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by varispeed 1588 days ago
Not sure why it is suprising? If the state wants something to be censored, corporations have very little room to wiggle out. It's funny how Overton window is moving. I remember in the 90s, the mere suggestion that the west could experience Soviet level of censorship was considered deluded conspiracy thinking. Now the population is very much okay with censorship as long as content they don't like is censored. But propaganda machine works well at shaping what general public like and don't like, so they can implant the idea of what people should dislike and then censor it - people will applaud.
2 comments
shadowgovt 1588 days ago
It's not even guaranteed it's for state censorship.

FB has a business interest in tagging and blocking "Hey, check out my new hot pics on scamsite.stealyourdata.haxx"-type messages because they harm their users.

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southerntofu 1588 days ago
FB has been doing political censorship for over a decade. First they started with torrent links, then anarchist propaganda. Since they introduced shadow-banning i haven't really followed the latest developments, but they definitely have been collaborating with other entities on what to censor.
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shadowgovt 1588 days ago
Torrent links are a viral vector and I'd expect them to be censored for the same reason the "hot pics" site would be censored... Potential compromise of user machines.

I'd be interested in what anarchist propaganda has been censored. Anecdotally, I see a ton of it on FB (a side-effect of being friends with anarchists), but I wouldn't be surprised if some things get dropped.

I've gotten smacked for sharing nudity (including, hilariously, reshares of my own Facebook posts from the past) and after January 6th, the service got very skittish about talk of violence and government (for I think obvious reasons... One of the few things that could end the party for Zuckerberg would be landing in prison for the very ambiguous charge "aiding sedition"). I have no doubt they engage in politically-related censorship... But we have no evidence that's what happened here, because (like any large public-facing messaging service that doesn't have a "user beware" attitude) they have those systems anyway for dealing with scammers and trolls.

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Ambolia 1588 days ago
Not just censorship. A lot of people think the media, the government AND the opposition, are actively malicious towards them. Not just in America, in many western countries.

I think in the 90s a lot of people thought the goverment was misguided, or stealing, or even had some shady branches. But not actively malicious and harmful as a whole.

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