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Comment by lbebber | Hacker News Reader

You are wrong in that it's only a matter of 'unfriend/unfollow/block them' - that is only a solution for people who might get one or two harassers, but there are people who just get bombarded with it - just look at the gamer gate thing to see a prominent example.

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What happens when those harassers report posts in the masses and get people silenced? It's a mess when you try to define whatever you think is not right. I had a friend tell me he tried to post a dream he had on Facebook and Facebook didn't let him post it, something about his dream was deemed hate speech somehow. A dream of all things. Lots of issues with this.

That's harassment. There are laws in place to deal with harassment. The mere presence of speech that is offensive != harassment

Then what about a whitelist? You can limit to hearing just from those you've followed.

How can this not just be blocked / igonored?

Because harassers can just register a new account in 10 seconds (and frequently do).

Then there should be settings for you to not allow communication except from those in your friends circle.

I agree that there are ways around that, but there will always be ways around it. Pretending that filtering speech will make the harassment go away is pretty naive.

You already can make your account private to only your friends on most of these services. I guess giving up the attention isn't worth it for some of these people.

If your suggestion is "people who are the target of persistent harassment should remove themselves from public discussions", that seems at least as contrary to the ideal of free speech as removing the harassers.

I'm not really sure where you got that idea, I never said that.

EDIT: I see what you mean. I think there's a huge difference between temporarily choosing to not engage in public discussions, and being shut out of said discussion.

> just look at the gamer gate thing to see a prominent example.

This comic sums up that situation pretty well: http://imgur.com/aF8eTQf

Yeah, it's for sure just some dirt being thrown when prominent women have been very openly threatened with death and rape. Get real.

The exact same comment popped into my head when I ready that line as well.

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