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Comment by grandalf | Hacker News Reader

Why does everyone think censorship is the answer? The idea that "evil" ideas pollute minds is the same reasoning that neocons have for why Islam must be stopped. It's bizarre and farfetched.

Our values of free speech and free expression are far more important than the cringeworthy and extremely stupid things some people choose to say.

Twitter should not ban these accounts, or should it ban ISIS accounts or anything else. Twitter is a platform, not a curation service or thoughtcrime police force.

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Indeed. Turn the spotlight of publicity onto what people, be they good or bad, have to say. Turn a platform into a "safe space" and pretty soon any kind of criticism will be interpreted as harassment. This will deny users a powerful means of making progress. So ultimately it becomes an unsafe space.

Twitter doesn't have to be a neo-Nazi propaganda platform if it deems that unacceptable. They should (and do) have the freedom and liberty to choose who uses their service.

> neo-Nazi propaganda

Can you give me a definition of this that can be consistently applied to all tweets?

The issue is that you can say something is "neo-Nazi propaganda" and it will shut down the discussion and publicly shame the person because the phrase is so powerful.

> because the phrase is so powerful

Less day by day, thanks to the liberals

Evil ideas need to be analyzed and refuted absolutely. Their adherents should write them up in depth and place them on the web so that they can be discussed widely and in depth and, if erroneous, be refuted.

It's hard to see how 140 character snipes, provocations and occasional calls to hostility fall into that category. But maybe.

Is it censorship to remove random stickers from telephone poles? To erase graffiti?

Ask 100 people what is evil and I'm sure you will get similar number of different answers. Is abortion evil? Is religion evil? Is being proud of your history and heritage evil? Is being gay evil? Not everything in life is black and white. In fact, most of things are grey, so it's important to allow both (or even more) sides to express their views, even if somebody else might find it evil. If it goes down to threatening with violence, outright racist slurs etc. we have laws to deal with it.

ok have you ever been in a meeting with a group of people where one person dominates the conversation ?

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