer to a free society.
Free and rational discourse is the only cure.
But free and rational discourse, require free speech for all.
Root Cause:
We're all using the same words, but we speak different languages.
English isn't a language. It's an amalgamation.
It is vast and diverse, even native speakers have trouble with it.
English is what you get, when every language, humps every other language.
To prove it, I want everyone reading this, to post an image showing either, a boot or a hood. Take your pick of either one and just post a picture of the first thing that comes to mind.
The point being that there is a huge disparity in language use, even in native English speaking countries.
The same word can mean different things or event opposite things, even in the same country.
It gets even worse when you have people from different cultures trying to find common ground using English.
Men and women also have different expectations from communication, so there is also a gender barrier in many cases.
In most cases what you think may be trolling or sociopathic behavior has it's root in communication barriers and only you have the power to tear those barriers down.
Prognosis:
Tit for Tat retaliation is like the flu. But the censorship tools we've created are a type of cancer.
It's virulent, it has metastisized and it will be fatal if we don't take positive action quickly to shut it down.
Fortunately each of us can take positive action and shut it down starting right now.
Prescription:
If you think you have enemies on this platform, think again.
That isn't to say that everyone likes you. But you won't find actual enemies. As in the kind with actual bullets.
People do get angry, they do get jealous and they do vent. Most of the time this begins with a miscommunication.
When they vent it isn't pretty. It exhibits as diarrhea of the mouth and constipation of the brain.
You don't have to feed into it. You don't need to answer a challenge to your honor coming from someone's verbal diarrhea. When you do that, what you're really telling them is that they have power over you.
Think about that a moment...
You are the only person in the world, who gets to control how you feel about anything.
The only power that no one can take away from you,
Is that you get to "choose" how you feel about everything!
Did you really just give your power to someone else?
If your feelings were hurt or you were made angry by something someone said, then yes you gave up your own power.
If people say bad things about you or anyone else, it's enough to just say
"I really thought you were a better person than that. I've decided to unfollow you, now you're on my ignore list."
Notice the absolute lack of any emotion? This is a message that says "I own how I feel and I'm making a choice".
Compare that to any message that contains the words "you made me", "i felt I must", "i had to".
Owning your emotions means you own yourself!
Doing that may trigger them to rant and rave, but unless you care about how they feel, then it shouldn't matter.
If they make threats of violence, then report them to the police.
Once you do this then stand back and let the police do their job.
If the police won't take action, then at least consider the possibility that perhaps they're not really a threat?
I know people want to make this a "safe place" for everyone.
But it already is safe. No one can reach through your monitor and harm you.
It's your feelings that got hurt and that's only because you allowed it. You get to choose, how you get to feel. You can also choose not to feel anything at all. That's your super power!
Don't let anyone take that away from you. Ever!
The scary thing is that...
People can only hurt us, when we care enough about them, that they matter!
This is the internet, not a cocktail club.
If you feel unsafe, it's because you actually do care what that other person thinks.
You have offended someone somehow, they are alien to you, their motives are alien and you don't understand why they feel the need to lash out. This makes you afraid, and when you're afraid you suddenly go from hero to target.
Once we come to that realization, the only thing we can really do is approach the other person and try to find common ground.
Doing that requires us to look through the words on the monitor and try to imagine the person on the other side of the keyboard.
It starts with realizing that somewhere in the world, there is a person on the other side of the keyboard who wants our attention.
They crave it badly enough to seek out that attention, even if it's in the worst possible way.
Nevertheless, there is a person there. We need to see the person, not the words.
Find them and you may find a new friend. Or you may just walk away with a profound understanding of them and a new entry on your muted list. But at least you tried.
If you are not the offended party, or the person doing the offending then the rest of this is for you.
Watching someone vent in public is like watching someone take a dump in public, it isn't pretty but frankly it isn't your business. It's certainly not the world's business, so don't upvote either side of it. Even if you feel like they might be in the right.
You CAN comment, as long as you try to remain neutral. But if you have feelings for one side of the other then perhaps that's not the best idea.
Perhaps the most powerful thing you can do is to just turn and walk away, maybe with a memo that this isn't the place to do that.
Meaning if your friend is on the attack with a case of verbal diarrhea, tell them to chill the fuck out.
If they won't chill out, then I recommend you, unfollow them, mute them, and walk away.
Mute is the most powerful tool we have. My mute list is getting rather long and I still have more high quality content to swim through than I could have ever dreamed.
There are thousands of voices here who are not getting heard and probably never will be. Find some of them and lift them up.
We absolutely do not need to lend our support any message of anger or hatred or retaliation.
Hate breeds hate, violence breeds violence and yes flagging is an act of violence.
Which brings up the final part of this prescription...
Both the rep and the flagging system need to go.
We need to push the developers to fix this right away.
At the moment, flagging only has a cost for the person being flagged.
This makes it the perfect tool to cause grief and distress with.
It's the ultimate tool for passive aggressive violence.
If we're going to keep it.
Make flagging available only to level 55 and above.
Make it be something that requires significant amount of SP to execute.
Flagging should immediately cost the flagger, SP equal to a weeks worth of power down, plus it should deduct a rep point. If they don't have the points and the SP then they shouldn't have the right to flag. They haven't earned it.
That's assuming we keep rep and flagging at all.
To my mind, neither of these have a place in a society that claims to stand for free speech.
If we're going to enforce laws, for example some country's definition of copyright, the law should not be subjective.
It should be an objective function of the witness nodes.
Things like copyright protection can easily be distributed to bots who interop with the witnesses for a small fee.
Our code is our only law.
If we need a change to law, we change the code and vote in witnesses which support the new code.
That's exactly how this system is supposed to work. We don't need police.
At most adding a "downvote" I disagree with you" button, that does nothing but tick a counter.
This is enough to voice dissent.
Rep is worse than useless. It tells you nothing useful about a person. Nor should it.
You should never rely on someone else's judgement of someone else's character.
As @tuck-fheman said,
at best it's a misleading quantification about some content they put out in the past.
Number of followers is something controlled directly by their followers.
As hard as it is to gain new followers now, each one should be cherished.
So if someone you are following is behaving badly, don't sit idly by. Do the right thing and try to stand up and correct them. But if they won't listen, then tell them good bye, unfollow them, mute them and walk away.
Having a mass exodus of followers, should be enough to get anyone to realize they have developed a case of verbal diarrhea.
This is the cure...
Maybe I am desensitized, but I haven't seen much trolling on here, also trolling isn't as bad as people make out.
If someone says something disparaging, who cares, that is just part of the price you pay for the Internet. Also some of the funniest things you will ever see comes from people who have mastered the art of trolling and if it's at my expense, I will laugh just as hard.
@williambanks Upvoted!
photo credit:http://www.azquotes.com/
actually - if we would just act like adults and Live and Let Live - everything's going to be fine. There's a cure to verbal diarrhea - it's called Breathe in Breathe out Quiet your monkey mind and if it's not strong enough then perhaps you should jump up and down to burn your energy pumped up by that anger, then drink plenty of water, find a mirror and look at the reflection you see on it, do you respect it enough to let that verbal diarrhea spill out and embarrass you? more so - do you like the place you are in to get it dirty because of uncontrolled emotions? remember - there is no delete in here and flagging would just create more damage to yourself -
It's the child in your brain that's talking - quiet that monkey mind and if it gets really out of control - try putting gaging it with tampons perhaps it would do the work. Ok I'm kidding about the last part ;D
We appreciate that you're discussing this issue @williambanks! We're seeing the misuse of the flagging button to indicate disagreement rather than to identify actual abuse. This censorship is the worst violation a user can perpetuate on another, and at the very least it needs to be discussed. Disagreements can be clarified with productive conversations, and the entire community can benefit from public discourse, but to flag a user maliciously or without any kind of constructive criticism offered stunts thoughtful development.
We like your suggestions for a new downvote button to indicate disagreement as well as a cost associated with flagging. We call for VALUES, honor, and responsibility, community consensus for the standards to be upheld, and accountability for users found to be abusing the system.
We love and appreciate Steemit, and we have high hopes for its evolution. We are committed to the success of this platform and are grateful for users like you who are willing to discuss options for improvement!
From what I've read of part 1, part 2 & part 3 of Dans posts on censorship, the developers have no intention of keeping the steemit platform censorship free. It is the blockchain only that is completely transparent. If you wanted to set up your own social media platform through the use of the blockchain, then you could choose to make it a porn site, a site filled with plagiarised content or leave it completely free and riddled with bots. I would be interested to see how many people choose the noisy platform over the censored one.
In my eyes censorship is not for removing what offends us from site (although of course it can and is often used that way) it is for filtering out noise. It is difficult to find what we like when what we like is riddled with what we don't like. And I'm not talking about opinions, I'm talking about noise like gifs, memes, very long sequences of text that were supposed to draw a picture but didn't. Website filters would help with this, but last I read Dan commented that anybody else could build the tool for that so I'm not confident it's coming any time soon. Besides even with filters, bots will misuse tags for the chance to be seen.
You describe controlling your feelings as a power. I would describe it as a skill. And a powerful one if you are good at it. But some people are better than others at controlling their emotions, and some people find it impossible. We are not like the robots. Muting what we don't like is not a long time solution for 2 reasons.
1: we can't do it as quickly and efficiently as a computer can.
2: we have to consider how the platform looks to each newcomer.
If we couldn't flag material (which is to censor) for example, and instead just muted what we didn't like, then we would have a great view of what we like from our own account. But as a new user comes along when this platform is getting bigger and bigger, to use their mute to filter out the crap and find what they like will just be too much work to bother.
Caring about how you make somebody else feel is an important part of being human and I fear this age of technology and cyberspace is turning many of us into robots. But we don't like to care about the feelings of others because that makes us vulnerable to care about how they feel about us. That's why we stupidly care what a troll thinks of us. We try to reach out because we care about the troll, we hand over a piece of compassion from our hearts, and it gets crushed. The safer option is to not care and be robotic. But this is not emotional strength. It is emotional suppression.
Even our ability to upvote what we like here can be considered a form of censorship. We are voting to bring what we consider more valuable to the front window, and anything we choose not to vote on gets left at the back.
Censorship in my view is inevitable. The transparency exists only on the blockchain.
Amen, blogged pretty much the same sentiment today.
I looked and cannot find that blog. Just the one about greenhair.
Mind linking so I can upvote it?
It was this paragraph that I wrote in "green hair" that I feel echoes your sentiments:
Lol I saw that, but I thought you meant a whole blog posting. Anyways yes these are great thoughts and I'm glad to see we're on the same wavelength!
Sounds like the solution here is 1. Don't get butthurt and 2. Take the high road. Been doing this all my life. Not that hard. Come'on Steemians! Let's get our emotions under our own control :).
I do think there is a way to incorporate the reputation to limit who can flag posts, but I believe a self-policing system is the best system and I don't agree that it should cost SD. Some people really do contribute only trash or plagarized content and that is not what the platform is for.
Fair enough, I'm just opening the dialog here.
But my point was the copyright thing needs to be enforced at the witness level before it ever makes it into the blockchain. If a witness is blocking content that isn't copyright or whatever, then we vote them out. We have that power but deciding what does and does not actually enter the blockchain is a function that rightfully belongs to the witnesses.
Since that's the only "legitimate" use for flagging, then flagging should go away. Replaced with a "downvote" I disagree with you button that does nothing but tick a counter.
I definitely agree with many of the things you said :). I guess my concern is that witnesses are just regular users like us, so why would their judgement be any better then yours or mine?
Adding a secondary downvote button (right next to the upvote) without any penalty to the post or to your steem is a great idea!
freedom of speech is the right to offend.
#istandwithhatespeech
http://www.organizingcreativity.com/2015/08/oxford-union-societys-freedom-of-speech-and-right-to-offend-debate/
Freedom of speech is also the freedom to ignore :D
yes, ignoring something or hitting that little mute button is what you are supposed to do. not try to censor the person that is saying or thinking something you disagree with. xD
gave upvote and am now following
I would argue that with freedom of speech comes the responsibility to listen to differing opinions And when you say what's on your mind without a two way dialogue you fundamentally give others the power to ignore you. I've havnt had or seen social abuse on this network. There are also other powers that nobody can take from you, like the power to kill yourself.
@sombrero being sedated or straight jacketed would do it and as multiple suicide "survivor", I can tell you unequivocally you don't get to end your own life.
You just increase the amount of suffering you will endure.
But yes the point was to try and listen first, but if dialog breaks down, use the mute botton.
These are some pertinent ideas. I like your netiquette. And also your position on flagging, down voting, freedom of speech,
But isn't quite normal to a young, bold and without great experience community to have diseases ? Even one that looks like cancer but that can be benign in the long run ? After some hot discussions over the subject I think we'll come to the free framework we all want here.
I'm optimistic about the winner in the reason vs ego fight.
Yes but it does matter how we treat those diseases.
There are some advocating more censorship tools in order to silence trolls etc.
But that will only cause the problem to get worse.
Need to talk to the person behind the troll mask and get them to stop, or you need to mute them.
Otherwise only the speech of the elite are protected.
Boot...
![](https://steemitimages.com/640x0/https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/97/Denver_boot.jpg)
Hood...
![](https://steemitimages.com/640x0/http://www.rantlifestyle.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Hood1.jpg)
Awesome I had totally forgot I left that line in. It was at the bottom of this blog when it was about trailer parks.
Im not sure if I prefer a shoe, or a trunk. And neither sure if a locale or some clothing.