Comment by dredds | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dredds | Hacker News Reader

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> "Censorship is restriction on others' flow of information."

There was nothing stopping people emailing the manifesto to each other privately using any archive formats. That is different from having to provide a free soapbox for supporters of the manifesto. Just as you have the right to block someone commenting on your Twitter posts. The ISPs are businesses and have legal terms and conditions to remove anything. That is not censorship. Here in NZ it became illegal to transfer the manifesto, but primarily the video which was deemed offensive under existing censor laws.

> "The laws against "gay propaganda" in Russia are similarly supported by the majority of the population, but they're no less wrong and oppressive for that."

If the Russian example you give is supported by the majority then that is by definition democratic, even though propaganda created that public sentiment in the first place. Should propaganda (manifestos of hate in this case) be censored? Your own example suggests "yes it should".

There was nothing, yes. But if Austalian mail providers joined the fray, the same excuse would apply to them as well. At what point does it become "genuine" censorship on your scale? Even in China, there are ways to get past the firewall, so if the ability to pass information somehow is sufficient to have freedom of speech, then China has that.

The Russian example doesn't work out the way you think it does, though. Yes, it's by definition democratic, and it's also oppressive - but saying that the propaganda that led to its popularity should be censored to prevent such laws amounts to saying that democracy is a sham, because people should only be allowed (by whom?) to hold "safe" opinions. If that argument were made openly - that we should abandon democracy in favor of rule by the enlightened elite, because people just can't be trusted to make the right choices unconstrained - I'd still disagree, but that would be a different conversation. But advocating censorship of political propaganda for the purpose of maintaining the illusion of democracy is just hypocritical.

My actual takeaway from that story is simply that nobody should have the power to do such things on a large scale. In a more decentralized political system, there can still be localized hotspots of oppression - but they don't suddenly apply to tens of millions of people at once, and with no easy way to escape.

> If the Russian example you give is supported by the majority then that is by definition democratic, even though propaganda created that public sentiment in the first place. Should propaganda (manifestos of hate in this case) be censored? Your own example suggests "yes it should".

Not at all. If you give governments powers to censor people, sooner or later you will have someone in power that will use those tools maliciously against their own populace.

Therfore you don't allow a government (or anyone else for that matter) to censor except in very specific circumstances e.g. when the content is considered obscene (child pornography being an example).

That why it is important that everyone has a right to speak their mind, even if it highly objectionable.

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