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Comment by dmazin | Hacker News Reader

It's important to note that this page is almost 10 years old.

I do find myself self-censoring in 2025, but it's for a far more boring reason than surveillance capitalism. It's because leaders on the far right literally said people should snitch on each other and dox each other.

Much as I hate to say it, I'm sure people on the right have felt the same way for at least a decade.

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I definitely try to avoid any public statement of political nature online. You never know how the tide will turn at some point and who gets into power. And then you do not want to have a record of having said the wrong thing about the new guy(s) at the top in your past.

This could also chill the social pressure caused by knowing other's opinions. Less pressure for conformity, leading to more fringe positions. Maybe.

Personally it's the ownership of the company I work for and the desire to retain most international travel privileges.

It’s not specifically far-right thing. The left are snitching and doxing people for the last decade if not longer.

PyCon was the turning point. I used to have accounts under my real name in Slashdot etc. before then.

TBF the individual at the center of it did suffer consequences. They were fired and struggled to find employment after the fact, and PyCon updated their attendee rules to include a clause on public shaming.

The tactic become normalized amongst the extremes of both sides. “ 5% of the wizards casting 85% of the spells.”

Not sure if you have read whole comment before posting this...

Yes it was common from every corner before. However now, it is encouraged from the governments. That means any laws that could help from cyber- or any other form of bullying will disappear. No matter how one think it was weak in practice, freedom of expression is going disappear completely.

Eh. Here we had some leftists in previous government. They had fancy idea to make hate speech an administrative offense. Because apparently penal offense process was too complex so they couldn’t trial as many people for online comments as they wished.

On top of that, they tried to change defamation law to include not only factually wrong information, but also make it a libel if the person felt like it was offensive.

Thankfully neither of above passed. Especially since we have a different crop of lunatics now who would be happy to abuse above laws…

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