Yes, but that is less likely if they have been deleted very soon after creation.

citing sources such as … “traditional news media”, right?

Israel/Palestine is truly a conflict where no matter what argument you raise (on either side), there is a counterargument.

The argument against yours, for example, is here: https://elderofziyon.blogspot.com/2024/05/a-really-strange-genocide.html

I am generally very sympathetic to the Palestinians and think the immediate root cause of the present situation is the fact that Israel has been blockading Gaza for more than a decade, not allowing movement in or out of it, which I do not think can be justified by anything. I regularly read the blog I linked to above (yes, I consciously read things I don’t agree with), its author would probably say that the immediate root cause is something Hamas did in October of 2023. Difficult to say how to “neutrally” present that, right?

Yeah but instances are supposed to e.g. delete posts when the user deletes them. A malicious instance might not do that. Even without malice, I know this doesn’t always work because some weeks ago, I deleted a comment almost immediately after saving it, then kept getting upvotes for it; I found out this was because (at least) one very popular instance hadn’t deleted that comment, its users were still seeing it and upvoting it.

Wikis are unsuitable for anything contentious. Wikis are the solution to the problem of crowdsourcing objective facts, what makes them great is that anyone can add a few (even very obscure) ones; on anything contentious there are way too many, not too few, people wanting to write about them, making the wiki a solution to a nonexistent problem. This news story is yet another example of this.

… and hardly anything is more contentious than Israel/Palestine, which is why wikis work least well for articles on that.

I switched to “new comments” a while ago and have no desire to go back to anything else.

Now, no one can say anymore that Trump has never done anything positive.

The “very random, as u can see” girl who posted on the “random” board of 4chan https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/katy-t3h-pengu1n-of-d00m is now in her early 30s.

You can control the platform, so long as “the platform” means only your own instance. I have tabs open right now to both reddit.com and discuss.tchncs.de and the only difference as far as “control” is concerned is that here I can read posts by users, and from communities, that are registered elsewhere than discuss.tchncs.de too, the operators of the latter still otherwise have the same “control” as those as of reddit.

If the links in the article are accurate, this doesn’t seem to be a “law”, but this thing: https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/code-practice-disinformation

Anyone know more about it than I could quickly find? Is this in any way legally enforceable?

Obviously, I believe that governments have no legitimate business whatsoever telling us on the Internet what we can talk about, say to each other, etc.; but I would still like to know more about this particular attempt by the EU to do so anyway, so would appreciate more information.

Thanks, will try that out

Do you know a way to see the ActivityPub JSON for fediverse objects?

I think you can publish on many ordinary (micro)blogging platforms through Tor, but you’ll need a valid email address.

So the problem is reduced to: how can you get a valid email address through Tor that is not linked to either a phone number, your real identity, your credit card, or another email address that has any of these pieces of information stored.

I have never needed to do this, but to my knowledge, there are email providers where that is possible. Another user linked to privacytools.io where I can find this list https://www.privacytools.io/privacy-email - so that may be a place to start.

Here’s the thing: without this thread, I might never have become aware of this user or their activities. Are you sure that what you’re doing isn’t counterproductive and giving them more undeserved attention?

I actually know about this law from a book (I think) about amusing laws and court decisions. It certainly does sound funny to have a sentence start “if the person who has been declared dead appears personally in front of a court”.

Not really. My country’s legal system, at least, foresees that someone may be mistakenly declared dead and so provides in the Todeserklärungsgesetz (§ 24):

(1)Wenn der für tot Erklärte persönlich vor Gericht erscheint und die Aufhebung der Todeserklärung verlangt, so hat das Gericht, falls die Identität des Antragstellers mit dem für tot Erklärten unzweifelhaft feststeht, ohne weiteres Verfahren die Aufhebung der Todeserklärung auszusprechen.

which translates to:

If the person who has been declared dead appears personally in front of a court and demands the cancellation of the declaration of death, then the court has to, if there is no doubt as to the identity of the applicant with the person who has been declared dead, without further procedure declare the annulment of the declaration of death.

Moderation = not showing things to people who do not want to see these things. If you are an LGBT person and do not want to ever see people calling you and people like you mentally ill, then hiding those things from you is moderation, completely legitimate, an important part of making the platform a more welcoming place. I don’t usually want to see people doing that either in my feed (and in fact I don’t, because I follow entirely different things on Facebook).

Censorship = not showing things to people even though they want to see these things. If a group of people who believe that LGBT people are mentally ill are talking to each other about these beliefs, then preventing them from doing so is censorship, it doesn’t make the platform a more welcoming place because the people it would make feel unwelcome weren’t seeing it anyway.

That is what I (and the linked blog post) am trying to say. You may still think censorship is in some cases a good thing, but I think it’s important to make the distinction.

I wasn’t actually expressing a substantive opinion on whether this policy change of Meta’s is a good thing or bad thing. The rules there are as arbitrary as anywhere else on the Internet; this slight shift does not make much of a difference.

But moderation is different from censorship: if you (or I or anyone else) do not want to read people writing about LGBT people being mentally ill, or calling me an idiot (and I certainly don’t, most of the time), or literally making any statement at all in the world, then none of us should have to. That doesn’t mean people who want to say these things to each other (necessarily) need to be prevented from saying them to each other; there are arguments for that too, but it’s a different issue.

That doesn’t contradict what I’m saying (“default behavior”), and also moderation is different from censorship.

Seriously, this is how the media is spinning this? “Facebook now allows people to post that LGBT people are mentally ill”?

The default behavior of any social media platform is to allow people to say anything they want. That’s what social media is for, to allow people to talk to each other. The things it doesn’t allow are, and ought to be, exceptions. Facebook has now decided that one of these exceptions will be slightly loosened. I somehow fail to see the big deal in this.