| So, I suppose you would describe yourself as being absolutely in favor of unrestricted free speech. Nothing is off-limits. All shall be discussed. Now, what happens when you mix this attitude with a self-moderating system? There will be no moderation at all. Every and any topic is able to be discussed by anyone. The fringe opinions mobilize and are given a powerful soapbox, and so horrible becomes the new normal. You can see this in nearly every thread on reddit dealing with sexism and (especially) race relations. You can't say that the average internet citizen, wandering into any of the sickeningly racist discussions found weekly on r/videos, won't see the hundreds of upvotes on vile opinions without also seeing an illusion of consensus, the normalization of disgusting prejudice. And you can't say that won't have an effect on their thought process next time they interact with a person of colour. That is the price paid for unrestricted discussion of the worst crap people can dedicate themselves to typing on the internet. That was just a particularly salient example. Everywhere else you see normalization of mysogyny, normalization of pedophilia (seriously, nearly any discussion of gymnasts during the olympics was disgusting). All this on a website with tens of millions of users, claiming itself as the front page of the internet. You go on to say reddit has self-examination. Reddit is not a single organism; the self-examination you refer to comprises many disgusted users, yelling at the people spouting crap who carry along regardless. "Self-examination" in this fashion is not a substitute for actual moderation. SRS has started linking to the odd HN comment, by the way. The crux is that tolerating and analyzing horrible opinions only serves to normalize them. There are some ideas that quite simply don't deserve to see a soapbox. You'll probably play the slippery slope card here. I don't care. We have many excellent moral frameworks with which to analyze ideas, and they are more than adequate for sorting out the grey area of what should and should not be allowed. |
Yup.
>Now, what happens when you mix this attitude with a self-moderating system?
/r/AskScience
You can't make horrible opinions less horrible by making them invisible.