[georgiapeach]

How would you feel if a government agency or ISP or some other adversary used such technology to censor all your online communications -- so you couldn't ever contact anyone, through any protocol -- because it considered you to be undesirable/objectionable/dangerous for its own reasons?

[seanflyon]

That would be both terrible and dramatically different from what I was talking about. The context here is private websites filtering comments. If you are in a private restaurant expressing some horribly offensive opinion it is appropriate for the owner to ask you to leave. It would not be appropriate for the police to come in and gag you.

[georgiapeach]

There is no difference whatsoever. All your censored communications would be attempted -- and rejected -- through private websites, too.

So how would you feel about it? How would you feel about the oppression you're looking to subject others to, being applied to you?

[seanflyon]

How would I feel if every website on the internet decided that I was so toxic that they banned me? It's hard to say considering that has happened to a total of 0 people ever.

You have the right to free speech, but you do not have the right to be listened to. If you are on private property the owner can ask you to leave. If I wrote a script to send you an obnoxious email every 5 minutes I imagine you would set up a filter so you would not have to read them or even be aware of their existence. You don't have the right to make other people read your (hypothetically) obnoxious comments any more than I have the right to make you read my obnoxious emails.

[georgiapeach]

> It's hard to say considering that has happened to a total of 0 people ever.

It's what you're proposing to do to other people, so you have the ethical burden of considering how you'd feel if it were done to you.

So how would you feel? Would you feel that it were ethical, even if it were somehow legally justified? Would you accept it? Would you consider it a good, just, humane use of technology? Stop evading the question and answer it already.

[seanflyon]

You and I are still talking about very different things. I am not proposing banning people from the internet. I am proposing that private websites should filter out particularly obnoxious hateful and unreasonable comments.

How would I feel if a website removed my profane, unreasonable, and offensive comment? Ashamed. Considering a website has no obligation to display my comment I think it would be ethical (and of course legal) for them to not display horrible comments. I would accept it. I see nothing inhumane or unjust about a website declining to distribute my hate speech.

[georgiapeach]

We are talking about the exact same thing and you keep trying to evade the question.

How would you feel if websites colluded to prevent you from communicating at all, based on what they consider to be undesirable, not based on what you consider to be undesirable? By definition, you're already negatively predisposed to what you consider to be undesirable, so your proposed scenario never comes up. Mine does.

It doesn't need to have anything to do with profanity. It could be something as simple as you being a pro-censorship piece of shit. Or something else. Who knows. It doesn't matter. What matters is them oppressing you the way you'd like to oppress others, based on criteria you don't necessarily agree with, and possibly don't even know. How would you feel about that?

Stop trying to evade the question. If you evade it one more time, I will consider you to have conceded.