this post was submitted on 30 Jul 2023
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As a silver lining maybe it's best people don't associate him with what the site has become. He was a piece of its history, but he wasn't trying to found what Reddit has become
Yes. I think Aaron would want to take his name off from there.
If I were him, I would be more concerned with my name being attached to this defense of child pornography: https://web.archive.org/web/20130116210225/http://bits.are.notabug.com/
There’s not much for him to be concerned about currently, given that he is dead.
As for 16 yo Aaron who wrote that list of hot takes in order of controversy, is it really surprising that a kid that developed an opinion of free speech extremism penned that down?
Especially after being inspired by this article as per his own admission?
The article also helps provide context for the time period this was written in.
Simple possession was still a relatively novel concept and simulated CSAM wasn’t criminal yet in the US.
Don’t misconstrue my own position on the matter, I originate from, and was legally trained in, a jurisdiction that criminalizes hate speech, imposing a significantly broader limit on free speech than the US currently does, and I think that’s the better path to take.
So I personally don’t adhere to free speech extremism.
Nevertheless, while not agreeing with his take, I can see the logic that persuaded him.
It’s essentially the facetious version of “Why stop here, why not also ban hate speech/guns/drugs/etc?”
All of those can be argued to be gateways to the harm of others, perhaps even disproportionately children.
To me it reads as him challenging the logic, not condoning the outcome much less the subsequent consequences. Very edgy indeed.
As for those who bring up that he reinstated his blog multiple times and with it this particular post from when he was 16, as a way to posthumously attribute this to a more older adult version of him; I’m not sure it’s that cut and dry.
As a fundamentalist such as himself it could also just be an exhibition of his free speech extremism perhaps combined with an effort to maintain transparency.
After all, it could suggest an eroding of his beliefs on free speech if he would remove it “now” with little benefit to him since the cat’s already out of the bag, even if he disagreed with his former self at the time of restoring the blog.
A better indication of his opinions later in life would be comments that reaffirm the prior expressed beliefs or, if the suspicion is that he practiced what he preached, one would expect this to have come out during the FBI investigation, considering they went through all his data.
Do I think it’s healthy to consider him a hero, or anyone else for that matter?
No not really, if only because the likelihood of heroes having irreconcilable blemishes is extremely high just by the very virtue of their, let’s say, unique thinking producing the things we love about them but also the things that might cause pause in many.