Censorship is not by defintion done by the government. It's perfectly correct to say "GitHub is censoring X on their platform".

Now censorship by the government is a much worse act, because you can't just go become a citizen of another country, but it's still censorship if a compay does it.

OK, we seem to have a problem with definitions.

I use definition of "censorship" that people use when they think that "censorship is bad". Because this definition implies that this kind of censorship affects everyone and they can't do anything about it.

The other definition of censorship, that also includes private companies and people restricting some materials in their own domain can also be used — that seems to be what you have in mind. But this censorship, when you think about it, is almost always quite OK. Which contradicts the inherent negative connotations that people perceive when they hear the word "censorship".

So, for the sake of using words with definitions that don't contradict their cultural perceptions, I would stick the first definition.

Eh, seems to me there are lots of situations where censorship by private companies is a problem.

For example, if Chinese banks / communication companies / whatever refuse to do business with human rights groups, that's a bad thing even if the companies acted without being explicitly ordered to by the government.

And just because newspapers and TV stations are privately owned, doesn't mean it's a good thing if they all decide not to publish negative stories about Qatar/HSBC/whatever due to a profitable advertising deal. Such self-censorship, if it happened widely, would be deleterious to the independent checks and balances our democracy relies on.

Now, I agree with you that it's not censorship if Joe's Childrens Books declines to publish my manuscript "Best Of 4Chan Shock Images And Racist Jokes" - but I don't think it makes sense to ignore censorship by private companies all together, as sometimes such censorship can be deeply problematic.

I'm sorry, you must have misunderstood my point. I'm not saying that what these companies are doing is OK. I'm actually quite appalled by Github's behaviour in OP.

I'm just saying that we should use definitions correctly, and "censorship" doesn't work here.

I agree that it's not bad for them to not publish it [edit: I mean, not bad for the kids books publisher to not publish the 4 Chan book of shock images and racist jokes] (probably good actually), but does that mean it isn't censorship?

It seems like the only things which might be why it isn't "censorship" would be because either we like it (or it is objectively good by some reasoning) (which would be a terrible definition of censorship), or because there are sufficiently many comparable other options.

So, it seems that either some censorship is good, or whether something is censorship depends on what the other options for publication are?

I guess that conclusion (that or statement) is reasonable?

Thoughts?

ok, so,

whoever downvoted this, that is entirely within your rights and all. I'm just a bit confused. This comment of mine seemed entirely inoffensive, so I'm not sure why it has been downvoted three times.

When I ended it with "Thoughts?" I meant to be inviting arguments against the line of reasoning that I proposed. I thought I was being fairly open minded about it.

If it is because I was allowing for the possibility of some censorship being good, know that I was not claiming that some censorship was good. I just was choosing to not immediately reject that possibility when looking for how best to define censorship. I was not arguing in favor of censorship.

I was hoping for a discussion to try to find reasons why some definitions of the word "censorship" would be better than others.

I really don't understand why my post would be sufficiently objectionable for 3 people to downvote it. I don't mean that they were incorrect to do so, their/your reasons could have been made perfect sense. I'm just saying that I don't understand what the reasons were, and I would appreciate understanding what they were or might have been (so, if you are only providing your best guess for why someone else might have, I would appreciate that also)

Let's take this a step furher, for arguments sake.

Say blogger.com or wordpress.com would delete any mention of police violence because, well, that offensive to many people. Is that censorship? If not, what should I call it?

Censorship does not require an act of Congress. Private entities are perfectly capable of censorship. How else could the term "self-censorship" have any semantic value?

Self-censorship only has value when people fear retribution by government.

"I won't use the word retard in my project hosted on github because github's TOS prevents it" is not self-censorship in any meaningful sense of the word. (Just as "Github doesn't let me spam all these users" is not Github censoring people.) Nothing is stopping you from hosting the repo in a wide number of other places.

"I won't insult my employer in this or that nation, because I risk a jail term" is self censorship.

This is nonsense. Self-censorship occurs whenever somebody censors himself. In polite conversation we might call it discretion (or valor). In a fiduciary or confidential relationship, we might call it adherence to the duty of confidentiality. In a contractual relationship, we would call it nondisclosure. In employment, on one hand we might call it professionalism—or self censorship on the other—depending on the context.

Regardless, the term "self-censorship" is not germane to or inherent in only citizen-government interactions.

People self-censor constantly on social media. You're not worried about the government taking a tweet out of context and driving your reputation into the ground, the mob of internet idiots has that covered. Fear of internet mobs causes people to censor themselves, and a definition of "censorship" that doesn't cover uses like that is not a particularly useful one.

Self-censorship as a term has value whenever people fear losing something that is important to them. With governments it might be their their career chances, personal freedom or even their life. With companies it might be your online identity, your data, your social contacts. Imagine being removed from Facebook/Google/Twitter/[your social network of choice] for writing the wrong post/email. While it is certainly orders of magnitude less threatening than being tortured by the secret police, it is still a deterrent.