Forums, Facebook and Free Speech

[anonymous-user]

Recently a thread in NP&E was closed by Haymarket for not abiding by the Forum rules (this one: http://www.pistonheads.com/gassing/topic.asp?h=0&a... which prompted lots of tongue in cheek remarks but also some utterances alluding to this being suppression of free speech.

Now with Pistonheads it seems fairly clear cut to me-it's their ball and they choose who can and can't play with it, and how the game is played. They perhaps have to walk a line between ensuring that they don't annoy too many people and ensuring nothing too offensive is posted but IMO they have zero responsibility towards 'free speech' and they can censor what they want on the website if they choose to.

But what about Facebook and Twitter and other massive social networks? Perhaps the same could be said of them-they are commercial ventures and can choose to censor what they like. However for some reason it'd make me very uncomfortable if they began to overtly censor certain political views.
At the moment there are some occasional mutterings about this going on it mostly seems to be small and isolated and those with extreme views that are racist/sexist/otherist that moan about it.

For you do big 'social' businesses have some sort of responsibility to promote/defend free speech? Should they? And if so where would you draw the line at when a commercial venture must preserve free speech, even over it's own business models and views?

[anonymous-user]

IMO if people write obviously unpleasant posts, rather than delete them the mods should lock them so the posts are there for all to see and the poster defend, if they can. It's not just racism/extreme politics either, there have been various posts where the usual types poked fun at people killing themselves; those posts should have stood as testament to the lack of character of the poster. That said presumably haymarket is just protecting itself from whatever legal ramifications there are for being the publisher of 'offensive' material. It's stupid that they have to but this is the world we've allowed ourselves to be bullied into by the professionally offended and their lawyers.

[anonymous-user]

anonymous said:

[redacted]

I'm struggling to define the commonly used term 'professionally offended' succinctly without just describing an argumentitive muppet. The latter being someone, typically of limited intelligence, who would for example chose to interpret a colloquial phrase literally in order to make some long winded banal point. The former is much like the latter except they throw in one or more 'isms in order to claim some perceived moral high ground, seemingly oblivious to the fact that everyone else is rolling their eyes at them. Both are tedious.

[anonymous-user]

Digga said:

If by value you mean political and implicit intent then no, it's really not hard to see what they're doing: on topics where they feel the majority view of their readers and/or the national as a whole conflicts with their world view and ideals, they'll block discussion. Dangerous and disingenuous.

FWIW, I do not think this relates to PH's very different stance. they were happy for a reasoned debate to be conducted, but stepped in when it deteriorated into something akin to the Mad Hatter's Tea Party, with stupidity and ignorance on both main sides of the discussion.

But this is the thing-why is it 'dangerous and disingenuous' for the Guardian and yet PH's stance is ok? Is it because you don't see PH's stance as one sided-or because the Guardian is larger than PH?