Comment by willstrafach
8 years ago
Serious question: If people want to post hateful content, what is preventing them from doing so on either their own website, or to one of the many existing websites which are friendly to that sort of content?
I honesrly don’t understand why mainstream social media websites should be allowing that sort of thing. There are plenty of other places they can freely post, so they really are not being censored.
Nothing is; that's great. (Let's see how long it lasts!)
But we've seen a huge embrace of censorship on our dominant communication platforms (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube).
There was a time when Twitter prided itself on its commitment to free speech. They patted themselves on the back and chuckled as Twitter helped foment revolutions in other countries.
Now its caused a fair bit of political upheaval back in the good ol' USA, and the official line has become "we didn’t fully predict or understand the real-world negative consequences" of "public conversation."
Censorship culture.
This is simplistic to the point of mischaracterization.
I think it isn't.
I think it's dead on.
I think it's just conflicting with your religious beliefs, so you automatically interpret it as "simplistic" and "mischaracterizing" to avoid seriously engaging with legitimate ideas that question your tribal beliefs.
It's very hard, if not impossible, for someone to have a "their own website" that doesn't have someone in the loop that can kick them off: hosting company, domain registrar, ISP, etc. See what happens regularly with piracy sites, for example.
If there were any examples besides Stormfront, that would make more sense.
But it seems like if that were to actually happen, it would make more sense for pushback to be aimed at those providers, rather than it currently being aimed at private social media companies out of a fear of what providers “may” do if people were to set up their own websites (or use one of the many existing ones).
You want an example besides Stormfront, and I did so in my original post: piracy sites.
If you want something a little more morally clear, take a look at what happens with Sci-Hub. They finally actually lost a court order (which led to the suspending of their hosting), but it doesn't always take that. They've been playing "domain whack-a-mole" for a very long time now: https://torrentfreak.com/sci-hub-battles-pirate-bay-esque-do.... And as that article mentions, less-savory sites such as The Pirate Bay get taken down without court orders all the time.
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People need to stop using the word "hate" and start calling people out whenever they use it. "Hate" just means "blasphemy". Once you make this substitution, discussions like this start to make a lot more sense.
Serious question: If people want to post blasphemy, what's preventing them from doing so? [...] I honestly don’t understand why mainstream social media websites should be allowing that sort of thing.
All that is necessary for this analogy to become literal truth is to classify blasphemy (perhaps only against selected religions) as hate speech.
> what is preventing them from doing so on either their own website
Hosting companies that decide what is and isn't acceptable speech just like Twitter and Google are doing right now.