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Comment by aww_dang | Hacker News Reader

Objective truth as revealed to us by the anointed technocrats and fact checkers has been accepted by partisans where it suits their biases. Questioning these official truths amounts to blasphemy in the social media space.

The premise of democracy rests upon the concept of free and open debate. If we cannot trust the public to consume information without hand holding, why should we trust them to vote on issues which impact our lives and property? Ironically, censorship is enacted in the name of protecting democracy.

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True censorship is when government does it. If you go to jail for promoting some information, that's censorship.

Twitter and Facebook are part of "the public". You are even using right now a website very heavy on "censorship", or how I call it "moderation". If you don't follow HN guidelines you will be silenced. The efforts by members of public to reduce spread of misinformation and polarization is part of why we should trust in public to handle information. But if you do not like HN, Twitter, Facebook you can look for another website.

Apparently Parler is getting recently popular as an alternative to Twitter and Facebook moderation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parler

Try posting anything remotely leftist on Parler and you'll be banned in less than a week. My profile lasted about 36 hours.

Completely the opposite experience of what quite literally is the first sentence on their homepage:

> Speak freely and express yourself openly, without fear of being “deplatformed” for your views.

Parler is a joke, but I believe that this censorship problem is a structural one, that is, any "network" that is just a website is inevitably going to become an echo chamber where opinions differing from the target demographic are censored.

Censorship is the hiding of information and prevention of publishing. that's it. That's the definition.

HNs guidelines appear to be "put some effort into what you say and don't fight." They're not censoring any particular set of ideas.

I agree and disagree with this simultaneously. I don't think they should add restrictions like this however I will paste a tweet I tweeted today of what I'd love to see from Twitter:

>I'd love a filter where Twitter only shows real people who have verified their ID with a passport. No companies, no bots.

It's not censorship if the post is still accessible. It's Twitter inc. expressing their opinion.

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