Mind Yourself: Censorship on Minds.

 

 

     Most of us migrated to Minds from another platform because we wanted greater freedom to express views that others might find distasteful. If our content was politically correct we could have stayed on lamebook, twitface, or BoobTube.  Polite speech doesn’t need defending. Most everybody likes hearing nice things. It is the offensive and degenerate thing that needs a platform and not because we agree with onerous ideas. It is because the first victim is never the last and time will find us all prey to endless arbitrary evaluation. Minds has its own trail of blood and where it will end is too soon to say.

 

     I am a proud member of the group Anti-HeartsProgress. Heart Progress is a community of minor attracted individuals who promote lowering the age of consent. Anti-HeartsProgress searches Minds for anyone who promotes Heart Progress and works to get them banned from Minds by waiting for them to break US/UK law. It is illegal to incite individuals to violence and having sex with a minor is classified as violence. A case can be made that teaching someone how to groom children for sex is inciting violence by speaking in a way that can cause someone else harm. Minds thinks this argument has standing because we have successfully had many admitted pedophile accounts banned.

 

 

 

     So, you can’t really say anything you want especially when it comes to public safety, but where does it end? To comply with the laws of the countries where the Minds social network is online all content must be monitored. This means whether anyone likes it or not, an ethics panel must be created to literally ban people for speaking their mind. I’ve given one example already but what about the case for parody/troll accounts? Is ironic speech hate speech? If someone were to satirically call for white genocide should they get the hammer? There is such a fine line between “I wish you were dead” and “I’m going to cause your death” that makes it a difficult question. Television seems to have no problem with it at all, Robert Deniro said he would punch Trump in the face and he still gets work somehow.

 

     When it comes to libel it gets even more confusing. You can’t tell lies about people, that’s a crime. You can tell stories about people, that is perfectly legal. Say for example I posted an article that claimed Donald Trump, the President of America, a man with a very tiny penis, was found last Tuesday snorting cocaine off the backs of Russian male prostitutes. This statement although 100% false, (especially when you compare the amount of distance between the Donald’s ring and middle finger), will not get me or anyone else in trouble. The embellishment “tiny” makes the statement a work of fiction and I can claim I was just writing a weird bedtime story. Besides who would ever admit that the guy with the teeny member is them?  

 

 

     Perhaps the most disturbing thing about being banned from Minds is there is no appeal process. Your channel can just disappear one day and you will have no idea why. You can create another account but if you are like me and put your heart into the content you produce to see it all vanish over some arbitrary nonsense would be infuriating. It would be as if I were sold a bill of goods and what I received wasn’t what I paid for. The Minds platform does not and cannot have 100% free speech but finding out where that line is will leave the Minds field littered with the corpses of some great channels.

 

 

 

What do you think? Where is the line in your mind? I draw mine at pedophilia. Do you know of anyone who returned to Minds to find their channel gone as if it never existed? I do. Beyond the somewhat vague terms of service agreement, what can we do to educate ourselves so that Minds doesn’t one day decide to destroy all our investment and trust in the platform?