gemini://oberdada.pollux.casa/gemlog/2024-01-04

I certainly find it difficult to cheer on demands for censorship as a blanket solution against nasty opinions. As a general principle I'm for free speech, which includes the right to say really stupid and objectionable things. However, a recent post titled Standing With Israel, which was blocked from Antenna, appears to argue in favour of genocide. I don't know what the legal implications are of a citizen soliciting war crimes, but clearly it is indicative of a broken moral compass.

Many things are factually wrong in that post. Debunking all of them would not be hard, although doing so wouldn't change anyone's opinion. Here I will only address a few points. At the core of the delusion is the belief that you can eradicate a threatening hatred by oppressing and killing those who hate you, or that you could eradicate an unwanted ideology by the same means. Instead, what you get is a spiral of violence that could easily escalate out of control, and we all know what a delicate situation the Middle East (or West Asia as some prefer to call it) is in.

In a sense, then, it is true that "Israel is fighting for its survival" – as a state built on the premise of oppression it might not survive if it granted Palestinians equal rights. The Israeli state is also surrounded by states with little sympathy for its ethnic cleansing project. These neighboring states have so far observed some restraint, but they could cause substantial damage. As long as the US stands with Israel they have serious deterrence; moreover, they are backed by something that Mordechai Vanunu wasn't supposed to tell us about. Mearsheimer coyly uses the phrase that US and Israel are "joined by the hip" which avoids the trouble of having to decide which of them actually controls the other. But if, one day, their hips should come disjoined, then Israel might no longer have sufficient backing to continue as it has done so far.

Thus, it is also true that "Israel has so few friends and so many enemies" among the populations of Western countries, and even more so in other parts of the world. Its impopularity is largely of their own making, and rapidly increasing since their heinous crimes against humanity have become visible to the whole world. Their impopularity is regularly but erroneously taken as an example of that oft abused term, anti-semitism, by confounding criticism against the policies of the state of Israel or the Zionist ideology with hatred of the Jewish people. It is by no means hard to imagine someone who is unable to differentiate between the state ideology and the entire people. The censored post in question makes exactly that mistake by identifying the Palestinian people as a whole with Hamas.

While it is true that many have come to look upon the acts of the Israeli state with disgust, it is hard to miss that they have solid backing from Western political elites, in particular in the US, Germany, the UK, and France, to the point that expressing even the mildest solidarity for the suffering Palestinian people may have severe consequences, including being cancelled or losing your job.

The fact that censorship almost exclusively affects defenders of the Palestinian cause on the bigger net is not a good argument for compensating by censoring staunchly pro-Israeli views on gemini. Weak arguments based on questionable premises, such as those in that censored post, are easily debunked. But of course, our beloved aggregator services are run by private individuals who decide what content merits to be spread far and wide. Antenna has always been perfectly transparent about how it works. Some might argue that this is not a case of censorship, merely de-platforming, but given the importance of the few aggregators we have the distinction is too subtle to make much sense.

Even Substack has now received calls for censoring certain extreme content. Fortunately, they have so far resisted. Being for free speech doesn't mean you endorse every indefensible message, but letting folks express their worldview based on their own misunderstandings makes it possible to counter them with better arguments. I also know that you don't convince anyone of a different persuasion by logical reasoning, you would have to engage empathetically with them and build trust over time. Which is not how the internet typically works.

If one of the merits of free speech is the ability to expose and correct harmful opinions and bad arguments, this admittedly works best in communities of one person one voice, as opposed to sneaky state-sponsered sock puppetry infiltrating every corner of the socialising web. I don't claim that has happened here, yet, but it might at some point.

I don't know how vulnerable our gemini aggregators are to spam, but if it becomes a problem I hope someone invents an aggregator that displays a daily digest of at most one post from each sender, and if there are more posts from the same person during this time you'd get a link to a new page with links to each post.

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Censorship?

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