No, the problem is with censoring people.
You make it seem like censorship is a given. I disagree and feel no need to have a third party prune unwanted ideas for me. This will seem like a strange idea for some but I don't need a priest in between myself and God. I don't need a doctor in between myself and good health. Why would I need a censor in between myself and information?
No need for governments, no need for corporations, just me and my silly brain will decide what to digest. What a concept!
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We need to realize our problem is not with censoring people, it's not with who does the censoring, it's people that try and normalize censorship.
Racism/sexism is a lot murkier of a topic. There's a lot of nuance there that I think we culturally haven't fully figured out. The whole "cracker" situation on twitch, for example.
+1. When I was younger I used to browse 4chan somewhat regularly. I saw snuff videos and other awful content that I still think about to this day. My life would have been better had I not seen it.
I censor myself all the time. There's numerous things I simply don't want to read or see, but I've made and own that decision for myself.
Here's a devil's advocate point of view:
Free speech/free press is an asset within a group when the following are true: A) members are acting in good faith which typically requires value systems to be not too divergent, B) members agree on how to arrive at the truth, and C) members are not confusing science (designed to be true), opinion (designed to be neither true nor false), and entertainment (designed to be false).
When one of these is not true, it creates liabilities that need to be managed. Social breakdown is the result of not managing these liabilities.
Probably an initial response will be: "well who decides X" ... if we've figured this out for engineering problems where lives are phyisically on the line we can figure it out for this. Any authoritative action whether it be laws or standards make some portion of people unhappy.
The term moderation itself often came from debate and discussion venues where moderators would police speeches.
This isn't true, it's just that the spatial constraints IRL mean there's never been a need to scale moderation of town squares beyond intuitive methods. Go to your physical town square and start screaming slurs and threats of violence at passers-by, and see how long it takes before the community "censors" you.
In developing and developed countries I've had (ostensibly) mentally ill people shouting epithets at passerbys and they're just ignored. So I think this is more about cultural norms.
Moreover, the case you mention is simple. If a spammer joins a forum and starts spamming, there's usually broad support to kick them out. Once the argument becomes ideological, that's when sentiment is a lot more mixed
No it wouldn't. As big as Facebook is, they still only moderate their own platform, and there is only one instance of Facebook. Separate vBulletin instances do not constitute a single, collective "vBulletin platform." The narrative of "Big Tech" as an organized leftist conspiracy orchestrating censorship over all social media is simply right-wing propaganda.
That's my point. The reason vBulletin forum moderators aren't equivalent to Big Tech censorship is that you can run your own vBulletin, independent of theirs. Censorship of Facebook is bad because that isn't an option.
Case in point: a number of Youtubers fed up with the platform demonetizing and delisting their content are advertising their content on other video platforms, or just hosting their own like Corridor Digital.
The web is one of the few examples of the free market actually working, but people have fallen for the defeatist and nihilistic narrative about the "centralization" of the web and "control" by sinister forces, insisting that competition with any big platform is simply impossible.
They said that about MySpace too and look what happened.
I'm wondering where exactly you think all of this "information" you would be digesting would be coming from, absent the "censorship" of structures and systems needed to collect, validate and disseminate it?
Good luck reconstructing the last 8000 years of human progress and knowledge from first principles, naked and alone in nature with some crystals and potions before you fucking die of parasites and tetanus I guess.
Back to the original point - You're assuming that a doctor, government or corporation will make a decision for me that's in my best interests. In reality they're much more likely to make a decision for me that's in _their_ best interests. Lots of examples in the past few year+ with the pandemic.
No, it’s who/when/where the censorship occurs.
If you want to come into my living room and shout Nazi propaganda, your ass is getting censored and banned from my house.
If you think that level of censorship is a problem, then we have a fundamental disagreement, and the bad news for you is 95% of people will disagree with you.
If you agree on that level of censorship, then we’re just arguing where the who/when/where line should be.
Do you really want to censor racist comments, for instance? Wouldn't you rather know how many racists there are out there?
The real problem is possible use of a channel like this to support bad actions, not bad viewpoints. For example, someone could advertise to hire a hit-man to kill someone. Or a group might use the channel to organize a mob to go around burning down jewish businesses.
In the scheme described, owners of individual servers could block such messages, if they recognize they're there (a possibly hard problem). Perhaps this would be sufficient, while still leaving viewpoints uncensored, since there are, we hope, very few people in favour of serious criminal activity, while many favour free speech even for those they detest.
I'm not taking a stand against the content itself, but as long as there are bullies that can be moved to action by bits on a disk, our protocols will need to either support censorship, of be zero-knowledge to the point where nobody knows which bits are on which disks.
The point is that it won’t be effective since messages are pushed to/pulled from multiple relays.
These are all questions we've already seen from USENET; in fact, it's not entirely clear to me what the benefit to this protocol is over USENET, except it's new.
We need to realize our problem is not with censoring people, it's with who does the censoring.
We don't like it to be the gov, because we don't feel like the gov is 'by and for the people'
We don't like it being large corporations because that's doubly the case.