Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

Have you ever thought you might be wrong? Go and talk to the nearest non-technical person you can find and ask them whether they’d consider it censorship. It seems you’re in for a surprise.


I don't see the relevance of how the average person might respond. People associate the term "censorship" with badness, and thus react with cognitive dissonance when an idea that they like is characterized by an appropriate technical term that has negative connotations. I suspect this is exactly what's happening here - I've basically made some pretty dry analysis based on a straightforward definition, while you've reacted with a larger pro-third-party-filtering (ie censorship) narrative that goes way beyond anything I said.


Cambridge Dictionary:

> censor: to prevent part or the whole of a book, film, work of art, document, or other kind of communication from being seen or made available to the public, because it is considered to be offensive or harmful, or because it contains information that someone wishes to keep secret, often for political reasons.

Miriam Webster definition:

> to examine in order to suppress or delete anything considered objectionable

If I automatically delete content merely because I think you won’t be interested in it, I don’t see how that counts as censorship under the standard dictionary definition.

That said, you are of course entitled to your own opinion of what the word means. But please don’t be surprised if I think you sound a bit melodramatic suggesting that Google is carrying out censorship by automatically deleting emails offering me cheap viagra, especially when I can still see these emails by clicking on a link or reconfiguring the rules.


Your second definition doesn't even invoke a third party (it claims even more than mine), and your first definition only differs in that it references some motives. But motives are a bit of a red herring in the day of probability-based filtering.

I've never claimed "Google is carrying out censorship by automatically deleting emails offering me cheap viagra". You're the one that keeps invoking such hyperbolic strawmen - the original topic was the surprise blocking of text messages.


Honestly, I have no idea what you _are_ trying to say at this point. Something something censorship is all I'm getting. And long words like cognitive dissonance.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: