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This is going to be a bit of a threadnought on free speech, but I feel like if it helps one person who disagrees with me to understand that we're talking past each other, it might be productive.
Fundamentally, you believe that speech that offends you needs to be banned, or at least cut out of mainstream platforms. I don't. This is why you don't understand me defending the speech -- because you will only defend speech you find acceptable.
You are working from a theory that speech itself is 'violence', that words can be 'harmful'. I am working from a theory that the best counter to bad ideas is good ideas and that any speech, no matter how offensive, should be protected in an open community or nation.
Let's take an apolitical idea: Lightning Dust is best pony. You probably think this is wrong -- you disagree with what I'm saying -- but you don't feel an overwhelming need to ban me from saying it because you accept that it's not harmful.
So, for general speech, we both agree that it's okay to say something that we disagree with. You can argue by saying "No, Rainbow Dash is best pony", or we can both just get on with our lives with differing opinions, and probably even still be friends despite our disagreement.
We also agree that despite you being okay with me saying "Lightning Dust is best pony", that doesn't mean that you agree with me -- it just means that you're willing to accept that we don't share an opinion. You're PlayStation, I'm XBox. You're Falcons, I'm Panthers.
So, at least for the sake of best faith argument, we can agree on some common principles:
1. It's okay for people, generally, to say things that we disagree with; and
2. Defending someone's right to express something does not mean agreeing with the contents of that expression.
1. It's okay for people, generally, to say things that we disagree with; and
2. Defending someone's right to express something does not mean agreeing with the contents of that expression.
It's therefore, on political speech, that your principles seem to change and mine stay the same. If you go out and say "we should have full communism", I'm not going to agree with that, but I'm also not going to advocate for you to lose your job or be disallowed from posting it.
Let's take the most extreme case and work backwards to what we have on Derpi. A Nazi group wants to protest, in public, with swastikas. Again, neither of us agree with this group. Your first reaction is to ban their protest, shutting down their right to spew hateful shit.
My first reaction is to organize a counter-demonstration with American flags and make sure that they know that their speech isn't welcome. Neither of us are agreeing with them, we just disagree about how to disagree.
You think that preventing them from speaking will stop them from recruiting more Nazis, I think that allowing them to speak, and giving our side a chance to obliterate their dreadful talking points will stop them from recruiting more Nazis. The ACLU agrees with me.
If we take each other in good faith that both of us want to stop the Nazis from getting power (and trust me, as an orthodox Jew, I have a lot to fear from Nazis getting power), then we can debate the merits of both approaches without slurs and hate.
In the USA, we have the strongest protections for freedom of speech in the world, yet we have never had anything close to a fascist government. The Weimar Republic imprisoned Nazis for hate speech and became their seat of power.
Freedom of expression definitely doesn't mean freedom from consequences, either. People who protest at the Nazi rally are likely to face social ostracision and potential economic effects of their speech, *because* we allowed them to speak.
Now let's take this down a level and talk about the actual subject at hand: not real Nazis but references to Nazis. In this case, a My Little Pony fan character with Nazi iconography.
Now, whether or not you find the character distasteful, again for the sake of arguing in good faith, it's fair to assume that the vast majority of people drawing her are not all Nazis. We could probably split them into three rough groups: provocateurs, fetishists, and Nazis.
The provocateurs are from what I can see, the largest group. These range from people deliberately trying to offend other people (a liberal tradition dating back to protests against blasphemy laws) to those trying to create an uncomfortable juxtaposition between Nazism and ponies.
It's fair to say that edgy jokes may cause offense, but jokes -- even bad jokes -- are just that. If you've laughed at the spicier jokes in South Park, played Cards Against Humanity, or found ebola-chan or other spicy memes funny, you probably fall into this category somewhat.
Notable comedians on both the left and the right have discussed the importance of free speech in comedy for nearly two centuries. Most of us posted in solidarity with Charlie Hebdo when their comedians were killed by terrorists, despite disagreeing with their content.
Second group as I see it (and this group tends to have the most upvotes) are the fetishists. They draw risque or pornographic images of Aryanne with Nazi iconography or framing. I don't think this group needs much elaboration, except to say that it's a common fetish.
Lastly, we have the actual Nazis. These people tend to make very low-effort 'mouthpiece' pictures where Aryanne is almost an 'accessory' to a political treaty written on the page. These are the least common by far.
There are actually a fourth group now: people just drawing and posting Aryanne as an object of protest against censorship. It's arguable that these people have a lot of cross-over with the edgy memers, but there is a different purpose.
The purpose of edgy jokes is humor -- to make people laugh (see the weed image), the purpose of protests against censorship is to make a political statement that people will not be told what to draw (see the 'no fun allowed' image).
Now, I have zero issue whatsoever with groups 1/2/4 -- the spicy memers, the fetishists, and the protestors. The question therefore, for me, becomes a) whether we should deny the Nazis a platform for their mouthpiece pics and b) whether we can without targeting the others.
Now, some of you in favor of the ban may actually agree with everything I've written so far, and others may not, and you may even agree with my conclusion to 'b' which is that it's impossible to meaningfully write a rule that can discern between a spicy meme and politics.
My answer to 'a' is actually irrelevant at this point, but I expect it's the most controversial: I don't think we should 'de-platform' this kind of political speech because it sets the precedent that any political speech we find disagreeable should be banned.
People argue that this is a slippery slope argument, but we already have people getting fired from their jobs for writing "all lives matter" on Twitter, meanwhile "white lives don't matter" is completely acceptable. https://wwos.nine.com.au/news/nba-announcer-fired-over-controversial-all-lives-matter-tweet/a9a50198-4b52-4cb7-a800-e0ffacb3302d
What I would suggest is that if you want to fight Nazis on Derpibooru, you should also be fully allowed to draw ponies representing the allied forces, or Aryanne committing suicide, or comment on those mouthpiece images. Speech to counter speech works well.
The problem with accepting the premise that objectionable speech can be de-platformed is that it implies that anything *not* banned is *not* objectionable. Banning Nazi art without banning depictions of rape, child abuse, etc suggests the latter are morally fine.
The problem is that this is a very deep hole. A *lot* of things are offensive to someone. By electing to act like a publisher and give 'approval' to some content but not to other content, the platform takes an implicit stance on *every* image on the site.
The follow-on problem from this is that Derpibooru becomes torn between its original purpose of being an archive -- a collective history of pony art -- and its newfound purpose of being speech in of itself. These are *not* compatible with each other.
It seems to me that there are two things to be taken from the whole shitstorm: the first is that people can agree that Nazis are bad and disagree on whether that warrants censorship, the second is that there may be a need for more restrictive booru platforms for sensitive people.
In the meantime, Derpibooru has a really powerful filter system. I'd suggest people who don't want to see Aryanne or other Nazi content use this filter:
https://derpibooru.org/filters/182128
https://derpibooru.org/filters/182128
