Not GP but their mention brings to memory these HN discussion I had read years ago and the comments probably already have more than this thread will discuss:
She builds off of "requires more than just the temporary silencing or permanent removal of bad actors from social media platforms" with "Turn on by default the tools to amplify factual voices over disinformation". Whether deplatforming or "amplifying factual voices over disinformation" are seen as a good thing, they are censorship. She also mixes some good ideas in that (particularly platform algorithm transparency) of course.
Inherently by nature of existing no, but they can be easily implemented as such.
The censorship problems in the above are in the call to continue silencing/removals of political actors from discussion platforms and in pushing for centralized platforms to decide which political statements are factual. If you go an abstraction layer above that it gets too generic to universally claim as for censorship and if you go an abstraction layer below that it most often becomes an individual's choice.
Ad-blocking is turned off by default in most browsers.
Also basically no one wants to see ads, it is functionally useless, you can just go search for the thing you want to buy.
Censoring someone because you think they are harmful isn’t similar to this. You can develop a trump-blocker extension but having this enabled on default in a browser like chrome would be obvious censorship
> Whether deplatforming or "amplifying factual voices over disinformation" are seen as a good thing, they are censorship
this seems like an interesting, strongly-principled, almost legalistically pedantic twisting of intent - not that i can really claim to know her intent. what you call censorship can be reasonably understood as a cry against abuses of freedom of speech.
there are very clearly bad actors who profit from the abuse of freedom of speech, who argue in bad faith and spread misinformation in order to benefit themselves at all of our expense. not all speech is valuable, and a lot of it is harmful.
i'm not saying i have an answer, but a blind devotion to the principle of free speech (or any principle, really) necessarily comes with blind spots that people more cynical than you or me are capable of (and demonstrably very willing to) exploit. this world sucks.
I'm not posting that it should be seen as good or bad, just that's the prime example of the CEO calling for political censorship in a blog post someone was asking for a link to. As I said, even if one sees such actions as a good thing they are still censorship.
To me the main problem with the blog post was less the specific calls to action but the complete distraction from core technology, such as Firefox, Mozilla should have been focusing more on at the time. This is likely why the blog post ended up getting pulled - it served as a distracted from the mission more than it made any progress for it.
Sorry, didn’t mean to imply you felt one way or the other, just responding to the general idea. I guess freedom of speech and censorship are pretty inextricable. It’s an interesting dichotomy to roll around in your head.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29884342 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25690941
It looks like the blog post was taken down several months later, so I had to pull this copy to see what it was https://web.archive.org/web/20210108192114/https://blog.mozi...