Free speech..

[ukaviator]

I posted this recently after someone had to be Moderated by the team:

 

Many of the online sites where you may think "free speech" is protected, you actually don’t have the same right to free speech that you would in a truly public forum. This is true of Facebook, Twitter, and pretty much all the major social media sites I’m aware of. Review their Terms of Service and see for yourself. While it may seem that you’re entitled to free speech just the same as you would in a public forum. Some online services are quite liberal when it comes to restricting your free speech rights, while others are more restrictive. We aim to be around a long time and have to constantly be careful about what we say.

 

This isn’t some draconian conspiracy. It’s largely a matter of business realities. Creating and managing a highly social website isn’t free. If someone is going to go to the trouble to host and maintain such a community, especially one that may become very popular, they want to make sure they have enough control over the management of the site to fulfill their reasons for building the community in the first place. Unbridled free speech can easily degrade the quality of a community and run afoul of the site owner’s agenda. Allowing unbridled free speech on this website would be a very bad idea. It’s easy enough to predict what would happen because I know what our moderators deal with on a daily basis, and I’ve seen what happens to other forums that have done that. Within a few months, the site would be overrun by spammers and marketers looking to promote their wares. Hope you understand the reasons for moderating some posts and threads.