Re:Imzy wants to be a kinder, gentler version of Reddit
by makomk on Saturday December 10, 2016 @04:05PM
(#13147920)
Honestly, I was more thinking about the layer of abstraction above individual communities like OrganicMothers.com and AnythingGoesMothering.com - the one made up of shared services like Reddit and Facebook that are used to establish communities, since they're harder to avoid. But even at that level, speech-restrictive websites can certainly be worrying. For example, anti-vaccination ideas are likely to be popular with your hypothetical organic mothering community, and obviously they are also likely to attract a lot of anger. So the community would certainly be a lot friendlier if they banned criticism of mothers' choices not to vaccinate their kids. Can you perhaps see how this might not be socially desirable?
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Re:Imzy wants to be a kinder, gentler version of Reddit
by jasode on Saturday December 10, 2016 @04:12PM
(#13147943)
>be a lot friendlier if they banned criticism of mothers' choices not to vaccinate their kids. Can you perhaps see how this might not be socially desirable?
Yes I do, but only because you cherry-picked an example that seems to be an obvious benefit.
I want to emphasize again that true free speech includes everything you don't like and all stupid opinions so you can't isolate good examples and ignore bad ones.
Re:Imzy wants to be a kinder, gentler version of Reddit
by makomk on Saturday December 10, 2016 @05:10PM
(#13148215)
You cannot isolate good and bad examples of censorship that easily either, because it denies users information on what information they're being denied. This hypothetical site is hardly going to tell users that it's hiding the fact they're killing their babies from them; it's more likely to frame it as protecting them from industry propaganda, exactly as you argued they should be allowed to. It's only from the outside perspective that this is obviously terrible.
(This is, in my experience, a general principle of site-based censorship. For example, if I had a dollar for every regular of every feminist community who was sure the site moderators were protecting them from the oppressor, when actually they were protecting the site owners from criticism and dissent by women more oppressed than them who they were rather spectacularly failing to represent...)