Reddit shuts down subreddits including r/The_Donald and r/ChapoTrapHouse

Although reddit acted as a free speech haven for a long time, it was only overall, and not ever in major specific communities. True free speech is valued because it fosters debate, and allows bad speech to be rebutted by more speech. A marketplace of ideas, and maybe more importantly, the counterspeech doctrine, are incredibly important principals in justifying the existence of free speech. Fiefdoms more often than not were echo chambers, where to see a response to bad speech, a person would have to know where else to venture. By creating filter bubbles, tribes, echo chambers, reddit was not an exemplar of a free speech haven, but instead a collection of lopsided megaphones pointed in opposite directions, strewn across a hard to navigate map.

Strong moderation is what allows communities with strict quality guidelines to function, but also amplifies division.

And on the topic of history, a part of me finds it unfortunate that this banning will make historical, sociological, and psychological analysis of trends, thoughts of the times, past bad behavior etc much harder. It's no what.cd or house of wisdom or library of alexandria loss, but it is still a historical record loss of a huge event that happened. I may not have personally liked The_Donald but it was quite the experience, as a fish out of water, to go look at how other people think, communicate, and reason. The culture that developed there will continue to exist, but the ease with which one could passively observe it, and learn lessons from it is greatly diminished. Another double edged sword.

The direction reddit has taken is absolutely abhorrent, but at this point it's hard to avoid adopting a fatalistic outlook on things. What else can be done?

Anybody in the upper echelons of reddit who is responsible for the direction the site has taken over the past few years should be absolutely disgusted with themselves. Was the hundreds of millions (billions?) in VC funding not enough? You were given an extremely important position of stewardship over the internet, and have utterly betrayed all of us.

Is that really a thing on the internet though?

It seems like the unmoderated free speech havens on the internet are bubbles themselves and I'm not sure there's much real debate going on there....

1. When has censorship been effective?

2. How does your censorship plan deal with subtle racism and dog whistles?

And I'll add a question I haven't asked yet:

3. How do populations become and stay primed against open and earnest fascism/antisemitism/racism/etc. in your censorship plan?

I don't think you have a leg to stand on if you can't answer these questions.

The reason I'm asking the third question: I hear your point that I'm talking about exclusion rather than censorship, and I agree that racism becoming respectable in polite company would be much worse than what we have now. But I think you have to realize that the way we got to a point where racism isn't respectable in polite company is repeated, persistent confrontation of racism with the truth. The reason you and I know that black people aren't criminals, is that we both know the more nuanced truth. I know I didn't come up with that truth myself--I heard it from someone else, and I heard it in the context of confronting the racist trope that black people are criminals. I get the temptation to use censorship as a shortcut to remove subtle racism, but by doing that we're giving up something even more fundamental: the very debate that made racism not respectable in the first place.

And make no mistake: racism isn't respectable in polite company in our little internet bubbles full of tech and startup people, but racism is absolutely respectable in many communities in our country and the world. If we're going to make racism not respectable in those places, censorship isn't going to work. We're going to have to have conversations that make that happen. If we let those conversations happen in public spaces, we can have those conversations in spaces that are friendly to us. But if we censor those conversations, then we just push those communities out, and then our only option is to go into those communities to have those conversations, which is much more difficult. And to be clear: censorship won't work in those communities, because we don't have the power to censor there.