Not entirely true - the reaction in the UK to this whole incident has been quite negative from what I've seen. Then again, we're not overly happy with our press at the best of times...
People are not happy with the press hounding people to suicide. The Daily Mail has a nasty track record of outing LGBTQ people, for example.
If misogynists and abusers want to go and construct their own forums, nobody can legally stop them (as long as their discussion stops short of the various sorts of criminal speech, like conspiracy to commit). But nobody is legally obligated to support them, either.
Reddit tomorrow could say, "Welp, we're not going to host people who cause harm in way X". And that's perfectly American because they'd be exercising their own rights. That they choose to support abusers is legal, but it is well within everybody else's rights to point that out, with volume and at length.
Reddit could censor all instances of discussion featuring the phrase "hackers news" tomorrow, and it's not as if they would be brought up on freedom-of-speech charges.
Who decides?
There is a wide gap between being hesitant and serious about prohibiting things and accepting everything for fear of overreach, in my opinion. We need to work towards a middle-ground.
You mean premarital sex, homosexuality, genital mutilation and women showing their faces? Hint: two of those things are still considered normal in much of the world.
We choose between letting everyone go free and dealing with the consequences, or restricting people and living with the consequences. There is no right answer.
There is no right answer, but restricting information is the wrong answer, primarily because it doesn't work. The leaked nudes are still available, even if not on reddit. You can still download pirated movies, even if it's not as simple as it used to be. Eventually, we'll have to figure out ways of preventing/minimizing the consequences, without restricting information.
That's the point - I can dump uuencoded blobs of text in HN that are stolen nudes. I'd be downvoted to hellban if I tried.
Online communities create their own standards. Reddit's standards exclude some groups of people. That's a weird choice to make - in the name of freedom of expression we're going to create an environment that is ridiculously hostile to large numbers of people to make sure they can't express their opinions.
So you're suggestion that instead, in the name of safety, we should create an environment that is ridiculously hostile to large numbers of people (banning them) to make sure they can't express their opinions?
If their opinion is "You should die you stupid fucking cunt" or "I'm going to find you and rape you and then kill you" then yes, ban those people.
"I'd do a lot worse than rape you. I've just got out of prison and would happily do more time to see you berried [sic]. #10feetunder."
"I will find you, and you don't want to know what I will do when I do. You're pathetic. Kill yourself. Before I do. #Godie."
I find it fucking baffling that you chose to defend those people, the people saying stuff like that, at the cost of their victims.
Caroline Criado Perez was not complaining about one or two people sending a few dozens of messages that were a bit mean. She was inundated with thousands of messages, from many people, threatening sexual violence and death. One man was sending 50 messages per hour, over about 12 hours. Another woman sent hundreds of messages. Perez's "crime"? She campaigned to have a woman on British banknotes after the Bank of England phased out Elizabeth Fry on the £5 - leaving no women on the banknotes.
I would be proud to ban those people from any service I ran.
Oh well, I find it weird that you're twisting my words so much, but I won't insult your intelligence because of it.
Anyways, I don't defend those people - I think they're morons, I would shame them, etc. (I would defend them in court, though, unless they actually (physically) harm anyone - because freedom of speech).
The problem is (1) banning/censorship is a slippery slope, and will inevitably results in censoring some inconvenient truth, and (2) it doesn't work, because the trolls can just make a new account. IMO, personal filters that each user can activate and tune to their desire (akin email spam filters) would work much better.
Yeah she was:
https://twitter.com/CCriadoPerez/statuses/375689920742182912
If you dig, you find that she's an aggressive jerk, and that's why she's a hate magnet. In a different political context, she'd be the "troll." Same for the person she's arguing with. I don't lump Kathy Sierra in this category, but there's a reason some people always find themselves in the middle of a shitstorm.
>I find it fucking baffling that you chose to defend those people, the people saying stuff like that, at the cost of their victims.
See, this is the thing. You see very, very few people defending that. But everybody who doesn't agree with banning vehement disagreement gets attributed that opinion. Every time. The same thing is happening with the so-called gamergate.
Who's being excluded by reddit's standards? Aside from egregious racists who become nuisances to others, and/or child porn distributors (both good exclusions, IMO), it seems like a free-for-all. You want to create a subreddit reflecting your odd interests, go ahead!
It bothers me for the same reason it bothers me that those things exist. They are terrible, and should not be given a platform. I don't feel that we, as a society, should tolerate terrible things in general, much less let them prosper.