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by threeseed 1945 days ago
Everyone says this.

Until they have to deal with the realities of what true free speech means: child pornography, child exploitation, rape, ultra violence, terrorism, organised crime, drug dealing, doxxing innocent people etc.

My Reddit account is 13 years old so I've seen personally seen communities of all of the above grow and flourish and the true levels of depravity that humans can reach. Ultimately it got to the point where Reddit simply couldn't take it.

But hey good luck. I do love the fact that you're using Github to host this.
2 comments
almost_usual 1945 days ago
If this is true then the US will be guaranteed to fall to China as a superpower. They have perfected censorship while we have floundered and ambiguously identified things worth censoring or not.

Freedom of speech is the only thing making the US remotely competitive at this point.

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bilbo0s 1945 days ago
child pornography, child exploitation, rape, ultra violence

Sometimes people get into a position where they have to defend the indefensible, and in the process end up rhetorically fighting a rear-guard action against the truth. There was the question of a particularly horrific death video of a 7 year old girl being disemboweled (among other things) a while back. Instead of simply conceding that there is some filth that has no place in civilized societies, these absolutists stubbornly stuck to their talking points. This makes all of us look bad. People start looking at all free speech advocates as being this same level of unreasonable.

I always try go out of my way to separate my ideas of privacy protection, anti-surveillance, and free speech from those of these absolutists. I do not believe little girls should be able to be publicly raped and disemboweled, even virtually and digitally created, simply because there exists a market of sickos for it. But I do believe that unpopular opinions should be countenanced and the right to express unpopular opinions should be supported.

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goldcd 1945 days ago
It's a reasonable point, but if I can be a little bit "whataboutist"

If you're against entirely fictional depictions of child abuse, then how do you feel about other fictional depictions of a crime? (That's a lot of films and books to ban). Or pictures of actual real crimes? Would you remove photos of Auschwitz from text books? Or from a far right meme?

Not saying I have any better answers, just I get slightly niggles when others think they've solved the issue, by everybody else agreeing with them.

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