Strypey
"It's not censorship. Only the government can do that."
I see this claim a lot, and I don't think it's true anymore, at least not without broadening the definition of the word "government". When quite a few of the 50 largest economies in the world are corporations, and many of them govern #BigTech platforms like FB and YT that have more users than many countries have citizens. it's nonsense to say they are not capable of effective censorship.
Strypey
Governments censorship has never been about preventing things from being said at all, that's impossible. It's really about a) preventing them from being heard, and b) preventing them from being considered legitimate topics of respectable discussion. You can say anything you want in China ... so long as you only say it in private, among people you trust. Does that mean the Chinese government doesn't do censorship?
djsumdog
@strypey I wrote about this very topic a while back, when CloudFlare decided to de-platform someone. I need to write an update as there is a Supreme Court case in the US which could change this for businesses. With Amazon/Google/Vultr/DigitalOcean being so large and the only big providers, if everyone denies your platform, you are effectively censored by corporations:
https://fightthefuture.org/article/the-new-era-of-corporate-censorship/
kaiyou
@strypey Another way of putting this requires making a distinction between communication (talking to your family and friends) and publication (talking to anyone who wishes to listen or read). Free speech is really about publication, so is censorship.
The interesting bit with this distinction is realizing the internet is in fact the first tool to empower everyone to publish instead of just politicians and the press. Free speech actually requires a free internet.
Strypey
@kaiyou there's an old saying in radical media circles, "freedom of the press belongs to those who own one". The revolutionary thing about the PC+internet was (in theory) that anyone who has them has a printing press. Problem is, at some point, the same #BigCable companies who were supplying net connections also got into the web hosting business. It then suited them to throttle upload bandwidth for anyone not paying for commercial hosting packages, which are now the printing presses of the net.
Strypey
@kaiyou the same thing happened to previous generations, with TV broadcasting, and before that radio broadcasting. They started as DIY media that anyone could use cheaply for public speech, and ended up as commodities dominated by an ever smaller number of giant corporations. So at root, the for-profit corporation is the medium we need to come up with radical alternatives to, like #SocialEnterprise and #PlatformCooperativism
Strypey
@kaiyou I used to be involved in an activist-run internet cafe (remember those?). We covered costs by providing tourists cheap access to desktop PC and the net. We had a fat pipe coming in, we had to. But it was super-expensive, and we had a monthly data limit. We had all the hardware, software, and skills, we needed to provide hosting for activist groups, but we couldn't afford to actually do it, in case we used up our data allowance before the month ended, and couldn't operate our business.
Jonkman Microblog is a social network, courtesy of SOBAC Microcomputer Services. It runs on GNU social, version 1.2.0-beta5, available under the GNU Affero General Public License.
All Jonkman Microblog content and data are available under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license.