> Still, is your standard 'did enough people complain'? If so, that is a bad standard, and most certainly not how internet was devised, or was intended to work.
No, though obviously it is a factor. I'm pretty sure it's not eBay's standard either. The rights holders, who are extremely familiar with the content, took the view the books are too racist to continue selling; eBay could have chosen to argue the other side and profit from people buying second hand copies at absurd prices to own the libs, but I don't see any particular reason why it should. Frankly categorising spam is at least as prone to disagreement as categorising racism, and I don't think spam has worse consequences. It possible the Seuss Foundation and eBay are excessively prudish about some of the books and certainly eBay's moderation policies are inconsistently applied, but that doesn't imply a website adding a few books to the list of stuff it doesn't want to sell on the grounds of they're bad enough for the publisher to have unpublished is a particularly chilling violation of speech. The internet has been prudish for a long time, as anyone trying to use Big Tech to sell nudes knows, and I really don't see racism as a less sensitive subject than sex.
As for how the internet was imagined to work, I'm pretty sure it's expected to work in exactly the same way as things normally do in Western democracies: people and corporations are generally free to choose who they do business with and what they sell except in very specific circumstances where it is deemed harmful (like refusing to do business with a particular race, or using market power to squeeze a competitor, or being a public utility). It is possible to argue that racism is an intrinsically valuable idea which deserves this sort of special protection which other forms of speech don't, and it's also possible to argue that the risks of curtailing good ideas by restricting any kind of communication is so severe that major retail platforms should be treated like ISPs and not allowed to have any influence on what's distributed by their service at all. But one of those involves explicitly privileging racism and the other throws out the possibility of those platforms attempting even the most cursory moderation, and probably other stuff most people here endorse like centrally-administered spam filters and ad blocking services too. Beyond those arguments we're not discussing speech right principles, we're discussing the details of what's silly [not] to ban.
Some organizations decide [some] ads are too disgusting to host, others decide the same thing about [some] racism. I find the intersection of people on here who believe the former is fantastic and the latter is chilling quite strange. Frankly I'm more uncomfortable about racism than ads, and I use uBlock's list of undesirable content as much as everyone else here.
I do appreciate the civil reply and agree that moderation is not consistent though.
No, though obviously it is a factor. I'm pretty sure it's not eBay's standard either. The rights holders, who are extremely familiar with the content, took the view the books are too racist to continue selling; eBay could have chosen to argue the other side and profit from people buying second hand copies at absurd prices to own the libs, but I don't see any particular reason why it should. Frankly categorising spam is at least as prone to disagreement as categorising racism, and I don't think spam has worse consequences. It possible the Seuss Foundation and eBay are excessively prudish about some of the books and certainly eBay's moderation policies are inconsistently applied, but that doesn't imply a website adding a few books to the list of stuff it doesn't want to sell on the grounds of they're bad enough for the publisher to have unpublished is a particularly chilling violation of speech. The internet has been prudish for a long time, as anyone trying to use Big Tech to sell nudes knows, and I really don't see racism as a less sensitive subject than sex.
As for how the internet was imagined to work, I'm pretty sure it's expected to work in exactly the same way as things normally do in Western democracies: people and corporations are generally free to choose who they do business with and what they sell except in very specific circumstances where it is deemed harmful (like refusing to do business with a particular race, or using market power to squeeze a competitor, or being a public utility). It is possible to argue that racism is an intrinsically valuable idea which deserves this sort of special protection which other forms of speech don't, and it's also possible to argue that the risks of curtailing good ideas by restricting any kind of communication is so severe that major retail platforms should be treated like ISPs and not allowed to have any influence on what's distributed by their service at all. But one of those involves explicitly privileging racism and the other throws out the possibility of those platforms attempting even the most cursory moderation, and probably other stuff most people here endorse like centrally-administered spam filters and ad blocking services too. Beyond those arguments we're not discussing speech right principles, we're discussing the details of what's silly [not] to ban.
Some organizations decide [some] ads are too disgusting to host, others decide the same thing about [some] racism. I find the intersection of people on here who believe the former is fantastic and the latter is chilling quite strange. Frankly I'm more uncomfortable about racism than ads, and I use uBlock's list of undesirable content as much as everyone else here.
I do appreciate the civil reply and agree that moderation is not consistent though.