An additional question: suppose you could limit the power of the alt-right, neo-nazies, and other racist agitators by limiting the flow of information.
Would also be against that?
1. http://www.theweek.co.uk/politics/22535/both-china-and-west-...
In an ideal world, then I'd say that the goal should be to educate the current and future generations to develop critical thinking capabilities, so that they'll hopefully laugh/cry/shake their head (or if they have more patience/heart than me, try to educate) when they read the kind of information you'd more often than not find on the_donald.
I honestly don't support the idea of censorship, and I believe everyone should have the right to privacy (I'm very saddened today to discover that Apple/NSA/Chinese government/etc is likely secretly recording my iPhone screen as I type this message). A part of me would even want to go as far as to say that if people wanted to spread hateful messages/illegal activity, then the solution shouldn't be to censor them, but rather to rely on the people to downvote and educate. Imagine a Reddit where mods were incapable of deleting/censoring any content. What do you think would happen? I personally have no idea, but I believe that there's a real chance these alt-right and racist aggregators wouldn't be able to succeed in creating a "safe haven" where they'd continue to have their hateful views reinforced. I recently read an interesting article about a neo-nazi that was forced to interact with a black police officer, resulting in a friendship that ended his hateful views. I strongly believe that if they couldn't censor rational voices (which I'd like to believe outnumber them by at least 10 to 1) then there's a high chance that their views could be corrected.
It would definitely be very difficult to achieve this when governments like Russia's appear willing to commit hundreds of millions of dollars (I'm assuming) in supporting hateful views. But I do (probably naively) believe that if people were highly educated then it should be possible to build a platform that could withstand these state attacks (e.g. value an upvote by a high karma user higher than a low karma user). Do you think the HN crowd would be negatively influenced (persuaded) by hateful flow of information? If the answer is no, doesn't that mean that high intelligence can withstand hateful/fake information and that there'd therefore be no need to censor it?
Censorship is dangerous because it can easily be abused. You may want to argue that with the right censorship tools then we could've prevented Trump from becoming the president. But what happens when a manic like him ends up in a position of control over said censorship tools? I'm guessing he'd do everything possible to become a dictator, to rewrite history, to spread his hateful views, to worsen the education and attempt to brainwash the students, etc. The way I see it, the only sustainable solution would be achieving a highly intelligent population.