Quote:
Originally Posted by PepsiFree
Considering hate speech is against the law, I’m surprised this is allowed on this forum.
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Sorry the team of lawyers that approve every post isn't doing their job very well
You know that we've taken actions in the past with such incidents, so it's obviously not an issue of not caring (or implicitly endorsing a view) just because we don't take the action you want in the timeframe you want it taken in.
So I think this kind of statement is pretty unfair, considering the amount of time and agonizing that goes on among the mods over threads like this.
There's professionals who spend their entire lives working in an entire profession dedicated to evaluating what constitutes hate speech, so it's not something that's always easy to identify.
You have your idea of what crosses the line. Others have different ideas. Who do we go with? You? Them? Any choice we make will make someone upset that we went too far or didn't go too far enough.
Is it hate speech to assemble a set of true facts that without context and perspective give a certain impression? Is it hate speech to quote facts that are untrue but that one believes are true? Should we ban anyone we think is a bigot? If they share their views in a thread relevant to the subject? If they try and spread their views in unrelated threads?
If you have a simple set of criteria that can be applied to every post to determine if it's hate speech in a clear and unambiguous way, please, we'd love to adopt it.
Barring that, that's why we've said repeatedly that threads about religion and politics get more leeway than other threads; if someone holds a view that isn't great or is even hateful, and they share it in a way and try to defend it without being obviously over the line into abuse or trolling or inciting violence or whatever, then should we ban them? Or should we let them say their piece and anyone who wishes can engage them to try and change their minds or at least demonstrate for everyone else how their views are devoid of merit.
We don't have a team of lawyers to tell us if every post crosses some fine line. We can act on the stuff that clearly crosses the line. For the rest we can either let people express their ideas (even if they're objectionable) and trust that others will be able to react in a way that doesn't burn everything down, we could ban anyone with a viewpoint that doesn't conform to our own, or we could simply stop allowing those kinds of discussions.
Because I don't really think banning everyone who says a certain religion has negative aspects to it is the answer. I think there's aspects of Christianity that are fundamentally harmful, and I've said as much, I would have to ban myself.
Or is it just presentation, how the ideas are communicated. Because if so, then it gets back to judgment and trying to figure out where the subjective line is.
Anyway my point is that the mods aren't ignoring or endorsing certain ideas, quite the opposite.