5.7 KiB
Censorship
This page is not accessible in your country... NOT :)
Censorship means intentional effort towards preventing exchange of certain kind of information among other individuals, for example suppression of free speech, altering old works of art for political reasons, forced takedowns of copyrighted material from the Internet etc. Note that thereby censorship does NOT include some kinds of data or information filtering, for example censorship does not include filtering out noise such as spam on a forum or static from audio (as noise is a non-information) or PERSONAL avoidance of certain information (e.g. using adblock or hiding someone's forum posts ONLY FOR ONESELF). Censorship often hides under euphemisms such as "moderation", "safe space", "filter", "protection", "delisting", "review" etc. Censorship is always wrong -- in a good society there is never a slightest reason to censor anything, therefore whenever censorship is deemed the best solution, something within the society is deeply fucked up. In current society censorship, along with propaganda, brainwashing and misinformation, is extremely prevalent and growing -- it's being pushed not only by governments and corporations but also by harmful terrorist groups such as LGBT and feminism who force media censorship (e.g. that of Wikipedia or search engines) and punishment of free speech (see political correctness and "hate speech").
Sometimes you can actually exploit censorship to get to good content -- look up a block list (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Blocked_websites_by_country), then you have a list of interesting places you probably want to visit :)
Sometimes it is not 100% clear which action constitutes censorship: for example categorization such as moving a forum post from one thread to another (possibly less visible) thread may or may not be deemed censorship -- this depends on the intended result of such action; moving a post somewhere else doesn't remove it completely but can make it less visible. Whether something is censorship always depends on the answer to the question: "does the action prevent others from information sharing?".
Modern censorship is much more sophisticated; in old days, e.g. those of USSR pseudocommunist regimes, it was simple: stuff was reviewed and it either got censored or it passed, governments even openly admitted to censorship and stated it was simply necessary for the advancement of society. People wanted to talk but the government didn't want to let them. Not so nowadays, it got much advance in several ways:
- Censorship is no longer done just by the state, but by corporations, various social subgroups and even individuals as well, as so called self censorship, often automatically and subconsciously. In wanting to talk you are not just standing against one big bad guy who wants you silent, there are hundreds of sneaky bastards waiting to sue you, report you, ban you, cancel you, even physically terminate you if you touch anything controversial in one way or another.
- NO ONE ADMITS TO CENSORSHIP NOWADAYS, no matter how blatantly obvious their censorship is, exactly in the capitalist "deny EVERYTHING" spirit -- Wikipedia explicitly states "we are not censored" and then literally removes and blocks inclusion of legitimate information it deems "harmful". You point it out, they ban you. They will say "no, it's not censorship, it is MODERATION, PROTECTION, DELISTING, free speech has its limits, it is not a ban, it is deplatformization, blocking of hate speech is not censorship blablabla ..." -- they are inventing hundreds of new terms so that they don't have to use the word censorship.
- There is a lot of soft, undercover and hard to prove censorship -- no longer is something either censored or not censored, but it may be shadowbanned, hugely underanked in search, censored only to specific eyes, modified rather than deleted etc. For example Google censors thousands of websites; you WILL find those websites if Google sees you are looking specifically for those to test their censorship, but it won't ever show it to people who don't know about the site and are legitimately looking for the information they contain. Maybe they will show the site on the 100th page of the search results, which is equivalent to just blocking it completely, but they can say "haha we are not actually censoring it, gotcha". TV series and movies are silently edited retroactively in the cloud to no longer include scenes deemed politically incorrect, no one notices as no one owns physical copies anymore. In the endgame capitalists will just be constantly updating history, let's say they will just change the characters in Godfather to LGBTQ queer black women and since the movie will only be streamed from the cloud, without any old copied of the original existing, they will just say "the movie has always been like that, the author supported our politics". And so on.
There exist tools for bypassing censorship, e.g. proxies or encrypted and/or distributed, censorship-resistant networks such as Tor, Freenet, I2P or torrent file sharing. Watch out: using such tools may be illegal or at least make you look suspicious and be targeted harder by the surveillance.
Examples
TODO: wikipedia, google, fediblock, DVD codes, copyright, ...