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Comment by GuinansEyebrows | Hacker News Reader

> They have blogs from the ceo straight up calling for political censorship.

got any links?

I'm not OP, and I'm at work so I can't get the links for you, but the CEO/company was pretty vocal about the need for censorship, especially around and after the 2016 election. It's a legitimate concern, and it's why I don't use Mozilla products if possible. The company is run by ideology and could blow up at any moment

Deplatforming is not the same as censorship.

Everything is run by ideology, since that's how ideology operates.

If all major platforms do so in concert, it actually is the same.

Not GP but their mention brings to memory these HN discussion I had read years ago and the comments probably already have more than this thread will discuss:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29884342 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25690941

It looks like the blog post was taken down several months later, so I had to pull this copy to see what it was https://web.archive.org/web/20210108192114/https://blog.mozi...

Doesn't look like censorship at all.

> Transparency on advertisers

Sounds good.

> Transparency on "algorithms"

Also sounds good.

> Improve algorithms to highlight facts over fiction

Considering he isn't calling for anyone to be censored, only promote facts, I don't see much issue.

She builds off of "requires more than just the temporary silencing or permanent removal of bad actors from social media platforms" with "Turn on by default the tools to amplify factual voices over disinformation". Whether deplatforming or "amplifying factual voices over disinformation" are seen as a good thing, they are censorship. She also mixes some good ideas in that (particularly platform algorithm transparency) of course.

Is ad-blocking censorship? What about spam filters?

Ad-blocking is turned off by default in most browsers.

Also basically no one wants to see ads, it is functionally useless, you can just go search for the thing you want to buy.

Censoring someone because you think they are harmful isn’t similar to this. You can develop a trump-blocker extension but having this enabled on default in a browser like chrome would be obvious censorship

Inherently by nature of existing no, but they can be easily implemented as such.

The censorship problems in the above are in the call to continue silencing/removals of political actors from discussion platforms and in pushing for centralized platforms to decide which political statements are factual. If you go an abstraction layer above that it gets too generic to universally claim as for censorship and if you go an abstraction layer below that it most often becomes an individual's choice.

> Whether deplatforming or "amplifying factual voices over disinformation" are seen as a good thing, they are censorship

this seems like an interesting, strongly-principled, almost legalistically pedantic twisting of intent - not that i can really claim to know her intent. what you call censorship can be reasonably understood as a cry against abuses of freedom of speech.

there are very clearly bad actors who profit from the abuse of freedom of speech, who argue in bad faith and spread misinformation in order to benefit themselves at all of our expense. not all speech is valuable, and a lot of it is harmful.

i'm not saying i have an answer, but a blind devotion to the principle of free speech (or any principle, really) necessarily comes with blind spots that people more cynical than you or me are capable of (and demonstrably very willing to) exploit. this world sucks.

I'm not posting that it should be seen as good or bad, just that's the prime example of the CEO calling for political censorship in a blog post someone was asking for a link to. As I said, even if one sees such actions as a good thing they are still censorship.

To me the main problem with the blog post was less the specific calls to action but the complete distraction from core technology, such as Firefox, Mozilla should have been focusing more on at the time. This is likely why the blog post ended up getting pulled - it served as a distracted from the mission more than it made any progress for it.

Sorry, didn’t mean to imply you felt one way or the other, just responding to the general idea. I guess freedom of speech and censorship are pretty inextricable. It’s an interesting dichotomy to roll around in your head.

In that case they already are "censoring" because they amplify certain voices over others.

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