Who wants to open a free-speech based forum site?
H. L. Mencken quote is applicable here, "The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all."
edit, The one thing I'm finding I really don't like about Voat is that it requires whitelisting Javascript from google domains in order to be able to post.
It is not so much that those views are "disgusting" in metaphorical sense. It is also that they are threat to my freedom and my success in life. Talking about all that as if it would be all just about badly written literature is misleading.
It's dishonest. And they know they're being dishonest.
If you dislike the first amendment, there are plenty of countries you can move to that don't have it.
And no, I live in this country so I think I'll be the change I want to see in the world.
Even many of the "hackers" around here seem to support regulation and censorship.
Freedom of speech != freedom to publish whatever wherever you want
They are entirely within their rights to do this. No doubt. Voat does not have as many (any?) restrictions on the content users can post. The speech is freer on their platform.
I may sound pedantic on this, but I think it's important to fight for freedoms even when they're not enshrined in law. So to grandparent's point, the bigots are often the ones who do so, as a matter of necessity. Now the gun, beer, and cigar aficionados are finding themselves in the same category as Nazis and Klansmen.
It is easy to see one of the unintended consequences of grouping cigar aficionados, home brewers, and gun enthusiasts in with the racists is that they will form common cause to fight back against the "enemy" who are trying to criminalize their hobbies.
>Freedom of speech != freedom to publish whatever wherever you want.
Wherever you want, no... but whatever you want, yes, more or less.
The only rights protecting you and I are the rights that protect the scum that many people currently (and understandably) want to see driven off of social media and out of public discourse. They act as the canaries in the coal mine of personal liberty, and democracy depends on the capacity for the free exchange of ideas, communication and debate.
The bill of rights comes from a belief that certain rights are self-evident and inherent to all people. In the modern mindset, we have a broader definition of "people" than the founding fathers (that is, we include people of all genders and races). Included in those rights is freedom of speech. Human rights don't simply disappear because you're communicating on a corporate-owned platform.
Strip away the privileges, and I wouldn't feel it necessary to impose additional obligations.
In my personal opinion, corporations chartered by a government cannot engage in acts forbidden to that government. If you want to exercise your rights as a natural person, you must be prepared to accept full responsibility for the consequences of your actions. If you want to shield yourself from those consequences through a fictional entity, then follow the rassafrassin' rules.
The US government is forbidden from restricting free speech, and so its corporations should not be engaging in viewpoint-based discrimination on that portion of their private property that they have explicitly opened as a public forum. If you allow the public into your space, you have to respect their rights.
users like go1dfish are a good example, he is known on reddit and voat, but he is an example of someone who was forced off reddit for having the wrong thoughts. We were chased off of digg way before digg4 came out and we went to reddit where people like swartz cared about transparency and no censorship. Then we were chased off the main subs of reddit, then our subs got subverted, then shit started disappearing, and now we are on voat.
Remember that many prominent progressives and socialists are also blacklisted by the bulk of NPR/reddit types. Kucinich is a prime example, Ed Shultz is another; their crime is to tell their followers to think rationally about the situation. This is where people like me, and I guess you, find themselves.
No they aren't.
Just as reddit has toxic content, but hardly anyone goes there, so will Voat have the same characteristics....but at the moment, it's not like that.
reddit was mainly a tech forum when it started, then people started making it more accessible, then more people arrived.
We need something in the US where we have free speech rights.
The alt right popularized particular terms that have racial and misogynistic undertones as insults such as cuck and soy boy.
"As linguist Mark Liberman explained on Language Log, cuck “was extended figuratively on 4chan to reference ‘relinquished manliness’ and more abstractly ‘selling out, abandoning principles.’”"
Before edit, comment was originally: "Cuck is invented by alt-righters"
but i suspect people actually want echo chambers these days where they never have to think about their enemies or political reality ... echo chambers for all
That kind of porn. The freaks and creeps are parasites on free speech, but like parasites, hard to manage. If you open a free speech haven, they’ll be first through the door. I don’t recommmend it. I don’t know what the solution is, but it isn’t too much censorship, and it isn’t too little. I’m afraid that the reality is that as people we need to do the hard work of a balancing act, so any ideology that is too unbalanced is doomed to fail. Absolute freedom is as doomed as absolute tyranny.