I am ANTI-CENSORSHIP. Change my mind.

@YourPalWaver  

Well I am always fully in favor of a civil discussion.
 
The big problem I have with the way this whole situation has evolved over time is the argument that it is about censorship. Of course I get why it is presented that way. Censorship as a concept is (for most of us) inherently connected to other ideas like “abuse of power” and “government overreach” and “moral panic”, and framing the issue as a matter of free speech on the one side and opposition to that on the other, takes advantage of all those related mental connections to make people, even if they know nothing else about what is going on, assume the censorious side is in the wrong. And to be fair, a great deal of the time that is an advantageous thing, because most of the time it is something that people should oppose.
 
Which is why I have an issue here, because this isn’t now and never was a matter of censorship.
 
As someone who lives in the US, I have a deep appreciation for the protections of the First Amendment and its guarantee of freedom of speech. But I also fully recognize that there are caveats to that rule. As much as people sometimes seem to think the amendments mere existence means they can do or say whatever they want anytime they want and no one can touch them for it, the First Amendment protections are mostly directed at preventing government regulation and/or retaliation over the kinds of things you can say and express (and even within that rule there are a few very specific examples that are not covered). And one of the things it very clearly does not do is require you to associate yourself with opinions or ideologies you do not agree with. And that really is the crux of the matter. If you own property, and your neighbor wishes to place a sign in your yard promoting a political view or religious ideology or opinion that you yourself do not agree with and do not wish to advertise, it is not a violation of free speech or a matter of censorship to refuse them. The protections of free speech protect your right to do that, and the same ones that do apply to websites as well.
 
So my position through this entire thing has been, and still remains, that this is not a matter of being for or against censorship, because censorship was never what was going on here. Nothing about the decision to cease allowing certain kinds of art blocks people from creating it. Nothing about this decision prohibits people from uploading it on any of the other sites and services that do allow that kind of artwork. Nothing about that decision stops people who want to view that artwork from doing so and discussing it with fellow appreciators. It merely separates this site from being party to any of that, which, because this is a privately owned site, is solely at the discretion of the owners to do. If they decide they want to disassociate themselves from the symbols of a real life ideology responsible for some of the worst atrocities in modern history, it is both their legal right and an exercise of free speech for them to do so. Just as it is the right of the users to decide, based on those rules, whether they will continue to use the site or not.
 
And that’s really where I stand on the matter. Supporting free speech means supporting the fact that the owners of this site can set whatever rules they want for the kind of art that can and can’t be uploaded. I can still argue the matter, if I want, and try to change their minds if they seem amenable to it (and a civil discussion on the matter is always worth trying in regards to complicated, inflammatory considerations like the current Nazi issue has been), but they are simply not obligated to provide a platform for anything they do not wish to, and if they ultimately decide something will not be allowed all I can really do is decide whether my personal principles will accept remaining here or if the issue is such that some other site would be more to my liking.

@Background Pony #8ECE  

 
you know, i see lots of people claiming that myself and others call anyone who they disagree with a nazi, but i’ve never seen anyone actually quote someone doing that.
 
lying by putting words into people’s mouths doesn’t make you more correct.

@Coco  
>i’m not overusing the word nazi when what i’m calling to remove is explicitly white supremacist art, that’s all i want gone. there’s no reason for them to be here.  
the same could be said about lots of fetishes or pictures that I don’t understand nor are pleasant to my eyes.
 
However, asking for their removal opens up the door of censorship that could end up in a vicious downward spiral of censoring more and more without its usersabe getting satisfied enough. This is why I can’t support the removal of any picture that induces any ideology because otherwise, people of X ideology will desire to remove that material.
 
There you have the main reason why the anti censorship side exists. It’s not because they support that content, they defend anything because they fear about the abuses of removing content,limiting freedom and creating taboos artificially.
 
They defend it because of the rights of feeling free to express anything (see the famous quote of “I don’t support what you say but I will fight for the freedom that you have to say so” more or less)
 
Besides, you have filters,downvotes and even the spoilers option to remove it by yourself at anytime without interfering others. Hell,you can even comment on that picture about your distaste towards it but don’t limit what people want to create.Judge it,dislike it,filter it…..whatever but the censorship route opens up a really dangerous path in the long term for the future of this site.

@Coco  
I haven’t been putting words into people’s mouths. Every post I’ve seen by you boils down to you calling people Nazis.

@Background Pony #89A7  
a fetish is not the same as a genocidal ideology.
 
if removing hate speech is considered opening the “door of censorship” as you put it then is already open. rule #0 regarding removing hate speech and hateful art has been a rule on this site from since day 1.

@Background Pony #D2CE
 
So your point is, in summary, that derpibooru is a private website and should be allowed to censor the sort of speech that it does not agree with, correct?
 
Assuming that is the point your trying to make i would agree whole heatedly; however, I also believe as Americans we also have a culture of freedom of speech. and throughout history I believe that has served us well. I just worry that that seems to be slowly going away to a point where people can get fired for making a joke
 
Also to clarify my point was never that derpibooru could’t remove these posts but that they shouldn’t

@Background Pony #8ECE  
you still haven’t quoted me calling someone here a nazi

@Coco  
>a fetish is not the same as a genocidal ideology.  
well…they might not have any apparent correlation BUT…
 
>if removing hate speech is considered opening the “door of censorship” as you put it is already open.  
then we would have to censor communism, anarchy, piracy, religions, kingdom and nations who have committed crimes….
 
basically anything that promotes hate. Hell, I could even censor Twitter because it promotes hate among its user. Don’t you see how foolish is the concept of hate speech? Hate is a very relative word that can be easily manipulated for any person and used for any projection.
 
>rule #0 regarding hate speech and hateful art has been a bannable offense and not allowed on this site from since day 1.  
then if we applied that rule to the extreme, we would have to ban not only politics (including mouthpieces) or religions.
 
We would have to go full puritan mode here,which means the ban of NSFW (rape, gore, hardcore, implied death, DBSM, sadomasochism…) and any kind of violent content because hey,anyone can take the word hate down to its own interpretations of it by corrupting its meaning according to its personal relative views.
 
Ans by the way,if we did this,Derpibooru would lose its appeal because Bronibooru already offers that. Just SFW content without anything problematic for anyone. Perhaps that site is meant for your taste.
 
Careful with what you wish because reality always hits harder than you imagine.

@Coco
 
Sorry I’ve been missing your remarks, i didn’t expect to be responding to so many people to be responding. But i just want to dig into that “you cant educate a nazi”
 
Now i haven’t talked to many nazis myself; However, my personal hero, Daryl Davis, has educated 200+ klansmen, and hes just a musician

@Background Pony #89A7  
hate speech does not mean speech from any group of people that has ever hated anything. it is a specific term defined as the expression of hate or encouragement of violence towards a person or group based solely on race, religion, gender, or sexual orientation. your ignorance on this topic is obvious.

@Coco  
>it is a specific term defined as the expression of hate or encouragement of violence towards a person or group based solely on race, religion, gender, or sexual orientation.  
I am simply warning you that the concept is a double edged sword to rely on.  
The word hate can be easily corrupted according to who you ask because those who are promoting actual hate might believe that that they are doing something good to the world according to them.
 
Excommunist intellectuals for example believed in communism at first because they had thought that they were fighting for improving the world,making progress and thus,becoming the good ones around that period.
 
Those people were very well educated but their good intentions were manipulated and after a certain period of time,they realized that the idea of fighting against the evil with that method was horrifying yet they believed they were doing the correct thing by promoting a hateful ideology without thinking it was like that. Those people left the communist idea and most of them appreciated liberalism and capitalism over time.
 
The moral here is that what people can and will make very twisted interpretations genuinely thinking that it is the correct way to follow yet they are promoting something hateful. It always comes down to a person’s viewpoint what counts as hate in this postmodern era.

@Skygunner
 
Okay, there’s a lot to unpack there so bare with me. Going to try and convey my position in this post in relation to yours. I’d agree that it doesn’t boil down to censorship, but it boils down to a series of logical conclusions we as a community have to whittle down to.  
As the article pointed out there are so many images on this site, and yet when I last looked a few days ago the offensive tag only had 3000 images under it. That’s 0.14% out of 100%. I know artists with more images under their own tags then that, a single user could overtake it with dedication within a week. I think it’s disingenuous to make it out like this is a pandemic when it’s a blimp on the radar.
 
But more to the point you say that it’s a black and white issue, that any depiction that isn’t clearly anti-nazi is pro-nazi. The first thought that came to my mind was “What about video games?” What about a video game like Battlefield that gives you a random chance of being a Nazi when you go on multiplayer. When playing you aren’t given any motif other then ‘win the battle for your team and earn points’. Would it be reasonable to argue that EA actively tolerates Nazis? That EA has a bad image when it comes down to Nazis and that according to EA, they don’t think there’s any difference between being a Nazi officer and being a British officer? To me you have to divorce yourself from reality quite a bit before we get a point where context has been removed enough to justify this way of thinking, that there is no contextual difference between a protayal and a good portayal if the portayal isn’t negative. This was a discussion that already took place and was unanimously agreed to be absurd by the gaming community when Extra Credits presented it. Maybe an actual Nazi will get put on the Nazi side and enjoy it. Okay. I’m not going to reconstruct my reality just because someone might enjoy something they shouldn’t. It’s not about a slippery slope it’s about moving the goal posts. It’s about creating very oddly specific conclusions that end up contradicting themselves as soon as you try to put it into practice.  
Equally I don’t see how we’d be better off having actual Nazis keep to their own kind rather then post among anti-Nazis? If anything posted by a user formulated a pattern that became legitimately concerning beyond a reasonble doubt, _{there’s a report system} but more importantly I’d rather we actually know about it. You say not removing it is having it go unchecked but when you remove it then it encourages people who actively believe this stuff to go unchecked within their own group chats and secret places where no counter arguments could ever enter. At least if they did it on this site, and I or many others like me actually saw it, I know I could at least open a dialogue about it rather then them just conveying it to people who they know already agree because sometimes opening the dialogue is all it takes.
 
Hitler’s biggest fear was that the Nazi’s would end up as a joke, something that doesn’t strike fear into the hearts of anyone who hears the word. It really frustrates me when people treat the word with such fear as fear grants power to it when prior to the 2016 we were able to treat Nazis as the joke they are. Now we’ve reverted to hiding behind the couch on the fear they’re going to come knocking like we’ve gone back 75 years all within 4. Over time villains in history become more removed from the current day. It’s not something that can be prevented, as time passes history become more historic and will feel further removed from the next generation. Pirates were awful terrible people but now Disney makes movies about them, kids dress as them. Cowboys were rapists and gangsters and now there are cartoons about them and games in the playground. It doesn’t mean all historic context should or will be lost it just means time moves on and the seriousness of the threat regresses and social constructs change.  
“How is anyone supposed to know who is actually supporting nazism/racism, and who is just doing it to be edgy.” – I don’t understand why this is the concern of the poster, art isn’t defined like that. Some Catholics believe Harry Potter is no different from Satanic ideology, but it’s not J.K’s Rowling’s concern to clarify her intent verses their interpretation and if it were she’d be too busy posting TERF content on Twitter to do anything about it anyway. Just because someone personally cannot differentiate something doesn’t mean the issue lies with the work or author. That’s not how art functions and never has been. As an artist, if you believe you have that much say or control over my work then you’re sadly mistaken. My work is my work, what goes into it vs what you see can be very different things. If you want to open that dialogue, it’s always there but it’s not your place to go into someone else’s space and enforce your interpterion onto them, regardless of the subject matter.
 
What I really hate about this idea of dealing with issues this way is that it’s simply the most illegitimate way of doing anything productive about any real issues that exist. It’s superficial and doesn’t really do anything outside of maybe winning a few brownie points for public reputation (which is always going to be a losing battle when the people writing about you have already come to their conclusions 10 years ago). Usually blanket rules actually come at the expense of actual progress like fundraising, creating networks/specific support groups. Larger voices in the community promoting smaller stories on the issues and first-hand accounts to raise awareness of it actually existing. I think if you want to tackle an issue you have to look at the avenues where the issue breaks down and why people who act badly to others get away with it.  
I did commissions for 3 years, dealt with legitimate sexism in the fandom from midly annoying dumb stuff like turning down me down as an artist because ‘girls can’t do NSFW as good as guys’ to trying to ruin me financially through fraud over me being a woman and all women being the same. In my experience a rule like this would make things worse if it were about hateful ideology surrounding gender. Because fantasies are just that, forced nudity and other NSFW concepts like it would be horrible in real-life, of course they would, in real life all sexual gratification between adults should be consensual without any form of ‘force’. I think that goes without saying but in the form of art it simply is not real. It’s fake people in a fake scenario. Equating this to actual abuse or as a stepping stone to it in my opinion does nothing but undermine actual abuse just like equating video games responsible for violence undermines victims of violence. You may argue in return that you’re not equating it, you’re just trying to stop actual bad people post under said tag or context but by doing that you are equating it, intentionally or not that’s what it does. Equating a specific thing as the direct route of something only works in removing the blame from “this was a mentally twisted person who didn’t get the help they needed before causing pain to others” to “this could happen to anyone who overindulges in X”. Having gone through a very similar thing in the gaming community I know it just makes legitimate sexists harder to spot.  
In my experience dealing with sexists in the fandom, it’s not usually the people who post edgy images, it’s usually the ones you’d not expect, the ones who know how to hide it and would never go near stuff that makes them stand out. I can only assume racists are the same.
 
Equally broad rules that include banning even dumb jokes make people like me look bad when talking about legitimate hateful ideology that can harbour within the context of the fandom. When you over enforce surface level things to counter a problem that’s deeper routed like bigotry it undermines the problems other people face around that topic. Over-enforcing only makes people have less faith in not just the mod and admin team but the issue that’s being tackled as well. It leads to situations where my issues or experiences get equated to the micromanaging as it slowly loses its impact when people keep hearing the same words pop up over and over and being thrown around nonchalantly. As I said I’ve already experienced this exact thing in the gaming industry where ‘journalists’ threw the word sexist around to the point where it lost all meaning and then when I actually did experience legitimate sexism it was hard to get taken seriously. Now if I say “I’ve experienced sexism in the gaming community” instead of people thinking of doxing, rape threats, and demeaning sexual comments, people will instead think of feminist frequency and that’s made the issue 10x worse for the people legitimately affected. You speak of bronie branding but what about the ‘branding’ of the people affected by the very issues we’re making rules about? That has an impact too, one I know first is a much bigger problem then 0.14% out of 100%.
 
You mention The Atlantic & The New York Post articles but using those as evidence to me seems flawed considering both papers have a very famous history and notable reputations of being gossip papers, You speak of the importance of reputation for Bronies but surely reputation should go both ways? Surely we should look at the reputation of papers like The New York Post and Atlantic?  
I started watching the show in late 2010, I remember back when the articles were about how scary it is that adult men are into a show for little girls heavily implying malicious intent from the grown men who watch it. If we are to use the argument that because it’s in article form it’s therefore true then that would apply to those outdated articles from 10 years ago but we know it’s not true, heck I knew it wasn’t true 10 years ago and I was literally one of the ‘little girls’ the articles were trying to ‘protect’. We know that fundamentally it’s not about reporting on fandoms, they don’t care when there’s charity streams or children hospital visits, they only care when they can convert fear and outrage into profit. It speaks to a bigger problem but fundamentally fear sells and quality vs time to produce quality will always be factors in the digital age of journalism leading to blurred lines where it’s not about if something is or isn’t news it’s about if an article can or cannot get away with sensationalism in its most ugly forms. And it worked, we all clicked their Pony article at the end of the day, so they get the last laugh in the end.
 
To me the biggest issue is how the admin teams on the main sites dealt with the media attention. It’s evident a lack of experience was at play here. It’s quite fitting That The New York Post was founded by Alaxander Hamilton, who famously had papers spreading rumours about his affair that no one believed, and then he wrote a massive article confirming everything to be worse than the rumours were insinuating, to me that’s what leaders in the MLP community did. Everyone knows these papers are gossip papers, a boiler plate statement that reads as generic as a horrorscope would have done the trick. But instead they write these lengthy admission of guilt statements, and play right into the hands of the journalists. It affectively tells everyone from the outside looking in that this house of cards will fold at a drop of the hat. That’s where the true problem for me lies. It encourages mediocre journalists to keep digging and it sends a signal that any form of pressure will lead to cracks. I can’t fully blame those involved since without knowing how companies usually deal with this kind of pressure and why and how to control the narrative it can easily boil over into panic and fear and blurting things out that in retrospect were a bad idea. But this entire thing has raised many concerns for me like it has for many in relation to the people who are supposed to be the flagpoles of the community.  
I’m all for new implentations of structures and ideas to build upon equality among users, creating a system in place to support groups when dealing with hateful ideology, but because I am so ‘for’ this I’m also very anti-wasting time on things that in my opinion help no one. Suface level concepts like banning nazi posts do nothing beyond ensure that more Nazi posts will pop up because if you tell the internet not to post something then of course they will.  
(Sorry in advance if I repeated any points anyone else has said, this took awhile to write :P)

@Background Pony #89A7  
if the definition of hate speech on derpibooru extends beyond the definition of hate speech that almost every other website and world government uses, i’ll call it out. as it stands currently, their enforcement of the rules they set themselves doesn’t even meet it.

@YourPalWaver  

In part, yes (although again I don’t really consider it censoring to do that). But more than that, I’m saying that the protections of free speech also protect us from being compelled to support things we fundamentally disagree with. It doesn’t matter if the sign my next door neighbor wants to put in my yard advocates Nazis, communism, or pizza with pineapple. If I don’t want it there, I absolutely should have the right to tell a neighbor no and not be accused of censoring him for doing so. I own the property, and the opinions I allow others to use it to express is no one’s right to decide but my own.
 
 
@YourPalWaver  

I understand that concern. It is worth pointing out that concern over that very thing is likely the reason (in the US at least) why there are so few rules that really do impose limits on expression. But it must be said too that freedom to express oneself does not necessarily mean freedom from repercussions. The tricky part is always going to be figuring out where the lines exist (or should exist) between the two.

@Coco  
but it can be corrupted. The world doesn’t extend it because it has been studied and used as rationally as possible so the countries can keep an stable order and have an idea of its patterns that are mostly accepted and agree to those terms because historically have been accepted to be seen as hateful so you don’t commit those mistakes. They remind you about them so you don’t repeat those same mistakes and learn something valuable from them. Their objective is that you always remember them but you have to know how to deal with them.
 
But instead of focusing so much on what counts as hate speech and what it isn’t (leftists fall too much into this trap because relying on emotions isn’t always the best method to solve it), it’s WAY more productive to understand its context,its consequences,its roots in the way of thinking,its actions….everything that leads to it and why it has managed to happen (psychological territory mixed with historical/cultural/ personal context). But Twitter doesn’t encourage this method to learn history, 280 characters make it seem too black and white when they hold much more complicated stuff behind those simple summaries.
 
Use logic and critical thinking when it comes to its roots of what you call hateful. What factors do contribute to cause it? How does it happen? How does any human manage to do this? What’s the context behind this?
 
And you will realize that hate is a very human thing just that one has to have the tools to face it.Political ideologies simply cover lots of insanities that people have inside their minds translated into the desire of leadership and power,nothing else (and if it weren’t politics,another medium would replace it instead).
 
I ask about the term hate speech not because of its meaning written in a dictionary. I simply raise the point that said term could be quite poisonous by itself and become easily corrupted according to who you ask about that term.

@Background Pony #D2CE
 
Right, I think we both agree that derpibooru has the ability to do that legally but the big question is should they. personally, is i had the keys to derpibooru i would allow anything except what is forbidden by US law so that there is no accusation of bias.
 
And to your second point i personally dont think its ok for a mob of people with an email list to force those “consequences.” i dont know if you looked into that article but its so depressing that someones hard work, or or career would be thrown away for something asinine

@Background Pony #89A7  
like i said, the staff aren’t even enforcing the removal of art that meets the commonly accepted definition of hate speech, they have to at least go that far in order to go past it. besides, the answer to the question of “what causes hate” and your analysis of why the left demands what they do is wayyyyy outside the scope of this thread or even the discussion of rule #0.

@YourPalWaver  
okay so after reading this i did a bit of reading up on daryl davis and while i don’t deny that he did do some undeniable good, i don’t think that his strategy is useful on a meaningful scale.
 
the people who he has talked to that have given up their robes seem to be older members who already wanted a way out of the Klan lifestyle for one reason or another. he even says that they converted themselves, not him. he makes no claims that these people aren’t racist anymore, but simply that they aren’t klansmen.
 
his methods also don’t address the very real concern of the dangerous harm that racists (and klansmen especially) cause before they rescind their beliefs, if they ever do at all. i think that trying to prevent people from becoming racists in the first place by limiting it’s spread ultimately causes the least amount of harm.

@Coco  
“you can’t educate a nazi out of their views”
 
Then you’ve given up on people and their ability to better themselves. If you think people are unable to change because of who they are in the present, you truly are so wrapped up in this us vs them mentality and so trapped on your moral high ground, you refuse to see the potential for change in anyone and, thustly, will never try to nurture any sort of growth in them. That’s very sad actually because its pretty much only through education and instilling empathy into a nazi that truly defeats the ideology.
 
And yes, you are overusing the word nazi when you point the finger at not only an imaginary nazi threat on this site to justify purging satirical art but also at anyone voicing almost any sort of discomfort of purges like this and paint them as bigot hitler lovers.

@Background Pony #5BE2  
you sure typed up an awful lot of words to put in my mouth that i neither said nor do i believe.
 
the way for a nazis to change has to come from a change of heart. it doesn’t come from debate or logic. something has to happen that forces them to reckon with their beliefs.

 
Western meme. Words mean nothing. Actions mean.

@Background Pony #D2CE  
You didn’t even read @Candel’s, post, let alone anyone else’s, did you? Not to mention hitting 10 Stupid Arguments Against Free Speech 29:50 10. Private Companies Can Do What They Want
 
@Coco  
“rule #0 has existed on this site since day 1.”  
Isn’t that exactly what people have been mentioning before?  
>>2180605s (deleted)
 
@InvisibleInkDoodles  
Heck of a great post.

@Brokedownandmadeone  

 
it’s almost like we have differing opinions on how well the mods are performing their duties

@Coco
 
If even satirical images of nazis = support for nazism, I’m really curious as to what you think of the dark comedy genre as a whole and if you think it should be outlawed.

@Background Pony #5BE2  
satire requires criticism, if it isnt critical it isnt satire.  
so no, i dont think satire of nazis is support. the great dictator is a good example of satire of nazis without glorification
 
what is dark comedy to you? if it includes making jokes at the expense of a marginalized you’re not a part of, it is tasteless at best and harmful at worst.