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Comment by baq | Hacker News Reader

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Although GP's comment feels like needless semantic nickpicking, what you've said isn't true: "Censorship can be conducted by governments, private institutions, and other controlling bodies." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship Essentially, any organisation can have a "censor".

That isn't the distinction between censorship and moderation [1].

Censorship is the removal or blocking of speech, moderation is a broader term that can include practices like flagging content without removing or hiding it completely.

The state actor distinction in the US is only important when deciding if a party is bound by the First Amendment. My speech is protected from government censorship, not from censorship by a private company.

[1] https://publicknowledge.org/content-moderation-is-not-synony...

Not correct in any sense (reference a dictionary) but why would you even want to define it narrowly like this?

I briefly lived in a country with censorship and the difference is substantial. A corporation can't put you in jail for writing bad things about it.

Seems obvious that we would want a way to distinguish speech that is completely suppressed for all platforms vs speech that’s outside of the parameters of what’s expected on a particular platform but that you’re free to conduct elsewhere. If I can’t publish a paper on cell microbiology in a computer science journal it seems unhelpful to lump that in the same category as Putin arresting people in Russia for reporting on the war in Ukraine.

I guess ironically some of the people trying to equate the two are doing so to suppress discussion of moderation by shouting it down as censorship.

You make a good point about on-topic moderation. But I think this misses something.

Rejecting a cell microbiology paper from a computer science journal is not an attempt to suppress the paper. If anything, it is of benefit to the paper, since publishing it in the correct journal will increase it's visibility to the relevant audiences.

In contrast, content moderation, particularly in political subreddits is often motivated by tribalism and a desire to suppress particular viewpoints. It's true that these people could just go to another subreddit, but by the same logic reporters in Russia could just go to another country.

The effect of this type of moderation is that it creates tribes or "communities" of people who have similar opinions and never encounter opposing viewpoints.

Moderating based on topic is different than censorship based on viewpoint. If an argument is allowed but it's counterargument is not, that's censorship, not moderation.

I agree tribal echo chambers is more of a problem than moderating to keep conversation on topic, but I wouldn’t go so far as to say it was censorship because the people in these echo chambers still have access to opposing viewpoints if they choose to go looking for them. This contrasts with journalists in Russia “just going to another country”, their views still won’t be available to their intended audience.

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