The most pervasive censorship is who and what social media companies decide to block or suppress. Even in places like China. It's deliberately harder to measure, but any censorship measurement that omits it is like measuring war casualties, but ignoring those on the front lines.
Not to minimize the impact of social media censorship, but one should really live in a country like Iran to grasp what pervasive censorship is. Most people born and raised in the relative freedoms provided in modern democratic systems have no clue what it feels like when you have such dictatorships. I say this because, looking at the current trends, we _could be_ heading in that direction, and the comparison is apt.
> Most people born and raised in the relative freedoms provided in modern democratic systems have no clue what it feels like when you have such dictatorships.
You don't know what it feels like not because you're so free, but because you agree with the ruling regime on what it considers the most important questions. Those that don't agree find themselves blocked from the financial system, debanked, banned or shadowbanned by social media, fired from their jobs, and any pieces of history or research that might shift opinion to their side is suppressed or twisted by popular media into advocating for the opposite.
To give you an example, the rape and severe beating of a black child by white rednecks, depicted in the star-studded film A Time to Kill, was based on a real event. Except in the real event, the victims were white and the rapist was black: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Time_to_Kill_(Grisham_novel)...
As another example, in the 2019 Joker film, where Joaquin Phoenix's character kills, vigilante-style, a group of unsymphathetic, threatening white finance-bros, as they intimidate passengers on the subway, was based on the real-life shooting by Bernhard Goetz. Again, the real-life perpetrators were black, and not working in finance, or well-paid in general: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joker_(2019_film)#Writing
The film Bad Ass was based on a viral video, in which an elderly white man defeated in a fight a younger black assailant, on a bus. In the film, the assailants are a group of white nazis, and the white man was replaced by a latino: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_Ass_(film)
It's less obvious in films not inspired by real events, but it is just as pervasive.
I would much prefer the dictatorship-style censorship, because our censorship is far, far more effective.
> You don't know what it feels like not because you're so free, but because you agree with the ruling regime on what it considers the most important questions.
We don’t know what it feels like because we collectively participate and decide what should be considered and what not _periodically_ and it’s possible to change it, evidently, with various degrees and velocity by voting.
> I would much prefer the dictatorship-style censorship, because our censorship is far, far more effective.
Case in point!
I’ve lived under both and can guarantee you don’t know what that dictatorship you so much yearn for has in their bag for you until it’s too late.
I guess he is not yearning for dictatorship, the style of censorship is the question. Preventing access to information is bad, but likely less harmful than deception.
Not a single one of my examples was committed by the government (except if you count funding Carnegie Mellon and MIT). But even in cases when they are, voting rarely helps: https://www.woes.blog/p/tgr-democracy
> you don’t know what that dictatorship you so much yearn for
Re-read my sentence. I don't yearn for a dictatorship, I yearn to blunt and make obvious the current secret, subtle censorship regime.
Its true, all usually highly conplex world events are dumbed down to an insanely infantile level that carefully omits anything that may poorly reflect on corporate interests.
Also obvious is that all news is made in a short list of countries. Everywhere else the best you can hope for are terrible events.
You will only get opinions from a small list of talking heads.
One might imagine populating the media with nothing but professors. Each field has new stuff every week. In stead you get Adam Savage. The name isn't by acident.
I'm curious what trends you see towards censorship?
Elon presumably being an exemplar for current trends: Twitter is unarguably far less censored than it was before (though censorship is still present). And Meta took note and also turned down its censorship significantly in response.
The Epstein files, while far less than hoped for by many, are another example of a trend towards sharing far more sensitive info than has been typical by past administrations.
There are many good examples you could point to of increased authoritarianism, but censorship in particular seems to be on the backswing, if anything.
It’s too soon for such a conclusion IMO. The pervasive Iran-like censorship I was talking about will rear its ugly head when those authoritarian regimes are established. It’s a tool and I can assure you it will be used extensively. This is nothing new really.
P.S. the Epstein files were just a cruel joke! I wouldn’t list it there.
There’s nothing simple about authoritarian control.
Who says we have less censorship? Sure people can tweet all kind of stuff without getting banned. Fine, but at the same time US president is removing news networks he doesn’t like from press briefings. That’s just one example. To say the censorship is in decline is baffling.
Multiple jurisdictions have tried to play the stupid games of "we'll make a dumb fuck law that creates problems for you, the website operator, and if you don't conform, we'll sinkhole you at ISP level". Platforms like Xitter and Telegram being the common early targets.
The "age verification" push is a big move in that direction in Western countries. "Think of the children" is an evergreen excuse for authoritarian measures.
>Twitter is unarguably far less censored than it was before (though censorship is still present). And Meta took note and also turned down its censorship significantly in response.
A private organization making editorial decisions is not censorship. Trying to compel these organizations to publish speech they dislike is a violation of their speech rights.
There are flagrant examples of the literal government literally censoring people.
> A publisher making editorial decisions is not censorship. You have no right to compel other people to publish your speech. If you don't like Twitter's editorial policies, you are free to go elsewhere
When a social media deletes users posts because they cross a political line, it may not be government censorship, but it's very obviously still censorship.
It's very hard to take opinions like yours seriously because I know exactly how you'd react if all your HN posts were deleted because you're calling people "Nazis"
No, really, you have no right to compel other people to speak. If you try to tell other people what they must publish, you are infringing on their speech rights. Call it censorship if you want—I don't much go in for semantic debates—but private parties have no obligation to publish speech they disagree with. People have a right to show you the door because they don't like your politics.
I exclusively use websites that "censor" their users. Millions upon millions of people are with me on this. Would you deny us our right to organize as we please?
>It's very hard to take opinions like yours seriously because I know exactly how you'd react if all your HN posts were deleted because you're calling people "Nazis"
If you deny that there are literal and unabashed Nazis on Twitter these days, you are wrong. I am not using the term as a pejorative; I am using it as a straightforward descriptor for people who post pictures of swastikas and SS officers, start their posts with "Hitler was right", have "1488" in their bios, and write my name (((like this))) every damn time. These sorts of people would not be offended by being called Nazis and are not shy about their desire to see me gassed to death. Twitter paid them to say these things and then tried to censor people who criticized them for it, and that's a fact.
> Would you deny us our right to organize as we please?
So you must really hate laws like the Online Safety Act and the Digital Services Act, that force platforms to censor vaguely-defined hate-speech, without a court order, or face ruinous fines. Literal government censorship, men with guns forcing private companies to silence citizens, denying you the right to organize as you please.
I mean, I assume you hate them. Based on your complaints about government interfering with individuals organizing as they please, you should hate them, but then you speak as if those laws don't exist, and you praise as exemplars of free speech and free association the very services those laws forces to censor. Maybe you just didn't know about them? And now that you do, you're going to protest these laws as fervently as you're protesting the other violations of free speech you mentioned in your posts?
> A publisher making editorial decisions is not censorship.
Are you really going to conflate publishing with operating a social media platform? Regardless, if those editorial decisions are meant to suppress a viewpoint, it is censorship - government censorship is only one kind.
> You have no right to demand Twitter publish your speech.
Nobody argued that what social media do is illegal, only that it counts as censorship.
If your definition of "censorship" is so expansive that it applies to a publisher declining to publish your speech or a club declining to have you as a member even when there are other publishers and other clubs just around the corner, then you have defined "censorship" in such a way that it is not a problem, and you are no longer entitled to use it as a pejorative.
Also, I have seen no evidence that social media companies try to suppress viewpoints. The laptop story certainly doesn't establish it, so try again.
>Regardless, if those editorial decisions are meant to suppress a viewpoint, it is censorship
Declining to say something is not a form of suppression. Kicking someone out of a group is not a form of suppression absent social control. You are free to say whatever you like, just not on Twitter. You really, truly, do not have a right to be a member of my club or to be published in my newspaper.
>Nobody argued that what social media do is illegal, only that it counts as censorship.
If you define censorship in such a way that social media companies can be said to be engaged in it, then you have defined "censorship" in such a way that it is not bad, and are no longer entitled to use it as a pejorative. You are like the people who define "murder" as "killing of a human" and act like you've just proved abortion is a crime.
>if those editorial decisions are meant to suppress a viewpoint
Big "if". In the case of all the big platforms, they are not.
You are free to define the term however you wish. But if "censorship" applies to ordinary website moderation, then you have no basis to object to it. If censorship refers to suppression of speech, and your speech is not being suppressed, then you are not being censored.
Trump banned disfavored news outlets from the White House.
He also tried to take TV stations off the air for hosting comics who made fun of him, cut funding for public broadcasters he didn't like, scrubbed information from government websites, and endeavored to punish "woke" universities.
I think hundreds of people being arrested for protesting masked government agents rounding up people in their neighborhoods is a more objectionable form of censorship than Twitter banning people for saying the n-word, but reasonable people may disagree.
Yes, but some of them aren't. There are instances of people being banned because they participated in another sub. Instances of people being banned for criticizing Israel. It wouldn't be so much of an issue if it was like back in the day where there were a thousand independent boards. But Reddit killed that.
I had an account banned simply for pointing out that there was a spare seat in that orbiting sports car, and implying that Musk would be a good choice of passenger.
It made me wonder how unlikely or impossible an event has to be before it would no longer be considered a real threat by whoever or whatever flags posts like that. Firing billionaires into the Sun? Hmm, probably too close to home. Sending them light years away to fire them into a black hole?
You get a flood of people praising Hitler in your subreddit. 1000 per day You have two buttons in front of you: ban individual user (ban form takes 30 seconds minimum to load and fill out), and ban all from /HitlerLovers. Which do you pick.
That's not what happened with r/conspiracy users getting banned in other forums. Yeah I guess it has its place but that feature has been mostly misused from what I've seen.
You're also a mod of six different forums. Do you wait until each one gets targeted by /HitlerLovers before configuring the bot to ban them or do you just leave off the filter from the bot and have it ban them everywhere it has power to?
If someone is doing that, it's classified as either a true threat or an incitement, both of which have been clearly established as not covered by the 1st amendment by SCOTUS and thus illegal - and can be stopped for no more reason than the fact that it's illegal.
On the other hand, online content moderation rules often get politically weaponized to silence dissent that is inconvenient but fully legal (and perfectly fine, for as much as you might disagree with it / hate that others get to hear ideas you don't like).
Going from "I voiced my opinion on the internet" to "people are inciting gassing the jews" is quite the stretch, crosses a well defined line, and is just nonsensical.
Regardless there's value to know exactly what topics are off limits and for which platforms. Censorship needs to be measured and quantified (probably with vectors).
Moderation as in "You can't call the other posted 'fuckface'" and moderation as in "I will delete every mention of this news story because it's negative to the agenda I want to push" are not, at all, the same thing.
In fact, I wouldn't call the latter "moderation" at all, rather it's mods abusing their power to push political propaganda, but they do it through moderation in terms of action.
> I will delete every mention of this news story because it's negative to the agenda I want to push
Thankfully this is extremely rare on the major platforms. "This news story is fake as fuck and is causing trouble such as people going to throw Molotov cocktails at random mosques" is the common scenario.
>there's practically no uncensored public spaces on the internet
Yes? Moderation is a form of censorship with a different connotation (the one you agree with vs the other you don't). I don't see how it's controversial
The story you are referring to involved the New York Post or its affiliates breaking in to Hunter Biden's laptop and publishing his personal correspondence, complete with unredacted phone numbers and email addresses. This violated Twitter's policies against doxxing and dissemination of hacked materials. Characterizing this as censorship is misleading; the story contained no newsworthy information and its publication violated longstanding Twitter policy. It's hard to imagine Twitter functioning without such a policy. I don't see any reason the New York Post should get away with violating it just because they claim to be a newspaper.
The Wall Street Journal, also a Murdoch rag and hardly notable for its liberal bias, declined to publish this information. Reputable journalists have ethical standards.
> Are there NYPost articles you feel people should be prevented from DMing? Or posting, for that matter?
qerghnui's reply was flagged to death:
> Why do you refuse to answer the question?
> The story you are referring to involved the New York Post or its affiliates breaking in to Hunter Biden's laptop (a felony) and publishing his personal correspondence, complete with unredacted phone numbers and email addresses. This violated Twitter's policies against doxxing and dissemination of hacked materials. Characterizing this as censorship is misleading; the story contained no newsworthy information and its publication violated longstanding Twitter policy. It's hard to imagine Twitter functioning without such a policy. I don't see any reason the New York Post should get away with violating it just because it claims to be a newspaper.
> The Wall Street Journal, a Murdoch rag like the Post and hardly known for its liberal bias, declined to publish this information, which is why it wound up in the disreputable Post instead. Respectable journalists have ethical standards. Act like thugs, get treated like thugs.
> P.S. Twitter is free to make whatever editorial decisions it pleases. Trying to make them publish something they don't want to publish is compelled speech. Compelling speech in the name of freedom of speech is hypocritical.
> Measure the speed and performance of your network with the NDT test
This is very much in line with the likes of pokemon go, wiki landmark projects and what have you (those are nice things to have for autonomous drones/missiles to navigate only with vision when gps/cellular/starlink is actively blocked).
—
Russia banned stuff like speedtest because things like that may help “map” the network, aid NSA to model malware propagation, etc.
Not that this should matter when you have cisco, dell, nokia hardware, but it won’t hurt either.
That's the point of open data. Anyone can use it, and that includes the NSA or any other state actor you don't like, but it also includes anyone else. I don't see what's wrong with running things like RIPE Atlas if the data is actually open and not just given to the NSA only for their purposes.
I really wonder if anyone installs it on their machine. May be I am one off but I am Hearing about this for first time, don't recognize any of their partners.
I would love to contribute, but i do not think it is a good idea to install and run this in China…enough said. Also i already know the outcome: network is fast, everything is blocked
In China's case, it is a very well known and documented fact that heavy censorship is present. Of course if one thinks additional knowledge on that is useful enough to solicit wide user participation, that is certainly one way of thinking.
Censor lists can be slightly different on different networks. Also the exact sites that are censored changes over time. The probe collects this data. "Everyone knows it's censored" is not data. There is a good chance that someone else on your network ran the probe though, if thsys what you mean by your excuse.
The probe also collects data like the exact mechanism of censorship, the IP or domain it redirects to if applicable, the DNS server to detect if DNS has been redirected, and so on.
Related: you can "traceroute" a specific port, TCP or UDP. Different routes for different ports is a sure sign of tampering. Check the man page for syntax.
For everyone in this thread saying "but the platforms!", I don't disagree with you. Extensive censorship exists. But I don't believe that's the intended purpose of this tool and the metrics it collects. It doesn't measure censorship at what we would call layers 4-7 in the OSI model. It's concerned with IP reachability and layer 3. It collects valid data for that purpose.
Do they distinguish between "censored in transit" and "blocked by destination"?
In the last years many sites started to drop/block connections from the countries like China and Russia. It is sad to see how Internet is becoming more and more fragmented.
There's a pretty bad bias problem here because the probe app scans domains that are frequently blocked in dictatorships, but doesn't scan domains that are frequently blocked in "democracies", like Anna's Archive. Then it ends up looking like the dictatorship countries have all the censorship.
Is it a bad sign if CSAM, Personal (medical, financial, etc) Records, Snuff, and Malware/Ransomeware are censored? What about manufacture of WMDs, terrorism, hate speech? Free software, and copyrighted music? Historical records of genocide?
Trusted authority with democratic accountability is the least worst option. Too much censorship is authoritarian, but too little and authoritarianism can flood the public discourse with so much noise that free speech becomes impossible.
"I was just downloading those videos of children being raped to make sure they were still available in their full un-redacted format!"
Let me know how that works out.
Arguably, the most significant difference is between "free speech" and commercial/paid speech, or distribution vs viewability, but not distinguishing the two and calling both "internet censorship" creates a phrase without much support or meaning.
scare quoting democracies is perfectly acceptable when it couldn't be more obvious that those so-called democracies do anything but represent the will of their peoples. do you know anyone who'd voted for having to scan their face to access verboten webseites? to have encryption backdoors in their messengers? to have state-mandated spyware preinstalled on their phones?
They don’t represent the people’s will, but unfortunately many people believe in censorship, so even if they were true direct democracies we may still see some.
With modern technology, we might be in the first era where direct democracy is truly viable. Frankly I think the people should have direct veto power on any legislation.
The normal approach is to compromise across topics.
Maybe one should have a finite number of winning votes in a period. Then the majority might want something (or not want) but wouldn't consider it important enough to spend their vote on.
I think that would reduce the sense of urgency where there is non, equalize involvement, foster debate with the barely involved and ofc create a focus on things one wants rather than things one doesn't want.
Who knows, maybe one should be able to spend more than one vote per topic.
> . Then the majority might want something (or not want) but wouldn't consider it important enough to spend their vote on.
Rule of the thumb: everyone will not 'just' [1]
The majority is not a single person that will somehow behave like a rational being that will count their votes and vote only for "things that matter". People view very different things as "things that matter", and the system is easily gamed. Run a few popular, but pointless votes, exhaust available winning votes for the period, then try to pass a meaningful legislation. You will have riots form people who have spent their votes, but still want to vote for something truly important.
And that's before we start talking about whether people should directly vote on removing building code regulations for example. Or whether or not measles vaccines should be mandatory.
I'm just playing with the puzzle. It's not like I deeply thought about it and this was my conclusion.
Votes per period might not work. You could in stead accumulate votes over time.
Of course the proposals could repeatedly go against a specific group. Not sure if you could create a unit of accounting for it or have some kind of independent jury examine the gaming.
I also wondered if the price could scale with the % victory. Like, if 100% votes A it costs zero votes. 51% would be the most expensive.
Maybe give the proposal makers a bunch of tokens, filling a proposal costs x, each vote against it costs y.
The core thought is basically, if people are overly attached to something they will get it but will have reduced influence on everything else.
...you'd be surprised, plenty of regular people actually want these things to happen. State is God for reliably the majority of the population of the world (seeing as the majority resides in China and South Asia).
> do you know anyone who'd voted for having to scan their face to access verboten webseites? to have encryption backdoors in their messengers? to have state-mandated spyware preinstalled on their phones?
I know a few. They're called "normal people who don't suffer from crippling tech libertarianism" and there's more of them than of you.
and so you've spent 20 minutes editing this comment to optimize the amount of snark instead of simply showing me one proof of that silent majority's existence :)
oh, but it's the exact opposite. the people IRL tend to react to censorship and surveillance with the word пидорасы, while the regime's eunuchs on the Internet defend it.
maybe having lived under the Soviets makes my people less welcoming to the idea of a commissar deciding what they're allowed to see, hear, say, and ultimately think.
GWB had a second term. Trump had a second term. I would find it reassuring to believe that democracies don't represent the "will of the people", but I've come to accept that, much of the time, the "the people" and I don't see eye to eye.
Funny how people block Anna's Archive but never archive.org, which houses the largest centralized collection of warez on the planet. Usenet might have more but it is replicated across the globe.
Internet blocking is a last resort for regimes that can't do anything against the source. It's a red herring in regimes that can. Anna's Archive has a political position and is one of the very few voices that survived the immense pressure. How many didn't? How many attempts were not performed at all because of it? This suppression is really hard to measure, OONI can't do anything here, it measures blocking. It's very simple to understand.
"democracies" have a separate problem, even if we had true direct democracy (and not representative democracy)- people often conflate what is popular with what is true.
You can see this directly in online forums (including this one), unpopular truths are routinely flagged to the point where it doesn't matter that discussion could have happened, it effectively can't- and not because the points don't make sense or can't be reasoned with... but because it doesn't feel good that it's true.
So, unfortunately, I think censorship is inevitable.. I guess it's better to have censorship from a small group of people for a small group of people instead of having censorship from a small group of people to a nation-wide group of people though.
Here's my personal benchmark on this public site. Anecdote of 1.
Does posting links to these two videos related to health care decisions that were officially approved or denied to people. Get this post... Unalived?
The platform is quite open, so you can build whichever tests you want. Personally I run a dockerized ooni via scheduled GitHub actions, which shows blocks impacting GitHub runners. You should be able to see logs from that here, which shows three blocked websites https://github.com/robalexdev/ooni-unattended-action/actions...
"Dictatorship" is the standard forum design. Reddit, HN, X, Lemmy... All of them. And censorship is common. We literally prefer it that way. I think it's to create a solid blame trail. I think that's a necessary thing.
that part, right there. "what we prefer, and what's good for us are two drastically different things" is why this stuff will keep happening in places like my country. We're raised thinking any discomfort at all must mean something is wrong, which is not the case. if you're experiencing discomfort it means you're literally being pushed to grow past your current plateaus, both physically, and mentally. I don't know of any slogans like "a bag of potato chips a day keeps the doctor away" or "avoid pain? you gain". Chances are whatever the most uncomfortable way something could unfold for you, within reason, is probably the best thing for you to experience.
I actually do the opposite now. The second something aligns with my own ideals perfectly, I inherently distrust it. Because that shouldn't happen. We all think a lot alike, but also very differently. If any political party, commercial, or anything meant to be absorbed by the masses seems like it's perfectly aligned with you? It most likely is bad for you, in my experience.
They also remember the internet not being flooded with disinformation, and then suddenly was and something had to be done about it. That genie won't go back in the bottle.
People flocked from other platforms to X making it the #1 iOS app in several markets for who knows how long just on the premise that it was free speech with minimal moderation.
"We literally prefer it that way" might apply to you and your bubble, but there's more outside of it.
People in the world like Dan Gackle and Tom Howard are the problem.
These two for signing up and doing the footwork along with Paul Graham and everyone at YC have done irreparable damage to the people of the United States in their sustained clandestine disinformation operations, funding Flock, and siphoning money out of programs for Americans and redirecting it to foreigners.
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[ 0.29 ms ] story [ 86.1 ms ] threadYou don't know what it feels like not because you're so free, but because you agree with the ruling regime on what it considers the most important questions. Those that don't agree find themselves blocked from the financial system, debanked, banned or shadowbanned by social media, fired from their jobs, and any pieces of history or research that might shift opinion to their side is suppressed or twisted by popular media into advocating for the opposite.
To give you an example, the rape and severe beating of a black child by white rednecks, depicted in the star-studded film A Time to Kill, was based on a real event. Except in the real event, the victims were white and the rapist was black: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Time_to_Kill_(Grisham_novel)...
As another example, in the 2019 Joker film, where Joaquin Phoenix's character kills, vigilante-style, a group of unsymphathetic, threatening white finance-bros, as they intimidate passengers on the subway, was based on the real-life shooting by Bernhard Goetz. Again, the real-life perpetrators were black, and not working in finance, or well-paid in general: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joker_(2019_film)#Writing
The film Bad Ass was based on a viral video, in which an elderly white man defeated in a fight a younger black assailant, on a bus. In the film, the assailants are a group of white nazis, and the white man was replaced by a latino: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_Ass_(film)
It's less obvious in films not inspired by real events, but it is just as pervasive.
I would much prefer the dictatorship-style censorship, because our censorship is far, far more effective.
We don’t know what it feels like because we collectively participate and decide what should be considered and what not _periodically_ and it’s possible to change it, evidently, with various degrees and velocity by voting.
> I would much prefer the dictatorship-style censorship, because our censorship is far, far more effective.
Case in point!
I’ve lived under both and can guarantee you don’t know what that dictatorship you so much yearn for has in their bag for you until it’s too late.
It’s a mistake to separate these. They go hand in hand and mich further as you climb up the authoritarian ladder.
What do you think is the style of censorship in authoritarian regimes like Iran? Do you think it’s just preventing access?
Not a single one of my examples was committed by the government (except if you count funding Carnegie Mellon and MIT). But even in cases when they are, voting rarely helps: https://www.woes.blog/p/tgr-democracy
> you don’t know what that dictatorship you so much yearn for
Re-read my sentence. I don't yearn for a dictatorship, I yearn to blunt and make obvious the current secret, subtle censorship regime.
> has in their bag for you
Is it jail?
“White Lives Matter” Slogan Earns Two Dutch Men Imprisonment for Racism - https://europeanconservative.com/articles/news-corner/nether...
Activist ran race-hate sticker library, court told - https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c51zn2l33r9o -Stickers with text like "It's OK to be White" and "We will be a minority in our homeland by 2066". For which he was later convicted and jailed - https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-leeds-68448867
Interesting! How did all of these social media companies made a 180 suddenly after power shifts in Washington?
> You're floating in the river,…
Of course but this doesn’t have any bearing on what I said. We are talking about severity and type of censorship not its meaning.
Also obvious is that all news is made in a short list of countries. Everywhere else the best you can hope for are terrible events.
You will only get opinions from a small list of talking heads.
One might imagine populating the media with nothing but professors. Each field has new stuff every week. In stead you get Adam Savage. The name isn't by acident.
Elon presumably being an exemplar for current trends: Twitter is unarguably far less censored than it was before (though censorship is still present). And Meta took note and also turned down its censorship significantly in response.
The Epstein files, while far less than hoped for by many, are another example of a trend towards sharing far more sensitive info than has been typical by past administrations.
There are many good examples you could point to of increased authoritarianism, but censorship in particular seems to be on the backswing, if anything.
P.S. the Epstein files were just a cruel joke! I wouldn’t list it there.
Surely they could get away with at the very least the same amount?
There’s nothing simple about authoritarian control.
Who says we have less censorship? Sure people can tweet all kind of stuff without getting banned. Fine, but at the same time US president is removing news networks he doesn’t like from press briefings. That’s just one example. To say the censorship is in decline is baffling.
The "age verification" push is a big move in that direction in Western countries. "Think of the children" is an evergreen excuse for authoritarian measures.
A private organization making editorial decisions is not censorship. Trying to compel these organizations to publish speech they dislike is a violation of their speech rights.
There are flagrant examples of the literal government literally censoring people.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/19/us/politics/trump-cnn-msn...
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/fcc-disney-abc-early-license-re...
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/quick-takes/2026/07/31/p...
When a social media deletes users posts because they cross a political line, it may not be government censorship, but it's very obviously still censorship.
It's very hard to take opinions like yours seriously because I know exactly how you'd react if all your HN posts were deleted because you're calling people "Nazis"
I exclusively use websites that "censor" their users. Millions upon millions of people are with me on this. Would you deny us our right to organize as we please?
>It's very hard to take opinions like yours seriously because I know exactly how you'd react if all your HN posts were deleted because you're calling people "Nazis"
If you deny that there are literal and unabashed Nazis on Twitter these days, you are wrong. I am not using the term as a pejorative; I am using it as a straightforward descriptor for people who post pictures of swastikas and SS officers, start their posts with "Hitler was right", have "1488" in their bios, and write my name (((like this))) every damn time. These sorts of people would not be offended by being called Nazis and are not shy about their desire to see me gassed to death. Twitter paid them to say these things and then tried to censor people who criticized them for it, and that's a fact.
Hell, I didn't even call this guy a Nazi:
https://tinyurl.com/5n94mk74
So you must really hate laws like the Online Safety Act and the Digital Services Act, that force platforms to censor vaguely-defined hate-speech, without a court order, or face ruinous fines. Literal government censorship, men with guns forcing private companies to silence citizens, denying you the right to organize as you please.
I mean, I assume you hate them. Based on your complaints about government interfering with individuals organizing as they please, you should hate them, but then you speak as if those laws don't exist, and you praise as exemplars of free speech and free association the very services those laws forces to censor. Maybe you just didn't know about them? And now that you do, you're going to protest these laws as fervently as you're protesting the other violations of free speech you mentioned in your posts?
Are you really going to conflate publishing with operating a social media platform? Regardless, if those editorial decisions are meant to suppress a viewpoint, it is censorship - government censorship is only one kind.
> You have no right to demand Twitter publish your speech.
Nobody argued that what social media do is illegal, only that it counts as censorship.
Also, I have seen no evidence that social media companies try to suppress viewpoints. The laptop story certainly doesn't establish it, so try again.
Declining to say something is not a form of suppression. Kicking someone out of a group is not a form of suppression absent social control. You are free to say whatever you like, just not on Twitter. You really, truly, do not have a right to be a member of my club or to be published in my newspaper.
>Nobody argued that what social media do is illegal, only that it counts as censorship.
If you define censorship in such a way that social media companies can be said to be engaged in it, then you have defined "censorship" in such a way that it is not bad, and are no longer entitled to use it as a pejorative. You are like the people who define "murder" as "killing of a human" and act like you've just proved abortion is a crime.
Big "if". In the case of all the big platforms, they are not.
You are free to define the term however you wish. But if "censorship" applies to ordinary website moderation, then you have no basis to object to it. If censorship refers to suppression of speech, and your speech is not being suppressed, then you are not being censored.
This is the current lead story on the NYT.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/19/us/politics/trump-cnn-msn...
Trump banned disfavored news outlets from the White House.
He also tried to take TV stations off the air for hosting comics who made fun of him, cut funding for public broadcasters he didn't like, scrubbed information from government websites, and endeavored to punish "woke" universities.
https://universityobserver.ie/silencing-late-night-censorshi...
https://www.politico.com/news/2026/03/31/media-broadcasting-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_government_onlin...
https://apnews.com/article/harvard-trump-funding-appeal-f652...
People have been arrested for writing editorials he didn't like:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detention_of_R%C3%BCmeysa_%C3%...
And hundreds have been bogusly arrested for protesting against ICE:
https://www.democracynow.org/2026/4/21/caught_crackdown_thom...
>Elon presumably being an exemplar for current trends
He is that: he is using lawfare to silence people criticizing X for hosting and funding white supremacists.
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/x-twitter-elon-mus...
https://apnews.com/article/elon-musk-media-matters-lawsuit-a...
I think hundreds of people being arrested for protesting masked government agents rounding up people in their neighborhoods is a more objectionable form of censorship than Twitter banning people for saying the n-word, but reasonable people may disagree.
one isn't ignoring the other
They censor and delete comments that would age very well.
Sometimes even to their benefit but they are not smart people (control freaks, mods).
I'd wager the vast majority of internet censorship is within platform, like that done by Reddit mods.
The most egregious example I've seen in my lifetime was when old Twitter decided to censor a NYPost article, down to blocking sharing in DMs.
It seems that type of example is entirely missed here. Is there any attempt to capture that signal?
Literally even 4chan has moderation.
Nobody, not even 4chan users, want an actually unmoderated space.
It made me wonder how unlikely or impossible an event has to be before it would no longer be considered a real threat by whoever or whatever flags posts like that. Firing billionaires into the Sun? Hmm, probably too close to home. Sending them light years away to fire them into a black hole?
That alone shows that the hyothetical "you" is the last person who should be allowed to moderate anything.
That one can only do it within reddit is of course merely a technical limitation. The idea can be implemented much more broadly.
If someone is doing that, it's classified as either a true threat or an incitement, both of which have been clearly established as not covered by the 1st amendment by SCOTUS and thus illegal - and can be stopped for no more reason than the fact that it's illegal.
On the other hand, online content moderation rules often get politically weaponized to silence dissent that is inconvenient but fully legal (and perfectly fine, for as much as you might disagree with it / hate that others get to hear ideas you don't like).
Going from "I voiced my opinion on the internet" to "people are inciting gassing the jews" is quite the stretch, crosses a well defined line, and is just nonsensical.
In fact, I wouldn't call the latter "moderation" at all, rather it's mods abusing their power to push political propaganda, but they do it through moderation in terms of action.
Thankfully this is extremely rare on the major platforms. "This news story is fake as fuck and is causing trouble such as people going to throw Molotov cocktails at random mosques" is the common scenario.
Giving an anonymous rando the power to censor my conversation is abhorrent. And it's absurd that most people are ok with that.
Yes? Moderation is a form of censorship with a different connotation (the one you agree with vs the other you don't). I don't see how it's controversial
Which article, about what subject?
The story you are referring to involved the New York Post or its affiliates breaking in to Hunter Biden's laptop and publishing his personal correspondence, complete with unredacted phone numbers and email addresses. This violated Twitter's policies against doxxing and dissemination of hacked materials. Characterizing this as censorship is misleading; the story contained no newsworthy information and its publication violated longstanding Twitter policy. It's hard to imagine Twitter functioning without such a policy. I don't see any reason the New York Post should get away with violating it just because they claim to be a newspaper.
The Wall Street Journal, also a Murdoch rag and hardly notable for its liberal bias, declined to publish this information. Reputable journalists have ethical standards.
There's an argument that when a platform is big enough, it's a common carrier.
Again, which article, about what subject?
howunfortunate didn't answer, just deflected:
> Are there NYPost articles you feel people should be prevented from DMing? Or posting, for that matter?
qerghnui's reply was flagged to death:
> Why do you refuse to answer the question?
> The story you are referring to involved the New York Post or its affiliates breaking in to Hunter Biden's laptop (a felony) and publishing his personal correspondence, complete with unredacted phone numbers and email addresses. This violated Twitter's policies against doxxing and dissemination of hacked materials. Characterizing this as censorship is misleading; the story contained no newsworthy information and its publication violated longstanding Twitter policy. It's hard to imagine Twitter functioning without such a policy. I don't see any reason the New York Post should get away with violating it just because it claims to be a newspaper.
> The Wall Street Journal, a Murdoch rag like the Post and hardly known for its liberal bias, declined to publish this information, which is why it wound up in the disreputable Post instead. Respectable journalists have ethical standards. Act like thugs, get treated like thugs.
> P.S. Twitter is free to make whatever editorial decisions it pleases. Trying to make them publish something they don't want to publish is compelled speech. Compelling speech in the name of freedom of speech is hypocritical.
This is very much in line with the likes of pokemon go, wiki landmark projects and what have you (those are nice things to have for autonomous drones/missiles to navigate only with vision when gps/cellular/starlink is actively blocked).
—
Russia banned stuff like speedtest because things like that may help “map” the network, aid NSA to model malware propagation, etc.
Not that this should matter when you have cisco, dell, nokia hardware, but it won’t hurt either.
—
I mean come on, some nuts even willingly install stuff like this: https://atlas.ripe.net/
In the last years many sites started to drop/block connections from the countries like China and Russia. It is sad to see how Internet is becoming more and more fragmented.
Is it a bad sign if CSAM, Personal (medical, financial, etc) Records, Snuff, and Malware/Ransomeware are censored? What about manufacture of WMDs, terrorism, hate speech? Free software, and copyrighted music? Historical records of genocide?
Doubt it. Besides malice there's also incompetence.
See the article that's also on the front page right now about Spain blocking Cloudflare (i.e. half the internet) during football matches.
Let me know how that works out.
Arguably, the most significant difference is between "free speech" and commercial/paid speech, or distribution vs viewability, but not distinguishing the two and calling both "internet censorship" creates a phrase without much support or meaning.
I think we would see more.
Counterpoint: see any NIMBY meetings where they shut down any and all proposals and legislations, even the obviously beneficial common sense ones.
Rule by mob has rarely been productive.
Maybe one should have a finite number of winning votes in a period. Then the majority might want something (or not want) but wouldn't consider it important enough to spend their vote on.
I think that would reduce the sense of urgency where there is non, equalize involvement, foster debate with the barely involved and ofc create a focus on things one wants rather than things one doesn't want.
Who knows, maybe one should be able to spend more than one vote per topic.
Rule of the thumb: everyone will not 'just' [1]
The majority is not a single person that will somehow behave like a rational being that will count their votes and vote only for "things that matter". People view very different things as "things that matter", and the system is easily gamed. Run a few popular, but pointless votes, exhaust available winning votes for the period, then try to pass a meaningful legislation. You will have riots form people who have spent their votes, but still want to vote for something truly important.
And that's before we start talking about whether people should directly vote on removing building code regulations for example. Or whether or not measles vaccines should be mandatory.
[1] https://www.tumblr.com/squareallworthy/163790039847/everyone...
Votes per period might not work. You could in stead accumulate votes over time.
Of course the proposals could repeatedly go against a specific group. Not sure if you could create a unit of accounting for it or have some kind of independent jury examine the gaming.
I also wondered if the price could scale with the % victory. Like, if 100% votes A it costs zero votes. 51% would be the most expensive.
Maybe give the proposal makers a bunch of tokens, filling a proposal costs x, each vote against it costs y.
The core thought is basically, if people are overly attached to something they will get it but will have reduced influence on everything else.
I know a few. They're called "normal people who don't suffer from crippling tech libertarianism" and there's more of them than of you.
They voted for it or you assume they don't mind it existing?
where do these paragons of civil obedience congregate? how do they express their wishes for less freedom and more surveillance?
why would i waste that much time on writing a reply to you and where do you see snark exactly?
> one proof
i just talk about it with people irl, yeah that thing i suggest you try;)
maybe having lived under the Soviets makes my people less welcoming to the idea of a commissar deciding what they're allowed to see, hear, say, and ultimately think.
consider that not everyone grew up in an oppressive dictatorship.
You can see this directly in online forums (including this one), unpopular truths are routinely flagged to the point where it doesn't matter that discussion could have happened, it effectively can't- and not because the points don't make sense or can't be reasoned with... but because it doesn't feel good that it's true.
So, unfortunately, I think censorship is inevitable.. I guess it's better to have censorship from a small group of people for a small group of people instead of having censorship from a small group of people to a nation-wide group of people though.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=YmOeKahtmdQ
https://youtube.com/watch?v=FRRX0J_TDXY
You can build your own lists and share them using ooni run: https://run.ooni.org/
But what we prefer and what's good for us are two drastically different things.
I actually do the opposite now. The second something aligns with my own ideals perfectly, I inherently distrust it. Because that shouldn't happen. We all think a lot alike, but also very differently. If any political party, commercial, or anything meant to be absorbed by the masses seems like it's perfectly aligned with you? It most likely is bad for you, in my experience.
to hear it from the mods, it's about being responsible for what's said to the admins above. so that's why they need to have censorship power.
Anyone over 35 remembers a lot better forum culture and so much more of it.
Sad we only have censored pieces of shit like HN and Reddit full of disinformation and bullshit
"We literally prefer it that way" might apply to you and your bubble, but there's more outside of it.
Quack: Scalable Remote Measurement of Application-Layer Censorship:
https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/usenixsecurit...
Global Measurement of DNS Manipulation:
https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/usenixsecurit...
Reachability index of Internet blockade circumvention tools:
https://explorer.ooni.org/circumvention
Psiphon:
https://forge.psiphon.ca/en/what-is-psiphon
These two for signing up and doing the footwork along with Paul Graham and everyone at YC have done irreparable damage to the people of the United States in their sustained clandestine disinformation operations, funding Flock, and siphoning money out of programs for Americans and redirecting it to foreigners.
They must be destroyed.
The glowing reviews would reflect quite the survivor bias.
Facebook doesn’t give a shit about censorship, beyond it means a limited audience.