I used to frequent /r/t_d when it was created, before the Republican primaries for the 2016 election. I visited every day because I was absolutely astonished at the gigantic marketing effort behind it. I had never seen anything like that before, and haven't since. It probably had a team of dozens or hundreds of Russians behind it, creating memes and shitposting on a payroll. And it obviously was 100% inorganic.
Edit: to be clear, I'm more concerned about how russia was basically banned from the site but worldnews itself seems like the primary fountain of western astroturfing on the internet. No matter your opinion of putin, that is extremely unhealthy for productive discourse. I don't care about american domestic politics.
Reddit is filled with calls to violence, I would say it's gotten quite worse since. What's changed is that it all comes from one side now.
When you curate the echo chamber, the calls start coming from inside the house.
A short version of this is, if you let a nazi come to your bar, you have a nazi bar.
When you claim that calls for violence are not freedom of speech, it's a slippery slope that leads you to absurdities like speech that could "lead" to calls of violence are not freedom of speech, or that secret codes that could be interpreted as speech that would lead to calls to violence are not freedom of speech, or that violent-sounding slang that is eventually recognized as being encoded speech that would lead to calls of violence isn't freedom of speech, or that people who own bars who host people who use violent-sounding slang that is related to secret codes for speech that could lead to calls for violence are nazis.
And since nazis deserve to be violently suppressed...
No, it doesn't. The concept of "free speech" isn't limited to prior restraint, you're mistaking it for the dominant precedent in judicial interpretations of the the 1st Amendment of the US constitution.
> It doesn't mean your fellow citizens need to stand there and listen to your shit,
Nobody asked you, or claimed this.
> nor does it mean you are entitled to any sort of platform or megaphone.
You should look up common carrier previsions. If we had to depend on your interpretation of law or morality, they'd be able to shut off your electricity for speech violations.
> It means you can scream on the side of the road into the ether and you won't be arrested for it.
If that's all it meant, it would be dumb and useless. What's more, it doesn't mean that, you can be arrested for screaming on the side of the road.
You're wrong in every way you could be wrong.
Even HN is only quasi-free speech, there are rules that will get one censored.
If you love freedom, there are mailing lists and other platforms but they arnt as high on dopamine and the audience gets a little bit more sketch.
Somehow we jut gave business owners more freedoms than we gave everyone else....