[Foundation-l] Image filter brainstorming: Personal filter lists

Tue Nov 29 11:09:17 UTC 2011

On Tue, Nov 29, 2011 at 11:37 AM, Tobias Oelgarte
<tobias.oelgarte at googlemail.com> wrote:

> If the filter is predefined then it might meet the personal preference
> and can be easy to use. But it will be an violation of NPOV, since
> someone else (a group of reader/users) would have to define it. That
> isn't user initiated censorship anymore.

It is still the user who chooses whether or not to remove images, and
if so, which list, although of course their choice is restricted. I
guess that's not user initiated, but it is still user chosen.

> The comparison with AdBlock sucks, because you didn't looked at the goal
> of both tools. AdBlock and it's predefined lists are trying to hide
> _any_ advertisement, while the filter is meant to _only_ hide
> controversial content. This comes down to the two extrema noted above,
> that are the only two neutral options.

I don't agree. We are not deciding which content is controversial and
which not, we are giving users the option to decide not to see
such-and-such content if they don't want to. That's not necessarily
labeling them as controversial; it is even less labeling other content
as non-controversial.

Even more importantly, your options are not neutral at all, in my
opinion. "Either everything is controversial or nothing is". That's
not a neutral statement. "It's controversial to you if you consider it
controversial to you" - that's much closer to being NPOV, and that's
what the proposal is trying to do. NPOV is not about treating every
_subject_ as equal, but about treating every _opinion_ as equal. If I
have a set of images I consider controversial, and you have a
different, perhaps non-intersecting set that you consider
controversial, the NPOV method is to consider both distinctions as
valid, not to say that it means that everything is controversial, or
nothing is. And -surprise- that seems to be exactly what this proposal
is trying to achieve. It is probably not ideal, there might even be
reasons to drop it completely, but NPOV is much better served by this
proposal than it is by yours.

-- 
André Engels, andreengels at gmail.com