[Trumpi]

> Is it censorship when your email provider removes spam?

No, but only in situations where it is user controlled. In other words, tools that empower a user to control what they read is not censorship. In the case of spam, false positives and false negatives can be addressed by the user by adding/removing email from a spam folder. If the user does not have this kind of control, then it can be argued that this is censorship because, after all, who decides what is spam?

If the publisher is prevented from publishing despite having an audience that wants to read them, that is censorship.

[josephcsible]

Exactly. If Alice wants to talk but Bob doesn't want to listen, it's not censorship to keep him from having to. But if he does want to listen, it is censorship to keep him from being able to.

[tmottabr]

yeah.. the problem is that you are forgetting about charlie...

Alice want to talk and bob want to listen, but they need charlie to grab tapes recorded by alice with what she said recorded on them and transport them all the way to bob so he can listen to whatever alice said in those recordings..

The problem is that charlie find alice to be assholes and do not want anything to do with her, and thus is refusing to transport the tapes she record..

Now, Alice can still record the tapes and she can even go and deliver the tapes herself and bob can listen to those tapes when he get those, but neither of then can force charlies to transport the tapes for them..

[vintermann]

The question is if Charlie is some poor guy drafted to carry people's tapes... or if he's like a billionaire owning the street and forbidding Bob from stepping out to walk down to the other end of the street where Alice lives.

[tmottabr]

Charlie can be a billionaire and own his own private street, but neither alice or bob can walk into charlie private street, they need to deliver their tapes to charlie and charlie will have to physically transport those packages to the other end of the street to be delivered from alice to bob.. and that is what charlie is refusing to do because he find alice an asshole..

Now alice and bob are not being prevented from meeting in person somewhere else.. hell alice can even build her own street all the way to bob house if she can afford it..

[josephcsible]

To make the analogy work, consider that Alice and Bob are 2 miles apart, but Charlie owns so much of the land around them that the shortest path between them that doesn't cross his property is 200 miles long.

[tmottabr]

no, the distance is irrelevant..

the point is they want to use someone else existing structure to communicate while not following the rules from that third-party..

either you follow the rules or you built your own infra..

[insanitybit]

I've updated my post to address this. While some of that is in the user's control lots of this happens behind the scenes ie: AWS banning users of SES who send out spam emails, GMail banning the spam accounts, hosting providers removing domains or infra that host malware/C2 infra, etc. This is all happening constantly behind the scenes to stop what is very literally "speech", what might even be legally protected speech (certainly you can put the source code for malware online, you can even write and deploy malware - people do it all the time for pentesting).

[LordOfMeese]

"What if this entirely different situation that is in no way comparable, huh? Bet you didn't think about that, huh?"

[insanitybit]

I've justified why it's comparable.

[LordOfMeese]

You've attempted to and failed because it isn't comparable, yes.

[insanitybit]

You can say that I've failed but it doesn't make it so.

[simplotek]

> No, but only in situations where it is user controlled. In other words, tools that empower a user to control what they read is not censorship.

That makes no sense. A paper supplier is not censoring anyone if they can't or won't provide printing paper.

You're somehow conflating not actively supporting a cause with censoring someone. It's ok if you feel yo have something to say to the world, but that does not give you the right to coerce everyone around you to support your personal project.

[snapplebobapple]

As an aside, this is only true if the paper supplier has no market power. Generally, if the next best supplier of paper is significantly worse than the one refusing to supply you then yes, they are definitely censoring you.Your position is correct in a competitive market because there are lots of other sellers willing to give the same terms but in the real world it's mostly oligopolies and monopolies with significant market power across broad swaths of the economy who definitely can suppress speech by choosing to not do business with someone.

[Trumpi]

> You're somehow conflating not actively supporting a cause with censoring someone.

No, I'm merely making the argument that spam control tools are not censorship because the user decides. I'm not sure how the paper supplier fits in to this argument. Perhaps it is a good analogy for the original topic.

[simplotek]

> No, I'm merely making the argument that spam control tools are not censorship because the user decides.

You stated no point.

You're trying to ignore the fact that businesse relationships require all parts to participate voluntarily.

If one part tries to abuse the terms of those services then service providers are free to not continue with the business arrangement.

Not continuing a business arrangement is not censorship.

Are we supposed to feign ignorance and claim terms of service don't exist anymore?

[sinity]

> Are we supposed to feign ignorance and claim terms of service don't exist anymore?

Terms of service usually are vague bullshit which boils down to "we can drop you whenever we feel like it". And if it's an oligopoly? Well, too bad I guess. It's hilarious leftists support oligopolies now.

[Trumpi]

Again, I'm merely saying that spam control is not censorship. Your argument about participating in business relationships might have merit, but it is a different argument.

[Fatnino]

Lots of spam filtering happens long before the user has any control.

You ever try to set up your own email server and then have it be able to send to Gmail addresses? Very very difficult.