Google is apparently taking down all/most Fediverse apps from the Play Store
qoto.org
qoto.org
Whether or not this is a good thing is a complex question. If you happen to be the target of this hatred and violence, and feel it is an existential threat to your livelihood, you might believe that it is a good thing to make it more difficult for those who are engaging in this behavior to enlarge their communities. On the other hand, if you believe eliminating communities by platform fiat is an existential threat to your livelihood, this may seem like a very bad thing.
(You might also think it's hypocritical, since you can access most of these communities via a browser. Google also controls the browser, and does make it difficult already to access some sites https://developers.google.com/safe-browsing/v4 . However, it does seem to have a higher bar for browsers than for social apps (e.g. malware, csam, iirc); some have suggested that there are legal reasons for this, I'm curious to learn more on this, but I have not seen any substantiation yet.)
This is grossly unacceptable. Apps need some safe harbor too. Apps can not be responsible for every possible use of the app.
So basically, Google only supports the Fediverse if, like itself, it engages in censorship. The Fediverse exists not to encourage hate speech, but to discourage censorship. Hate speech is the inevitable result of allowing humans to say what like they like. Some people will choose to be nasty. Many people believe the greater good is the free flow of information, and that adults are more than capable of filtering out and avoiding those information sources which make them uncomfortable. Instead, Google wants to treat everybody like children, and be the helicopter parent that swoops in and removes anything objectionable.
As you state, one can access these specific communities in a number of ways, including Google Chrome. If the community is the issue, go after the community, not an ActivityPub app that can access content from these and other communities.
Should Google also ban RSS reader apps that don't actively block RSS feeds from sites Google doesn't like?
Safe browsing doesn't include sites for encouraging hatred and violence, etc. Only malware, social engineering, and "harmful"/"unwanted" applications. If they start including those sort of sites in their safe browsing lists, that would make your point here more relevant.
(Of course, some people get hit by safebrowsing unfairly. But I think in most cases, it is because someone compromised their site and used it for a malicious purpose, and then they struggle to get Google to remove it within a timeframe which is reasonable.)
The problem is the fact that Google banning these apps borders on state censorship because of the monopolistic position Google has.
Busting up Google solves the correct problem.
Because if it's "user types in the server URL and tries to log in", blaming the app is ridiculous.
All these disparate media sources that we yearned for back in the cable-only days have finally turned to dogshit.
There's a huge difference.
There are ton of instances which much of the Fediverse blocks, but if you set up your own server and follow people on those instances, it's not 80% hate speech and racism as others would have you believe. Yes there is some of that, but there's also weebs, and anime and political discussion and weird gaming discussion and videos not posted anywhere else and memes and the great diversity of through we use to have on Reddit before it became a monoculture.
There are also straight up anarchist instances that justify violence and destruction of the state like Rage Love, Anticapitalist Party, and others.
It's a very big space, with new players entering and leaving every month.
Banning apps because they do or don't have block lists greatly misunderstands how the Fediverse works.
I’m indeed being threatened by various hate groups (one of them actually tried, and almost succeeded, to kill an acquaintance), but strangely enough they are never removed by Google or any other big corporations. Worst, each time I voice any slight complain about them, I am the one being censored. Some of those groups are even sometimes getting official support by the GAFAM. This is a really odd and unfair world.
To see how ridiculous this sounds, Google might as well completely take down the entire social media and internet browsing category on the Play Store since I keep seeing the same content from both extremes on all these platforms.
Just wait until you tell them to take down their own browser since you can find this "content" with a simple search. They will soon realise that "drawing the line on hate speech" is more tougher than solving leetcode CS questions.
Well, they're taking the address bar away, bit by bit; they have SafeSearch; and they have AMP. It's a very slow erosion, but there will come a point at which going outside of the list of officially acceptable sites will become more difficult - first with mandatory warnings, then maybe with mandatory reporting to law enforcement or whomever, and eventually not at all.
Yes, it sounds like a "slippery slope" argument, but we're a few steps down the slope now, and any argument that encourages us to climb back up has to point out where things may go if we don't resist.
It sucks that this requires us to defend the rights of people to speak whom we may intensely disagree with, but that's the crux of the matter. Either we become mature enough to understand that people will have discourse we dislike, and avoid it or engage with it as we see fit, or we continue to hide behind authority figures who will purport to keep us safe by controlling what we can say and think.
edit: Trouble in a sense that it is inconvenient for them.
Edit, found it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23219427
And well, they should probably remove the apps of Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, etc as it's plenty of hate speech there too.
That was a mistake, presumably. It's likely this is too. The deep desire on the part of posters here to assume malice and scream CENSORSHIP is really off-putting.
I actually don't know anything about fediverse, but if it's like other pseudoanonymous obscure communications media it's probably filled with awful stuff. It's not that hard to imagine a naive reviewer who doesn't understand the architecture to be confused if they get a report showing screenshots of the app with the content available in it.
It's not obviously in the Restricted Content policy page: https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/topi...
The rules there are extremely general, and technically cover all sorts of things which are currently let into the Store.
We need a list of these lizards so we know when to throw tomatoes and rotten eggs at them whenever they give a talk or share feel-good posts on LinkedIn.
people should be ashamed instead of proud when they write "disclaimer I work at X"
Don't give Google ideas.
(throwaway since the former name searches themselves to find new targets.)
The far more likely reason is that they know we have an issue. They've been monitoring and they don't like what they've been hearing.
If this is the Google policy they may want to bake that policy into the way Chrome operates.
Various think tanks, NGOs, board members with multiple irons in the fire, foreign interests, and the government itself exert a lot of influence on large players to shut down harmful narratives. Most visible was when the deplatforming activity started with threats from lawmakers against outlets if they didn't remove certain content. You've also got various orgs with CIA connections acting as "fact checkers" on Facebook. The influence happens in subtle and many ways.
How was the narrative controlled by the powerful before the internet became a part of everyday life? Specifically, how was the narrative controlled in the US in the decades before 1993?
I'm asking for recommendations of books written by historians, journalists and other serious people. (Understanding the situation decades ago is probably a lot easier than understanding the current situation -- partly because the powerful will take pains to hide their controlling actions from the public.)
In the US I get the general sense that politicians and holders of government offices have never been able to exert a lot of control of the narrative with the result that journalists and the prestigious universities have so much influence that they are best thought of as essentially part of the government.
That suggests that the efforts of the establishment to rein in the big social media companies will prove largely ineffective with the result that Facebook and Google will probably join the New York Times and Harvard as parts of the de facto governing structure of the US.
EDITED: changed "rein" to "rein in".
but does everyone agree on what hate speech is? That's the danger. You can just claim any opinion you don't like is hate speech. You can say endorsing a particular candidate is hate speech and those people can justifiably be censored; their views invalid (and in some places; justifiably killed).
It was once considered offensive, in many places a crime, to say homosexuality is morally okay or that the Bible should be translated into German and English or to say God doesn't exist.
There is no distinction between "Free speech" and "hate speech," because it requires you to qualify the former. There are exceptions in many countries, but they are for very specific things: child abuse and advocating specific violence against individuals.
However, when most people talk about censorship they're using it not in the strict sense, but rather as a shorthand for someone violating their first amendment right. In this case this is really only a crime when it's a government entity doing it, although people don't typically differentiate between the government and any large organization, which technically are legally allowed to censor you on their platform or property.
There's a larger discussion that needs to happen with regards to censorship. There are two extremes at play here, on the one hand there's the absolute freedom stance of literally nothing censored (only example I can think of for this is maybe the dark web, but really everyone censors if only a little), even shouting fire in a crowded theater or posting child pornography. On the other extreme is the absolute censorship of someplace like China, where only permitted thoughts and expressions can be posted. The US and most of the rest of the world tends to fall somewhere in the middle.
The big struggle right now is that everyone has recognized that there's clearly some kind of problem. We're seeing unprecedented levels of misinformation, and a frankly weaponization of social media both for profit, and for international politics. I don't know that anyone has a good solution for how to address that problem, but the pendulum seems to be swinging towards a more censorship focused response.
As an extreme example: Do you really think the KKK believe hate speech is bad? Even if they do agree, do you think their definition looks anything like your own?
I find it hard to believe that someone who has lived through the last four years can say with a straight face that everyone agrees hate speech is bad. One would think the last US election cycle would have gone differently if that premise were true.
That sounds like an unjustified premise.
_Note to the casual downvoter not critically examining my argument: I am not saying that I personally do not think hate speech is bad._
Free speech is that they shouldn't be a law by a government to punish expression of ideas or opinions.
citizens or companies should be allowed to host and not host whoever they want.
The first amendment would like to differ!
Anyway it's meaningless to believe hate speech is bad, because hate speech is an undefined term. It just means something someone somewhere would like to punish someone else for saying.
We have two things to unpack here. First, hate speech. What is it? Who gets to decide what the word means and what is their procedure for deciding? Is the definition stable or fluid (or even very fluid)? Is hate speech universally wrong, or only wrong when issuing forth from certain speakers? If we all agree that it's wrong, then why are people engaging in it, even unintentionally?
Second, censorship. Is self-censorship not censorship? Why must the state be involved in order to censor? We're TV networks that for decades voluntarily forbade their programming from portraying homosexuals being censored or not? What is unique about state authority versus corporate authority as it relates to censorship?
"Hate speech is bad" is a very abstract statement. The sentence conveys almost no actual concrete meaning. It seems like a rational or sensible statement, but it delegates almost all of the actual work to feelings and emotions, and highly subjective ones at that. I don't find "wanna grab a cup of coffee" terribly hateful, but apparently some people do.
I get the overall sentiment of your post, and I think I mostly agree. Nevertheless, the way we stop this nonsense is to say at the beginning that it is an abstraction over extremely subjective feelings and emotion, and thus has no basis other than eventual mob rule authoritarianism.
This doesn’t seem very sensible to me, I would even say it seems to be the opposite of sensible, probably because I am not American.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech_laws_by_country
I think there's a good conversation to be had as to what in particular makes physical harms so special as compared to others, and how existing law in every country (including the US) can constitutionally include some non-physical harms within its legislation (such as laws against sending threatening letters, or child pornography law, or fraud).
I'm paraphrasing what was here a few days ago:
Our banking partner is uncomfortable that the realistic sex toys modeled after magical creatures have the colors that strongly represent human organs. You will either have to change the colors or we will not be able to continue providing you with our services.
Censorship can be conducted by private institutions, governments and other controlling bodies. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship
Yes, Google and Apple are big. You can say well, it’s different because in this world there’s only two boards for the entire country, that’s true! But it’s not a censorship problem, it’s an antitrust problem.
many places have cultures and also law that for decades has worked perfectly fine reigning in the very worst forms of hate speeech (say holocaust denial in my country) while not descending into a sort of activism that starts to get silly.
There's no automatic mechanism that turns sensible rules into insensible ones, and it's also need not be the case with sensible hate speech rules.
With cases like Google's play store the issue seems more concrete. On the one hand it's the overwhelming power and lack of due process that large firms have over software. Decentralise this and put authority into the hands of people who know their networks and the situtation will imporove. Secondly it also seems to be a very activist employee base at companies like Google that's gone somewhat overboard. Again, an accountability issue. If these things were decided publicly, it would moderate to reasonable levels.
Section 230 was about child pornography and became used as a safe harbor for anything.
I am not usually agreeing w the Trump admin but they do have a point there.
In general our thinking about freedom of speech is itself idiosyncratic in the same way. Human FREEDOMS means doing what you want. It’s not the same as a right to a megaphone maintained by thousands of employees and infrastructure of large corporations to give you a platform to say anything unfiltered to 5 million people at once. I would argue that such interpretations of the First Amendment have been detrimental to society. Speech on giant platforms should be vetted like on Wikipedia’s Talk Page, where mutually distrusting people engage in responsible fact checking BEFORE the crowd sees the main page with these claims.
But hey I also argue similarly that the supreme court’s Heller decision similarly obviated the Well Regulated Militia clause into irrelevancy, so now anyone can have a gun no matter whether they are part of any well regulated organization or not. No checks on individual action that can affect others.
Now we reap what we sow as a society. Yes FREEDOM of speech is important but what we call freedom today has greatly expanded even to unlimited political donations by super PACs and so on. Again a supreme court decision where expanding freedoms in Citizens United harms democracy. A win for ideologal purity I guess, but is socity better off?
PS: before someone objects with “who will be the factcheckers/watchers I will say it will be self selected and self policed like on Wikipedia, as long as there is a healthy mix of views, it’s better than one wacko with a megaphone. Who does this celebrity culture help? It further divides us. And that’s why we can’t have nice things!
That's the "slippery slope" fallacy. There's a knee-jerk reaction in America that any censorship is bad and will somehow always lead to more censorship. But there area places where censorship has been implemented in small ways and it hasn't led to some sort of free speech apocalypse. In Germany or Israel, for instance, it's illegal to deny the holocaust. That's a pretty sensible limit considering their history. All these years later, they're still free an functioning democracies.
It looks like letting people say anything they want on major social media platforms is only having one major positive effect: a few advertising companies are becoming very rich.
The negative effects include:
- incited violence (gang-oriented gun crime in Chicago is often fanned by social media posts for example)
- bad medical decisions (vaccine/COVID misinformation)
- cancel culture/political manipulation (people taking other people's posts as facts when they are not)
I would like to uphold the principle of free speech and forcing social media providers to be free speech agents even though they are private companies, but it's starting to get hard to defend. I am losing faith that strict adherence to free speech is going to result in a smarter, happier humanity. It might be better if less people speak their mind.
And yet today, despite decades of "censorship" by Facebook and Google, you can see whatever porn you want, snuff films, terrorist propaganda, hate speech, libel/slander spread by instigators like Glenn Beck and Alex Jones. Just not on Google or Facebook.
Different private entities and people have different levels of tolerance. If you want filth, use Gab or 4chan/8chan. If you want forums that are partially moderated, use Facebook/Google/Reddit. If you want forums that are fully moderated, join a private or niche board like HN.
Browser seems to be an exception.
> The rationale they gave is that hate speech appears on these apps,
So does in countless app on the store, and not in the third party content, but app themselves pretty much, and Google don't touch it.
A much more rational assumption is that Google sees the Fediverse as something that can come to steal their cattle (eyeballs,) and they have a plan to subplant it.
You will very soon see them turning even more picky, and eventually remove even censored fediverse apps.
They are repeating the trick they did with uBlock. First, they say do a purge, with an option for the most resistant to "play along," and a few month later, they pull the rug again. This way, they evade an immediate backlash.
In the US, beyond explicit calls for illegal behavior (usually illegal) and kiddie porn (always illegal), we don't have many restrictions or even a legal definition of "hate speech." But even those laws aren't consistently applied. For the most part, it's up to the judgement of the viewer or based on the "reasonable person" rule and "reasonable people" seem to be getting rarer and rarer..
Do the apps connect by default to a server that allows hate speech? If that's the case, is this an instance of bad defaults? Maybe the apps could work around this by just connecting to a server that's moderated to be acceptable to Google, but leave it configurable.
Think of them as retail outlets, in a mall. Do you see shady stuff going on there?
Would 'The Gap' sell porn to increase profits by 15%? Of course not. And for obvious reasons.
We shouldn't think of 'App Stores' as some kind of truly open marketplaces, any more than a shopping mall is.
What we need is just more independent means of distribution.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/hi97fz/...
Pretty much all the subs like the the_donald, republicans, conservative, asktrumpsupporters that are against the big tech censorship will censor (ban) you for just showing their hypocrisy.
I clicked on few links or r/RedditAlternatives, and they look like Facebook pages of rural Ohio.
Good thing you can't find any hate speech on Play Store–promoted corporate behemoths Twitter and Facebook!
Some servers on the fediverse specifically allow unfettered hate speech.
To be fully accurate, this is absolutely censorship, but it's not a violation of anyone's First Amendment rights. People often conflate the two.
We can argue about whether or not Google should ban certain opinions on their platform, or where the line should be drawn, but it is arguable that hey have the legal right to do so. And the Federal Government, just as inarguably, does not have this right.
I take your point about legality. But, I'd make the point that we don't have a clear moral or legal concept of free speech that relates to the current world.
"We can argue about whether or not Google should ban certain opinions on their platform, or where the line should be drawn, but it is arguable that hey have the legal right to do so."
At some point, the distinction between legal and moral breaks down.
In theory, google could legally do quite a lot. Say google decides to censor all mentions of the tiananmen square rising. They could remove it from search, youtube, android phones, chrome. Gmail could spam filter emails mentioning it. They could exert influence outside of companies/services that they own directly. None of that is illegal (at least not unconstitutional). In practice, this is very close to what China does with the great firewall.
It also wouldn't stand. Something like this would be too contradictory to the moral concept of free speech.
Constitutions are interpreted, and the supreme court is not the only interpreter. It's a cultural construct as well as a legal one.
We are effectively at this point now. Google, Twitter, Facebook, etc... These aren't platforms in the way newspapers were. They're not platforms at all. They're the level ground, in terms of speech, press, the right to petition the government or practice religion. The reasons that amendment was written runs through google.
EX: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_v._Pacifica_Foundation
Large general-purpose platforms should be forced do distribute all content which is not otherwise illegal, and only perform removal based through the standard legal system.
True. But while technically correct, it is becoming a more and more academic distinction.
Facebook-Apple-Google-Twitter, and maybe a few other tech behemoths, probably have greater ability to censor people and content than most governments throughout history. It's also true, in theory, democratically elected governments could reign them in. But it's also true they have unprecedented power to manipulate public opinion, if they chose to do so, to get people elected or legislation passed or blocked.
Decided to look, pretty clear.
"Google may make changes to this Agreement at any time with notice to Developer"
and
"Google may terminate this Agreement with You immediately upon written notice"
This is actually still a good Wikipedia article to educate yourself.
You're technically right, but in practice it really doesn't matter that the "government" can't censor you when the modern "public square" is held almost entirely by private companies. The government doesn't really hold any power in shaping modern public discourse anymore, tech companies do! Now the fact that said private company's ideals line up closely with one certain political party is just a coincidence, I'm sure.
It's not censorship, its moderation and editorial discretion.
In respect to this move by Google, there are no differences between web browsers and Mastodon browsers. The only difference is that if Google applies their ban equally and fairly, they lose tremendous amounts of money by banning all web browsers.
We shall see if Google follows it's own policy on this manner or if they are descriminating based on what lines their pockets.
This sets a dangerous precedent and highlights why we should continue removing Google/etc as dependencies in our lives.
All depends on who the companies consider a hate group.
"Oh it doesn't matter they went after people I disagree with"
Okay wise guy, what happens if the other side takes power? Think that's never happened historically? Then they'll come after you and I. How about we just not give this kind of power to anyone and let people make their own choices.
Yes, everyone would obviously prefer a fully open and uncensored platform, but the reality is that those are very easy for bad actors to take advantage of. So many things on the web is disappearing thanks to these bad actors. Public APIs are getting locked down, Catpchas everywhere, passwords and 2fa are getting increasingly more complicated, and so on.
If you really think every platform should be 100% open, you live in an idealistic universe that is not this one. The whole idea of "the solution to bad speech is more speech" simply does not work. It just doesn't.
In terms of hate speech or illegal content... does that make up the vast majority of fediverse content, in the way that pirated media makes up the vast majority of torrents? (Even though torrents can also still be used for 100% legitimate and legal purposes.)
Or is it like the dark web, which from what I understand is mostly legal content, but still hosts a sizeable proportion of content for illegal services and content?
Or is it more like what Reddit used to be, where it's 99% all for good and fun, but with a tiny minority of super-hateful communities? (These days all those super-hateful communities have been banned for a while, which is why I mean the "old Reddit".)
Just trying to get a basic context here. Not looking for speculation, but the impressions from people who actually use it...
In my experience, there has been a very minimal amount of hate speech on my timeline.
The nature of the decentralized, federated system does allow hate groups to easily gain a platform. However it's just as easy, if not easier to prevent their instance from communicating with yours.
It's very much NOT like the torrent analogy you made and a lot more in line with your Reddit analogy.
I would encourage you to go to https://mastodon.online and check it out!
Anyone could start their own 'Twitter' server, and doesn't matter which server you are in, you can send messages/follow anyone in any server, unless the person or server blocks you/your server.
In Mastodon, it's mostly about legal content, but with different servers focusing on different subjects, or offering different levels of privacy and/or free-speech. Some servers focus on a safe-space for transgenders, others, a non-censored place for alt-right people.
However, anyone can create an instance in the Fediverse, like when Gab created their own Mastodon instance. Basically every other instance chose not to federate with them, though.
That's what is nice about the Fediverse, you can pick what community with what rules is best for you.
This is nothing more than a monopoly stomping out a platform it doesn't like. Probably because federation is a threat to Google's position as the central hub of the internet.
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
The real reason is that Google employees live in an ideological echo chamber where censoring anything that doesn't align with their ideologies is a completely normal thing to do. They think they're protecting the world from bad ideas, without noticing how they themselves promote other bad ideas.
Basically: the moralistic version of the Dunning-Kruger effect.
Now, I do understand the families of the victims may want the videos taking down. But it seems to me the mob of people flagging these videos have a different motive. This shows that trusting the community to flag offensive content has its flaws. (although at Youtube's scale there's no alternative really)
Were you able to find the videos? They tell a pretty different story than the media narrative. Every person he shoots attacked him or had a gun. He doesn't shoot the kid behind them who had his hands up, or any other bystanders. He then walks with his hands up and turns himself in to police.
It's still up on several alternative sites (BitChute and PeerTube instances) along with some I can't mention here. I always use youtube-dl to download YouTube videos, Tweets and Reddit videos for anything that's going on right now; especially shootings. They get taken down pretty fast and it has a chilling effect because people are only seeing the CNN/MSNBC/FOX versions that are HEAVILY edited.
This happens all the time--recently, a podcast app was removed from the Play Store because it could be used to listen to content which didn't meet Play Store guidelines. The only way to fix it is to post about it and generate enough outrage that Google hears about it and can undo the ban.
i'm not familiar with the other apps on the list but i expect it might be some issue like promoting such instances in their registration screen.
also interestingly, the instance OP links to qoto.org is known within the fediverse for being full of creepers, because they've implemented a partial defederation and block circumvention. if you have an account on qoto.org, you can follow users who've blocked you, on instances that have blocked you, because it will recognize such, pull a list of posts via RSS instead of via activitypub, and fake an activitypub actor internally to generate posts for your feed. in their defense they have said that the posts are public anyway, and the user could just browse the public feed with a web browser, but it's clearly a bit different when posts from a person who has tried to block you appear in your feed normally as an item you can interact with. it's certainly against the spirit of consent.
https://old.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/r3dhg/reddit_is_fu...
So the issue isn't so much that content is accessible, it's when the content is more integrated with the app.
In the case of the Fediverse apps they can't block anything because firstly there's no resources to police it, and secondly it's kind of the whole point of federation to let the user see what they want without getting in the way.
Sarcasm aside, I think its one of the big tech moves to control free web.
First, there are content providers like Facebook or Youtube. Those platforms store the content of their users and if the content can be publicized the content providers have to apply their rules.
Second, there are software providers like the Play Store in its original function, Apples App Store or Amazons App Store. Those platforms should not care about content but just about software. If the software is malicious, ban it. But they should not ban software because if the content you can reach with it. That is the job if the distributing content providers.
That said, I am not a particular friend of censoring content at all. I just accept, that some content providers have their own rules about which content they accept and which content they don't want to support.
That being said, imagine if this happened on the Apple App Store...
Disclaimer: Views expressed are my own and do not reflect my Employers position
Only free (free as in freedom and open source) software is ever acceptable. Everything else eventually leads to Hell.
Wait, Gmail is made „by us” and not „by pesky them”. Gmail is sure ok.
[0] https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.keylesspalace.tusky/
Let's say that 100% of the servers were bastions of hatespeech. It seems like the folks in this thread would be against banning it in that case. But I think that's wrong. If the app was 100% just hatespeech sites, then it should probably be banned.
Now, then we get to reality: What is the real mixture? 80%? 50%? 20%? I don't have any background knowledge to make a guess. But I think it would not be difficult to show that whatever percentage it is, it would be far greater than say, what you can find on the average internet site.
Why do I say that? Because instead of going on Facebook, which is so easy that over a billion people use it... you have to pick up an obscure piece of software and run a server, or something. So the only people who are going to pick this up are likely technophiles, and people who have been banned from mainstream sites.
And on that front I completely understand where Google is coming from. Because the fediverse has a laissez faire attitude towards moderation (i.e. instance owners don't really block much) much of what you see on the fediverse is stuff that would get you banned on mainstream social networks [1]. And that content is the default experience unlike a web browser/chat programs/communities where you have to seek out that kind of content.
I expect that an app tied to a specific instance that put effort into moderating their content and put up some safeguards against seeing content on other instances by default with some popup like "content on other servers is not vetted, are you sure?" would be allowed to stay.
[1] Which makes sense since these are some of the only havens for people who can't make it on Twitter/FB/Reddit.
Of course, Google won't ban the web, but only because it doesn't suit them to. What we wind up with is Google having arbitrary control over which types of communication protocols are allowed on Android with no need to justify their decisions, because any protocol could carry hatespeech, and that's pretty concerning.
We desperately need a mobile general purpose computing platform that doesn’t make side loading so onerous. Apple and Google are going to continue pretending they aren’t selling general purpose computers and they may well convince the regulators.
Consumers need to be able to choose an operating system that gives users full control. I don’t want to be confined to a desktop or a laptop.
> This is particularly worrisome because for most people Google Play is the only way they understand to install apps at all.
I disagree. Users dependent on installing apps are the least likely to use fediverse apps to begin with. I use F-Droid or download APKs from XDA, but I have no idea how I would even get started with Mastodon or these other decentralized apps. I frequently hear the term "start an instance of ___".
What does that mean? Can't I just create an account? When I hear "start an instance", I think of launching a Linux droplet on Digital Ocean and setting up an app there. I can't imagine what an average user that wants a Twitter alternative would think.
Naturally, a lot of these visitors often engage in dynamic discussions on international relationships and domestic issues. Nothing too sensitive from my perspective. And most of the time, people contribute personal experiences that are quite valuable.
The site is frequently shutdown for a few weeks, probably once every 2-3 months. And sometimes it can be a long one, as long as a few months.
The reason is of cuz the site is engaged in "appropriate discussion".
I want this to be a cautionary tale that, despite different motivation, the end results of these powerful entity, exert influence that is almost identify in behaviors.
The good thing is that there is a process in US to correct the behaviors. While as there is none in China. And we have to stand up to protect the freedom.
Serves you right.
Countries like Austria and Germany have a law called Wiederbetätigungsgesetz which prevents public display of neonationalistic symbolism or speech. I think such a law would be a great starting point for a new law preventing hate speech and discrimination based on ethnicity, religion, gender, or sexual orientation.
We can see a shift to the alt-right in the USA at the moment, where reasonable people and certain ideas like universal healthcare are being labeled as extreme left.
Maybe a tolerable law could be modelled using some concept of truth (eg. I think the Nazis were great vs. The Holocaust did not happen), but I am unsure how that could reasonably be applied when talking about contemporary affairs.
You can't just keep banning Fediverse instances. It's like banning websites. So what is this going to mean?
Approved instances. Here's a list of 200 instances ... get on our approved list to be a part of the app. That list might grow to 3000, but if you're not on it, your instance is not accessible.
That is where we're heading.
Do you have links? The only example I could think of was Freetusky, which was unmaintained while upstream Tusky itself got regular updates. That's what I'd guess as reason for its quite recent archival: https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroiddata/-/commit/f9b7a9540f368f...
Latest version is 8.0.7 while upstream Tusky's latest version is 12.1.
Back when it was new, the F-Droid devs actually defended Freetusky and didn't follow demands for its removal. https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroiddata/-/issues/1736
I don't think that F-Droid should pander to people who don't care about FOSS or maintaining software, no matter their views.
Disclaimer: F-Droid maintainer/contributor (but gotten inactive for unrelated reasons).
Edit to add: note that another Tusky fork had been uploaded to F-Droid (Husky) before Freetusky got removed.
As for why they do it, this essay may prove enlightening:
Obviously a "KKK Members" app in the app store is absolutely unacceptable, or something overt like that, but to dig into the content of an otherwise harmless app? Cmon, man. We're adults. Let us see what we want to see.
Why? if you want the internet to feel less "safe" and for people to simply ignore hate speech, why would this be unacceptable? It would certainly make the internet feel less safe for a lot of people, but maybe you're not one of those people, and those people can just ignore it as you said.
There we are. When framapiaf.org, mamot.fr and other "free speech" and "anti-censorship floss activists" will start to apply a proper moderation and clear blocks of fascists instances and users, maybe Google would reconsider to publish the Android clients on Google Play.
Those spaces are totally out of control and this is a part of the problem.
I’m going to start supporting pine and any other open alternatives more. Pine is the only mobile platform I’m even vaguely optimistic about.
Be aware that while it's possible for Android users to download Fediverse apps from an alternative app store like F-Droid instead, the same would not be possible on an Apple device if Apple were to do the same.
Maybe it's too soon to say but given the reputation of 4chan vs the small user-group of fediverse I'd say these rules are being enforced selectively.
When I see the amount of people registering with Gmail accounts on the Fediverse when it is supposed to be a tech giants escape (Twitter here but still) and then complaining and crying about a "Google Play ban", I am laughing very very strong.
On a higher level, what’s the problem and what should be changed? Google has a policy that people don’t like, Android can side load, isn’t that exactly what people want?
(Or at least that's the most reasonable argument/step that I've seen from an anti-trust perspective)
The point is that sideloading presents several barriers to entry and at every extra step you'll lose a few more users. very few people will get all the way through enabling sideloading, figuring out how to actually do it with ADB or something, ignoring the scary prompts, and get all the way to actually installing and running an app. This is a nice workaround for a few people, not a solution to Google applying their policies in an aggressive way to remove apps they don't like that clearly aren't themselves dedicated to hate speech.
There’s plenty of hate speech on Facebook, but their app remains. Chrome allows you to access sites with hate speech too, but it’s not going anywhere.
Roughly, web browsers, podcast players and Fediverse clients (and probably a bunch of other apps, those are just obvious examples) all fetch contents from a user-supplied source over HTTP(S) and display it. As long as they are not specifically promoting "banned" sites, they should all be treated the same in that regard.
So this hurts discoverability and credability ("if it's not bad software, why isn't it allowed in the Google store like all the other apps?") of fediverse apps and networks.
Marginalizing ideas that breed on marginalization is to me a fool's errand. Light the ultimate sanitizer.
The internet, yes, as one cohesive whole. There aren't safe places, adult content can't be hidden from kids so let's not let kids use google until they're at least 18, maybe 21, and hate speech is something we see continuously everywhere...
I think you're overreacting.
They seem rushed to establish some kind of precedent. Is there someone on Biden's team who is known to be a strong anti-monopolist, and this is in preparation for a administration change? I don't think Biden himself has ever had strong feelings here.
Or maybe someone at the Trump admin has pretty much given them a green light?
Rank speculation, all of what I wrote, but there seems to be a behavior pattern emerging recently among some of the most powerful tech companies.
For Google, seems like it's because there's an election in a few months and Google's doing whatever it can to stop Trump winning again.
Any confirmation of the broad speculation in this thread and the the linked thread..?
The play store needs to be fairly permissive in terms of content, so that people keep their phones secure. The primary purpose of app review needs to be security and quality, not censorship and rent-seeking.
Its not like we have a MONOPOLY problem in tech!
The markets will just sort it out.
I have a 500GB microSD card on my phone with all my music. I've been collecting it for decades, many from artists I meet in bars and pubs. I buy off Bandcamp when I have to, which only charges 15%, compared to Google/Amazon/Apple which charge 30%+, or streaming services that pay artists pennies.
Take control of your music. Download it, buy it DRM free, save it, back it up.
Take control of your video feed. Subscribe to YouTube channels using an RSS reader. Use 3rd party frontends like Invidious.
If you're and tech and know how to do this, than do it, and help write posts to show how others can too.
Wonder if this has to do with the recent Husky/Tusky drama.
And also maybe revise all those antitrust laws into something actually useful - they're using their (kinda, mostly) monopoly to hinder competition by selectively applying their rules to whever they want and never themselves.
The open web has never been more important. What next, will Google's Chrome browser start blocking fediverse web domains? That's their 'platform', too.
It's not the abuse of power that is the problem but the power to abuse.
Decentralize all the things!
First they came for Alex. Then they came for the frog...
then they came for the corona and now they come for all the elephants in the room.
Most people won't put in the effort though.
I realize the sort of people who make decisions like this think they are doing this to "win," as the only thing on anyone's mind right now is influencing November, and making sure it "never happens again," but Googlers and tech people like this are creating a self-isolating minority of themselves.
Exiting what has become the Karen-net is probably one of the most interesting problems to solve right now.
I see the argument often that things like this are a free speech violation but the 1st amendment says “Congress shall pass no law...”. It doesn’t apply to actors other than the state.
I’m not defending Google’s actions here but I also don’t think it’s technically a free speech violation at least as the amendment is written, so I’m wondering if there are any cases addressing this sort of censorship w.r.t. the 1sr amendment.
The only current framework to protect freedom of speech from private companies is to designate them as common carriers, e.g. phone companies legally cannot police what is said over their wires.
Moreover, if you can access the very same content from Google Chrome, should Google remove their own browser too? The same happened to Podcast Addict, police all the podcasts in the world or we will remove your app.
The concern is Mastodon app developers are small one-man shops, less likely to be able to bring reason to bear and get Google to review these warnings. These app devs cannot possibly be held responsible for every post on the entire Mastodon network.
https://twitter.com/PodcastAddict/status/1261651512947691520...
That a few app developers have now been put in a position where they must implement the block is unfortunate. I always thought it was a good indicator of the developer's morals, but not much more.