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Comment by surgical_fire | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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