Sorry, but that's not what the word means. By definition, it refers to the interception of communications between others. That's now what's happening here.

"the action of preventing part or the whole of a book, movie, work of art, document, or other kind of communication from being seen or made available to the public, because it is considered to be offensive or harmful, or because it contains information that someone wishes to keep secret, often for political reasons:"

https://philzimmermann.com/EN/essays/WhyIWrotePGP.html

It was a good time indeed.

This is the critical piece of information that I think gets fumbled (and usually on purpose by the media). The word "censor" is being supercharged and abused to apply in cases I don't think it should, and also in absurd cases where no censorship is happening.

"Cases where no censorship is happening": a comedian, to a crowd of thousands, on a Netflix special getting front page treatment, complaining about their jokes being censored for being too edgy.

Cases I don't think it should include instances of websites like Twitter banning hate speech, because the consequence of Twitter banning hate speech is that a user doesn't get to use Twitter anymore. They can still do hate speech in other places, to anyone they want. Whereas the consequences of the ruling communist party banning hate speech is that you well and truly can't do it anywhere, for many reasons.

First reason, every institution will follow the policy of the ruling party the instant it's created. This isn't the case in a country like the usa: despite whining about cancellation, you can get on voat or 4chan and drop the n word all day.

Second reason, there are legislated consequences to violating the censorship of a ruling party ban. In countries like the PRC that probably means some kind of violence such as being jailed, reeducated, or possibly even tortured or shot.

This is nothing like the system we have today. Now for the second part of my thought where I acknowledge some of the subtleties of societal pressure and side effects of what some today call "censorship," or being cancelled, and how despite us not having a ruling communist party, we do seem to have less freedom that one might assume naively above.

With your name attached, drop the n word on Twitter, get banned, no jail, no torture, sure... But you might get doxxed, and you might get banned from other platforms if you're semi famous enough to warrant some place like Facebook needing to purge you for being publicly too toxic to platform. So your actions on Twitter could result in being "censored" on all platforms whose existence depends on surviving in a traditional capitalist mode of production.

But, not just platforms, as we saw entire platforms themselves that try to host this kind of content can be themselves deplatformed by the very internet itself if cloudflare decides not to serve your hate platform.

So it seems in 2023 though nobody has to fear the bullet or the gulag, we've given various corporations so much power that their ability to "censor" is much more capable than ever in history, especially if they collude (which they often seemed forced to do). At least their collusion is much more predictable than the single communist party, whose legislation can drive the will of a single madman depending on their structure. The collusion of "big tech censorship" follows the predictable algorithm of capitalist profit seeking protection. You probably won't randomly get "censored" for criticizing a president's clothes or whatever in this environment.

So in the end though I think people are misusing the word "censor" in a way that diminishes what it means to be censored in the Soviet Union or the PRC, I do think there's a problem with how much power over what's able to be communicated publicly because of monopolization efforts and anti-interop and federalization efforts by large corporations. Don't mistake me for some kind of dude that wishes he could say the n word on Twitter though, my fears are justified by the punishment levied against people for posting pro-union rhetoric, or the doxxing to hostile governments of activists by platforms like Facebook or Twitter, or even just algorithms selectively choosing what people see, usually in favor of culture war rather than showing the reality of the world as a much more mundane place then tik tok would have you believe. This fear is similar to one I've always had about the ability to reach people on television being only available to multi billion dollar corporations.

> I miss "hackers" from the 90s with some actual backbone.

Same. It boggles my mind that I can find people who accept wrongthink as a legitimate concept here on Hacker News. I wonder if those hackers left this place and if so where they are at.

The Catholic Church does. The office of Censor is still part of the official legislation (Can. 830 CIC).

eg. to this day many people live under the impression that Kyle Rittenhouse shot three black people. If asked to estimate how many unarmed blacks get killed by police, Democrat voters give absolutely wild estimates when according to shooting databases the actual number is about 20 a year. According to a poll D voters thought you had a 50% chance of dying if you caught Covid, which is completely nuts even with the earlier, more dangerous strains.

Yet these people think they're well informed and follow the Science™.

Uh, no.

By easily findable statistics, the number is more like 225+ a year - shot and killed. And is consistently disproportionate to the number of white victims.

If you run a community tech support forum and someone starts suggesting deletion of windows32 directory as a solution to other users issues, do you let them do that?

If some neighbor in your bbq party claims to be a doctor and goes on a rant about benefits of microdosing rat poison, do you invite them ever again?

Do you disable spam filter in your mail?

We now have malicious misinformation multiplied to internet scale by modern tech. Add LLMs in the mix and we will drown in it if no measures are taken.

You want to prevent politicians or corporations from abusing or even using censorship at all - good, implement corresponding barriers. Limit scope to clear factual misinfo and not e.g. opinions - yes, sure. Proper transparent process, recourse, rehabilitation, grace of application, oversight - absolutely, implement all of those things.

Make censorship good. Denying it is required makes no sense.

Also, honestly, the spam filter example (and the rest of your examples) is pretty ridiculous. I don't turn it off, but I'd definitely freak out if my email provider decided to censor my messages for my own good without letting me see them. If nothing else then because of how many false positives I constantly see in my spam folder.

And sure, we can't verify factuality of every claim, but I do believe there is a big enough set where we can. If you accept that all information on internet is fundamentally unverifiable, then of what use is the whole thing?