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Comment by diego_moita | Hacker News Reader

It is interesting that attitudes, laws and initiatives that would be called "censorship" against traditional media are more and more accepted against social media platforms, all over the world in very democratic countries.

I am not against these attitudes. I just want to point to that.

A possible reason is that these platforms are seen as either monopolies or American imperialism agents. In both cases these are very damming perceptions. Both Musk and Zuckerberg have been disastrous in branding their platforms.

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I think it's a fair limit. Preventing social media companies from invisibly favoring any candidate seems sensible to me.

Censorship is deletion of the candidate's social media presence.

There are various laws in many countries that ban traditional media from straight up recommending specific candidates.

Do you know if this applies to explicitly partisan media, such as media directly funded or run by political parties? Many newspapers in the US used to be openly run by political factions, a century ago.

It's still called censorship when it's against a social media company.

What interests me more is that Elon has completely reversed his anti-censorship stance. He was always censoring while opining against censorship and getting sued for millions of dollars for ignoring a Brazilian censorship law. Now he's just quietly complying with Brazilian censorship law.

I miss his feuds with the supreme court. Trump actually got the judges sanctioned under Magnitsky too, then dropped the sanctions not too long after. No clue if Elon helped with that.

It was quite funny, the far right in Brazil elected Elon Musk as their savior. Then he ran with his tail between his legs.

The posts are not being forbidden or excluded. Candidates are still free to post. It just can't be recommended in algorithmic feeds.

And those platforms are absolutely agents of American imperialism. Latin American countries in particular should be very wary of these.

That's how Elon always does censorship. "Freedom of speech, not freedom of reach." Restricting reach is still censorship.

That would be a fair argument, were it not for the fact that every candidate is being excluded from algorithmic recommendations.

Were it just one or two candidates, then it would indeed be a form of "soft censorship". That doesn't seem to be the case here.

What's wrong with saying that it's censoring every candidate?

Censorship targets subversion. Censors seek to prevent the spread of antiestablishment information and ideas. So one can hardly claim that a universal ban on algorithmic recommendation for all candidates is censorship.

Censorship doesn't have to "target subversion" or "prevent the spread of antiestablishment information" to be censorship.

Even if we use an all-encompassing definition of censorship, this still doesn't quite qualify. It's just preventing the recommendation algorithms from working on the politician accounts. The accounts themselves were not censored.

Elon actively censors on his platform points of view he dislikes.

Brazilian regulations just dictates that candidates cannot be recommended, regardless of party.

Candidates are forbidden of doing many things to keep elections free and mostly fair.

This is not censorship, and traditional media have always been forbidden from picking a candidate and promoting them in Brazil.

Anyone sensible doesn't call this censorship. It might sound complicated if you live in a country where elections are won by who spends most money for airtime, but granting candidates equal airtime on traditional media is how it works if you want to hold normal elections. Since that can't work on algorithmic platforms where everyone sees different content, you just block their reach to avoid anyone gaming it.

Normal countries also have media silence for the day or two before the votes.

Restricting the reach of politicians is an absolute good.

> It might sound complicated if you live in a country where elections are won by who spends most money for airtime

Which country are you referring to here? I’m not familiar with any that work like this. In the United States, Trump famously spent less than his competition and won both times. Bloomberg outspent his competitors by multiple orders of magnitude and endured a humiliating loss.

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