4 ms·

> No matter how good the technology, it can eventually be censored if the law is strong enough. I won't repeat sibling commenters here giving examples of where

> No matter how good the technology, it can eventually be censored if the law is strong enough. I won't repeat sibling commenters here giving examples of where this is not true (US encryption mainly). I'm wondering if you have any examples of where it is true. What has been censored effectively? As far as I've been aware, legal censorship has never worked. "Cultural censorship" (a.k.a. "taboo") can be quite effective, but I'm not aware of any examples where the law has been in any way effective at all in this area. > you can see with Parler’s experience (ignoring political affiliation) that once a large group of people are organized against you, it’s simply in feasible to rebuild decades of infrastructure in isolation. There's two issues with this. Firstly, you're conflating "a large group of people", with "the law": these are not the same thing. Far from it. Secondly, Parler is not exactly a shining example of technical competency. I wouldn't hold them up as "the example" of technology -vs- legal censorship purely because there are much stronger/actually competent representatives of the technological side out there that would fair far better than Parler. It's also notable that many of the learned "techie" individuals who might rally to defend some other technology were it under siege from powerful state & corporate censorship, in this case actually rallied against Parler. So Parler were up against far more than just the forces of legal censorship.

simias 6y ago
Squashing something completely is extremely difficult, but you can make it inconvenient and risky enough that most people won't bother. See the Chinese internet for instance. There's often this fallacy when discussing governmental action that if it's not 100% effective it's useless. It's of course not true.
_jal 6y ago
Depends on what exactly you mean by 'censored'. You don't need to suppress every mention of something to have an effect. The most recent US example I can think of is that the Trump administration has been reasonably successful in suppressing hospital C19 images: https://theintercept.com/2020/12/27/covid-photography-hospitals/ https://theintercept.com/2020/12/27/covid-photography-hospit... But every administration in living memory (and probably without that qualifier, too) has suppressed something. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_the_United_State...
kofejnik 6y ago
> As far as I've been aware, legal censorship has never worked. "Cultural censorship" (a.k.a. "taboo") can be quite effective, but I'm not aware of any examples where the law has been in any way effective at all in this area. Sorry, but this is extremely naive. Russia routinely jails people for merely liking (not to mention, reposting) improper things on social media.
myWindoonn 6y ago
Sibling comments are being ignorant. The most famous born secret in the USA is how to make breeder reactors and nuclear weaponry; even if somebody independently rediscovers it, the government will censor them. But, that said, our profession has never attempted a revolution where we explicitly try to breach this born secret. It's not clear whether we'd succeed, and the victory cup is literally nuclear waste, so it's not exactly desirable either.
- zozbot234 6y ago
  To be fair, breeder reactors are used to recycle nuclear waste. The secrecy around them is due to proliferation concerns.
obblekk 6y ago
I agree that it’s likely impossible to completely sensor information. What is much more feasible is to add so much friction/risk to spreading it, that it defacto is unavailable to 99% of people. I would argue that legalizing marijuana massively increased consumption (because so much friction and risk went away), legalizing encryption massively increased adoption on the internet (compared to a world where it was formally illegal and ISPs were used to enforce mandatory cleartext), bans on medical drugs without prescription have reduced how much people develop experimental drugs, bans on child porn have massively reduced number of people ever exposed to it, etc. I think most information bans can be enforced with such high effectiveness that it becomes difficult to consider a society in which that weren’t the case. Much of “regulatory reform” is actually about legalizing and normalizing behavior/information that was always doable but banned. Rarely does the government invent a new type of behavior (patent law is a good example of that).
endominus 6y ago
> What has been censored effectively? >As far as I've been aware, legal censorship has never worked. If you hold "worked" to the impossible standard of "completely eradicated its target" then no, just as basically no policy or initiative has ever "worked." Hell, polio still exists![0] By the much more reasonable standard of "suppressed the dissemination and popularization of its target" then there are a plethora of examples: - Libel and slander laws successfully limit outright lies reported by the media. - Various governments censor and punish criticism of themselves or specific officials. - Copyright law successfully limits propagation of media. - Certain content - typically sexual or graphically violent - cannot legally be broadcast. - You are legally barred from lying about, for example, the ingredients of a product you produce or its efficacy. - State secrets are heavily censored, and those who circumvent this censorship are heavily punished. Not to mention individual cases of censorship, such as whether a man may publish his own autobiography.[1] That particular case was eventually decided in his favor, but there was no guarantee of that. [0] https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/10/30/929080692/the-campaign-to-wipe-out-polio-was-going-really-well-until-it-wasnt https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/10/30/9290806... [1] https://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/may/20/concert-pianist-james-rhodes-wins-right-to-publish-autobiography https://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/may/20/concert-pianis...
dash2 6y ago
Not by censorship alone, of course, but here's J. S. Mill: "But, indeed, the dictum that truth always triumphs over persecution, is one of those pleasant falsehoods which men repeat after one another till they pass into commonplaces, but which all experience refutes. History teems with instances of truth put down by persecution. If not suppressed for ever, it may be thrown back for centuries. To speak only of religious opinions: the Reformation broke out at least twenty times before Luther, and was put down. Arnold of Brescia was put down. Fra Dolcino was put down. Savonarola was put down. The Albigeois were put down. The Vaudois were put down. The Lollards were put down. The Hussites were put down."

simias 6y ago

Squashing something completely is extremely difficult, but you can make it inconvenient and risky enough that most people won't bother. See the Chinese internet for instance. There's often this fallacy when discussing governmental action that if it's not 100% effective it's useless. It's of course not true.

_jal 6y ago

Depends on what exactly you mean by 'censored'. You don't need to suppress every mention of something to have an effect. The most recent US example I can think of is that the Trump administration has been reasonably successful in suppressing hospital C19 images: https://theintercept.com/2020/12/27/covid-photography-hospitals/ https://theintercept.com/2020/12/27/covid-photography-hospit... But every administration in living memory (and probably without that qualifier, too) has suppressed something. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_the_United_State...

kofejnik 6y ago

> As far as I've been aware, legal censorship has never worked. "Cultural censorship" (a.k.a. "taboo") can be quite effective, but I'm not aware of any examples where the law has been in any way effective at all in this area. Sorry, but this is extremely naive. Russia routinely jails people for merely liking (not to mention, reposting) improper things on social media.

myWindoonn 6y ago

Sibling comments are being ignorant. The most famous born secret in the USA is how to make breeder reactors and nuclear weaponry; even if somebody independently rediscovers it, the government will censor them. But, that said, our profession has never attempted a revolution where we explicitly try to breach this born secret. It's not clear whether we'd succeed, and the victory cup is literally nuclear waste, so it's not exactly desirable either.

zozbot234 6y ago
To be fair, breeder reactors are used to recycle nuclear waste. The secrecy around them is due to proliferation concerns.

obblekk 6y ago

I agree that it’s likely impossible to completely sensor information. What is much more feasible is to add so much friction/risk to spreading it, that it defacto is unavailable to 99% of people. I would argue that legalizing marijuana massively increased consumption (because so much friction and risk went away), legalizing encryption massively increased adoption on the internet (compared to a world where it was formally illegal and ISPs were used to enforce mandatory cleartext), bans on medical drugs without prescription have reduced how much people develop experimental drugs, bans on child porn have massively reduced number of people ever exposed to it, etc. I think most information bans can be enforced with such high effectiveness that it becomes difficult to consider a society in which that weren’t the case. Much of “regulatory reform” is actually about legalizing and normalizing behavior/information that was always doable but banned. Rarely does the government invent a new type of behavior (patent law is a good example of that).

endominus 6y ago

> What has been censored effectively? >As far as I've been aware, legal censorship has never worked. If you hold "worked" to the impossible standard of "completely eradicated its target" then no, just as basically no policy or initiative has ever "worked." Hell, polio still exists![0] By the much more reasonable standard of "suppressed the dissemination and popularization of its target" then there are a plethora of examples: - Libel and slander laws successfully limit outright lies reported by the media. - Various governments censor and punish criticism of themselves or specific officials. - Copyright law successfully limits propagation of media. - Certain content - typically sexual or graphically violent - cannot legally be broadcast. - You are legally barred from lying about, for example, the ingredients of a product you produce or its efficacy. - State secrets are heavily censored, and those who circumvent this censorship are heavily punished. Not to mention individual cases of censorship, such as whether a man may publish his own autobiography.[1] That particular case was eventually decided in his favor, but there was no guarantee of that. [0] https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/10/30/929080692/the-campaign-to-wipe-out-polio-was-going-really-well-until-it-wasnt https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/10/30/9290806... [1] https://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/may/20/concert-pianist-james-rhodes-wins-right-to-publish-autobiography https://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/may/20/concert-pianis...

dash2 6y ago

Not by censorship alone, of course, but here's J. S. Mill: "But, indeed, the dictum that truth always triumphs over persecution, is one of those pleasant falsehoods which men repeat after one another till they pass into commonplaces, but which all experience refutes. History teems with instances of truth put down by persecution. If not suppressed for ever, it may be thrown back for centuries. To speak only of religious opinions: the Reformation broke out at least twenty times before Luther, and was put down. Arnold of Brescia was put down. Fra Dolcino was put down. Savonarola was put down. The Albigeois were put down. The Vaudois were put down. The Lollards were put down. The Hussites were put down."