| Quarantined subreddits are analogous to downweighting a particular Facebook post in the FB algorithm: both are a form of "soft" moderation stopping short of outright censorship. Banning users who vote for Reddit's arbitrarily-defined objectionable content is a bridge even further than mere censorship. Particularly because the users are voting for the content before they know Reddit has defined it as objectionable, by definition, because once Reddit has made that determination, the original post is removed. > There's nothing wrong with Reddit not wanting to facilitate and provide a platform for that sort of content, though. The counterarguments to this have been presented so many times on HN. The most fundamental problem is that there is a motte-and-bailey going on with these defenses of censorship: in theory, Reddit and others are censoring far-right hateful domestic terrorists. In reality, they are also censoring qualified medical professionals from opining on COVID in a manner contrary to the WHO, or people who are not actual climate denialists, but who merely question the precision of particular climate models. Exactly as any defender of free speech would have predicted, these mechanisms are enacted on the pretext of defending against a bogeyman, but are actually used in practice to impose ideological uniformity and suppress legitimate dissent. |