@Filiecs
I think you’ve made clear the core of where our disagreement lies.
You claim, as an axiom, that barring strong, empirical evidence of a link to some extremely deleterious effect of a particular sort of speech, ‘censorship’ ought not to be imposed, even in private spaces. (Or perhaps your argument is limited to communities like Derpibooru; the core of the claim is the important thing here.)
There’s almost certainly no way for me, or anyone else in this conversation, to convince you otherwise of this point. Further, it’s an opinion on what is right or good; it’s not something that I can ‘factually’ disprove. From this axiom, you construct an argument which logically and reasonably concludes that Derpibooru ought to reverse its new rule.
I also have an axiom I’m using in this conversation. My axiom is that communities ought to be proactive in ensuring that hate, and hateful ideologies, do not proliferate through them and on their fringes. A further axiom is that, when communities are opt-in and do not hold governmental power, they ought to be permitted to set limits on what content is permissible in that community, especially when there is
reasonable evidence indicating that such limits will reduce the spread of hateful ideologies in, and on the fringes of, the community. (Reasonable does not require or imply strict, empirical evidence; humans are fickle creatures that are hard to generalize about, so I think it would be essentially impossible to prove
or disprove the idea that cute drawings of a Nazi pony can soften perspectives towards Nazism, with complete scientific rigour. Reasonable indicates suggestive evidence in related literature, as well as collections of case studies.)
There’s almost certainly no way for you, or anyone else in this conversation, to convince me otherwise of these points. And it’s also an opinion on what’s right or good, so it can’t be ‘factually’ disproven. And from these axioms, I can construct a reasonable and logical argument concluding that Derpibooru ought to maintain this rule.
Can you see why I didn’t want this thread to turn into a debate? We disagree on a core principle. Neither of us are objectively ‘wrong’, per se, but we can both conclude, if drawing from our own principles, that the other is wrong. If we are in an environment where tempers can flare, where we have an ‘audience’, where said audience can join in and fan the flames, we’re not even going to learn anything useful about the other side, much less have any chance of coming to some sort of consensus.
I have described a pipeline that (a) has
lots of anecdotal evidence of its existence, (b) has
at least some literature modelling it, (c) matches, in broad strokes, the well-studied model that we see real-world hate groups construct, and (d) the first steps of which have demonstrably come to pass in this community. That’s enough for me to say that this community should do something about it. But
even if you were to agree with these four points, you would come to a different conclusion.
That’s totally fine. But it means I have little interest in attempting to convince you of those points. I’m sorry.