Well, I guess the lesson here is that if you happen to hop into a subreddit named /r/coontown you'll probably see what you expect to.
Thing is, the American concept of "freedom of speech" is inclusive of all speech, even the stuff that makes you sick and angry. While I don't condone anything that coontown or the WBC says, I fully and strongly support their liberty to say it.
Allowing the loud freaks to yammer is, ultimately, a canary for all free speech liberties. You start putting a muzzle on the loud, the profane, the hateful, you will start muzzling those less loud, less hateful. And eventually you will muzzle yourself.
A lot of this is at the core of the fatpeoplehate debacle at reddit. You stomp on one group of (relatively tame) assholes, but let the racists and the creeps fapping to dead girls go? Where's the line? The moment you start drawing lines is the moment that you've lost the narrative.
Not to mention, allowing such reprehensible speech allows it to be open to all. Everyone can see for themselves how awful they are. Also, by allowing WBC to exist, we can monitor them as well. We can see the places they plan to picket and plan accordingly. Whereas if they were criminalized, they'd be underground and harder to monitor.
Think about it in the context of /r/fatpeoplehate. They were relatively contained on their own sub. Hardly anyone knew the place existed because no reasonable person would link to it, and anyone that did know about it spoke negatively about it. By being on Reddit's site, they are bound by reddit's rules about brigading and whatnot. Now what happened now that they've been snuffed out? Immediately they flooded other subs since they had no place to call their own; they were angry as well. They moved on to Voat which ISN'T bound by Reddit's rules. If you ask me, they're more of a threat to Reddit now; being able to coordinate invasions, brigades and whatnot without Reddit interfering.
Well, I guess the lesson here is that if you happen to hop into a subreddit named /r/coontown you'll probably see what you expect to.
Thing is, the American concept of "freedom of speech" is inclusive of all speech, even the stuff that makes you sick and angry. While I don't condone anything that coontown or the WBC says, I fully and strongly support their liberty to say it.
Allowing the loud freaks to yammer is, ultimately, a canary for all free speech liberties. You start putting a muzzle on the loud, the profane, the hateful, you will start muzzling those less loud, less hateful. And eventually you will muzzle yourself.
A lot of this is at the core of the fatpeoplehate debacle at reddit. You stomp on one group of (relatively tame) assholes, but let the racists and the creeps fapping to dead girls go? Where's the line? The moment you start drawing lines is the moment that you've lost the narrative.
Not to mention, allowing such reprehensible speech allows it to be open to all. Everyone can see for themselves how awful they are. Also, by allowing WBC to exist, we can monitor them as well. We can see the places they plan to picket and plan accordingly. Whereas if they were criminalized, they'd be underground and harder to monitor.
Think about it in the context of /r/fatpeoplehate. They were relatively contained on their own sub. Hardly anyone knew the place existed because no reasonable person would link to it, and anyone that did know about it spoke negatively about it. By being on Reddit's site, they are bound by reddit's rules about brigading and whatnot. Now what happened now that they've been snuffed out? Immediately they flooded other subs since they had no place to call their own; they were angry as well. They moved on to Voat which ISN'T bound by Reddit's rules. If you ask me, they're more of a threat to Reddit now; being able to coordinate invasions, brigades and whatnot without Reddit interfering.
From what I gather, they're still brigade get reddit from voat.
But I get the point. A contained cyst is better than an active infection.