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Comment by smt88 | Hacker News Reader

Guns removed from YT and reddit are totally different. They're corporations choosing to ban certain content from their own platform.

Craigslist is responding to a change in the law, which isn't comparable.

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It's comparable insofar as, in each case the sociopolitical temperature of the moment has resulted in a reduction of the content available to users, even if the actual dynamic varies in the important ways you point out.

But one is through mandated censorship, the other is voluntary. YouTube decided to stop serving certain content to better serve it's customers, that is it's perogative as a business. Nothing is preventing a competitor from hosting such content.

its hard to see that its anything but censorship when these platforms hold a pure monopoly on the space. If Gutenberg prevented anything displeasing to him from being printed, we would rightly see that as censorship. Further, censorship takes place in many ways only a small number are the result of state actors. In Mexico reporting on the cartels will cause them to target and perhaps kill you.

If you want to argue that a good defense against censorship is to prevent a single entity from having too much power, I agree.

One is mandated, other is voluntary, but they both reflect the same phenomenon happening in the society - that more and more topics are becoming "not acceptable" and thus get eliminated from popular areas on-line.

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