“ once you censor some content you are implicitly endorsing allowed content. That means that you are on the road to destruction.”
Not really. Free Republic, appropriately and with good reason, censors blatantly racist/nazi posts. Has that been the road to destruction, or has it helped maintain civil discourse?
What you say might be true at the governmental level, but completely unmoderated online forums always devolve into trash.
I follow many forums of different kinds.
One off the charts controversial forum has successfully solved the “moderation” problem with a simple rule:
—Only three posts per hour.
That knocks out almost all spam and the obviously kooky posters find it boring after a while...
It works—no “censorship” required.
I have learned a lot from that forum—since it covers a wide range of heavily censored topics in almost every field of human knowledge.
Btw—many folks think that there is just political speech that is being heavily censored these days. That is not correct. Unconventional views in almost any field are under constant assault by a wide range of censorship.
History has shown that a small percentage of “nuts” in any age turn out to be brilliant folks who saw things other more conventional folks did not see. Yes—most of them turn out to be real nuts—but if you ban all of them you lose the richness of real debate where all oxes can be gored.
It was less than a hundred readers out of millions of readers!
I think it is different. Free Republic is not created to be an open posting platform. It is intended from its beginnings to provide a forum to promote a certain overall viewpoint, with discussion only around the edges.