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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 5, 2023

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Oh, sure. But this is how Twitter / Facebook / Rotten Tomatoes and all the other ones talked themselves into their current policies, or got pushed into them, or justified them to skeptics. If I remember correctly, one of the big turning points was when social media companies realised that they were the linchpin of Isis recruitment efforts, complete with execution videos.

If you’re serious about building something which supports free speech, you therefore have to recognise that a fraction of your users are going to be trolls and bad actors. Another fraction will use the existence of the first faction to push their agenda, and you have to have countermeasures for both.

As countermeasures go, this site’s rules do pretty well, I think, with the caveat that it relies on the good will and restraint of a handful of mods to function.