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Comment by nurumaik | Hacker News Reader

Are you afraid for your and your family lives after posting this comment? If not, then it's not worse

Did he complain about safety and freedom, or did he complain about censorship? Is it possible that corporate censorship in the west today is already worse than state censorship was in the USSR, due to the unavoidable encroachment of technology into everyday life and the surveillance/centralisation path that we've taken with the internet, without the impact on safety and freedom (yet)?

Once you have the surveillance in place, it only takes a regime change and a suitable excuse (e.g. a terrorist attack) before you live in a dystopia worse than the USSR.

>is already worse than state censorship was in the USSR

It is not. It is absolutely inadequate comparison.

What does censorship mean to you?

Censorship is the suppression of speech, public communication, or other information. (Wikipedia)

and which part do you think Facebook/twitter/etc don't take part in?

Wrong question. Of course they censor content. I did not say they don’t do it, I only pointed out that comparison to USSR is quite an exaggeration.

what evidence would convince you that the comparison is apt?

I know that such evidence does not exist, but if it were, a detailed comparison based on it would deserve a scientific degree. Neither a single corporation nor entire big tech considered together as a single actor can really compare with the scale and diversity of censorship of a totalitarian state.

now try all the corporations together.

Oh, it absolutely is. Censorship in USSR was manual labor. The scale at which its is operating today is incomparable, as is the amount of false positives which it captures, as well as the variety of censored topics across different institutions.

Manual vs automatic is irrelevant here. There was much less content to moderate if we talk about media. They could censor every single publication, movie or song manually. In oppressive regimes like USSR the censorship is total - the only escape is your kitchen (if you can really trust the people you talk to), in the West you are free to choose the platform and live peacefully in your bubble if you want.

In oppressive regimes like USSR (as if there are or were any regimes "like USSR") (where censorship was manual) there always were loopholes to avoid censorship and convey messages you wanted to. In the West (as well as in the East) today the platforms don't allow for any loopholes, or even when such loopholes are found, they're being censored out very quickly.

> Once you have the surveillance in place, it only takes a regime change and a suitable excuse

Or just a pandemic. We've seen first hand how divergent speech was treated in "democratic" countries and how quickly algorithmic censorship was implemented on web products, especially those owned by Google.

Not everyone who was censored was immediately in danger of being killed. That’s a false premise.

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