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Comment by cm2187 | Hacker News Reader

But where does censorship starts? Google already have to comply with local laws everywhere it operates. Is the right to be forgotten censorship? Is removing piratebay from the listing censorship? Or does it have to do with anything that offends a US liberal political stance? Then is Google’s mission really meant to be a propaganda tool for a particular political viewpoint?

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Political censorship that is supposed to keep current rulers in power by shielding them from criticism is categorically different from all other types of censorship.

The difference is not gradual as you suggest, because political censorship works on a meta-level. It obstructs the democratic mechanism by which all other types of censorship can be debated and ultimately lifted.

Opposing political censorship is not just another political viewpoint. It is a prerequisite to freely discussing and changing political viewpoints in the first place.

A 1000 times this. The key difference (as you said very well) is that in countries with a free press you can openly discuss any restrictions that are in place for various reason, may it be historic (Nazi time in Germany), cultural (the "f-word beeps" in the US) or legal, like the "secret" trials in Australia https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/14/world/australia/george-pe... )

That's a good point, but I don't think drawing the line is so easy. Take copyright and dmca. In the USA you can argue that the "copyright lobby" is effectively one of the rulers in power -- they write and enforce laws, after all, one of which is the DMCA and used for censorship. And it is absolutely meant to keep themselves in (economic) power. It also establishes a precedent for censorship more generally, a slope that can be made slipperier over time.

Powerful as the copyright lobby may be, they haven't yet managed to make it a copyright violation to criticise copyright law or the copyright lobby itself.

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