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posted by n1 on Wednesday June 07 2017, @09:04AM   Printer-friendly
from the anything-you-say-will-be-used-against-you dept.

The Facebook messaging group was at one point titled "Harvard memes for horny bourgeois teens."

It began when about 100 members of Harvard College's incoming freshman class contacted each other through the university's official Class of 2021 Facebook group. They created a messaging group where students could share memes about popular culture — a growing trend on the Internet among students at elite colleges.

But then, the exchanges took a dark turn, according to an article published in the Harvard Crimson on Sunday. Some of the group's members decided to form an offshoot group in which students could share obscene, "R-rated" memes, a student told the Crimson. The founders of the messaging group demanded that students post provocative memes in the main group chat to gain admittance to the smaller group.

The students in the spinoff group exchanged memes and images "mocking sexual assault, the Holocaust and the deaths of children," sometimes directing jokes at specific ethnic or racial groups, the Crimson reported. One message "called the hypothetical hanging of a Mexican child 'piñata time'" while other messages quipped that "abusing children was sexually arousing," according to images of the chat described by the Crimson.

Then, university officials caught on. And in mid-April, after administrators discovered the offensive, racially charged meme exchanges, at least 10 incoming students who participated in the chat received letters informing them that their offers of admission had been revoked.

-- submitted from IRC


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  • (Score: 2, Disagree) by sjames on Wednesday June 07 2017, @09:01PM (2 children)

    by sjames (2882) on Wednesday June 07 2017, @09:01PM (#522214) Journal

    Nobody has made any attempt whatsoever to prevent those ex-students from speaking nor to keep others from listening/rteading it.

    I suppose you also think it's an attack of free speech if you claim in an oral exam that Colombo discovered America in 1972 and you get an F?

    Free speech can be a two edged sword. If you reveal through your speech that you're a backwards asshole, people may not want to be associated with you.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 07 2017, @11:47PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 07 2017, @11:47PM (#522318)

    Nobody has made any attempt whatsoever to prevent those ex-students from speaking nor to keep others from listening/rteading it.

    Punishing someone for their speech by withdrawing acceptances is not an attempt to discourage such speech? You don't think this sort of thing could have an effect on what others decide to speak/joke about?

    Are you willing to defend this kind of thing no matter what? Logically, what you said should apply to *any* type of speech, not just speech deemed offensive or vile. What if they withdrew acceptances for people who criticized Trump, said they did not believe in god, etc.? Would you still be using such an argument? Even if you would still use the same argument, you'd just be shortsighted; in a society where you can be (and frequently are) fired from your job or kicked out of/not accepted into colleges or universities simply because you said something deemed offensive elsewhere, that will have a chilling effect on certain types of speech. As long as it's not the type of speech you like being discriminated again, maybe you'd be fine with it, but you would be an authoritarian.

    I suppose you also think it's an attack of free speech if you claim in an oral exam that Colombo discovered America in 1972 and you get an F?

    Giving someone an F is not the same as withdrawing acceptances. Grading speech is fine, but punishing people for speech that is merely offensive or vile is not.

    • (Score: 2) by sjames on Thursday June 08 2017, @05:34PM

      by sjames (2882) on Thursday June 08 2017, @05:34PM (#522694) Journal

      What if they withdrew acceptances for people who criticized Trump, said they did not believe in god, etc.?

      I wouldn't characterize that as repression of free speech. I would call it discriminatory and wrong.

      Would you insist that the Catholic church not pass someone over for Pope just because he said "There is no God, it's a bunch of fairy tales"?

      Do you consider it repression of free speech when someone says "I robbed that bank last week" and he ends up on trial for bank robbery? I'd love to see you argue that one in court!