In Fallout one and two, the main character had the option to kill NPC child characters. The game went so far as to mark you with a specific perk "Childkiller"[1] after performing that act.

From the linked fandom wiki, quote by Tim Cain about the subject:

> This led to the child killing controversy. We said look, we're going to have kids in the game; you shoot them, it's a huge penalty to karma, you're really disliked, there are places that won't sell to you, people will shoot you on sight, and we thought people can decide what they want to do. [...] This of course contributed to our M-rating, however, Europe said "no". They wouldn't even sell the game if there were children in the game. We didn't have time to rewrite all the quests, we just deleted kids off the disc.

[1] - https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Childkiller

Right, but the charge is that this is a slippery slope. That as soon as you put some limitations in the name of protecting children, eventually and inevitably you are preventing your characters being named after religious icons and politicians. I'm just wondering where that's actually happened. As far as I'm aware you can name you character whatever you want in Fallout.

I don't think there is an explicit filter installed. Quick search reveals a companion that can pronounce names and Jesus is not recorded as something the character can say while Mohammed is allowed and voiced. Though this might not be censorship but just something that wasn't recorded. Fallout also evolved into an online game. I haven't played it but that might lead to character name restrictions.

> Codsworth is known to say the Sole Survivor's chosen name if it is an option, although it may be shortened, extended, or have a word omitted. A list of spoken names can be found here.

> Ironically you can be Mohammed but you can't be Jesus. I know I missed a bunch of the good ones, feel free to add some below.

[1] - https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Codsworth

[2] - https://steamcommunity.com/app/377160/discussions/0/49688113...

As for Jesus vs Mohammed, Mohammed is an incredibly popular name among muslims generally, so it’d be like leaving out “John”. Jesus is a much less popular given name around the world.

Jesús is a popular name in Spanish speaking countries...

An example that comes to mind is reddit banning the jailbait subreddit. Not too long after reddit started its campaign of removing "offensive" subs more broadly. Fatpeoplehate, gendercritical, watchpeopledie, etc have all been victims of the new censorious mindset.

The problem with this sort of censorship is that it has huge collateral damage that most people don't see. WPD is the best example because that kind of content wasn't hurting anyone. Go look at where it's moved to, and have a look at the kinds of people commenting there as opposed to the reasonably level headed comments on the reddit version.

Every time you kill a subreddit or facebook group, 99% of the users stop participating in that kind of content, and the other 1% scurry off to some out of sight echo chamber until one day they randomly pop up again to murder a bunch of innocent people because they've been corrupted beyond saving.

Everyone was talking about this for a hot moment after the Christchurch massacre, but nothing was done and now nobody gives a shit again.

It's important to let people with divergent views to feel some sort of social pressure to change. Those 99% of people that have no interest in blowing up buildings or murdering children are the best weapon we have to convince the other 1% of people with weird interests that the world as it is ok without them taking some drastic action. There's always going to be a small subset of people that will rebel, but the important thing is to make sure that otherwise normal people (that want to watch porn, or learn how to safely handle a gun, or learn about cybersecurity, or get desensitised to gore, or whatever else is on this week's "think of the children" hitlist) are integrating into civilised society and not being dragged into cesspits of violence and terrorism because their interests have been deemed by a bunch of fucking software engineers to be "bad".

We're well past the critical point where enough large platforms have banned all the "bad" stuff that any new contenders either need to ban it too or become one of those out of sight echo chambers themselves. The only way to fix it now is for everyone to agree to be less stringent all at once, together.

It's worth remembering that the internet wasn't very censored 20 years ago. Most of us grew up during that time and turned out fine. I'll take tubgirl and lemon party over neo-nazis and conspiracy nutjobs any day of the week.

> Every time you kill a subreddit or facebook group, 99% of the users stop participating in that kind of content, and the other 1% scurry off to some out of sight echo chamber... > It's important to let people with divergent views to feel some sort of social pressure to change.

I would love to have actual discussions with people regarding certain views I hold. But quite often others just refuse to even entertain that I have a different view because x and y. And to them I am just dumb/uneducated/other things to discredit me having an opinion at all.

Hell, I went quite a bit more towards "bad" opinions, just because that side is more accepting of discussion/dissent.

It isn't just corporations banning subreddits/websites that drive people into echochambers, but also people simply refusing to engage at all.

philosopherai.com had a few funny instances of self-censorship, like “who owns the central bank”. A ridiculous side effect of some well-meaning censorship.