Blizzard Suspends Professional Hearthstone Player for Hong Kong Comments

A lot of comments here seem to take as a given that banning any offensive speech in any forum leads inexorably to situations like this, where the "offensive speech" is political speech offensive to an authoritarian government. But this implies that it's impossible to distinguish between different kinds of "offensive" speech based on any meaningful criteria whatsoever, and this just seems to be fundamentally incorrect.

(1) Someone in a forum makes an "offensive" comment that's a show of support for political protestors which might anger an authoritarian government that not so incidentally happens to be of a country with a lot of customers of a product the forum supports;

(2) Someone in a forum makes an "offensive" comment that's an insulting attack on other users based on race, and the offensive nature is pretty clear to most people -- at least those who don't agree with the attack -- even if it happens to be prefaced with "I'm not racist, I'm just saying...".

These are not incredibly difficult to distinguish between. The commenter in the first case is supporting a marginalized group; the commenter in the second is attacking one. Punishing the commenter in the first case is kowtowing to an authoritarian government for baldly monetary reasons; punishing the commenter in the second case is showing support for an oppressed group in a way which is probably not going to bring you any financial benefit -- your company's accountants are not going to step in and say "you need to ban Pepe1488 for consistently sounding like a white supremacist because if you don't, it could cost us hundreds of millions of dollars" -- and whose PR benefit is, at the least, debatable. (The people in the oppressed group might love you, but if there is any press coverage whatsoever you are going to be inundated with threats.)

There's a principle involved here which can lead you to boycotting Blizzard, but that principle is "we should support the right of people to protest against their goverment." The principle isn't "you should never ban any offensive speech of any kind at any time because to do so inexorably leads you to taking the side of authoritarian governments." (Use a slippery slope argument once, and you'll use them everywhere.)

The actual principle which corporations apply is, "We should censor whoever it makes the most money to censor." Starting from the assumption that companies are operating on ethics at all means we're wrong right from the beginning. Hypothetically there exists an ethical way to censor, but where that falls apart is when you give that decision to ethics-blind corporations.

You should check out Schelling Fences on Slippery Slopes[1], particularly the section "Coalitions of Resistance".

There's also a separate disagreement which I have here, which is whether silencing people is actually an effective way to create change. It takes enormous resources even for governments to enforce it effectively, as we've seen with Nazis and the USSR in the past, and with China now. With bigots, censorship on other platforms has driven them together into some real cesspool platforms such as Voat[2]. I know for myself, having grown up in a homophobic environment, that the only thing that changed my mind about gay people was meeting and talking to gay people--a strategy which was explicitly executed by Harvey Milk in his coming out campaigns. Censoring bigots does the opposite: it drives bigots into echo chambers where they will only ever converse with other bigots who reinforce their views. In short: if you're censoring bigots, you aren't addressing bigotry, you're just sweeping it under the rug so you don't have to see it.

[1] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Kbm6QnJv9dgWsPHQP/schelling-...

[2] https://voat.co