[gavanwoolery]

I would not say it is "unfounded" - but rather that censorship is ill-defined, at least in the public eye.

We have come up with words that are easier to swallow like "deplatforming" and "fact checking." Censorship occurs in many forms, and not all of it is directly blocking access to speech (IMO).

There is a common misconception that censorship can only occur at the public (government) level, but not the private level. As per Wikipedia:

"Censorship can be conducted by governments, private institutions, and other controlling bodies."

There is also the issue of orthodox views and orthodox privilege (as per Paul Graham's explanation). Many conservative views are not orthodox to the point where you can be canceled for merely quoting someone else or citing facts (yes, both have happened in the past). So there is some form of self-censorship (this is related to "social cooling" IIRC).

I think it all boils down to this: which side supports censorship and which side condemns it? There you will find your answer on who is more adversely affected by censorship.

Note: this is not a left or right issue, historically speaking. For example, look back to McCarthyism.

[monopoledance]

> I think it all boils down to this: which side supports censorship and which side condemns it? There you will find your answer on who is more adversely affected by censorship.

I don't think that's a valid metric at all. This doesn't reflect the quality of censored expressions, their factual validity (mere facts are not opinions) or evolutionary adaptations to the discourse, like deflection ("No u!"). You assume a zero sum game.

See how diversity initiatives and co are confronted with "this is racism against white people!". Does this reflect an increase in discrimination against "white" people, or an decrease in discrimination for "non-white" people?

Then, people getting kicked off a Platform for being mean and abusive, doesn't mean they got censored for their political views, even if they claim that's the case.

All, I am saying is, your metric is problematic.

[gavanwoolery]

You are absolutely correct - perceiving censorship does not equate to being censored.

That said (IMO), there is a lot of abusive behavior on all sides - so the question becomes, is the treatment equal? It may just serve as a litmus test, at worst a false positive, to consider which side thinks they are being censored more. :)

[monopoledance]

I think the root problem is reasonable discourse not winning the heads anymore. The monopoly of newspapers put a price on information and by that rate-limited lazy bits. Now spreading (mis)information is free. The short/simplistic message wins over complexity every time.

Additionally there is a fundamental difference in fitness for left and right discourse to this new ecosystem. There is a reason right wing terrorism isn't needed to be as centrally organized, as historical left wing terrorism has been. If you find spontaneous unity in atrocity your political movement has no clear borders; whereas the left is constantly fighting itself over irrelevant intellectual nuances. If the left answers to ceiling-less rightwing populism, this will end in race to the bottom. The right will always one-up the show.

I think right wing politics is the better, fitter meme in the current environment and the left hasn't found an answer yet, as better arguments isn't enough.

We will all lose in this. I hope we find a way to shift incentives in social media soon, or this will be the end of civilization.

[netizen-9748]

Would you mind sharing details about the time someone was canceled for citing facts? I stay out of the popular culture loop so I likely missed it.

[edbob]

> David Shor, for example, was until recently a data analyst at a progressive consulting firm, Civis Analytics. Shor’s job was to think about how Democrats can win elections. When Omar Wasow, a professor at Princeton, published a paper in the country’s most prestigious political-science journal arguing that nonviolent civil-rights protests had, in the 1960s, been more politically effective than violent ones, Shor tweeted a simple summary of it to his followers. Because the tweet coincided with the first mass protests over the killing of George Floyd, it generated some pushback. After a progressive activist accused Shor of “concern trolling for the purposes of increasing democratic turnout,” a number of people on Twitter demanded that he lose his job. Less than a week after he tweeted the findings of Wasow, who is black, Civis’s senior leadership, which is predominantly white, fired Shor.[0]

The censorship and control of the visibility of information hits Democrats as well as Republicans. See Tulsi Gabbard's appearance on Joe Rogan. Cancel Culture is about making all unorthodox beliefs and facts unspeakable, whether on the left or on the right.

[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/stop-firin...

[threatofrain]

At the root of cancellation is the freedom of association. If you lived in a rural town and you are hated, what is outcome? What is the government to do?

I think no matter where you move, whether to Taiwan or Japan, there is a natural burden for you to understand what community affection means. Or not.

[edbob]

netizen-9748 asked for a reference where someone was canceled for sharing facts, which I provided. This has huge implications for the entire nation. How can we trust "facts" when everyone knows that the "facts" are cherry-picked, and certain facts can't be published without committing career suicide? Shor and Gabbard are both progressive Democrats who are heavily involved in politics. They're not hated for who they are or having "fascist" beliefs. They're hated for stating inconvenient facts.

If you live in a rural town and can't make any friends, that's uncomfortable, but it's not a threat to the rest of the country. You're also handily glossing over the fact that the "hated" viewpoints make up around half of the country. If one person does something that pisses off 90% of the town, then "community affection" applies. But if half of the town has decided that the other half are Nazis and need to be subdued, along with any unorthodox people in their own half, then that's just a naked political power grab.

[monopoledance]

From the article: Civis denied the firing happened over the tweet. The only evidence is this:

> One Civis employee, who requested anonymity for fear of professional repercussions, told me, the only reason for the firing “that was communicated that I heard were the client and staff reactions to the tweet.” The employee also said that at “our company-wide meeting after Shor’s firing blew up on Twitter, [CEO] Dan [Wagner] said something along the lines of freedom of speech is important, but he had to take a stand with our staff, clients, and people of color.”

Sure... Solid journalism, given the above.

I am not yet sold on "cancel culture". I only ever hear people crying about people calling them out on Twitter, intermixed with some random people losing their jobs for actually doing really nasty shit on public record. What ever there is, it's blown way out of proportion.

I hope we are heading for a drama recession. And I hope Twitter and Facebook die over it. I wish the idiots lighting 5G towers would shift their anger towards data centers. Any, at this point. I would fund them on patreon.

[gavanwoolery]

I should correct that slightly because no one ever cites facts or quotes in isolation - usually they are in the context of a broader argument or hypothesis. But there have been a few cases, here Google will probably serve you better than my feeble memory. One (rather controversial) example I can think of is James Damore. His hypothesis may have been wrong (I will leave that up to the reader), but he at least did seem to earnestly back it up with data and research papers (and even though there is some debate there, at least a few experts have publicly agreed that the science he cited was well-established).

Note: I am not defending Damore's position, only stating that it was a great example of the "yellow/blue dress" when it comes to orthodox speech. People seemed to be pretty fiercely divided on whether or not his memo warranted being fired.

[retox]

Try tweeting anything about sex/gender or crime statistics that doesn't fall within the socially acceptable window of discussion.

[mancerayder]

I think it's fair to say the target of the censorship actions are non-mainstream views more broadly.

I agree with you we've been overly conditioned to worry about government censorship and not private platform censorship, and yet the former have elected leaders while the latter are unaccountable to the public.

That was in a sense Merkel's shock and public criticisms of the deplatforming actions. It's ironic because the criticism wasn't that there was censorship, it was that private companies were allowed to do it and not government.

Who is right, the American laissez-faire pro-corporate/neoliberal philosophy or the traditional European approach that wants government to have that duty?

[ttt0]

> Who is right, the American laissez-faire pro-corporate/neoliberal philosophy or the traditional European approach that wants government to have that duty?

I'd prefer neither and that they'd just stop censoring people, no matter if it's the far-left or far-right. But America has the advantage of the First Amendment (assuming that's not going to be repealed). So maybe I'm naive, but I think in this particular case, at least the government would have to obey the free speech laws, unlike private entities.

[gavanwoolery]

Someone else on HN (I cannot recall who), stated something along the lines of (paraphrasing):

"Centralized power can be abused in the hands of the government or the private sector [via monopolies]"

Whether or not you agree, I thought this was an elegant way of phrasing it. The cure, IMO, is to ensure that both ultimately answer to the people, although I have no idea how that is practically enforced.

[monopoledance]

It's funny, because Merkel's party is actually pushing for the decision about what counts as "hatespeech"/"terrorism" to be made by the platforms themselves. The CDU wants there to be nothing edgy at all. Pretty similar to China's "social credit dystopia" moral panic, actually. Just different means.