I’m disappointed to read how many members of this community will hand-wave away the harm done by actual fascism. Others made many good points, and the buttons are removed, but I think you all should consider that, yes, the Internet is full of terrible things, but having buttons at all is a promotion of those platforms. It’s not neutral to leave them in place - it implicitly endorses to the members of this community that those are places worth sharing the content on, whether they actually share it or not. And then it raises the social capital of those places in the public consciousness. It’s the difference between it being allowed for someone to walk into a bar full of Nazis and start talking about OpenStreetMap, and this site actively suggesting that all members go recruit OpenStreetMap participants at their nearest Nazi bar.
If you all want to have a libertarian view of it, that’s fine - the libertarian view is that this site doesn’t endorse any of it and you’re free to associate with who you want and post on Nazi platforms, but I certainly don’t want to be associated with a community that actively promotes that kind of platform. I appreciate that this community’s admins took action to remove the links.
That might be consistent with Free Software Foundation-style freedom, but IMO is not reflective of the much broader set of ideals that bring people into open culture movements. It certainly doesn’t speak for me. It’s also pretty demonstrably false when it comes to maps. The history of maps is full of politics. Maps were entirely political tools for a long time, and still are incredibly political - look no further than recent events related to the Gulf of Mexico/America to see how people try to use naming on maps to drive cultural narratives, and that’s the simplest way maps can be political. The decision to map something or not is political. This community makes political decisions in every proposal, in every discussion, and in everything it shows or doesn’t show on the map. If it doesn’t seem political, it might just be that you’re OK with the status quo - and that can be fine, but it doesn’t mean the status quo itself isn’t political.
You have to appreciate that the “Everyone I donʼt like is Hitler” crowd have made people tune out of requests using the F word and that activists have sometimes called on OSM to take stands contrary to the projectʼs interests. While neither are probably true here, people can naturally be suspicious.
OSM should not be be an arbiter of political views (beyond “open data is good”). Objecting to X being included in a set of sharing links because of some content on X is not reasonable.
However, there is the larger question, a point made by others, which is that there is no justification for OSM to endorse any centralized external sites. And especially, no resources from third-party sites should be loaded.
Another issue is that centralized surveillance-based social media treat people badly, in terms of privacy. That’s arguably a political view. However, a non-political view is that OSM has a privacy policy and norms, and these sites do not comply with that policy and norms. They also do not show information to everyone, but in many cases only registered – meaning signed a contract – users.
That lands firmly at “remove all social sharing buttons”, an action that isn’t about content on X.
It’s ok to have “share on copy” which when pushed puts the URL in the clipboard I have seen sites configured with that only. But I think that’s silly and it should be removed also.
I think we’ve landed at the same thing, from a shared set of political views you outlined about privacy, but I want to add that it’s not just “some content” on X. It’s that the owner of X had his staff build a robot in his likeness, and that robot calls itself Mecha-Hitler. The owner is the primary beneficiary of continued use of the platform, the platform’s own robot quite literally endorses Nazi viewpoints, and the owner himself espouses those viewpoints proudly. I don’t think anyone here is suggesting that any platform that has a little bit of fringe or harmful content should be banned solely for that. But when the owner himself champions viewpoints that ignore what others in this thread rightly called basic human dignity, I don’t need to go beyond that.
Sure, but don’t let the suspicion prevent you from seeing the Mecha-Hitler right in front of you. That’s not anyone calling people they don’t like Hitler. That’s those people calling themselves Nazis and being proud of it. Speech can be free, but it also has consequences. Someone being a Nazi - i.e., saying they think everyone who doesn’t look like them deserves less or even deserves harm - should make the hairs on the back of your neck stand up, even if all you care about is open data access. Nazis want you to have only what they’re willing to give to you based on your perceived value to their social order.
I think a pretty bare minimum rightful consequence for that speech should be that people stop pretending like the site is a normal part of our society and including it in lists of valuable places to go. Nobody here is suggesting that any member of this community have consequences for associating there or what you say there, but that community itself now creates harm, and we shouldn’t refer people to it. If you think it’s political, fine, but then, to me, you’re not just defending the rights of Nazis to say what they want, you’re saying that this collective community should amplify their platform, and I think people are understandably concerned about that.
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ika-chan
(Sharks with laser beams attached to their heads!)
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I may be a bit late to this but for the record, I had a different reason for removing social media buttons: the social media market is saturated, and there are dozens of new options from Threads to Bluesky: too many to justify buttons for a handful.