While trolls online do pose a preponderance of inconvenience and annoyance to ALL internet end-users, in my personal opinion they are only the SECOND biggest problem we face in online communications today. The larger problem, although much less rare, is much more damaging to the free and open exchange of ideas in online forums, and that is: CENSORSHIP. I cannot speak on others individual cases, but in my own experiences online the top two reasons given to justify censorship of posted content by website moderators and administrators are: 1. the content lacks material evidence and thus lacks scientific credibility, and the topic is thus considered pseudoscience and shunned. My difficulty with this proposition is this: if we do not research and discuss topics of fringe sciences and no material evidence is allowed to be presented, then no scientific credibility can ever be attained for it. This is an unfair double-standard applied to fringe science topics like telepathy and time-travel most often, by people attempting to silence research into these topics for their own, personal motives. Once upon a time, studying Gravity was considered a pseudoscience and a blasphemy; the crimes committed against scientists by Papists are merely being committed against scientists nowadays by OTHER scientists. A sad situation. 2: the content being shared is considered dangerous and the person who is sharing the information, whether they personally BELIEVE for themselves in the ethos of the info they share or not, is often accused of fear mongering (or being an advocate for terrorism), being a traitor (if they are a whistle-blower with insider intel) and / or called a conspiracy theorist (implying their theories have no basis in reality, even though they do). Examples of this second type of information that I have been accused of these things myself for sharing include information about the asteroid Apophis and all the posts I made, before being banned, on ATS. Personally, I would PREFER an internet populated mostly by uncensored trolls than one wherein certain ideas are considered forbidden to discuss. Those who censor the works of others due to philosophically disagreeing with the content of what the others shared ARE information terrorists themselves, and a threat to the general online peace.
Posted on: Tue, 30 Sep 2014 00:41:23 +0000
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