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No, you don’t always need to shine light on all nastiness on the web to fight it. Do you remember YouTube’s comment section or any other forum without decent mo

No, you don’t always need to shine light on all nastiness on the web to fight it. Do you remember YouTube’s comment section or any other forum without decent moderators? I remember YouTube comments being highly nasty. Many people had installed browser plugins solely to hide YouTube comments. Google finally started to remove nasty comments. And now I rarely ever see horrible comments. In fact, you can actually get useful info from some comments and threads. And this is not a free speech issue but a hate issue. Almost all platform forbid hate and violent content. I don’t understand why so many people are equating this with freedom of speech instead of TOS violation.

resters 8y ago
What if someone argued that killing food animals is murder and must be due to hate, and wanted a youtube channel about grilling meats to be taken down due to a TOS violation. The problem with the whole idea of hate speech (which I think is a foolish idea) is that it classifies certain ideas as abhorrent. Ideas cannot be abhorrent, only actions can be. If ideas were abhorrent, than we would all be guilty just for considering them, even if we decide for now to reject them. Not sure why you would assume that anyone holds non-provisional, permanent beliefs. That's just not how human consciousness works. Actions can be harassing, inappropriate, etc. But someone simply publishing a private channel that others can encounter only through voluntary choices is not harassing. Content platforms have the perverse incentive of appealing to society's moral leaders (these days usually politicians). We should resist the idea of legitimizing platform level censorship of content, and instead insist upon the higher standard of enforcing conduct guidelines. If a user harasses other users, that's a problem. If a user self-publishes opinions that are simply expressed as opinions, we should not view that as a problem unless the world we idealize is one in which views not held by moral leaders are always considered abhorrent.

resters 8y ago

What if someone argued that killing food animals is murder and must be due to hate, and wanted a youtube channel about grilling meats to be taken down due to a TOS violation. The problem with the whole idea of hate speech (which I think is a foolish idea) is that it classifies certain ideas as abhorrent. Ideas cannot be abhorrent, only actions can be. If ideas were abhorrent, than we would all be guilty just for considering them, even if we decide for now to reject them. Not sure why you would assume that anyone holds non-provisional, permanent beliefs. That's just not how human consciousness works. Actions can be harassing, inappropriate, etc. But someone simply publishing a private channel that others can encounter only through voluntary choices is not harassing. Content platforms have the perverse incentive of appealing to society's moral leaders (these days usually politicians). We should resist the idea of legitimizing platform level censorship of content, and instead insist upon the higher standard of enforcing conduct guidelines. If a user harasses other users, that's a problem. If a user self-publishes opinions that are simply expressed as opinions, we should not view that as a problem unless the world we idealize is one in which views not held by moral leaders are always considered abhorrent.