T-Mobile Actively Censoring Certain URLs [video] | Hacker News Reader

T-Mobile Actively Censoring Certain URLs [video]

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237 pointsAcrobatic_Road155 comments

I performed the following tests for odysee.com, which is mentioned in the video. Google Voice is on a paid Google Workspace plan. AT&T is a Small Business plan. All others are typical consumer plans. Visible is a Verizon subsidiary. Google Fi is an MVNO that routes texts through T-Mobile.

Google Voice -> T-Mobile: blocked

T-Mobile -> Google Voice: blocked

Google Voice -> AT&T: allowed

AT&T -> Google Voice: allowed

Visible -> Google Voice: allowed

Google Voice -> Visible: allowed

AT&T -> Google Fi: blocked

Google Fi -> AT&T: blocked

T-Mobile appears to be the only provider blocking that particular website. (Google Fi routes SMS through T-Mobile.)

But it gets better. Odysee appears misspelled at first glance, so I decided to look it up to make sure it wasn’t a phishing site. I typed it into DuckDuckGo and…

…nothing. Just a bunch of completely unrelated websites. Not even a Wikipedia article. I tried again a few more times—same results. Tried again about 10 minutes later, and I’m finally seeing limited results. The Odysee website appears, but third-party sources discussing it, including Wikipedia, are nowhere to be found.

It’s pretty clear this is a controversial website, but I don’t appreciate this. It makes it orders of magnitude more difficult for someone such as myself to research the matter and communicate with other researchers.

Not only is the site itself being censored, but information about the site is being censored. I’ve noticed this happening quite a bit with DDG lately, particularly with right-leaning and libertarian websites. Google and Bing both show the expected results, but DDG will censor the bulk of it for about 10 minutes. Disabling safe search has no impact, but retrying repeatedly eventually yields valid results. I’m curious whether this is intentional censorship or an unrelated technical issue.

Are you sure about Odysee? When I search it on DDG, it shows Odysee as the first result. Every subsequent result on the first page is a post or article about Odysee, except for a URL to lbry.

FWIW I have safe search and advertisements turned off, region set to "All Regions" and language set to English. Re-trying with safe search strict and I still get the same results.

Yes, I’m sure. It’s been happening to me a lot with DDG lately. Unfortunately, I haven’t been keeping track of the circumstances, but it seems to correlate with my usage of iCloud Private Relay. I suspect it happens when I’m routed through either Cloudflare or Akamai, but not both. Waiting 10 minutes tends to result in a new route.

It’s very odd behavior, but when it happens, it’s as though a particular organization is scrubbed from the search results. I’m regularly researching controversial organizations, so I find this particularly inconvenient, but at least it’s conspicuous.

Occasionally it’ll happen to mainstream sites such as Hulu. That leads me to believe it may be some sort of regional or safe search glitch, but the correct results will eventually reappear without changing any settings. Regardless of the cause, it comes across as censorship—even Wikipedia will be missing from the results.

DDG's not giving me a Wikipedia result for Odysee, but I'm not surprised either, because DDG rarely gives me Wikipedia results for queries in general. Eg I just searched for "dog" and Wikipedia is not in the first page's ten results (two dictionaries, four lists of breeds, two youtube videos, a shelter, and "dog.com"), while it's number one in Google's results.

Kagi seems to be doing great in this regard.

https://i.imgur.com/fHSbPra.png

I have verified that every single result is relevant. I do not believe there is any censorship of these results in my case.

Anyone else? https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Odysee&ia=web

The first results:

odysee.com https://odysee.com

apps.apple.com https://apps.apple.com › us › app › odysee › id1539444143

Odysee: The New YouTube for the Far-Right - GNET Search domain gnet-research.org https://gnet-research.org › 2021 › 02 › 17 › odysee-the-new-youtube-for-the-far-right

Odysee Overview - Reclaim The Net reclaimthenet.org https://reclaimthenet.org › odysee-overview

reclaimthenet.org https://reclaimthenet.org › odysee-better-than-youtube

Odysee: a new video platform backed by LBRY publish0x.com https://www.publish0x.com › ghastly-gaming › odysee-a-new-video-platform-backed-by-lbry-xpjklpk

Odysee aims to build a more freewheeling, independent ... techcrunch.com https://techcrunch.com › 2020 › 12 › 07 › odysee-launch

Free Odysee Video Downloader HD Quality Fast pastedownload.com https://pastedownload.com › odysee-video-downloader

LBRY - Content Freedom Search domain lbry.com https://lbry.com

Etc

I see exactly the same as you - located in EU.

I am located in the EU too. Maybe that's why we see uncensored results? As an American, I sure hope not.

What is weird is that if you accept the suggested spell check: Search only for "Odysee"? You get an entirely different set of results, with Odysee filtered out. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22Odysee%22

Can confirm. That is really weird

That's weird but I still see results talking about Odysee in the results. Mostly blogs and whatnot with extreme fringe conspiracy stuff like "graphene razor blade" in vaccines and reptilians, pointing to various social media handles including Odysee.

Yup, this is what is happening to me as well.

The answer to why some of you are seeing different test results from each other is context: you, your location, and other identifying information they can use in their firewall rules. If you are testing with SMS, the carrier knows who you are. DDG is supposed to be user neutral, but the Azure server serving the Bing results may have some information such as location. I do not know the relationship between DDG and MS and what data is shared.

i don't exactly know why you're using Bing/DDG, but Google has all the relevant links:

http://google.com/search?rls=en&q=odysee&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8

Because google sucks in so many ways.

You're saying that Google sucks because they aren't censoring (in this case)?

I am on tmobile, and searching odyssey via ddg gives me all the relevant results (the homepage, wikipedia, etc)

Google is the search engine I see most aggressively editing my results.

that is different. when you use the web everything these days is via HTTPS, which encrypts the content so tmobile can't see what's going on.

TMobile is censoring SMS texts, which is not encrypted.

I can't reproduce the DDG experiment on TMO.

I can reproduce OP video's experiment. TMO is absolutely blocking certain SMS content.

Relevant conversation here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28554400

Turns out .xyz domains are regularly blocked by carriers as well. I'm on T-Mobile and I can't send my own personal blog, because it's a .xyz. (I really need to change that...)

In my experience, T-Mobile also blocks messages over ddosecrets.com. They also block leftist sites such as Jacobinmag.com or itsgoingdown.org, so it'd be an interesting study to see what the cause is and if it's biased. (I confirmed these three and my own site just now.)

I was unable to replicate the block of Jacobinmag.com nor itsgoingdown.org. I was able to replicate the block on ddosecrets.com.

This is really weird. They were blocked once, but I tried these again ~40 minutes after my original test, and they went through. Then, when writing this comment, I tried a third time, and they were blocked again.

First run: odysee.com, jacobinmag.com, itsgoingdown.org were blocked. I did these just before midnight EDT.

This second run: odysee.com, and freethestates.com (didn't try it the first time) were blocked, but jacobinmag.com and itsgoingdown.org are not anymore. I double-checked for spelling mistakes, etc. I also checked covidcarealliance.org and lichess.org, also blocked. I also checked goo.gl URLs (previously notoriously blocked by T-Mobile) and they are not blocked.

I did some looking into this, and T-Mobile employees have been surprisingly open about URL filtering in the past on their support forums. One example (see https://community.t-mobile.com/accounts-services-4/tmobile-i...)

> I’m taking care of this right now. I must say the domain is very amusing and creative! It’s flagging for a combination of issues: collocated with Amazon AWS with 5k other domains, registrar to Namecheap (poor reputation with DGA generated domains), and inserting both URL and email address in message body. (double whammy). Otherwise, you are following proper protocol with Twilio A2P messaging. > > I’ll have the vendor reputation resolved in a few hours. Thanks!

It's surprising to me that AWS and NameCheap are named as contributing factors.

In fact, writing this comment took so long that I tried the strange URLs a third time. jacobinmag.com was blocked again but not itsgoingdown.org. So, jacobinmag.com has flipped from blocked, to not blocked, to blocked again in the span of an hour.

I appreciate the openness on their part. I can relate to the difficulty of crafting anti-spam risk assessment rules. It’s common to take these factors into account, and it would explain why .xyz is blocked; that’s on a lot of naughty lists because of early registry rules that were inadvertently amenable to malicious actors.

That being said, they’ve clearly got some serious false positives, so their rules need work.

When it comes to things like this, transparency prevents cancellations, so it makes sense to be more transparent about it.

Do you mind checking l̶i̶c̶h̶e̶s̶s̶.̶c̶o̶m̶ lichess.org? It's a popular online chess website, as the name suggests. A Reddit post from a month ago claims it is also blocked. [1] I think that would be hilarious.

[1]: https://old.reddit.com/r/tmobile/comments/r0r2jh/tmobile_blo...

I can confirm! It seems lichess.org (the legit url) is blocked, but lichess.com is not.

FWIW, I'm on an MVNO of Tmobile, and I can reach lichess.org but not lichess.com.

I can't reach lichess.com on my home internet either (Service Electric, a subsidiary of PennTeleData, IIRC)

I believe they are blocking links to the websites in an SMS message.

That’s unrelated. The issue here is that SMS messages containing particular links are blocked, not that the sites themselves are blocked.

Thanks :-)) lichess.com was a typo on my part, sorry for that.

For those curious Facebook does the same thing in private messages

https://www.quora.com/Why-is-Facebook-censoring-private-mess...

Politicians have been supportive of censoring text messages

https://nypost.com/2021/07/12/dnc-biden-allies-want-phone-ca...

Yeah, I was recently discussing firearms with my brothers via FB Messenger and sites for finding ammo were blocked. We then tried several other types of sites to see if they were blocked. A lot of firearm related stuff, ammoseek, and piracy. PirateBay was blocked. Tor and Scihub were not. Porn sites were not but antivax sites were. Marijuana sites were not, but random liquor distillers were. Total hit and miss.

But a lot of gun-related stuff was.

Conversely, I never had gun-related stuff censored in FB messenger, but links to some websites about weed would be blocked. Looked very weird, too - no message, no error, the (web) app just hangs.

I think they have some kind of blocklist that is, shall we say, "dynamic" wrt the current political environment.

It must be really dynamic. I tried a number of URLs, and one of them, jacobinmag.com, went from blocked to unblocked to blocked over the span of an hour.

Perhaps the algorithm blocking takes into account individual activity. I almost never send SMSes, and now my phone is sending dozens at midnight.

I stumbled upon a website of furries discussing 3D-printed firearms. sent a link to my friend. blocked. other 3D-printed arms websites were not. I wonder if they do some network analysis and automatically determine the furries are scarier? no idea.

How were they blocked? When you sent a message containing "www.blocked-domain.com", what did the sender and recipient get? An (honest?) error message, or silent failure?

Late reply, but Facebook and Facebook Messenger both prompt the user that the URL you’re trying to send is not permitted. The message is never sent, you have to remove the URL. The URL checker even follows redirects, so e.g. a URL shortener won’t cut it.

I've seen specific Jordan Peterson YouTube videos URLs blocked on messenger as well. Sometimes they're completely non-controversial as well.

According to the video, links to Odysee (a YouTube alternative) and Free The States (an anti-abortion websites) are blocked. People on Reddit [1] also corroborate this. Corporate censorship exists, it is generally biased politically, and is not OK.

[1]: https://old.reddit.com/r/GoldandBlack/comments/rs2wqr/appare...

---

PS. Here are a couple of things that I think are worth clarifying:

* This about them blocking links to the websites in an SMS message, not DNS blacklisting or deep packet inspection.

* Their blocking system seems pretty dumb in general. Apparently, it is even blocking lichess.org [2], the whole .xyz TLD, and stochastically Jacobin (the National Review of the left).

[2]: Thanks to @lynndotpy for confirming this.

The Reuters story linked in the Reddit thread has the FCC reassuring us this authority is for bulk messages only.

To be clear, for the benefit of those who are reading these comments before watching the video, this censorship happens even to single messages sent between individuals' personal phones, so it doesn't fall within that authority.

I just tested this with my wife and odysee is being blocked over SMS. If you send it over RCS, it works fine.

That makes sense, as Google's extension to RCS does have a form of "end-to-end" encryption.

(Deleted, with apologies for the misunderstanding, and thanks to lynndotpy for the clarification.)

To be clear, it's not T-Mobile censoring access, it's T-Mobile blocking texts with these URLs.

> system seems pretty dumb in general.

Yes it kinda a MVP "designed" to block spam, phishing and similar.

Which then is all the time abused to block other thinks.

Like the UK "adult content" (i.e. porn) filter is all the time abused to block other thinks (like the ticket website for the C3C in the past).

Or like CCP minions (1) sneak sensitive terms in lists of Chinese insults to block them.

And because all "censoring" of non-adult-only, phishing, etc. content is supposedly just a random mistake you can guess how that never ever has any consequences.

(1): Sometimes state sponsored people, sometimes CCP favoring Chinese nationalists etc.

CCP nationalists is an, ahem, interesting concept.

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

Ok I didn't know this.

I meant people which put effort into hiding darker parts of there national and/or governments history without being payed in any way. But instead because of some form of their "national" pride.

The censorship is an inevitable result of tollerating these tech companies and their promotion of content moderation.

If we are under attack from a foreign adversary, then the logical thing to do would be to firewall our social medias off into national siloes.

Instead, they use their positions to censor our speech amongst eachother, promote their own political ideologies, and cause everyone to live in a state of unknowingly being censored, shadow banned, algorithmicly limited, etc for having a very human opinion that differs from that which the platform seeks to amplify.

Most likely machine learning gone wrong where enough people report messages with the same link as spam to cause anti-spam systems to auto-block it. Makes sense that the links are all political, these are the most likely type of domains someone would want to perform an ideologically-motivated confused-deputy attack on.

I doubt it's nefarious purposeful censorship. But the anti-spam system does need to be fixed to prevent this sort of abuse.

Stop spreading doubt about it being nefarious. AI is trained. And if this is the future it’s still censorship regardless of if there’s an algorithm to blame or a human.

He should be censored for spreading doubt

That comment was neither censorship nor advocating censorship. It was meeting speech with other speech.

and regardless what the stated purpose was. You're still just as dead from friendly fire.

A poorly designed AI can appear to be … nefarious.

How do you report an SMS message as spam to T-Mobile? Is that even something you can do? I've been receiving annoying blatant phishing texts from e-mail addresses as of late.

You copy the message and then send it to 7726.

You’ll get an automated response back saying something like “Thank you for reporting spam”

sheesh! how come T-Mobile never let us know that THAT 7726 is the “anti-SPAM” mechanism?

In case it's not obvious, 7726 spells "SPAM" when using the letters on the keypad.

Interestingly, there's an older discussion on the t-mobile subreddit that goes into quite a lot more analytical detail and is much less reactionary than HN is. What a role reversal.

PSA: "Reactionary" doesn't mean what it sounds like it means.

re·ac·tion·ar·y (of a person or a set of views) opposing political or social liberalization or reform. "reactionary attitudes toward women's rights"

Edit: Here's the T-Mobile subreddit link: https://www.reddit.com/r/tmobile/comments/rskfmx/video_evide...

I’m seeing the same thing on outgoing T-Mobile SMS messages.

The really nefarious thing is that T-Mobile doesn’t reject the text outright or notify the user. Instead, it pretends it was processed and the recipient just decided not to respond.

That might be the worst aspect of this worse than the censorship itself.

Is it possible these were just anti-spam measures that are accidentally getting discovered by normal people as well?

Can confirm -- I've attempted to replicate this with multiple messages with and without URLs to my wife (on the same account). Messages with the documented URLs are consistently blocked while others are not.

For what it's worth, messages I just sent to and from my Google Voice number to my Fi number (while on T-Mobile underlying) went through fine.

Via SMS to a forwarder?

Or GVoice app/webapp?

Between Messages app (Fi with RCS enabled, vs. the special Fi syncing system [1]) and GV app.

[1] https://support.google.com/fi/answer/6188337?hl=en&ref_topic...

Interesting, messages sent from my T-Mobile to Google Voice number are being filtered out as the video describes.

Maybe Fi has a special deal the other MVNOs don’t?

My results were what I expected, and what I would expect for any MVNO. Are other non-Fi MVNOs being filtered/censored? I think that'd be a pretty big deal, unless it's just Boost Mobile or whoever it is they own that really isn't, practically speaking, an MVNO anymore.

IIRC, SMS on Fi is handled like gvoice. I'd be highly surprised if TMO had much interaction at all with the message.

I figured more or less the same thing (my results were expected, in other words).

Just don't use SMS.

I deprecated SMS 12 years ago in favor of e-mail, because it's carrier-agnostic and my e-mail address doesn't change even if I switch providers or roam to another country and change SIM cards.

And bonus -- no censorship.

I purposely do not want e-mail notifications on my phone. E-mail doesn't solve all communication use-cases.

Just have another e-mail account that's your instant messaging account. MUCH easier to filter, block, whatever you want.

They also block all .xyz links. This is why I spent the extra money on a .org

Wait, what…How is that legal?

it's not true

No. It's true. I have T-Mobile, and I cannot send .xyz links over SMS. If you have T-Mobile, this is easy to verify: text yourself "abc.xyz" (or any other .xyz link) The message will show as sent but not received. If you text yourself any uncensored link, it will show as sent and received.

Probably the same type of agreement that permits them to block spam calls on your behalf, deep inside the EULA.

Why would it be illegal? T-Mobile is a private company, and they can do what they like. (whether they should...)

what other ones do they block?

I thought .com .net .org are the cheapest ... They're like $9 on NameCheap and I think I've seen $3 elsewhere

I thought .org was more expensive than .xyz for the name I was looking for. Could be wrong.

Namecheap says .xyz is $1 for the first year.

A lot of registrars were offering .xyz domains at fire-sale promotional prices (like, $1 for the first year, or outright free with the purchase of another domain). This made them extremely popular with spammers.

The same goes for a lot of other new gTLDs.

This is wild because I just saw an article about xyz on techcrunch. I even checked Spamhaus and they have a lower score than .com in spam. Im weary of these outdated filters than block new gtlds because they're new and automatically considered bad.

Really depends on the domain - a short(ish) word or name combo won't be, and many .com, .net, .org domains are already taken. My personal blog is on .me ( Montenegro), the .com is parked and advertised at $4k, the .net is taken but unused and the .org is taken and used.

Oh, that's just because there are some hoarders and squatters on some .com domains who aren't doing anything with the resource and just want to make some money without doing real work.

The $4k isn't really the actual price of registration though, that's only a few bucks.

Does it block https://abc.xyz/ ?

In my experience as a moderator of several subs, Reddit actively blocks zerohedge links, they'll appear in our moderator queues and even if you manually approve them they just sit there in the queue, the only option that works is to remove them or mark them as spam.

They do some others too but zerohedge is the one I see every few days in /r/silverbugs and /r/prepperintel, and the only one I can remember by name.

Someone on this board probably has access to the entire list of these domains?

Devil's advocate -- is it possible T-Mobile's anti-spam system is being overly aggressive? If this was truly a C-level executive decision to push some political agenda, wouldn't both the "freethestates" and "studentsforlife" sites be blocked? Looks like the "studentsforlife" went through despite having the same "pro life" themes. Although, at first glance the "freethestates" site does appear to have a very extreme anti-abortion view. Refers to the act of abortion as equivalent to the Holocaust.

I'm not seeing any of this on T-mobile cellualar or otherwise. This leads me to think it is either something enforced by the USA inside the USA, or something only allowed in the USA. (I'm in the EU to be specific)

You tried sending and receiving links to those exact sites over SMS, and the messages all came through? I ask because multiple other people in this thread accidentally tried just accessing those sites over T-Mobile's cellular data, which isn't what's blocked.

The result of the banality of slow-creep censorship which lots of people winked at because it was censorship they could live with.

Don't worry, they said platforms have a right to censor the content they carry, they are not "dumb pipes" and many other ways people dismissed the threat from censorship.

Now we have "dumb pipes" censoring certain services as well as content.

Of course politicians love this. They will not oppose censorship. Power loves censorship.

ISPs are not platforms. If they want to meddle with traffic they should lose all common carrier indemnity.

T-Mobile is supposed to block spam and scam texts like all providers, I thought? The instructions from the FCC for responding to text spam include forwarding the message to shortcode SPAM on the cellular provider, which presumably is to give them a database of spam to block in the future.

https://www.fcc.gov/news-events/blog/2020/03/02/mobile-phone...

This is not that. It censors alternatives to youtube for example --The landing page not any particular content.

Also, what ARE they doing (not doing) about scam/SPAM telephone calls? Nothing!

That sounds like bad toupee fallacy. You don't know what the situation would be like if they were doing nothing.

AFAIK T-Mobile was the first carrier to implement STIR/SHAKEN to verify caller ID.

Pretty sure they're not actually considered common carriers in the first place.

Certain FCC chairmen would say they should be. I might even agree.

This seems to be about SMS, which would be part of their telephone business, not their ISP business. I believe that telephone services are common carriers.

The FCC declared that wireless text messages (SMS and MMS) are information services (Title I), not telecom services (Title II), so this type of practice is unfortunately perfectly okay with the FCC.

Not the first time, either.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_Austral...

I fail to see the slippery slope here. This kinda makes me dislike T-Mobile. Same as I would dislike any other corporation that does something shitty. And lots of them do shitty things all the time. Not saying you're doing this, but people seem to have a very tenuous grasp of the 1st amendment and apply it to private entities, thus elevating some nothing-burger issue to the level of a constitutional violation.

"slow-creep censorship"

You mean like the PMRC, fundamentalist religious censorship, and what happened to groups like The Dixie Chicks?

This isn't a new issue.

Exactly. Whither Tipper and Al and their PMRC?

And it continues today. People want to censor some songs, but not others, because presumably some are offensive in different ways.

I am curious as to why you didn't mention the other founders in your post.

"The women who founded the PMRC are Tipper Gore, wife of Senator and later Vice President Al Gore; Susan Baker, wife of Treasury Secretary James Baker; Pam Howar, wife of Washington realtor Raymond Howar; and Sally Nevius, wife of former Washington City Council Chairman John Nevius. "

"The PMRC was founded in 1985, in the shadows of rising political conservatism under president Ronald Reagan, by a group of "Washington Wives" that included Susan Baker (wife of the then Secretary of the Treasury James BakerWikipedia, Peatsy Hollins (wife of Sen. Ernest HollingsWikipedia of South Carolina), and many other Washington socialites (such as Pam Hower and Sally Nevius). Most notably, the group included Tipper Gore, wife of then-Senator, later-Vice President and inventor of the Internet Al Gore, who became the group's most outspoken member."

From Wikipedia & RationalWiki

Another reason to use signal, briar, etc...

Censoring in SMS messages. Certain anti-abortion links, and a distributed youtube alternative are censored.

In particular, the links they tried were:

* https://odysee.com/ * https://freethestates.com/ * https://freethestates.org/ * https://freethestates.org/who-we-are/

Any SMS, whether incoming or outgoing, with any of these links is silently dropped.

It's the free part. Twilio will also flag patterns like this. We built a contactless workflow that was being censored, and it was due to a similar substring appearing in the link. It was a pain in the ass to figure out

From the Reddit thread and my own testing, links like “ https://free-test.com/” go through fine from a T-Mobile phone. These URLs T-Mobile blocks appear to be individually treated differently, for whatever reason.

Interesting, thanks for checking it out!

Other sites like ddosecrets.com and itsgoingdown.org are also affected. Neither have the string "free" in them

Other sites that are blocked are ddosecrets.com, canadiancovidcarealliance.org

Also: https://barnhardt.biz

A friend tried to send me a link to that blog back in June in regards to investing in cattle, and T-Mobile blocked it. Only noticed the missing message because the conversation didn't read right.

Does anybody ever heard of something like this on EMail? Both SMS and Email are not encrypted, so it could affect both.

And why they even bother to censor SMS. Almost nobody does use SMS anyway. So why?

The same thing happened to .win sites including a popular one, post election.

I posted proof here (using another account) but it was immediately flagged because nobody cared. In fact many were happy about it.

for anybody reading. he means thedonald.win.

this entire thread is about t-moble censoring right wing and alt-right (white supremacist) websites.

hats off to them for doing the moral thing.

I wouldn't call this "the moral thing". If it was a setting as part of their spam filter that you can turn on or off, then maybe it should be permitted, but it should definitely not be the default.

How do you discuss, examine, learn how bad something is, or what exactly makes it so bad, if you can't even refer to it?

This is a more idiotic position even than the positions espoused on those sites.

that already happened, en masse. that forum used to be a subreddit that was thoroughly understood and read by the entire internet.

perhaps you need another reading of mein kampf, just to be sure?

Any association to mein kampf shows a profound misunderstanding of that forum.

There is no association other than these ideas are both clear rejects. I believe my point stands.

You had no point.

Your question implied that no one needs to read mein kompf, thus proving that it's ok to censor it, thus showing that it's ok to censor anything else you don't like.

Since all of those things your attempt at a point stands on are false, the point in fact does not stand.

It's not only wrong, it's unbelivably ignorant.

Perhaps I'm misremembering from so long ago in 1979 or 80, but I feel like they explained the fundamental problems with censorship, including reasoning such as you present, as early as 4th or 5th grade.

That's why I say unbelievably ignorant. How is an adult saying something that a 5th-grader k ows better? I guess literally I can believe that they allow kids to reach adulthood without ever being made to understand something so important, but I sure don't want to.

I think you're being ignorant to the realities of modern communication.

Censorship of libraries and press in the pre-internet era is completely different than preventing new copies of stormfront being shoved down everyone's proverbial throat on a daily basis.

You keep making these wild associations. Again it has nothing to do with stormfront. Nobody is shoving anything down anyone's throat.

This is about two consenting adults not being able to exchange text messages with each other because the middlemen censors do not approve of the contents.

So what? It's a private company. they also probably censor CP.

I highly, highly doubt that anybody is going to the mat over this unless they believe in banning abortion. No definition of free speech includes what sms middleman can or can't do.

They are our enemies and deserve it! It will never happen to us, that I am sure.

What does "private company" matter? It doesn't.

And it's not even quite true anyway. The phone system has federal mandates. It's recognized as a piece of infrastructure that that the state has an interest in, and so is not actually 100% free to do whatever it wants in the way that say, BestBuy is. And plain sms is part of that basic telephone service.

But even if they were, legally, free to violate the integrity of the communications they have been entrusted to carry, why in the world are you ok with that?

There are countless things that are legal and wrong, and I see no valid reason not to see something wrong and say "that's wrong".

sir that is a huge pile of nonsense

it entirely matters if it's a private company. this isn't 1995. there is no regulation anymore. you can't compel anyone to transmit whatever hate speech people deem "Free".

so, they are already expected to "violate the integrity of the communications" they handle (whatever that means).

this isn't 'nam, donney. there are rules.

so tomorrow, it is discovered that fedex and ups are opening all the envelopes, reading the documents, and silently throwing some away. They don't say anything to either sender or receiver. They keep your money, which by the way does not silently fail on them 10% of the time. You are obviously fine with this because they are private companies and you are not an odious hypocrite.

if that happened i'd say told ya so. should have funded the post office.

Some censorship needs to be accepted as anti terror measures. If you white people were ok with random brown people being pulled aside by TSA for random checks after 9/11, I as a brown progressive am ok with your Christian white Taliban organizing and propaganda being censored after 1/6.

Do we even need a back and forth to point out how un-related these two things are and how they shouldn't be treated the same.

No, censorship should not be accepted.

OK, George Bush.

Better opinion: both of those are bad policies.

SMS lol what year is it...

Sometimes it is the only thing to do. For ex. I have no Whatsup (because I don't wanna have anything from Facebook), just Signal, Threema and Telegram. So sometimes SMS is the only possible way to send a message to other people.

The censorship is something but I think what we have to me more worried is these two young men having so much interest in all these anti-women's choice websites to begin with. MaYbE ThEy ShOuLd Be CeNsOrEd

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