>ah yes, making fun of people dying is okay as long as you obscure the names!
Yes. You've made up an imaginary enemy in your head and you are talking down to others based on the imaginary Reddit company in your head.
The reason those other communities were banned were for targeted harassment, doxing of real people, and brigading other subreddits. Reddit has never stated that they were any rules on the "morality" of the content. The communities that are still around have not broken those rules yet.
So then what is the defense for a similar subreddit that made fun of people that died after getting the vaccination. They followed the same "rules" you seem to claim here, they did not doxx anyone, they did not harass anyone, they did not brigade other subreddits, most of it was just side by side tweets of a person positing the vaccination announcement followed by a notification they died a few day later...
>the only speech moderation we should be worried about on any site is illegal speech
I never said that. I, for one, am not a free speech absolutist, and I think those that pretend they are, are children of the Facebook era of online discourse. I am iterating once again, that Reddit has clear rules and those rules have largely been executed without political bias. If your favorite subreddit got banned, they were very likely violating those rules.
I wasn't active in the community, but I believe r/fatpeoplehate was mostly unsolicited photographs ("creepshots") of overweight people and making fun of them.
It appears r/hermancainaward is 100% based on posts that the deceased willingly shared with the public. I think that's a meaningful difference.
> It appears r/hermancainaward is 100% based on posts that the deceased willingly shared with the public. I think that's a meaningful difference.
Just a minor correction there: The majority of posts from the death people in HCA are from Facebook. I think that normally, people posts would only be shared with their Friends (unless you specifically change it to be public).
In that respect, posters in HCA would be publishing posts that were originally not meant to be public.
As an example, I might write a post in Facebook about me and my wife going on vacation to X place for 1 week. While it is OK for me for my friends to know that, I may not want this information to be public for fear of my house getting robbed while I am gone.
Although I completely agree with the sentiment and main point of HCA (and I actually have enjoyed the schadenfreude of some of the awarded people there), I concede that it is definitely a subreddit that is of quite bad taste and brings the worst of the "pro-vaccine" side of the argument.
I think that r/HermanCainAward is actually quite sinister and designed to normalize and reinforce dehumanization of "the other side". The whole point of the subreddit is to showcase people who've had strong political convictions, then died as a result of them.
You're supposed to feel a sense of comeuppance that these people who don't believe in the vaccine or dismiss the severity Covid died as a result of their beliefs. There is no shortage of mockery involved, either. It is disguised as simple schadenfreude, but I sense the subscribers are actually reveling in the deaths of others.
There have been threads there where people say they would prefer that sub wouldn't exist at all, those preventable deaths and misery fading from existence. I don't know whether they do it for laughs or are just burnt out from people choosing to make a point of politicizing not wearing a mask, probably a mix of both. I don't know how to solve that problem either, some of the posts there contain straight up insults towards people who vaxx/wear masks, this feedback cycle of radicalization is self sustaining at this point.
