Is it censorship that the rules of chess say you can't poke someone's queen off the board? We're trying to play a particular game here.
Perhaps its one of those things that are hard to define. [1] But that doesn't mean clear cases don't exist.
> Is it censorship that the rules of chess say you can't poke someone's queen off the board? We're trying to play a particular game here.
No, but it is clearly political censorship if you only apply the unwritten and secret "rules" of the game to a particular political faction. Also, banning entire domain names is definitely heavy-handed.
I remember some words that succinctly express something I often observe. To paraphrase:
> Left-wing and Right-wing are terms which make a lot of people falsely believe that they disagree with each other.
It is worth trying to find common ground with people “on the other side”.
I mostly agree. I argued in an article [1] that it's only censorship if the author of the content is not told about the action taken against the content.
These days though, mods and platforms will generally argue that they're being transparent by telling you that it happens. When it happens is another story altogether that is often not shared.
[1] https://www.removednews.com/p/twitters-throttling-of-what-is...
You're dang right, trying to play a particular [rigged] game here.
The one that I think makes the most clear sense is "censorship" by a state power. But you must be thinking of something different, because HN is not a state power.
On the other hand, no single political or ideological position has a monopoly on intellectual curiosity either—so by the same principle, HN can't be moderated for political or ideological position.
It's tricky because working this way conflicts with how everyone's mind works. When people see a politically charged post X that they don't like, or when they see a politically charged post Y that they do like, but which we've moderated, it's basically irresistible to jump to the conclusion "the mods are biased". This is because what we see in the first place is conditioned by our preferences - we're more likely to notice and to put weight on things we dislike (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). People with opposite preferences notice opposite data points and therefore "see" opposite biases. It's the same mechanism either way.
In reality, we're just trying to solve an optimization problem: how can you operate a public internet forum to maximize intellectual curiosity? That's basically it. It's not so easy to solve though.