I hadn't heard of this guy, so I just looked him up. He ran a subreddit for sharing photographs of children for the express purpose of jerking off to, and the CEO of Reddit at the time (Yishan Wong) defended that? That's bad indeed.
On the flip side, the knee jerk reaction "think of the children" has resulted in many awful policies which do more aggregate harm than good. It is useful to have someone defend things which are distasteful but not illegal. When we snuff out a particular bit of speech we should have to think about it, however briefly.
I don't think so. The legal and moral principle of free speech is meant to protect different political, scientific, philosophical, etc. views. It's not meant to protect a pedophile's right to sexualize children. What do we lose by censoring those people?
The aftermath of r/jailbait getting shutdown was also the shutdown of any adults only subreddit focused on "smaller" women. I helped mod xxsmall and other small breasted / lithe / petite focused adult subreddits at the time. Reddit didn't care that we explicitly stated everyone must be of legal age, and had age verification in place for the gone wild style subreddits. I put in a lot of my spare time trying to make sure illegal shit didn't end up on our pages and banning people trying to maliciously post images to get us taken down.
It didn't help that this was around the same time Australia started talks of banning A-Cup adult actresses as part of a conservative "protect the kids" push.
In the end they blanket banned all of the small breast subreddits because of the shitheads over at r/jailbait. Some of which had stories from the girls posting about how they never felt attractive or realized they'd actually get attention from men/women online because of their smaller shapes. Not just younger women either, we had women in their 40/50's saying the same thing.
I still think killing off r/jailbait was needed. I just wish they hadn't kneejerk banned every legit sub because they were being blasted in the main stream media. Eventually most of these subreddits came back with new moderation/names and I gave up on subreddit modding because it was stressful trying to fend off illegal posts.
You misread my point. I did not say we could not decide to censor such people, only that it is useful to have people willing to offer up a basic defense that pushes us to justify the actions we take. "Think of the children" is a way to instantly shut down opposition and win a moral argument without having to justify that your policy is well considered.
Everybody has a group they consider 'those people'. It is at least best we have a discussion before banning any of 'those people' before we realize that the people in charge consider 'those people' whatever group you are in.
