What? You don’t think women/homosexuals/minorities were barred from holding certain cultural megaphones?

Fredick Douglass owned and published a newspaper that was not censored - when you look at abolitionist articles or early drafts from the Seneca Falls Convention, you are not likely to find a bunch of scribble marks or other equivalents to the [deleted] tag that litters the internet today.

> Fredick Douglass owned and published a newspaper that was not censored

He was the owner and publisher, and his viewpoint, while not exactly establishment, was well within the Overton Window where it was published.

> when you look at abolitionist articles or early drafts from the Seneca Falls Convention, you are not likely to find a bunch of scribble marks or other equivalents to the [deleted] tag that litters the internet today.

Because their weren't user content platforms with the owner exercising post-publication editing, for technological reasons. The ideas that were censored were just never published (sometimes because those holding them were murdered for expressing them), not published and then edited partially after the fact.

>Because their weren't user content platforms with the owner exercising post-publication editing, for technological reasons. The ideas that were censored were just never published (sometimes because those holding them were murdered for expressing them), not published and then edited partially after the fact.

There were cases of this happening, often in the South, but in many other places it was not common practice.

The consolidation of much conversation onto 'platforms' with the internet makes the act of censorship a lot more obvious, and tends to set people's 1984 alarms off more. We mocked China for deleting scores and scores of Weibo comments, but here we are doing the same.

No, “we” are not doing the same. In China the state compels private companies to hold and enforce certain positions toward certain speech. That’s exactly what the “anti-censorship” lobby is asking for, and it’s not at all what is happening today in the US.

Today, you have private companies managing content on their own platforms according to their own policies. The government can and does ask for certain actions and, unlike China, companies are more than welcome to decline those requests.

Indeed, the relationship of the state and business does differ in China. In the US it is more decentralized.

To the person who considers the outcome of something like Weibo covered in deleted comments and only having survivors parrot narrow lines, this is a bad thing, even if the cause differs.

I’m not an expert on censorship in China, so I won’t weigh in on that, but in the US it’s a non-issue. If you can’t discuss some conservative view on Twitter, move over to Truth Social or Gab or the many Mastodon instances that exist explicitly to host that content.

“X group wasn’t censored because I can find an instance of X that wasn’t censored” is quite the argument.

You know you can find plenty of racist and sexist scribbles all over the internet, not [deleted]. According to your logic: proof that they are not censored!

When you want to track censorship in those days, you'd typically look for lawsuits. The US had blasphemy laws in local areas for a long time, but those were rarely enforced or taken to court, for example.

This is a total non-sequitur and ends up being a self-defeating argument anyway.

You’d look for people who couldn’t get business loans, couldn’t rent a storefront, couldn’t find a lawyer who would work for them to file lawsuits around their censorship, couldn’t leave their captor’s estate, couldn’t look at someone the wrong way without getting beaten to death, etc etc.

I actually struggle to imagine a worse way to track censorship than looking for lawsuits lol.

The NAACP and other organizations existed at the same time as Jim Crow. The reality was that the extent of the racial oppression varied considerably based on geography. Many find the idea of current censorship more intimidating because it exists everywhere within the US and many places outside of it, so there would be no good way of escaping it - while many blacks instead had the option of fleeing northward.

Got it. Social media sites moderating content is at least as bad as Jim Crow. Truly striking argument, though probably in the opposite way as intended.

If you could guarantee the problems are limited to social media moderation, it would be no issue. But the kinds of people who cause bad social media moderation also have their pies in many other kinds of policies, and they want blood. The end result of this would be worse than Jim Crow because it would be applied nationwide.

I see... and I guess this argument is meant to be a testimony to one's ability to imagine worlds worse than Jim Crow?

There are many possible worlds that are far worse than Jim Crow. Sure. What does that have to do with reality again?

Should we be alarmed about people ordering at restaurants given that we can't guarantee they have no intention to eat the entirety of planet Earth?