4 ms·
Before the internet, if I wrote a letter to the editor of a magazine or comic book, the editor obviously made the decision whether to publish my letter or not.
by magpi3 5y ago
Before the internet, if I wrote a letter to the editor of a magazine or comic book, the editor obviously made the decision whether to publish my letter or not. Was this censorship? No, of course not. And no one complained about it. It wasn't my magazine after all.
Of course, I could just start my own magazine if I want to publish my own content, but that would obviously be ridiculously cost prohibitive. And this was the norm for magazines, radio, TV. There was always strong editorial control by corporations.
Boom comes the internet, and all of that goes away. As long as you can convince your web host to host you, you can say what you like.
But now podcasts and content creators are making deals with big corporations again, and those corporations have the right to make the same decisions the magazine editors did. It's not censorship. It's how things have always been.
You can always build your own website, and the government will not interfere. There is your freedom of speech. Your web host might, but even that hasn't been an obstacle for extreme left/right wing sites, at least not so far. Worse comes to worse you can seed your content on bittorrent.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- docmars 5y ago> Worse comes to worse you can seed your content on bittorrent. At the expense of huge barriers of entry for people to discover that content, or even care bothering with the hoops you would have to jump through to find something you're interested in, to the less tech savvy. This is partly why the removal of content after its publication due to political pressure and threats of coercion is fundamentally the problem that needs to be addressed. Whether it's semantically "censorship" or not is debatable, but the ill effects it has on society are irrefutable, by communicating: 1. these views need to be taken down. 2. these views need to be silenced. 3. the consumers of this information are "domestic terrorists" or "completely stupid", as readily communicated by major pundits on the Left, and at times, by our own leaders (Biden, Trudeau). 4. the 100,000+ global outspoken doctors who agree with these controversial views are fringe, misguided, deserving of losing their licenses, etc. ... All 4 reek of condescension and political bias in a way that damages and divides society to the extent that massive psychological harm is inflicted on millions of people seeking good information who want to be left alone, and risks enforcing a single stream of thought where panels of experts or public dialogue are discouraged. That should alarm anyone who trusts the scientific method as a means to find answers and provide honest insight into something as imperative as a pandemic.