Hacker News Reader

Comment by sdoering | Hacker News Reader

This piece lost me the moment I saw the image created to visualize the content.

The big "censored" banner across made me instantly regret clicking it.

If people, and (I need to use it here) so called "journalists" don't know the difference between a private corporation and a nation state I just can't tske anything they produce seriously.

You can't be censored by YouTube. You can be deplatformed if you would like to call it that way. But until a government forced YouTube to not show your content to their citizens you are not being censored.

The outcome might be the same, but there is still a structural difference between me showing someone the door as I don't like what they say on my platform and the government coming and gagging them.

Maybe I am just to sensitive to the usage of the term, but imho it denigrates the victims of actual censorship.

View on HN

> But until a government forced YouTube to not show your content to their citizens you are not being censored.

You're just plain wrong on that specificity and you threw in a pathetic ad hominem to boot.

Wikipedia:

"Censorship can be conducted by governments, private institutions and other controlling bodies. "

Merriam-Webster:

"to examine in order to suppress or delete anything considered objectionable"

Oxford:

"to prevent part or the whole of a book, film, work of art, document, or other kind of communication from being seen or made available to the public, because it is considered to be offensive or harmful, or because it contains information that someone wishes to keep secret, often for political reasons"

To be clear, you can be censored by government, or by a corporation, perhaps your own editor, or even yourself.

Often when I look at how us works it seems to me that a lot of political action, censorship and coercion is privatised there, so it looks superficially like you have more degrees of freedom because you are limited by private actors and not the state.

I grew up in western Germany. My SO in the GDR (eastern Germany) before the Iron Curtain fell.

Comparing my experience and hers (or her family's) gave me an interesting view of freedom. Namely that I think there isn't one freedom. Not in the universal sense.

For example. In the GDR it was a bad idea to critique the state/government/socialism. But I know quite a few cases of people telling their boss he was an asshole. Without any consequences.

Compared to Western Germany. We could call our politicians names, critique our government, call democracy an idiotic for of representation but tell g our corporate bosses they were idiots could destroy your life.

Just an extreme example of what I mean with different forms of freedom.

In the end I think it always comes down to a society needing to decide where to limit the freedoms of their people to ensure as much freedom as possible for all members of society. And future generations.

Our constitutional court for example declared the climate change efforts of our former government not sufficient to ensure freedom of future generations as doing nothing (or too little too late) now would burden future generations to an extent that is not in line with our constitution. Limiting our freedom right now (taxes, limits to how fast to drive, and so on) to ensure freedom for yet unborn.

If the government is the instrument that directs/coerces the private corporations. Is it really the private corporations doing the de-platforming?

That's how it works in Russia and China. It's not how it works in the West. Corporations here have fiduciary responsibility and are beholden to their shareholders. To the extent government tells them to do anything, it's a big public fight in front of elected officials who we (citizens and shareholders) can also vote out of office and replace. That cannot and does not happen in dictatorships, so in China, for example, the government tells corporations what to do. That is not the case in America.

I'll allow that the situation in Australia is a lot cozier when it comes to certain things like mining, but the Australian government has literally zero control over Youtube, so the argument falls flat.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com