Marsden is Here

For a tamer example, it would be entirely possible to make a bot that responds to everything a particular person posts on Twitter with pictures of human poop. If you use public-domain images, like Wikimedia's, it's even legal. But no one wants to use a website that's plagued by Poop-Bot and its ilk. A site that allowed Poop-Bot to run rampant would lose all its users in short order.

I somehow think, even though it's just gross and not actually dangerous, Poop-Bot would get kicked off the vast majority of "free speech" sites.
raininshadows

Everyone always says they want to use a website that doesn't "censor" content. ("Censor" in scarequotes there because people treat it like it's a magical word even when they're not treating it like the greatest possible offense... If you actually look at how people behave, though, the vast majority avoid unmoderated or undermoderated spaces, and the people who don't avoid them are the ones who've been kicked off every other service -- usually for cause -- and are shitty fucking neighbors. People do not actually want to hang out on a website that is nothing but spam and neo-Nazis! They just have no idea how much careful effort it takes to keep a website from becoming wall-to-wall spam and neo-Nazis, because good content moderation is invisible; they never see the amount of stuff that gets removed or the sheer volume of shit-tier spam and garbage that would cover 95% of every even mildly active site in 24 unmoderated hours.
denise

...banning content that actively harms human beings isn't censorship, it's basic safety and human rights.
...
This isn't about free speech, it's about protecting users from actively harmful content like human trafficking and doxxing. As in, things that happen to real human beings and should not be happening to real human beings.
sarajayechan

"Free speech" is the wrong framing! "Free speech" is about the government suppressing or punishing you for what you say, and we aren't the government. Any online site that accepts user-generated content (which is the fancy term for "the stuff y'all post" as opposed to "the stuff the site itself posts") has to set forth content policies that govern what their users can post, because without those policies (and active enforcement of them) a site will be unusable in days, if not hours, because it will be overrun with spam, child sex abuse material, and a thousand other categories of things that make a service impossible to use and create legal liability. Like every other site out there, we have content policies that govern what people are and aren't allowed to post, and we will (and do) remove content that's reported to us that violates those policies.
denise

Actual free speech actively requires deplatforming those whose only "side of the story" is trying to harm and/or silence others.
onewhitecrow

There's an immense difference between fictional content and conduct that has concrete, tangible, offline harm. (Not trying to police your use of the term at all, but I personally try to avoid "real-world", because dammit, after 20+ years of us all living, working, and socializing online, and *especially* after the pandemic and associated virtual event shift, "online" *is* also the real world.) But there's also a huge difference between "someone posted a link to my Twitter account" and "someone posted a link to the GPS coordinates of my house", and the potential consequences of both are wildly different. Smart policy needs to recognize that!
denise