A slur filter isn’t DRM and free software is in no way some kind of culture that obliges software developers to write code that lets you be more racist/whatever online, lol. The code is generously licensed and you can fork it if you want something else.

I’m convinced you’ve never read the works that I, the Carl Marks, wrote.

There was kabuki theater around this, so far as intelligence was involved. Mostly the official faces quietly did nothing. None actively contradicted the narrative. And of course, Tenet (the CIA director at the time) called it a “slam dunk”. Most of them were never under oath about any of this - it’s not like the US actually investigates or punishes its own war crimes or violations of the UN Charter. In reality, invading Iraq was a Washington consensus position to destabilize that country further after over a decade of civilian-targeted sanctions. Our liberal hero, Joe Biden, happily laid the propaganda on thick through his position as chair of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, bringing in hack after hack to testify and make the case via the media apparatus. Very few people in power even publicly questioned the case for a war of aggression, let alone did anything to oppose it, and media narratives were more or less lockstep with them despite record-setting protests. Actually, scratch that: there was a pervasive culture of anti-brown, islamophobic rhetoric that questioned the patriotism (read: right to belong) of anyone who pushed back. Ask anyone that looked vaguely South Asian or Arab at the time.

Of course, I don’t want to gice the impression that possessing WMDs has ever been a consistent, valid, or legal justification for being a target of a war of aggression. The only country to use nukes on civilians was the US and I don’t see them invading themselves with a “coalition of the willing” since then, though they have certainly been very aggressive.

But I digress. Of course US intel is going to be doing shady things, that’s not really debated. The thing I think is most relevant here is the parallel of a lack of media criticism and how easy it is to get folks, and particularly Americans, to absorb headlines and claims without looking any deeper into sourcing, into the history at hand, or even just for now, admitting that there is very little information or ways to get a good handle on the sequence of events, and it’s okay to not have a hot take. Opposing a jingoistic fervor is essential to opposing fascism.

Accusations of whataboutism are a thought-terminating cliché that, ironically, usually just help the accuser avoid engaging with a critical argument.

The relevance here is that using “it sounds right to me” to decide whether a media narrative is true will lead a person to make big mistakes. And I am criticizing the general lack of media criticism in this thread.

It also “made sense” to most Americans that Iraq had WMDs. Colin Powell even said so, and he was greatly respected despite his participation in covering up the My Lai Massacre.

Love to see the immediate certainty that Russia did it based on… UA saying so. Impressive media criticism. I’m sure Iraq’s WMDs will turn up any day now, too.

Carefully curate and vet both devs and mods. Fight hard to ensure that the character of development and moderation does not depend on just one or two people, but of active internal practices that recruit, support, and otherwise churn out cool people that support the mission and guard it from people who don’t get it or are aggressively hostile towards it. Shoot for 2X of what you need (devs, mods) and start getting worried if it dips below that.

Ensure that funding models for hosting and development work are limited but viable. Make a rejection of certain funding models a hard requirement of being a dev or mod. Everyone thinks they can resist corporate pressure, but if you, for example, make a site ad-dependent, you will eventually come to the conclusion that you need to make editorial changes to avoid losing advertisers, and have a very good chance of falling into false dichotomous thinking: either the site dies or we ban X group that makes our site less attractive for advertisers. Trying to find ways to profit off of Reddit is why the APIs are basically planned for demolition right now. This also has a dev implication: optimize for lightweight resource use. Obviously devs try to do this in general, but you’d want to make it a real priority, as cheaper server (and dev) costs are a better way to make the project viable than finding more income.

Keep to your political commitments and ban/exclude those who stand for their antithesis. Those people already have corporations on their side and there’s no point to putting in all of this effort to just end up being a Reddit clone full of the incurious and bigoted. I’m sure you already know this, but lax moderation against, e.g., right wingers tends to create spaces where they want to be and nobody else does.