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Comment by dismayedbycorp | Hacker News Reader

> Can you imagine corporate policy of SF or Menlo Park sets what people in Mumbai or Seoul can discuss regarding SARS-Cov-2?

You don't have to imagine of course, it already does.

Also, last year someone mentioned here that joebiden.info (which AFAICT is just a website with a collection of inconvenient clips and reports on Biden, maybe misinterpreted to fit an agenda in some cases) was censored in Messenger, seemingly worldwide. Crazy stuff.

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Was quite shocking the first time my message got blocked.

I am part of autoimmune support groups where plaqunial is a normal treatment. Pre pandemic.

Get constant warnings and fact checks about plaqunial.

Friends regularly have their post “fact checked” of course always by liberal sources.

Full blown 1984 / animal farm these days.

I have stopped posting to Facebook when they would just randomly kill my posts. Just things I thought were funny or sarcastic (all before covid). Now I am just interested in peoples life events. My timeline is devoid of anything.

It’s long past time to start thinking about social media systems as publishing platforms, not communication platforms. You post things there and the companies decide whether or not they want to publish them. As much as we may want them to be neutral pipes like telephones, they are not, and complaining about it is just pissing in the wind. If you want a neutral pipe, use the telephone or email, not social media.

So it’s okay for a handful of companies to control most of the commutation in the country?

Perhaps home / auto loans should he decided on how “truthful” these companies decide you are. Surely no sane country “cough China” would do such a thing.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit_System

Not saying it is okay, but that it is this way, and we shouldn’t be surprised when publishers exercise editorial control or moderation on their platforms.

If I wrote the N-word here on HN, it would be downvoted until it disappeared, and if not, the mods would disappear it. Is this surprising to anyone? They don’t want that crap here. Facebook doesn’t want its definition of crap there. Twitter doesn’t want it’s definition of crap there. If you want to communicate without a filter, use a communication system without editorial filters.

You seem to be experiencing it right here. People down voting you, your personal experience does not fit their politics.

I wish people always use quotes as in "liberal"

"Plaqunial"/"Plaquenil" seems to be a brand name of hydroxychloroquine (HCQ). To some extend this makes it understandable why it is being censored at the moment because the unfounded claims going around that it would help against Covid-19.

This does not mean that it does not have its uses but only that there might be too many people spreading bad medical advice/misinformation at the moment. Combine that with social media' inability to scale content moderation and you end with a blanket ban of the term. This might have gone better for you and your group if these companies could only differentiate if someone is suggesting improper or valid use of HCQ.

So you might consider yourself a victim/collateral damage of an unfortunate coincidence of both Trump spreading misinformation on hydroxychloroquine in the first place and tech's inability to scale moderation and quality of it at the same rate as their growth.

Now why is this comment being downvoted. The last few nooks of the internet are being invaded by thought police.

Unsubstantiated claim, followed by a seemingly unrelated segue into US political commentary.

> Unsubstantiated claim

YouTube among others censored so much content surrounding SARS-CoV-2 (rightly or wrongly, I’ll remain neutral here), Apple and Google’s app stores straight up rejected apps for unofficial COVID info, including quite absurd cases like xscreensaver being rejected for including 3D renderings of the virus, or maybe just the word covid.[1] You really didn’t pay much attention if you’re unaware of these pretty extreme editorial decisions hotly debated last year.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25384689

Edit:

> seemingly unrelated segue

The censored worldwide part is related.

(Also removed a swipe in my edit, it didn’t add anything.)

Removal of SARS-CoV-2 content seemed at my end to be mainly driven by international calls to block disinformation [1], and certainly not driven by US corporate policy as claimed.

Censoring US content worldwide still seems unrelated to exporting America's political culture. Maybe you could make an argument that is hindering the export, or providing a biased view of the export.

[1] https://www.who.int/news-room/feature-stories/detail/counter...

WHO really dragged their feet before admitting that (1) it is a pandemic, (2) masks work and people should use masks, and (3) aerosols are the primary mode of transmission. They have been a notable source of misinformation themselves.

So your evidence that joebiden.info was censored is to point to something completely different that was censored?

That undermines the original claim in 2 ways. First it shows that you don’t have evidence for your original claim. Additionally, it also shows that it’s possible to present evidence for the kind of claim you’re making.

I did not make any “original claim”. You need to start checking who you’re responding to and what arguments they were responding to, not somehow assuming there’s exactly one person on each “side” arguing about only one thing. The “unsubstantiated claim” part I was responding to was clearly about COVID discussions outside the U.S. censored by U.S. corporations.

Also, are you asking for evidence that joebiden.info was censored? Took me half a minute to find: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23110664

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23110664

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