RE: Week 03 Questions -- Online Censorship

To answer question 2: not only does categorization of information online do nothing to curb online censorship, but it also could make the situation even worse.

Originally, I thought that having different categories on a social media website, such as subreddits on Reddit, was a great way to make online censorship obsolete. There could be subreddits for politics, subreddits for kids, subreddits for discussing and showing video of recent crimes, subreddits for science, subreddits for video games, subreddits for video games with adult content, etc. That way, there wouldn't have to be any censorship because one could simply avoid the type of content that they don't want to see! Right?

Wrong. The admins of assumably all subreddits have permission to delete or edit posts within subreddits that they have administration over. This means that if a political subreddit is controlled by liberals, then pro-life posts and anti-BLM posts will be deleted in that subreddit; if a scientific subreddit is controlled by evolutionary biologists who do not believe religion to be compatible with their theories, then creationist (or merely religious) posts will be deleted in that subreddit.

Yes, information may be categorized in Reddit through subreddits, but categorization is far from the solution to online censorship and the cancel culture, and it might even make it worse. If factions are made on Reddit -- if a subreddit for republicans is made, a subreddit for democrats is made, a subreddit for Creationists is made, a subreddit for Evolutionists is made -- then each faction will become more and more biased towards their own beliefs, because they will simply ignore what their opposing factions will have to say!

I think that posts should only be able to be deleted by the author, and that instead of deleting posts, admins should only be able to tag posts as explicit or offensive. Maybe an explicit or offensive post could be partially blurred by an admin, and if a user really wanted to see it, that user could click on it, and it would no longer be blurred? It's difficult to come up with a fully efficient solution, thought, because this is an incredibly complex issue.