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"All too often cries of "free speech!" are about not being able to say something that legitimately hurts or offends someone else" This is exactly what free spe
by mjhouse 11y ago
"All too often cries of "free speech!" are about not being able to say something that legitimately hurts or offends someone else"
This is exactly what free speech is. The freedom to say things that are wrong, hateful, misinformed, misleading, vicious, cruel and hurtful as long as no actual violent or criminal acts are incited.
- angersock 11y agoAs I've said over and over, the key problem with freedom-of-speech on the internet and harassment is how to handle people using the point-to-point facilities to antagonize others in volumes beyond what they could filter reasonably. Having ten thousand people on twitter continually tweet at one person, or email them, or whatever, is kind of like a psychic DDoS. This is a thorny problem for freedom-of-speech absolutists who can recognize the harms such things may allow. However, shitty subreddits? There's nothing there to offend anyone until they go to the subreddit and become offended. People in those cases are basically autoharassing themselves. It's just so shitty to see a few crybabies and a few shitheads drum up enough drama to cause everyone to forget just how awesome it is that we had this nice, open platform for idea exchange--even the ones the majority dislikes. EDIT: And lest we forget, the newsgroups and BBSs and everything were more than happy to allow people with nonstandard gender configurations and sexual tastes to merrily congregate, as they did other weird and sometimes hostile subcultures. That people want to remove the facilities to support such formations, now that $PREFERRED_CULTURE is mainstream enough, is pretty harmful.
- DanBC 11y ago> However, shitty subreddits? There's nothing there to offend anyone until they go to the subreddit and become offended. People in those cases are basically autoharassing themselves. Fatpeoplehate would often brigade other subs and other sites.
- angersock 11y agoSure, you can maybe get a brief respite by cracking down on the forums where the chat with each other--but that hardly fixes the problem. "These people we don't like used this coffeeshop to organize their protests. Therefore, let's shut down this coffeeshop."
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- drew-y 11y agoI agree with you. I think that was a poor way for engadget to end the article. It was probably meant to be more along the lines of this quote from earlier in the article "It was all because they thought Reddit was restricting their free speech, something they have no actual right to on the site in the first place."