Censoring Social Media

Summary

In mid-April we learned about Bluesky censoring accounts as demanded by the government of Türkiye. While I haven’t seen coverage of who the account-holders were and what they said, the action followed on protests against Turkish autocrat Erdoğan for ordering the arrest of an opposition leader — typical behavior by a thin-skinned Führer-wannabe. This essay concerns how we might think about censorship, its mechanics, and how the ecosystems built around ActivityPub and ATproto can implement and/or fight it. That link above is to TechCrunch’s write-up of the situation, which is good. There’s going to be overlap between that and this but neither piece is a subset of the other, so you might want to read TechCrunch too. Censorship goals and non-goals · How, as the community of people who live and converse online, should we want our decentralized social media to behave? I’m restricting this to decentralized social media because the issues around censorship differ radically between a service owned and controlled by a profit-seeking corporation, and an ecosystem of interoperating providers who may not be in it for the money. So, from the decentralized point of view, what should be the core censorship goals? As Mencken said, “For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.” Here are two of those: No censorship. Let people say what they will and the contest of ideas proceed. Freedom of speech must be absolute. Suppress any material which is illegal in the jurisdiction where the human participant is located. Stop there, because making policy in this area is not the domain of of social-media providers. “Free speech”? · The absolutists’ position is at least internally consistent. But it has two fatal flaws, one generic and one specific. In general, a certain proportion of people are garbage and will post terrible, hateful, damaging things that make the online experience somewhere in the range between unpleasant and intolerable, to the extent that man...