Facebook's censoring of #Revolution via their claims of moral superiority should frighten the shit out of every free person on earth. While we still have it reasonably good in America, their willingness to suppress speech in good times doesn't bode well for people who will be oppressed during bad times.

The first amendment made it clear that not even the government had the authority to use their vast moral authority, as they exercise through the legal system, to prevent people from speaking and organizing.

But #BigTech has a nuclear option on the speech on the web's most visible ecosystem, social media, through purely market forces and are doing the bidding of a single political party, exclusively. It's not just horrifying that they amassed so much unchecked power, but since 2016 they're actively using and abusing it to suppress legitimate political speech in every nook and cranny they control.

It absolutely can be, and it's absolutely something to watch out for, but I'm not sure that it is government censorship in this case. YouTube is choosing who to ask ostensibly due to their expertise, not because of government threats or enforcement.

That said, a few years ago one of things that kicked off the change from being relatively hands-off to more active content censorship by all of these platforms was being dragged before Congress and lectured and threatened that, if they didn't start voluntarily censoring content, the government would force them to. Those government threats, though they lacked immediate legal force, really do constitute government censorship. So there's an argument to be made that this whole new world of "voluntary" censorship by platform providers really is at its core government censorship.

Is there a law? Or are the platforms in question voluntarily using guidelines as guidance? Are platforms punished in the courts for failing to follow guidelines or implement moderation? As far as I know, the answers to the above are a resounding "no," and it follows that this isn't state censorship. It's the freedom of association, and freedom of speech, exercised by corporation-persons.

Always amuses me when it slowly dawns on people just how much power a government can exert if it wants to. Facebook, and most importantly it's advertisers, simply cannot afford to piss off countries. It is a battle that is not in their financial interest. Corporations will not stand up for your rights. You want to fight the power you'll have to become tank man yourself.

Every social group eventually uses the weapon of censorship. It's not just government...even without a proper institutional structure , censorship will emerge as a thing that a social group does endogeneously.

Like just scrolling back and looking at my last 10 posts on HN , I had to delete them after a few minutes in order to cut my losses because they were being heavily downvoted and once you are in negative territory nobody can see your posts anymore.

People just crave and love being surrounded by people who see things the same way as they do, so after a person has been burned a bunch of times, they'd start stepping outside themselves and acting on what they think will sell well socially among the community.

Pretty soon everybody starts doing this and you'll soon have a community full of people who are worthy of an actor studio interview.

Hollywood, DC, San Francisco and the Valley are prime examples of this

Related: Under India's new IT Rules, govt determines (of-course, arbitrarily) what is anti-national and intermediaries like Twitter and Facebook have to comply with deletion requests for such content.

Govt is also asking WhatsApp, Signal and other messaging platforms to store information about the "originator" of message (which defies the concept of encryption).

I'm on record railing against the collective power of BigTech, in particular some of their leaders' public statements about using their power to put the thumb on the scale since the 2016 election.

However, here I'm not convinced there's a huge issue. As I understand it the videos are still available on YouTube, but the creators are no longer able to generate revenue from them (or other videos on their channel). I'm not convinced YouTube owes anyone the ability to generate revenue from videos hosted (for free) on their platform.

I would expect many advertisers would not want to be associated with "fringe" theories; as the money YouTube pays creators is funded by advertising revenue, this makes demonetizing anything that strays too far from socially acceptable norms the sensible thing for YouTube to do IMO.

Another example of state censorship via private monopolies was AOC calling for the Apple and Google app stores to ban Parler following the Jan 6 capitol riot. If a sitting member of the government pressures private organizations to censor others, it should be considered a violation of the first amendment. Leaving aside the technicalities of law, it is unethical and immoral even otherwise and completely in conflict with American and classically liberal values.

Glenn Greenwald wrote a great article about this titled “How Silicon Valley, in a Show of Monopolistic Force, Destroyed Parler” https://greenwald.substack.com/p/how-silicon-valley-in-a-sho...

People shake their heads and wonder how the Catholic church could have been so backwards, dogmatic, and ignorant as to jail Copernicus. Yet, here we are.

"At the time, it was scarier to be associated with Trump and to become a tool for racists, so people didn't want to publicly call for an investigation into lab origins."

https://thehill.com/changing-america/well-being/prevention-c...

Censoring commentary on scientific data because it doesn't fit with the a political narrative is anti-science.

The rationale that well intentioned speech should be censored because may be used by people to spread misinformation in a way the speaker never intended is a horrible standard to uphold.

When scientists openly and freely admit to self censorship for political reasons, it erodes the credibility of scientists.

But their videos are still online, they just can't make ad money from them?

Is it illegal for governments to start their own social network? I imagine it could be a lot of fun. Have a section for the block, the city, the region, and one for the country. Create contact lists, market places, business and personal pages for each? Use the same laws we already have for public space? Am I missing something? Are toll roads the future?

The thing that really bothers me about Weinstein's approach is that, while he and his wife are scientists, they're exceedingly quick to assert their hunches as scientific fact. They wear their scientist labels on their sleeves but their thinking is far more ideological. In a recent podcast about fluoridation in tap water, they were talking about how they avoid iodized salt, because iodine is a reactive chemical and you don't want to OD on it. Ludicrous. You'd sooner die from the sheer quantity of salt you'd have to ingest before the iodine even starts to become a problem.

Yes. I have been a victim of this when in 5 August 2019 they snapped all internet and even telephone and almost 8 months long curfew /shutdown to prevent me from voicing my anger.

The often used term was "misuse" in "misuse of social media" which meant they were watching every Facebook post and tweet and people were arrested for it.

Guidelines here is an euphemism for orders. The pro-censorship faction in the gov isn't strong enough yet to openly censor media, but it's strong enough to coerce Twitter and the like with the passive-aggressive "guidelines".

Worse. Collusion and election inference.

A corporation deciding not to run ads on videos of a crank promoting snake oil is not a First Amendment issue. It is barely even a censorship issue in the broadest sense of the term. Very sad to see Taibbi reduced to this kind of totally empty hysteria.

The amount of gray posts in censorship threads always cracks me up.

Please go on.

Now that the facility of the digital tooling is more granular and refined, and theres no shortage of weak-minded grunts that are powertrippin to do what theyre told, by the telepath aliens in human disguise or transdimensionals with the ability to manipulate all digital processes or the government, as zealous intern lords over the online conversation or jannies of pre-crime trends, this is all now easier to implement when it will matter the most to our future: silencing anti-alien dissent after "arrival."

The Roswell trojan horse and social infiltration to pressure the farce of 2020, is paying off. Abductees/contactees with negative experiences of the 40+ species will be flagged as "agents of "disinformation" and limited for "preemption of public criticism."

https://reclaimthenet.org/world-economic-forum-makes-censors...

https://fair.org/home/us-censorship-is-increasingly-official...

https://archive.vn/WVDGU

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/a-case-of-intellectual-capture...

Betteridge's Law of Headlines points to "no".

It's not state censorship. There is no law driving these takedowns. It's the problem you get when one company has monopolized video.

But serving videos for free isn't financially sustainable without advertising and network effects. So you're stuck with YouTube or some regional equivalent whether you like it or not.

That was an odd summary of the issue at the end. Taibbi finishes by saying this is a problem because it potentially allows corporations to influence state institutions via regulatory capture, which in turn would result in dictating what can be said on sites like YouTube that use, e.g., CDC guidance to decide what is acceptable speech on their platform.

That seems tremendously convoluted to me. Regulatory capture is a problem, but it's a separate issue. Government agencies directing private censors would be a big problem. But private companies influencing other private companies' moderation guidelines indirectly like this, hoping the target company doesn't notice - really?