While we're at it, should we ban email apps as well? And probably the Internet itself and go back to "safe" walled gardens like AOL, since there are almost certainly bad people on the net?
We try to rationalize this when it affects apps we don't use. But censorship is a very slippery slope. No single company should have this level of power. Browsers will be next. Solidarity is the only answer to abuses as such. Shade Freud always begets irony.
> should we ban email apps as well? And probably the Internet itself and go back to "safe" walled gardens like AOL
Huh? The AOL you're thinking of included an enormous cross-section of the population, with no controls on who could talk to who. If the Internet is unsafe, then so is AOL, because they're the same thing.
Right, that was the point. You can never get rid of "bad actors", and even if possible, that would have a myriad of unintended consequences (such as living under authoritarianism).
The irony in this case is that the speech that is attempted to be censored isn't even illegal. (at least in the U.S., where our liberal, cherished "anything goes" approach is enshrined in the Constitution.)
No it’s not — it’s pointing out that those arguments fail when looking at existing systems, and would trivially deny things that we know we want. A slippery slope would be that the reasoning lends itself to more extreme reasoning down the line. You don’t need to bother with that here, we’re already arguing from the bottom of the slope.
This simply argues that they’re special-casing against non-established systems — if you applied it uniformly, you’d trivially lose things you obviously want to keep.
That is, this is a stupid operation that is at best sponsored by “think of the children!” Mothers Against Everything foundation.
My assertion was a narrow one: the client application of a network designed to avoid censorship of bad actors is not exactly as legitimate as a web browser that is not designed to avoid censorship of bad actors.
To go from that narrow assertion to "ban email apps and probably the Internet itself" is fallacious reasoning at its finest.
There's no rebuttal by refuting any of the premises or finding logical flaws, just straight to the end of the world as we know it.
> the client application of a network designed to avoid censorship of bad actors
You didn’t argue this, and I’m not clear that matrix or similar technology makes any direct, intended or significant effort to do so beyond the much broader, all-encompassing goal of “let nothing be unavailable”. But if true, I might be more inclined to agree with you.
What you did argue is that
a key use case for federated messaging platforms is to evade censorship
Which is wholly different, in that the usage is at fault, not the protocol in and of itself (in the same fashion that Bitcoin was not designed to facilitate drug trade, even if it’s a key use case driving its valuation).
But we also know that illegal activity is a key use case of the internet, of email, of encryption and a wide variety of other decentralized and federated technologies. This is hardly a good justification because you’ll ban all sorts of good things.
The only thing that protects your argument against everything else is that you arbitrarily limit it to non-established technologies — in the name of all that is good and wholesome, you would kill anything like the internet, email, etc, that is not itself the existing technologies.
A web browser is only more legitimate because the internet is more broadly used. Which isn’t much of a case for legitimacy.
