As SSC says, even if witch hunts are genuinely bad, if you found a town with the founding principle of having no witch hunts, you will end up with a town with 5 genuine civil libertarians, and 100 witches.
I think an interesting strategy would be to found a site with an initially high level of censorship, but a public commitment to reduce the amount/degree of censorship on the site over time with a particular timetable.
So in theory, voat & co should either shrink or get less radical the more reddit-alternatives there are. That is, unless reddit is turning normal people into witches that will then populate the new alternative platforms.
Also if people are spread sufficiently thin, some of the sites will die from “no one is using this”, I think.
I don’t know how this all balances out, but what you brought up does seem like an important force/mechanism to take into account. So, I’ll say “Further work is needed in order to understand the behavior in this area.”, haha.
I was imagining an organization which from the outset planned to be very permissive in what they eventually allowed, with initial restrictions just being in order to cultivate a desirable community to start with, but now that you mention it, perhaps the motivation behind the policies don’t matter so much as the policies themselves. Good point.
That being said, I don’t imagine that TikTok will become quite as permissive in the end as I was imagining?
My preferences determine what communities I prefer to be a part of.
I prefer to not be part of a community where the majority says super racist garbage.
As such, I choose not to join such a community/website.
Banning illegal content, spam, harassment, etc (which even the most hardcore "censorship free" platforms do) are also forms of censorship.
The law gives you a legitimate and stable line that you can draw between allowed and disallowed speech. It's fine for a platform to censor what's illegal, because in a sense, we all agree on the law and have a say in its content. But we have no say in big tech content policy, and that's what makes it illegitimate.
My basic point is that it's infuriating and wrong for big tech to impose its values on the public. A public space that's privately owned is still a public space. A free society is one where you don't get barred from public spaces because of your opinions.
Platforms aren't public venues, they're private businesses offering access to a service under terms that serve their interests and business needs first and foremost... terms that everyone agreed to before being able to use the platform.
>The law gives you a legitimate and stable line that you can draw between allowed and disallowed speech. It's fine for a platform to censor what's illegal, because in a sense, we all agree on the law and have a say in its content. But we have no say in big tech content policy, and that's what makes it illegitimate.
The law also allows for private ownership of businesses, contracts and freedom of association. The law says Google's platform is Google's property and Google can do whatever it darn well likes with it.
>You can shut down spam without harming the principle of free expression because you can express any idea in a way that isn't spam.
Who gets to define what spam is? Free expression isn't free if someone has the ability to define any arbitrary speech they don't like as "spam" and censor it. All of the slippery slope arguments applied to censorship of any other form of speech also apply to spam.
You’re not actually against lines being drawn through legal speech — you just don’t like where they fall.
Do you allow any form of speech in your house or is your house a platform that censors speech?
Counties can imprison or kill you for speaking incorrectly.
Companies? Only have the power to cause me trouble when they are oligopolies, e.g. big tech right now. It can be quite severe trouble, even if it isn’t literal imprisonment.
A house? I am aware that poverty (and being a minor) forces some people to live with abusive persons who can give them a choice of silence or homelessness. That kind of evil doesn’t scale up to affect everyone (perhaps if it did we might try harder to fix it?)
If they deleted the apps already installed on your phone, then I'd agree.
4chan, being the obvious exception, since content can be created anonymously.
Plainly: I want reddit to censor hate speech on their site, but I don't want hosting companies to disallow those alernative sites to exist, nor do I want Chrome to disallow any user to visit any of those alternatives in their browser.
It should be illegal to deny fundamental infrastructure to someone on the basis of his philosophy or point of view. That's what a free society means.
The parent poster simply said that they want to join communities free of (or, mostly free of) hate speech and that being free/mostly free of hate speech is an attractive quality for them.
Not once did they advocate for denying infrastructure or any of the other things your entire comment is based on. In fact, they stated the opposite.
