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> Some of the conspiracy theorists left Reddit and reunited on Voat, a site made by and for the users that Reddit sloughs off. (Many social networks have such B

> Some of the conspiracy theorists left Reddit and reunited on Voat, a site made by and for the users that Reddit sloughs off. (Many social networks have such Bizarro networks, which brand themselves as strongholds of free speech and in practice are often used for hate speech. People banned from Twitter end up on Gab; people banned from Patreon end up on Hatreon.) Other Pizzagaters stayed and regrouped on r/The_Donald, a popular pro-Trump subreddit. Throughout the Presidential campaign, The_Donald was a hive of Trump boosterism. By this time, it had become a hermetic subculture, full of inside jokes and ugly rhetoric. The community’s most frequent commenters, like the man they’d helped propel to the Presidency, were experts at testing boundaries. Within minutes, they started to express their outrage that Pizzagate had been deleted. This is a critical thing that we as a society need to recognize about censorship and political correctness. When we censor people or ostracize them for saying things we don't like, even when what they say is legitimately awful, these people don't disappear, change their minds, or stop voting. They go elsewhere, become more entrenched in their awful beliefs, and because we've pushed them all together, they become more united. They become stronger. And because they become stronger away from us, we don't notice, and we're blindsided when they flex their political power. Underlying this mistake are some important truths: 1. People who say hateful things are human beings worth engaging with. No, I don't like reading a lot of what people say. It's easy for me to forget that they are human beings with their own struggles and traumas that cause them to believe the awful things they believe. When we dismiss them as trolls, we're dehumanizing them. Such a society doesn't leave room to be wrong and learn--if you're wrong, you're dismissed--and it dismisses the people who are the most dangerously wrong. It's not our responsibility to educate people, but that's irrelevant to the fact that if we don't educate people no one will. We need to engage people who believe awful things, try to understand what needs cause them to believe those things, and try to address those needs with compassion and courage. Truth is the antidote to hate. 2. Free speech doesn't just matter in a legal context. Free speech is protected in the US constitution because it's important in a free society. If we're going to let the discourse of our society move into privately-owned platforms like Reddit/Facebook/Twitter instead of publicly-owned platforms like street corners where newspapers are sold (or, the rest of the internet) then we have to value free speech on those platforms as well. Too many people are stuck in this idea that the Trump election was an anomaly--that in November Congress will change and in 2020 we'll have a new president. I see no reason to believe this will happen. We have changed nothing about our behavior and we're hoping the ones who elected Trump to change.

milesrout 9y ago
>2. Free speech doesn't just matter in a legal context. Free speech is protected in the US constitution because it's important in a free society. If we're going to let the discourse of our society move into privately-owned platforms like Reddit/Facebook/Twitter instead of publicly-owned platforms like street corners where newspapers are sold (or, the rest of the internet) then we have to value free speech on those platforms as well. I think this comparison makes little sense. Either you're comparing newspapers and social media platforms or you're comparing the street corner and the internet. The powers that be should not be censoring the street or the internet. But the owners of newspapers have always exercised some level of control over their content, just as social media platforms exercise varying levels of control over what is posted to them. I don't like it, but I didn't like newspaper control over newspaper content much either. Expressly ideological newspapers that are more like newsletters are one thing, but newspapers that purport to be objective and are not are quite another. I don't see echo chambers on reddit as being much different from the echo chamber that is the University [Insert Here] Society's newsletter. Echo chambers have always existed. People sometimes just want to surround themselves with opinions they agree with.

milesrout 9y ago

>2. Free speech doesn't just matter in a legal context. Free speech is protected in the US constitution because it's important in a free society. If we're going to let the discourse of our society move into privately-owned platforms like Reddit/Facebook/Twitter instead of publicly-owned platforms like street corners where newspapers are sold (or, the rest of the internet) then we have to value free speech on those platforms as well. I think this comparison makes little sense. Either you're comparing newspapers and social media platforms or you're comparing the street corner and the internet. The powers that be should not be censoring the street or the internet. But the owners of newspapers have always exercised some level of control over their content, just as social media platforms exercise varying levels of control over what is posted to them. I don't like it, but I didn't like newspaper control over newspaper content much either. Expressly ideological newspapers that are more like newsletters are one thing, but newspapers that purport to be objective and are not are quite another. I don't see echo chambers on reddit as being much different from the echo chamber that is the University [Insert Here] Society's newsletter. Echo chambers have always existed. People sometimes just want to surround themselves with opinions they agree with.