Moral absolutism on freedom of speech is a sympathetic position to take, but not one what’s all that practical... If I exercised my right to freedom of speech to sock puppet thousands of Twitter bots as Facebook accounts to discuss your alleged sexual deviancy, flooded the channel with creative via photoshop, then claimed “ma rights.” would you seriously feel the same way? Facebook is going to stumble through this hard. They’re going to get it wrong, often. They’re at least starting to show how they’re doing content filtering in this article. There’s a world outside of Facebook called the real world where we can meet in person and protest their stupidity if it goes off the rails. Equating Facebook’s wall post feature to the comprehensive number of other ways you can more effectively use your voice... I’m not all the concerned. If Facebook disappeared due to a hardware failure tomorrow, freedom of speech would still be alive and well...

But the problem here is the political bias in censorship. If facebook existed 100 years ago, you could say the same thing as now, just the 'good' and the 'bad' groups would be a lot different.

And you don't have to wait a 100 years, in my country, if we overly applied the same rules, at the start of the first covid wave, facebook would censor all the science-deniers, and crazy preppers for using masks (because "masks don't help" - our doctors, depending on where you live, probably yours too). Then one random saturday, our government decided you need a mask and gloves to enter any indoor public place (stores,...), and facebook would censor the anti-mask people.

We also live in a culture, where we have a few "protected groups", where we censor anything (even jokes) about that (eg. rape jokes), but even those rules, we apply very arbitrarily.... in movies, rape bad, rape jokes bad, unless the person raped is a man, then it's not a crime/thriller, but a "satirical erotic romantic comedy" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/40_Days_and_40_Nights ). Again, rape jokes are censorship worthy, unless you change one tiny variable, and that makes it all ok. Today atleast.

The source of the voice is the only thing that I honestly care about. Again, sympathetic but not practical. Banning a Facebook nut job with a hobby and banning the peer reviewed work of epidemiologists are not equal things. I don’t weigh all speech as equal. By the extension of your logic, all speech has equal value. It doesn’t.

So who do you ban?

The paranoid prepper advocating for mask use, while all the doctors say masks are useless?

Or antimask denier, who says masks are useless, and doesn't want to wear them, when the doctors say you need to wear a mask?

In my country, you could ban both in a single weekend, when we went from "masks are useless" to "masks are mandatory in public indoor places from monday on".

If you mix politics into this, it makes it even worse... we were listening for four years how the ameican election was stolen, how the russians hacked everything, etc., and now we listen how it's impossible to hack the election, steal the votes, etc. Who do you ban? The conspiracy theorists then or now?

More stupid example? You have religious people in eg. Iran saying that women should cover parts of their bodies, that men don't have to cover. And you have instagram saying that women should cover parts of their bodies, that men don't have to cover. On one side, if you advocate that women should cover up parts of their body, that men don't have to, you're a misogynistic hate group, and get banned, unless we're talking about nipples, then it's instagram itself doing the deleting and banning.

> But the problem here is the political bias in censorship.

Alleged bias.

> So, why so much outrage,

Outrage is also free speech. You're saying if you agree with moderating some things, you should never be allowed to complain about other types of moderation? That's even more antithetical to free speech.

If you support a system with moderation (censorship) based on peoples beliefs, then you should not complain when the system you supported is used (with one tiny variable changed - belief).

It's like supporting (eg.) warrantless surveilance (because pedos and terrorists), and then complaining when it's used against you. You supported the system, now shut up and deal with it.

I support moderation by private companies on private platforms on the basis of property rights, and the right of free speech for those companies.

I support criticism of moderation decisions on the basis of freedom of speech for individuals.

You're allowed to say whatever you want, but if you insist on using my property and resources to say it, that's an infringement on my freedom.

These positions aren't inconsistent.

> If you support a system with moderation (censorship) based on peoples beliefs, then you should not complain when the system you supported is used

Again, now you're arguing against free speech. I'd never tell someone they shouldn't complain about something because they said something I didn't like. They're free to complain all they like.

Because being anti-LGBT is morally wrong, that's why. It has nothing to do with legality or with freedom of expression.

I really don't understand how we can start equating LGBT rights with outright hate speech.

Who gets to decide what definition of morals Facebook should use to answer these questions? Why should Facebook choose your particular moral framework to work with?

Yeah, I know, you're right. Everybody else is sure that their moral framework is right, too. So why does yours get to rule? What is your basis for saying that yours is right and theirs is wrong?

You may in fact be able to give a defense of your moral framework. That defense seems right to you, and to those who agree with you. But defenders of other moral frameworks can do that, too. Which self-consistent and defensible (per the adherents) moral framework should be the one to rule Facebook, and why?

> Who gets to decide what definition of morals Facebook should use to answer these questions?

Everyone individually, and each can then express their opinion on Facebook’s moral status, and decide otherwise whether and how to engage with Facebook, based on whether and to what extent Facebook aligns with each individual’s moral standards.

This is moral relativism. You can't build anything on moral relativism. By that same logic, there is no moral justification to freedom of speech either.

(also we're talking about outrage here, not about lawsuits.)

That totally fails to answer my question. You said being anti-LGBT is morally wrong. Here's some guy in Teheran. He's not a moral relativist. He's very much a moral absolutist, and he's dead certain that LGBT itself is what's morally wrong.

Why do we believe you instead of the other guy? Why does Facebook believe you instead of the other guy? Because Facebook is in the US instead of Iran?

Here's my position: I am a moral absolutist. Still, I don't want a moral absolutist deciding what Facebook thinks is appropriate content. There's too many systems of absolute morality, and too many of them differ from my own in important ways - ways that I'd like to be able to talk about.

Wait, I didn't say that I get to legally dictate what Facebook is allowed to do.

However, I get to be morally outraged at their actions whenever it pleases me, and I get to get others to be outraged too and if we're enough people we may convince them to change course.

In that sense, I don't care one bit about the guy in Teheran who thinks being LGBT is wrong and I don't have to.

OK. I pretty much agree with that.

I'm still worried about the guy who does get to dictate what Facebook will carry (namely, somebody at Facebook). I don't want that person to be very morally absolutist, and I worry that they are becoming increasingly so as time goes by.

Well, it's not black or white.

There are opinions that I don't agree with that I think are still completely legitimate and perfectly moral.

There are opinions that I take serious issue with and may even find immoral but for which I'd still claim that it's worse to try to suppress them than to allow them.

And then there's stuff like incitement to violence or the president of the USA spreading dangerous lies about an election ... tolerance can only go so far.

Of course, it's a difficult call to make. Of course, no matter what you decide, someone is going to be angry. But you can't just not decide, you do have to take a stand and by refusing to do so, you have effectively already decided something (that's the whole point of Sartre's philosophy btw, which was inspired by WW2).

> This is moral relativism. You can't build anything on moral relativism.

So what exactly makes your morality absolute? Can you provide any evidence for it? Most people give hand wavy answers to this question, mumbling something along lines of intuition etc, which is not evidence, but as arbitrary and relative as some random choice of initial values for some random moral framework.

I'm not arguing for moral absolutism. Both that and moral relativism are deeply flawed.

It's a fact that different people have different perceptions of morality, but that alone is not a sufficient argument to shut down any debate about ethics.

It is our duty as moral individuals to fight for what we think is morally right. And sometimes we will have to compromise.

But I'm tired of having to argue for why LGBT rights are important (something that I really would have hoped would be understood by now), since that is not the point. The point is that OP gave an example of a decision that "would spark an outrage" and I contended that that would be the case because it would be seen by the outraged as an immoral decision.

You can't take people's rights to be morally outraged away from them. You can, at the most, try to argue with those people why the supposedly immoral thing is not actually immoral, but I haven't seen anyone here doing that: only people defending the truism that "everyone has different moral standards". Which... yeah.

That's not even the point. You are throwing around with the word 'moral' around a lot and it seems to me that you don't even understand the basics of moral philosophy. Your usage of 'moral' seems to be merely a rhetoric device to give more weight to your opinion, but what does that even accomplish when you fail to deliver any evidence for your morality?

You just make a lot of claims, but you fail to back them up, so they are and remain nothing but that, baseless claims. It's basically just your opinion, which you are trying to wrap in the garment of 'morality'. So if you are moral realist and your morality is easily discarded, why should they care? If you are a moral anti-realist and still make moral value judgments, which are also easily discarded without consequences, why should they care?

Many, many religions find pro-LGBT to be morally wrong.

Even evolutionary, everything that doesnt create more kids is useless.

But we, as a western society usually stand by the rights to let adults do whatever they want (consentually), and don't care about it, if it doesnt affect us directly.

And what does 'morally' even mean?

We, as a western society, support kids seeing and sucking on boobs, until they're 1yo or 2 (or whatever), then for the next 10-12 years we hide (images of, and real) boobs from them, as if they were radioactive, and they don't know why, then they (approximately half of them) want to look at (real and images of) boobs, but we find that "wrong", a few years later we legally let them pay to see boobs (or find them online for free), and somewhere in the meantime, start bothering then, when are they going to find someone with boobs. Meanwhile mens boobs are ok.

In some other cultures, women of all ages don't even cover their boobs in public.

So basically something, that is a normal everyday thing in some cultures, for people of all ages, becomes morally wrong in our culture, and we censor it online, we also lock up people if those boobs are owned by a person younger than some arbitrary age, and even have wikipedia pages about that ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Bowl_XXXVIII_halftime_sh... ).

So basically, for some other culture, what we do is morally wrong, but we, as a majority, get to ignore their morality and impose our own (even if it's stupid).

TLDR: we (as a group) support social networks deleting photos of female nipples, because showing and seeing those is morally wrong in our culture, even though it's an issue that affects a lot more people than LGBT stuff.

> Many, many religions find pro-LGBT to be morally wrong

So? They are as free to express and act on their opinion of private actors expressing pro-LGBT messages as people who believe otherwise are to express the opposite.

> Even evolutionary, everything that doesnt create more kids is useless.

Obviously false or such traits would be quickly weeded of it wherever they arise, and they are not.

>So? They are as free to express and act on their opinion of private actors expressing pro-LGBT messages as people who believe otherwise are to express the opposite.

The last time someone didn't want to bake a cake, they had to fight their way to supreme court... so yeah, expressing your beliefs is not an easy task to do.

The problem with beliefs is, that they're arbitrary, and a tiny variable can make a good thing a bad thing. Rape in a movie? Bad thing. Crime, thriller, etc. Rape jokes, bad. But wait, if you just change the gender of the rape victim to a male, you've got a hollywood "satirical erotic romantic comedy" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/40_Days_and_40_Nights ).

So, rape jokes are bad, and deleted ( https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-15641998 -here facebook even stood with free speech, but bent down soon after), but if the victim is a man, you can shoot a comedy and make $95M. And it's far from being the only movie with such cntent ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9nheskbsU5g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uc6QxD2_yQw ).

Why is one (morally) ok, and the other isn't? Who decides that? If we censor one, shouldnt we also censor the other? Or if we let one online, why not let the other? Is it just a personal choice of a trigger happy moderator? Or is there a written, official moderation rule, where content with rape is ok, if the victim is a man?

You seem to have a bone to pick, and are injecting tangential arguments into the conversation.

But as a matter of fact, it wasn't about bakers not baking a cake for gay people, or whether you should be allowed to make rape jokes - all topics that maybe have a bit more nuance to them, and can be discussed elsewhere.

The question was "would it be wrong for Facebook to ban LGBT content"? I contend that it would be wrong, i.e. immoral. If you disagree with that, we can try to have an argument about that. If you agree or don't care, I don't see the point in this mental exercise.

It is of zero interest in any discussion ever that there are hypothetical people who disagree with opinion X, because I'm not arguing with hypothetical people. I'm having an argument with specific individuals with specific beliefs.

> I contend that it would be wrong, i.e. immoral. If you disagree with that, we can try to have an argument about that.

Read again what you have formulated above. You just asserted that it's 'immoral' without giving any argument or evidence for it. Surely, you should formulate an argument yourself first, before asking for one.

Well, it depends a bit on what is meant by "banning LGBT content", but suppose that a gay couple wouldn't be allowed to post their wedding pictures. Since, presumably, all straight couples can do so, Facebook would effectively imply that gay couples are somehow "wrong" and should not be shown to people. I would find that deeply immoral because gay people are not worth less than straight people.

However, I would have thought that this line of reasoning is self-evident on a forum such as this one...

Your argument is convoluted and confused, the worth of the individual has nothing to do with the action/event being 'right' or 'wrong'. Furthermore what relevance does it even have when something is 'deeply immoral' (according to you)? Will they be punished by Zeus or Karma or neither? Since assuming it's perfectly legal and morally good in their locality, they couldn't care less about what you think of it.

What is self evident to you might be self evidently wrong to others, let your arguments speak instead of appealing to your local culture. this is an international forum and one shouldn't just assume that everybody thinks and values the exact same things. maybe start off by explaining why your moral framework is supposedly 'absolute' and not just some arbitrary choice you made that is convenient to you and how it's supposedly better or more valid than the moral framework of the people you lazily vilified as 'crazy' just because they oppose you on certain issues.

I don't care if those people don't care about my moral assessment of them. I still get to choose what I find moral and what I don't find moral, and I get to fight for what I think is right.

And now I'm done talking to homophobes.

Quite the convenient cop-out, not even surprised. You failed to deliver any arguments (valid or invalid) for your 'morality' and resorted to name-calling.

See that makes your 'moral assessment' as worthless as your infantile name-calling. If you had any valid arguments, you would have given them. Thanks for the exchange anyway.

Why is banning LGBT immoral, but banning nipples is moral? Who decides what is moral and what is not? Who should have the power to decide what 2.7B (or whatever number of) users see?

LGBT is just an example, because in many cultures it is immoral. As is the nipple.

I just don't think it's a good idea for a private company, to be able to decide arbitrarily what is moral and what is not. Especially facebook.... there are many bakeries, but not many social networks with billions of users.

> I just don't think it's a good idea for a private company, to be able to decide arbitrarily what is moral and what is not.

You seem to be under the illusion that if Facebook banned nothing (or at least nothing that goes beyond what is illegal), they would not make a moral decision.

But that is wrong. Deciding to allow absolutely everything is a decision (e.g. by placing higher moral value on freedom of expression than on other things) just as much as deciding to disallow some other content is a decision.

In the end, there is no escaping morality. As a human being, it is your responsibility to make decisions according to your own moral standards (and the limits of the law) and if you're someone with power, these decisions will affect more people and will be scrutinised more.

> Who decides what is moral and what is not?

Everyone decides for themselves. And then we come together as a society and we figure out what to do about the messy differences between our positions and find some sort of compromise - that's really the only way it goes.

this is textbook whataboutism.

also, I support less repression on sexual expression (btw something that often correlates with support for LGBT issues) and (as a European), I find American prudishness to be often quite puzzling, but this

> TLDR: we (as a group) support social networks deleting photos of female nipples, because showing and seeing those is morally wrong in our culture, even though it's an issue that affects a lot more people than LGBT stuff.

is ridiculous. Some people's inability to be able to view boobs on FB is not on the same level as LGBT rights.

> Some people's inability to be able to view boobs on FB is not on the same level as LGBT rights.

Why?

Isn't seeing boobs a lot more natural than anything lgbt? I mean, pretty much a 100% of people have boobs, 50% of those have the ones we're not allowed to see, and if you count all the lgbt people, you get what.. 10% of the population? 20%? Definitely less than the number of people with boobs.

Yes, i know it's a stupid example, and there are historic reasons for promoting lgbt rights... but we're currently in a state, where one person (or a relatively small group of people) with their own set of beliefs, can decide that an 8-9yo drag queen is ok (Lactatia), a 6 year old can be a star of really creepy beauty pageants (honey boo boo), but one visible, female nipple is bad (sometimes even very bad: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Bowl_XXXVIII_halftime_sh... )

Who decides what is ok and what is not? Laws surely don't. Yes, facebook is a private company, but it should be treated as having a monopoly position, especially after buying instagram and whatsapp. Having a company with so much power (having so many eyes watching them, that they can manipulate) is not a good thing, especially if they can arbitrary censor stuff they arbitrarily don't like.

> Why?

Seriously? LGBT people are being bullied and beaten not only in Russia but also in Poland, which from here is about an hour away. In Iran and other countries they are hanged. In Chechnya, they're being deported and murdered.

But even in the West, suicide rates for LGBT people are much higher, AIDS continues to be an issue (even though significant progress has been made), there are still crazy people who think that teaching LGBT issues in school - which would be enormously helpful for teenagers in accepting themselves - is some sort of propaganda, and to this day, some families still don't accept if their kid is gay (or trans). Oh and also, just a short while ago, in a city not that far from where I live, there was a murder attempt on a homosexual couple and one of the guys actually died. These are real issues with real impact for the people that are affected. It's easy to think that homophobia is gone in the West, because of the public opinion, but secretly and deep down some people (even if they are fewer) are either latently or sometimes deeply homophobic.

Funny of you mentioning Iran... https://monitoring.bbc.co.uk/product/c2011nxv ... 24 years in prison for removing a headscarf.

Again, as in the other thread... who decides what is moral and what is not?

In iran, it is moral and expected for women to cover parts of their bodies, that men don't have to cover. And on facebook it is moral and expected for women to cover parts of their bodies, that men don't have to cover.

But you care about LGBT issues, and don't care about special covering rules for women, so you're arguing me, that one group of people should be protected because of unequal treatment, but other group of people shouldn't be protected for their unequal treatment.

What on earth gives you the impression that I would be defending Iran of all places? You're strawmanning and shifting goal-posts.

Yes, it's wrong that women are forced to wear head scarves, but that has nothing to do with nipples not being allowed on Facebook.

Ok, let me simplify this for you.

You're letting facebook decide that groups of people should be equal regarding issue #1, and disregard facebook treating them differently regarding issue #2.

To quote you from another post:

> Well, it depends a bit on what is meant by "banning LGBT content", but suppose that a gay couple wouldn't be allowed to post their wedding pictures. Since, presumably, all straight couples can do so, Facebook would effectively imply that gay couples are somehow "wrong" and should not be shown to people. I would find that deeply immoral because gay people are not worth less than straight people.

I'll just change a few things:

Well, it depends a bit on what is meant by "banning womens nipples", but suppose that a woman wouldn't be allowed to post their nipple pictures. Since, presumably, all men can do so, Facebook would effectively imply that womens nipples are somehow "wrong" and should not be shown to people. I would find that deeply immoral because womens nipples are not worth less than mens nipples.

You're basically saying iran is right to jail women not wearing headscarfs, because their culture and morals say that it's somehow wrong for women to go outside uncovered, while man can do that.... oh wait... replace "iran" with "facebook", "jail" with "delete photos", and "headscarfs" with "nipples".

So basically, by your logic, discrimination is ok, as long as it's nipples, and not anything lgbt related. I mean, showing womens nipples is immoral in america, showing womens faces is immoral in iran, and women kissing women is immoral probably in iran too... as a not-american, it's interesting to me, that you're against respecting what's im/moral in iran, even if it's clear discrimination, but don't care about discrimination if it involves american morals.

I clearly can't seem to be able to convince you, so I'll stop here.

However I do hope that at some point you will do some thinking or research about the myriad issues LGBT people (or, for that matter, women in Iran) have to go through, and then maybe see why it comes across as slightly offensive for someone to equate these struggles with nipples not being shown on Facebook.

Have a good day.