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Sometimes I'm a bit confused by the discourse around #SocialMedia in the West. On the one hand they rail against censorship and decry countries like China who practice it. On the other hand, they demand for moderation, which, well, means censorship of certain content. (It's just a nicer way of saying it lol.)
I've come to believe that unbridled "freedom" on social media is damaging and "censorship" is a necessary evil. This is based on my experience as a Malaysian used to "cybertroopers" who are used to sway public opinion in Malaysia, sometimes dangerously. In our last election, teenagers were recruited as cybertroopers to incite people to attack minorities after the election. The platform refused to take down the content for weeks. There was a lot of fear that racial riots would happen.
Even in China, where there's lots of censorship, social media like Weibo is rife with terrible content that spread rumours, destroy people's lives and cause violence. What I'm saying is, I feel that social media is tearing apart society's fabric in some way, and there's still no good solution to this.
@liztai Censorship is suppression of political (or wrongfully politicized) information or opinions that are deemed a threat to the state, by the state or state affiliated actors.
Moderation is suppression of opinions that are deemed harmful to the participants/community.
@liztai Fascism tries to equate them by its take on the relationship between the state and the ingroup and outgroups. But that's an artifact of fascism not inherent.
Of course fascists would try to equate the two because it's how they've successfully been platformed for ages.
Due to how bungled up the design & architecture of the Internet works, that is tantamount to censorship because there remains no way to self-publish (online samizdat requires the routing infrastructure not to discriminate). It becomes not a community moderation matter, but active silencing even away from external communities (especially in places with ISP monopolies, which sometimes try to prevent hosting *any* website).
The issue is rather specific to clearnet routing.
VPS on the other hand… they are hosters and hold much more responsibilities, makes sense for them to show the door to customers at their discretion.
A "you might be able to publish by yourself in a few decades or if you move" is far too long or impractical.
> Yeah, when it comes to ISPs I think routing should be neutral, exception being for precise DDoS mitigations
Indeed.
> and legal requirements
I'd disagree. I prefer full application of the “I write myself, edit myself, censor myself, publish myself, distribute myself, go to jail for it myself” samizdat pattern.
Illegal data should still not be interfered with by the ISPs. That is not and should not be their remit. Dumb pipes all the way.
It's a hard question though but pretty sure I'd prefer to have stuff blocked in some countries (where then actual people can use Tor, VPNs, mirrors, …) than those countries trying to get people in other countries jailed.
At least it quite reminds me of the shit Hollywood pulled against ThePirateBay main ~members.
It's a feature, not a flaw.
> It's a hard question though but pretty sure I'd prefer to have stuff blocked in some countries (where then actual people can use Tor, VPNs, mirrors, …)
China, Germany, Russia and USA have varying levels of ability to completely break the anonymity of Tor and VPNs due to a mix of Sybil attacks and global observer status.
Other anonymization networks are under attack in some of those too (I recall reading something about China pulling shenanigans with local I2P).
> than those countries trying to get people in other countries jailed.
The thing is that they generally should just answer the others with "lolno" on the requests. Ideally /literally/ in those exact terms, but I'll take the bureaucratese equivalent.