Reddit has to make a lot of decisions, some were soon after she joined. Not sure CEOs of social media company get involved in making that decision personally, rather than name people who would -- Pao might be an exception, though.
From all the subreddits that were closed, I’d be hard-pressed to name one that I felt contributed to free speech.
I don't know enough about the situation to take a definite position.
However, it seems to me that free speech is intended to protect the expression of unpopular viewpoints. In that case, I think that we should protect people's right to advocate that suicide, shoplifting, or advocating watching people die should be legal.
However, as long as those things are not legal then it doesn't necessarily violate free speech to restrict the practices themselves or information on how to engage in the practices.
Actually spent quite a while going through the list of banned subs to eliminate contentious ones, gotta make commenters work for it :)
They are a US based website subject to those laws, even if those words posted on their site didn't violate laws, it's entirely legal for them to censor at will for any reason they deem ok.
In most cases, the subreddits openly advocated for crimes, often violent, which I understand is the type of speech that isn’t protected by even the most relaxed definition of free speech.
I’m surprised to quote FIFA as an example but on that point, they have had fairly exemplary approach [0]. Players occasionally try to make political statements, and Fifa has a progressive take on infractions. An unexpected outburst after a victory is usually met with a stern conversation, possibly leaked to the press for good measure; repeated offence, something egregious acting after being explicitly warned not to lead to symbolic fines. You’d need to really cross a line to get near the sanction that Blizzard thought was appropriate for someone expressing a widespread sentiment in his home country.
Blizzard dosen't give a shit about it being political speech, what they care about is that it might upset the Chinese Communist Party, and their profits in the process.
I didn't know that as I'm not up on soccer, but I'm not surprised. This is liberal ideology at its most pure, and it leads to a great many of the social problems we have today. Some know taking a moral position will disenfranchise some subset and reduce their income, and some know that society would recoil (usually rightly!) at their views if they were forced to spell them out.
Are you perhaps using "liberal ideology" in a way that's different than what I'm used to? It seems that Blizzard's decisions were made in service of Capitalism which is a belief system that I associate more with conservative rather than liberal ideology.
