Canadians vs. "Hateful" Website

We received the following: "Brad Fitzpatrick runs the freevote website with the help of a a few friends. It's simply a website where you can create a voting booth and take a poll about any subject you're interested in. Recently, some Canadian news sources have been creating quite a stir about his site, talking about how it violates hate crime legislation. Why? Because irresponsible people, specifically a group of canadian high schoolers in this case, have been logging onto his site and supposedly have been creating 'hateful' voting questions." Interesting definition of "hateful".

Comments

Canadian Erosion of Free Speech

[BigBlockMopar]

This makes me sick.

I don't like hateful material any more than anyone else, but seeing stuff like this makes me ashamed to be a Canadian.

Isn't it understood that when you limit freedom of speech only to that which you find acceptable, the speech is no longer free? This isn't such a tough concept.

Canadians' speech is free so long as they don't do anything that feels offensive to government officials. Hmmm...

Well, under those rules, Red China has free speech, too! Just make sure you only say nice things about the communist party.

I'd rather turn away from things that disgust me (like the KKK's recent success in joining Missouri's Adopt-a-Road program), rather than worrying about the steady erosion of my rights. Part of the cost of freedom is seeing and hearing things that may offend you.

And they want to go after the American who owns the website - for comments he didn't even post!

Once again, my country provides an international forum to embarrass me.

Jeez, as if being raped by Revenue Canada wasn't bad enough.

Anyone wanna hire a good, hard-working computer geek who yearns for the responsibility and pride of being an American citizen? Check out my user bio for more info.

Re:Canadian Erosion of Free Speech

[BigBlockMopar]

I'm quite proud to be Canadian and not American. At least if I was unemployed and had cancer, I wouldn't be left to die.

Part of the beauty of the American system of doing things is that it forces you to be productive.

However, the Canadian system attempts to spread the country's wealth among all citizens, not just those who have legitimately earned it.

I think this fits the definition of Communism pretty well; while Canada is not quite that bad, it's getting there.

Communism (and socialism) are great on paper, but they fail to address a fundamental human flaw: All people are lazy. Sure, some more so than others. But if you're going to give your people 50 rubles every day regardless of whether or not they bother to show up to work, how many people will actually show up to work?

The gross domestic product of the nation then collapses. Don't believe me? Take a look around Eastern Europe.

The economies where people have the most chance for personal success are also those where the perils of failure are the most devastating: United States, Hong Kong, etc.

Why is it we spend millions of dollars a year treating homeless heroin addicts who seldom contribute anything back to the economy in turn? Come on, people have to take some personal responsibility for their lives.

Here's a thought about socialized medicine. Since there's no great cost savings incentive to quit smoking or lose weight because OHIP (provincial HMO) will pay for all your medical expenses, how about we deny all coverage for lung cancer victims who have smoked since it was known that smoking was harmful? How about we make obese people who have heart attacks pay for their treatment? People who drive their cars without wearing their seatbelts should have to pay for the doctor to staple their skulls back together.

Then, you can legalize all those nasty things without worrying about the burden to the healthcare system, sit back, and watch Darwinian Theory take care of things.

Oh, I can't wait to see how many people send me back nasty responses... :) Stirring it up is sooo much fun.

Re:Canadian Erosion of Free Speech

[BigBlockMopar]

You are either really naive or a complete moron, if you think Canada will not follow and declare drug information illegal too. Canada routinely mirrors Federal laws passed by FCC and other similar American organizations. This is a fact: Canada cannot think on its own, it has to do like Big (Bill) Brother does.

Exactly. Thank you.

If I at least had something besides misguided copycat policy to show for my contributions to the government's coffers, I might not feel so raped by the process.

With Canadian taxes, I'm paying for the Cadillac, but I'm getting a Cavalier.

A preemptive disclaimer...

[bradfitz]

I've already started to see some comments to the effect of, "That's great that they run a site, but they should monitor the content somehow..."

We _do_ monitor the content.

There are many mechanisms running behind the scenes that screen the content based on sets of "bag" regexes and then flag booths. At any time, booths can be in the "Probably okay", "Probably bad", "Verified Good", or "Verified Bad" state, along with a date that the booth was set to that state last. There are then jobs working all the time scanning booths more and adjusting the states of booths that have changed since their last update.

FreeVote volunteers and employees then manually verify booths that are in the "probably bad" state and place them in either "Verified Bad" or "Verified Good".

In addition, visitors to the booths can rank the quality/content of the booth, and that raises more flags we look at.

There is a ton of moderation being done on the site, both automatic and by hand. More code has been written for our admin area than any other part of the site.

The real problem is the combination of:

a) people's immaturity
b) people's intolerance

I'm not sure either one is solvable.

My issue with Canada is that they're extremely intolerant. A bad booth will go up and immediately they start threatening lawsuits and calling my advertisers complaining, even if we shut it down within a day or so of its creation.

I don't start websites to make money --- I do them all for fun. I really hate having to deal with this crap because IANAL, I don't want to be a learn, don't want to pretend to be a lawyer, and just hate dealing with this stuff.

So depressing.

Re:A preemptive disclaimer...

[the_other_one]

Moderate Up

When it happens in Canada, they should fix it...

[human bean]

Seeing as how:

Registrant:
Programming, Consulting (FREEVOTE-DOM)
9350 SW 175th Ave.
Beaverton, OR 97007
US
Domain Name: FREEVOTE.COM

Maybe they should just leave it alone. It doesn't happen to be in Canada, so I can't see how it is any of their business.

The fact that their kiddies had to leave the country to do this doesn't speak well of their free speech efforts.

If I leave the US and go to a country where laws are different, and I do something that is illegal here in the US but isn't there, I have broken no laws in the US and am not treated as a lawbreaker here (most of the time. I grant there are exceptions, dammit...). Maybe Canada is different?