Comment by bad_user

There is empirical evidence from the multiple natural experiments that happened on subreddits at the start of Reddit.

I personally had to come up with arguments to justifiably censor people to stop the sub I became a part of, from becoming more of a chess pool.

I was a card carrying member of the market place of ideas/ free speech camp till 12-13 years ago, at which point it was clearer to me that giving free speech to certain groups was the same as allowing prions to proliferate in the food chain.

Which is why stronger moderation was required to reverse the descent into madness - it worked.

The people who were hateful bigots were ejected and made their own forums, where they promised never to ban dissenting voices.

Sure enough, they too started banning voices because

1) they weren’t there for free speech in the first place, just for indoctrination.

2) free speech meant that They became petri dishes for even more extreme material and eventually had to be banned or risk getting the entire forum/subreddit removed.

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I’d love alternate interpretations for it, if possible, but the experience from these multiple natural experiments show that letting malicious Machiavellian actors on your platform will result in the abuse of normal users and the tolerance of the system.