[dralley]

By analogy, consider how frequent spam phone calls have become as a direct result of VoIP technology making it trivial to automate them.

Email has been in that position for a long time, so much so that the quality of censorship is frequently advertised as a feature by mail services.

[nonethewiser]

You can mark things detected as spam as not spam though. Filtering is not censorship.

[programmarchy]

Sure, but filtering spam is different than the censorship being done by social media platforms. I can easily opt in to calls and messages from a person or group by adding them to my contacts. However, if my contact is deplatformed, then that removes my ability to opt in. So the locus of agency shifts from me to some corporate or governmental authority, which is what people actually have a problem with.

[sellyme]

You're confusing a protocol (email) with a platform (e.g., Twitter).

You can still pretty easily "opt in" to receiving their communications. You just can't force someone else to be the middleman. If they set up their own blog or forum you're completely free to visit that.

This is similar to how you can't force [e-mail] to forward you your friend's messages, but your friend can send them to you from their own personal email.

The locus of agency is on your friend to put in the effort themselves if they can't find anyone willing to help them spread their speech.

[programmarchy]

Doesn’t it boil down to the same problem, though?

Maybe [e-mail] says something Google doesn’t like so gets blocked from sending to gmail.com or any other email server hosted by Google, which is a huge swath of people similar in scale to the YouTube audience.

Through either the accumulation of capital (e.g. computational power) or consolidation of political power, central authorities can police traffic to censor information on a massive scale, even on decentralized protocols like email.

So yes, at that point, you could argue that the locus of agency falls on Bob to start his own tech empire or whatever, but that becomes absurd. We’ve already seen censorship at the infrastructure level and even the domain registrar level, which is extreme.

There’s always a middle man on the Internet, or any peer to peer system with more than two edges for that matter. The problem arises when that middle man grows into a giant leviathan hell bent on manipulating the conversation of parties between itself.

[sellyme]

> Maybe [e-mail] says something Google doesn’t like so gets blocked from sending to gmail.com or any other email server hosted by Google, which is a huge swath of people similar in scale to the YouTube audience.

If these people continue to use Gmail rather than more open alternatives, does that not indicate that they don't want to hear what Bob has to say?

> We’ve already seen censorship at the infrastructure level and even the domain registrar level, which is extreme.

There is absolutely zero good-faith use of the internet that can result in you getting irreversibly banned by a significant number of domain registrars, therefore this example is completely unrelated to the original quote (replicated below for convenience):

> it is better to leave a few “noxious branches to their luxuriant growth” than to risk “[injuring] the vigor of those yielding the proper fruits.”

There is a lot of validity to the quote. I largely agree with it. But the second part is important - it cannot be interpreted as "we better make it illegal for Twitter to ban people calling for genocide".

[programmarchy]

> There is absolutely zero good-faith use of the internet that can result in you getting irreversibly banned by a significant number of domain registrars, therefore this example is completely unrelated to the original quote

How is it unrelated? A noxious branch is exactly something that many or most people would consider abhorrent and perceive as not in good faith.

There will always be some moral veil put forth by censors to justify their actions. A good example is banning discussion on Ivermectin as a treatment for COVID. Some consider that a noxious branch — quackery endangering public health — but if it’s immediately pruned we won’t be able to see if it yields proper fruits.

[sellyme]

> How is it unrelated? A noxious branch is exactly something that many or most people would consider abhorrent and perceive as not in good faith.

Because that quote fundamentally discusses cases where pruning said noxious branch is a risk to non-noxious branches.

Sometimes you can just prune a noxious branch and that's that.