Labour MPs begin quitting X over ‘hate and disinformation’

perviouslyiner@lemmy.world to Fediverse@lemmy.world – 387 points –
Labour MPs begin quitting X over ‘hate and disinformation’
theguardian.com

The only alternatives mentioned were Threads and Bluesky.

55

about time...

Start pushing for mastodon! Honestly there should be an official mastodon instance

You mean mstdn.social?

I mean there should be a mastodon.gov.uk

That's.....actually a cool AF idea/inplementation of Fediverse shit. A practical use as well, as they'd control who was on the instance and would be a sorta pseudo-verification process for any accounts on it's own.

I think it's perfect for governments. You can subscribe anywhere, you know it's legit, and that's a much better way to do notifications than twitter.

Yeah I'm not entirely well-versed in the implications of what that would allow, but it's another use-case that would be cool to see!

Yeah, but then again, do you want a government controlled social media? 🤔

The government could control social media on their own instance, sure.

I think having government accounts come from an official instance would garner more trust in the platform.

People don't trust the government all the time, they are a bunch of sneaky buggers you know.

This is healthy attitude but irrelevant to the point

It's not.... it's the fediverse. I'm completely fine with them having their own instance, it's not like they control it by any means. Hell they can be defederated. It's a lot better than them choosing some random instance.

Then it should be only for government officials.

Correct. It would only be for government officials, so anyone federated with them would know that they are in fact, validated as the government official.

I think the distributed nature of Mastodon keeps government control from being an issue. It would be kind of cool as a space for citizens to ask for assistance or air grievances while giving the politicians an officially owned space for things like announcements.

Totally agree. The issues with "government-controlled social media" are a non-issue in a federated environment, and the URL would give them legitimacy.

I don't want a private company controlling government email servers, why would I want them to control government social media platforms?

What you don't like pot holes in your roads? XD We can easily host our own server where the database password is already 123456

Be careful. He might sue saying you have to use the platform. He'll claim that not using it hurts his free speech.

Yeah, not sure the UK Labour party are going to be receptive to a free speech argument, given recent events. If anything, an updated law might make X liable for the real-world problems it causes.

Can you explain this point?

There was/is a wave of far-right riots happening in the UK, which involved a lot lotting and attacks on Muslims. This was triggered by a stabbing in Southport and a lie that spread on social media claiming that the perpetrator was a Muslim migrant that came to the UK on a 'small boat' crossing the channel (he was actually born and grew up in Cardiff). Musk may be liable because during the riots he made several posts undermining the government's attempts to quell the unrest and his general failure to tackle disinformation spreading on Twitter, such as the Muslim migrant lie.

Fair point. I thought you were implying the opposite.

I read it as implying Labour is anti-free speech for clamping down on racist hate speech and mob mentality.

Arresting people for things they say even when they aren't threats is anti-free speech and the UK and many European countries do not allow free speech. You can be arrested for even saying Israelis genociding Palestinians are Nazis.

No you cannot. Assuming you're not from the UK.

Stirring up racial hatred and geeing people up to burn down hotels holding refugees is not free speech.

I specifically said things that aren't threats. Just because you don't like what they say doesn't mean that it isn't free speech.

You sound like you get your knowledge of European and British laws from tabloid journalism

Since when did the NYT become tabloid journalism?

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/10/world/europe/germany-pro-palestinian-protests.html

Or Wikipedia?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_the_United_Kingdom

Which says, "there is no general right to free speech in the UK."

First one is about Germany, not UK. Secondly, you do realise wikipedia is unreliable, prone to edit wars and subject to those that have the most passion for a topic (like free speech "absolutists"/racists). It's why academia tell you its a poor reference and to not bother.

Can you find a UK example that you think overstepped the line?

I'm in the UK, critical of Israel and not been arrested yet...

It's always interesting seeing distrorted American views of the UK.

John Richard here is definitely an American. He doesn't understand the difference between "free speech" and "freedom from hatred"

Those of us in truly modern countries enjoy the latter and are very happy to have it.

It's a common thing in backward-thinking, religious countries to think that the former is better.

People in the UK need to start pushing Mastodon hard. You could use the tagline "You don't want to switch services again in a few years, do you?"

Only now? It's been two years of this and now they've had too much? No partial credit should be given for people that continued to participate when it was clear what was happening.

Also, I don't believe a significant number of them actually will.

Have barely touched Twitter since Muskification ruined it.

Threads is okay but Mastodon would be brill with more interaction.

Bluesky is really nice. It’s like mastodon but with an algorithm. Still decentralised and FOSS. Plus it bridges with mastodon well.

Labour MPs begin quitting X over ‘hate and disinformation’

Why does this happen? Lemmy doesn't get mentioned in articles, but Lemmy is still fairly small. Last I checked, Mastodon is doing well against the competitors. BBC even has an experimental instance

https://www.bbc.com/rd/blog/2023-07-mastodon-distributed-decentralised-fediverse-activitypub

Depends on the writer, chances are that those in the bbc who are involved with the mastodon instance are the nerds (like us) and the writer of this article doesn't know as much and is just listing the places the MPs went, and they are politicians so they wouldn't know about the "nerdy options"

They could start their own fediverse instance and ruthless ban users who have ever agreed with Jeremy Corbyn.

It’s rare to see such a big fuck up as with twitter…

Labour MP's need to put their grown up pants on and work for the people instead of being emotional about a platform.