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> It's not just Europe. DMCA takedowns in the US: no liability for taking down innocent content.

Isn't it under penalty of purjury?

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Only in theory. If I remember correctly, the "penalty of perjury" is applied to only some small part of the claim, which makes it easy for all but the most blatantly malicious claims (and possibly even those) to get off scot free by claiming a honest mistake.
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Isnt taking down illegal content censorship?

If not you can get around the absolute statement “censorship is always bad” by just making more things illegal.

I think censorship is so clearly good in some scenarios that we would never think to even debate it. Like child porn.

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Anything you want to censor has at least 5 stages:

Creator, first share (direct), second order sharing (public-ish website), third order sharing (indexed resharing), and finally the consumer wanting it presented.

In the way there are things we clearly want to censor for being awful, there are things we must never allow to be censored. Eg the holocaust.

But the solution kind of rights itself. To censor something you need as many actors as possible in that enormous graph of sharing nodes to clearly want to censor that thing we all agree we clearly want to censor. I.e. a public library doesn't censorship child porn because they are required to.

> Isnt taking down illegal content censorship?

So yes this can be called censorship by some definition, but i'd call it uninteresting.

We only actually care about the censorship beyond the natural baseline.

Censorship, usually, means the extraordinary request for powers to control the web of communications.

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Just to be sure to point out the obvious here, I think the main police effort should be on catching the sources of such material. There is the root problem. In a world were we’re ruled by Epstein friends, this is probably not gonna happen though
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>Just to be sure to point out the obvious here, I think the main police effort should be on catching the sources of such material.

Uhhh how about both? It is vital the material be taken down as well.

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Enforcement budget is limited. If you have $1, would you rather spend it to fight crime, or to chase whatever gets distributed online?
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Sure, but let's prioritize catching actual criminals, right? Somehow US started completely ignoring the actual criminals and demanding platforms to play police and not try to punish the actual sources of lawbreaking.
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I think they should catch the criminals as well, like I already clearly stated. They just aren’t mutually exclusive.
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How do you know if something is child porn?
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I dont think it matters for the point im making. Child porn exists and should be censored.

What are you suggesting?

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I think the point they might be trying to make is that there are religious and socially conservative groups that intentionally misclassify anything even remotely related to LBTQ topics as “pornography” so that anti-pornography laws can be used to silence anyone and anything that opposes their regressive views on sexuality, as one example. So it is a line that must be tread carefully.
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Ah thanks that makes sense. And it indeed does not matter to the point Im making, which is some censorship, such as child porn, is good.

People can disagree on what that means, although I think there are some very obvious examples. Unless you think NOTHING called child porn should be censored because it might not actually be child porn, you can see how its a non factor.

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It matters because if you can't determine if something is child porn, then you'll end up overblocking, so it doesn't matter if it "exists" and "should be censored"
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But my point is some censorship is good. Such as child porn. We can disagree on what constitutes child porn in practice but you arent saying nothing should be censored right?

You do think there is such thing as child porn right? And that it should be censored?

Im not claiming more censorship is better. So I agree it could be overapplied. Im saying some censorship is clearly good.

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soon with the age verification laws, the mass surveillance laws coming

we'll have a great wall of Europe ... my guess is that they're following the Russian / Chinese model.

banning of VPN is a matter of time.

then the days of free or anonymous internet is behind us.

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> censorship is bad. Always.

Sure! Great slogan! Who can disagree! Now, let's define the terms?

What's censorship? Don't we all want some sort of censoring of content? If someone doxxxes me, posts revenge porn of me, threatens me and my family with credible threats of harm, shares my credit card numbers and bank/Bitcoin/Ethereum accounts, uploads all 400 of my password credentials and my mobile phone#, posts videos of them strangling my dog, wages a campaign to redefine my personal name into a perverted sexual practice...

Aren't those the sorts of things where we encourage the censorship of content? Do those fall outside of our definition of the term, so that "censorship" is bad, but "moderation" is good?

If someone gets a hold of "F/OSS" software and distributes it contrary to the licensing and violates that licensing, do we want their distribution censored or suppressed or, what's the term for good censorship? LLMs and generative AIs are moderated/constrained as a matter of course, and we've got the entire board here in an uproar over too much moderation, or too little? Because AI Slop Is Ruining Everything and please rein it in?

Our Founding Fathers espoused "Freedom of Speech, Freedom of the Press, Freedom of Religion" but is that an unbounded, unchecked, lasseiz-faire freedom that they envisioned, or were there boundaries?

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If you want to talk in the american context, its not like they wrote the constitution yesterday, there is hundreds of years of juriprudence on the issue.

To be sure its not an easy question, but we aren't starting from zero here.

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Rick Santorum was a public figure, his name is fair game.
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It only took 13 minutes for an account to bulls-eye exactly the incident I was referring to.

Sure, "fair game", whatever, how can you "censor" a grassroots parody/mockery like this? Part of the game was, it wasn't actually stoppable in any meaningful fashion.

It seems rude, unethical, puerile even, to do this name-calling and dragging through the mud, if you will, and it was perpetrated/spearheaded, so to speak, by a journalist whose morals and platform encouraged that sort of tactic.

I don't think "censorship" was a solution to that incident, and since Mr. Santorum was a politician then "fair game" is a meaningless circumscription.

But perhaps the whole episode should reflect more on the character of the originator, rather than the target?

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