Sunlight is [del]the best[/del] a good disinfectant. The problem is that communities enhance and reinforce the kind of thinking that brings people to that community in the first place. Dylann Roof had whatever nascent hostility reinforced by seeking out and listening to messages that amplified racist hostility and anger.
I’ve got no problem with shutting down a little rascist greenhouse.
Also, for dummies, see the xkcd link above for a description of free speech rights.
Are you speaking of a government ban or individuals and groups to disallow certain speech from their spaces and websites?
Both. I should be able to tell anyone what they cannot say.
Regards,
Shodan
Ahh, so it’s snark for you. Snark away!
I don’t care about Reddit or know much about its culture. “Coontown” sounds like something an edgy 12 year came up with. But on the larger issue of free speech…
This comic is silly and parochial. Free speech is both a legal right in the United States and a concept of liberal civil discourse. If you try to silence people, dox them, get them fired, etc. because their speech offends you then you’re not for free speech.
You claimed right up there in post #6, and I quote, “reddit has announced that the subreddit will be banned and the participants are planning on moving to a website of their own creation.”
As proof, you linked to a quote by one of the Admins who claims that the Board wants to ban /r/coontown but Ellen Pao stopped them. That one Admin is not Reddit and he provides nothing to back up his assertion.
In reality, anyone can google r/coontown and see for themselves that it’s up and running in all it’s nauseating glory.
In short, your reading comprehension is, indeed, most disappointing.
That’s fine, and I’m not trying to silence them, dox them, or get them fired. Saying “you can’t post that and link to that on my website” is none of these, and has nothing to do with free speech.
You don’t understand the principle. I am in favor of free speech. I am just against hate speech.
I am in favor of respect for humanity and its rights. All my positions are based on this. Therefore, anyone who disagrees with any of my positions, by definition, is opposing human rights. That’s hate speech.
Thus, anyone who disagrees with me is engaging in hate speech. QED.
Regards,
Shodan
More lovely, tasty snark. Thank you!
You know, less time spent thinking you’re the next Jonathan Swift, and more time spent reading and understanding and responding substantively to arguments, will really make your contributions to threads shine.
I liked a proposal I read recently. Allow “coontown” and the like to continue, but give them the “Hate” tag. Anyone who posts in them ever would also get a “Hate” tag attached to their username. Free speech continues, but is called out for what it is. If it’s important to you to spew hate, you should own it in other subreddits.
I like this. It brings the disinfecting sunshine element into the equation.
Trying to silence people using legal means and get them fired is speech. There is no “liberal ideal” that there should be no consequences at all based on the content of speech. That’s just some bullshit that people with offensive views trot out.
There was a lawyer disbarred in Louisiana last week for starting a Change.org petition demanding that a judge rule a certain way in a family law case she was handling (and for including a number of falsehoods in the petition.) She argued that her petition was entitled to First Amendment protection, and she was right - but that didn’t help her keep her law license.
[QUOTE=Voltaire]
I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it. I’ll even give you two pages in my next book to bitch about negroes.
[/QUOTE]
(Yes, I know Voltaire didn’t really even say the first part himself.)
Did Reddit ever claim to be a bastion of free speech? Users of Reddit might claim that, but it seems from executives that wasn’t exactly what they claimed.
Reddit CEO: Site Not Supposed to Be a “Bastion of Free Speech”
Former Reddit CEO: You’re All Screwed
It seems the creators gave the users some freedom, and the users took that ball and ran with it much further than the creators hoped or anticipated.
And like others have said, free speech is legal but it doesn’t mean that others should have to allow it in their businesses. In my hypothetical coffee shop, I could kick out a table of white supremacists loudly talking about how the black race is inferior, even if they aren’t actively harassing anyone at the moment. Reddit can do the same.
Also, it makes sense for Reddit to try to clean up things as they are trying to become profitable. I can imagine it’s a hard line to walk.
Now if Reddit kicks Coontown and other racist subreddits out, and they travel to a new website, I don’t think that people should try to get newCoontown shuttered. If they find a website and host company that’s happy to have them, then that’s fine. Still not great, since like Hentor the Barbarian, those communities can reinforce thoughts and speech amongst themselves and stoke hatred, but I’m wary of actively going out and shutting down speech.
My real name is XT. 
I read that article too. While I like the idea since it makes business sense, I did find it funny that while so many people these days are up in arms about “shaming” and “bullying” - that is effectively what this is. It’s just a matter of justifying it.
Reddit as a private corporation can do whatever they want and are completely in the right to do so, but they may need to modify their values as they go. I think if they want to remain as a complete supporter of free speech, they should leave anything legal open. You simply can’t have it both ways which is why the government tries to uphold free speech and has to let hate speech fly.
I don’t like the contents of the subreddit, so I don’t go there. I don’t know what they say or do there because I don’t go. Let them live in their sad bubble by themselves.
I like this idea in theory, but as mentioned earlier, many redditors use throwaway accounts when posting on r/coontown. So any tag applied to those accounts wouldn’t show up if they used a different account in other subreddits.
Unless reddit was able to tie together accounts somehow, so the tag would be applied to all accounts held by the same user? Of course, a moment’s thought brings up about sixteen ways to circumvent that.
Seems like a good idea, but probably not workable in practice.
Well it’s a matter of first-they-came-for-the-Socialists… Coontown (and all the rest) means nothing to me, but Reddit as a whole only means something to the extend that its a champion of free speech. If they start to censure the lustre dissapears and me with it.
I don’t see what this has to do with free speech – no one’s rights to speak freely are affected. “Don’t post this message on my property” restricts no one’s free speech.
It’s their website, they can do whatever they want.
My preference would be for them to allow these idiots to keep demonstrating the problems that still exist ina very public forum, but I can definitely understand the desire to give them the boot.
I haven’t read the forum so I have no idea if it would violate the posting rules here at SDMB, but I assume they would. Would you prefer that a separate forum be set up here on the SDMB for the same reason?