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Comment by marcus_holmes | Hacker News Reader

I think there needs to be. Because the consequences of keeping the bad stuff accessible are worse than the consequences of censoring the good stuff.

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Conceptually, though, how would it work, and who becomes the arbiter of what's good and what's bad, and what can be shared and what cannot ?

In no way shape or form am I defending the nasty stuff or saying that it should be allowed, but when defending privacy and liberty, there's a real question about how we deal with hidden lawlessness that uses the same tools people use for legitimate purposes, or, more importantly, how people use these tools in a way that a government views as illegitimate or a thought crime but are in the defense of liberty.

I think there's a notion of policing that comes out of this discussion that is not part of the technology but rather a complement to it. I don't know what shape that would take.

Well, that's where we have laws, and elections, and all that stuff.

We similarly have a complete ban on violence, except for the state which has a monopoly on it. This does get abused sometimes, the system isn't perfect. But it's better than allowing anyone to use violence whenever they want to resolve disputes.

I agree that there's a discussion that we technologists need to have about policing and censorship, which we're currently not having.

Such complement cannot really exist. If it will exist and actually be effective, the technology as a whole would be pointless.

An analogy can be made to WhatsApp. It's known to be used to coordinate terrorist attacks in Europe yet not a single government intelligence agency has managed to legislate Facebook into opening a back door. Because a backdoor makes encryption quite pointless.

Similarly, the case with Apple. Whom categorically refuses an unlock ability to authorities, and so far has won.

There's no public outrage. The public seem happy to be protected from the prying eyes of their governments. And I guess the public implicitly accepts that as part of this protection, some very nasty stuff goes around these same platforms.

That's why I believe we should separate content extermination (which is fully impossible) from hiding said content from view. The latter is doable and common.

For example, terrorist videos are almost immediately removed from social media platforms upon detection. This stops it from spreading and its damage and shock effect is contained. However, should you specifically seek out such videos, they can still be found in several places, and you don't even need to go to the darkweb.

Censorship, in the practical sense, should be seen as hiding from view. Not deletion.

From what I’ve seen, you would basically just unpin or force unpin undesirable content. As long as no one requests that content, it will be garbage collected/deleted.

Countries which have more censorship tend to end up being less desirable places to live than places with less censorship, and I dare say that a country with no censorship at all would be better than a country where the government has complete control over all media (even if both of those scenarios would be worse than the average liberal democracy).

I disagree, having lived in countries with pretty severe censorship (e.g. Australia), and countries without (e.g. Cambodia). I think this truism is actually false.

I'm not sure how you are measuring censorship levels, but Freedom House ranks Australia as "Free" with a score of 76, and Cambodia as "Partly Free" with a score of 43, in their latest Internet Freedom Scores:

https://freedomhouse.org/countries/freedom-net/scores

Well, Australia's Federal Police raided the state broadcaster [0] and has a whole bunch of laws against hate speech that get regularly used. While Cambodia really only cares about whether or not you say bad things about the ruling party on Facebook. It depends on what you consider "free speech" I guess.

I think the larger picture here is that censorship really doesn't impact how pleasant a place is to live in. I currently live in Berlin, and there's a whole heap of sensitive history here, but that doesn't really affect you if you just want to live a normal life.

[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-48522729

I think it is misleading to cherry-pick an extreme example of the Australian government getting a search warrant to look for copies of leaked defence documents, while ignoring Cambodia's complete crackdown on independent newspapers[0] and radio stations[1].

Even more worrying is Cambodia's recently introduced internet censorship decree, which "requires all internet traffic in Cambodia to be routed through a regulatory body charged with monitoring online activity before it reaches users."[2]

[0] https://freedomhouse.org/article/death-press-freedom-cambodi...

[1] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/9/22/cambodia-switching-...

[2] https://www.hrw.org/news/2021/02/18/cambodia-internet-censor...

Well, this was the radio interview I gave to the ABC when the Post was sold: https://www.abc.net.au/radio/programs/pm/mass-resignations-a...

As I said in that interview, there are a lot of cultural factors at play, and it's not nearly as clear-cut as it has been made out to be.

Really? The bad stuff is already accessible.

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