"The Debian Publicity Team will no longer post on X/Twitter. We took this decision since we feel X doesn't reflect Debian shared values as stated in our social contract, code of conduct and diversity statement. X evolved into a place where people we care about don't feel safe." 2025-01-30
This is pretty interesting to see from a distro that was pretty focused on freedom. They no longer care about freedom of speech. Well, they still have it as of today, but they encourage people to use platforms that censor people over using slurs and create echo chambers, just so a single person doesn't get insulted by a stupid post outside of their page. This doesn't make any slightest sense, because if someone is already on twitter, they must feel very safe on musk's platform.
This freedom of speech will be slowly eroding with people that have a problem with facing a different opinion. Unfortunately, by promoting censorship you don't have control over who will be censored in next 10-20 years, when the government changes.
Your only hope is to be political majority during that time when we finally get rid of free speech, otherwise the elected party will get rid of you in one way or another. They can kill yourself with enough money. You should still remember that SJWs and communists are not a majority in broader society and you might literally censor yourself, not normies, by these stupid actions.
Everyone seems to support free speech until their feelings get hurt.
I'm not "anti-woke", but when i see someone demand censorship, i always know they're not right, otherwise censorship would be unnecessary for their opinions to shine.
Personally i think these social media pages are useless for the most part, but it's a moment like that when you can check what values are driving your project.
It's not rare for people to treat libre software as just another brand that is more convenient and ignore the philosophy.
It's just another brand of coke for some people.
Have you seen Richard Stallman "cancel" or ban someone on a mailing list over their tweets from 10 years ago? LOL
Content preservation
This is always a difficult one. I don't think most of the art and written text actually survived to modern times. Many contemporary big artists died poor or pretty unpopular.
Now we live in a different world. They tell you that noting disappears from the internet, but it's only true if someone downloaded it or shared it on a different service. Otherwise, it's actually pretty common for some less known content to be unavailable.
Now imagine getting cancelled retroactively for saying some word or being banned from most places for having a generic opinion that becomes ILLEGAL in 20-30 years? Or someone revealing that you said N-word as a teen, and then your entire career falls to dust? I think it's funny. It's like a reverse of these previously unknown artists.
Mentions of Notch from minecraft were removed for his online posts, but have you seen what kinds of crazy things he have posted on twitter to get banned as a creator of the game?
"It's ok to be white"
"There clearly is an agenda against white men"
"Nazis and communists are bad"
And even if notch is a ""nazi"", then you are playing a game made by a nazi and you don't see a problem with it. You are literally nazi.