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Comment by eg5fv4 | Hacker News Reader

Thanks to this particular incident I've clearly seen the hypocrisy of many people regarding these matters.

Hypocrisy? Why do you assume that censorship will be used to block far-right material rather than leftist material? The right is gaining more and more political power and historically (at least in the US) is the side most willing to use censorship for it's own benefit.

I've read many people for too long opposing censorship, because it was always used by those in power for many things, from oppressing the political will of people to protecting copyright. Think of China, Russia on one side and the West on the other.

But now that some political power that we don't like is emerging, well, a lil censorship never hurt anyone huh?

I oppose censorship when the government does it. However, I fully expect to be able to boot any content that displeases me off my own website. Which is what Facebook is trying to do.

This very discussion forum is moderated, and very well as far as I can see. Do you think it would somehow be better if the mods weren't here?

Facebook is the only reliable or affordable form of internet access at all. I think the measure of "own website" changes once you reach a certain mass and especially when that "own website" is not a personal website but a corporate one. Not to mention the government influences that can and are made against these corporations.

It gets morally messy when you consider scale. At what point does it cross over from reasonable moderation to censorship? If Facebook were a country, it would the largest country in the world. Is it okay to censor two billion people because Facebook is not an "official government"?

I'm not against moderation at all but at a certain scale does it cease being only moderation? I would argue yes, but at what point? That's trickier to answer and I can't really say I know.

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