Real profanity and disease on the internet is untouched while you police decorum
davidsimon.com
davidsimon.com
Look no further than Gab, a no-censorship right wing Twitter alternative that is now in crisis due to fights between users and corporate leadership over a mix of death threats and - you guessed it - decorum.
Without strict rules and strong moderation, most online communities devolve into a cesspool of trolls, sock puppets, spam, shills and ignorance.
The noise swamps the signal.
Twitter has come a long way in the last year by clarifying the rules, enforcing the rules, and suppressing the troublemakers that turned Twitter into a cesspool.
Twitter's signal-to-noise ratio has improved quite a lot recently.
Gab claimed to be the alt-Twitter for those banned from Twitter. But without strict rules and strong moderation, it's no surprise that Gab has become a stinking pit.
The Constitution and general body of law doesn't really address interactions on privately owned forums. It doesn't even really cover publicly (shareholder) owned forums, either, because they are, in effect, private as well.
Government-owned/controlled forums are a different matter entirely and they can't be censored in the same way.
Any online site has the right to say: this far and no further. How simple is that? State what you're not going to allow, admit that some things are judgement calls and call it done and dusted.
I will fight for your right to say any damn stupid thing you want (barring yelling fire in a theater), just don't try it in the middle of my f---ing living room.
When it comes to privately owned forums, they may have absolute control over what is acceptable to say, but those who disagree with their policies are perfectly justified in criticizing them for violating the principle of free speech.
But it isn't even as black and white as you say from a legal standpoint. There is precedent (Marsh v. Alabama) for the owners of a publicly-used, privately-owned space to have their rights limited in order to protect the constitutional rights of persons using the space. The same principle could apply to sites as large as Facebook, Twitter, or Reddit.
Sure there’s an emotional side of it, but following a set of rules doesn’t prevent from expressing one’s opinion to a satisfactory point.
Hyperbolically decrying minor things as atrocities has led to rules of decorum that assume no atrocities actually occur, and any heated argument is automatically bad.
> But the hyperbolic and comic hope that a just god might smite the slanderer or brutalizer with a deadly skin disorder is somehow beyond the pale.
Words are plenty, there would be no shortage of them to express the author’s point within relying on deadly skin disorders. Nobody [edit: here at least] is denying atrocities, the point is to adjust communication to the medium used.
"Section 208(a) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) confirms that any individual who is physically present in the United States or who arrives in the United States at a port of entry or otherwise may apply for asylum, irrespective of the person’s immigration status"
https://www.humanrightsfirst.org/sites/default/files/hrf-cro...
> "mothers who have their children kidnapped and held
> incommunicado from them at the American border are criminals
> - and both mother and child deserve that fate"
Not that I'm very enthusiastic about his main point. There are ways to communicate scorn that don't involve death wishes.
But I should point out that I don't really know how twitter works and have a very hard time following conversation there. Maybe something different went down.