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Comment by Slansitartop | Hacker News Reader

> Shrugs, people invoke freedom of expression where it simply doesn't apply, YouTube is a private entity, they can pretty much nuke any content for any reason.

You've got it mixed up, you're only supposed to deploy that snark when someone complains about a private company violating First Amendment rights.

Seriously now, I think its very important to consider how the increasing concentrated private ownership of public communication affects the people's natural rights of free expression. The legal regime that was developed to protect free expression when there was only one entity (the government) with the concentrated power to widely censor may no longer be adequate for the modern world.

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It’s definitely something to keep in mind, and a reason to keep an eye on alternative outlets that don’t curate content at all. So far those alternatives seem to confirm the wisdom of that curation. By analogy to the world of art, it’s good to look beyond big museums, schools, and galleries. Graffiti art and folk art for example, don’t come from the heavily controlled world of professional art.

The truth though, is that most graffiti is crude bullshit, not unlike most of Voat for example. Keep an eye on it, because there might be some fine art hidden in there, you can still understand why curstion is necessary; imperfect, it necessary.

Outcasts and undesirables aren't invited to parties. Is that censorship or is that just how society works?

It could be if there's only one or a handful of groups throwing parties, and if going to parties is essential to political participation.

Put another way: what wasn't censorship when there were a dozen independent media outlets in every city becomes censorship when there are only a dozen or fewer independent media outlets in the whole country. We're not there yet, but that's the direction we're headed.

Is it? So far all of the outsider parties are full of exactly the kind of people who should be shoved into margins. When I start to see more physicists, doctors, artists, etc making the same complaints as trolls and dimestore Nazis, I’ll worry.

You're in pretty dangerous territory when you start to justify censorship because the right people are getting censored. Censors, be they government or not, never think they're censoring the wrong people, they always think they're doing the right thing.

Also, if media and network consolidation make non-government censorship as powerful as government censorship, and the "physicists, doctors, artists, etc making the same complaints," then it's probably too late to do much about it. It's much better to nip the problem in the bud, and prevent the infrastructure of private censorship from getting too developed.

Think of it this way: if you give too much power to good people in government, then when some crazy fucker like Donald Trump comes along, he can do a lot more harm because he has all the tools and precedents he needs to fuck things up, handed to him ready-made. It's the same for power generally.

You're in pretty dangerous territory when you start to justify censorship because the right people are getting censored. Censors, be they government or not, never think they're censoring the wrong people, they always think they're doing the right thing.

I’m not making that argument, and I’m not diving into the bottomless pit or what people “feel” is censorship, when it’s appropriate, etc. HN exists by virtue of constructively and carefully applied censorship, with a specific and stated goal to avoid degradation and collapse. Censorship is a tool like any other, none of us should expect to be free from it. Government censorship is a whole other matter, but fortunately the 1st ammendement protects against that.

To the rest, I’ve been hearing the same “if’s” from the same bad actors for decades. After all, when a good argument or cause is absent, out come the slippery slopes. I’m just tired of it. It always seems to come down to a plea for assholes to be given deference, and anything short of that is “censorship”. Please.

It's clearly both.

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