By Ross Cheeseright, Parliamentary Candidate | November 19, 2017

Introduction

Moderation and Censorship are two different things that affect people in similar ways and we are in the unique position of doing much of our communication on the internet under groups controlled by Civic Asgardia.

Civic Asgardia does amazing work, there is no doubt about that. They’re juggling hundreds of things, spinning hundreds of plates and managing a community that’s hundreds of thousands strong and most of the time they do it seamlessly but there has been a lot of discussion recently about how moderation can easily become censorship under this current model.

Censorship

No-Censorship

I’m going to use America as an example here. The home of the free with the famed ‘free speech’. Let’s say that I wanted to write a book on gay romance. In America – I could go ahead and do that. I would be able to publish it, market it, sell it and profit from it. Good times. Freedom has prevailed.

Censorship

Now let’s move to a less tolerant society. I want to create some material promoting Gay rights but I can’t do that. Why? Because of state censorship. Gay rights are not recognised in this country and material promoting gay rights is prohibited and breaking that would result in fines, prison sentences or even lashings!

Other forms of censorship can be things like:

1. Blanking out / removing words
2. Deleting things from history (by removing references to them.)
3. Banning certain content.

So why have censorship at all?

Censorship ensures that our ‘ wider society’ operates by certain rules that are generally deemed ‘lawful’ or ‘acceptable’ to our society. Most countries have some form of censorship – take the film classification bodies, they may decide that a film is just too unsuitable and that it should not be allowed to be played or sold in the country but there are many other things that are designed to protect people

1. Banning hate speech
2. Banning of material promoting hate
3. Censorship of inappropriate materials
4. Control of what audiences see certain materials (e.g film classifications.)
5. Banning material that defraud/scam people.
6. There are a host of good reasons for a country to adopt ‘censorship’.

Moderation

Moderation performs a similar function to ‘Censorship’ in that it defines when, where and how something can be talked about (or not). Unlike censorship it’s not enforced by the ‘ wider society’ but rather groups and fractions within society.

Let’s take America as an example again. In America, free speech dictates that you’re allowed to talk about gay rights. That’s great. You can go out and do that. But let’s say that I have a gaming group dedicated to Pong and I have specified that in my group, we may only talk about Pong-related things.

If you come into my group and start talking about Gay Rights, then I’m going to moderate you and delete your post or give you a warning. If you keep talking about Gay Rights, then I’m going to remove you from the group.

Even though in the USA it’s completely allowed to openly discuss Gay Rights, those rules do not apply to the group. The Group has defined its own set of rules.

So why have moderation at all?

Moderation is incredibly important for groups and communities to ensure that people stay ‘on-topic’ and that people are confirming to an agreed set of standards for the select group. If your group was meant to be talking about Pong, but people came into the group and started talking about a wide range of random topic, then it’s going to completely ruin the group and cause chaos to the discussions there.

An established set of rules that everyone must ‘play by’ creates order and orderly discussion. It helps to compartmentalise the world’s information and create areas where more meaningful discussion and content can be found.

In Summary

Censorship generally relates to the laws and rules of the wider society and Moderation generally relates to the rules of micro-society.

The problem

With our current model, almost everything goes through Civic Asgardia’s groups, forums, websites and social networks. On these platforms, they have an overarching policy that governs how communications should be undertaken.

It might be that certain topics are not legally or constitutionally banned, but they might still be moderated in the groups where they’re taken down, banned or forced to be edited.

Why is this a problem? Because our ‘wider society’ exists in these groups. It’s where all our people congregate and communicate, and it means that the rules of moderation also function as the rules of censorship or the line between the two is intrinsically blurred.

While Civic Asgardia aren’t doing anything wrong by carrying out a highly important community function and moderating posts that aren’t fit for our groups – such as banning inappropriate material, removing spam, shutting down conspiracy threads and flat-earth theorists – There is also no arena for us to have open discourse that is constitutionally allowed (not illegal or banned by law).

Furthermore any ‘group’ of Asgardian Citizens needs to become ‘official’ before you can post about it in the Civic Asgardia Domain thus creating more pressure to operate within the existing social networks. This model prevents citizens from simply ‘coming together’.

The Solution?

I’ve put a lot of thought into this matter and it doesn’t seem like there is a simple solution to this problem due to the unique nature of our nation being digital. The ‘officiality’ of a group is incredibly important because we’re not tied down to a physical location.

In the physical realm of Earth, another country couldn’t spring up claiming to be America because we know where it is located, and we know its government and so on.

But, it could be possible for another ‘Asgardia’ to spring up out of nowhere and claim to be official. So, removing the ‘official’ stamp from groups just wouldn’t be practical and it seems to be a highly important measure to ensure the legitimacy of our society.

Simply Dropping moderation won’t work, either – Civic Asgardia are the gatekeepers of order and without them, the groups that we use would descend into chaos and that would be harmful to our communication, collaboration and public image.

I think that until Parliament is formed, any changes or proposals are impractical at best because we haven’t yet defined what should be censored from a /legal/ standpoint and so right now, operation under Civic Asgardia’s ‘rules of conduct’ seem to be the most viable short-term solution to ensure smooth communication and collaboration.

Then, when laws are implemented that outline what our ‘wider society’ should censor, more groups could be created that are less heavily moderated. Groups that have a ruleset that more closely mirrors our nation’s rules and laws.

Either way, I don’t see an answer to this debate arising any time soon.

About the Author
Ross Cheeseright is a Parliamentary Candidate , Asgardia Enthusiast and Volunteer for Civic Asgardia. His work has been featured several times and he has been interviewed by several national newspapers about his work in Asgardia. If you’d like to see more of his work, check out his blog .

Здраво Асгардијци.

Со декретот 26 објавени се резултатите од првата фаза за избор на градоначалници на Асгардија. Овој декрет, меѓу другото, официјано го потврдува изборот на 44 градоначалници меѓу кои сум и јас како градоначалник на Асгардија од Скопје.

Ви благодарам за гласовите и подршката кои ги ми дадовте за време на кампањата.

В нашем Русскоязычном дистрикте были избраны 6 депутатов, так вот, в канале дебатов кроме меня нет ни одного депутата из 7 дистрикта. Это еще пол беды. нас в канале там всего 21-22 человека, из 100 избранных депутатов. И есть даже такие, которые сказали что у них нет времени читать сотни сообщений там, это не подходит им и удалились с канала. Если вы меня слышите, 5 наших депутатов от 7 района, появитесь в канале #mp-lounge в дискорде. Мы уже начали работать и разрабатывать процедуры и положения по работе парламента.
Но пока нас 21% из 100, это выглядит очень странно

https://asgardia.space/en/elections/candidates/Arabic/23829/

Hello Asgardia!

Due to the notice that went out letting leadership candidates on Asgard 7, 0001 / June 24, 2017 several candidates removed their candidacy from all positions and found that they could not reapply to just one position. We have enabled it so that those affected should be able to reapply their candidacy.

Please note, if you remove your candidacy after this time you will need to wait until the next election cycle to apply to run again.

Good luck candidates!