Tumblr recently announced that it would begin to remove blogs supporting anorexia or other forms of self-harm in an effort to combat "thinspiration" culture on the internet. It was a bold move from a company who had built its business on allowing people to write blogs about whatever they want, and the Tumblr user base is, as expected, divided.

The move comes not too long after another formerly wide-open internet community, Reddit, chose to begin self moderating to eliminate child pornography from its website. There's no question about what these moves are saying: websites that used to be unquestionable platforms are free speech are realizing that they may have a moral responsibility to not make the world a worse place. For the philosophical internet defender, moves like this are anathema to the very basic idea of a free and open internet.

For the more reasonable person, however, these moves are laudable moral imperatives. These companies have taken a measure of responsibility over the impact they have in the world, and they've chosen to make an effort to tackle the dark sides of the internet that they've enabled with their websites. They're realizing that you can talk about freedom of speech all you want, but at the end of the day running a website that supports anorexia or child pornography is like renting a house to a drug dealer and promising to look the other way.

The internet is developing forms of social contracts, and that's a good thing. In an Anderson Cooper story on child pornography and Reddit that seemed to spur the company's decision, Cooper quotes Reddit general manager Erik Martin:

We’re a free speech site and the cost of that is there’s offensive stuff on there … Once we start taking down some things we find offensive, then we’re no longer a free speech site and no longer a platform for everyone. We’re exerting editorial control and that’s not what we are.

It sounds high and noble. But as it seems like Reddit quickly realized, it wasn't. As people with a choice to either support or oppose child pornography , the Reddit management realized that it was indefensible not to do the latter.

Like the old Voltaire quote goes: "I may not agree with what you have to say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it. Just don't expect me to retweet it or host it on my website."

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