Aug 22, 2017 · 2 min read
If you honestly felt you needed to ban one user in order to protect your entire user base, that might be a stance worth applauding.
- But why would you have to announce his name publicly multiple times through multiple social media channels? However abhorrent this guy might be, this seems wrong. Should every user have to be concerned that if they even accidentally break one of the rules that OkCupid will publicly drag their name and possibly personal info through the mud in order to virtue signal? A better solution would have been quietly blocking him, putting out a statement that you don’t like racists and some of them have been removed from your platform.
- Is there a fair process in place to protect users from false accusations? Zero tolerance policies lead to bad outcomes in schools and workplaces many times because nobody can exercise proper judgement. What if somebody has a bad date and merely messages you saying that their date was a Nazi in order to get revenge? This stuff happens.
- Nazis are some really bad guys. But in another example, Communists have killed tens of millions more people than Nazis and have committed acts of deliberate genocide as well. Will you be working on a purge of all outward Stalinists on your site, or are Nazis the only evil guys you’re targeting?
- Will you be removing your features that allow people to filter by race? Why would somebody need that unless they were racist?
This brings up a lot of other implications that I don’t think you’ve fully thought through to be honest!
