What a fun way to completely invalidate anyone who doesn't agree with you that "freedom is out of fashion"!
To me, those 2 sentences contradict each other. Doing it through copyright rights, and doing it for money and business sound pretty much the same to me. But you're saying that traditionally one wasn't considered censorship, but the other was considered censorship.
Besides copyright, especially among Americans, I find that its completely O.K. to censor content it is bad for business. A major one is censorship in order to be advertisement friendly but anything flies, even the guy owns the thing and can do whatever he pleases is good enough for many(slightly controversial).
At the time, Germany had a law censoring insulting comments about foreign heads of state, but that only applied to living ones (and maybe only those in office at the time?) That law was repealed in 2018.
The videos remained blocked in Turkey, but on account of a specific law banning criticism of Ataturk, not copyright.
But CUII is formed by a private oligopoly, with anonymous judges, implementing vague rules, trying to keep secret even what they block. All while limiting what the vast majority of Germans (who don’t know what DNS is) can access on the internet. IMO that’s the issue.
Would you ban all propaganda? Russian propaganda? Propaganda from countries engaged in illegal wars? How many social media or news sites survive? Heck, how many sites that allow comments and user interaction survive?
Yours is the "think of the children" argument, makes you feel warm and fuzzy when it aligns with your interests but you won't have a leg to stand on by the time it's used against you. Banning is just sweeping some of the trash under the carpet. The ones wielding the ban hammer don't care that most of the trash is still out in the open (social media?), they just need to open the door to arbitrary banning. The ones applauding the ban hammer are lacking the same critical thing that would otherwise handle propaganda and misinformation very well: education.
If you want your child to not smoke you don't just hide the cigarette pack on a higher shelf, you teach them what smoking is and does.
Meanwhile all the RT type crap is flooding social media under thousands of names. But that's fine as long as enough rubes are tricked into thinking banning one site did anything to solve the propaganda issue.
What's "freedom" mean if not the right to read any publication you want, including (especially!*) media from hostile foreign countries? It's cynical to attack core civil liberties and say that you are doing so in defense of liberty.
*This is the most obvious thing in the world, IMHO, if you look at the general category, and ask yourself what you think about it when the actors are switched around. If China bans its citizens from reading the New York Times (it does), is that a human rights violation—or is it a simple exercise of sovereignty? When North Korea sends people into labor camps for possessing South Korean television shows (it does), is there a colorable case that *their* national security justifies that? Or is that totally out of the question?
One'd have to twist themselves into pretzels to plead exceptionalism for their own country doing anything of this category.
(There's a further subtext that anyone on HN knows how to trivially circumvent such blocks, so, these rules inherently can never apply to HN commenters, ourselves—it's always other people, we'd wish to apply these rules to).
It's been a longstanding part of the fascist playbook to turn the norms of liberalism against itself, advocating for "free speech" when it helps actively amplify their message to audiences, and having no hesitation to abandon those purported principles once in power and able to censor opponents. Poof, there goes your free speech.
Principle agnostic approaches to freedom of expression lead to the collapse of democracies. Happened in Hungary, almost happened in Poland, and it's unfolding in the U.S. The point isn't that these idea's "win" in a marketplace of ideas but that they mobilize violent anti-democratic capacity.
You don't want to live in America because it's dystopic and collapsing? Strange. Strange that there's a correlation between countries that hold your opinions and dystopia and collapse. One might even be lead to think that principles held by dystopic countries that collapse might be bad principles to build a country on. But those who promoter those principles told me to reject the evidence of my eyes and ears.
The problem is just getting bigger because 1) we aren't actually doing anything else (real) about it and 2) we even actively allow propaganda and misinformation on so many other channels it's laughable.
I said above, the people doing the banning just need a vehicle to carry their interests and justify their banning powers. Since they don't care about the problem itself, they don't care about any of the real measures that could tackle it. They pick the only one which gives them what they really want: power to arbitrarily control information. Russia is a great excuse today (and honestly, almost throughout their history) but it will be used against you tomorrow.
You don't even have to dig too far to see the exact same type of propaganda freely spread on X or Facebook, where the people actually are. RT is happily active there. Far right Musk is there. Can you even pretend that banning the rt.com site in Germany does anything towards the goal of curbing disinformation?
lol the US has had that door removed
> just
So... you do both?
You keep trying to make it sound like we are doing "both". In reality we aren't doing the thing that works, and keep doing the thing that doesn't. The proof is that we live in a world with more disinformation on more channels than ever, while education is cratering.
So I guess the question is why are you pretending we're doing something useful about this? Why are you pretending the useless measure we keep applying needs to be applied nonetheless? Who convinced you that banning solves the problem when reality shows things getting worse and that if we pretend we "do both" it's as if we actually did?
We do both, yet it does not work, so I ask the parent, now what do you suggest?
No, it's a false binary choice presented by you in which the only outcomes are "dealing with it" (severe overreach) or the destruction of the country.
It is a tool that entrenches current powers that be, system wise. Who decides what the "common" good is? the one in power.
It also hides societal problems and signals that could be used for policymaking.
The acceptance of censorship honestly scares me, and i grew up on stories of oppressive communist regime - full of censorship, secret police etc.
and frankly, commercial censorship might be even worse - it is a "for profit" enterprise, common good be damned.
and one last thing - even if you fully trust your current government, you're just one elections away from something vastly different. They will have access to the same powers that you've granted them(indirectly, by voting).
But then, you have to define these things. E.g.: freedom of person "A" to kill person "B" infringes on person "B" freedom of come and go and not be killed (by "A" or anyone else) ... so what is freedom. "Common good" is even more complicated ... who should defined it ? And how ?
On the other topic, I for one think that censorship of AI generated content and fake news, as well as AI generated ordering of results should be censored. But it's not that easy, and implementing that is an even bigger can of worms.
> But then, you have to define these things. E.g.: freedom of person "A" to kill person "B" infringes on person "B" freedom of come and go and not be killed (by "A" or anyone else) ... so what is freedom. "Common good" is even more complicated ... who should defined it ? And how ?
even worse - how do you make sure the definition of such terms stays up to date with changing times?
Everyone believes in censorship for the common good. People don't agree what should be censored for the common good.
the issue with it isn't just in itself, but the fact that there's no way to make it without abuse.
The Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse strike again!
If you believe nothing should be censored, then you believe child porn shouldn't be censored, so please either square that circle, or weaken the argument to "I believe this thing shouldn't be censored"
CP is often used as an "I win" card in this kind of arguments, as it can stir up emotions in the general public, in favor of ever expanding scope of surveillance and censorship. We should be extra aware of this.
I didn't say "should child abuse be illegal?". I said "should child porn be illegal?".
You said it's good if a court orders the website owner to block the material, i.e. censors it, so I assume you're pro-censorship for child porn and likely also support jail time for those who possess it.
In which case, please do not claim to oppose all censorship.
It's not what's good for you, it's what's good for them.
There's this weird effect I've noticed where people act like words don't have meanings any more. I don't know what to call it.
If a low six figure number of people in a handful of states had voted last fall, none of the lawlessness that we’ve seen this year would have happened. The people telling you that voting is useless are enjoying the fruits of suckers believing them.
The key part being "in a handful of states". There are many states in the country in which your vote is all but meaningless at the federal level. The Electoral College + relentless Gerrymandering that has been done over the past decades ensures that only a small fraction of eligible voters can cast meaningful votes. Makes it much easier to target and propagadandize those smaller groups. We saw it play out with Cambridge Analytica, but there hasn't been another "scandal" of that sort because it's just established practice now. Everyone has their hand in the pot doing the same thing, it's all above belt.
You should still vote, because you can enact change at the local + state levels, but the levers of federal power have been taken from the people.
See? Same facts, but culminating in a call to action based on the premise that is affirmative of the value of democracy. If there was one person who mobilized this way for every ten who gave up in resignation it would be done already. But the battle against hedonic skepticism is hard.
Second, while some states may be unlikely to change their choice of president or senator, the local level matters quite a lot AND that’s where electoral reform will happen. If you don’t like the two party status quo, if you don’t like the electoral college, giving up on voting ensures defeat whereas supporting things like ranked-choice voting or the The National Popular Vote reform.
That also happens to be what the people in power would like you to believe.
Taking a step back, I support the ideals (the good ones at least) of what I’d perceived that our country was founded on. I also support the individual people in our police and military, but not the fascist orders that they’re having to fulfill. I think the majority of these people joined to uphold law and order or to protect all people in-general, I don’t think they want to be doing these things some of them are being ordered to do, and I think that continuing to do bad things is how fascists are able to take hold.
This is a predicament, because it’s like you’re driving the bus and a fascist jumps into your lap with a gun to your head and takes the wheel, while he has others put guns to the head of your family and others on the bus. No one asked for this, and I still feel like there are many that believe that there is nothing we can do and that it will take care of itself. But the gerrymandering law that just passed in Texas, on top of everything else that was already in place, is another warning that this won’t go away on its own.
I get what you’re saying about sending people to space, but I think that being able to get off our big rock if we can do so without destroying other life and other places in the universe is worth time and effort. Even natives that lived with the land and life that existed had to move sometimes, life and all that exists physically that has space is to some degree nomadic.
I hope that someday we will put this genie back in the bottle and return to the previous normal.
I don't buy this. These folks literally swear an oath. National Guard troops are literally flag bearers. Those US flag patches on their uniforms mean that they don't get to decide that an order that is otherwise lawful is "political" in nature and therefore invalid. If they don't want to do their jobs, as ordered, they should resign. These are not private employees, they are public servants.
I am still making that argument. They don’t have the authority to decide if they’re pawns, political or otherwise. They’re part of an unbroken chain of command. I don’t see the contradiction that you are implying, as I’m not trying to change my position to my reading.
I can’t speak to realities perhaps as you can if you have served, as I have not served, though I am seeking to do so. No disrespect to you or to any service member intended by anything I have written.
I think people who joined the military, or the FBI, or some other federal agency, expected to be serving their country, not the whims of the sitting president. They went in to catch criminals, or defend the nation in combat, etc. Of course they know that orders are orders, but it's perfectly reasonable, before 2025, to assume that the commander-in-chief is generally working in the best interests of the country, and what you will be ordered to do will therefore be serving that interest.
I don't get how knowing that they could be ordered to do something legal-but-blatantly-political means that they should have expected that eventuality. That has not been broadly true in the recent history of this country; the military I was in considered itself a professional organization and we hated politics.
> I don't get how knowing that they could be ordered to do something legal-but-blatantly-political means that they should have expected that eventuality.
Most folks who are in the military or are considering it have heard of the honor guard. This is the most obviously political post one can have, but it is arguably one of the most important, due to the virtues such a post embodies, and the highly visible, public nature of the post.
Many folks would leap out of their seat to have such a post, though I can see how some would rather decline if given the option, due to the importance of the job and perhaps their own feelings of unsuitability, or desire to not interact with the public, or whatever.
I think it's an inherently political job, and everyone should know that going in. What you do in uniform reflects directly on the nation whose flag your uniform is emblazoned with.
Check out "Ordinary Men" by Christopher R. Browning.
Also check out this one, written to counter Ordinary Men.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitler%27s_Willing_Executioner...
It's not well-regarded, but I think that one thing the book tries to bring to light is the context and valence of values of the times, and the political furor of that era which directly contributed to the hatred and violence. I'm not sure that it's fair to say that they were just following orders without looking at the broader social context that people were living in up to the point that those orders were given.
I think that his concept of "eliminationist racism" is somewhat accurate, as I have known race-based supremacists in real life, and have had them protest/counter-protest public events I have been involved with providing security for.
I don't support racial supremacy or hatred in any way, in case that was ambiguous or unclear from context.
Id start by looking into the deportees, people like Abreco Garcia — working men and women who contributed to their society, and all those who received pardons — between rapists, violent criminals, and abusers, you’d have a hard time replacing many of the deportees.
How about we do better and say trying to steel man the claim and then refute? Of course one has to understand the claims before they can steelman the argument.
Ha.
What delectable naivete.
I came to a similar conclusion, what happened in the 90s and early 2000s is since the govs had restricted freedom in the physical/real world a lot of young people took refuge in the Internet.
It became harder for an individual to build his own house or start a business, but you could make a website pretty much free from regulations and impediments.
But governments and a lot of interested parties slowly invested the Internet and now we are complaining it sucks. The common Internet and web suck anyway now because it is full of bots, AI generated content, hard to search and you need to prove you are a human every 5 minutes.
We need to create new networks and places just because it is fun and it will take some time for the govs to follow us there: freenet, yggdrasil, alfis, gemini, reticulum, B.A.T.M.A.N, etc.
Censorship is state/company mandated retraction or blockage of certain information. Copyright is state/company mandated blocking of certain forms of expression.
Copyright permits you to publish any idea you so desire, only that you don't plagiarize someone else while doing so. (Which is always possible, as the fair-use doctrine is a thing)
Copyright law is absolutely a justification of and mechanism for censorship.
It may arguably be socially beneficial censorship, but then that's what is claimed by proponents of every basis and means of censorship.
Removal of content due to copyrights is censorship, you are being denied to spread or consume certain content. It's not different than defining that some content is protected with "national security" or however else you define it and then prevent the spread and consumption of it. Same thing, different excuse.
You can use placeholders to see it more clearly, i.e. "This content is X therefore in accordance to the law needs to be removed, failure to do so may lead to prosecution and penalties of Y"
You can replace X with anything, including "copyrighted material", "support for Hamas terrorism", "hate speech", "defamation of our glorious leader","communist propaganda", "capitalist propaganda", "self harm".
If I steal an object, and the government takes that object away from me, would you call that government action "theft"?
I think censorship is generally already considered to be any suppression of speech/communication/information. There are forms of censorship that many consider to be fine/justified, like taking down libel or removing inappropriate language in songs played on the radio, but it'd still conventionally be considered "censored".
The threat of 10 years in prison under the DMCA for providing information that lets people jailbreak/repair/reverse-engineer their own devices definitely fits the bill of censorship to me.
> If I steal an object, and the government takes that object away from me, would you call that government action "theft"?
If you see some state/company secret that you weren't supposed to, and the government prevents you communicating about it, I'd say that's a form of censorship. I don't think it can be analogized to stealing an object in a meaningful way.
Indeed, but that's not really what we are talking about with piracy, is it? State secrets and copyrighted material are clearly different things.
I don't want to go into the copyright discussion. The only thing I will tell you is this and I won't follow up: Piracy is not theft, it's something else and removal of content to elevate the claimed harm is still censorship. Other censorship types all claim greater good too, the "good guys" in this digital world are not just the copyright lawyers.
I am not saying this from anti-copyright perspective, I'm not anti-copyright although I have issues with it and IMHO needs a reform.
Good faith dialogue is not possible under these self-imposed constraints.
The nub of the issue though is not really if something is theft on a legal definitional level. Laws themselves are extremely rarely enacted by direct decisions of those who are commanded to follow them. so they don't reflect what the vast majority of people would consider moral, which often include reciprocity, fairness, and staying beneficial to the society as a whole rather than benefit a tiny minority with highly detrimental consequences for the rest of people.
Then I think it's on you to provide an alternative definition to the one in the dictionary:
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/censorship
I'm very curious as to what you think the word means.
The most relevant definition, which is actually under "censor (verb)", I reproduce here:
> to examine in order to suppress (see suppress sense 2) or delete anything considered objectionable
Piracy is not typically considered bad due to being "objectionable", it is considered bad because many people/societies consider it equivalent to theft. You can obviously stretch the definition of objectionable to mean that, but it is on you to demonstrate that is a reasonable stretch. Blocking out sex scenes from a movie and removing pirated materials are obviously different actions, and this definition clearly refers to the former.
Calling people from other countries "savages from primitive cultures" is textbook hardcore racism.
Would you like people who think raping 12-year-olds is fine because their prophet did it, living in your neighborhood, and going from 10% to 90% of the local population?
Some cultures are just better than others. Some are downright evil.
People need to obey laws, not whatever morals you want to pick and choose for others to accept.
Also when someone says you are repeating white nationalist talking points verbatim, your response should be 'I didn't realize that', not 'sign me up'.
The West is (mostly) a "high-trust society". We obey laws and morals because we want to, because it's the right thing to do. Just think about it, how easy would it be to steal a lemon at self-checkout, or bump a car in a parking lot?! It's almost impossible to enforce the law on everybody.
Moving from a low-trust society to a high-trust society is almost impossible, and requires tremendous effort and extreme authoritarian measures (e.g. ubiquitous video surveillance (China) or military crime crack-down with mass imprisonment (El Salvador)). Our best bet is to avoid losing a high-trust society in the first place.
On top of that, obviously "law" and "enforcement" is just downstream of "culture". See e.g. San Francisco (where law isn't enforced) or statistics on black vs white jurists (blacks vote in line with race, not "for justice"). Or Muslim rapes in the UK (the victims went to the police.. who also raped them!)
So, yeah, I don't want people who believe that stealing, fraud or rape is normal, living near me.
Everything you put here could be a cut and paste from comments on white nationalist and neo nazi forums.
It's tough to imagine what this might look like. I suspect it's too late.
Device attestation is becoming more prevalent, and required for increasingly more functionality. Passkeys are breathing down our necks.
Alternate protocols can only exist if the corporate and governmental powers look the other way. We have Signal and VPNs and BitTorrent and tor, but for how long?
And moreover, does it even matter what protocols we want to use, if most of us use devices that are fully controlled by the tech giants who want to do the censorship?
Ideally you would have good government involvement to enforce traffic neutrality, but that's out the door. I'm sure this has been talked to death but ground level P2P infrastructure is what I would be rooting for.
Fast forward to today, Americans are pushing you for self censorship through force and denial(if you don’t speak in line with the admin, you will have hard time if you want to travel to US) an Europeans find all kind of other ways.
Tough new world order. I used to be advocating for resolution through legal means, but now I inclined to believe that the solution must be technological because everybody wants security and control. Nobody wants loose ends. Everyone is terrified of some group of people will do something to them, freedom is out of fashion and those claiming otherwise want freedom for themselves only. The guy who says want to make humans interplanetary species is posing with people detained for traveling on the planet without permission. Just forget about it.
So this website itself is about censorship, therefore people interested in this shouldn’t be using websites. New tools are needed, the mainstream will be controlled the way the local hegemony sees it fit.