There are multiple issues here:

* General principle that people in influential positions have less protections and should have more scrutiny than average John Doe. Celebrities and influential people have less legal privacy protections.

* People are free to speak as individuals, but they may not be free to speak while they have public position in the organization. Elected members of the organization like FSF don't have the same protections as employers have. They represent the organization even outside the work. Their public position gives them a platform where what they say goes trough bullhorn and private becomes public and reflects the organization. If something they say harms the organization they should go even if they are right.

You feel safe because you are not famous, but remember that if you make an inappropriate joke or someone mistake something you say as an inappropriate joke, you can end fired https://techcrunch.com/2013/03/21/a-dongle-joke-that-spirale...

There's plenty of ground between "Stallman shouldn't get a pass for years of varying grades of crappy remarks and opinions as a public leader of the FSF" and "the PyCon dongle thing got way out of hand..."

I agree that they are very different. The GP said that the famous people should be very careful about what they say or have the risk of being fired. I only wanted to notice that everyone should be very careful about what they say or have the risk of being fired.

Celebrities do have protection from any injustice, and mob rule is unjust. They can't demand punishment for other people for mild disturbance, but that's all, they have all other rights and protections.

If you are the leader for an organisation focused on advocacy (i.e. raising awareness and communicating), then your words become de facto the words of the organisation, even with comments not related to your organisations purpose.

If your leader appears to advocate pedophilia, then your organisation no longer becomes "that organisation that advocates for free software", but "that organisation run by a pedophile apologist".

> If your leader appears to advocate pedophilia

He doesn't advocate pedophilia. Nothing has changed for years. Are you advocating it?

He has just been completely misrepresented by some popular media as supporting statutory rape, and you are fueling the fire.

It is pure bullshit - the journalists that write (or publications that publish) headlines that completely reverse meaning should be held accountable for their lies.

It is libel: make it appear Richard said she was willing when he definitely said she was coerced (within the exact same paragraph as the "quote"). Seems she was 18 too - any organisation publishing clearly slanderous headings designed for sensation and payment for eyeballs should be punished.

The pedophilia advocating is much earlier. From his website (the last sentence is his opinion)

Dutch pedophiles have formed a political party to campaign for legalization. [Reference updated on 2018-04-25 because the old link was broken.]

I am skeptical of the claim that voluntarily pedophilia harms children

I disagree with Stallman's skepticism (I do think it harms children and I don't think children can make that choice). But that one liner does not make him a pedophilia advocate. That makes him someone who is wrong on that topic.

He didn't know what he was talking about, but felt it was okay to use his public platform to say it anyway. That's not scepticism. It's laziness. We have reams of evidence to show that paedophilia is harmful to children, and a 5 minute web search would have returned some of it.

> He didn't know what he was talking about, but felt it was okay to use his public platform to say it anyway.

You've described basically every single human being in tech I've ever met, they just don't have as big a platform. See: Musk's twitter feed, for instance.

If this is so easy, please provide links to research, preferably not done by a clearly biased organization. (E.g. not IICSA) Books are acceptable too, as long as they're research.

There are only a handful of case studies of really bad cases I'm aware of. And they're not that exacting in follow-up.

Note research, not opinion pieces.

Good quality papers. I found just a handful. I'm having trouble fishing then out from the thousands of opinion pieces.

Edit: I found one credible meta-analysis so far, and the results are not good. Most of abuse is not reported. Impact is not known, how handling of it is done is unknown to affect severity.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3720272/

And he did retract that more than a decade old statement.

It took him a decade to retract that statement, said retraction conveniently occurring when this shitstorm about Epstein is reaching a crescendo. Retractions and apologies with such timing appear awfully convenient and insincere.

Who remembers everything they've said more than a decade ago? He was reminded now that he had said that and has changed his views on it.

This isn't a verbal conversation, this is something he wrote on his own blog, no?

Yes, but one doesn't have neither written or regular speech memorized so it doesn't matter which it was.

Why did it take him takes to come the the conclusion that sexually abusing children is wrong? And why are you defending that?

Because who remembers everything they've said? I do what?

Yeah but is there a web search engine that respects your freedom?

If you're wrong about something, are famous and put that wrong thing on your site, you are advocating for that wrong thing.

Because people believing in that wrong thing will point to you as a figure of authority.

Not fair, but life's not fair.

Wtf?

As a rule, explanations are more helpful than exclamations.

The point is it doesn't really matter what he advocates. He's using his position of power (given to him to promote Free Software) to push his controversial political opinions instead. It doesn't matter if those opinions are right or wrong. What matters is they are controversial and that he's using his platform to express those opinions.

If he said this anonymously or in private it would've been fine. The problem is him using his platform for stuff that it's not meant to be used for. So now they're taking away his platform. Seems fair to me.

Just picking away at the 'what matters is that they are controversial' statement - that isn't in Stallman's control and it relies on 'everyone knowing' something and evidently without people ever being able to discuss it or test out ideas once they have reached a certain level of respectability. Stallman wasn't trying to make this an international topic of discussion. Important people are going to be wrong about things and calling for resignations is not a sustainable solution if it isn't directly in their line of expertise.

Everyone bar nobody has formed an opinion on an important topic that is completely wrong at some point in their life. To correct their opinion, they will need to talk to somebody who will explain why it is wrong.

This wasn't Stallman trying to use his position on the FSF to spread his opinions, he was using his position at MIT to try and defend a colleague to other academics. And what you are describing is an unreasonable standard to hold anyone to if a topic isn't supposed to be their central area of expertise.

It does matter what he advocates and it does matter whether his opinions are technically correct and incorrect. The 5-days-comment-to-resignation mob are doing damage here; and setting up terrifying dynamics. They aren't going to stop at Stallman.

The point is that it doesn't really matter what anyone actually says or thinks. If they are in the public sphere and holds power they will be got at for some hurt.

Truth doesn't count if the thing hurts someone. Intent doesn't count if harm was caused. This is a view that many here would seem absurd but which many here would also agree with.

Does this still seem fair? Is truth and intent not that important when it comes to tricky issues?

Richard Stallman about defending pedophilia:

"The nominee is quoted as saying that if the choice of a sexual partner were protected by the Constitution, "prostitution, adultery, necrophilia, bestiality, possession of child pornography, and even incest and pedophilia" also would be. He is probably mistaken, legally--but that is unfortunate. All of these acts should be legal as long as no one is coerced. They are illegal only because of prejudice and narrowmindedness."

    RMS on June 28th, 2003 https://stallman.org/archives/2003-mar-jun.html

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"I am skeptical of the claim that voluntarily pedophilia harms children. The arguments that it causes harm seem to be based on cases which aren't voluntary, which are then stretched by parents who are horrified by the idea that their little baby is maturing. "

    RMS on June 5th, 2006) https://stallman.org/archives/2006-mar-jun.html#05%20June%202006%20(Dutch%20paedophiles%20form%20political%20party

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" There is little evidence to justify the widespread assumption that willing participation in pedophilia hurts children.

Granted, children may not dare say no to an older relative, or may not realize they could say no; in that case, even if they do not overtly object, the relationship may still feel imposed to them. That's not willing participation, it's imposed participation, a different issue. "

    RMS on Jan 4th, 2013) https://stallman.org/archives/2013-jan-apr.html#04_January_2013_(Pedophilia

You can sue for slander and defamation of character.