← Back to context

Comment by tantalor

5 days ago

If anything, this is a useful looking glass into the minds of people who love to complain about language policing and think "censorship" is our biggest social problem.

If you're very rich, not left leaning, and have a big platform, I imagine it's very easy for censorship/woke mobs to seem like the biggest problem. Most of your needs/wants (in terms of food, shelter, safety) are met, you can mostly do what you want, but people online call you names and some of your posts might get taken down. It's one of the only problems you can feel, and it's obviously because the culture is wrong, because you feel it's empirically established that you are smart and good.

It's a little like people whose exclusive concern in the realm of sexual assault is false accusations; if you can't imagine being a victim or a perpetrator, false accusation is the only part you think can affect you, so naturally your priority is minimizing that risk. Skews your perspective a bit.

Censorship is and always has been a central threat to a free, pluralistic and democratic society.

It is always a key tool of authoritarian governments. And always starts with people thinking certain ideas are too dangerous to express.

Well, with the recent news that Facebook censored vaccine side effects by order of the government, I think we shouldn't underestimate censorship.

  • FB was not ordered to do this. In their words:

    it was our decision whether or not to take content down, and we own our decisions, including COVID-19-related changes we made to our enforcement... we made some choices that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn't make today

    - Mark Zuckerberg, 26 August 2024

  • "News"

    I'm not saying this didn't happen but I wouldn't trust Mark Zuckerberg if he said the sky was blue. He is trying to curry favor with the new administration and he is not above lying or embellishing what really happened.

    • Ok, so they're making that up according to you? Wouldn't they be investigated and if it turns out to be BS they would get an enormous fine? The Biden administration can easily sue them, why wouldn't they do that? Maybe because they know it's true, and they don't want to draw more attention to it, and they don't want an investigation?

      4 replies →