manchicken here…

Wow, so today I saw the O’Reilly Factor on the Fox News Channel. It’s been a long time since I’ve watched any real news program other than local news, and I must say I was stunned.

I saw Mr. O’Reilly hounding somebody from freerepublic.com about “hate speech” on the web site. Mr. O’Reilly suggested that freerepublic.com had some sort of obligation to police their site. Well, as an employed developer of a popular website, I understand the difficulties that are posed by this problem.

First, there’s the money. Hiring a person to police comments posted to a site–particularly a political opinion site–is very expensive, and has a high rate of turnover. Secondly, there’s the fact that most people can’t handle or don’t want to handle that filth. We had a lot of child porn posted to the site I worked for before we figured out how to stop it, and believe me when I say that nobody but the sickest of the sick wants to see some of that. Nobody likes dealing with upsetting and offensive materials all day long.

Then there’s the free speech aspect. Bill O’Reilly said that he “draws the line” on free speech at hate speech. Well, if we all draw the line on free speech where we disagree with the speaker, then gosh, we won’t have very much speech at all then will we? I’m sure there are plenty of people who disagree with some or most (or maybe even all) of what I have to say, but the vast majority of folks have the common decency to let me speak my mind, and I do try to return the favor.

Mr. O’Reilly, you speak your mind an awful lot, and the only reason your speech isn’t being silenced is because a cable network is paying for you to be heard. Now I don’t agree with what these people are saying about minorities, but you bet your ass I won’t silence them. I won’t legitemize it, but damnit that’s what freedom is all about. They have the right to post whatever they want to wherever they want to, and the owners of those sites have the right to remove the content, block the users, and ban the IPs if they so choose… but they are in no way obliged to do so.

For some odd reason, Bill O’Reilly seems to believe that sanitizing comments on a website is a patriotic obligation, or a civic duty of some sort. Poppycock. Sanitizing the web is not anybody’s job. FreeRepublic.com is a privately owned web site, and if you’re looking at it, you asked for it. You typed the URL in, and you read it. Most of us have the good sense to ignore folks like that, or if there is some sort of community policing in place to report the abuse.

Bill O’Reilly, if all of this stuff bothers you so much then why don’t you volunteer at FreeRepublic.com to police their site? Call up MySpace.com, too, while you’re at it. If you’re so offended, tough. This is the internet, and it’s free speech all the way baby. That’s the way we like it, and that’s the way it should be. Shame on you for attempting to silence those who are speaking their minds, no matter how disgusting their ideas may be.

Popularity: 9%

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 31st, 2007 at 21:34 and is filed under Politics, Ranting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Stumble it!