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Given that 99% of the removed comments were legal, it doesn't seem like it's the governments that are restricting what people are seeing.
by technobach 2y ago
Given that 99% of the removed comments were legal, it doesn't seem like it's the governments that are restricting what people are seeing.
- Georgelemental 2y agoSomething doesn't have to be "officially" illegal for laws to suppress it. If the law gives no penalty for a false-positive block, but very high penalties for any false-negative failure to censor, then companies will be incentivized to err on the side of censoring legal speech.
- recursivecaveat 2y agoI don't disagree about the risk of chilling effects, but the methodology of this report is so embarrassingly, deceptively bad that I don't think any conclusion can be drawn from it. They basically snapshot a comment section, then return repeatedly, and enumerate the comments that disappeared. Without any insight into who (ie the platform, the poster, or the channel/page owner) removed the comment and why, this is like performing a legal analysis of the leaves that disappeared from lawns in autumn.
- raxxorraxor 2y agoIt has the same quality of any research or report that suggest there to be negative effects if people do see such content. And if in doubt, content removal should be done defensively.
- technobach 2y agoYes, that's the primary complaint of the article, but the actual report just doesn't back that up. There's no mention of false positives or negatives. Probably because, as the report notes, it doesn't know who removed the comment, let alone what the rationale was. So it could be that they are attempting to comply with broad and vague laws, or they could just be against hosting MLP memes.