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this post was submitted on 12 Dec 2023
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Ghazi
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Obligatory XKCD for the folks who keep citing the 1st Amendment 🙄:
If you want to be a hatful person online or in person, there's nothing stopping you from starting your own little online utopia- VPSs are pretty cheap, after all. You'll quickly find, however, that you probably attract a large number of assholes and, in all likelihood, either find yourself moderating content or shutting down just like every other "free speech" bastion.
Which is fine. I'm a firm believer in free speech. If bigots want to have a place to talk to one another, that's their prerogative and their right. What they don't have is a right to force others to host or listen to their bullshit, which appears to be what they want.
Content-based moderation is neither new nor pernicious, folks. So long as those doing it don't hold a monopoly on the use of force, you remain free to vote with your feet, wallet, eyeballs, and ears.
Telling diet Nazis to go fuck themselves is an appropriate use of power, but any power can be abused. You have an underlying moral right to free expression. That's the reason behind the first amendment. It is not a gift from the state.
What makes Discord's choice okay is freedom of association. Most people don't want to deal with diet Nazis. It is fine for most businesses to exclude diet Nazis, whether or not anyone asked them to.
But nobody would tut 'Discord's not a government' if they'd banned trans-rights advocacy. And that's fine. There's no hypocrisy in it. You understand businesses can do harm, individually and in bulk, through their decisions. Silencing reasonable opinions, expressed politely, is almost always censorship we should fight. There's just nothing reasonable or polite about being a goddamn fascist.
I mean, I'm a trans woman and I would indeed say "Discord's not a government" if they adopted such an asinine policy. I'd also probably be fairly critical of those continuing to use it.
I agree that silencing speech is a bad thing. I'm just not sure that I agree that moderation on any particular site is silencing speech. We're all free to use the sites we like. While I might think your putative policy of banning trans advocacy is imprudent, I would still respect the right of a host to have such a policy (while maintaining my own right to boycott/criticize).
I can't respect that libertarian attitude. It is intolerable for any business to endorse bigotry and prohibit criticism of bigotry - especially a business whose purpose is people talking to one another. How could that be anything but censorship?
Saying so doesn't require outlawing forums run by assholes, for assholes. Your church or bulletin board or whatever can be as racist and sexist as you please. But businesses are openly forbidden from excluding certain groups. Stormfront can say "no Catholics." Walmart plainly can't.