Ban racist jokes, memes and Aryanne

@GenericArchangel
 
On their respective terms, Hitler is to Mussolini what Pol Pot is to Lenin.

@Surprise  
Pol Pot? Who/What is that?

We already have a politics shitthread, take this latest nonsense there.

@The Frowning Pony
 
Sorry.

Here’s Aryanne’s thoughts on the matter:
 

Use filters, OP. I use filters to block foalcon and other fetishes I don’t like, and spoilers to episodes I haven’t seen. They’re your friend.
 
I’m glad the mods have enough decency and maturity not to follow through on OP’s wishes. Aryanne is cute.
 
I hope that shooter burns in Tartarus. Seriously fuck the alt-right. They won’t ruin Remove Kebab and that one Initial D song for the rest of us.

@Da5ch  
Aryanne is very cute. For a Nazi that is. ^^
 
Kebab? I’m not familiar with that. I’ve heard of Initial D though.

Would pictures of ponies chasing Aryanne with molotovs be fine? It’s not promoting fascism and is actually doing quite the opposite.

@SmartMars603  
There are “oc:aryanne,abuse” images already on the site. They’re not rule #0 because she’s no one in particular’s OC or “ponysonna”.
 

@SmartMars603  
Aryanne abuse is fine.  

@Derpy Whooves  
YAY! I’m fine! (I have a ponysona, but I’m fine with people “killing” him in pictures. But, I’m a random person on the internet, I doubt anyone will draw my oc for any reason.)

I think I just lost brain cells from this.
 
I mean, seriously. Yes, the content is bad, but even though the site is under the European law, we still follow under Freedom of Speech.
 
If you go out and literally start banning alt-right content, you silence somebodies voice and stance.
 
That is a highly dangerous thing you’re not seeing clearly.
 
You silence once voice, you silence a lot more, and that triggers a domino effect in which other point of views can concurrently be silenced.
 
If we like, banned [place political ideal here], you end up giving one side more of a voice, but the other side that’s for it has none.
 
Just saying, something like this is very poor judgement, a slippery slope, and can cause everything to unravel.
 
I say keep it.

@Dave33333  
“Hate speech is NOT free speech. Everytime hate speech is permitted it costs someone part of his or her self, part of their self-respect, or part of their sanity. It rips people to shreds and destroys society. Hate speech is anything but free.” -Unknown
 
Also, it’s the freedom of responsible speech. I don’t think anyone who hates a person because they were born black or something else they can’t control is responsible. But hey, what do I know? I’m just a random autistic sixteen year old on the internet. (Although, I can see why you think that… sort of.)

@SmartMars603  
Hate speech (unfortunately) is free speech.
 
Anything goes unless it intends to harm, or lie.
 
Like the media can’t just lie and paint a saint as a complete racist without a source and get sued for slander.
 
Or somebody screaming “BOMB” in a crowded area where people will in a result, run and trample each other.
 
While hate speech is bad, it is protected. We let the KKK and Nazi parties in America do their little protests and scream some shit about how Jewish people destory the economy and rule the world and that the Earth is flat.
 
We just ignore them unless they start brandishing weapons or say explicit things online that could lead to another tragedy.

@Dave33333  
Isn’t the entire point of hate speech to cause harm to certain types of people, just because they’re people?

@SmartMars603  
Not exactly since they express their hate for a specific group of people but don’t usually end up causing bodily harm or murder.
 
They can say they hate somebody all they want, but the worst they can do is cause emotional damage unless they just ignore them. And emotional damage doesn’t usually fall under illegal circumstances. At least to my knowledge.

@Dave33333  
Nothing you say here is “protected” if it violates our rules. Whenever anyone promotes any actual, IRL Nazi party or movement here we delete their posts.
 
@Dave33333  
You also don’t get to intentionally cause “emotional damage” to others here.
 
If you want to talk about your freedom of speech, go to the political thread.

@Dave33333  
Hate speech can directly, and usually does, lead to hate crimes, which do physical damage.  
(This probably belongs in the political thread, but since I don’t feel like going there, I’m going to leave it there and drop it like it’s hot and burning my skin.)

I am all for free speech, But we can not tolerate hate

@Background Pony #4A8A  
“They speak the truth!”

I frankly feel offended that someone takes a tragic event, and uses it for an anti-freespeecg agenda like this.  
That “link” between the two is nonsense. A school shooter doesn’t browse Derpibooru and say: “YES! a nazi parody has 100 upvotes! THE MASSES HAVE SIDED WITH ME, time to bring on the murder!” If you panic so bad every time a bad thing happens somewhere in the world that you go as far as trying to enforce a society-wide ban on anything tangentially related to a subject, you are NOT being a force for good. You’re just abusing a tragedy to create arbitrary limitations on freedom. You might even be scapegoating people for something they had nothing to do with.
 
You could as as well say something like, “in the light of the recent swine fever epidemic in China/Africa, we can no longer treat meat eating as a joke - remove all the “carnivore Twilight” memes!”
 
As stated, blatant incitement to hatred is regulated on the site. Parodies do not fall under this nor should they. Currently you (OP) are one step away from blending edgy teens and parodists in the same group as nazis an murderers. I do hope you don’t take that plunge.

^To clarify: this has actually happened to me a few times. There’d be, say, a book with a black character and someone would scream “this book is racist! we must destroy it! everyone who enjoys it is racist too and probably has other crimes!” and you’re like: no, it’s not…it literally just has a black character. In fact excluding it would be MORE racist. And they’d be like: “omg you’re a racist too! DESTROYBAN”whatever. This happens very easily when you adopt a mindset like OP.
 
There’s something so contradictory and misguided when you claim to be out to stop hate and try to achieve it by creating more hate towards unrelated, undeserving things. These “solutions” are never aimed towards actual help or solution of the problems or tragediesthey cite. They just exploit them, which is fairly disgusting. They are always easy target goals that don’t help but may make one feel better? And at the cost of putting a stigma on others. It’s…yeah, don’t do it, just don’t.

I think this conversation has probably gone as far as it can without degenerating. Suffice to say, aryanne isn’t going anywhere (except the pony equivalent of The Hague), but that isn’t a carte blanch to post any old racist shit with an obligatory pony attached and expect it to stay. This is as it has always been, and unless the law changes significantly, as it always shall be.

For whatever is worth, I’d like to echo what Archonix just said. I don’t want to reveal too much about myself, but having recently seen this phenomenon rise around me, I think I have a bit of knowledge from experience to impart.
 
Unlike what some say, there is a difference between ironic and unironic bigotry on the internet, and the overwhelming majority of instances, it’s easily discernible. Memes, jokes, art etc. conveying ironic bigotry, by and large, aren’t a problem and should be tolerated. Unironic bigotry, on the other hand, is the sort of thing which poses some problem, because, unlike the ironic ones, it carries signal, so to speak. And this signal, sadly, does get through to, ahem, weaker minds. Nowadays, education in the West is possibly at its worst quality ever since public and universal education began, and popular culture is an endless desolation, having been stripped of nearly all artistic and cultural merit for the sake of simple mass consumption. You probably heard of the Flynn effect by now, but what you probably don’t know is that it has been reversed. The average person is becoming dumber.
 
With this in mind, the current wave of reactionary idiocy around the world was inevitable, really. The garbage dumpster was already doused in gasoline, and, sooner or later, a spark would ignite it. Ultimately, a lot, if not the majority of people in the West, are just plain unable to discern between politics and entertainment. And to anyone so completely devoid of critical sense, unironic bigotry, even in the form of memes, jokes, fanart and whatnot, does act as propaganda, unfortunately.
 
So, my recommendation is this. First, make sure the people in charge of moderation are sensible enough to discern between ironic and unironic bigotry, and, this is also important, that they aren’t easily-offended. This way, unironic bigotry should be terminated on sight, and ironic bigotry, tolerated. The latter serves a subtle function, acting as a honeypot to the aforementioned dimwits, who, being dimwits, will think that the ironic bigotry means they are in likeminded company. In other words, the ironic content induces the proverbial chaff amidst the userbase into revealing themselves, making the purging all the easier. Bigots, as a rule, are dissimulated, and will only ever reveal as much of their revolting ideas as they think they can get away with, and thus, giving them a false sense of security is the best way to weed them out. There’s a reason why most Western countries don’t immediately clamp down on radical speech, and it isn’t sheer love of freedom.

@OneMoreAnonymous  
While I agree with most of what you said, I do want to stress that we’re not trying to “purge” anyone.
 
So, where possible we try to help people get along with others, and only “purge” people who have shown that they are simply incapable of getting along with others, whether that is because they are belligerent bigots, or suffering from some chronic mental condition that they are unable to mediate.
 
We only have one planet. Eventually we all have to get along.
 
For me, that’s the core message of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic.
 
Before Twilight and her friends, the solutions to all of the little pony’s problems was to seal things in stone, lock them away in Tartarus, banish things to the moon, or aspirate them with their god-like laser horns.
 
Since Twilight and her friends came along, friendship has become the solution to most of their problems.
 
Some are still irredeemable and can’t be reasoned with. So there’s still a Tartarus, and periodically you catch the whiff of the dusty remains of some creature that couldn’t be reasoned with on the evening breeze.
 
So this site has a Tartarus and other containment threads for people who are unable to co-exist with others without arguing about politics or bitching about the hot buttons of their special identity politics at least SOME of the time, and bans and staff who watch for ban evaders for those who simply can’t be civil with others.
 
But, no purges. We allow things on this site that some of us on staff frankly despise. Because at some point, we all have to get along.