No, moderation isn't censorship. Community moderation tools allow the users of the community to have control over what content their community sees. It gives them personal control over their feed and their attention. At the same time, the person that's being moderated can still say whatever they want and create whatever they want. Free speech doesn't mean the world has to see your content and read it, it means that the world can see your content and can read it if they want to. My front door is kind of a moderator. It keeps unwanted people out. If I allow you in, you can come in. And if you want to stand outside on the street and preach about why you think cats are superior to dogs, you can do so all night long, I just don't let you inside my house to do it. You win. You get to preach. I win. I don't have to hear it. Moderation works the same way. Censorship would be the cops arresting you in the street for speaking or a client banning you for posting.

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weev 3 months ago
This argument is antithetical to the entire history of free speech jurisprudence and common law. In Marsh v. Alabama, it was ruled (in line with all previous precedent) that privately owned roadways and sidewalks had to allow religious pamphleters, even though it is private property. The court asserted that anywhere that is the forum for public discussion is de facto allowed for political and religious speech regardless of property rights. In the very early days of the Internet things changed, when people tried to assert First Amendment claims on Compuserve chats. Compuserve claimed they weren't the public square, that they were a private service. I think they were correct, in that Compuserve was a very marginal private space and couldn't possibly have been "the public square". But precedent over this tiny service were eventually laundered into much larger and more critical bits of social infrastructure. In contrast to Compuserve, Twitter and Facebook are definitely the public square. You cannot petition for a redress of grievances or lobby for policy changes without using them. If Nostr is successful, it will also be the public square. And the political left delights in suppressing their opponents on them but files lawsuits claiming their rights are infringed when they aren't given access to every inch -- such as when they sued Trump for blocking them on his Twitter account: This hypocrisy must quickly end, or we as a country will end up in a violent conflict. There must be open, public debate on every major platform, and Americans must be entitled to express their opinions because the only other alternative is violence. Using this line of “it’s private property so nobody has to hear or see you speak” is a subversive lie propagated by international Jewish Communists who owned or otherwise controlled Internet companies via critical staff positions to be able to unilaterally censor criticism of them and their agendas regardless of popular will.