Dropsafe

by Alec Muffett

QUESTION FOR DISCUSSION: where FOO is a federated protocol, can one ever be truly “deplatformed” by BAR, where BAR is an instance of FOO?

1/ FOO=Mastodon/ActivityPub, BAR=infosec.exchange

2/ FOO=AT-Proto, BAR=Bluesky

3/ FOO=Email, BAR=Gmail

I suspect that losing your Gmail account would be considered deplatforming, so why not your Mastodon account?

I have, perhaps unsurprisingly, received some pushback from Mastodon users who are saying approximately that “if someone gets kicked off a server for something they said somewhere else, it’s entirely fine and they can just go and create a new server for themselves, it’s not like they have been deplatformed”

I think this is demonstrably nonsense, simply by analogy.

Hence the above; what do you think?

⊞

Comments

2 responses to “QUESTION FOR DISCUSSION: where FOO is a federated protocol, can one ever be truly “deplatformed” by BAR, where BAR is an instance of FOO?”

  1. ? Lee ?

    @alecm

    I would say it depends. If BAR is the dominant instance by number of users for a region, topic, etc, and that is the domain which you predominantly discuss, if BAR bans you and blocks your future content on the FOO platform, then effectively, yes, you have been deplatformed… unless you can persuade a group of people to come and join you on your new server… but how do you do that if you have been silenced?

    1. alecm

      If it depends then there is an essential question of who makes the call in a liberal order; not to mention: what can we say about a platform which deplatforms people on the basis of their behaviour elsewhere? That it is on a moral crusade? That it is exclusionary? That it is censorious? These are not kind words.

      Reply

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