You can apply that argument to any kind of moderation. The core problem is not that hate speech is censored, the problem is about who is responsible for applying the rules and how these people are selected.
Hacker News is also censored and moderated, but it is my impression that the mods are quite carefully selected. On Reddit, the mods are anonymous and external, and are elected in an opaque process which I don't have a good understanding of. I fear that you end up with the catch 22 also seen in homeowner's associations: The people who have the time and dedication to rise to the top in these kinds of organizations are exactly the people you don't want to be in charge.
I think it should be censored because A. I think it’s important to protect victims of hate. and B. I believe allowing hate speech leads to hateful groups recruiting more members and gradually gaining power.
Who decides what hate speech is? The goverment… the same way they decide every other law.
Complaining about slippery slopes is fairly absurd. If we used similar logic we wouldn’t prosecute murder because of the slippery slope that would lead to locking everybody up.
I live in Canada… where unlike the US (but like many other countries), there are strong rules against hate speech, yet we haven’t descended into fascism nearly as much as the US has.
Hatred towards specific groups of people based on race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, disability and gender should not be allowed in a civilized society. The value and and very existence of those groups of people is not up for debate.
Being banned is in and of itself only a signal of strong disagreement with those holding the banning power.
Often those holding bumming power will ban for being an arsehole but they can also ban for many other things.
For instance, I don't necessarily think not wanting to allow people with male levels of testosterone to compete in female sports is arseholishness, but reasonable people can disagree here and a moderator might ban for it.
Oh for sure, a 1-off ban in a single community doesn't mean much, but if you find yourself being banned from multiple communities because of the things you're saying, it's probably worth taking a moment of introspection to really assess whether you're in the right or not.
I also don't think that particular example is arseholeish but it sure is tedious to hear folks with no interest in sports who suddenly have an opinion on who can compete. If you want to engage in the subject matter go speak to folks at your local athletics or sports club.
> but it sure is tedious to hear folks with no interest in sports who suddenly have an opinion on who can compete
Clearly they do have an interest in sports - on the topic of fairness for female athletes at the very least - if they have formed an opinion on this topic.
Most folks talking about the issue only care about it in as much as it provides them with an opportunity to bash trans athletes.
It’s a complex topic and you’d do well to talk to folks who are actually affected by it.
I competed in the Southern Athletics league last summer and train with my local athletics club, I’m yet to even see a single trans athlete take part, let alone compete.
That's like claiming that most people talking about the subjugation of women and girls in Iran are only doing so as an opportunity to bash Islam. Even if this unevidenced claim was true, women are still being treated appallingly, regardless of anyone's motivations for raising the issue.
For your information, I have talked to women adversely affected by male athletes competing in their leagues. The issue is not particularly complex to understand, most people can easily see the inherent unfairness in this.
It usually is. Reddit in particular banned a whole swathe of women-focused communities, and users who commented in them, where women were advocating for their rights regarding female-only spaces.
Outside of social media, there is a significant amount of institutional censorship on this topic, favoring male privilege over women's rights.
Which banned communities are you referring to? I can't recall any ban wave targeting anything other than content most would consider to be hateful or bullying.
Ah so when you say "women-focused" community what you meant to say was "anti-trans" communities.
Those aren't communities I ever looked into but I can imagine the sort of content that got posted there, see my comment above about hateful or bullying content.
Why do I have to be DMCA compliant when reaching a US audience?
Because they want to ensure to be available and reach users there. There is no inherent need, but not playing by the rules may result in being banned from participating in countries. Sometimes that's accepted (your Saudi Arabia example), sometimes ensured via separate services or other tricks (e.g. Chinese markets).
There are vast differences as to what constitutes "hate speech". But even if the moderation here was the same as on Reddit it wouldn't necessarily mean that you can't criticise such moderation here.
Government (in my country we use a parliamentary system where laws get proposed/changed/...), courts.
For example in my country it is not legal to agitate to overthrow the political system, to form a new Nazi party, to use Nazi symbols as a political party, to organize a storm of the parliament, etc.
There are also strict laws to protect the privacy of people, incl. persons who are suspects of crimes. It's for example not allowed, without court order, to openly publish personal data (fotos, fullnames) of suspects and to search for those. Even the police can't do that without permission.
Yet so-called "hate speech" moderation on sites like Reddit tends to be a lot stricter than the law, often going as far as removing facts that might offend some group.
I meant it more in the sense that (in this case) the RNC weren't proposing that the solution for this is for google to do zero filtering. They're still accepting that spam filtering is important, they just want the rules changed in their favour.
