Those instances weren't breaking laws. At least not American ones. It is not illegal to be an incivil assclown, but you are going to get thrown out of the bar.

It’s not a place for incivility that I’m making, either. I just struggle to believe you genuinely don’t understand what people mean when they ask for less moderation or censorship.

I don’t see the issue. This is how it was in the early days and things were infinitely better. I’m convinced that the overly paternalistic moderation that overtook online platforms what was gave power to the alt right in the first place.

All online spaces could do with less moderation.

Yep. I'm old enough to remember when online censorship was taboo. It's pathetic how far we have fallen. Now the normies demand it.

Hello, I was in the "good old days" of the internet. It wasn't the "right-libertarian utopia" that right wingers like to paint it was. Sure people believed in "free speech absolutism", usually until someone whose first "forum" was 4chan, who demanded the same kind of "freedom of speech" they had over there. Also those 4chan bastards were extremely hypocritical with their own "free speech absolutism", as the moment they got doxxed instead of someone they disagreed with, they either backpedalled, just cried like a bitch online, or rarely literally went that they only meant the free speech for themselves. People who actually lived in those days on the interne,t and weren't just heard about it some zoomer internet historian or someone whose first "forum" was an anonymous image board know that 4chan marked the end of the old internet, and marked the beginning of the centralization era (4chan sucked up some traffic from fan forums, similarly to what Facebook did later).

What actually is happening is that if you also peddle the right kind of economic policies for Google, you get whitelisted for hatespeech, meaning moderators are only allowed to act on your hatespeech after consultation with the higher ups. Talk about uBlockOrigin? Banned! Talk about how fascists are cruel in the comment section? Your comment is insta-deleted without explanation by the YouTube automod system. Demonize trans people? Wanna call "bad" black people n****rs? Want to talk about how all women are whores and deserve all their rights being taken away? Make sure you also bitch about taxes, how artists and other workers are "entitled", and write odes about how we need to "move fast and break things, ask for forgiveness later". Google will be happy to play "heel" for your "face" in case of "censorship", so you can have the facade of a freedom warrior.

YouTube, the world's largest video platform, appears to have changed its moderation policies to allow more content that violates its own rules to remain online.

This is revisionism of the highest degree. Everyone knows Google et al were very heavy handed at dealing with any dissent with the liberal agenda, for the lack of a better term. Facebook fired Luckey Palmer because he supported Trump! That’s how far the tech industry went to protect left wing views and for the best part of the last decade.

And no one is being allowed to say any of those words on any major social media. Hell my comment up there that says faggot would have gotten me suspended in all the major social media. So stay grounded and stop making shit up.

More and more often I see mainstream social media platforms letting people say slurs. A few days ago I literally say the F-slur on YouTube, while you cannot say "porn".

Old internet weren't 4chans, kiwifarms-style doxxing forums! Just because some YouTube pseudohistorian said the old internet literally were composed of unmoderated image boards and forums, that doesn't make that true.

No they weren’t but they sure as fuck weren’t banning people for slurs either except the few really socially unacceptable ones. It was a good balance.

Also who’s the YouTube historian you cite? Because I was there too and I know exactly how it was. Lemmy has the right amount of moderation imo most of it enforced by users themselves as it should be.

Also I’d like to add, since you keep bringing it up, that 4chan often had more stringent moderation than other websites because on-topic discussions were strictly enforced. Outside of the adult boards (I forget their name, blue boards was it?) stuff like gore, porn etc was not allowed at all.

Fuck your paternalistic bullshit is all I have to say. Let people say whatever they want, let society decide what is acceptable or not. Not fucking corporations.

That's like bottom of the barrel kind of moderation. Even Kiwifarms has that much of a moderation even if they let people doxx others, but only if they're the wrong kind of people.

Here's the problem with the whole "free speech absolutism" experience: People don't want to be told that they're wrong, not just when Trump supporters are doing that. You know why Trump is popular? Because people want to be told they're not racist if they have double standards towards "less trustworthy races". Because people want to be told it's okay if they drive their big trucks even to the toilet. Because people want to be told that their home remedies are much better, than vaccines. And people will go as far with this that they'll go after people who don't, often by doxxing or sending threats.

Meta rolled back protections. Now hate is surging - What we're seeing: More hate, more fear, less freedom. - Lemmy.World

> On January 7, 2025, Meta announced sweeping changes to its content moderation policies, including the end of third-party fact-checking in the U.S., and rollbacks to its hate speech policy globally that remove protections for women, people of color, trans people, and more. In the absence of data from Meta, we decided to go straight to users to assess if and how harmful content is manifesting on Meta platforms in the wake of January rollbacks.

(lemmy.world)

Well, well, well, it seems like "letting people decide what's okay and what is not" favors hatespeech every time...