Downvotes that hide your reply. Post removal. Automated post removal. Secret forbidden word lists. Banning. Shadowbanning. Blocking.
We have so much censorship now that we need to create a new language to talk about it.
Forget piles of burning books. The library is on fire.
For example, If a site has a mechanism where after X number of downvotes by users, your comment is hidden, that's not censorship.
You've spoken your piece, and other users voted on if they liked your comment or not, or if it contributed to the conversation or provided useful information, etc.
Those other things you mentioned, you do so without context. No social media site can function and be a useful and valuable place to visit without some form of content moderation.
The distinction lies in where the line is drawn. Can you (constructively) criticize the site mods or parent company? Speak your own views in a reasonable discussion that don't cross the line (calls for violence, unintelligible ranting, trolling)?
There's a fine line for a lot of this.
Not at all. Whenever some individuals posts ONE piece of content that's not acceptable for some obscure non-written reason, the censorship hammer falls on the whole profile/account of said person, thereby removing all historical acceptable communication as well.
If it was really different, you would ONLY censor the problematic piece of content, not everything back to the roots of history.
There should be a difference, but in practice, content moderation tools are abused to enact agenda-driven censorship. Always.
Then combine their email inbox and spam folder for a day, and there will be riots.
"But that's not what I meant!" Well, algorithmically sorting through your incoming mail and hiding a bunch of it from view based on opaque criteria decided by a large tech corporation is the very definition of censorship. And yet we are okay with it since it makes our personal experience better.
People who cry about big tech censorship are perfectly fine with a curated experience with 99% of the garbage removed. By debating endlessly about the remaining 1% you aren't making some great moral point.
Of course there will be a degree of necessary censorship. For example, yes, it is practical to censor the spambots.
> Forget piles of burning books. The library is on fire.
You DO have a right, in the US, to be protected from a government limiting your speech through law. And it is our responsibility, as US citizens, to uphold that right.
You are not entitled to use other people's platforms. Sorry.
If you feel that they are so central that it's effectively silencing you, it may be that you should put down social media and step outside for a bit. It's not the world. It's not all that important.
To an extent. You can't host it on AWS, and Cloudflare might refuse to route traffic to it. Expect that to get worse.
The internet itself is the public square. Not the individual websites.
Social media cannot censor you. Social media, or any content publishing platform, can only moderate content. Only a government - which has the power to legislate arrests or fines - has the power to censor you. Demanding that the content publisher publish the content you have submitted is akin to demanding the New York Times publish your letter to the editor. Both are unreasonable requests.
Unless a content platform is an absolute natural monopoly, there should be no reason to legislate that it must publish all content submitted to it. Forcing a content publisher to publish all content is akin to forcing it to not publish content; both are a removal of freedom from the content publisher.
If your posts submitted to a content publisher are removed, consider spinning up your own content publishing platform - many are available free online, or even pay for the printing of your views in pamphlets or books. If your government does not imprison you for your views, then you are not being censored.
We're just talking about conversations here.
Censorship, banning, and the threat of all that, definitely steps on sincerity like a 5000 pound gorilla foot. ESPECIALLY the sneaky invisible kind.
It turns a nice conversation into mass psychosis. Are we seeing a lot of that these days. Maybe.
There’s a difference between being forced to promote something and being compelled to not censor.
in turn, we are NOT obligated to accept that as good or normal.