Radical free speech is important and a cornerstone of the US. Yeah, you've got some real shitheads on voat but also a lot of decent people that just don't hold the previously approved PC opinions. The internet was way better before it began to coalesce into megacorps like google, fb, and reddit. Instead of defending free speech they caved to advertisers. The issue w/ that is someone is always pissed off by something and the smallest groups shout the loudest. Now we've got a situation that's gotten out of hand and even regular conservatives are targeted. Voat is basically a concentration camp for free speech online. They've rounded up all the "wrongthinkers" and sent them to one place.
Before reddit and that Mountain Dew (the hitler did nothing wrong naming contest) troll happened /pol/ was libertarian more or less believe it or not. The PC left is Frankenstein and Voat's their monster. Assholes were fewer and farther between online before they all got shipped to the same place.
When you start inventing shit like "micro aggressions" and telling everyone their racist nonstop... I could provide a thousand other examples. The left has even managed to bring back segregation on college campuses only this time they're called "safe spaces" and black only dorms.
The Radical Left and the Far Right are every bit as bad as each other and more alike than they are different. They both have a need to be authoritarian in order to stay in power. (Horseshoe Theory)
Reddit, Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, etc. have no shortage of racists. They've just got the "right kind" in our weird double-standard culture.
Well said, saverem. It definitely is a big problem that Reddit, Google, Twitter, and Facebook resorted to caving to advertisers instead of defending freedom of speech. And thus, those who are the most frustrated with Reddit, Facebook, Google, and Twitter will often be the first ones to arrive at a new alternative that promises freedom of speech. There's nothing inherently wrong with it. Gab, a microblogging and free speech alternative to Twitter, currently has mostly conservative and "alt-right" users because they often are purged from Twitter. However, if the owners of the new platform decides to ban anyone who disagrees with their majority of users (or even the owners of the new platform), they become just as equally terrible as their competitor. And therefore, both sides would feel like concentration camps for different political extremes.
As much as I like Gab as a platform, I think too much of it is focused on politics currently. And because of that, most people who are looking at it from the outside will see it simply as some platform with a specific political label based on the majority of its users. It's unfortunate, but I sincerely do have hope that it will diversify over time.
I hope Phuks becomes a place where we can have civil political discourse, without getting into calling each other "Nazis" or "libtards," while also focusing on getting along with one another on different things besides our social and political views. And I feel like so far, Phuks has the right setup. A lot of the people here currently are very laid back and I've easily been able to talk about various topics here besides politics.