Bluesky just verified ICE
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I .. don't understand? Are they bad because they verified them? Why the "welcome" comment, that's not what Verification is? Are they "platforming" them? I don't get what is the preferred outcomes?
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Everyone responding here and confused why this matters seem not get the point. This post is just a warning that the types of people most of us don't want to associate with are now on that platform. The problem is not that they are verified, it's that they exist there at all.
Edit: some reasonable arguments have been made here for allowing these Nazis on Blue sky, which I originally thought was a bad idea, but maybe disallowing them won't actually solve anything and may exacerbate things. I don't know. I'll think about it some more.
No, that's exactly what I thought, and I'm still confused as why this is bad? Do people want baby's first echo chamber again?
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No, that's exactly what I thought, and I'm still confused as why this is bad? Do people want baby's first echo chamber again?
It's not hard to understand that people want Nazi ideology to be rejected.
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It's not hard to understand that people want Nazi ideology to be rejected.
I do. But.. how will that happen if they are not verified...?
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Eh. I don't use bsky, and think most current ICE staff should be imprisoned for terrorism for the rest of their lives, but I don't want any communications services to decide which entities should and shouldn't be verified. That's how you end up with power-tripping mods, propaganda bubbles, and censorship (exactly what fascists are doing with X, fb, tiktok, etc).
The goal should be an open protocol where users/orgs can sign messages cryptographically (like PGP) and every other user can decide which users, feeds, or algos they subscribe to without censorship. Like, if I subscribe to my friends and family (trusted sources), or friends of friends, I don't want any form of moderation between them and me, but the freedom to sub to moderated topics is also necessary for public (untrusted sources) feeds/comms.
Nah balls to that. This is simple paradox of tolerance shit, anti-social ideology doesn't get a platform in the marketplace of ideas.
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There is no Mastodon for them to be blocked on in the sense you're talking about.
Mastodon is similar in setup to Lemmy in that nobody owns it and anyone can run it. I am absolutely positive they are banned on tons of Mastodon servers and not banned on tons of others. If the server you are on is federated with even one server with one that isn't banned, you could potentially see their posts, at which point you can either report those posts to your and their admins, or block them yourself.
So the mastodon service supports Nazis.
nobody owns it and anyone can run it
They could have chosen a license that forbid usage for spreading hate. They put "free software" and "open source" above blocking hate speech.
They're providing software to Nazis, and I don't really see how that makes them better than providing a place to post. -
So you want a Nazi bar. Ok.
That's a nice strawman you've built for yourself. What's their name?
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Lol, yeah. If I saw an account labeled "American Nazi Party" with a blue check mark, I wouldn't think "wow, Bluesky endorses Nazis" - I'd think "wow, this isn't a satire account, these are actual Nazis, imma block them."
And miss out on all the juicy trolling opportunities?
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There's another relay: https://atproto.africa/ .
Relays don't index posts, they collect them from different servers, and provide a "firehouse" of events.
You can crawl pdses directly, akin to the fediverse. AppViewLite does this (and is lightweight enough to run on a phone).
You don't need a relay or appview with https://reddwarf.app/ .
The fediverse also has relays.
Good to know there's a second full-network relay (assuming this is what it is). Last time I checked all third-party relays only indexed some sections of the network, so my knowledge was outdated.
Conceptually relays are the indexers of the network, you can view individual PDSes without them, but you won't get cross-PDS discovery; this is because PDSes don't actually federate with each other.
This means that in practice, relays define what it means to be "on bluesky". If you are banned on all relays, your PDS becomes just a weird standalone microblog.
This is different from the fediverse, where all instances federate with each other by default and relays just enhance discoverability and connectivity, rather than being the only way to do it.
And in any case this is all a bit academic, bluesky are hosting nazis on their own PDS, bsky.social.
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Find out how long your Lemmy instance stays federated with the rest of the big instances once you start hosting Nazis
You don't get it: I am and will remain the only user of my instance...
Do you even now how Lemmy works? Did I say I was going to let ICE people create users on my instance? I only said I don't defederate any instance.
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They haven’t posted anything yet.
‘Official verified’ isn’t a thing on bluesky. It’s self-verification, just means you own the domain.
Most western governments are terrorist. Can you name an administration that isn’t guilty of war crimes? Should they all be automatically blocked from socials?
They have already posted a job ad to join a violent fascist paramilitary in their profile.
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It's not, though. Do you think that the admins of reddthat.com endorse everything you post? Creating a public forum for people (including the representatives of organizations) to post on doesn't imply that the forum endorses any of the content those people post on it.
I wouldn't call it "endorsing", but I would call it "platforming". blahaj.zone is platforming you, lemmy.ml is platforming me, bluesky is platforming nazis.
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They haven’t posted anything yet.
‘Official verified’ isn’t a thing on bluesky. It’s self-verification, just means you own the domain.
Most western governments are terrorist. Can you name an administration that isn’t guilty of war crimes? Should they all be automatically blocked from socials?
ICE is attacking and brutalizing people, daily. Killing them. Blinding them. They do not deserve any platform for them to post their hate.
Haven’t posted yet? So what? This is some dumbass free speech absolutism that brought us to timelines like these.
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I deleted my account on BlueSky since last Sept. BlueSky is pretty trash
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They haven’t posted anything yet.
‘Official verified’ isn’t a thing on bluesky. It’s self-verification, just means you own the domain.
Most western governments are terrorist. Can you name an administration that isn’t guilty of war crimes? Should they all be automatically blocked from socials?
True they have been guilty for a while, but they didn't always post like they have been now, as a part of DHS who posts nothing but fascist propaganda on other social media these days I doubt their posts would be different. ICE is actively recruiting so just having the account is an ad for joining, not that different than a corporate business social media. I agree with the idea that a communication platform should be neutral politically, in general, but it is a special situation when an agency is currently waging a violent campaign and uses social media to further their agenda and blurring of the truth. They are a government agency but not a necessary one and it's not essential they are allowed on a third-party social media platform, it could be argued their conduct and behavior as a group is already against the policies of Bluesky like condoning violence.
But anyway I agree they shouldn't necessarily be blocked preemptively, a rogue poster could use the account to say "ICE are terrorist thugs" or something.
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Bluesky is a centralized platform and their mods don't ban Nazis.
Trump being able to clone Mastodon is not the same as letting Trump on Mastodon.social
Trump being able to clone Mastodon is not the same as letting Trump on Mastodon.social
The Mastodon devs made a choice in releasing it as open source. They could have decided to pick and chose who is allowed to use it. It was completely foreseeable, that the software would be used for something like Gab or Truth.Social. When they release update, they know that these will also be used by such services.
This is merely a statement of fact, not criticism. They chose not to exercise power or become arbiters of good and evil. That is laudable.
Bluesky is a centralized platform and their mods don’t ban Nazis.
I get it. You feel that tech companies should deny service to bad people. For example, to a government agency acting on behalf of a president elected by a solid majority of the popular vote.
I agree that the voters got it wrong, but I don't think that the rich and powerful vetoing voters will lead to good outcomes. Look at medieval Europe. Life got better with democracy, not with a supposedly more just king.
The tech lord most in line with your ideas is Elon Musk, except that he's kinda nazi. So, on a purely practical note, it doesn't seem very likely that tech companies being more political would lessen racism.
Do you think it would be better if all the billionaires, who are probably mostly non-nazi, were activist like him?
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What difference would it make in the social media.
Apparently you slept through a fascist dictator rising to power by manipulating desperate people, specifically on social media.
Apparently you slept through the part where mainstream social media did try to censor, ban, and deplatform that dictator's supporters, and it backfired.
I mean, Twitter literally banned Donald Trump, and he just started his own Twitter clone. Mainstream social media banned COVID disinformation and now we have an anti-vaxxer running the US Department of Health. Probably hundreds of thousands of people got deplatformed for claiming the 2020 elections were stolen, and more people now believe Trump won in 2020 then they did in 2021.
Biden pressured big social media to censor ideas he didn't want spreading. The ideas spread anyway. All Biden did was show he was afraid of those ideas and make some of the worst people in the world look like martyrs.
I really can't think of a better example of how "deplatforming Nazis" doesn't work than the last five years of American history.
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You think Nazis should not be banned by admins on your instance?
What's the alternative? They have admins ban any and all accounts that might be made by ice or ice personnel? Refusing to validate them doesn't take them off the platform. They'd still be there, you just wouldn't know who they were. In fact you still don't, they could very well have puppet accounts all across blue sky, Lemmy, and all of your favorite instances.
At the very least when this account starts to post insane shit, you'll know it's actually them and not some edge lord cosplayer pretending to be ice. A verified account removes the plausible deniability aspect of anonymous posting.
And I'm not being argumentative, I'm asking a genuine question. This is the Gestapo wearing a uniform. If anything, they're stupid for asking for verification. This is them wearing ICE jackets to the grocery store.
The real test will be how bluesky treats the content this verified account posts. When (and let's be real, it'll be when, not if) bluesky refuses to censor this account, then they'll have proven themselves complicit.
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Everyone responding here and confused why this matters seem not get the point. This post is just a warning that the types of people most of us don't want to associate with are now on that platform. The problem is not that they are verified, it's that they exist there at all.
Edit: some reasonable arguments have been made here for allowing these Nazis on Blue sky, which I originally thought was a bad idea, but maybe disallowing them won't actually solve anything and may exacerbate things. I don't know. I'll think about it some more.
Personally, I do want a common communication platform for people I despise because I want to be able to keep tabs on their public announcements. Also, I don't want any tech platform to have sole authority over who can communicate, as in the present, that will invariably work against the left more than the right.
I do not want to share close proximity to them on a network graph, or regularly engage with their supporters, though. So I agree that federation is crucial. But to be clear, it's not because I want to ban them from a platform, it's because I want managed distance and better moderation.
I don't mind Bluesky verifying them, but I'm glad that on Mastodon I don't have to share the same giant server as them.
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No, that's exactly what I thought, and I'm still confused as why this is bad? Do people want baby's first echo chamber again?
We also want to ensure that conservatives are repeatedly alienated so they build their own networks and never see other points of view! /s
![irelephant [he/him]](https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/pictrs/image/0cf354b4-4275-4895-a1ec-d194978a2b32.webp "irelephant [he/him]"){kind=avatar}
