Every time someone sets out to create a completely unmoderated free speech platform, it immediately becomes an object lesson in why people moderate platforms.
Why do you think it's unmoderated? I saw this same statement in another comment and pulled up their guidelines: https://gab.com/about/guidelines. Essentially they aim to moderate according to US law
They censor speech in order to conform to US law, which means they don't support free speech. They cannot as a platform both support free speech and practice censorship.
Which is odd, because in every other instance with every other platform, any censorship no matter how benign is denounced as a slippery slope towards an inevitable and irreversible Orwellian nightmare dystopia. I guess Gab is the exception to the rule for some reason.
Yes. Abridgement of speech in any form is censorship. In this case, the speech of people who want to discuss activities the US government deems illegal is being censored.
Censorship can be (and in the most heinous cases, is) compelled by a government, and can even arguably serve the public good, as is often argued with hate speech laws, or (less controversially) with laws against libel and slander. But as far as free speech is concerned, all censorship is equally dangerous.
It's hypocrisy for defenders of Gab to complain about platform owners and businesses de-platforming them, while accepting Gab doing the same.
>> Was that censorship in order to conform to US law?
>Yes. Abridgement of speech in any form is censorship.
That wasn't the question asked.
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize."
The question was whether the other examples were compelled by government law. That puts them in a different category. Unless you would like to argue that the other censorship was performed to keep the organizers out of prison, your argument falls flat.
That's because the first adopters of an unmoderated platforms are those who were kicked out from the moderated platforms, whether rightfully or wrongly.
Indeed, many settlements in the yesteryears were founded by outlaws and dissidents (also see: the Pilgrims and Mormon settlement of Utah)
So what does it say that unmoderated platforms always seem to become sinkholes of bigotry?
Or are you saying that, like the Pilgrims, they will eventually transmute themselves into something less unpleasant if left alone? That's stretching the metaphor a bit far, I think.
Voat and Gab seem to have done. Which ones haven't?
The way it seems to work is that unmoderated forums attract the toxic bigots that aren't allowed to speak their minds elsewhere, and they attack anyone who disagrees with them until most of those people get tired of it and go elsewhere, leaving the forum to the jerks. (Or else the owners have second thoughts and start moderating.)
It happens to any unmoderated forum that gets large and popular enough.
But bigots are allowed to speak their minds elsewhere, in many many places, especially in private, hidden from people who don't like them. They don't naturally gravitate to any place that lets them spread their ideas.
What I've seen happens is different, no actual genuine bigotry, but some organized effort to spread hateful propaganda and moderators not banning any of that, taking sides, especially when the organized effort comes from the government and is supported by mainstream government propaganda, so the moderators are naturally conflicted. Owners, moderators sometimes realize it's hurting the site, but still don't like to compromise on their views and eventually ban entire topics, not hate, personal attacks or anything like that and still being soft to the views they share even if they are against new rules.
> They don't naturally gravitate to any place that lets them spread their ideas.
Why wouldn't they? Everyone else does, you and me included.
Voat was a tiny site of 30,000 users in April 2015. Two months later, Reddit banned r/ShitN*ggersSay, and Voat's user base exploded. That was four years ago. Go take a look at the front page of https://voat.co/ right now. Don't do it at work, though.
