I'm With Stupid
Well-Known Member
- Joined
- 6 May 2013
- Messages
- 20,565
Well it's censorship in the same way that getting kicked off Youtube for uploading porn would be censorship. The important point being that there are plenty of other platforms that you can do that on, and that private companies are free to set the rules for things that they are effectively publishing and paying to host.I'm not so sure. In so far as Twitter and the like have become the new public square of the 21st century, being banned from it or other social media mediums like it, is in fact censorship.
In terms of the comparison to the public square, it's not really. The major difference, of course, is that a public square would be a very local thing and a very public thing. Doing or saying something offensive there would have very real consequences in your personal life because everyone would knew who said it and you would have to say it to their faces. That creates a certain amount of moderation and self-censorship. It's not possible in a public square to anonymously call someone a **** and threaten to rape them, for example, and anyone who did that would like face far more serious consequences than being kicked out of the public square.
I actually think the issue with Twitter is that you have a combination of virtue signalling (in the wider sense) and anonymity. So you get people who get large followings through showing how progressive/conservative/whatever they are, and there's almost a competition to be the most progressive/conservative/whatever so people become more and more extreme. These people aren't anonymous, because there's no point virtue signalling if nobody knows who you are. But then you have their followers, many of whom are anonymous, so when the virtue signaller posts something they find objectionable (to show what a good person they are) to all of their followers, that can be a green light for all of those people to attack whoever is responsible. The virtue signaller then comes up smelling of roses, because they weren't involved in the abuse, even though they obviously initiated it.