[DanielGee]

> The whole concept of "community standards" for a worldwide communication channel strikes me as newspeak for centralized moral policing.

This is a classic case of the race to the lowest common denominator. When the "community" is so large and diverse and often in opposition to each other, there can be no good standard other than free speech. This is why we had such strange issues of white supremacist content along with gay rights and atheist content being censored. If you censor one group because some people are offended by it what are these tech companies going to do when pressured by china, saudi arabia, israel, europe, etc to ban content they find offensive. They would ultimately have no choice but to simply ban everything that everyone finds offensive or lose market share.

Sadly, I think this is just the beginning of the censorship wars. Tech companies have set precedent the past few years which is going to cause them a lot of problems in the future. Usually the young "liberal" people lead the way in tech but they are usually followed by the much larger religious and conservative groups. The tech companies might agree with the censorship requests of today, but I doubt they'll like the censorship requetss of tomorrow. An organized conservative/religious censorship movement that mimics the recent liberal censorship movement can't be that far off.

[NegativeK]

> what are these tech companies going to do when pressured

Countries that wish to implement legal-based censorship don't care if an internet company has implemented moral-based censorship.

[DanielGee]

Sure they do. If FB stuck to legal-based censorship then they wouldn't need to ban atheist or gay rights content because those content are legal in the US. But if they swing to moral-based censorship, then those countries can appeal to morality ( their own ) and demand FB censor content in the US. Why? Because FB and tech companies have set a precedent.

What defense does FB or tech companies have against people who say they consider atheism or gay rights to be immoral or offensive? None.

What happens when criticizing a religion is considered hate speech? Wouldn't we have to ban atheism? What happens when people say they find content about gay marriage offensive?

Moral-based censorship opens the floodgates to unlimited censorship.