Seriously. Just a week ago, Facebook employees went on strike because FB refused to censor Trump’s messaging. NYT reporters forced the opinion editor to resign for allowing a Republican senator to publish an op-ed. Meanwhile, I’ll bet many of those same people consider censorship of Tiananmen Square to be wrong.
Apparently, there is good censorship, and bad censorship. What’s frustrating is that the proponents of “good censorship” do not even realize this irony, or at least they
call it a false equivalence when you point it out to them.
To address that “false equivalence” criticism, I would be curious to hear from someone who thinks Facebook or Twitter should annotate Trump’s posts. Do you also think that they should annotate posts about Tiananmen square to include links to the Chinese government’s narrative that actually, there was no massacre and it was a CIA-instigated riot?
Who decides which posts to annotate and what to annotate them with? It’s not just the CCP who believes the Tiananmen square massacre didn’t happen; there are millions of Chinese citizens who agree with them, just like there are millions of Americans who disagree with Trump. So is there a difference between a mob of Americans asking to annotate a Trump post about a BLM protest with a CNN article, and a mob of Chinese people asking to annotate an Ai Weiwei post about
Tiananmen Square with a People’s Daily article?
> NYT reporters forced the opinion editor to resign for allowing a Republican senator to publish an op-ed.
That is quite a naive interpretation. It's not like the Times Opinion pages have never seen a Republican op-ed. The issue is that the op-ed in question advocated for violence against American citizens based on factual errors and flimsy premises.
A few months ago, the NYT published an op-ed from the leader of the Taliban. In 1941, they dedicated a full page to an excerpt of Mein Kampf. How is it consistent to give them a voice on the pages of the paper, but to deny the same privilege to a sitting US senator?
It’s an opinion section, and labeled as such. The NYT explicitly does not endorse its content, nor do they designate it as “factual“ reporting. The idea that reporters revolted and the editor of it resigned because a mob disagreed with an opinion in it, seems farcical given that the purpose of such a section is to present opinions opposite those of the editorial board (literally, op-ed).
If it’s full of “factual errors and flimsy premises,” surely NYT readers are smart enough to decide that for themselves. If not, surely the NYT can solicit an opinion from an opposing viewpoint to rebut those “errors.”
It’s not like he is some radical with no voice; he’s an elected senator, and could choose to publish in any number of periodicals. The NYT isn’t “giving him a voice”; he already has one.
People's primal need to 'kill the bad thing' is completely dysfunctional in our modern world, and on the Internet, hopelessly unrealistic. (There's always Tor. You can't completely get rid of something...not if it has enough interest.)
I even feel bad for the platforms due to this push and pull, with them always in the middle. Always being pressured one way or another: 'Allow this content, you're censoring us!' or 'Take down this content, it's abhorrent!'
Since the companies are the organisational equivalent of sociopaths anyway, surely they can make the hard decisions. Why not just have filters? If users don't want racist, terrible content, then just tick a box in their settings that will tune their personal algorithm to not show it! Then it's their fault they're only siloing themselves further into their own echo chamber - not the platforms'.
Apparently, there is good censorship, and bad censorship. What’s frustrating is that the proponents of “good censorship” do not even realize this irony, or at least they call it a false equivalence when you point it out to them.
To address that “false equivalence” criticism, I would be curious to hear from someone who thinks Facebook or Twitter should annotate Trump’s posts. Do you also think that they should annotate posts about Tiananmen square to include links to the Chinese government’s narrative that actually, there was no massacre and it was a CIA-instigated riot?
Who decides which posts to annotate and what to annotate them with? It’s not just the CCP who believes the Tiananmen square massacre didn’t happen; there are millions of Chinese citizens who agree with them, just like there are millions of Americans who disagree with Trump. So is there a difference between a mob of Americans asking to annotate a Trump post about a BLM protest with a CNN article, and a mob of Chinese people asking to annotate an Ai Weiwei post about Tiananmen Square with a People’s Daily article?