That a bad example given that the user in question wasn't anonymous.
Being truly anonymous on the 'net is harder than most people imagine.
In Western society using Tor and not leaking personal information should be sufficient for protecting that kind of speech.
I am not sure this is the case. Example.
Oh, and in this context what's special about a Western society?
I am not sure this is the case. Example.
Not an example of speech that happens within a forum.
Oh, and in this context what's special about a Western society?
We have a concepts such as guilty until proven innocent with makes it hard to sentence people based on statistical stylometry data.
The interest in censorship is also lower. It's much easier to simply ignore speech because Western society is more resilient.
A long blog post explains why the author, a feminist, is not comfortable with the rationalist community despite thinking it is "super cool and interesting". It's directed specifically at Yvain, but it's probably general enough to be of some interest here.
http://apophemi.wordpress.com/2014/01/04/why-im-not-on-the-rationalist-masterlist/
I'm not sure if I can summarize this fairly but the main thrust seems to be that we are overly willing to entertain offensive/taboo/hurtful ideas and this drives off many types of people. Here's a quote:
The author perceives a link between LW type open discourse and danger to minority groups. I'm not sure whether that's true or not. Take race. Many LWers are willing to entertain ideas about the existence and possible importance of average group differences in psychological traits. So, maybe LWers are racists. But they're racists who continually obsess over optimizing their philanthropic contributions to African charities. So, maybe not racists in a dangerous way?
An overly rosy view, perhaps, and I don't want to deny the reality of the blogger's experience. Clearly, the person is intelligent and attracted to some aspects of LW discourse while turned off by other aspects.