Justin Ward
2 min readJun 25, 2019

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There is content fetishizing children that is nevertheless legal. It was just (justifiably) banned by Youtube.

“Wow, a private company adjusted its own internal policy to make its platform more enjoyable, generate more profit and reduce harm to children? Are WE IN NORTH KOREA?!??!?”

-You, probably.

At one point Reddit used to have a subreddit called r/WatchN****rsDie. It was full of videos of black people getting murdered, hit by cars, beaten to death, and neo-Nazis cheering it all on. Were they wrong to ban that?

In r/Incels young desperate men would gather to alternately encourage each other to kill themselves or to mass murder women. Were they wrong to ban that?

Get over your persecution complex. I’m not calling for subreddits to be banned because they want to repeal the estate tax or advocate small government. I’m not calling for subreddits to get banned for being anti-abortion (unless they’re calling for abortion doctors to be murdered) or for being pro-border wall (unless they’re fantasizing about murdering immigrants, which happens in The_Donald regularly).

If you treat calls to ban hate speech on online platforms as an attack on conservatives, you know you’re basically saying bigotry is a conservative position, right?

Like when Laura Ingraham included Neo-Nazi Paul Nehlen on her list of conservative “free speech” martyrs. The guy literally praised the murder of Jews at the Tree of Life.

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Justin Ward
Justin Ward

Written by Justin Ward

Journalist and activist. Founder and co-chair of DivestSPD. Bylines at SPLC, The Baffler, GEN, USA Today. Follow on Twitter: @justwardoctrine, @DivestSPD

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