> Facebook’s ‘independent fact-checker’ doesn’t like the wording of the article by the BMJ. And if I don’t delete my post, they are threatening to make my posts less visible. Obviously, I will not delete my post . . . If it seems like I’ve disappeared for a while, you’ll know why.”
Just treat them as ideological censors, not unlike those employed by authoritarian regimes. You want to publish an article criticizing the party? Not so fast! In order to get past them you have to use euphemisms hoping they won’t catch them. Or, profusely praise the ideology hoping to appease them so they’d let your article through, hoping they would be flattered and let your one slightly controversial idea at the end through.
No, they won’t send you to a labor camp or come after your family. And, yes it’s a private company and if anyone doesn’t like it they can leave, but the mechanics of censorship are exactly the same.
"The arrest of a woman in Australia for promoting an anti-lockdown protest online has drawn criticism, after video of the incident went viral.
Footage shows officers handcuffing pregnant woman Zoe-Lee Buhler, 28, in her home in Victoria on Wednesday in front of her partner and children."
>And, yes it’s a private company and if anyone doesn’t like it they can leave, but the mechanics of censorship are exactly the same.
"MS. PSAKI: Sure. Well, I would say first, it shouldn’t come as any surprise that we’re in regular touch with social media platforms — just like we’re in regular touch with all of you and your media outlets — about areas where we have concern, information that might be useful, information that may or may not be interesting to your viewers.
You all make decisions, just like the social media platforms make decisions, even though they’re a private-sector company and different, but just as an example.
So we are ma- — regularly making sure social media platforms are aware of the latest narratives dangerous to public health that we and many other Americans seeing — are seeing across all of social and traditional media. And we work to engage with them to better understand the enforcement of social media platform policies."
> No, they won’t send you to a labor camp or come after your family. And, yes it’s a private company and if anyone doesn’t like it they can leave, but the mechanics of censorship are exactly the same.
If you have to ignore 2 mechanisms by which authoritarian regimes enforce censorship in order to say that "the mechanics of censorship are exactly the same", then they're not _exactly_ the same.
> If you have to ignore 2 mechanisms by which authoritarian regimes enforce censorship in order to say that "the mechanics of censorship are exactly the same", then they're not _exactly_ the same.
I didn't say they are _exactly_ the same, that's pretty obvious. Especially that one is a country and the other is a company. So it's a bit of straw man, isn't it?
Not every single person who criticized the government or published anything that was censored was sent a labor camp. Those had been eliminated by the 60s. However people didn't get promoted, lost their jobs (is a journalist losing their job and not being able to be hired because they pointed out something controversial that different?), added to blacklist. The response to that was the people auto-censored themselves. They didn't want to get in trouble so they didn't talk about certain things. Those that tried used a few trick to get around the censors, and I outlined those already.
Just treat them as ideological censors, not unlike those employed by authoritarian regimes. You want to publish an article criticizing the party? Not so fast! In order to get past them you have to use euphemisms hoping they won’t catch them. Or, profusely praise the ideology hoping to appease them so they’d let your article through, hoping they would be flattered and let your one slightly controversial idea at the end through.
No, they won’t send you to a labor camp or come after your family. And, yes it’s a private company and if anyone doesn’t like it they can leave, but the mechanics of censorship are exactly the same.