8 ms·

Updating our rules against hateful conduct

32 points by tareqak 7y ago

ddingus 7y ago
Hopefully, they recognize the group of people who do not practice religion as "basis of religion"
- sdinsn 7y ago
  They probably won't. Atheists are the most oppressed 'religious' group there is but no one will recognize it. It's common they are left out of so-called "progressive" movements to support peace / safety.
luckylion 7y ago
I get skin color, sex, gender, sexual orientation etc for protection, but including religion and excluding political word view has always been weird to me. Calling one of the two innate and deserving of protection and the other a choice and undeserving seems like a religious answer. Narrow down what’s considered — Respondents said that “identifiable groups” was too broad, and they should be allowed to engage with political groups, hate groups, and other non-marginalized groups with this type of language. And you didn't just tell him to just not de-humanize anybody, instead opting for "okay, that's fine, just don't mention religion when you do it?
- duskwuff 7y ago
  Yeah, the way this has been introduced into their policies [1] is weirdly specific. It's prohibited to target individuals with dehumanizing language if it's related to any protected category, but targeting groups with dehumanizing language is only prohibited if it's related to religion? [1]: https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/hateful-conduct-policy https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/hateful-condu...
droithomme 7y ago
Interesting. So criticizing religious positions against abortion, against vaccines, against homosexuality, and in favor of the flat earth will now result in post removal. Assuming this policy is going to be impartially and fairly applied as stated.
- ARandomerDude 7y ago
  How so? It seems like only if they say "those animals" (or similar) instead of "those people".
- ceejayoz 7y ago
  It's entirely possible to criticize without dehumanizing.
  - Nuzzerino 7y ago
    The problem is that it's also possible to criticize in a way where it's simply not possible to determine if it was a good faith criticism or not. There's a wide population of people who even optimize for that, they're called trolls. Moderation mistakes are inevitable, and the consequences of a bad moderation decision can be as bad, or worse, than the effect of the message itself. IMO, people should learn to defend themselves against trolls rather than helplessly relying on a nanny from above to do it. Unfortunately, using those platforms doesn't give us much of a choice in the matter.
    - dragonwriter 7y ago
      > The problem is that it's also possible to criticize in a way where it's simply not possible to determine if it was a good faith criticism or not. That's a problem in some generic sense perhaps, but not with the application of this policy, which does not rely on a determination of “good faith criticism”, but instead of dehumanization. Note that the examples of what is covered all are dehumanizing in a very narrow sense (stating directly that the target groups are vermin, viruses, etc.): https://blog.twitter.com/content/dam/blog-twitter/official/en_us/company/2019/dehumanizationreligion.png https://blog.twitter.com/content/dam/blog-twitter/official/e...
ngngngng 7y ago
I've been deeply concerned with attacks on religious freedom as of late, this seems like a strong step in the right direction.
- homonculus1 7y ago
  If Twitter removing posts for their political content is not an attack on free speech, then Twitter users insulting religious people is most certainly not an attack on religious freedom...
- JaimeThompson 7y ago
  I do wonder if they will remove comments from prominent American fundamentalists who dehumanize non-Christians and/or atheists?
- sdinsn 7y ago
  Hmm? It seems like this is a step in the opposite direction.
- kstrauser 7y ago
  Which religious freedoms have been attacked, and where?
  - ngngngng 7y ago
    https://newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/article/other-examples-of-attacks-on-religious-conscience-and-free-exercise https://newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/article/other-examp...
    - kstrauser 7y ago
      Sounds like a series of cases where courts ruled that religious reasons were not justifiable to allow discrimination, as per the Constitution.
jngreenlee 7y ago
I'm not convinced centralized models being politically "pushed around" in the age of the internet will succeed. They may likely be a retreat, and long term ebb-and-flow from centralized to decentralized poles. The centralized but politically watched model is also specially susceptible to Taleb's "The Most Intolerant Wins" theorem.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- bassman9000 7y ago
  Specially when religious (or other kind of) minorities where Twitter HQ are located won't necessarily be somewhere else.
jngreenlee 7y ago
I'm very concerned about loosing the right to attack religion. It's an important discussion to have and for children to see. All religion is foolish, and has to be approached from a reality-based context.
- dragonwriter 7y ago
  > I'm very concerned about loosing the right to attack religion You aren't losing the right. You may be losing Twitter's active cooperation if the manner in which you do so is unacceptable to Twitter, but you never had a right to Twitter's active participation in your attacks to lose.
  - jngreenlee 7y ago
    You are of course correct in a grand sense, but there's this weird gray area philosophically where someone builds a town square and says "everyone come and talk in my square"...until the hear what you are speaking about! The problem is likely greater in our corporate/mercantilist system where some state-sponsored and some natural monopolies develop. Totally get and appreciate the private property of the corporation argument...it is their town square after all...but when there is only one that is 'allowed' to succeed, what happens? This then leads to specific tactical rules we have on the books in the US like FTC and even FCC regs, where some may protest unfair commerce. IANAL but I can see this is a real mess. Also, what is the ROI for Twitter when it comes to policing this? We know FB has been having problems.
    - cabaalis 7y ago
      > Also, what is the ROI for Twitter when it comes to policing this? I think most of the things regarding regulating speech coming out of twitter are about avoiding being put in the spotlight next year in the next U.S. election. If what happened in 2016 happens again to any social network, the hammer will fall.
    - goto11 7y ago
      If Twitter was the whole internet, then you would have a point.
whatshisface 7y ago
What if someone's holy book contains text that dehumanizes people on the basis of religion?
- jngreenlee 7y ago
  Sorry but if you're not a member of the tribe, you can't possibly interpret the tribe's book. (said in jest to point out the problematic response)
- dragonwriter 7y ago
  > What if someone's holy book contains text that dehumanizes people on the basis of religion? Then they probably aren't allowed to tweet their holy book.
  - sverhagen 7y ago
    What if, as part of a developing story, a journalist quotes a government official making such statements?
    - dragonwriter 7y ago
      Is it dehumanizing to report that someone else made a dehumanizing statement without endorsing the statement? I don't think so. You are essentially asking “will Twitter make use/mention distinctions in enforcing this policy”. While it is of course impossible to state for certain in advance, I don't see any particular reason to believe they would either be disinclined to or incapable of doing so.
    - iamnothere 7y ago
      My guess is it will depend on whether or not the journalist is considered part of the mainstream media.
- goto11 7y ago
  I guess you can't post those quotes on twitter then.
- 7y ago
drak0n1c 7y ago
Does this mean that Swiftian satire such as South Park's episode making fun of prominent Scientologists is now unfit for Twitter?
- duskwuff 7y ago
  I don't believe it would be affected -- as I recall, that episode mocks the religion and its members, but doesn't dehumanize them.
  - whatshisface 7y ago
    What exactly does "dehumanization" mean?
    - jbattle 7y ago
      Did you read the article? They give some fairly vivid examples
    - duskwuff 7y ago
      It means precisely what it sounds like -- using language which describes the targeted group as something other than (and lesser than) human. The article gives examples where religious groups are described as "rats", "viruses", "filthy animals", or "maggots".
      - whatshisface 7y ago
        Many cultures use animal analogies to describe nuanced and complicated personality trait combinations. Some of them are more negative than others, referring to combinations of positive and negative traits in varying proportions. Reductively, calling someone a lion is just as dehumanizing as calling them a shark. In the Bible, people are both complemented and insulted with comparisons to lions. Calling someone a shark is more respectful than calling them a rat, unless you're Chinese in which case I'm not sure what rat means. What exactly is banned here? Twitter gave us only the most obvious examples, leaving the hazy zones open for the endless fighting that I predict is about to start.
schalab 7y ago
Twitter needs to be a set of open source protocols and standards like the internet. Imagine if all of the internet was owned by one company and they had this kind of power. This is more power than many governments around the world.
childintime 7y ago
Excommunication isn't the solution. Isn't it enough to hide these comments by default, as on HN?
- tptacek 7y ago
  Comments like those in the examples Twitter provided will reliably get you excommunicated from HN.
  - childintime 7y ago
    HN has dead posters. They are still readable for those that want to. That's the type of solution I promote. Digital media, like Twitter, can't be a megaphone to spread hate speech. That means their algorithms should be smarter, and accept input. On the other hand, with these media effectively being monopolies, that doesn't mean they can excommunicate (which is what this is about). That should be against the law. Just like when there is just one shop in town: everybody should be allowed to buy. That doesn't mean the shopkeeper has to smile to every customer. A good shopkeeper may even be able to get this customer some help.
rubidium 7y ago
Everyone should read the examples so they have a clear understanding of what twitter is meaning when they say "dehumanize". It's not "hey I disagree with these people" it's "hey I want these people dead/injured/equated to shit". Religious and ethnic persecutions have often gone hand-in-hand. Religious minorities of all types will be helped by this, and we'll see less hate-speech on twitter. Seems to be a very reasonable step. Sidenote: any religion topic really brings out the "I have a problem with religion" types on HN.
- drak0n1c 7y ago
  Twitter would be better received if it were bold enough to also state specific examples of permissible religious satire/criticism. I think that would do a lot to address what people are worried about, and be a step in the direction of having more concrete rules and predictable enforcement.
  - creaghpatr 7y ago
    >Twitter would be better received if it were bold enough to also state specific examples of permissible religious satire/criticism Talk about a PR Minesweeper, expert mode.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- loudtieblahblah 7y ago
  If experience is anything to go by, "things I don't like" or "things that offend me" get twisted into things far more severe than what is actually stated, words are now "violence" and make people feel "unsafe". This rule's application - like all rules like this - will be stretched and exaggerated to cover much more than intended and will be applied unevenly across demographics. Just like we see on Reddit when /r/ChapoTrapHouse and /r/Bad_cop_no_donut (both of which I sub to, genuinely) gets a pass, while right wing subs do not, when it comes to violent threats and comments. Atheists and Christians will get the short end of the stick on this. Mark my words.
djsumdog 7y ago
People really need to get off Twitter. There are a lot of servers on the Fediverse, running Mastodon, Pleroma, Misskey, Pixelfed and other ActivityPub webapps. Just because famous person x,y,z or friends a,b,c, aren't on the Fediverse doesn't mean you shouldn't try it out. It's like the 1990s, old IRC and AOL chatrooms. You can just follow a lot of randoms and get into cool threads. There are many instances that have open speech policies (which are banned by many other instances) and other instances with standard ban lists. You can choose where you want to sign up. Many of the people on HN have the knowledge to stand up their own if they want. (I run my own in Docker using a ruby tool I wrote: https://github.com/sumdog/bee2 https://github.com/sumdog/bee2). You can even create accounts of different Fediverse servers to get a better picture of what gets blocked/censored where. The difference with ActivityPub/Fediverse is you have choices. Twitter, Reddit, et. al. worry so much about keeping people "safe" that they have completely killed off any diversity of ideas. Back before Reddit started their multi-year long banning-of-everything campaign, you had a lot of different voices, with a lot of different ideology, from conservative to socialist to libertarian to progressive .. battling it out with some really great discussion. Now it's all just monoculture. The places people fled too, like Voat/Gab, are also just monoculture (Gab recently migrated to their own broken, garbage fork of Mastodon ... as if they needed a way to make the Mastodon UI worse). Voat is just a cesspool of hate, and any melting pot where people discussed ideas rationally is kinda gone. I highly recommend The Coddling of the American Mind, a book that talks about how people today see "Free speech" as a bad thing, how people say words == violence (they don't, violence is violence, and saying words are violence show you're afraid of ideas). I've also been reading The Strange Death of Europe, which talks a lot about migration and religious hate speech. Honestly a lot of the book is garbage and I didn't like any of the initial arguments, but I also realize it's important to read about viewpoints I don't agree with. As I kept reading, the author did make a lot of effort to interview Muslims (both long term residents and refugees) and he does make a good set of arguments for the difficulty of criticizing religion in Europe (and I don't agree with a lot of his findings, but I think his arguments and original research are worth looking at). We really need to be careful with these new blurred lines around speech and hate and ideas and ideology and violence. Restricting things on any platform just gives people with those views, people who get banned, more validity in the eyes of people who see them as persecuted. The Westburro Baptist Church is an example of a small, non-evangelistic set of families that barely grow, who are fully supported by slander lawsuits (they're mostly lawyers). If there weren't WBC counter protests and publications against them, they'd have no one to sue, would have run out of money a long time ago, and would have needed to take real legal case work again. The great irony is the reason they still hold strong is due to protesters giving them relevance.
08-15 7y ago
This is strangely specific. Is it still okay to dehumanize people afflicted with other kinds of mental illnesses?
benmmurphy 7y ago
I assume it is ok to say religion is a virus, or a particular religion is a virus but the rule is that you can't say the followers of the religion are a virus. Likening religion to a memetic virus is not a fringe opinion.

32 points by tareqak 7y ago

ddingus 7y ago

Hopefully, they recognize the group of people who do not practice religion as "basis of religion"

sdinsn 7y ago
They probably won't. Atheists are the most oppressed 'religious' group there is but no one will recognize it. It's common they are left out of so-called "progressive" movements to support peace / safety.

luckylion 7y ago

I get skin color, sex, gender, sexual orientation etc for protection, but including religion and excluding political word view has always been weird to me. Calling one of the two innate and deserving of protection and the other a choice and undeserving seems like a religious answer. Narrow down what’s considered — Respondents said that “identifiable groups” was too broad, and they should be allowed to engage with political groups, hate groups, and other non-marginalized groups with this type of language. And you didn't just tell him to just not de-humanize anybody, instead opting for "okay, that's fine, just don't mention religion when you do it?

duskwuff 7y ago
Yeah, the way this has been introduced into their policies [1] is weirdly specific. It's prohibited to target individuals with dehumanizing language if it's related to any protected category, but targeting groups with dehumanizing language is only prohibited if it's related to religion? [1]: https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/hateful-conduct-policy https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/hateful-condu...

droithomme 7y ago

Interesting. So criticizing religious positions against abortion, against vaccines, against homosexuality, and in favor of the flat earth will now result in post removal. Assuming this policy is going to be impartially and fairly applied as stated.

ARandomerDude 7y ago
How so? It seems like only if they say "those animals" (or similar) instead of "those people".
ceejayoz 7y ago
It's entirely possible to criticize without dehumanizing.
- Nuzzerino 7y ago
  The problem is that it's also possible to criticize in a way where it's simply not possible to determine if it was a good faith criticism or not. There's a wide population of people who even optimize for that, they're called trolls. Moderation mistakes are inevitable, and the consequences of a bad moderation decision can be as bad, or worse, than the effect of the message itself. IMO, people should learn to defend themselves against trolls rather than helplessly relying on a nanny from above to do it. Unfortunately, using those platforms doesn't give us much of a choice in the matter.
  - dragonwriter 7y ago
    > The problem is that it's also possible to criticize in a way where it's simply not possible to determine if it was a good faith criticism or not. That's a problem in some generic sense perhaps, but not with the application of this policy, which does not rely on a determination of “good faith criticism”, but instead of dehumanization. Note that the examples of what is covered all are dehumanizing in a very narrow sense (stating directly that the target groups are vermin, viruses, etc.): https://blog.twitter.com/content/dam/blog-twitter/official/en_us/company/2019/dehumanizationreligion.png https://blog.twitter.com/content/dam/blog-twitter/official/e...

ngngngng 7y ago

I've been deeply concerned with attacks on religious freedom as of late, this seems like a strong step in the right direction.

homonculus1 7y ago
If Twitter removing posts for their political content is not an attack on free speech, then Twitter users insulting religious people is most certainly not an attack on religious freedom...
JaimeThompson 7y ago
I do wonder if they will remove comments from prominent American fundamentalists who dehumanize non-Christians and/or atheists?
sdinsn 7y ago
Hmm? It seems like this is a step in the opposite direction.
kstrauser 7y ago
Which religious freedoms have been attacked, and where?
- ngngngng 7y ago
  https://newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/article/other-examples-of-attacks-on-religious-conscience-and-free-exercise https://newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/article/other-examp...
  - kstrauser 7y ago
    Sounds like a series of cases where courts ruled that religious reasons were not justifiable to allow discrimination, as per the Constitution.

jngreenlee 7y ago

I'm not convinced centralized models being politically "pushed around" in the age of the internet will succeed. They may likely be a retreat, and long term ebb-and-flow from centralized to decentralized poles. The centralized but politically watched model is also specially susceptible to Taleb's "The Most Intolerant Wins" theorem.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
bassman9000 7y ago
Specially when religious (or other kind of) minorities where Twitter HQ are located won't necessarily be somewhere else.

jngreenlee 7y ago

I'm very concerned about loosing the right to attack religion. It's an important discussion to have and for children to see. All religion is foolish, and has to be approached from a reality-based context.

dragonwriter 7y ago
> I'm very concerned about loosing the right to attack religion You aren't losing the right. You may be losing Twitter's active cooperation if the manner in which you do so is unacceptable to Twitter, but you never had a right to Twitter's active participation in your attacks to lose.
- jngreenlee 7y ago
  You are of course correct in a grand sense, but there's this weird gray area philosophically where someone builds a town square and says "everyone come and talk in my square"...until the hear what you are speaking about! The problem is likely greater in our corporate/mercantilist system where some state-sponsored and some natural monopolies develop. Totally get and appreciate the private property of the corporation argument...it is their town square after all...but when there is only one that is 'allowed' to succeed, what happens? This then leads to specific tactical rules we have on the books in the US like FTC and even FCC regs, where some may protest unfair commerce. IANAL but I can see this is a real mess. Also, what is the ROI for Twitter when it comes to policing this? We know FB has been having problems.
  - cabaalis 7y ago
    > Also, what is the ROI for Twitter when it comes to policing this? I think most of the things regarding regulating speech coming out of twitter are about avoiding being put in the spotlight next year in the next U.S. election. If what happened in 2016 happens again to any social network, the hammer will fall.
  - goto11 7y ago
    If Twitter was the whole internet, then you would have a point.

whatshisface 7y ago

What if someone's holy book contains text that dehumanizes people on the basis of religion?

jngreenlee 7y ago
Sorry but if you're not a member of the tribe, you can't possibly interpret the tribe's book. (said in jest to point out the problematic response)
dragonwriter 7y ago
> What if someone's holy book contains text that dehumanizes people on the basis of religion? Then they probably aren't allowed to tweet their holy book.
- sverhagen 7y ago
  What if, as part of a developing story, a journalist quotes a government official making such statements?
  - dragonwriter 7y ago
    Is it dehumanizing to report that someone else made a dehumanizing statement without endorsing the statement? I don't think so. You are essentially asking “will Twitter make use/mention distinctions in enforcing this policy”. While it is of course impossible to state for certain in advance, I don't see any particular reason to believe they would either be disinclined to or incapable of doing so.
  - iamnothere 7y ago
    My guess is it will depend on whether or not the journalist is considered part of the mainstream media.
goto11 7y ago
I guess you can't post those quotes on twitter then.
7y ago

drak0n1c 7y ago

Does this mean that Swiftian satire such as South Park's episode making fun of prominent Scientologists is now unfit for Twitter?

duskwuff 7y ago
I don't believe it would be affected -- as I recall, that episode mocks the religion and its members, but doesn't dehumanize them.
- whatshisface 7y ago
  What exactly does "dehumanization" mean?
  - jbattle 7y ago
    Did you read the article? They give some fairly vivid examples
  - duskwuff 7y ago
    It means precisely what it sounds like -- using language which describes the targeted group as something other than (and lesser than) human. The article gives examples where religious groups are described as "rats", "viruses", "filthy animals", or "maggots".
    - whatshisface 7y ago
      Many cultures use animal analogies to describe nuanced and complicated personality trait combinations. Some of them are more negative than others, referring to combinations of positive and negative traits in varying proportions. Reductively, calling someone a lion is just as dehumanizing as calling them a shark. In the Bible, people are both complemented and insulted with comparisons to lions. Calling someone a shark is more respectful than calling them a rat, unless you're Chinese in which case I'm not sure what rat means. What exactly is banned here? Twitter gave us only the most obvious examples, leaving the hazy zones open for the endless fighting that I predict is about to start.

schalab 7y ago

Twitter needs to be a set of open source protocols and standards like the internet. Imagine if all of the internet was owned by one company and they had this kind of power. This is more power than many governments around the world.

childintime 7y ago

Excommunication isn't the solution. Isn't it enough to hide these comments by default, as on HN?

tptacek 7y ago
Comments like those in the examples Twitter provided will reliably get you excommunicated from HN.
- childintime 7y ago
  HN has dead posters. They are still readable for those that want to. That's the type of solution I promote. Digital media, like Twitter, can't be a megaphone to spread hate speech. That means their algorithms should be smarter, and accept input. On the other hand, with these media effectively being monopolies, that doesn't mean they can excommunicate (which is what this is about). That should be against the law. Just like when there is just one shop in town: everybody should be allowed to buy. That doesn't mean the shopkeeper has to smile to every customer. A good shopkeeper may even be able to get this customer some help.

rubidium 7y ago

Everyone should read the examples so they have a clear understanding of what twitter is meaning when they say "dehumanize". It's not "hey I disagree with these people" it's "hey I want these people dead/injured/equated to shit". Religious and ethnic persecutions have often gone hand-in-hand. Religious minorities of all types will be helped by this, and we'll see less hate-speech on twitter. Seems to be a very reasonable step. Sidenote: any religion topic really brings out the "I have a problem with religion" types on HN.

drak0n1c 7y ago
Twitter would be better received if it were bold enough to also state specific examples of permissible religious satire/criticism. I think that would do a lot to address what people are worried about, and be a step in the direction of having more concrete rules and predictable enforcement.
- creaghpatr 7y ago
  >Twitter would be better received if it were bold enough to also state specific examples of permissible religious satire/criticism Talk about a PR Minesweeper, expert mode.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
loudtieblahblah 7y ago
If experience is anything to go by, "things I don't like" or "things that offend me" get twisted into things far more severe than what is actually stated, words are now "violence" and make people feel "unsafe". This rule's application - like all rules like this - will be stretched and exaggerated to cover much more than intended and will be applied unevenly across demographics. Just like we see on Reddit when /r/ChapoTrapHouse and /r/Bad_cop_no_donut (both of which I sub to, genuinely) gets a pass, while right wing subs do not, when it comes to violent threats and comments. Atheists and Christians will get the short end of the stick on this. Mark my words.

djsumdog 7y ago

People really need to get off Twitter. There are a lot of servers on the Fediverse, running Mastodon, Pleroma, Misskey, Pixelfed and other ActivityPub webapps. Just because famous person x,y,z or friends a,b,c, aren't on the Fediverse doesn't mean you shouldn't try it out. It's like the 1990s, old IRC and AOL chatrooms. You can just follow a lot of randoms and get into cool threads. There are many instances that have open speech policies (which are banned by many other instances) and other instances with standard ban lists. You can choose where you want to sign up. Many of the people on HN have the knowledge to stand up their own if they want. (I run my own in Docker using a ruby tool I wrote: https://github.com/sumdog/bee2 https://github.com/sumdog/bee2). You can even create accounts of different Fediverse servers to get a better picture of what gets blocked/censored where. The difference with ActivityPub/Fediverse is you have choices. Twitter, Reddit, et. al. worry so much about keeping people "safe" that they have completely killed off any diversity of ideas. Back before Reddit started their multi-year long banning-of-everything campaign, you had a lot of different voices, with a lot of different ideology, from conservative to socialist to libertarian to progressive .. battling it out with some really great discussion. Now it's all just monoculture. The places people fled too, like Voat/Gab, are also just monoculture (Gab recently migrated to their own broken, garbage fork of Mastodon ... as if they needed a way to make the Mastodon UI worse). Voat is just a cesspool of hate, and any melting pot where people discussed ideas rationally is kinda gone. I highly recommend The Coddling of the American Mind, a book that talks about how people today see "Free speech" as a bad thing, how people say words == violence (they don't, violence is violence, and saying words are violence show you're afraid of ideas). I've also been reading The Strange Death of Europe, which talks a lot about migration and religious hate speech. Honestly a lot of the book is garbage and I didn't like any of the initial arguments, but I also realize it's important to read about viewpoints I don't agree with. As I kept reading, the author did make a lot of effort to interview Muslims (both long term residents and refugees) and he does make a good set of arguments for the difficulty of criticizing religion in Europe (and I don't agree with a lot of his findings, but I think his arguments and original research are worth looking at). We really need to be careful with these new blurred lines around speech and hate and ideas and ideology and violence. Restricting things on any platform just gives people with those views, people who get banned, more validity in the eyes of people who see them as persecuted. The Westburro Baptist Church is an example of a small, non-evangelistic set of families that barely grow, who are fully supported by slander lawsuits (they're mostly lawyers). If there weren't WBC counter protests and publications against them, they'd have no one to sue, would have run out of money a long time ago, and would have needed to take real legal case work again. The great irony is the reason they still hold strong is due to protesters giving them relevance.

08-15 7y ago

This is strangely specific. Is it still okay to dehumanize people afflicted with other kinds of mental illnesses?

benmmurphy 7y ago

I assume it is ok to say religion is a virus, or a particular religion is a virus but the rule is that you can't say the followers of the religion are a virus. Likening religion to a memetic virus is not a fringe opinion.