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  • hallucigenia
    +5

    Stormfront style factoids

    I think those should be challenged, not banned.

    And 'free speech' is not an argument for bigotry.

    That sounds like a weird thing to say. Free speech is....free. It can be bigotry, it can be anything.

    • TheGuyThatsMeh
      +7

      Yes, free speech protects your right to say offensive and otherwise hurtful things. However, that dosn't mean that it should be encouraged in this type of platform. Whether you are conservative or liberal, man or woman, we should all try our best to keep a friendly community. I am not saying to ban hurtful speech but it should not be encouraged.

    • DastardlyVandal
      +1

      Stormfront style factoids

      I think those should be challenged, not banned.

      I'm going to raise the point that challenging their stance leads nowhere, citing personal experience. When it comes to the Stormfront "facts" they cite, in many cases they're ignoring huge swaths of the sources they cite, because it has a relevant statistic to their point, but disregard the entire premise of the paper as "excuse making." The stretch they go to present a fake group bias on the issue as well as in general spreading disinformation leads to toxicity when left unchecked. The downvoting system at Reddit wasn't able to handle the surge of Stormfront users, resulting in a large swath of Reddit looking racist. In reality, it was just a very vocal minority spurred on by the new users who thought that was the norm. They got exactly what they wanted, a fake group bias and a few misinformed facts leading people on the road to sharing that same Stormfront dribble elsewhere. It's toxic, unintelligent, and overall a blight that needs to be taken care of instead of allowing it to fester.

      I understand your point on the basis of principle, but in practice it leads things open for growing a toxic and misinformed community, that takes people giving up on replying as a sign of victory versus someone being tired of wasting their time arguing with a brick wall.

      You honestly end up having to treat it like trolling to make it go away, by ignoring and downvoting it instead of challenging it. It's a lot harder for them to spread misinformation when the community can silently disregard them all together.

      That's at least my feeling on it.