Because painful truth can be interpreted in hateful/racist/sexist way when it may not be anything like it in the first place.
Do you want facts and truths be covered because they oppose your agenda?
Do you want your women in your family to end up like those in Cologne because you dont want to offend someone?
Do you want your road blocked by BLM because you dont want to offend someone?
Do you want to experience racism as a white because you dont want to offend someone?
Do you?
A long while back, when the telephone industry started booming, AT&T had cornered the market on telephone lines and monopolized the game. They were able to limit who could and couldn't get lines and what could be said on those lines. The government stepped in and said that because this technology is so imperative to most peoples daily function and the lack of alternatives people could find for communication that they should make it illegal for those private companies to deny service or limit people's speech on their service in addition to breaking up AT&T's stronghold and effectively destroying 70% of their company value.
Now today a lot of people will paint broad strokes to say that there are hundreds of social media outlets to choose from and use and those people who use speech that hurt others feelings should use platforms where their speech is more tolerated instead. I believe that certain sites have become too powerful in their own right as ways to communicate and facilitate people's daily lives. Facebook has the market absolutely cornered on public profiles and information sharing between friends and twitter has cornered the social media market on its special take on mass communication.
I'd assume the thing to do in this situation is to declare them as monopolies on their various communication types and break them up as per monopoly laws or to have the government step in to regulate their ability to censor, limit, and hinder people's speech and prevent these platforms from denying service to people.
It is pretty obvious that are tons of upsides to Social Media censorship:
1. Helps To Prevent Conflict
By censoring things that may offend or anger entire groups of people, like other countries or religious groups, the amount of conflict that the country is under can be greatly reduced. Censoring hate helps to promote peace.
2. Security Measure For The Country
Sensitive military and government information can be removed from view. This is good because potential terrorists and people that wish to do harm to the country will not have access to information that would give them the intelligence that they need to do it.
3. Prevents Plagiarism
Plagiarism and pirating of content is a serious issue in the world today, largely due to the internet. By censoring certain things, you can effectively prevent plagiarism from happening and other people profiting off of work or content that is not their.
4. Avoid Children Being Exposed
There is a wealth pornographic and violent material that can be accessed with ease, even by young children. This exposure is dangerous for kids because it desensitizes them and makes them curious about things that they should not even know about. It can also deeply confuse and psychologically damage the mind of a young child.
5. False Advertisements Can Be Stopped
Companies that make extreme claims for their product, in order to entice people to buy them, can be stopped with censorship. This is a big problem in marketing and business today because people buy things under false pretenses. It also helps to protect the legal health of businesses.
6. Helps To Control Panic and Fear
When political, environment, world, or economic disasters occur, the government can help to stop the spread of rumors and lies. This is also true for political propaganda that is often spread through the use of the internet. People begin to panic and believe everything that they see, by controlling the information that is out, they can help to prevent riots and other problems from happening.
So yes, hate speech and misrepresentation should be censored because there are too many who don't know better than to believe everything they read on the internet.
I don't believe social media should be censored. But at the same time, twitter, facebook, whatever are free to police their sites however they please. I don't have to use them.
Gaming & Tech related discussion with occasional poo flinging!
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNS...PDOAsdXS7I029g
https://twitter.com/Aztech_Zero
By your logic, sausage makers can put rat shit in their product: people don't have to use theirs! But a law has a different perspective on it...
no.
fuck the privatisation rules. by suppressing speech you are just allowing the discussion to take place elsewhere, companies need to realise they arent going to shutdown racists or hate speech by simply closing threads or banning accounts. Perhaps they are forced to because some whiny baby complained? it doesn't matter the conversation will continue somewhere else. its better to let things get discussed so people can draw a conclusion instead of simply closing it when something becomes offensive.
I am fine with two options:
Either limit free speech to avoid people talking out of their ass and spilling blatant misinformation (which is actually dangerous)
Or allow absolute free speech...HOWEVER ,in this case, the so called "defenders of free speech" who use freedom of speech to talk out of their ass should not be offended when we call their BS talk. Freedom of speech goes both ways and I know that way too many whiners about censorship actually want freedom of speech only for their own viewpoint and not others. Yeah guys that is not going to happen
That's not actually a slippery slope. There is no slope. Corporations have zero obligation to allow any and all speech they do not want to allow.
You wouldn't want companies to have that obligation either, by the way.
ONLY your government has an obligation to upholding your right to speech.
There is no in-between or argument- social media platforms are not public domain or government.
Sure there is. The obvious in-between position is that while no company or private individual should be legally required to uphold free speech values, free speech is an important value and people should promote it in all cases that they don't have a strongly compelling reason to do otherwise. That seems like a simple enough in-between.
This is really the best point - some people think based Katie was a white supremacist spewing racial hatred. Who is to decide? If you disagree with a certain group (BLM) you could be deemed a racist and then banned. If you disagree with feminism some people actually think you're a misogynist (sexism). Remember this is the side of the spectrum that has produced "words are violence", so we're not dealing with reasonable people. And because of that, even on an abstract disagreement you could be deemed hateful.
Last edited by Kraenen; 2016-08-22 at 12:08 PM.
So do you mean that there's no in-between position to be had on the law then? Even there, there are shades of grey (exact positions on slander, for example). As a matter of values, there's certainly more than one possible position and just saying "the government shouldn't prosecute anyone, but everyone should do whatever they want" is pretty hollowed out as a moral position.
Personally the only speech that should be actionable by moderation staff on social media, in general, would be that which exhorts or promotes violence against other people - whether based on race, gender, sexual preference, or really for any reason at all. Speech that offends or emotionally harms others can be handled organically or internally by the systems already in place, as those users can be squelched, downvoted, lose their followers, etc. etc. as a result of their words or actions. Extreme reactions are usually the wrong path for a given problem - and neither zero moderation nor moderation acting as a moral straight-jacket is really the best approach.
"We're more of the love, blood, and rhetoric school. Well, we can do you blood and love without the rhetoric, and we can do you blood and rhetoric without the love, and we can do you all three concurrent or consecutive. But we can't give you love and rhetoric without the blood. Blood is compulsory. They're all blood, you see." ― Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead