Violentacrez is a scumbag and the fact that redditors are willing to stand behind him as some sort of show of reddit brotherhood is a large part of the reason why I don't go there much anymore.
1. If you stand for free speech, you are going to be defending assholes and thugs and people who say disgusting things. We don't need free speech for people who emit rainbows. The ACLU defended the KKK's right to march, not because they thought the KKK was a bunch of nice guys or that the KKK would ever return the favor if the ACLU were in trouble.
2. It's more about the doxxing, which seems to be the one legal thing that isn't allowed on reddit. Either they have the policy that doxxing is horrible or they don't.
You can have a policy of "we are not allowed to publish personally identifying info of anyone."
You can have a policy of "we are allowed to publish personally identifying info of anyone at will," but you need to realize that it will also affect people you like as well as people you don't like.
What doesn't work is "we are allowed to publish personally identifying info of people that a sizable minority of the community thinks sucks."
Which is an argument that flies legally, but not morally depending on what you believe.
If you believe in free speech, then using the fact that your website is private to censor others is not a violation of the law, but it certainly seems like a violation of your own declared ideology. Which is to say, you would support free speech until it got inconvenient.
Reddit as a community seems to place a high value on free speech, so while they're under no legal obligation to keep things open, it would be a violation of its own declared ideology if they started censoring.
Note that I don't miss the creepy subreddits at all, but if you're one of the people on /r/politics, /r/atheism, or whatever who are quoting Voltaire all the time, it seems hypocritical to call for censorship.
Ultimately, I think it is exploitative of the reddit corporation and their masters to allow completely disgusting and clearly immoral content. This is 2012. The internet isn't the wild west anymore.
I support free speech but I certainly wouldn't allow the KKK to march through my backyard.
Exactly like all the pro-/r/CreepShots/ arguments.
Upskirts, panty shots, and the such are not legally protected, even if they are done in public. As a street photographer myself I'm quite familiar with the difference.
Which is to say, much of the content on /r/creepshots wouldn't pass legal muster, let alone the morality test.
Oh, it's ok to do it to violentacrez, but not to someone slightly less creepy? Are you in favor of the slightly less creepy guy? What about someone talking about drugs online? Hacking?
I'm not usually a 'principle-above-the-particulars' kind of guy but when it comes to free speech and privacy online, you've gotta keep it absolute.
Actually if that person is publically and actively opposing gay rights (e.g. political who blathers on about how bad gay people are and shouldn't have rights, and then is caught with a prostitute of the same gender), then yes, those people should be doxxes.
"You know, when I was a young man, hypocrisy was deemed the worst of vices. It was all because of moral relativism. You see, in that sort of a climate, you are not allowed to criticise others--after all, if there is no absolute right and wrong, then what grounds is there for criticism?
"Now, this led to a good deal of general frustration, for people are naturally censorious and love nothing better than to criticise others' shortcomings. And so it was that they seized on hypocrisy and elevated it from a ubiquitous peccadillo into the monarch of all vices..."
http://fishbowl.pastiche.org/2006/03/21/hypocrisy_is_the_gre...
For better or worse, the reddit admins want free speech, in which the admins don't prohibit anything that isn't illegal in the US. The one exception, which they apply in a viewpoint-neutral basis, is doxxing. The policy is "no doxxing," not "no doxxing unless you really really hate someone."
Now, you can say that the doxxers were doing their version of protest. Civil disobedience, I guess, because they think that reddit's approach to free speech is wrong. We now have two mutually exclusive philosophies in conflict, and reddit will need to choose one of them.
There are numerous different defintions of free speech. Some countries draw the line in different places. E.g. in the USA, you cannot say "shout fire in a crowded theatre", and there are various laws against revelaing some USA military knowledge. All "right to free speech" laws have limits, as they should.
It's more about the doxxing, which seems to be the one legal thing
Here's a thought, in the EU, we have data protection/privacy law. It's illegal to release personal details of people unless it's within the law. I wonder is doxing illegal?
The folks in creepshots and its kin are in fact doing something against the law, and they should be shut down accordingly. This is not a free-speech issue.
Every country decides where to set it's limits, the USA is almost certainly the one that has a few limits as possible, but it has limits, it has set the line somewhere/
We have a moral obligation to protect free speech from government intrusion.
We have an equal or greater moral obligation to personally confront the KKK, and sexual predators in order to enforce moral standards within our community.
The government's job is to make sure we both get to speak, and don't kill each other over the disagreement. The first amendment has nothing to do with protecting KKK members from public shaming and expulsion for the views they profess.
"You" wasn't "you, thwest." It was to the reddit admins and their own desire to have a community of free speech. Once they, the reddit admins, decide that they, the reddit admins, want a community of free speech, then they, the reddit admins, are going to find themselves supporting the rights of assholes to speak.
I guess the question is whether that is a sensible policy. It may make sense to protect anonymity - I can see that - but does it make sense to protect nothing else? Is anonymity really the only true community value?
Violentacrez's speech rights do not automatically trump the privacy rights of his victims. His ideas and opinions can be communicated via speech that does not violate the rights of others, and so when balancing his speech rights against their privacy rights I'd favor the privacy rights.
Sure they are media and sure the media loves a witch hunt but the bottom line is that their actions are threatening and it's blatant blackmail. In my opinion their actions are as disgusting as their targets online activity.
It's easy to defend and justify stuff being anon.
Warning: most of those are exactly what it says on the tin. Pics of dead kids is exactly that.
He also claimed to have had sex with his (of legal age) stepdaughter (whom he raised from a very young age).
I suspected a lot of his activity was bluster just to get people riled up, but I think I'm in the minority, and probably completely wrong.