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I think everyone is freaking out about the headline unnecessarily here. From the first paragraph:

has started to implement a new policy to ban content that glorifies and incites violence, and among the first to go were forums for Nazi, racist and white supremacist groups.

They aren't banning Nazis because they are Nazis. They are banning Nazis that glorify or incite violence. And anyone else that glorifies or incites violence. A quick look at /r/blacklivesmatter shows no posts of that nature, but I'm willing to be corrected.

There are circumstances where violence is the only answer. Look at the Arab Spring. In hindsight, Egypt did not fix the fundamental social issues that led to their revolution, but they were faced with a tyrant dictator butchering people in the streets in 2011.

Almost all modern democracies came about through violent disposition of monarchies or dictators, and we only consider those good revolutions vs Nazi revolution or communist revolution being bad because, usually, people only want violence done to prevent violence in the future by the aforementioned murderers on the throne. IE, defend yourself or your neighbor and you are in the right, but if you overthrow the mob just to create your own mafia you are in the wrong.

Look at Catalonia now. Take away political ideology and ask the question - if a majority of Catalonians want independence (and that is a big if), and the Spanish government brings troops to bear upon them, is it immoral of them to organize their own army to fight back? That is inciting violence, but it is in the exact same capacity as revolutions for centuries were organized to overthrow regimes deemed undemocratic or unrepresentative of a people.

Not to say all revolutions are good. The American Confederacy was abjectly bad because their motivation for secession was to continue to own human beings as property. Or how Caesar overthrew the Roman Senate to become a tyrant himself. But unless you categorize the American, French, Spanish, etc revolutions of their times as all being "bad" because they were "inciting violence" then it is not a black and white issue where you can just say "we ban the inciting of violence because were being moral" and wipe your hands clean of it. Its way more complicated than that.

A huge portion of the banned subreddits were zoophilia related too. This was just general housecleaning.

Black Lives Matter is very specifically an anti-violence organization. The Root has an article debunking the idea they're somehow comparable: http://www.theroot.com/for-white-people-who-compare-black-li...

Nevertheless, the end of the day, privately owned websites on the Internet are not "free speech zones". Each site sets their own rules. There are numerous sites out there where Nazis are welcome (Voat, Gab, the various chans), all available completely free and readily accessible to the public.

When they want to discredit BLM, pundits (e.g. Hannity) just show the video from a few years ago where there are black people chanting, "pigs in a blanket, fry'em like bacon" while marching. They play it over and over again and claim these people are all violent. Yes, it's illogical, no, they won't stop.

It really doesn't matter what your group does, it matters how the public views your group.

If your group is actually violent or not doesn't matter at all.

I think for the intents and purposes of the dicussion, when mentioning BLM it can be safely assumed people usually refer to the violent part fo the group and not the non-violent, peaceful/pacifist part of the group.

>The problem is: where will the line be drawn?

Intolerance, you draw the line at Intolerance. If BLM, PETA, Antifa want people of other race/class/sexual orientation harmed in any kind of way, sure go ahead and ban them. If on the other hand they want fair treatment, equality or reprieve from targeted brutality, listen to them and see how we as a society can address their concern. If they resort to violence, arrest them and treat them like you would treat a criminal.

It is not really that hard. Right to free speech does not really mean right to say anything anywhere without any consequence.

The irony in this whole thing is, the more tolerant you are to an inherently intolerant ideology like white-spremacy, the less tolerant we become as a society.

> Intolerance, you draw the line at Intolerance.

That doesn't work. There are lots of people who are extremely intolerant to people who hold views that weren't very controversial a decade or two ago and are still widely held today; case in point, Brendan Eich (and the intolerant campaign that got him fired). "Unacceptable intolerance" is something that can have very different definitions from one person to the next, so it's not a useful test.

> It is not really that hard.

Drawing the line about what the limits of free expression are in an open society is a very hard problem. Saying it isn't is flippant and frankly wrong.

> The irony in this whole thing is, the more tolerant you are to an inherently intolerant ideology like white-supremacy, the less tolerant we become as a society.

That isn't true either, it can also show societal confidence that ideas like white-supremacy are wrong and that the light of scrutiny will make them look foolish.

I don't want to argue about this on HN, because I don't think this is the right forum. You can argue all you want about how X was discriminated for having Y opinion and how it was not alright. I may agree with you on some instances, however, under no circumstance is is alright to:

1) Own another person 2) Discriminate based on something that people have no control over. Like race, sexual orientation, Gender etc. 3) Exploit somebody's helplessness for your profit.

No matter what age you grew up in, modern society has no place for such ideas. There may be other things that are debatable or in the gray area, but Nazi ideology isn't one of them.

If you don't want to talk about anything that's fine. However, this discussion is about speech about those ideas, not their actual implementation. You don't really seem to be distinguishing between the two.

> Intolerance, you draw the line at Intolerance.

Not that simple! "Intolerance: unwillingness to accept views, beliefs, or behaviour that differ from one's own".

Does unwillingness to accept Nazi ideology make you intolerant?

>Does unwillingness to accept Nazi ideology make you intolerant?

Yes, Intolerant to intolerance.

Yes, it does.

Why are your morals the ones that deserve free speech?

Because wanting to own other humans, killing people because of their race, gender or sexual orientation are not morals.

moral: adjective - Concerned with the principles of right and wrong behavior and the goodness or badness of human character.

noun - a person's standards of behavior or beliefs concerning what is and is not acceptable for them to do.

Actually, those are morals.

There are cultures and religions around the world that live life differently from you. They believe there should be strong gender norms, have strict codes of conduct for how to live their lives, and expect and enforce those standards on everyone in the community. Do you think they should be silenced?

When those groups draw enough ire to affect ad revenue, they will be banned. There are no philosophical debates in the boardrooms of corporations, so let's stop pretending like these moves represent some kind of moral stance.

> where will the line be drawn?

It's a difficult question. As much as I'm for free speech and against censorship, I still have the feeling that a line has to be drawn somewhere. For instance, we can't reasonably authorize Isis propaganda on public forums, can we?

Actually, now that I'm thinking about it, I suppose that calls to violence are already forbidden. I'm not familiar with US free speech laws, but I remember that Martin Shkreli has been jailed over some stupid joke on twitter.

> For instance, we can't reasonably authorize Isis propaganda on public forums, can we?

I think we totally can and should. We just need to invest in the infrastructure to identify and respond to it.

> After all, they're vile and in my opinion don't deserve any place on the world except the inside of a jail cell...

Whoa, whoa, stop right there. Who's going to jail? These Nazis are kicked off Reddit, not into some jail cell. Nobody's going to jail, unless they actually punch somebody or something.

(Are there people who calls for throwing all Nazis to jail? Well, of course there are, and that's nothing new. There are even people who want to throw all $(choose your ethnic group) out of America, or so I've heard.)

The slippery slope is not that slippery, after all.

Can you go into some more detail on how BLM "advocates, tolerates, or embraces" violence?

I'm talking about stuff like this here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_shooting_of_Dallas_police...

While I do not see this as being "symptomatic" or representative for BLM, by far not everyone does so, and therein lies the danger in my opinion. People from the right wing, but also so-called "centrists", both already are using this as an excuse to denounce BLM in general...