/mlpol/ - My Little Politics

Dissenter to remove "banned word list" after deplatforming?

Dissenter is a commenting overlay for the web, allowing people to make comments
about websites without the website's consent or control. I never took it very
seriously since it had a list of (((banned words))). It's developed by Gab,
previously (((gab.ai)))

Recently, dissenter has been deplatformed by major browsers, which spurred the following discussion on the development platform:

> Removing the banned words list would be a start. [...] for a platform that
> pridesi itself on free speech, this extension should not have a banned word
> list in any form.

to which mgabdev replied:

> Good idea.
> This has been implemented.

Gab.com made an official statement on twitter
> Being that both Mozilla and Google removed Dissenter from their extension
> stores, we are removing the "offensive words" filter we had activated on the
> extension. We included this in good faith, but Big Tech doesn't operate in
> good faith.
>
> For those who don't know: it filtered 20 or so racial slurs from the extension
> to comply with "hate speech" policies of the extension app stores. It could
> also be turned off in the settings by users.
>
> Here's an interesting fact: only 0.81% of 600,000 Dissenter comments contained
> any of these words. So Google and Mozzilla banned Dissenter for nearly 100,000
> users over 0.81% of content on the entire platform posted by a few dozen
> users.

Somewhat suspicious is that no change has been made to the public code roughly
since last month, so all we have is a promise that it's been removed.