That isn't the reality of moderation. Often moderation effectively acts as a form of censorship, and the two work together. Often moderators either power trip or misunderstand the situation and allow bad actors to abuse the rules to their advantage to have people shut out of the group.

This happens, btw, when there are the most rules and heavy-handed moderation. Places that are less moderated, this rarely happens because people will directly call this behaviour out and the moderators are only intervening on important stuff, e.g., threats of violence, illegal material, etc.

Those sounds like largely unrelated concepts that just happen to overlap somewhat in practice, and are also very individual. As a private person I don't lose anything at all by not using social media, but if I owned a local pizza shop I'd be losing a ton of business by shunning hat avenue of advertisement.

Personally I think the most useful definition for censorship in the context discussed here is *government* censorship. A company offering a product isn't forcing you to engage with it, even if it is a benefit to do so. You cannot in any way evade the oversight of your government without risking criminal penalties. Amazon can deny you their services. The government can deny you your life and freedom.

It's why the 1st Amendment protects us again government control of speech and assembly, but not the censure and pressure of our peers.

> can have online discussion without moderation

That's a big negatory.

>you publish on your site,

And your site gets a takedown for illegal content, or cops show up at your door and drag you out while beating you.

Life is heavily moderated in a million different ways. What we're talking about this point is just moderation or unjust moderation.

Yeah, that's not going to solve twitter, facebook, instagram, etc.

I'll make my position clear: many parties try to influence people, and quite a few of them do so with grave consequences. The swing to extreme right politics cannot be seen separate from internet interference. In the words of the article: it's already not "technology serving people", but rather "controlling" them.

If extreme right (or left) parties come to power, your freedom of speech and privacy is over. So it's either moderate moderation, or authoritarian moderation. And if it's up to me, it's not your choice.

What if the democratically elected government is emailing their pals at the platform owners to do the censoring on their behalf?

"The family had a lot of buffers."

Because this was definitely happening during COVID.

Platforms naturally coalesce into near monopolies due to network effects. It's far easier to get rid of a government than it is to get rid of something like Youtube at this point.

“simply go to another platform” stopped working years ago when Apple took it upon themselves to decide which platforms you are allowed to install.

RIP Tumblr

"Democracy Just Werks^tm" is starting to look like "The Free Market will solve it" more and more with each passing day...

20 years ago I heard "I'd rather China than Google" and I still think about it often

Ok Elon