Ian Macdonald @ianmacd@qoto.org

xkcd 1357 presents a cogent, yet naively simplistic and ultimately one-sided view of free speech. Indeed, things go awry in the very first frame, in which it is claimed that free speech amounts to no more than one's ability to speak without fear of arrest by the government. However, many people, myself included, would contend that the right to free speech is a philosophical concept that far transcends this narrow American legal definition.

The waters suddenly become much murkier when one examines the fact that large corporations with (socio-)political agendas have, in recent years, become more powerful and influential than even national governments and heads of state. This is an alarming and undesirable development, since said corporations are not subject to any third-party oversight or regulation, and there is no independent process of appeal against their summary judgements or the imposition of punitive measures.

This grave situation has steadily worsened over the last decade as the reach of these companies has expanded and gone largely unchecked by governments who either cannot see the danger rising before them, or find themselves without any existing legal recourse to combat it. The unfettered growth of this influence has emboldened these corporations to reach increasingly harsh and arbitrary judgements against selected users, whilst making proportionately diminishing efforts to justify their actions.

In many cases, governments have been not merely ineffective at curtailing this rise in influence, but instrumental in it, by misguidedly conferring on these corporations an editorial responsibility for the utterings of their users that no mere carrier or publisher should either want or be forced to bear. Historically, we have not demanded of the postal service that it take responsibility for the missives it conveys, nor of telecommunications carriers that they intervene if controversial and challenging ideas are sent over their cables and airwaves. Corporations like #Facebook and #Twitter are essentially no different, and should enjoy and be bounded by the same status, because to confer more is to endow them with a power that they can abuse, have abused, and will continue to abuse.

The rise of these corporations' influence has seen the town square, where we are free to gather and engage in public debate, controversial or otherwise, slowly undergo a paradigm shift from the physical world to the virtual realm; the crucial and essential difference being that access to the virtual town square is not without encumberment. It is not a public forum, and access to it is granted, tolerated and revoked at the pleasure of said corporations.

This grim development has been further catalysed by the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic, which, in many parts of the world, has resulted in the actual revocation of the right to public assembly in a physical space. In much of the world, including the so-called free world, the actual town square no longer exists as a hub for the free and unhampered exchange of ideas. The ability to express one's thoughts is now largely confined to the virtual realm, and the freedom to wield one's voice in that expression is now, in no small part, at the whim of corporations run by megalomaniacal billionaire ideologues.

When the arena in which public debate takes place shifts to new ground, discourse in that new territory needs to be afforded the same privileges and protections it enjoys elsewhere. This is not currently the case, and our right to free speech is under extreme duress as a result.

Never a day passes now without new cases documented of "hateful" people having the right to voice their "problematic" thoughts and opinions suppressed. And with "hateful" and "problematic" being such subjective concepts, this is an extremely slippery slope on which society now finds itself.

You may have cause to celebrate the downfall of your particular chosen foe today, but when the tables turn tomorrow and it is now you or those you advocate in the sights of these corporations' guns, who will you turn to then?

To those who write about #Stallman's alleged transphobia, I offer this response.

Stallman is demonstrably not transphobic. If you believe otherwise, I wonder whether you have actually read Stallman's own writings on his use of pronouns, or merely formed an opinion from what secondary sources have reported. Stallman's stance on the subject can be found at https://stallman.org/articles/genderless-pronouns.html

Regardless of Stallman's position on this issue, a transgender person's perceived right to be addressed using the pronouns of his or her choice does not compel another person to act in accordance with that perception. In most Western liberal democracies, most people enjoy a very real, i.e. legally protected, right to free speech; certainly to the extent that the speaker's choice of pronouns is concerned.

As such, rigid adherence to certain constructs of language can, at worst, be ascribed to self-interest, namely the assertion that the existent right to free speech trumps another's perceived right to be addressed in a particular way. That's a wholly reasonable attitude to take on principle alone, and garners more weight as one examines the pressure currently being placed on this central tenet of liberal society by regressive elements and their proclivity for cancel culture.

The suppression of free speech has far-reaching consequences for the whole of humanity; the inflexible use of pronouns affects a much smaller subset.

@anjum The conflation is the same all over Europe and cynically exploited for political capital.

In the Netherlands, our centrist and left-wing parties are careful to hide their supranational policies behind the guise of pro-European, because, well, we **are** in Europe after all, so how could any sane voter not be pro-European?

In reality, of course, many people across Europe won't vote for any pro-EU party, precisely because the voters themselves **are** pro-European.

@M0YNG Skills are just the tip of the iceberg.

What about RMS's unwavering lifelong commitment to the cause of free software? I don't see anyone else who even comes close.

The contribution of the GPL alone eclipses what most other hackers will achieve in their careers, and constitutes far more than a "handful of things" in itself.

I would contend that Stallman has, across 35 years in the service of free software, enabled and inspired far more people than he has scared off or otherwise demotivated. This cannot be quantified, of course, so I won't argue the point.

@freemo No, it was correct to delete them. Better to have the full message contained in a single posting and its content not duplicated.

I verified my Moa config before posting, but something still went wrong behind the scenes.

@freemo Yes, I did use Moa, but for whichever reason, it didn't work in the direction of Twitter; from which I drew the illogical and clearly wrong conclusion that it wouldn't work in the other direction, either.

Very cool that toots of arbitrary length are simply handled as one would hope across the Fediverse.

@freemo Incidentally, how do other instances deal with your huge and generous character limit? I assume that it's honoured, but I can see technical issues with not knowing that the length is immutable.

Has someone developed an efficient way of dealing with that dynamically?

@freemo The reason I did that was... incompetence.

After posting a single message on Qoto, I noted that cross-posting to Twitter had failed.

I then posted separately to Twitter, using a client that automatically split my message into ten parts, which then, thanks to Sod's Law (you may know him as Murphy in the US), **were** cross-posted to Mastodon.

I have deleted the ten individual postings. Thanks for bringing it to my attention.

Richard #Stallman a.k.a. #RMS is the founder of the Free Software Foundation (#FSF), author of the original versions of **gcc** and **Emacs**, and perhaps best known for his creation of the GNU Public Licence a.k.a. #GPL.

Thanks to the pioneering work of Richard Stallman, Android has a freely available kernel that can boot it, and companies like Samsung are forced to release their augmented kernel source code to us every month, so that we can build — using Stallman's compiler — a working custom recovery like TWRP.

Richard Stallman is currently under coordinated attack by the cancel culture mob. They have him firmly in their sights and have set their hearts on trying to get him removed from the board of the organisation he founded in 1985, and which has been his life's work.

The reason for the attack is that Stallman is alleged to hold views that are "problematic" in the eyes of his detractors.

My own stance is that to even engage in debate of Stallman's views would be to lend credence to the notion that they are somehow germane to the work that Stallman does in support of free software. I contend that they are not, which is not to imply that the accusations leveled at Stallman would otherwise require intellectual or moral contortion to refute. They would not. Stallman's views, even if they were relevant, have been grossly misrepresented.

The attempted silencing of free speech is always painful to behold, but this ill-conceived attack on Stallman is particularly stomach-turning, given how much of his life he has devoted to the freedom of others, including those who accuse him now.

His contributions to free software and his consistent, uncompromising commitment to his beliefs regarding software freedom have made millionaires of others, including many among his accusers now, while Stallman himself continues to lead a life of subsistence.

#Android would not exist if it hadn't been for Stallman.

Without Stallman, we would not have the assurance that important software like #Magisk will continue to exist long after the project's creator has moved on.

Without Stallman, #TWRP would not now exist.

Were it not for Richard Stallman, most of the cheap electronic appliances and gadgets in your home would simply not exist.

Without Richard Stallman's groundbreaking work, the world would be a different and much worse place.

Now you can do something in return. Richard Stallman needs your support.

Please consider signing the petition below:

https://github.com/rms-support-letter/rms-support-letter.github.io

If you need more background before signing, please take the time to do your own research and reach your own conclusions.

@sjw

The app user, not the poster on spinster.xyz, is Tusky's customer.

This is absolutely tantamount to censorship, not to mention the arrogance and condescension involved, because Tusky's author is forcing his morality on the user.

It's a great shame and not a little ironic that so many people in the Fediverse are intent on reintroducing the problems that decentralisation fixes.

@trinsec Het gaat mij eerder om de partij en haar politiek dan om de lijsttrekker. Voor mijn part zou Van Haga ook een prima leider zijn.

Bijkomend probleem is dat er ondanks die 37 partijen over rechts toch weinig te kiezen valt. Het zijn net tv-zenders: heel veel van hetgeen men niet wil.

Maar goed, een groot deel van het land kan er blijkbaar toch geen genoeg van krijgen.

#noxp

The quest to rid my life of #bigtech and reduce my reliance on centralised services continues.

So let's see if this is properly crossposed from #Mastodon to #Twitter.

Ik heb mijn steentje bijgedragen, maar het lijkt erop dat we nog 4 jaar Rutte in het verschiet hebben.

Het #FvD is zo te zien op weg naar de 8 zetels. Hulde! Waren het er maar meer. Volgende keer beter.

#TK2021 #noxp

It is proven! I am ianmacd on Keybase: https://keybase.io/ianmacd/sigchain#5955b820f190adbe9d6984e3ce788fb37a8df39644fb0718d001807444ae20d70f

@moaparty @foozmeat Trying to authorise Moa for Twitter is returning a 500 at the moment.

@freemo That's great. You've managed to strike a very delicate balance in a philosophical minefield that is constantly contracting.

And how ironic that the safety of the LGBT community was threatened not by maintaining a link with the perceived threat, but by breaking that very link and becoming unable to keep a spotlight shone on it.

'Know thy enemy' didn't become an adage for nothing.

This is the myopia of censorship, and it's as applicable to the digital world as it's ever been to the corporeal.

You can ban speech, but speech is merely the verbal expression of thought; and you simply cannot eradicate thought, no matter how repugnant you might find the doctrines it sometimes espouses. All you achieve is driving it from scrutiny into the shadows, where it festers and grows with ever greater resentment.

More importantly, you drive a stake through the heart of constructive discourse, too; which is why it's tragic to witness the succumbing of so many academic institutions in the West to the practice of creating safe spaces, where ideas can and must go unchallenged, and anyone foolhardy enough to issue such a challenge is punished by being summarily deplatformed.

This is how the USSR used to operate, and for reasons I will never understand and would not even believe possible, had I not witnessed the emergence of the phenomenon first-hand, this is what many people in the West now also aspire to: a culture in which free thought is suppressed, either semi-voluntarily via peer pressure, or under direct duress.

The town square has undergone a seismic shift in recent years, a process catalysed by the Covid-19 pandemic. Public discussion no longer takes place in open spaces, be they physical or virtual, but has slowly moved, one brick at a time, behind the walled gardens of big tech.

And people have foolishly done it to themselves over the last 15 to 20 years, shifting all of their content away from the public digital space onto platforms that require an account to read it, and/or editorial control over it before they will print it.

A few powerful companies in Silicon Valley are now very much the arbiters of free speech, with no government or even industry oversight to prevent the abuse of that power. And these are not neutral entities, but corporations with a very well-defined agenda run by demagogues with delusions of grandeur.

Most people have yet to even wake up and realise just how much freedom they have surrendered.

I always imagined that people would go screaming into the night when Big Brother finally came to assert total control over their lives. Never did I consider the possibility that they would surrender without a fight in exchange for the illusion of a free lunch. A Faustian bargain if ever there was one.

Anyway, I'll rant all night if I build up a head of steam, so I'd better quit here and save the rest for an endless diatribe of toots some other day.

@khird @freemo Ah yeah, I hadn't seen that list on their site.

OK, it's not exactly in the spirit of federation, but hey, it's their service so their call, too.

Thanks for clarifying.