• 0 Posts
  • 24 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 23rd, 2023

help-circle















  • I’d argue most major news networks are propaganda parading itself as news. CBC may be more of an exception since they have government funding, though they do still have advertisers and to some degree lose some element of control because of that.

    Things like cellphones and internet are a big proponent of most Canadians lives, and the antics that Bell and Rogers gets up to are rarely reported on, or if they are reported on, there is a lot of omissions. It’s no surprise why considering Bell and Rogers own a lot of the news networks.

    I’d say a good chunk of Canadian and American news is pretty heavily controlled by mega corporations.


  • The problem I see with echo chambers is that people start to believe their views are normal, but often times they are the extreme minority. It can allow unproductive and toxic ideas in society to spread like a virus that undermines things.

    For example, there are groups of people out there who believe the government is trying to give you microchips in vaccines and that they cause autism. The reason people often end up believing these kinds of things is because they get pushed out of regular communities when they start to get attacked and censored for “wrong-think”. Instead of being able to engage in some rational conversations with more rational people they get pushed out if they question things. This often results in them finding a fringe echo chamber of people who are already far deep into this weird viewpoint. Their viewpoints now start to seem to make more sense because everyone around them also feels the same way. They no longer feel like they could be wrong in how they think. Now not only do they get more hardened in their beliefs, but now they also HATE that group that kicked them out.

    So in my opinion these echo chambers often lead to more division and more hatred in society. I think when people are forced to absorb more opinions and a differing set of viewpoints they become a smarter, more intelligent thinker.


    I’m not sure if you’ve seen this shift, but for most of my life I’ve held more liberal values. Nowadays I find I need to call myself a more “traditional liberal” as a lot of current liberal ideologies have shifted to become more far-left. It seems like the division between being liberal and conservative has immensely widened and previously liberal people can often get called conservative despite their views not having changed over the years. Often the vocal minority in a community is able to force people to adhere to their more radical viewpoints or they kick them out of the community.

    Overall I just think echo chambers often can just be called a “cult”. Because that’s usually how they operate. Anybody who refuses to accept one narrow viewpoint of the world is cut out of the cult.


  • I can throw out a view examples of content that I have seen deemed as “hateful” in local subreddits that I personally don’t think fit under the purview of “hate speech”.

    • Comments removed that were speaking about drivers from a particular city being bad. The city has one of the highest insurance rates in Canada due to high collision rates. It however also has one of the highest immigrant populations of East-Indian people so I will often see any comment vaguely mentioning this cities poor driving being deemed “racist” simply because it could be a racist implication despite the bad driving comments having no race component and being backed by stats.
    • Comments that are against PRIDE movements. Now again I am not meaning blatantly homophobic comments like “Gay people suck”, I mean comments like “I don’t agree with this content being taught in schools”. In many subreddits both of these comments will get removed and result in bans. Which I’d agree is valid for the first comment, but not the latter.
    • With COVID-19 specific topics I saw some pretty heavy handed moderation as well. It’s been a bit so I don’t have any specific example, but I saw people who would be presenting simple opinions who were trying to have good faith discussions/debates have their comments removed and get banned. Again, I am not talking about the blatant “don’t get vaccines, they cause autism” clowns. During COVID I actually was working for a public health clinic and worked in vaccine clinics. So don’t get me wrong on which “side” of things I stand on, but it was always disheartening to see people who had differing opinions, or who were hesitant about things get mobbed by people, comment removed, and banned. People who could have had reasonable conversations and eventually maybe formed different science-based opinions instead get shut out and pushed off to fringe communities.

    Now don’t get me wrong, I am a moderator on some communities on reddit and I know content-moderation in general is a hard topic. Knowing someone’s intentions behind a comment can sometimes be murky and that is often part of the issue. I come from a viewpoint where I think it is important for people to see comments that they may disagree with or may even offend them. Of course there is no need for posts that just flame someone, or attack specific immutable characteristics, but I think there is harm from being too isolated from different viewpoints as well.



  • Hey @smorks I am interested to hear how you will handle content that some people may view as “hateful”? One of the problems I often see in some reddit communities is that they can be heavy-handed on moderation and it can often mean the subreddit is filled with primarily left-leaning comments as the right-leaning comments are counted as “hateful”. I’m personally looking for an instance where I can see a diverse set of viewpoints and based on what you said here it sounds like this may be an instance that is supportive of that.

    Just to be clear, I am not asking whether people would be allowed to be blatantly racist, but whether people could disagree with political movements that lean right/left without being censored? I personally think communities thrive when they can have more open, productive good-faith conversations about topics. When people get censored it usually seems to create more division and more hate in my opinion.