I don’t think the government views video game mod hosts as so fundamental to a healthy society that they require strong limitations on their own freedom of speech, but you’re welcome to call up your representative and start a campaign for the ability to force Nexus to host Nazis if it’s truly important to you.

Forcing people to host speech they don’t want to is far more draconian than not doing so.

You’d probably be more than a little annoyed if I put a swastika sign on your front yard and then told you that you were infringing on my right to free speech when you went to go remove it.

If you’re looking for games that have nothing that might make you uncomfortable, those games do exist, but Baldur’s Gate is not one of them.

For a lot of people, directly tackling elements of life that are uncomfortable or actively unpleasant is what can make a game, movie, or whatever else high quality art. Schindler’s List is explicitly about one of the most horrendous chapters in all of human history, and it’s also one of the greatest movies ever made. Being uncomfortable isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

This is not the Baldur’s Gat devs dashing into the mod maker’s house and holding him at gunpoint until he deletes the mod. I’d agree, that would be inappropriate.

What this is instead is the people running Nexus deciding that they don’t want to be associated with this kind of content and that they are not willing to host it. If you owned a bar and it started being frequented by neo-Nazis, you’d be perfectly within your rights to kick them out, because you’re a private business owner and can conduct it however you like within the bounds of the law.

Your position isn’t the “live and let live” idea you think it is, because what you’re in effect claiming is that the people behind Nexus should be forced to host content that they find extremely morally objectionable.

https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/10/23911338/unity-ceo-steps-down-developers-react

The guy at the top actually just got booted, if you care.

There is a practical difference in the time required and sheer scale of output in the AI context that makes a very material difference on the actual societal impact, so it’s not unreasonable to consider treating it differently.

Set up a lemonade stand on a random street corner and you’ll probably be left alone unless you have a particularly Karen-dominated municipal government. Try to set up a thousand lemonade stands in every American city, and you’re probably going to start to attract some negative attention. The scale of an activity is a relevant factor in how society views it.

Not really, no. Freedom of speech is very strongly ingrained in our Constitution. The only legal restrictions on it are essentially direct threats or incitement of violence.

“Go kill this Jew” - Absolutely illegal.

“Go kill the Jews” - Illegal

“The Jews should be killed” - Borderline based on circumstances

“The Jews deserve to die” - Borderline, but probably protected by the Constitution

“The Jews deserved the Holocaust” - Almost certainly protected by the Constitution

Honestly, I would love to see a Wikipedia-style social media platform take off, but I really don’t know if the finances could work out. Wikipedia already struggles, and it’s obscenely useful. I don’t think nationalization is really feasible for social media - at least in an American context - because it would be subject to the government’s legal limitations on regulating free speech, which are extremely minimal. A federally run platform would not be able to remove literal unironic Nazism, which is probably going to be a bit of a turn-off to normal people.

Genuine question: given that running a platform like that costs money, and that money must come from somewhere, what would you actually do if you were in charge of running it? You either take money from advertisers, or you charge users directly, and I’d hazard to guess that if you’d nuke your account upon seeing ads, you probably wouldn’t pay actual money to use it.

So what do you do?

Don’t do it; don’t give me hope.

For the record, the numbers they reported were based on the number of Instagram users that downloaded the Threads app and took the active step of activating their account there. Threads and Instagram share accounts, so it’s a very seamless process. What Meta very much did not do was take the number of Instagram accounts, which is around 1 billion, and say “We have a billion Threads signups!”.

Sharing accounts and thus making it extremely easy to sign up for was, if anything, a very clever and smart move.

Really does make the case for a federated protocol of some sort.

Well, Threads is at least aiming to do that and integrate with Mastodon, but the group mind has decided that this is bad.

I still haven’t seen any actual evidence of this, but I’m excited to see yours, which you clearly have given how confidently you’re asserting this.