It is ironic how the western public generally frowns upon the silencing of dissident throught in China, and at the same time welcomes precisely the same behavior for "sensitive topics" back home.
When the government does it, you can't express that idea anywhere. When private companies do it, you can still express those ideas somewhere else.
Anyhow, this is about a private company suppressing speech, so I guess you are OK with that?
Instead, we have an effective monopoly on online search, monopoly on content monetization and a monopoly on social media. These monopolies are sustained through network effects and lack the feedback loop.
Edit: I would even say, they have a wrong type of feedback loop, since they are directly incentivized to censor the opinions that go against the vocal social groups, since that could result in decreasing profits.
China could technically spin off their censorship functions to a privately owned company that would wholly depend on the state-issued license to operate and would keep doing exactly the same thing. Would it make them more democratic or change anything for the end users?
I think, the distinction between private and government is a technicality. What is more important, is how many independent parties are making the censorship decisions, and whether they report to a single vs. distributed source of power. From that angle, the government-dominated Chinese web is very similar to Silicon Valley-dominated western web.
If the private company requires a state-issued license, and that license is dependent on the content on the site, then it's still government censorship.
In America, you can still start a competing private company and allow any opinion you want. In China you can't do that.
I really don't think it's about the wording you put on the decision maker's badge. It's about who's interests they represent and the structure of their incentives.
Government-drivern censorship is bad, because their incentive would become to stay in power no matter what. Monopolies act the same way.
I think that's exactly what's happening for certain online services eg iCloud[1], AWS China[2]
[1]https://money.cnn.com/2018/02/28/technology/apple-icloud-dat... [2]https://techcrunch.com/2017/11/13/aws-exits-china/
The sad fact is, nobody's principled and everybody's just reaching for arguments based on which "side" is being gored.
Considering that private companies are now becoming more powerful than many governments/countries, maybe this is something we should take another look at.
> When the government does it, you can't express that idea anywhere.
Can't you argue that you can always move to another country, just like you can use another company?
> When private companies do it, you can still express those ideas somewhere else.
Depends on the private company and its scale/monopolistic position.
So there is a difference, but I don't think it's 'vast'.
I'm not aware of any government action regarding speech and sensitive topics like we see in China, or other dramatically less free countries.
Only part of the US public, to be fair.
That said, the US public does certainly seem to be mostly apathetic about the giant US government surveillance system, even though that system, if the right sort of political will appeared, could be rapidly turned into a system of social control rivaling what China has.
Apparently, there is good censorship, and bad censorship. What’s frustrating is that the proponents of “good censorship” do not even realize this irony, or at least they call it a false equivalence when you point it out to them.
To address that “false equivalence” criticism, I would be curious to hear from someone who thinks Facebook or Twitter should annotate Trump’s posts. Do you also think that they should annotate posts about Tiananmen square to include links to the Chinese government’s narrative that actually, there was no massacre and it was a CIA-instigated riot?
Who decides which posts to annotate and what to annotate them with? It’s not just the CCP who believes the Tiananmen square massacre didn’t happen; there are millions of Chinese citizens who agree with them, just like there are millions of Americans who disagree with Trump. So is there a difference between a mob of Americans asking to annotate a Trump post about a BLM protest with a CNN article, and a mob of Chinese people asking to annotate an Ai Weiwei post about Tiananmen Square with a People’s Daily article?
I even feel bad for the platforms due to this push and pull, with them always in the middle. Always being pressured one way or another: 'Allow this content, you're censoring us!' or 'Take down this content, it's abhorrent!'
Since the companies are the organisational equivalent of sociopaths anyway, surely they can make the hard decisions. Why not just have filters? If users don't want racist, terrible content, then just tick a box in their settings that will tune their personal algorithm to not show it! Then it's their fault they're only siloing themselves further into their own echo chamber - not the platforms'.
That is quite a naive interpretation. It's not like the Times Opinion pages have never seen a Republican op-ed. The issue is that the op-ed in question advocated for violence against American citizens based on factual errors and flimsy premises.
It’s an opinion section, and labeled as such. The NYT explicitly does not endorse its content, nor do they designate it as “factual“ reporting. The idea that reporters revolted and the editor of it resigned because a mob disagreed with an opinion in it, seems farcical given that the purpose of such a section is to present opinions opposite those of the editorial board (literally, op-ed).
If it’s full of “factual errors and flimsy premises,” surely NYT readers are smart enough to decide that for themselves. If not, surely the NYT can solicit an opinion from an opposing viewpoint to rebut those “errors.”
It’s not like he is some radical with no voice; he’s an elected senator, and could choose to publish in any number of periodicals. The NYT isn’t “giving him a voice”; he already has one.