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2025-04-16 19:31:36

UlrikeHahn@fediscience.org

@jdp23 @laurenshof @koen @Gargron @andypiper individual user and post implications aside, it feels to me like the bigger difference could be that mastodon.social can afford not to care about being geo-blocked by Turkey because it doesn’t have a for profit business model that relies on scale, whereas Bluesky probably wants/needs the users (? still unclear what BS business model is)

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2025-04-16 23:37:42

Jon

jdp23@neuromatch.social

Possibly. That’s why a statement would be useful — although I can also see arguments against making a statement in advance. Tricky situation. Congrats @andypiper on your new role!

But also, Bluesky (unlike .social, as far as I know) has the ability to geoblock content. When Bluesky’s German labeler takes down content in response to German court orders, it’s still visible to Bluesky users outside Germany. When mastodon.social takes down content in response to German court orders, it’s taken down for everyone. So that’s also a big difference

@UlrikeHahn @laurenshof @koen

2025-04-16 23:51:23

Ulrike Hahn

UlrikeHahn@fediscience.org

@jdp23 @andypiper @laurenshof @koen yes. And at no point in internet history were any of these issues/difficulties properly resolved. Imagine (hypothetically) extreme racist content about the US that I could view but you couldn’t - would your not seeing it feel sufficient to you? How would you feel about your participation in the commercial entity that profited from it? Or conversely, the use of said commercial entity by actors that (legally by the standard of that country) are using it for evil (lots of real examples to choose from here…) in their own countries… can that circle even be squared (by transnational corporate actors?)

2025-04-16 23:54:10

Laurens Hof

laurenshof@indieweb.social

@UlrikeHahn @jdp23 @koen @Gargron @andypiper

mastodon.social cant afford to ignore Netzdg tho. and so far germany has issued more takedown requests to bluesky than turkey has (47 actions by the german labeler vs 14 by the turkish one)

2025-04-16 23:57:48

Ulrike Hahn

UlrikeHahn@fediscience.org

@laurenshof @jdp23 @koen @Gargron @andypiper sure- but Germany is a democracy, Turkey isn’t. I see no issue with respect to Turkish laws on say medical advertising, but it sounds like this isn’t that. We need more fine-grained conceptual distinctions here …

(for what it‘s worth, I only lurk on BS for research purposes but have seen content there that seemed illegal by German standards that was visible to German users and received no response to reports…so systematic evidence would be good. I guess we will eventually get this via EU legislation once BS is a VLOP)

2025-04-16 23:59:13

Jon

jdp23@neuromatch.social

Agreed - it’s part of why I think decentralized approaches are the path forward. But of course that introduces new complexities …

@UlrikeHahn @andypiper @laurenshof @koen

2025-04-17 00:12:54

Ulrike Hahn

UlrikeHahn@fediscience.org

@jdp23 @andypiper @laurenshof @koen I‘m inclined to agree Jon: regardless of the actual of state of fedi/Mastodon, the possibility of building outward from local units that are locally sensitive to the relevant rules while still being able to communicate (to some extent) with each other sounds a more feasible path forward than a large transnational entity trying to slice up content in a way that respects local differences…

2025-04-20 19:04:24

Feral Ferment

feralferment@klacker.org

@Ulrike Hahn

In

https://fediscience.org/@UlrikeHahn/114349878017953058

you say

sure- but Germany is a democracy, Turkey isn’t.

Maybe unintentionally, but you are veering into "clash of civilizations" and "white man's burden" territory, when you say this.

Turkey is also technically a democracy (a Presidential Republic), and advocating that a random American company defy court orders of a sovereign nation state is not far from advocating for a Western-backed coup, or for "civilizing" that country by bombing the hell out of it. This isn't some hypothetical scenario, this literally has been happening to brown and black countries, year after year after year, for almost a century.

Granted democracy in Turkey may more visibly be a sham than it is in the USA or UK or Germany, but even those illusions of liberal/social democracies in the West had to be bankrolled by centuries of colonial loot. And those illusions are crumbling as we speak.

As for Germany: it has 100+ American military bases. By any definition, it ought to be called a colony of the USA. When it came out that the Americans were tapping Merkel's communications, the Germans had to grin and bear it. When the Americans (or their agents) blew out a gas pipeline co-owned by Germany, the Germans had to pretend to be mystified.

Majority of Germans are opposed to the genocide of Palestinians, and yet the German state backs Israel unconditionally, supplies it weapons, and even fights for it at the ICJ. It is persecuting as anti-semites Jews themselves who are appalled and enraged by the latest holocaust being perpetrated in their name. Germany wants to deport pro-Palestine activists who have not been convicted of any crime.

So what exactly is this German democracy that you are talking about?

Right at this moment, millions of Palestinians are deliberately being starved to death, with full Western backing, and this latest round of starvation has been going on for several weeks now. And the Western regimes claim Israel is entitled to do all of this because, among other reasons, it is the "only democracy" in the Middle East. And here you come saying Bluesky must obey Germany but not Turkey, because... "democracy".

That this went unchallenged so far says a lot about Mastodon.

postscript: I appreciate your effort at analyzing whether it is at all possible to have social media at scale without concentration of power/control (though that's not exactly how you are putting it), and also your effort at highlighting that this is ultimately a political issue. I shared my thoughts on that with you in another post.

https://klacker.org/item/6217d742-21b6-41c1-9856-485292e813a9

And @Jon has highlighted how the Fediverse has its own insidious problems; how, in contrast to Bluesky, mastodon.social blocking something is curtains for that post/user the world over. And on that topic, you can find almost daily examples of mastodon.social blocking content about the genocide of Palestinians. This post by @Tariq is a very recent example.

https://mastodon.social/@rzeta0/114353755117956203

You can also see in the thread psychopaths arguing that they have a right to NOT want to know about an ongoing genocide perpetrated by their own regimes, and also the usual Mastodon argument of "start your own instance".

Anyway, back to my point: I appreciate some of your analysis, but how casually you dropped to a "clash of civilizations" language, perhaps without even realizing it, shows how deeply embedded those attitudes are.

@Laurens Hof @Jon @Koen de Jonge - SynQ @Eugen Rochko @Andy Piper

2025-04-20 19:41:51

Tariq

rzeta0@mastodon.social

@feralferment @Gargron

100% what Feral said.

"Germany is a democracy, Turkey isn’t"

Even in 2025. Even after Trump. Even after Farage and Yaxley-Lemon. Even after the lies of Amsterdam's football thuggery were exposed. Even after Orban and le Pen, and the AfD.

.. it still shocks me that a European academic (professor of psychology and cognition, no less) can say that so casually.

The fact that it was said expecting it to be so uncontroversial is actually the thing that troubles me.

2025-04-22 19:22:49

Ulrike Hahn

UlrikeHahn@fediscience.org

@rzeta0 @feralferment @Gargron

the statement is based on a) the widespread classification of Turkey as a competitive authoritarian regime and b) the context of censoring accounts following last month's arrest of the Turkish opposition leader.

The post and discussion you are responding to is about *governance*, that is, the question of who decides what speech is allowed on a social media platform or not.

In that context, treating the local laws of democratic societies as 'censorship of free speech' seems conceptually unhelpful to me. Furthermore, the post stated explicitly that respecting self-governance was not all or none with respect to Turkey.

What the post was not was a value judgment about political systems. I also don‘t see where in the post I was „advocating“ anything.

2025-04-22 19:35:10

Ulrike Hahn

UlrikeHahn@fediscience.org

@rzeta0 @feralferment

and "clash of civilisations territory" isn't something I'm veering into, it's precisely the issue: whose cultural and legal norms hold sway when it comes to online speech?

Who gets to decide?

and what different answers are possible depending on technical design (a decentralised network of local servers or Bluesky's debundled global network)?

2025-04-23 03:14:06

Ulrike Hahn

UlrikeHahn@fediscience.org

@rzeta0 @feralferment @Gargron vis a vis your framing in terms of ‚clash of civilisations/white man‘s burden territory‘ you might wish to consider that 1) *both* Turkey and Germany are signatories of the European Convention on Human Rights and associated protocols which set out basic democracy relevant rights such as free speech, freedom of assembly, and a commitment to free and fair elections.

This means the two countries are compared by the European Court of Human Rights, international observers (e.g.m OSCE), and by scholars with respect to the same standard that each has voluntarily committed to as a sovereign nation.

2) there is a decade of academic scholarship on authoritarian backsliding in Turkey, e.g., https://repository.bilkent.edu.tr/server/api/core/bitstreams/33225c09-76a5-4ffd-982e-943d0ab542e9/content

2025-04-23 22:58:45

Feral Ferment

feralferment@klacker.org

@Ulrike Hahn

You are arguing about technicalities and nuances. This is a valid approach as long as there is an agreement about the larger framework. But there isn’t.

Whether or not a nation state is democratic is no longer a meaningful framework for analysis, according to me. (Was it ever a meaningful framework? I won’t go into that here.) That’s the essence of our disagreement.

A world/country/society characterized by horrifying levels of inequality and exploitation obviously cannot have the substance of democracy, even if it exhibits all the forms. I agree with, and repeat, what Bertold Brecht wrote all the way back in 1935.

Certain countries are still able to maintain their property relations by methods that appear less violent than those used in other countries. Democracy still serves in these countries to achieve the results for which violence is needed in others, namely, to guarantee private ownership of the means of production. The private monopoly of factories, mines, and land creates barbarous conditions everywhere, but in some places these conditions do not so forcibly strike the eye. Barbarism strikes the eye only when it happens that monopoly can be protected only by open violence.

So yes, Germany may be more democratic today than Turkey by whatever technical criteria, but it is irrelevant.

You also cited a 2016 paper which claims that the Turkish government has morphed into a competitive authoritarian regime. Within its own framework, the paper may be contentious but valid. But in this context, I would like to highlight the overall politics of knowledge production.

The funding funnels and a thousand institutional and structural constraints ensure that “knowledge” produced remains in service of the status quo, that it does not subvert it. In this setup, the exploitation and pauperization of the colonies of the global south is not part of the analytical framework. The analysis starts with the assumption that all nation states are sovereign and equal. There is also an implicit assumption that democracy is something bestowed on the people, not something that arises out of people’s movements. With those as starting points for analysis, the countries of the global south inevitably come out deficient in democracy, liberalism, human rights, free speech, rights of LGBTQ+ people, etc. as compared to the countries of the global north.

This knowledge then becomes the excuse for speeding up the exploitation by a West-backed coup or even by direct colonization. The academic setup thus acts as a vital part of the imperial/colonial machine.

(By the way: I am aware that Turkey’s situation is not like that of Sudan or Palestine or Congo, that Turkey is a European country and a member of NATO. But it is a Muslim country in an age of Muslim-phobia, and like Russia, it is the frightening “other” that mainland Europe has nightmares about. Therefore, much of what I say here does apply to Turkey.)

I am saying that your “Turkish authoritarianism in contrast to German democracy” framing snugly fits into this larger picture of academia as another arm of the empire, whether or not you were conscious about it.

Also: isn’t it instructive that you, an academic from the global north, primarily focussed on Turkey and its democratic backsliding to buttress your argument, while I, a brown person from the global south and not connected with academia, focussed on the 100+ American military bases in Germany and the impotence of the German government in the face of American actions that amounted to a declaration of war.

And if all of the above sounds abstract, let’s get back to what I said in my earlier post. Israel is perpetrating and live-streaming a genocide in Palestine for the past year and a half. The Israeli government has been explicit about their intent, they have been stating it again and again and again. Israel’s actions have formally been deemed a genocide, and the International Court of Justice has issued arrest warrants for ministers and officials of the Israeli government. Despite all this, the “liberal democratic” regimes of the Western “free world” are actively abetting the genocide. They are persecuting with the full might of the state all voices opposing their actions, including their own citizens. Neither legal nor ethical nor moral considerations hamper them. They are shredding conventions and treaties they had signed not long ago.

From where I stand, I can see the democratic and human rights of citizens (and the welfare state) in the global north vanishing right now. To me, it seems obvious that the present state of Palestine is a mirror to the future of people everywhere, including those in the global north.

In this scenario, do you honestly think it matters whether or not Turkey and Germany are signatories to the European Convention on Human Rights and associated protocols, and whatever other agreements?

And yes, I know you started this thread to discuss the governance structures of social media platforms. (I agree with you that a company of any one country should not get to moderate the voices of its users from all across the world.) I myself interacted with you on the topic in another thread. We have to carry on pretending to live even as we mutely witness a genocide.

But framing even that niche topic as “Turkish autocracy in contrast to German democracy” doesn’t help, it merely advances the colonial narrative—that’s my contention.

You obviously disagree, so that’s that.

Carry on.

#colonialism #imperialism #capitalism #exploitation #inequality #democracy #Israel #Palestine #genocide #ATProto #ActivityPub #Bluesky #Fediverse #Mastodon

@Tariq @Eugen Rochko @Laurens Hof @Jon @Koen de Jonge - SynQ @Andy Piper

2025-04-24 01:45:38

Ulrike Hahn

UlrikeHahn@fediscience.org

@feralferment I linked to that paper because it was by Turkish scholars…

2025-04-24 02:40:00

Feral Ferment

feralferment@klacker.org

@Ulrike Hahn

Yes, I had noticed that before writing my previous post - both names were Turkish, the corresponding author was affiliated with a Turkish University, while the other was affiliated with an American University.

I am not elaborating, but in my opinion, that does not affect or alter any of my arguments.

2025-04-24 02:49:46

Feral Ferment

feralferment@klacker.org

@Ulrike Hahn

To be clear: I am not even disagreeing with the broad contours of the arguments made in that paper. My larger disagreement with you is independent of the specific points in this particular paper.