How are you “forced to continue associating with someone” who is arrested and cannot use their online accounts? What exactly does that do to you? And how does Stack Overflow keeping all the posts but removing the name protect you in any way?

>how does Stack Overflow keeping all the posts but removing the name protect you in any way?

Well that's just a violation of the license they attribute posts to

>Attribution — You must give appropriate credit , provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made . You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.

That's not even a moral argument. They just broke the contract they signed up to.

They shouldn't be "forced" to continue associating with someone; they should not change their position on whether or not they should associate with said person based on this situation.

That sounds abstract, but such concepts already exist. If you have a restaurant, you are allowed to refuse to serve someone who happens to be a member of a race R, but you are not allowed to refuse someone _because_ they are a member of race R.

> they should not change their position on whether or not they should associate with said person based on this situation.

This sounds like you forcing them to adopt your views.

Maybe people are just very fickle these days, but last I checked: "someone posting on your server" is not association. Site owners put in that one article precisely so that cannot be the case.

But this does break the CC license by unattributing content but not deleting it, so that's bad.

I don't know if people are different these days, but we certainly have taken the concept "all relationships are voluntary" too far. If we had a society where people associated with each other only when there was personal gain to be made, that would not be a very nice society.

In this case, because StackExchange is acting criminally themselves.

The author has licensed his posts to Stack Exchange under CC-BY-SA, which requires attribution.

By removing that attribution StackExchange has commited copyright infringement, which is punishable with jailtime (as seen in the Kim Dotcom case).

By participating in an online community, you have entered into a social contract to interact with others.

Do you feel that you are being forced to post here, or read comments and responses from other humans?

Yeah, and I don't need a person's name erased to choose not to read something. Especially when it's not me manually blocking them.