The Tor devs are saying "Hey, somebody has been harassing one of our members, and we're going to do something about it, concretely, and we write tools, but that

The Tor devs are saying "Hey, somebody has been harassing one of our members, and we're going to do something about it, concretely, and we write tools, but that's not enough." So, a casual reading suggests that they are intending to do something beyond mere blogging to help their friend. Such an action, unless it's just counter-harassment, could well be censorship. That's how I read their post. And no, it's not a good thing that their friend is being harassed. Basically, as I read it, their post was either feel-good me-too blog support, or it was a declaration of intent to do something, the nature of the problem in turn suggesting censorship or mechanisms for censorship. The whole "If you need people to have thick skins, well, that's a problem" attitude just isn't supported by the tech we're working with. Fact: It is possible to send a direct message from one person to another without any significant intermediary (via email, twitter, etc.). This is freakin' awesome. Fact: Some percentage of communications sent will be negative or offensive. Fact: We can either stop offensive communications in transit, or we can ignore them at receipt. We can't stop them being transmitted without creating a mechanism for immediate de facto censorship (hell, consider shadowbans in HN for an example of this). Fact: If we choose to stop offensive communications in transit, we are enabling the stopping of any communications in transit. The same software that lets us drop messages that say "kill all women"--or some other ghastly comment--is the same software that lets us drop messages that say "save all women". To pretend otherwise is willfully ignorant. So, it follows (to me, at any rate) that the only way to prevent the installation of such apparatus is to handle discarding messages at the point of reception--and that means being able to ignore or filter out things we disagree with without calling for some central authority to protect us. I even suggested a nice area of exploration for decentralized handling of that kind of spamming, but nobody cares about that--they just disagree with something else and flag to the bottom of the page. There's your system in action, by the way.