5 ms·

Traditionally in the west, censorship was through copyright rights. It wasn’t considered censorship if you do it for money and business. Fast forward to today,

• FirmwareBurner 1y ago
  What does the political situation in America have to do with the topic of German Internet censorship? The current US administration even called out the EU countries for excessive censorship so they have nothing to do with this. Why can't people stay on topic without bringing Trump in the discussion every 5 minutes?
• squigz 1y ago
  > freedom is out of fashion and those claiming otherwise want freedom for themselves only. What a fun way to completely invalidate anyone who doesn't agree with you that "freedom is out of fashion"!
  • dingdingdang 1y ago
    Yes, pre-empt the opposition Rumsfeld style and you ain't gotta worry about anyone taking that position any time soon #chat-with-ai
• Thorrez 1y ago
  >Traditionally in the west censorship was through copyright rights. It wasn’t considered censorship if you do it for money and business. To me, those 2 sentences contradict each other. Doing it through copyright rights, and doing it for money and business sound pretty much the same to me. But you're saying that traditionally one wasn't considered censorship, but the other was considered censorship.
  • lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 1y ago
    They are saying that it is censorship, it just largely wasn't (and isn't) considered such.
  • deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
• mtsr 1y ago
  Interesting point. There’s wide acceptance of commercial censorship, but censorship for the common good (rightfully) feels like a slippery slope. But are they actually so different? Couldn’t the latter be done in a way just as purposeful? Or does it always lead to loss of freedom disproportional to its goals?
  • buran77 1y ago
    What about all the propaganda sites you like? Would you ban all propaganda? Russian propaganda? Propaganda from countries engaged in illegal wars? How many social media or news sites survive? Heck, how many sites that allow comments and user interaction survive? Yours is the "think of the children" argument, makes you feel warm and fuzzy when it aligns with your interests but you won't have a leg to stand on by the time it's used against you. Banning is just sweeping some of the trash under the carpet. The ones wielding the ban hammer don't care that most of the trash is still out in the open (social media?), they just need to open the door to arbitrary banning. The ones applauding the ban hammer are lacking the same critical thing that would otherwise handle propaganda and misinformation very well: education. If you want your child to not smoke you don't just hide the cigarette pack on a higher shelf, you teach them what smoking is and does. Meanwhile all the RT type crap is flooding social media under thousands of names. But that's fine as long as enough rubes are tricked into thinking banning one site did anything to solve the propaganda issue.
    • squigz 1y ago
      > If you want your child to not smoke you don't just hide the cigarette pack in a higher shelf, you teach them what smoking is and does. > just So... you do both?
      • johnisgood 1y ago
        Y'all never made homeless people walk into the tobacco store to get cigs for you when you were kids? Or anyone who would do it for a quick buck.
• derelicta 1y ago
  There is no technological solution. Only a political one. And I tell you already: voting is useless.
  • _9ptr 1y ago
    How can you say that. Look at Trump.
    • cowboylowrez 1y ago
      I think this "derelicta" is actually advocating for Trumps position here so I bet "derelicta" has already had a look at Trump lol
      • derelicta 1y ago
        I am not. I just don't see a difference between Trump and Biden. Or Merz and Scholz. Or Lepen and Macron. All these people serve Capital, and you'd be very wrong to believe I stand with capitalists.
  • JKCalhoun 1y ago
    > voting is useless That also happens to be what the people in power would like you to believe.
  • acdha 1y ago
    > And I tell you already: voting is useless. If a low six figure number of people in a handful of states had voted last fall, none of the lawlessness that we’ve seen this year would have happened. The people telling you that voting is useless are enjoying the fruits of suckers believing them.
    • Atreiden 1y ago
      > If a low six figure number of people in a handful of states The key part being "in a handful of states". There are many states in the country in which your vote is all but meaningless at the federal level. The Electoral College + relentless Gerrymandering that has been done over the past decades ensures that only a small fraction of eligible voters can cast meaningful votes. Makes it much easier to target and propagadandize those smaller groups. We saw it play out with Cambridge Analytica, but there hasn't been another "scandal" of that sort because it's just established practice now. Everyone has their hand in the pot doing the same thing, it's all above belt. You should still vote, because you can enact change at the local + state levels, but the levers of federal power have been taken from the people.
• drfridg 1y ago
  I’m in the U.S. and am not aligned with what’s happening to freedom. Taking a step back, I support the ideals (the good ones at least) of what I’d perceived that our country was founded on. I also support the individual people in our police and military, but not the fascist orders that they’re having to fulfill. I think the majority of these people joined to uphold law and order or to protect all people in-general, I don’t think they want to be doing these things some of them are being ordered to do, and I think that continuing to do bad things is how fascists are able to take hold. This is a predicament, because it’s like you’re driving the bus and a fascist jumps into your lap with a gun to your head and takes the wheel, while he has others put guns to the head of your family and others on the bus. No one asked for this, and I still feel like there are many that believe that there is nothing we can do and that it will take care of itself. But the gerrymandering law that just passed in Texas, on top of everything else that was already in place, is another warning that this won’t go away on its own. I get what you’re saying about sending people to space, but I think that being able to get off our big rock if we can do so without destroying other life and other places in the universe is worth time and effort. Even natives that lived with the land and life that existed had to move sometimes, life and all that exists physically that has space is to some degree nomadic.
  • Dumblydorr 1y ago
    I doubt a lot of the individuals doing these actions, like police or ICE, don’t believe in this. They signed up for these jobs, and votes last year show many of them heartily endorse and believe in these policies.
    • acdha 1y ago
      The national guard, though, probably didn’t sign up to be the backdrop for political ads and a lot of FBI, DEA, etc. agents signed up to work on major crimes rather than busting someone’s landscaper.
      • aspenmayer 1y ago
        Folks doing those duties and jobs should know that these organizations are parts of the executive role and remit of the president. They signed up to do whatever the president orders them to do. Officers have a somewhat different oath, but the chain of command is still abundantly clear to all involved.
• sunshine-o 1y ago
  > I used to be advocating for resolution through legal means, but now I inclined to believe that the solution must be technological because everybody wants security and control. I came to a similar conclusion, what happened in the 90s and early 2000s is since the govs had restricted freedom in the physical/real world a lot of young people took refuge in the Internet. It became harder for an individual to build his own house or start a business, but you could make a website pretty much free from regulations and impediments. But governments and a lot of interested parties slowly invested the Internet and now we are complaining it sucks. The common Internet and web suck anyway now because it is full of bots, AI generated content, hard to search and you need to prove you are a human every 5 minutes. We need to create new networks and places just because it is fun and it will take some time for the govs to follow us there: freenet, yggdrasil, alfis, gemini, reticulum, B.A.T.M.A.N, etc.
  • TomLisankie 1y ago
    I'll have to check out gemini again sometime. I tried it out a couple of years ago and really liked how it had that wild west feel of the old-web.
• zosima 1y ago
  Copyright is not censorship. Censorship is state/company mandated retraction or blockage of certain information. Copyright is state/company mandated blocking of certain forms of expression. Copyright permits you to publish any idea you so desire, only that you don't plagiarize someone else while doing so. (Which is always possible, as the fair-use doctrine is a thing)
  • mrtksn 1y ago
    Copyright is definitely not censorship, Copyright is the framework implemented to create intellectual properties to allow for commercial exploitation of text, sound, images and some other intellectual output(details depend on jurisdiction). Removal of content due to copyrights is censorship, you are being denied to spread or consume certain content. It's not different than defining that some content is protected with "national security" or however else you define it and then prevent the spread and consumption of it. Same thing, different excuse. You can use placeholders to see it more clearly, i.e. "This content is X therefore in accordance to the law needs to be removed, failure to do so may lead to prosecution and penalties of Y" You can replace X with anything, including "copyrighted material", "support for Hamas terrorism", "hate speech", "defamation of our glorious leader","communist propaganda", "capitalist propaganda", "self harm".
    • fastball 1y ago
      Is the removal of any content for any reason "censorship"? I don't think that fits conventional usage of the term, and broadening the scope of the word to that level removes much of its usefulness. If I steal an object, and the government takes that object away from me, would you call that government action "theft"?
      • mrtksn 1y ago
        Yes it is censorship. A 3rd party decides what you can consume, the only difference between instances is that you may or may not agree with that. I don't want to go into the copyright discussion. The only thing I will tell you is this and I won't follow up: Piracy is not theft, it's something else and removal of content to elevate the claimed harm is still censorship. Other censorship types all claim greater good too, the "good guys" in this digital world are not just the copyright lawyers. I am not saying this from anti-copyright perspective, I'm not anti-copyright although I have issues with it and IMHO needs a reform.
• tomp 1y ago
  [flagged]
  • CyberDildonics 1y ago
    Calling someone who buys a platform and amplifies nazis, white nationalists and groups while sequestering marginalized groups of people free speech is basically 1984 double speak. Calling people from other countries "savages from primitive cultures" is textbook hardcore racism.
    • tomp 1y ago
      [flagged]
      • CyberDildonics 1y ago
        These two comments are basically verbatim textbook lines from what white supremacists say as well as people who champion separating races and encourage racially segregated states.
        • tomp 1y ago
          If “racially segregated white supremacy” means we accept any race and nationality as long as they respect and are aligned with our cultural and moral norms… then 100% sign me up!
          • CyberDildonics 1y ago
            Culture is essentially always a nonsense purity test to rationalize things that have no other arguments. No one needs to respect whatever idea of culture you have in your head and based on your comments I hope they don't. People need to obey laws, not whatever morals you want to pick and choose for others to accept. Also when someone says you are repeating white nationalist talking points verbatim, your response should be 'I didn't realize that', not 'sign me up'.
• JeremyNT 1y ago
  > So this website itself is about censorship, therefore people interested in this shouldn’t be using websites. New tools are needed, the mainstream will be controlled the way the local hegemony sees it fit. It's tough to imagine what this might look like. I suspect it's too late. Device attestation is becoming more prevalent, and required for increasingly more functionality. Passkeys are breathing down our necks. Alternate protocols can only exist if the corporate and governmental powers look the other way. We have Signal and VPNs and BitTorrent and tor, but for how long? And moreover, does it even matter what protocols we want to use, if most of us use devices that are fully controlled by the tech giants who want to do the censorship?
  • glenstein 1y ago
    I don't know if there are particular good ground-level solutions to infrastructure (mesh networks can have their application but are difficult to drive critical mass adoption and every square inch of mesh network has "last mile" problems). Ideally you would have good government involvement to enforce traffic neutrality, but that's out the door. I'm sure this has been talked to death but ground level P2P infrastructure is what I would be rooting for.
• immibis 1y ago
  Something that annoys me is that OONI (which collects internet censorship data) only considers censorship of things like Twitter, Wikipedia, opposition political parties, Tiananmen Square, etc and Tor. It doesn't consider copyright censorship as censorship.