this is probably a thought terminating cliché but I find a lot of problems with blocklists on a social media not because I “think opinions should be debated on the free market of ideas” I’m not a fucking liberal thank you very much, but I find problems with assigning moral values or even quantitative value to opinions that can be used to say “these are The Bad People of Bad Opinions and you should Remove Bad People”, like, that’s just not a good thing whether you’re on the left or the right.

the worst part is that because you’re making a list of “bad people” and not, say, a list of Extremism or a list of Channers, you’re quietly distributing your own moral judgements into these lists and people will just take your word for it because if you have a popular blocklist then you’re in a position of authority to begin with. and these decentralised servers are sure putting a ton of trust into people that aren’t held with any real standards of scrutiny by doing this

and every time a list gets called out it’s because Some Person just happened to actually look into the fine prints and found out that the list was quietly slipping in controversial and extreme moral judgements

and yet people still use those lists

and yet people still make new ones

@twinkle a pattern i keep seeing is list-makers succumbing to the temptation of “criticizing the list means you belong on the list”