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Comment by Shish2k | Hacker News Reader

> as we are seeing with all of the woke craziness

People (eg, sex workers) have been getting deplatformed (often with the government assisting in - or requiring - the deplatforming!) for decades, and I didn’t hear the free-speech / right-wing types complaining.

But now that some private companies don’t want to support racism, it’s a brand new problem we need to fight against? :P

(I agree with the overall point that censorship is a two sided blade; just find it funny when some people think that this is new, when in fact it’s been happening for longer than I’ve been alive, it just seems new to them because they’ve never been on the receiving end before)

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Not sure why your comment got downvoted; the hypocrisy and misinformation at the core of this issue absolutely needs to be addressed. There's a lot of pretense that this "censorship" or "deplatforming" is a new and mostly left-wing thing, but it has been around for ages, and the people crying the loudest about "cancel culture" are the same people calling for boycotts of Target, Colin Kaepernick, or the Dixie Chicks. Legal sex workers can get their bank accounts blocked or denied, athletes and artists receive backlash for speaking out. There's at least as much regressive craziness as there is "woke craziness".

The case of the Dr. Seuss Estate deciding not to reprint these books, it's the estate itself making their own decision what's best for the estate they're managing, and is not remotely comparable to censorship, deplatforming or any form of "cancel culture". Ebay banning other people's books arguably is.

De-platforming for decades?

If a TV station broadcast a daytime TV show containing violence, racism, and a female nipple - which aspect would they get in the most legal trouble for?

I’m neither a lawyer nor an American (I assume we’re talking about America here), but my reading and experience would suggest that the first is glorified, the second is tolerated, and the third can result in hundreds of millions of dollars of fines even if it’s a fraction of a second by accident (eg the Super Bowl XXXVIII halftime show being a particularly well-publicised incident. The $550,000 fine was eventually dismissed, but only because “it’s unfair to apply this rule retroactively”, not because there’s anything wrong with the rule...)

For America, I was going to say:

- violence: tolerated

- nipple: becoming more accepted, barring antiquated FCC rules that only really impact things like Superbowl. streaming seems to completely allow it.

- dirty words (f-bomb, s-bomb, etc.): roughly same as nipple. Yippie kie-yay Mister Falcon.

- racism: depictions of historical racism, e.g. History Channel are fine. racial slurs, racialized depictions (Apu on Simpsons) risk randomly getting episodes or entire series effectively banned (delisted and never shown again). applies to actors' and producers' personal lives, twitter feeds, etc.

- sexism, other-isms: racism-lite. there is a bigger emphasis on sexism in personal lives vs. racism in the actual show content. Seinfeld wasn't cancelled over Michael Richard's Laugh Factory incident and there are tons of sexist tropes on 80's/90's sitcoms that haven't haven't (yet) resulted in cancellation.

A new day, a new example - “Utah bill would require activated porn filter on new phones” - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26362605

IMO “Government requires a filter” is a waaaay bigger problem than “private company decides to stop selling a thing"

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