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this post was submitted on 10 Aug 2023
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Did everyone just skip right past reading this part? That's a lot of exceptions that cover a large gamut of activity that will continue to be not allowed. That's not exactly "free speech" by definition, but it also is not allowing content that most platforms also do not allow.
I am not exactly sure what I am missing?
There's a lot of types of bigotry and other general nastiness that are not covered by that.
Normally I would not be so nitpicky with language but if multiple admins were removed / quit over it, that's pretty suspect.
I would imagine a place shouldn't even need rules for that in the first place, but I understand people arent always the most kind they can be online.
I think also, a lot of what is called "bigotry" is often being subjectively identified (that is, one person thinks a thing is bigoted while another doesn't, certainly one cannot and should not always default to agreeing that every interaction is bigoted otherwise no interaction would be allowed anywhere), but I would imagine a vast majority of "bigotry" would still fall under the very vast "slurs racial or otherwise" or "targetted harassment" exceptions.
I dont know all the details, but its possible these admins may have been overly strict in removing content they considered bigoted to the point of being disruptive. I used to operate a forum back in the early 2000s (for reverse engineering video game software) and there was one moderator I had to remove because they were too strict in their deletion of content for a similar reason. Entire threads would be left graveyards and there was no way to discern the context.
I am only presenting my own speculation of course. What you're saying is also possible. The only way to know is to wait and see what happens. I think a big problem for those platforms is how quickly people bandwagon leaving when a small group decry a potential problem. It's like when people try a new game with a low player population, then call the game dead. Those people leave, and they tell everyone else the game is dead. So nobody really joins, except the bottomfeeders nobody else wants.
There's a screenshot elsewhere in the comments of him saying he was specifically removing transphobia and homophobia as punishable offenses from the rules because those rules "were being used to silence conservative voices." That's a pretty clear stance to me.