[javajosh]

You have misused a slippery slope argument to turn the other position into a strawman. There are risks to this FB ban, but silencing outcry about the ban is not one of them.

In practice, the distinction between banning a subject and banning a conversation about a subject ban, is easy to make. For example, Germany bans racist speech, but does not ban speech about whether racist speech ban should continue (and this particular debate is definitely alive and well in Germany). Even in the US we've banned certain words from broadcast TV for many years, but this never limited people from discussing whether the ban should continue!

[coldtea]

>In practice, the distinction between banning a subject and banning a conversation about a subject ban, is easy to make

And equally easy to abuse, something which has happened time and again:

Complain about the "ban of X"? Discussion shut down as supporting X.

[BurningFrog]

Germany and the US are constitutional republics with independent judiciaries who adjudicates these things.

At FB, Twitter, Snapchat etc, whoever happens to work in the subject banning division arbitrarily makes these decisions, unless overridden by top management.

[vsl]

> In practice, the distinction between banning a subject and banning a conversation about a subject ban, is easy to make

Apparently not for Facebook’s moderators/censors workforce. Just they other day: https://mobile.twitter.com/OzraeliAvi/status/111040092879067... The day before that they banned a local satirical comics and this keeps popping up regularly.