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Comment by fruzz | Hacker News Reader

I mean, as a Canadian consumer using American social media platforms, we're subject to American censorship policies. Tumblr / Facebook / YouTube being most notable in their filtering of LGBT content and suspending accounts of LGBT users, because of the American governments stance on human sexuality. This argument of who censors makes sense for Americans, but it's more about picking your poison for people from other countries.

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>we're subject to American censorship policies. Tumblr / Facebook / YouTube being most notable in their filtering of LGBT content and suspending accounts of LGBT users, because of the American governments stance on human sexuality

No, you're subject to corporate censorship policies. Let's not pretend that individual platforms regulating content is the same as government censorship. Please show me how their policies are related to "the American governments stance on human sexuality".

Also, doesn't Canada have a few laws on the books regarding how people are allowed to address other people, specifically, LGBTQ people?

Yes, Canada has bans on targeted gender-based harassment against individuals, not bans on LGBT content.

Let’s not pretend a monopoly regulating content is much different from government.

Oh it is when the entity with a monopoly also has a monopoly on violence a.k.a government. A Uighur detention center, U.S. concentration camp etc. can only enforce their views with threat of violence. It is on an entirely different level of cardinality. To equate them would be to undermine the misery that those that suffer under such extreme regulations of content/thought.

Those aren't being enforced, either! It's not hard to find tweets deadnaming or misgendering a person.

They're taking a fully US-centric approach, treating abortion as a political topic - see https://business.twitter.com/en/help/ads-policies/restricted... . You can't advocate for abortion in Canadian ads. Which is insane, considering abortion is fully legal here. Going down that list, it's "things that are controversial in America". It's absurd to apply the same policy globally.

> Also, doesn't Canada have a few laws on the books regarding how people are allowed to address other people, specifically, LGBTQ people?

Not really. Canada prohibits hate speech and discrimination against LGBTQ people. The whole "using the wrong pronouns is now a criminal offense" meme was made up by someone looking for something to be offended about/sell books about how PC culture is ruining everything.[1]

People can be sued for discriminating on the basis of gender identity or expression. Repeatedly using the wrong pronoun can be used as evidence of that, but probably has to fit into a larger pattern of behavior. And that's the kind of thing you could credibly sue an employer or business for in the US as well.

1. https://factcheck.afp.com/no-canadians-cannot-be-jailed-or-f...

> corporate censorship policies

Which in a large part with preference tailored to US

Yeah, but not the US government.

Why should a Canadian, or European care about the difference between US government laws affecting the services and media they consume, versus US corporate policies doing the same?

It's a distinction without a difference. They don't have any redress, or ability to influence either US corporations, or the US government, much like how Americans have no ability to influence the CPC.

Would a Canadian have more of an ability to influence a Canadian corporation? I guess I am just confused why it being a US corporation changes the equation verse a corporation from anywhere else.

What are you referring to, exactly? There certainly is no enforceable law in the United States against LGBT content. There theoretically are restrictions on "obscenity," but they are virtually nonexistent in practice. The only law I can think of that resembles what you're describing in any way is our, indeed, quite aggressive ban on child pornography. And I'm no expert on Canadian child pornography laws, but I'll bet Canada isn't too friendly to that content either.

The theoretical point is true enough, that American content restrictions would generally wind up being exported abroad. The key difference is, however, that we do not actually have Chinese-style content restrictions.

SESTA/FOSTA led to large changes in content moderation strategies for a bunch of sites outsizedly effecting the edges of LGBTQ communities ...

EDIT: Sources in-text since i'm already being downvoted: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Enabling_Sex_Traffickers_...

Pretty much all hate speech is censored on social media platforms. So is calling for or promoting violence against certain groups. Harrassment is also prohibited on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.

All American social media censors their users, most people just arent producing that type of content.

> Pretty much all hate speech is censored on social media platforms. So is calling for or promoting violence against certain groups. Harrassment is also prohibited on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.

Social media platforms censor more than that. Try posting a picture of a nipple on Facebook.

Yes. But GP's comment was about the US government, not restrictions placed on content by American companies voluntarily (or due to pressure from the broader US culture). I agree, of course, the US culture is restrictive in some ways, and this can come through in the practices of US companies (the culture is also quite permissive in some ways). But this is different in important ways from the restrictions being imposed by the government.

Aren't those mainly hidden behind gag orders though? Isn't that enough proof? We can't even tell what was censored presumably for our safety.

Don't think so. We know that there are some allegedly national-security-related takedowns where the government has sought gag orders. We know about them because the companies sometimes object, and the request becomes public. Then there the other types of content being discussed in this thread such as LGBTQ content, adult material, etc. where I don't think there is any reason at all to believe that gag orders would be involved.

> What are you referring to, exactly?

There's a pretty good meme about differences between European and American media take on censorship [0].

It's now locked behind an Imgur login due to being NSFW (over a single nipple), but the basic premise is that US media would censor a nipple away, leaving the person recognizable, while European media didn't take issue with the nipple, but instead censored her face to protect her identity.

Which is a pretty good example of how different cultures prioritize things differently. Scale that up to the reality of the tech space being dominated by US companies, and suddenly US cultural norms largely became established as global norms [1].

Before the Internet, US soldiers stationed in other countries had a very similar effect: They also brought their culture with them, which often was considered way more exotic than anything local. Decades later nobody even much cares or notices how US influenced much of our culture has become in Western Europe.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/2f8xmd/nsfw_the_dif...

[1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2018-09-29/the-cleaners-...

To view Imgur NSFW content without logging in, simply add ".jpg" to the end of the URL.

Yes. This is a fair point. I would emphasize, though, that this is about US culture, not US government or law. Interestingly, part of the whole point of the 1st Amendment to the US Constitution is to maintain a lot of separation between these two things.

> this is about US culture, not US government or law

But these things do not exist in a vacuum.

Ask anybody working on the tech and legal ends of the adult industry and you will hear quite horrific stories about having to jump through so many hoops just for finding a payment provider.

For a while, these used to be www dominating issues, and how they were dealt with in the US, often ended up being the de-facto global standard.

A very recent and relevant example for this is footage out of the Syrian Civil War on platforms like Twitter and YouTube.

Over these past years, whole swats of videos have disappeared on the basis of being tagged as "terrorist propaganda" [0]

In a very similar vein how "Napalm Girl" ended up getting censored as child pornography [1].

By now even Reddit has learned to "selectively forget", as all undeleting/uncensoring sites that used to work, have stopped working.

Just because it's not some US government agency playing the censor, but rather the US government pressuring US companies into self-censorship, doesn't make this kind of censorship any less real in its overall impact.

[0] https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/youtube-ai-deletes-war-cr...

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-37318031

The thing missing from all of this is any actual evidence of government pressure.

From [0]: "YouTube is facing criticism after a new artificial intelligence program monitoring "extremist" content began flagging and removing masses of videos and blocking channels that document war crimes in the Middle East."

From [1]: "Facebook said it has to restrict nudity for cultural reasons."

I'm not saying this isn't important. I'm not even ruling out some sort of indirect and informal government role. (Government policy and culture are intertwined!) But they fall far far short of supporting the false equivalency drawn in this thread ans elsewhere between western companies removing content due to TOS violations, etc. on the one hand, and content being removed literally, and undisputedly (as far as I've seen) in response to direct commands by the Chinese government.

Sorry I may of missed your point? As a lot of right wing commentary (not saying that you are right wing) suggest when talking about LGBTQ they bring up child pornography alot. Why are you doing so as well?

Yes, you missed it. My point is that the US government does not censor LGBTQ content. In fact, it censors very few types of content. One of the few areas it does censor, just by way of example, is child pornography. But this has nothing to do with LGBTQ content--thus my puzzlement over GP's comment.

I don’t know that it has anything to do with the U.S. government, so much as U.S. social norms which sometimes consider mentioning the existence of gay people as a “sexual” topic (and therefore banned, demonetized, or flagged as adult content) even though many aspects of being gay are not sexual.

Tumblr / Facebook / YouTube being most notable in their filtering of LGBT content and suspending accounts of LGBT users, because of the American governments stance on human sexuality.

Facebook removed LGBT pages because the American government forced them? Do you have a link?

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