Yes, It’s Censorship
doctorow.medium.com
doctorow.medium.com
It's also clueless because it's extremely difficult to run a business or service online if your views/product/service is despised by a large enough percentage of the population, due to every single layer of the stack being controlled by someone that can and will shut down anyone they disagree with. ISPs, web hosts, anti DDOS providers, software providers, domain name registrars, payment processors... all of them think of themselves as the internet moral police, and will boot customers/clients if enough people scream at them to do so (or in the case of things like porn or gambling, because it's 'convenient').
So running an alternative gets more and more costly and impractical the more controversy you bring, to the point you're probably required to run your own datacentre and networking links if people hate you enough.
That's not true of a real life business or organisation, which gets services provided by utilities and where (assuming they own the building), only the government could boot them out.
Well wait a second, is that really censorship? "Censorship" implies to me a small group of powerful and unaccountable people tinkering with the information flow, quite probably in secret. That's not the same thing at all as being hounded out of town because everyone thinks you're a piece of shit.
I think people may be more outraged by censorship if it is done by a small group of powerful and unaccountable people. But censorship that is approved of by the majority is still censorship. And it can still be wrong, for the majority is not always right.
Cambridge Dictionary: a system in which an authority limits the ideas that people are allowed to express and prevents books, films, works of art, documents, or other kinds of communication from being seen or made available to the public, because they include or support certain ideas: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/censorsh...
ACLU: "the suppression of words, images, or ideas that are "offensive": https://www.aclu.org/other/what-censorship
The electric, water and gas companies can't just decide to cut off everything they don't like because they dislike their political views/actions, why should the tech equivalents be allowed to?
> If a company has an almost defacto monopoly and stops people from talking about something, it's effectively the same as a government doing it.
Parlor’s issues for example is not “censorship”. It is a badly run business.
That’s the whole idea behind grass root movements.
It’s shear laziness or the fact that none of them believe strongly enough to get their words across.
The Canadian government froze the bank accounts of protesters early this year. How are you meant to "get around the establishment" when you can't even afford to pay your bills and have been essentially made penniless?
Worth noting that the same Canadian government is cheering on equivalent protests against covid restrictions in China.
It crossed the line into soft terrorism for anyone living in the city. Breaking the law has consequences, even in democracies. I don’t remember any praise from right wingers when a Baltimore Mayor gave some protesters “space to destroy”. Civil disobedience has a place, but the law must also be enforced. If you believe in your cause strongly enough, going to jail is part of the point.
as a proper noun i think this is worth correcting
He’s ignoring this, which makes the essay weak and pointless.
As you point out, there's a lot of nasty hateful speech being spewed, and cooler heads are asking if there's a way to simmer it down. If we believe that such a request is a path to censorship, then perhaps the real answer is that those with different political / social / ideological points of view need to become more aggressive with their counter approach.
In other words, legislate.
There is not a single credible example where minorities were suppressed because people were allowed to talk too openly. There are a lot of cases were they were suppressed. And I do not believe this is what you can call a close call.
If you find any example at all, I would be interested to hear it.
Commercial sites need customers, so they have to edit the clientele in order to survive. Smaller sites, commercial or not, are like clubs and they can set their membership rules as desired. The former gets the bland middle ground. The latter handles the edges. Most people will just go elsewhere when faced with noise.
The metaphor is interesting but the existence of .gov and .mil domains indicates that the internet isn't fully privatized, while the .edu domain indicates that schools are still on the internet as well. Public schools do seem to have digital auditoriums, and the question of whether first amendment rights are violated in them is an interesting one.
I have noticed that many public libraries have web sites. I like Doctorow's idea of having digital town squares and parks as well, assuming they're not ruined by crime, garbage, pollution and advertising, as many physical spaces are.
This article follows the age old and wrong pattern of defining freedom of speech as some absolute freedom based on nothing but it’s name and ignoring context and contents, then calling everything censorship. Imagine if the constitution was explicit about citizens having “freedom of popcorn”. Here made with a stupid name that has no relation to what it is defined as to highlight the distinction between name and definition. This freedom of popcorn would state that the government shall not inhibit the freedom of movement of its citizens without due process.
That would be a fairly ok freedom to establish. Essentially saying “the government cannot just put you in jail for no good reason”. Now comes the dumb part. We would then have authors like OP arguing that when their neighbor prevents them from camping in their kitchen, they are infringing on their freedom of popcorn, and are thereby effectively putting them in jail without process unless they let them camp out in their kitchen.
"The problem isn’t the calls they make — it’s the lack of an alternative when they get it wrong."
But as much as he says that... do we really believe there will ever be an alternative?
The nice thing about the internet is that it is a "dumb pipe", actual protocols are determined at the end points. This aside from eg. current web browsers allowing anyone to set up a UI anywhere to do anything at any time.
This means that there were alternatives in the past, alternatives right now, and there will be in future too.
And there is no monopoly on being able to set up a web server at a colo and create your own social media website where like minded people can listen to themselves - ie Parlor.
Mastercard and Visa don’t habitually keep people from using their networks to make payments. They may stop businesses from accepting payments.
Besides, the “true believers” are willing to send money orders and get other funding.
People these days with unpopular views lack imagination. The entire civil rights movement thrived against a much more hostile environment than Gab. No one is burning down their houses, lynching them etc
The entire legal (at least in states where they are legal) weed industry has a viable business without banks, credit cards, etc.
If you truly believe in your message and enough other people are interested, you don’t let minor roadblocks stand in your way.
The civil rights movement didn’t boo hoo that things were “hard to work around”.
I'm quite confident that the civil rights movement did complain that things were hard to work around. That didn't stop the movement of course. Just like people are still fighting the big tech monopoly, despite the uphill battle
There are alternatives, they are just not convenient.
There are no monopolies except for governmental - that's where the game is rigged the most.