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Comment by hunglee2 | Hacker News Reader

What Americans see is already censored - by Americans. If you want to know what a whichever prescribed political leader is saying, you are not going to get it from the local media establishment, you're going to have to go to official transcripts from the government of that prescribed political leader, and no doubt risk ending up on an FBI database as a result.

This is true for all government systems, the more you dig into it, they are all just different flavours of a system of control, less Perl vs Python more PHP7.3 vs PHP7.4

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You can totally look up what terrorists or mass shooters say. Here’s an interview given by Al-Al-Qaeda to CNN: https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2021/04/30/asia/al-qaeda-afghanistan...

Censorship/cancel culture is bad but it’s nowhere near what dictators do

They alter transcripts. The examples I have seen have been done to fix "flubs" of the Presidential Administration but a simple 'fix' done with care can subtly alter the message for future readers and I believe sets a dangerous precedent. However, for all I know this has been common practice for some time, but I have only seen evidence of this occuring recently.

who is 'they'?

I don't mind transcripts being altered if it reflects the officially endorsed position. Different matter of course if official transcriptions were altered by unauthorised parties

"I don't mind transcripts being altered if it reflects the officially endorsed position."

Can't you see how this "officially endorsed position" editing would be a dangerous thing? Transcripts should be an exact representation of what occurred.

why - please explain? What actually needs to be known is exactly the official policy, this is more important than the exact words used. Right now, we are reliant on media to reinterpret what was said, with the inevitable decontextualisation and reframing that comes along with it. This is the practice of propaganda

Trump admin was caught scrubbing embarrassing statements from official transcripts, but it's not common

Decades ago, the American media colluded to hide FDR's physical condition from the American public.

Many doubtlessly think this was good, because a physical disability shouldn't reflect poorly on his leadership abilities. But there is no guarantee that such collective blindness will always be done in the 'good' way, whatever that is.

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