It’s probably temporary until there is some regulatory guidance in place.
Legally speaking you are perfectly right - they can do whatever they want. But morally speaking they can't - if they have put themselves in a position where they are so popular and making so much money that it is in the general public's best interest for them to censor certain scam artists, then they should invest into content moderators. I have no idea how many people they would need to reliably sort through all the content and only block the scams. But it is the price they need to pay for deciding to censor a specific topic. Otherwise the price is being paid by all the researchers, entrepreneurs, publishers, and enthusiast, who have nothing to do with the scam artists.
This issue basically boils down to big corporations (Facebook, Google, Twitter, Mailchimp) being too lazy to do the right thing.
What if there were actual Nigerian princes who truly wanted help with currency exchange and were offering a real mutually beneficial business opportunity? Would you expect Gmail to hire a team to weed out those emails from spam? If they don’t, are they “lazy”?
However, millions of people are searching about blockchain tech and are reading blockchain-related publishers every day. That is why any company which decides to censor them instead of investing resources into moderating the content is being lazy. Those companies' focus should be on their users' trust because without it they would have never achieved their bottom lines.
Depends on whether they’re doing it on the blockchain!
There are no legitimate Nigerian prince emails. There are legitimate coin emails.
Blocking all coin topics like Facebook and ICO emails like MailChimp goes beyond “spam filtering” into big brother territory.
These companies are free to do as they please - and I’m going to boycot and avoid them. There is a line between “we’re helping!” and censorship and Silicon Valley is definitely crossing it.
And yea, I get it, you can’t possibly understand something that doesn’t directly effect you - yet. When something you consider good is censored maybe you’ll get the idea of acceptible precedent? “First they came for <x>” and all.
FWIW, I hate ICO and consider crypto commodities a waste in general; but I know “nudging” when I see it.
If it bothers anyone, they can use one of the many competitors or send the emails themselves.