[isaacremuant]

American society has been slowly convinced, and then the rest of the world by extension, that this was absolutely necessary to combat the next big threat.

First it was to "combat hate", that speech was limited according to what partisan big tech companies decided was fair. It was said it had real-life consequences. Harm. So it should be banned.

Then anything from certain parties or ideologies became hate if labeled so by the tech giants. So out they went.

Now, anything questioning the authoritarian narrative of the pandemic is labeled as such.

The slippery slope that people tried to deny with claims of "private companies" has gotten higher and keeps going deeper.

Talking about freedom, freedom of speech or human rights gets you mocked in certain spaces. It's mind-boggling.

[devwastaken]

U.S. barely has "hate speech" laws, so I don't know what you're talking about there.

"Big tech" decided to ban people for being hateful to others on their platforms. Those platforms don't exist for your protection against government actors. Nor should it.

[u20210717]

What you're saying is "a company banning certain forms of speech on its platforms does not constitute censorship", which is true at least in the strict definition of "censorship", but does not contradict what the GP is saying. What the GP is talking about is a shift in American attitudes that leads to the acceptance of such policies, whereas in earlier times they might have been rejected or the companies in question might not have even thought to implement them.

[devwastaken]

I don't at all believe people would reject it. People have been censoring content for a long time in far worse manners. Early 90's had plenty of "obscenity law" enforced, Ronald Reagan and regulation of content in games and music was a thing. People cheered it on, and that was actual government censorship, not corporate.

People agree with censorship if it's in in agreement with their belief.

[u20210717]

To be clear, I don't necessarily agree with isaacremuant.

Obscenity laws are kind of different, since it's perfectly possible to add or remove obscenities from an utterance without substantially affecting the message. I'm not saying I agree with such laws, just stating the facts. What are examples where specific types of messages were banned? E.g. hate speech laws, blasphemy laws, lese majeste laws, etc. In Western democracies, the only examples that come to mind are recent.

>People agree with censorship if it's in in agreement with their belief.

Agreed, generally speaking.

Geez, what did I say that was so disagreeable? This is why I don't have a permanent account here. Whatever.

[isaacremuant]

I think you're arguing a strawman and didn't really address anything I said.

Of course, my point is seemingly unpopular in very partisan websites where it's seen as a rep/dem or left/right issue (US centric) but the fact that we see more and more of these types of articles (today an EFF one) shows there's more of us, concerned by this arbitrating of truth by a certain group of ideologes and the people who agree with them where they leverage their power to prescribe what speech is worth transmitting and which is worth censoring.