Comment by bawolff
4 years ago
> It's not a difficult to say, "while we have no policies that restrict lawful content, we reserve the right to not service those who host and promulgate content that explicitly creates emergency threats to human life."
And if everyone did that, its the exact same as government censorship minus any sort of due process or redress ability.
There's this weird idea that government censorship is abhorent but private censorship is somehow without sin, even when the results are basically identical.
Corporations aren’t throwing you in jail for questioning the decisions of the King.
Neither are governments most of the time. Martyrs cause problems, much safer for evil governments to just deny publication.
They can't directly remove your physical freedom but corporations especially when acting in unison can remove most of your economic freedom. If enough precedents are set where large service providers deny service to groups and individuals at the behest of the mob, eventually it will become politically and financially expedient for these providers to pre-emptively deny service to a whole basket of people.
It's somewhat amusing that corporate run dystopias were always imagined as a product of unfettered libertarian policy in science fiction and film but we may very well slide into one being pushed the whole way by the very people who decried such policies in their youth during the 80s and 90s.