Definitely weird to be "happy" that the government is cracking down on people who help prevent the propagation of fraud, scams, and CSAM.
If that sentence from the article is accurate, the parent poster's response makes complete and perfect sense. You don't have to like the current administration, to like a specific thing they are doing.
Now is this actually what is happening? I don't know. And of course, that's a different conversation, and not what the parent poster was talking about.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46156979
98% of current foreign service officers who responded to a survey said morale is lower, plus the administration is laying off 1300 of them:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/02/us/politics/state-departm...
The only way "an applicant was responsible for, or complicit in, censorship or attempted censorship in the United States" would be if they were an employee of the US government and they somehow violated US law to enact censorship.
To review: censorship is when the government doesn't allow you to say things with your printing press. Censorship is not when private parties don't let you use their printing press.
The 'Network State' fascist bros (Balaji Srinivasan, Peter Thiel, Curtis Yarvin, et al) are the powers behind the throne of the current regime. They want to dismantle the United States and create modern-day fiefdoms where your corporate overlords dictate your rights. They are serious about doing it.
"You can vote with your feet and leave our fiefdom if you don't like the lack of rights" is literally their stance.
> censor (verb): to examine in order to suppress (see suppress sense 2) or delete anything considered objectionable.
> also: to suppress or delete as objectionable
Government censorship is a very notable class of censorship, but the word has a broader meaning.
If we valued banning all censorship we'd make laws banning that. We don't: we value private property and free speech instead. Taking the rights of private parties to control what they publish tramples both of those rights. It's not complicated: you have a right to own your 'press' and do whatever you want with it. You don't have a right to someone else's press.
These days the "property" in question is just a fancy telecom system. And it's already an established principle in America that the phone company doesn't cut off your line just because you're talking some political smack.
You do know why these laws exist, right? And they are not useless. Many terrible things happened, and tens of millions died, because an extremely hateful ideology was allowed to take hold by assaulting civil society and democracy.
Banning anything related to that ideology is not only needed, not only common sense, but I'd argue the moral duty of the German people. And everyone else who witnessed it (so everyone). And for what it's worth, most developed countries have banned Nazi-related things. The US is an outlier in thinking that Nazi opinions matter, and allowing murderous types to express their desire to murder others is somehow a virtue.
And to be clear, yes, National Socialism is extremely agressive and murderous. One of its core tenets, probably its main one, is violent antisemitism and "master race"-ism, with their solution being exterminating "lower" "races". Nothing useful, nothing good, nothing redeeming. Just pure hatred and genocide.
Nothing good can come out of "debating" a Nazi in the "marketplace of ideas". Goebbels himself said so back in the 1930s, that they do not intend to play by the rules of democracy, but if democracy wants to give them the tools to spread their ideology, they'll happily use it. The world saw this happen and saw the results. Nazis have no place in any civilised society, and anyone espousing Nazi ideology or sporting their insignia deserves to ostracised at least.
(Answer: they don't care about protected expression or pesky laws, they are lawless and reward other lawless types like themselves)
I mean... This is HN... You should see people's reaction when Apple decided to do something about it...
Such self-descriptions are not necessarily accurate and honest.
We have had quite a few debates around Chat Control here. It is sold as a tool to prevent propagation of CSAM as well.