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by stale2002 3314 days ago
Popular speech doesn't need to be protected. It is never in any danger of being censored, almost by definition.

The only purpose of freedom of speech and thought is to protect unpopular, evil, and straight up false speech.

That's fine if you use your platform to exclude those that you don't like.

But we aren't talking about that. We are talking about platforms that explicitly ALLOW this shitposting, and yet other people who don't own the platform are trying to stop it.

Sure, fine, businesses can do whatever they want with their own platform. So how about we allow that? Those that want to censor can censor, and those that don't can not do so.

And it turns out that there seems to be a huge demand for a platform that doesn't censor and allows people to post anonymously. (yik yak only died because it went away from what made it good).

So how about those procensorship people just leave it be and let those of us who disagree with them go to our own platform?

2 comments

> The only purpose of freedom of speech and thought is to protect unpopular, evil, and straight up false speech.

This is patently false. Did you even read the paragraph I quoted? I'm not sure if I even need to get into details here. There are hundreds of historical examples where non-hateful, and non-evil speech was censored. But you're being incredibly disingenuous by lumping in "unpopular" with "evil" -- the two are not even remotely the same.

You're trying to put an equal sign between, e.g., Communism (unpopular) and an anonymous post doxxing a rape victim on social media (evil). Give me a break.

> So how about those procensorship people just leave it be and let those of us who disagree with them go to our own platform?

hypothetical: I've just told all your neighbors that you've got a criminal conviction for raping 8 year old children. It's just words, what's the harm?

Anonymously on the internet? Sure, whatever.

If we live in a culture where people understand the concept of "people on the internet could be lying", especially with regards to specific, highly serious, allegations against specific people, then someone posting something like that about me wouldn't be a big deal, because nobody would believe them.

There certainly could be "harm", but I'd argue that on average, the harm would have a very low chance of mattering, and I'd rather live in an open society.

The more people are able to talk, the more they are able to get to the actual truth of the matter.

> If we live in a culture where people understand the concept of "people on the internet could be lying", especially with regards to specific, highly serious, allegations against specific people, then someone posting something like that about me wouldn't be a big deal, because nobody would believe them.

We don't live in that culture. We live in a culture where paediatricians are attacked because a group of people was too fucking stupid to know the difference between paediatrician and paedophile.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2000/aug/30/childprotection.s...