RE: BRD comes to Steemit!
Just to add in my dimes:
Steem (the blockchain) is completely decentralised of nature. Any content can be placed by anyone with an account on the blockchain from anywhere in the world. No censorship, no blocking as there will also be a node left unblocked seeing the p2p nature of the chain.
What that placed content in the end will take home from the rolling reward pool is the result of the up and downvotes.
Whether that content is being displayed or not on one of the many interfaces of the Steem blockchain, is totally up to the given interface. For example you can see any comment on Steemd.com. You can also actually see any comment / post on Steemit (another interface of the chain), but might have an annotation: 'Content hidden due to low rating, click to reveal'.
Seeing any content can be posted and not removed by anyone, there is "no curtailing people's rights to freedom of speech". Steem / Steemit and other interface are way more than the 'trending' pages, if you look through the bushes of $ :)
I mean, can you access facebook in china? Can you post nipples on facebook? Double no. Right here, on the Steem chain, you can. Hello freedom of speech.
The problem is if you simply restrain or hinder my freedom to speak, for my post to be seen, - you don't have to block it out right ("this post is no longer visible"...) - that is still a hindrance to my rights. Being made invisible is a hindrance.
Also using china and facebook aren't good counter-examples because they are explicitly immoral. "I'm more moral than Ted Bundy which is good right?". Not really because you could still be a complete asshole by that criteria. Being better than bad isn't good enough.
Just as an example i'll flag your post, which you could unflag only because you have more SP than me, but imagine if you couldn't do that? I don't think that's right. I'm making you invisible and hindering your ability to express yourself in a very real way. This is an impediment to your freedom to express yourself unhindered. And no one will help you because i'm not accountable to anyone and I really should be for being such a dick. People are being flagged simply because other people don't like them.
If I had a billion steempower i become the centralization. I'll decide, i'll make the rules, people are already behaving like bastards on here.
I don't think being made invisible and demoted to a sister site is a good enough solution.