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Comment by retox | Hacker News Reader

There are people that say that it's not censorship if it's a private company doing the redaction, but if big tech does it on behalf of the government is it censorship or not?

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Whether through State or private entities, censorship is censorship. The State doesn't get a karma pass for using private companies platforms rather than their own.

The US constitution bans government limitations on free speech because the people of the 1700s believed that the government was such a powerful force in society that it needed restrictions placed on it.

It's the 21st century now. We might need to reevaluate whether private enterprise has grown powerful enough that it needs to have similar restrictions as well.

But govt is given monopolistic power on violence. Private companies did not acquire power on violence, and the power they did acquire on speech and other things was done through market competition.

Companies used to have plenty of violence, and arguably a monopoly of violence in some contexts, e.g. the massive private armies of the Dutch West India or British East India companies.

Coca Cola has murdered union reps, and fruit companies have used actual government militaries as tools of their own game, too.

Hell, it's a primary trope in cyberpunk -- mega-corps having their own private ninja cyborg army, and with the growth of Iraq-era military contracting, it's not crazy to see that happening.

"By 1803, at the height of its rule in India, the East India company had a private army of about 260,000—twice the size of the British Army"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_India_Company

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_West_India_Company

The question was never "Is this censorship?" it was "is this justified?" which is also sometimes conflated with "is this legal?" Is it censorship? Yes. Is it justified? No, because YouTube doesn't operate in the Chinese market, so they have no reason to believe this move protects their interests. Is it legal? Yes.

But is YouTube actually doing it on request of a government?

If posting "Communist bandit" in plain english doesn't get removed, then it's safe to assume they do.

Or perhaps the Chinese phrase just got caught in the spam filter as a false positive while the English phrase didn't?

YT's spam filter is notoriously terrible so I don't think this is far out there.

I'm no authority, but I'd say absolutely a yes.

It might not be censorship (in the classic government sense) but its still very sad to see US based companies and organizations bow down to China. Granted I am aware China is not the only communist country.

Another example of companies bowing down to China: https://www.reuters.com/article/china-basketball-nba-espn/es...

Plus a Github repository of companies that kowtow to China's interests from a previous discussion here on HN:

https://github.com/caffeine-overload/bandinchina

don't forget blizzard/activision

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