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That's not censorship, either in theory or in practice. "In theory" should be pretty obvious. "In practice" might require some explanation, because there seems
by fouric 5y ago
That's not censorship, either in theory or in practice.
"In theory" should be pretty obvious. "In practice" might require some explanation, because there seems to be a meme going around about trying to have another discussion with a person in a room where there are a bunch of people screaming at you to drown out your words. While that might be considered censorship in that exact scenario, that effect does not translate over into the internet - you simply block noisy sources on whatever platform you're on and keep reading the content that you're interested in. For instance, even though Matrix and Mastodon are federated, you can block users (and even entire servers) from either local visibility or even federation with your particular instance.
Similarly, nobody says that highly biased sites like the Verge, Vox, and the NYT are "censoring" opposing viewpoints because when you Google an issue all of the top results are from those sites with the same political bent - you can still craft Google queries that exclude those sites, one at a time.
- Y_Y 5y agoYou make a good argument. To me it still feels like you can "effectively" censor something by flooding its channel with crap. Maybe there is a technical way to filter away the the "noise", but it's unlikely that the audience will bother. If you DNS-block a site is that still not censorship, because you can still reach the site by IP (if you can find it out)? I'm genuinely asking here, I think this is an interesting case and I'm not able to make my mind up.