Call me crazy, but I a) think the fediverse probably doesn’t have more ‘toxic content’, harmful and violent content, and child sexual abuse material then other platforms like X, Facebook, Meta, YouTube etc, and b) actively like the fediverse because of that.
But after a few hours carefully drafting and sourcing an edit to make it clear that no, the fediverse isn’t unusual in social media circles for having a lot of toxic content, I realised that the entire ‘fediverse bad’ section was added by 1 editor in 2 days. And the editor has made an awful lot of edits on pages all themed around porn (hundreds of edits on the pages of porn stars), suicide, mass killings, mass shootings, Jews, torture techniques, conspiracy theories, child abuse, various forms of sexual and other exploitation, ‘zoosadism’, and then pages with titles like ‘bad monkey’ that seemed reasonably innocent until I actually clicked on them to see what they were and, well.
I decided to stop using the internet for a while.
I’ve learned my lesson trying to change Wikipedia edits written by people like that - they tend to have a tight social circle of people who can make the internet a very unpleasant place for anyone suggesting maybe claims like ‘an opinion poll indicated that most people in Britain would prefer to live next to a sewage plant than a Muslim’ should maybe not on Wikipedia on the thin evidence of paywalled link from a Geocities page written by, apparently, a putrid cesspit personified.
I thought I’d learned my lesson about trusting Wikipedia.
It just makes me so angry that most people’s main source of information on the fediverse contains a massive chunk written solely by a guy who spends most of his time making minor grammar edits to pages about school shootings, collections of pages about black people who were sexually assaulted and murdered, etc, and that these people control the narrative on Wikipedia by means of ensuring any polite critics’ are overcome with the urge to spend the rest of the day showering and disinfecting everything.
Can you show a recent example? I don’t follow news communities, but it seems surprising that every news post would have a call for murder
This deal with Charlie Kirk has people on edge, although so too did Luigi, and the Presidential election, and so on.
Yes here’s an example from today - I just sorted News posts by active and scrolled down to find a post with >100 comments on it:
6 hours ago one person said (referring to USA Vice President JD Vance, the subject of the OP)
And someone replied:
Neither received any downvotes, and the latter reply received more upvotes than the one I quoted above it. Am I wrong to interpret that the reply is suggesting that it is unfortunate that the guy has not yet been shot in the throat? Involuntarily in case I need to add that, i.e. not euthanasia but non-consensual killing aka what most centrists would call “murder” (although I am not wanting to debate whether other definitions such as “justice” might also or even rather apply).
Of course it could be a “joke”, though isn’t the recipient just as much the party who determines what a message means as the sender? If it is a “joke” (possibly as in “haha jk except not really”), then there are an enormous number of such, and have been for quite awhile now - especially “joking” about how Luigi needs to save people, joking about the fact that a second amendment exists in the USA, joking about how people can conveniently die in non-murderous ways e.g. their liver goes out (see the posts about the recent Steve Bannon announcement), and just overall about how death is a good thing so long as it happens to “them”, the “other side” (again, I’m not wanting to get into whether it’s deserved, just stating here that such is being discussed, since these topics relate to how centrists from Reddit would view the Lemmy platform).
These kinds of things are likely to get Lemmy banned from the USA as the authoritarian program proceeds forward, but that is a separate issue from centrists (including those who think of themselves as leftists, not realizing what that means when recalibrated on a more global scale) and most especially conservatives (e.g. in the USA, that are currently using Reddit) feeling welcomed here.
So anyway that was the first such post that I examined. The next post has even more egregious and obvious comments, such as this one, from a whole week ago so at this point seems extremely unlikely to be removed by a mod and even if it were, it has already long served its purpose:
(And then s whole discussion ensues about just how okay it is to kill people. Other more… “circumspect” comments to that same OP include such things as “The 2nd amendment works for all sides.”
So far this is 100% of the first 2 posts I have examined, so let’s move on to #3. Yup, I immediately spot this really cute picture of a cat depicting someone being beheaded, in response to the statement “the aristocrats!”, itself in response to something deleted by a Moderator. So this makes 3 of 3 posts, still a perfect 100%. And I did not have to reference anything from any tankie instances (where the frequency is surely much higher), or anything removed or likely at this time to ever be removed by a moderator, one even having been from a week ago. Seriously, calling for shooting/beheading/otherwise killing “the enemy” are extremely common here. You have undergone extreme efforts to avoid seeing it, I understand, but it does exist, and new people visiting here can notice it, not knowing to expect this level of vitriol. Tbf even Reddit these days is exploding with calls to Luigi people, they just work much harder to repress it - which I am not saying is a good outcome, my only interest here lies in explaining what is, not what should be.
Filtered by Top Day on slrpnk
All of those posts are mere hours old, and shown from an instance that has defederated from Hexbear and Lemmygrad. And even there, I definitely see calls for outright murder, such as this one, although here it was fortunately caught and removed by a mod:
That post was of very limited / niche interest though, with only 17 comments total. If you want to disprove my wording that “all” posts have such calls, you can easily find several posts with 0 comments, which obviously disproves my wording choice:-). And likewise those with 1-20 comments - among a community that often has hundreds (e.g. this post from just 10 days ago has >1500) - is low-interest.
This is why I avoided using “Hot”, especially within a 1-day time period. But following your lead, I sorted by “Top Week”, and was going to ignore anything from just the last single day, although all of the top 4 posts are older than that so that makes things easier. The top one could be a bit of a bad example but like in response to “Shoot 'em. Problem gone!” has “it is also a way to end conservatism… just sayin…” - but this one is much more likely to TRULY be a joke, in the spirit of that whole post in general, or at worst a venting of steam (although further down people are talking about “Solutions” that involve “electrowhatever or guns, which seem like the two bodies of knowledge a solution would come from.” - note that guns are very ineffective tools to affect non-violent means of resistance or to destroy property, and chiefly are used to KILL PEOPLE aka “murder”). Another one there is literally “shoot the fascists”, another is “if you need some tips on making firearms out of things easily lifted from home depo, I’m your man”, others stop short of advocating outright murder but still do things inching towards that end such as “When do we start rounding up all the Faux execs and the on-air talent … When do we start doxxing those that support Faux by watching Faux, and start getting THEM fired?” - granted it starts as “fired” but the reply immediately carries it forward with “And then those high profile people would start losing their homes and lives. I would celebrate that as justice served.” The latter is admittedly a stretch to say advocation for actual murder directly, but it is like one millimeter indirectly removed from it so as part of this whole batch I will include it here.
So using your procedure, though skipping over posts that are less than or only a day old, I have added one more to the pile. We are at 4 out of 4 so far, or 4 out of 5 if you want to count the Hawaii one as a false positive. Moving on to the next one I see like “I would straight up start busting windows out of any vehicle with trump stickers.” - which tbf is not murder, just terrorism/violence. So yeah, this one has no calls to murder that I saw. So this is 4 out of 6.
Next is this one - and I am getting tired so going to rush through this one. There are a BUNCH of comments describing guns like “He is saying arm yourself while it is legal, so you have weapons for when you need them to fight off bad people in designer uniforms… Roughly translated.”, “2A for all. Time to resist in other ways”. Again these are describing guns not infrastructure-destroying or people-convincing tools, but tools to involuntarily kill people aka murder. So this is 5 out of 7.
Certainly not 100% though, if that is your mark. Which would be fair on your part b/c my literal wording called for it by stating “it seems virtually impossible these days to read the comments in even a news post that does not include at least one call for murder of someone or another.”, and my hyperbolic exaggeration is clearly false (in my defense I did not mean per-post but rather like “all the content that I read in a day will include at least one call for murder”, but I did not clarify so that’s on me). Again, any post that has 0 comments would already have disproven it, as too is any comment with very small number of comments or interest, etc. However, it still seems true that well over half of all the current most active or top weekly posts from News@lemmy.world contain calls for using weapons to kill people or the lesser version of at least celebrating death of “the enemy” however it may happen, even if depicted in cutesy pictures of cats frolicking. Separating aside any judgement of good or bad or neutral or “it’s waaaaay more complicated than any of that”, it is going to be a turn-off for some people.
Also I looked at meme communities again for Top Weekly and of course the top several posts are all about politics and news, though I am too tired to go through hundreds more comments looking for calls to murder in them as well, even in “memes” communities. It seems likely that they are there somewhere though? Also, we didn’t even begin to go looking into the whole Gaza situation… or Ukraine/Russia, or any of the myriad others. I am confident that if you look, you will easily find it. Now in brand-new posts and not in the Hawaii one for sure, but such calls do appear here and there, around the wide Threadiverse.
First of all, sorry I thought you wanted to use slrpnk as the first link you posted was from there, I forgot that slrpnk doesn’t federate hb and grad
But actually, thinking about it now, does it really matter? LW defederates both, so there would be no way for a hexbear comment to make it to that community? https://hexbear.net/c/news@lemmy.world
Anyway, it doesn’t really matter, it’s still not 100%
I don’t have time for a comparison, but doesn’t Reddit has a similar amount of call to violence today? Intuitively, one would think that if people are okay with reading those on Reddit, they would be okay with those on here too
Correct.
Hrm… you know what, maybe? I mean my first answer is most definitely no, bc Reddit fights hard to censor it, but beyond that, people find ways to convey the same meaning, so there is a certain sense to which your statement could be true? Perhaps I am thinking back to my / our experiences on Reddit from two years ago without updating it in my head to reflect modern times.
But then at that point I want to say no again, for several reasons. One, I do have to read some subs on Reddit bc the content is simply not here - and you go to where that is, and that concept will never change no matter how popular the Threadiverse gets - and I don’t see anything close to the levels that we see here. Then again, it might exist there, just not where I am looking?
However, two, people in r/Redditalternatives say that we are too toxic - which we are - and that as bad as things are over there, we are worse from what they see, and we also have less content. The only thing we have less of here that they like is fewer bots - although tbf we have those here as well, despite how most of us have blocked them and they tend to be properly labeled here (which I would argue makes 100% the difference - one that you know is a bot is not a problem, as it is not pretending to be a human).
All of this is far more complicated than I am able to say cleanly and succinctly - e.g. we do have a higher maximum here of extremists, and also it seems to me a much higher baseline level of it as well, but we also have kindness here, whereas there it seems mostly absent, and we have more intellectual discussions here whereas there the baseline level expectation seems to be either teenagers or right-wing trolls that everyone just seems to give up on keeping our and just accepts the fact that they are everywhere, in every sub, in most posts even though they get ignored.
And yeah, calls for murder appear there - but they tend to be removed. And yeah, some of that content gets removed here as well, but as I showed links to, not all of it, nor even perhaps the majority of it, though depending on which community, on which instance, and which subject matter and in particular which mod (team) is looking at it.
We are definitely a den of iniquity. Perhaps Reddit is too. X/Twitter even more so. Bluesky seems far less so though, so maybe that was the source of that comparative thought process - some journalist who is editing Wikipedia in their spare time, so applying their personal bias to it, which is true but mainly in a highly narrow sense?
Perhaps the focus should not be on whether calls for murder exist - I’ve shown you, they DO, but that overall the Threadiverse provides tools to engage with content in enjoyable ways. Obviously engaging with controversial topics is going to bring up controversial wording, but someone can - as you do - block it easily. Reddit is too restrictive, and 4chan too open, but the Threadiverse provides a nice middle ground. It does require a helluva lotta work though, to understand how to make proper use of those tools. Or rather, Lemmy does, whereas PieFed makes it downright trivially easy with Topic Feeds and keyword filters and such (e.g. “guillotine” and “2A” and perhaps things like “, deserve it” and whatnot). Here at least you can make something work, whereas on Reddit you just can’t.