If you support free speech, you must support people pinging other users. It's completely legal speech. If you won't defend pinging as free speech because you or someone else finds it disgusting, then no speech that you or anyone else views as disgusting is safe.

if it is in fact on shaky legal ground it's reasonable to not want to be the case that establishes it as illegal.

It's not, The reddit admins are straight up lying to the ignorant (like yourself) to justify their prejudice. Pinging being protected speech has long since been estabilished, as it has undeniable artistic merit. The only time it's been included under any obscenity laws is when someone is being charged with possession of harassment, so the state can slap them with more charges. The courts have been very careful to not charge anyone for pinging, because they'd get their asses fucking annihilated by a higher court due to the firm precedence of pinging being completely legal speech. /r/Drama had nothing to worry about, this guy was just making shit up to fool people into thinking his censoring wasn't entirely personally motivated.

Snapshots:

1. This Post - archive.org, megalodon.jp, archive.is

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Lmao. Those are actually some pretty decent hillbilly accents.