My point is that a comment filtering system is consciously based on the identification and exclusion of a group, which we'll call the out group. Of course it's limits will be debatable, just as the definition of spam is debatable.
If what you're excluding is political speech of a sort, then someone is going to be able to accuse the system of censorship, no matter where the line is drawn. It's inherent in the system's goals.
Personally, I think that's a point where any system is going to be rightfully challenged and examined critically, but I think it's still worth doing on a greater good basis. Spam filtering works, it makes my inbox a more tolerable place. It's a good idea to extend it to other types of crappy speech that makes other peoples' lives worse.
I have just noticed that in many online communities, you couldn't easily filter on extremism because, based on the community values, expressing the wrong opinion is "trolling" but responding to that opinion "die in a fire you fucking asshole" is a top-rated comment. I don't even think these are outliers, a lot of communities are run like this.
Also, possibly this comment would be a false positive in some places because I included extreme text as an example.
Your point is very well taken. The choice of whose community values to use is an important one. If your goal is to try and exclude some actually popular but perhaps embarrassing opinions, then you are likely to need to incorporate some of the values of other communities where this sort of speech would be filtered.
Applying r/SRS standards to r/RedPill would be an extreme example of this, and a good thought experiment. Could you model what kind of karma score a RedPill post would get on SRS? How would it change what a discussion page looked like?
If what you're excluding is political speech of a sort, then someone is going to be able to accuse the system of censorship, no matter where the line is drawn. It's inherent in the system's goals.
Personally, I think that's a point where any system is going to be rightfully challenged and examined critically, but I think it's still worth doing on a greater good basis. Spam filtering works, it makes my inbox a more tolerable place. It's a good idea to extend it to other types of crappy speech that makes other peoples' lives worse.