Hacker News Reader

Comment by Panino | Hacker News Reader

Lots of misuse of the word "censorship" here and any time this subject comes up generally, not just on this site but anywhere the topic is discussed.

What is/are the root issue(s) of this mistaken belief? I typed a few possibilities but they sounded preposterous so I just deleted all that.

Could someone who thinks this is censorship please explain why Github doesn't have the right to control its own privately owned website, and how one single website monitoring the language used there is equivalent to a government "universally" (well, within its borders) coercively prohibiting all such content, such that the person in question is prevented from publishing it anywhere else, even by themselves?

View on HN

Personally I think this is censorship because Github holds power in the development world. Basically every developer is on Github. I switched from Bitbucket to github not because Github is better, but because it's basically open source suicide NOT to be on Github.

Disabling a repo because they don't agree with a word in it seems like an abuse of that power to me.

So basically, I feel it's censorship because Github holds enough power over its users.

Why is the word "censorship" the problem here? Of course it is. Github is censoring what it is willing to host. This is roughly akin to you or I selecting which papers we'll read tonight, or which speakers we'd like to hear in a conference, or which links we'd like to include as related work on a blog post. Or which book we'd give to a friend.

The western world has a lot of implicit censorship going on that we think is unfairly applied en masse, and that's where we start to see a problem. Women, for example, are consistently and provably discriminated against in a variety of ways in these subtle decisions. This creates a general vacuum of their input in our field (and many others!).

Actions like this help to remove said implicit bias and apply the censorship principles we use in our daily lives more fairly, giving us a more accurate picture of the world without having to listen to every single voice.

Github certainly has the right to control its own privately owned website. That doesn't mean they have the right to stop people from complaining about how they control their website, or from deciding they don't want to use Github because of it, and neither of those things is an infringement of Github's rights no matter how much the "it's not censorship" brigade want to spin it that way.

The Comics Code Authority was not part of the government, but it was a censor. Can you explain your use of the word censorship to only mean when the government does it? And sure, it's just one single website, it's in their rights to do that. And then another website. And suddenly it's the entire industry, and if you dare oppose it you will be blacklisted and boycotted.

The definition of censor is "to examine books, movies, letters, etc., in order to remove things that are considered to be offensive, immoral, harmful to society, etc.", right?

Github is censoring content on their site according to their TOS. They have a right to.

It's not a First Amendment issue. It's still probably worth considering if it's a good thing. Especially, if you plan to host a project that has content that might be objectionable to someone.

The definition you gave appears to be from Merriam Webster [0]. This is a good starting point, but it's crucial to note that the word "censorship" predates the modern web, with publicly read-write websites. So the word publish [1] has been radically altered as well. As for publishing, have a look at the MW examples: they all cite books or magazines. That's an old conception of publishing that clearly needs to be updated.

And censorship is intimately tied to that definition.

  1. http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/censor
  2. http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/publish

Is your objection here based on just the denotation of the word? What's your preferred definition? Are you coming at it from a legal definition (e.g. Black's) or other specific context?

I think the word broadly works in this situation although certainly the leap in context it suggests (from private legal act to illegal governmental action) is unwarranted.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com