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25 points by Bluestein 2 hours ago | 12 comments

Hmm.

I'd wager the vast majority of internet censorship is within platform, like that done by Reddit mods.

The most egregious example I've seen in my lifetime was when old Twitter decided to censor a NYPost article, down to blocking sharing in DMs.

It seems that type of example is entirely missed here. Is there any attempt to capture that signal?

eigenspace 21 minutes ago

If you count platform moderation as 'censorship' then there's practically no uncensored public spaces on the internet.

Literally even 4chan has moderation.

Nobody, not even 4chan users, want an actually unmoderated space.

zrobotics 12 minutes ago

4chan users might want that, but even for the types of people willing to operate a site like that they don't want to be liable for the amount of CSAM, piracy, and other legally objectionable material that would end up on a fully unmoderated site.

eigenspace 7 minutes ago

Deciding what is spam and blocking it is moderation or "censorship".

If 4chan didnt have spam filters, the users would be begging for it almost immediately because the website would become unusable.

like_any_other 14 minutes ago

You still want to know the extent of that 'moderation' that is totally not censorship. E.g. Facebook and Instagram ban white nationalism, and Youtube has banned American Renaissance, meaning we can infer Google bans white nationalism too, as American Renaissance is guilty of nothing else.

You may agree or disagree with the ban, but surely you agree that we should be aware of such Overton window enforcement.

Bluestein 44 minutes ago

As a thought exercise, could it be captured?

howunfortunate 41 minutes ago

Depends on the platform. On Reddit, definitely yes, as almost all censorship is "deletion style" where the target post or comment is initially visible until the mods suppress it.

But your point is well taken, it's definitely more challenging and expensive than what's being done here.

Bluestein 38 minutes ago

It would be one heck of a challenge, but, almost by definition "impossible" - as a naive guess, perhaps (for those platforms that have opened code) characterize some statistical signatures that "arbitrary data" ran through it (simulating user activity) would show ...

... and then check for those (or, counterexamples) in the wild.-

sandeepkd 10 minutes ago

I really wonder if anyone installs it on their machine. May be I am one off but I am Hearing about this for first time, don't recognize any of their partners.

piskov 37 minutes ago

> Measure the speed and performance of your network with the NDT test

This is very much in line with the likes of pokemon go, wiki landmark projects and what have you (those are nice things to have for autonomous drones/missiles to navigate only with vision when gps/cellular/starlink is actively blocked).

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Russia banned stuff like speedtest because things like that may help “map” the network, aid NSA to model malware propagation, etc.

Not that this should matter when you have cisco, dell, nokia hardware, but it won’t hurt either.

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I mean come on, some nuts even willingly install stuff like this: https://atlas.ripe.net/

like_any_other 49 minutes ago

The most pervasive censorship is who and what social media companies decide to block or suppress. Even in places like China. It's deliberately harder to measure, but any censorship measurement that omits it is like measuring war casualties, but ignoring those on the front lines.

geraneum 18 minutes ago

Not to minimize the impact of social media censorship, but one should really live in a country like Iran to grasp what pervasive censorship is. Most people born and raised in the relative freedoms provided in modern democratic systems have no clue what it feels like when you have such dictatorships. I say this because, looking at the current trends, we _could be_ heading in that direction, and the comparison is apt.