balsoft

I'm not defending anyone. I am just looking at a stated claim (Bluesky is as bad as Twitter because they verified ICE) and evaluating if it has merits.

I don't think that's the claim, at least that's not the way I'm reading it.

Bluesky is knowingly hosting nazis. The verification here just displays the mens rea: rather than them just not noticing the account, they know about it and still haven't banned it.

I don't think Bluesky is as bad as Twitter right now, neither is the OP. However, what we recognize is that this is the quintessential beginning of a Nazi bar, which means it will eventually become as bad as Twitter.

As long as I am reasonably in control of the information that I can access, I see no point in complaining about it.

I think there is a significant problem in platforming nazis. It gives this vile ideology a voice and a means to spread. Especially given the state of media literacy and critical thinking in the West, a lot of people don't know how to control which information they see, and makes them susceptible to this manipulation. Fascism is rising through social media misinfo right now, as we discuss this, so it is very important to complain about it as loud as possible.

I wouldn't call it "endorsing", but I would call it "platforming". blahaj.zone is platforming you, lemmy.ml is platforming me, bluesky is platforming nazis.

What I am “OK with” has no impact whatsoever in “what actually gets to happen”. I rather not waste my energy on the things that I can not control.

You are in control of which social media you use, and even more so in control about which companies you choose to support or defend. You are currently spending your energy defending a company that is hosting a de-facto nazi account on their servers.

Let me rephrase the question. If a newspaper you enjoy reading started publishing a column from Gestapo, what would you do? Would you boycott and complain? Would you just complain and keep buying it? Or would you keep buying it and defend their actions by "well I can just skip that page with the nazi propaganda on it"?

It would. They would just do it from unverified accounts.

Well, yeah, but that would take effort in creating&advertising new accounts. Why make their nazi jobs easier?

Worse still, they would be able to post it and completely deny it if confronted about it.

There is literally nothing stopping them from doing it now. Having a verified account does not impede their ability to create fake unverified accounts in any way.

Spammers also get to send millions of messages every day for “free”, but we mostly ignore it because we are able to filter them out. Sure, it would be great to completely get rid of spam and the phishing industry… but there is no way to completely get rid of them that does not involve increasing the surveillance aparattus and given more power to a centralized enforcer, so if I have to choose between spammers and corporate-controlled communicatioins, I will take the spammers any day.

I would agree with this (except bluesky is also corporate-controlled). There is no way to completely cut out spam, including nazi spam.

But in this case someone from Bluesky looked at this account which self-identifies as a nazi organization, verified that it belongs to a nazi organization, and hasn't banned it. It is clearly different.

Truth Social is running Mastodon under the hood. But nobody considers it a part of the fediverse, because even if it had federation turned on it would instantly be defederated by 99% of instances.

I'm sure there are nazi lemmy instances out there, but they are all defederated from the lemmyverse. This is the correct approach, decentralized platforms are somehow doing a better job at this then the de-facto centralized bsky.

No, I don’t expect them to ban anyone from the government.

So, you would be OK with a newspaper accepting ads and publishing an opinion column from Gestapo or SS? They were official government organizations after all.

And, no, I don’t think it would be wise to do it: verifying the account does not mean they are supporting it, it just means they are making sure that whatever crap ICE is saying can not go around without accountability.

You are once again presenting a false dichotomy. The choice is not only between "verify" and "not verify", there is also the option to "ban". Banning ICE would not let them post Nazi propaganda on their platform at all.

That’s how decentralized systems work. Bluesky does not control who I get to see.

1. Bluesky is de-facto centralized, they operate the only full-network indexer, they get to control what accounts can post to all frontends
2. They are hosting the ICE account on their own server and domain (bsky.social), and make it available through their own frontend (bsky.app). They definitely can control that, even if there were other indexers available

ICE or any other institution can not buy its way into manufacturing propaganda.

They literally can. Except in this case they didn't even have to pay, the corporate overlords of bluesky will let them post propaganda for free.

Nazis are quite good at bending or evading rules to further their agenda. They will push the boundaries of what's acceptable by using creative allegories or dogwhistles. Moderators are supposed to moderate assuming goodwill from participants, this should not be the case here because ICE is not operating in good faith; a good mod will know to just ban self-identified nazis straight away. Even if the mods are hesitant to ban without any activity, me thinks a job ad to join the modern Gestapo (which is already in ICE's profile) should be grounds for a ban.

Bsky is actually quite centralized. Bluesky the company owns the only full-network indexer (I think they call it a "relay" or something), which collects posts from all other servers and allows those posts to be rendered by various apps (e.g. bsky.app, but all other frontends use the same indexer). They could just ban them at indexer level.

But even that is moot, because they are letting them host their account on a server Bluesky the company owns, bsky.social.

It is a lot better. If you let Nazis join your platform, your platform is now a Nazi bar. Ban them, don't let them spread their propaganda.

Do you expect bsky to ban ICE? They already have a job posting to join the Gestapo in their profile, is that not enough?

Someone at bsky verification team looked at this, and instead of flagging the account to be reviewed and removed, they pressed the "verify" button. If you give them the benefit of doubt, this was a mistake from someone on the verification team, but realistically speaking a corporate platform turning into a Nazi bar is quite natural nowadays.

It is a clear indication that they don't intend to ban the account, they have verified it on their own server. They are two separate actions, but one implies that the other will not be done.

And in any case, I'm pointing out that the dichotomy between "verify ICE and let them post nazi propaganda officially" and "let ICE post nazi propaganda with plausible deniability" is false, they can (should) just ban them.

It's better if the nazis were permabanned from their indexer thingy. Otherwise it's just a nazi bar.

Imagine if in the 30s, some newspaper allowed the Gestapo to run ads and write an opinion column. Would you be defending them?

South Koreans can only imagine it as well. It is a grim dystopia for the working class there either way, this is just a skirmish between two factions in their oligarchy.