Gatekeepers or Censors? How Tech Manages Online Speech

Having been censored multiple times by tech firms, I fall squarely into one camp.

During the Snowden Disclosures, I took to Facebook with the documents getting published and started to do my own summaries.

Facebook implemented a policy in which it would not let any post that contained a link to a Snowden Document. In some cases they would let the content get posted, but I confirmed with a friend's account that it was not visible when scrolling my feed from another account. Posts about other content were all visible and otherwise had no problems.

I complained and Facebook got back to me with a customer relations paragraph about keeping their platform free of unwanted or questionable content.

Not long after I discovered through media, and then some friends from Turkey, that what I experienced was identical to state sponsored censorship that Facebook extends to the Turkish government.

This lasted for close to the entire duration of public attention on the global and domestic surveillance scandal.

(Other links and content in other scenarios, for example May Day protest organization, was similarly blocked by Facebook - at least in Seattle for the organizers that I was in contact with).

I like the reddit and 4chan model. Content is clearly compartmentalized by topic with different rules for each subcommunity. Of course they are not totally free of moderation but it still allows a greater diversity of opinions with seemingly diametrically opposed groups existing side by side.

Many of the big social networks lack compartmentalization. On the other hand twitter demonstrates that it's not necessary, just helpful.

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In some ways i envy the governments that block facebook. The threat of blocking is the only thing that changes facebook's behavior, normally by causing them to implement censorship. But western democracies cannot block facebook, and so lack real power. Facebook may scream about burdens and taxes, but those arent a problem if you have customers. Saudi Arabia controls access to customers and so is more important than any western legislature.

This is central to what is going on with Bitcoin as well these days.

The main Reddit forum (r/bitcoin) is "heavily moderated" by a pro-Blockstream team with any mention of opposing implementations being censored.

Arguably, the control of this main platform is the only reason Blockstream, along with Greg Maxwell, today controls the Bitcoin Github repo.