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> shot down in the name of free speech and anti-censorship Not to defend the material in question in any way - but the people who expressed concern... were rig
by commandlinefan 5y ago
> shot down in the name of free speech and anti-censorship
Not to defend the material in question in any way - but the people who expressed concern... were right. As soon as Reddit gave mods the tools they needed to expunge the really terrible stuff from the site, those tools were almost immediately used to ban completely unrelated conspiracy subs.
- throwanem 5y agoI think lots of folks would consider that an entirely worthwhile tradeoff. Would you like to try to argue that it's not?
- ipaddr 5y agoWhy stop the tradeoff. Without the internet these things could not spread. Shut it down. People can take photos without permission from the government. Stop selling camera and charge camera resellers. Would you like to argue where your line is?
- throwanem 5y agoSomewhere short of enabling revictimization so that r/thedonald doesn't have to pay for hosting.
- giraffe_lady 5y agoUm do you want to try again at not defending it? My information is very out of date but I'm curious how you know how unrelated they were. My more-than-lay understanding is that the trading didn't happen in the open. Users used questionable comments, line-toeing images, and "jailbait jokes" to find each other and then swapped in DMs or off-site entirely. Reddits mods have always had a rich grapevine. In my time I never once heard of a sub getting banned that didn't have a months or years long reputation for turning a blind eye to that. Possibly that completely changed after I left, sure.
- newguynewphone 5y ago
- notch656a 5y agoYou can ban all speech and it would end the spread of these images altogether, at least to the extent the law can be policed. The ends don't justify the means.
- jakelazaroff 5y agoOkay, but we didn’t ban all speech, right? The collateral damage was mostly weird conspiracy theory subreddits and hate-based communities like r/fatpeoplehate. Given how it actually shook out, I think the ends absolutely justified the means.
- psyc 5y agoCriticisms of pragmatism don’t typically depend on failure to achieve the ends.
- ipaddr 5y agoUntil 'weird' and different becomes systemically shutting out minorities. People justify a lot of things they shouldn't
- jakelazaroff 5y agoIf that happens, I’ll change my tune. I’m much more concerned with actual harm that’s currently happening than theoretical harm that may not even come to pass.
- TimeBearingDown 5y agoTo be honest, I’m still quite bitter and resentful about losing the r/RightWingLGBT community. Vast majorities on a site like that are already self-censoring. The damage in terms of isolation and radicalization is already very real.
- doctor_eval 5y agoAgain the conflation of freedom of speech versus the freedom to be heard. Freedom of speech means that the government can’t put you in jail for saying something stupid. Censorship of privately owned online forums is entirely up to the forum. There is no high principle at stake there. In fact, censorship of this kind of forum is itself a kind of speech - so forcing someone to publish what you want them to publish, is also a form of suppression.
- tenuousemphasis 5y agoThat doesn't make any sense. Mods (not Reddit employees) can't ban subreddits, because they only have control over their own subreddits. The admins (Reddit employees) did ban subreddits, but it had nothing to do with the new tools the admins gave to subreddit mods.