Reddit has zero problem leaving post that threaten the lives of an entire religious group on their frontpage. If they were serious certain subs would be nuked.
You realize that is a perfectly reasonable objective for a site to be a mostly impartial, user-moderated forum, right? I don't consider any view I encounter on reddit to be endorsed by the platform. If people want content moderated with a specific slant, just subscribe to the subreddits that suit your tolerance, there are plenty that are heavily moderated.
Personally, I love seeing things that I disagree with on reddit...it's honestly one of the last places left that gives me the feeling of exposure to different bubbles.
The problem with Reddit is that, while it's not endorsing the content, it is facilitating it. You can let the white supremacists in your neighbourhood use your garage for their weekly meetings and plausibly claim that you're just being neighborly while disagreeing with their purpose. But I'm still going to judge you for helping them out, for making their organizing easier and cheaper, and for smoothing the road for them.
When Reddit banned r/fatpeoplehate and r/coontown in 2015, among others, it actually succeeded in reducing the amount of hate speech on Reddit:
Working from over 100M Reddit posts and comments, we generate hate speech lexicons to examine variations in hate speech usage via causal inference methods. We find that the ban worked for Reddit. More accounts than expected discontinued using the site; those that stayed drastically decreased their hate speech usage—by at least 80%. Though many subreddits saw an influx of r/fatpeoplehate and r/CoonTown “migrants,” those subreddits saw no significant changes in hate speech usage [0]
By making it easy for participants of r/coontown to participate, Reddit actually contributed to the output of r/coontown.
Letting white supremacists use my garage for weekly meetings is not the same as me building an establishment for the explicit purpose of facilitating conversations of all kinds, and then not kicking out a white supremacist minority for using the facility.
My concern with censorship is always 2 fold:
1.) You have to always assume the person who is in control of censorship is the person who doesn't agree with you. Donald Trump has on multiple occasions indicated that he would like to restrict the press's capability to criticize the president, since he has been in power. Kim Jong Un shares a similar sentiment. Would we like that, because there are many Trump supporters who would see absolutely nothing wrong with that. There was a moral majority in the US for a long time that would have preferred to restrict the capability for others to talk about what they considered to be sinful things, such as homosexuality or communism.
2.) You have to realize how quickly things become conflated. Ben Shapiro, a conservative pundit, went to Berkeley to speak, where student groups attempting to ban him from speaking had strung up a huge sign reading "We say no to your white-supremacist bullshit." It's important to note that Ben Shapiro is an Orthodox Jew who is harassed daily by white supremacists online...and has never said a single thing advocating for racial supremacy. In fact, he is hugely opposed to racial, gendered, or national identity politics of any kind. Students wanted to ban him for hate speech simply because they associated him with what they perceived to be hate speech.
Building an establishment to facilitate conversations of all kinds generally does not obligate you to allow every specific conversation. Were it my establishment, I wouldn't permit members of NAMBLA to organize their sex-trafficking trips to Southeast Asia, or white supremacists to organize the next Unite The Right rally. I wouldn't feel at all like I'd betrayed my purpose in facilitating more, and more different, conversations by specifically banning some that are obviously problematic in and of themselves.
I also wouldn't feel like I was censoring anyone. My not facilitating their conversation is not the same as my preventing them from having it. I would also be mindful that the presence of nazis and pedophiles in my establishment was itself a barrier to other communities taking advantage of my facilities; if members of those other communities started showing up after I banned them, I'd probably consider it a net win for freedom of expression and conversational facilitation.
Also, you're soft-pedaling Ben Shapiro by calling him a "conservative pundit", as if he's in the same inoffensive league as Ross Douthat or David Brooks. He was an editor of Breitbart News, which is now quite openly the voice of the "alt-right"; he departed and got on their enemies list because he was smart enough to realize that Trump was going to damage the cause for a generation--which is why they're going after him, because they were quite happy to have an orthodox jew on staff while he was agreeing with them. He's said a variety of things about Arabs and black people that are flat out racist. He's not quite the bomb-thrower that Milo is, but he still drops nuggets such as "Arabs like to bomb crap and live in sewage". Calling him a white supremacist might be hyperbole, but it's not simply conflating conservative views with nazis. He's a racist asshole who advocates for ethnic cleansing. Maybe white supremacy isn't his conscious goal, but when he facilitates that end, it becomes a bit irrelevant if he's actually written that down on his "A better 2018" list.
I think that study is good but I add personal nuance when interpreting its obvious curative suggestion.
Its not the ban that worked - as much as the full identification of those groups, the banning of those subs and the negation of the immediate survival attempts of those subs.
The whole process is what worked, not just a simple ban.
The parent commenter specifically said "post[s] that threaten the lives of an entire religious group". Hardly comparable to something someone can simply disagree with.
Those are also specific posts, but most of the posters who share the sentiment of the commenter typically advocate for the removal of entire subreddits.
Also, to be frank, I think that posts of that nature are exactly the kind of thing that someone can and should disagree with. Suppression of those beliefs by silencing them just means they are moved away from platforms through which their views can be better contextualized for them. The prevailing attitude that some people are just not worth debating says more about the person who holds that belief than it does about those they're accusing of never budging. I have had my mind changed many times, as well as changed the minds of others.
I suppose I'm saying that disagreement is just a start when it comes to content like what was brought up. Of course you and I disagree with a suggestion we eliminate a people group. But it's not simply another unit of thought in an objective marketplace of ideas. The Overton window came up a lot in 2016, and I think it's useful both descriptively and prescriptively--certain things should be outside the bounds of civilized discourse. Implicit in the notion that these ideas should be confronted rationally is that its adherent is simply misguided, miseducated, and that sure and steady appeals to reason and empathy will persuade them, as if all white supremacists rooting for genocide are waiting for their American History X moment, but I don't think you have to look hard to find intelligent and otherwise rational people advocating vile things. The obstacle isn't reason, it's something beyond that.
I think it's extremely patronizing and disingenuous to lump posts calling for the extermination of members of a religious group, or calling for the execution of refuges in with "things I disagree with".
I go on reddit every single day, and I have never seen a post on the front page advocating for the genocide of an entire religious group. I've seen a handful of posts linked from /r/againsthatesubreddits, but the irony is that the only reason those posts made the front page is because they were linked from the meta subreddit.
That being said, for posts of that nature that do reach the front page, I stand by what I said. If it is the policy of reddit to be entirely noninterventionist and simply allow the communities to self moderate, that is completely reasonable, and I don't think any of those views should be interpreted as being encouraged by reddit.
The obvious question given an open platform should be why exactly would a community like that be able to exist successfully within a system that votes content up or down?
Could you give examples, I've been there a lot and have never seen this (though I've been told "people like you should be killed" a few times because of my religious associations, so don't doubt it, just curious about specifics).
