There's an interesting cognitive bias in the western media that tends to define freedom of the press (and freedom of expression) as exactly what is perceived as freedom in this side of the iron curtain.
Libgen domains are "seized", and tiktok "goes dark", but of course other countries "censor" porn or news outlets.
As long as we're not discussing ways to circumvent the American firewall, since there isn't one, we can still say that one country tries but sometimes fails to live up to a free speech ideal perfectly -making exceptions for national security- and the other is blatant authoritarian.
Just a hypothesis: the fact that there's no need for an American firewall might be a consequence of the information controls being enacted at the level of platform moderation, or DNS resolution.
(I agree with you about authoritarianism in a political sense, but I'm trying to look at the informational "water" in which we're swimming in).
The mistake is in thinking that there is no need for an American (or Canadian, or EU) firewall. The reality is that either due to corruption or naivety, western countries let foreign information attacks and foreign propaganda spreads completely unchecked.
One could argue in the US that this was very useful to the new regime gaining popularity.
Semantics aside, there's an objective list of who bans or censors more, and it's not even close. Not by an order of magnitude. Source: the great firewall's existence.
This is interesting. I agree, to some extent, but there's nuance in what do you include in the objectification of the concept. The usual argument, as I perceive it, is that we can be objective if we just quantify protocol interference, or DPI, or bogus DNS resolution.
But still, not all blocks are born equal. That's a bit of beating around the bush to avoid going one level up in the abstraction of information controls. There's a thin line between content moderation at the platform level and mandatory hijacking of the DNS system via legal means.
If you squint, they are just a different configuration in the phase space of distributed technical systems, corporations operating in nation-states, and national laws.
In many European countries this still includes regulations for publishers - while social media are somehow excluded from these regulations (and that explains why society is in state that is now when lies are not confronted but amplified).
Yes. I was recently in Indonesia and shocked at how many high-profile sites are blocked at the DNS-level there, e.g. Reddit.
Is Reddit a great place? Eh. Is it critical to daily life in Indonesia? Of course not. But what I witnessed was censorship, full-stop.
I understand that the U.S. is not blocking TikTok at the DNS level. And that there are valid concerns over sharing user data and government influence over TikTok. But in my view, this is still censorship. Instead of allowing individuals decide whether or not to use TikTok, my government decided to ban it.
The whole argument over selling TikTok to a U.S.-based company is bullshit, imo. What kind of precedent is that? I use online services from all over the world, and in doing so decide to allow my usage to fall (to some extent) under the jurisdiction of that country.
Censoring is different to banning though. Banning in this case is the correct word to use, censoring isn’t. You can censor things on a platform, you can’t censor a platform entirely - that is a ban.
The censors in this case are Apple and Google, acting at the behest of the US Government. This news isn't about Tiktok censoring, rather about it being censored. Apple and Google are the platforms/publishers.
(There are also a whole host of other service providers that might be put into the position of being censors if Tiktok were to ignore the law and continue working for sidedloaded apps).
I agree with your linguistic point and the interaction of bias and ideology.
It's probably worth adding, though, that Libgen, TikTok, Porn and News Outlets would all be censored/banned/deliberately-excluded-from-culture-by-people-with-legitimate-power for different reasons.
I think TikTok and News Outlets would be the most closely aligned in this sense.
But that is precisely what I was talking about. You do not seem to find any commonality between censoring different categories of websites or apps. As far as I understand it, "media", "gambling", "porn", "politics" are quite common categories when researching (and defining) online censorship. See, for instance, https://censoredplanet.org/censoredplanet
You say "banned", but that is not quite the same as "censored". Just try and search, you will see the US "bans" and China or Iran "censor". Perhaps one regime's "censorship" is experienced as "lawfully banned" from within the context of their legal and cultural system.
And no, I don't see why would I keep my edgy observations to myself. That would be self-censorship :)
Because it isn't censoring. Censoring is selective removal of information. This is wholesale. The tiktok ban isn't even about suppressing information. If you search for e.g. the Moscow Times, you'll also find words like "banned", "declare illegal foreign agent" in the Western press. Censorship already applied to that news outlet, but after the feb 2023 offensive, the Russian state simply forbade the whole publication.
> You do not seem to find any commonality between censoring different categories of websites or apps.
The fact that they're different is important. Pornography is really different from journalism. Aversion against public nudity and sexual acts is deeply ingrained in many cultures, if not all. It also doesn't serve any democratic goal. Freedom of porn isn't a human right.
1. Libgen domains are "seized" - only the domains got seized, the website is still operational.
2. tiktok "goes dark", yes because it was an action of tiktok to go dark with the hope that they will be operational next week. Nobody banned them and even Biden said he would not enforce it so they could have simply do nothing and wait for the next week.
3. "censor" porn or news outlets, I think thats common usage.
Libgen domains are "seized", and tiktok "goes dark", but of course other countries "censor" porn or news outlets.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Press_Freedom_Index