[dTal]

People are most certainly not less educated than in the 1800s.

Meanings do indeed shift, especially when terms become euphemisms for other less savory terms. "Moderation" sounds much nicer than "censorship", and you may be right to fight a rearguard action at preserving the nuances of each term, but in the end they're both subsets of "information control". People say "moderation" when they want to imply that the control is good, and "censorship" when they want it to sound bad.

Neither of your definitions of "censorship" amd "moderation" fit cleanly into a discussion about controlling the dialogue between a human and their private LLM. There is no publishing of information, and no channel whose tone must be maintained. It is about control of what the LLM says in private - in particular, it is about preventing it from saying certain things, before it says them. It is close to "censorship" by your definition, but because the thing being censored is not human, we need not speak of fines, or pre-publication vetting - it is simply a question of controlling the output of a computer program, impossible without a total lockdown on general purpose computing.

I think we should default to "information control is bad" and only allow exceptions in well supported exceptional circumstances, because the consequence of allowing systems more control over information than humans is that the systems fail to reflect the interests of the humans that constitute them, in favor of their own self preservation.

[holgerschurig]

> I think we should default to "information control is bad"

I actually don't. I live in a country that was twice wholly or partially under a dictatorship (Germany, once "3rd Reich", and once the socialist eastern part). Both governments tried to control political information ... and quite successfully so. So from that point of view I should be against what you call "information control".

However, I'm not really naive, because things can also go the other way. Both dictatorships also used heavily propaganda. Carefully fabricated lies, if you so will. In Germany, we now have a paragraph "§130 Volksverhetzung" -> instigation of people. So if someone comes around and say "They Jews poisoned the wells" (or modern variants of it) ... then you might say "Let them say this, we don't want information control!". But I say that there are enough dumb people that actually listen to such persons. And therefore I'm very well AGAINST a naively free flow of any "information". I think the core idea of anarchy is dumb, since people are power hungry and manipulators.

BTW, even countries that claim to be full of "freedom of speech" limit it. E.g. the USA, whose inhabitants arrogantly claim they are the epitome of freedom of the world ... they highly regulate sexual "information". Why is that? Partially because of religious prudism. But also partially because they think that this could harm weak people --- e.g. kids.

And here we're back to one of the core freedom idea of Germany: my freedom MUST have it's limits as it targets your freedom.

So, should I be allowed to tell lies about you in public forums, with full anonymity? Like "dTal is sleeping with kids"? Should I be able to start some slander campaign, the online form of bullying? Would you be happy to grant me this full freedom, this full flow of information control ... even if it harms you? Nope. We should protect weak people: people went into suicide because of such things.

I'd even say that things like 4chan, that don't regulate at all, are failing to reflect the interests of humans. Like e.g. the love of harmony and peace.