this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2023
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OP may come across a little alarmist, but it's really easy for online communities to become Nazi bars if the admins aren't carefully weeding out the ne'er-do-wells. Especially in places with open signups. Taking a hands-off approach and simply hoping that everyone is going to be a mature adult and behave themselves is effectively voting to surrender the site to assholes.
And yeah, they follow "the rules", and free speech and all that, until they don't. The thing to keep in mind is that these are not folks who, as a community, are interested in engaging in good-faith discussion. They are looking for a platform to spread disinformation and troll the libz, and any platform that facilitates it is also complicit.
Actively purging communities of reactionaries is pretty important and the hands-off attitude that some Free Speech Warriors inherited from Reddit advocate for is only going to spread reaction. If they care so much about Free Speech, they can go back to their pedophile website and talk about how r/jailbait needed to be kept up for the sake of free speech.