Amerika

Forget for a moment about the definitions of our time. For any society to survive, it must be able to discuss issues that determine its future path and may or may not doom it. Whether this is “free speech” or freedom from “viewpoint discrimination,” it is nonetheless essential to any functional society.

When this ability goes away, the society turns toward denial and rationalization, which means that it focuses on non-essential issues and enforces a speech code that means no one can criticize the myths it uses to justify itself. In a democracy, those myths are things like equality, diversity, and wealth transfer.

The problem for us now is that our discussions no longer take place in public spaces but in corporate ones. That is, you converse at Starbucks or Barnes and Noble, or post ideas onto social media owned by Meta or X, but you will reach very few standing out on a street corner and may get assaulted for your efforts.

Even more, print media is dying, leaving the internet as our primary source of interaction. This consists of wires and servers owned by people who pay for electricity and bandwidth, which means that there are no real private spaces, only public ones owned by others who have the right to enforce censorship.

Now, this could be a temporary legal bubble; after all, the internet is a collective enterprise, and no site exists without it, so for Meta to claim absolute jurisdiction over material on its server is dubious, especially since it is granted some legal protections for that content.

To provide an option, the usual Open Source type people have created their own network based on GNUSocial called the Fediverse. However, like most Open Source projects, this one is designed around the nerd mentality and not the average person, which means that it is much smaller and more random than the big public sites.

These servers promise the power of social media for information sharing without the problems, namely censorship, that afflict the big sites. However, in the interest of keeping their audience happy and not getting in trouble with their webhosts, the major Fediverse sites have embarked on a diligent campaign of censorship.

We can easily test this by posting a free speech canary such as the following to see who mass complains and which janitors remove the content:

I am preemptively muting people from these groups:

1. People from SF and NY
2. Born-again Christians
3. Pro-Palestinians
4. Commercial messages
5. National Socialists
6. Communists/Socialists
7. Transsexuals
8. Influencers

There are lovely people from all of these groups, no doubt, but there is also a much higher rate of mental illness than in the regular population and I don’t want it in my head.

This message is designed to be as neutral as possible while mentioning a real-world problem and a possible solution, namely excluding people from certain angry groups from the user’s own view. Their messages still get out to everyone else, so they are not censored, but they are kept away from the user who does the muting.

It turns out that most of the big sites on the “Mastodon” or politically-correct side of the Fediverse censor these posts, as well as mention of scientific data that indicates mental health problems in the transgender community, such as the scientic studies about the associations between transsexualism and other mental health problems.

One section of the Fediverse does not fall prey to this, and that is the Open Fediverse or free speech related section that realizes social media is only useful so far as it is open to all viewpoints:

Broadly speaking, servers whose anti-authoritarian operators take a principled stance on freedom of expression.

I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it. – Voltaire

Freezepeach servers are operated by individuals who do not censor user posts for reasons that are, under Section 230, defined as “otherwise objectionable”.

This much smaller segment of the Fediverse operates without constant censorship and therefore is much more interesting to people looking for ideas instead of Taylor Swift and Joseph Robinette Biden news. It alone seems to be resistant to what is occurring now, namely the corporate takeover the Fediverse.

Last week the network Minds began openly federating or sharing posts with other servers on the Fediverse, and this week the latest Meta project, Threads, has begun doing the same. The bigger social networks dwarf the Fediverse traffic and will quickly assimilate it, then implement their own Politically Correct censorship.

As one might have predicted, the only resistance to assimilation is hard realism, and this requires networks that are surly, uncontrolled, and impolitic, much as the early internet was. The Fediverse offered something the mainstream sites did not, then removed it, and now will perish for its stupidity.

Tags: censorship, fediverse, free speech, freeze peach, mastodon, political correctness, social media