Woah I heard the they eat dogs in the UK from a reliable source on vgchartz I better tell the the far right protesters in the UK quick.

Is what LegitHyperbole is posting against forum rules? It’s kind of fucked if we let people spread easily debunked, racist conspiracy theories.

Seriously dude, don’t believe every ridiculous story you see online and do the bare minimum by spending 2 fucking minutes looking up these stories before spreading them.

Twitter is a cesspool of cynicism.

it wasn’t conceived of being used that way. Co-founder of Blogger and Medium, Evan Williams, conceived as a Microblogging counterpart to the long form Blogger (Medium was more of a higher quality article focused platform). Some people actually use it for that. Examples include news/announcements for various media (games, TV, films), artists and authors posting bits of their work, and the Milblogger posts that get posted frequently to this forum in the Ukraine and Palestine threads.

But the main thing it’s used for is a place where people act out cynicism to the extreme. This manifests as cancel culture, virtue signalling, harassing creators (TV show cast and crew are popular targets), accusing others of some verb used as an adjective (woke and cringe), and spreading misinformation to make people hate other groups of people. That’s why (long before Elon Musk) I wasn’t a fan of Twitter - although, for a time, I did use it to some degree of success as a means to drive people to my business; like Facebook Pages, that went down the shitter.

I'd take that ban but I'd not return. Free speech is important even if it's false, I don't believe these forums to be Neo Gaf or the site that shall not be named. I was thinking about a conspiracy thread not long ago, I do find them interesting but I'd not want to get people banned so I too now wnat to know Is it against the rules to post about conspiracies on here?

Because there was a real story of a US citizen eating their neighbor's cat. She was a black lady, so she could get roped into the racist rhetoric. 

Fact check: Ohio woman accused of eating cat is from Canton, not from Springfield

The best lies have an element of truth in them. It is pretty easy to look up lady eating cat, and find a picture of black lady.

People do a lot of weird crap, and if you can start associating a group of people with some kind of weird behavior, then it's a lot easier to subjugate them. It's basically "look at how weird and unamerican these people are. Why are they here?"

The vast majority of people talking about Springfield have never even to Ohio, let alone Springfield. 

The rhetoric is frequently overblown, and worse is that it elicits a reaction in the complete wrong direction.

A lot of people eat geese. If you're poor and struggling to get food on the table, chances are higher you're going to try getting food in ways that are more illegal. 

And rather than trying to fix the problem of people being poor, the rhetoric more often than not pushes people to punish others for doing what they had to. 

Yeah, I agree with everything you said there about th e poor being punished. However if people are eating cats that's another story, perhaps she was mentally ill. I see the picture here now, people took that story of the woman eating the cat and ran with it to stoke anti immigration rethoric. Fuck what the Internet has become, there's no news anymore just this damn culture war BS and everyone poking for a class war now. 

We're absolutely not having a conspiracy theory thread on these forums, Lol. Maybe if it was humorous in nature and intended to mock certain harmless conspiracy theories but it probably wouldn't remain that way so I'd rather not, and especially not one to seriously discuss conspiracy theories like "migrants eating dogs" or "Jews controlling the world" or "COVID wasn't real" those sorts of offensive and dangerous conspiracy theories.

Free speech doesn't mean make shit up and it doesn't protect you from making shit up, especially in law.

Not saying you intentionally "made shit up" but if someone persistently spreads inaccurate news without doing research for themselves, especially if said news is inflammatory in nature then yes it can result in a moderation, usually a thread ban. In other cases, straight up bans, especially if it's a dangerous or offensive conspiracy theory. If it's something like "the Earth is flat" I'd probably just mock the user, if it was "They're lying to us about how many Jews were killed in WW2. Wake Up Sheeple!" I'd probably ban the person.

Because A. It's offensive and B. We do not want to be a place which allows dangerous conspiracy theories to grow and spread.

If I had to keep debunking your posts then I would have likely given you a warning because people should be putting in the effort to research things for themselves before posting, especially if said thing is inflammatory in nature, the migrant eating dogs/cats story is inflammatory in nature and is resulting in bomb threats right now in Ohio and it should be handled with care.

Just like those recent riots we had in the UK...They were largely inflamed by bullshit spread on Twitter, had people not engaged in spreading said bullshit, the riots would have been lesser or maybe not exist at all, that's a recent example of how dangerous fake news can be. That's when "free speech" hits a threshold of "must be acted upon" to avoid further damage.

I didn’t say you should get banned but there should be rules against spreading misinformation. Free speech doesn’t mean people get to say anything they want without repercussions.

You’re not just spreading silly conspiracy theories that do no harm to anyone, like the moon landing being fake, you’re spreading hateful and racist rhetoric that can cause violence against minorities.

Be a responsible adult and don’t believe everything you read online and make sure you check with multiple reliable sources before spreading information that can do harm to people.

But now that it's been unraveled and we've figured out where and how the conspiracy started isn't that better than hiding it completely. Would you not agree that even if one person who believed it passed in here and now they can see that it's false and follow how the consensus was reached instead of being told simply true/false, that, that is a good thing instead of ignoring things completely and more souls go on about their day believing it to be true. I fail to understand the reasoning, free speech even if people can get hurt is the most prized right we have in the free world, something our ancestors died to protect over and over again and yet we are squandering it. Air, water, food, free expression. 

A lot of these things are case by case basis. 

If you're blatantly spreading Nazi propaganda and being blatantly racist, that's very different from suggesting there's a conspiracy theory that bigfoot is being covered up. 

Everyone ultimately understands that there are always limits to free speech. You'd be rightfully upset if someone posted your address and schedule.

If you're spreading conspiracy theories that are harmful to others, especially if you're doing so with an obvious intent to harm others, the mods are going to step in.

If you're just genuinely asking a question, several of us try to have the conversation to explain why it's wrong, what the reality is, etc.