Reddit is under no obligation to support, nurture, or pay for the resources required to keep this up. They are under no obligation to implicitly condone this content, as they have taken on an editorial role in the past and now anything they don't ban is in contrast to those things they have. As you pointed out, it's the web. There are many web hosts that will refuse you service for hosting pornography. That doesn't prevent anyone from finding one that will allow it.
Technically you are 100% correct. They are definitely within their rights, as are twitter and facebook. The problem is that we've got a de facto (as opposed to de jure) "censorship" system going on where people with undesired opinions are being forced (whether they wanted it or not) into echo chambers.
"Censorship" just forces people underground to talk amongst other people with the same opinions. While it has some kind of measurable effect on preventing impressionable people from being exposed to their opinions, it also prevents people from discussing alternative views with the ones who were "censored". This is a large part of the reason why everyone was blindsided by Trump, the trump supporters were largely either not speaking up due to social penalties for doing so or only talking on-line in forums where other people agreed with them.
If the goal is to "defeat" the alt-right movement, then I don't think it is necessarily obvious that banning them is the right move. As I said though, maybe it is since it does limit exposure to their views which in theory limits their membership.
Note: Scare quoted censorship due to it not being government run which is what people usually mean when they say censorship.
One of the big problems here though is thing like twitter's recent behavior(I'm using twitter as an example but other sites do it too).
You can say something hateful, disrespectful, and even threatening to/about a white person(or people) and twitter doesn't care even if you are reported.
However if you say the same thing about/to a black person (or people) [literally the same sentence with only those words switched out] then when reported you will be banned.
If twitter(and others) would actually apply their rules fairly, a lot of people would be a lot less upset.
are mockery and satire respectful? what does that make Stewart, Colbert, Bee, Meyers, and Oliver? how about SRD and SRS? they are assholes too but they deserve their space to mock people they disagree with. should /r/atheism be banned for its disrespect towards religion? /r/atheism has the same fervent hate towards people of belief.
you dont have to listen to those subreddits. dont subscribe to them. dont hang out in /r/all if you cant handle seeing things you disagree with.
you just called other peoples views a cesspool of garbage, and youre advocating respect.
> the trump supporters were largely either not speaking up due to social penalties for doing so or only talking on-line in forums where other people agreed with them.
You have a good point about driving people underground, instead of giving them an outlet - but as the article points out,
> Like the mod said in his own words, they are not interested in public policy, they are focused on white nationalist racial discussion. To continue on that course without steering into hate speech is impossible.
Unless they are literally calling for people to take action and kill/harass/otherwise harm people I see no reason to "censor" them. From what I've seen, most of that subreddit is hating on other races(which definitely is hate speech) but not calling any real action. I also don't consider calling for legitimate political action to be worthy of "censorship" either, only going outside the political system to directly harm.
Why isn't Spez able to arbitrarily delete subreddits? Why isn't Twitter starting mass deportations? I don't see any reason for them to wait. They can get started right away. It's easy to write a regex that identifies Trump supporters and eliminates their accounts quickly. Why haven't we started yet?
