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.)

Chinese feelings towards Hong Kong arise out of a history of subjugation by the British. The Opium Wars devastated China's economy and sovereignty, including the British forcing them to cede Hong Kong. This was the beginning of the "century of humiliation": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Century_of_humiliation

It's not just the authoritarian government that is angered, it is the people of China who remember this history of imperialism and domination. Before the first Opium War, China's economy was the largest in the world. Is has only recently begun to recover: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angus_Maddison_statistics_of_t...

Everyone has a story about why they are oppressed. Who is oppressed and who are oppressors? What actions are oppressive, and which are not? Free speech is necessary as a way of litigating these very questions.