This is an overbroad usage of censorship, a term well suited for the physical world and far less nuanced for online content.
The physical world has very little in terms of sock puppet accounts, overloading channels with noise to crush the signal, without the expenditure of significant resources.
On the other hand Palantir was selling sock puppet administration tools back in the PHP forum era.
I have a million ways to ensure someone is not heard, which have nothing to do with the traditional ideas of censorship. The old ideas actively inhibit and mislead people, because the underlying communication layers are so different.
Dang and team, who run HN, has very few actual ways to stop bad behavior, and all of those methods are effectively “censorship”. Because the only tools you have to prevent harm is to remove content. This results in the over-broad applicability of censorship, diluting its practicality, while retaining all its subjective and emotional power.
The physical world has very little in terms of sock puppet accounts, overloading channels with noise to crush the signal, without the expenditure of significant resources.
On the other hand Palantir was selling sock puppet administration tools back in the PHP forum era.
I have a million ways to ensure someone is not heard, which have nothing to do with the traditional ideas of censorship. The old ideas actively inhibit and mislead people, because the underlying communication layers are so different.
Dang and team, who run HN, has very few actual ways to stop bad behavior, and all of those methods are effectively “censorship”. Because the only tools you have to prevent harm is to remove content. This results in the over-broad applicability of censorship, diluting its practicality, while retaining all its subjective and emotional power.