-1 upvotes, 1 direct replies (showing 1)
View submission: Content Policy Update
The latter is only binding upon the US state. The former is one of the basic principles of western society.
The latter is binding upon the US state. The former says that reddit decides what kind of stuff gets published on their website, and not you, because it's their website, and not yours.
You're acting like you're somehow morally entitled to post here. You're not. If you had a website, I seriously doubt that you'd allow random douchebags to post whatever shit they wanted because of their free speech rights to post *their* shit on *your* website.
Comment by Whisper at 07/08/2015 at 18:33 UTC
4 upvotes, 1 direct replies
One of the ways that governments of the past practiced censorship was to ban certain materials (typically pornography or literature considered subversive) from the mail system. In the United States, it could do this because the mail was a federal system, a branch of the state... until it eventually was decided that it may *not* do this, because the first amendment is binding on all branches of the state.
Now, in the modern world, we have private mail systems which compete with the state mail system... fedex, ups, and so forth. If fedex were to decide tomorrow that all pornographic material was banned from its delivery network, and that it would open and examine all packages to make sure they contained none, and that if any were found, the source and destination addresses would be permanently banned from the network, none of this would actually be illegal.
Nonetheless, I suspect that neither you nor I nor anyone would be remotely okay with this.
A society or culture talks within itself by exchanging messages through the medium of some sort of messenger. That messenger can be a physical phenomenon (sound carried through the air), a service of the state (the postal system), or a privately owned medium (the internet). However, if the messenger is able to pick and choose which messages to carry, and who to carry messages from, rather than neutrally carrying the messages of anyone who pays their fee, then *the messenger controls the discourse*.
And we have to decide, collectively, whether we are comfortable with that or not. The *state* has the mandate to enforce the rules about which behaviours are absolutely not allowed, and is at least theoretically accountable for what it does. A private messenger is not.
It's facile and simple to say "Well, they *should* be allowed to decide what gets posted on their website!", and this seems sensible when expressed so narrowly. After all, I can kick people out of my house for saying things I don't like, because it's my house.
But is a website really analogous to a house? The definition of private property is the right to exclude others. To what extent are we okay with the owners of *carrier media*, such as a website or an ISP, excluding individuals or content from the dialogue?
Can reddit decide to exclude racial minorities and become a "whites-only" site (verification required)? Can your ISP decide that they do not want any campaign material supporting Bernie Sanders for President to travel across *their* fiberoptic cable? Can Verizon decide to block reddit because it contains /r/islam ?
These are questions that we owe more thought to than "dude, it's like... *their* house, man, you know? And there's no law against it!".