I realized this comment carries more pith than meaning, as it were, and thought I'd expound.
Communities censor in benign ways all the time. Most successful online forums regularly remove posts that are spam, self-promoting, or flamebait. They also remove contributions that are off-topic: completely harmless posts that just don't happen to be what the community wants to focus on. Celebrity gossip on a tech site, say.
Some places are more wild-west than others and that's fine. The point is that while the word "censorship" has a negative ring to it, most censorship is mundane and unobjectionable.
It's not okay (in USA culture) for the government to set community standards, not because standards are bad, but because the organization that controls guns and prisons is already terrifying enough without it being able to control speech too.
Google and Apple (and Facebook and Twitter) are in an in-between space. Their platforms are much too large to be a "community" in the traditional sense, but as private organizations they're still obligated to moderate. And when they get it wrong, the results can be devastating to the individuals affected, both in false-positive cases like this one, and false-negative cases where their cold machinery fails to protect victims of real harassment.
With more, smaller networks, there's no such tension. You can visit a network that lets you post all the hate speech you want. I can visit one that blacklists yours and every one like yours. And neither of us has to give two bits how odious we find each other's spaces.
I agree. There was a case that I cannot remember about a company town that banned people from handing out religious material in the town square, but the Supreme Court (I believe) decided that since the company was effectively taking the place of the government it had to abide by the same rules.
If we continue to go down this path then soon enough we will be taking away the phone and mail service of whatever group of people are out of power.
Communities censor in benign ways all the time. Most successful online forums regularly remove posts that are spam, self-promoting, or flamebait. They also remove contributions that are off-topic: completely harmless posts that just don't happen to be what the community wants to focus on. Celebrity gossip on a tech site, say.
Some places are more wild-west than others and that's fine. The point is that while the word "censorship" has a negative ring to it, most censorship is mundane and unobjectionable.
It's not okay (in USA culture) for the government to set community standards, not because standards are bad, but because the organization that controls guns and prisons is already terrifying enough without it being able to control speech too.
Google and Apple (and Facebook and Twitter) are in an in-between space. Their platforms are much too large to be a "community" in the traditional sense, but as private organizations they're still obligated to moderate. And when they get it wrong, the results can be devastating to the individuals affected, both in false-positive cases like this one, and false-negative cases where their cold machinery fails to protect victims of real harassment.
With more, smaller networks, there's no such tension. You can visit a network that lets you post all the hate speech you want. I can visit one that blacklists yours and every one like yours. And neither of us has to give two bits how odious we find each other's spaces.