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"We will not ban questionable subreddits," Reddit's then-CEO, Yishan Wong, wrote mere months ago. "You choose what to post. You choose what to read. You choose what kind of subreddit to create."
But in an apparent reversal of that policy, and in an unprecedented effort to clean up its long-suffering image, Reddit has just banned five "questionable subreddits."
The site permanently removed the forums Wednesday afternoon for harassing specific, named individuals, a spokesperson said. Of the five, two were dedicated to fat-shaming, one to transphobia, one to racism and one to harassing members of a progressive video game site.
Unsurprisingly, a vocal contingent of Redditors aren't taking the changes well: "Reddit increases censorship," read one post on r/freespeech, while forums like r/mensrights and r/opieandanthony theorized they would be next.
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Saturday June 13 2015, @05:20PM
Pretty easy for the purpose of my proposal. If you believe in discrimination on the basis of race, gender, etc. you are out. There is zero difference between Al Sharpton and David Duke other than skin color and political power, if you disagree you are probably a bigot. If you believe science is ever 'settled' and thus believe in sending any remaining dissenters off to the camps, you are out. You may of course laugh at the flat earthers[1], you may not believe it acceptable to ban them from public debate. If you believe there is such a thing as 'hate speech' you are right out. If it isn't speech you strongly disagree with, of course you believe in the right to say it, free speech is is about protecting the stuff you do not approve of.
You simply can't set out to build a beacon of tolerance, diversity and free debate and allow those utterly opposed to all of those values to wield authority. You just can't. You must, on the other hand, allow those intolerant bigots to speak if only for the purpose of debate. Rush Limbaugh once said that, someday, when we retake the Universities we should retain one Communist at each so that future generations can see it, speak with it and understand that we weren't exaggerating the evil and the threat it poses.
Sooner or later we are going to have to make the same decision about the country because the exact same problem exists. You can't have a free country while allowing those utterly opposed to freedom and every other core American value to participate. But that is a much thornier problem which can be deferred to another day, companies (for now) are still allowed to hire as they will so long as they don't infringe on the 'protected classes' and political identification is not yet one of them.
[1] Or Chemtrail nuts, Electric Universe folks, AGW fanatics or other critics, etc.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 13 2015, @06:05PM
Oh, so you propose banning bigots. Say that next time so people can understand you. Is your use of a made-up, meaningless term an attempt to avoid the inevitable "You preach tolerance but you're intolerant of my bigotry!" accusations by only being bigoted and intolerant towards the same label / group as the audience you want to attract is ("SJW"s, whatever that means)?