[pdabbadabba]

Yes. This is a fair point. I would emphasize, though, that this is about US culture, not US government or law. Interestingly, part of the whole point of the 1st Amendment to the US Constitution is to maintain a lot of separation between these two things.

[freeflight]

> this is about US culture, not US government or law

But these things do not exist in a vacuum.

Ask anybody working on the tech and legal ends of the adult industry and you will hear quite horrific stories about having to jump through so many hoops just for finding a payment provider.

For a while, these used to be www dominating issues, and how they were dealt with in the US, often ended up being the de-facto global standard.

A very recent and relevant example for this is footage out of the Syrian Civil War on platforms like Twitter and YouTube.

Over these past years, whole swats of videos have disappeared on the basis of being tagged as "terrorist propaganda" [0]

In a very similar vein how "Napalm Girl" ended up getting censored as child pornography [1].

By now even Reddit has learned to "selectively forget", as all undeleting/uncensoring sites that used to work, have stopped working.

Just because it's not some US government agency playing the censor, but rather the US government pressuring US companies into self-censorship, doesn't make this kind of censorship any less real in its overall impact.

[0] https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/youtube-ai-deletes-war-cr...

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-37318031

[pdabbadabba]

The thing missing from all of this is any actual evidence of government pressure.

From [0]: "YouTube is facing criticism after a new artificial intelligence program monitoring "extremist" content began flagging and removing masses of videos and blocking channels that document war crimes in the Middle East."

From [1]: "Facebook said it has to restrict nudity for cultural reasons."

I'm not saying this isn't important. I'm not even ruling out some sort of indirect and informal government role. (Government policy and culture are intertwined!) But they fall far far short of supporting the false equivalency drawn in this thread ans elsewhere between western companies removing content due to TOS violations, etc. on the one hand, and content being removed literally, and undisputedly (as far as I've seen) in response to direct commands by the Chinese government.