But sadly not Rush Limbaugh himself.
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Just like a bakery can legally deny service to a gay couple, Apple and Google can do whatever the fuck they want with their app stores as long as they aren’t breaking any anti-trust laws, because capitalism.
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Hitler called himself a socialist, but he was a fascist. Trump calls himself a patriot, but he attempts to tear apart national institutions. Religious fundamentalists say they fight for freedom of religion, but they want to impose their own religious views on everyone else. You have to look beyond what people say they are, to what they do.
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Good advice, that.
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Nice musing!
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Agolf Twitler
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Trump and many of his co-conspirators getting booted from all these platforms?
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This absolutely is censorship, it’s just private censorship, the same way the BBS is moderated, and way too many folks don’t understand the difference between that and government, public censorship.
But make no mistake, it is indeed censorship.
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Looks like MySpace is gonna have a monopoly on Trumpists soon.
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Not to split hairs, but is it censorship or moderation? Once one breaks the rules too much or too egregiously, banning is the next step up in moderation, yes?
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It is splitting hairs.
It’s censorship.
Cory Doctorow just posted a whole article on this:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/09/the-old-crow-is-getting-slow/#deplatforming
And yes, of course it’s censorship. They have made a decision about the type and quality of speech they’ll permit, and they enforce that decision using the economic, legal and technical tools at their disposal.
If I invited you to my house for dinner and said, “Just so you know, no one is allowed to talk about racism at the table,” it would be censorship. If I said “no one is allowed to say racist things at the table,” it would also be censorship.
I censor my daughter when I tell her not to swear. I censor other Twitter users when I hide their replies to my posts. I censor commenters on my blog when I delete their replies.
Dress is up as “content removal” or “moderation” if you’d like, but it’s obviously censorship.
That’s fine. Different social spaces have different rules and norms. I disagree with some censorship and support other censorship. Some speech is illegal (nonconsensual pornography, specific incitements to violence, child sex abuse material) and the government censors it.
Other speech is distasteful or hateful (slurs, insults) and the proprietors of different speech forums censor it.
@gracchus posted the XKCD article above that explains this as well. We censor private spaces. That’s fine. The government shouldn’t be able to censor public, legal speech, nor should anyone be able to force private spaces to endure speech. Those are the paths to propaganda and the sorts of evils we see in totalitarian states.
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There should also be a distinction between censorship as the prevention of speech in contrast to holding people accountable for their speech.
It’s not censorship, for example, for a company to fire someone for speech that violates their terms of employment, such as hate speech. That’s consequences of their expression, not prevention.
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Hi!
After many person-years of research*, I’m trying to get “gops” going as a derogatory. As in “gops, rhymes with cops.” Always uncapitalized, even if it begins a sentence. Try it on for size.
You can also use it in the singular as an adjective. As in, “gop politician”, “gop thinktank”, “gop terrorist”.
-—
* Field studies have shown that using “Republic” as an derogatory adjective, the same way gops use “Democrat” as an adjective (eg, “Democrat politician” instead of “Democratic politician”) just doesn’t work. People are left confused and not certain that the phrase was an intentional derogation.
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Yes, ‘gop’ is more succinct than American Nazi Party.
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cheers dad’s crying
i swear i was trying to remember who the dad was on “cheer’s” and was drawing a blank. your expanation makes much more sense. though in truth, i kind of figured he’s cried himself to sleep every night of his life.
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it’s all going to come crashing down for Big Tech. The well-connected and powerful don’t like being silenced.
Honestly, I though like Ted Danson’s dad was crying at first.
I guess that was a fake tweet though? 
I suppose the term fits. Personally I’d frame it as “moderation”. Your title, for examples, is BBS Moderator, not BBS Censor. Everyone moderates their speech and speech of the people around them, to one agree or another.
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somewhat. it’s obviously also a prevention of similar future speech.
i think in all this “freedom of association” is good constitutional argument that goes beyond simple private property strong-arm rationale. people who maintain a privately run space should get to pick and choose what kind of speech they want to associated with. that’s more than just an arbitrary “this is my space, and what i say goes.”
a person ( or people ) spend effort to maintain a space, so why in the world should someone get to cover that with graffiti and not expect that graffiti to be removed?
going further – re: josh hawley — why should a book publisher be forced to put graffiti all over their brand if they don’t want to? they want to present themselves a certain way, and that’s their choice… so long as they are discriminating among individuals and not against a class of protected people.
[ eta: some bold facing. because otherwise it creeps into bathrooms separated by skin color territory ]
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