At least for me its very difficult to make the line between preventing hate speech and allowing the freedom. I’m thinking to launch a lemmy instance, but the targeted audience is very sensitive to religion topics, and i’m sure if i allow it, this could lead to hate speech at some point and may fuel violence. Also, from my prospective, i just want my audience find new good things far from porn, porn sites are a lot, and i don`t want to mix it with other topics that can very constructive.
So please tell me your opinion, if banning these 2 topics can effect the freedom of speech.
Freedom of speech has limits.
You want to protect others from possible hate, dis- and misinformation as well as deescalate in the first place. I do not see that it violates freedom of speech or freedom of religion. People can freely go to other instances if they seek advise regarding those topics or research themselves on the internet.
As owner you can be held liable for actions of your users and if they deliberately spread nonsense and stuff that hurts other people feelings, while disallowing such hot topics you just want to prevent this in the first place.
Censoring would be for example that the ISP directly blocks every access to research and opinions in the first place, which gives people absolute no indicators or possibility to get aware of it. This is not the case here, because you are just another instance provider and write clearly before someone register on your instance, in public, your rules and code of conduct down. Everyone can see it. The ones who actually censors silently never tell that or handle things in secret, you do not do that by writing clearly things down, to make people aware of it. It is the opposite, transparency.
You also do not ban topics, you just decided for your instance that the topics are not your specialty or that you want to avoid possible conflicts because people can get emotional pretty fast. Ban would be to allow content, then remove it afterwards, which you do not do if its clear from the start what your rules are. Lemmy.ml also disallows porn, so this is clearly visible and known.
I find that better than an instance that is out of control, quickly bad moderated due to e.g. lack of moderators who want to handle such things and even possible infiltrated by people who seek to confuse others or start hate.
Ignoring that sometimes I have trouble even understanding what other people mean by “hate”, I’m not sure how you think that it’s possible (or even desirable) to protect others from hate. I’m not talking about lynchings, or other obvious, visible crimes.
But if some klansman is hiding out in his West Virginian shack, trying to send his hate vibes out into the world, believing himself to have psychic powers, how do you protect anyone against that? And why?
Nothing changes if instead of doing that silently, he then starts speaking about it. No one is hurt more when the words are spoken along with his thoughts.
If anything, him speaking those thoughts is good. As uncomfortable as they might make the rest of us, the last thing anyone should want is to train these people to be guarded in what they say and where they say it. To bottle it all up, where none of us can notice. To give him the inspiration that what he wants will require action instead of words.
Not only do such policies undermine free speech, they’re dangerous and counter-productive. It’s some sort of irrational magical thinking, that their words can convince others to hate along with them, but that your words are so ineffective that they can’t persuade others to stop. When coupled with policy that prevents people from seeing that this is untrue, it can concentrate the hatred and even allow it to grow.
Hate would be for example, slandering others, which is also explained in my Wikipedia link under limitations of free speech because causes hate and the repercussions that comes with it, as you say, lychings etc.
I get it that this is your definition. But it’s defective and misrepresentative. Still, I replied with your definition in mind.
Freedom of speech as a concept has no limits, and at least within US law, has no limits there either. You have to go back to quotes taken out of context from ancient Supreme Court rulings that have effectively been overturned (and were later retracted by the justice quoted) to think otherwise.
The trouble of course if you just don’t like freedom of speech. But the public is enamored with it and they romanticize it, so you can’t publicly be honest about not liking it. Thus the mental gymnastics that there are “limitations”.
The opposite is true. The lynchings happen when no one can talk about it. When you shut up people who were only ever going to mouth off, you inevitably spur some to take it farther and to venture into action.
But that takes a few years, and in the meantime you can pretend that you’ve “cleaned up hatred”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech#Limitations
Everything in the universe, including universe itself has limits.
Cant take you serious, I am out of the discussion, there is no one on earth who does not like free speech, it is about misinformation and other variables, mentioned above and e.g. misinformation is not spreading freedom, it is to deceive others, on purpose or by accident.