>One question is, why did it take until now for these bans to come into effect?
I think a lot of social media sites and platforms really believed that it was bad to try to be arbiters, and that an anything-goes system would go well. The fact that this was the easiest option for them probably played a part in this. I think a lot of platforms and their audiences are increasingly seeing that this position as naively optimistic and not backed up by the results.
>Gray areas are always going to emerge. For example, the popular YouTuber Jenna Marbles came under criticism recently for old videos (years ago) that could be construed as hate speech, or at the very least, mildly racist. Does this justify a ban?
I think rules should be and largely are oriented around whether something encourages bigotry, rather than about whether the creator privately has racist opinions in their head. If no one is sure if something is pushing a racist message, then that's evidence it's not doing it. If it's not doing it effectively but maybe trying, then that might be a gray area. I don't think the existence of gray areas is an argument for the extreme no-judges position.
>These issues are going to be decided by the discretion of humans, many of them with a geographically-concentric worldview (i.e., Silicon Valley).
And choosing to allow and promote racists and peddlers of inflammatory pseudoscience is also a decision made by humans of specific worldviews. There's no clean non-political option.
>A few comments say Stefan Molyneux (again, don't know this guy) is not specifically racist but has white-centric views.
https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/indi...
He pushes misinformation about races and advocates white ethnonationalism: “I don’t view humanity as a single species...” “The whole breeding arena of the species needs to be cleaned the fuck up!” "Screaming 'racism' at people because blacks are collectively less intelligent...is insane." “You cannot run a high IQ [white] society with low IQ [non-white] people." He seems like the textbook example of the sort of person that rules about racism would target. I guess he doesn't literally say the n-word or specifically advocate actively exterminating minorities, just that it might be good if someone did that or at least some segregation.