♡ Charlotte Fang 🪲 Crown Prince ❀ LOVE HEALS 💞@CharlotteFang77
And yes, Bluesky, Mastodon, etc.’s distributed “anti-harassment” censorship is still censorship. “No you don’t get it, we’re not coercing anyone who believes anything deemed politically dissident by the government into silence. We’ve just classified all their views as abusive, harassment, and basically spam, which makes our coordinated suppression of your speech simply applying a flame/spam filter! And it’s not top-down moderation if we make a platform wide distributed spam filter we encourage everyone to opt-in to at the top level, until it grows to a size where our public inclusion of anyone who shares the wrong views (fuck it, or interacts with anyone who does) is meaningfully punitive on their reach. So you better self-censor if you don’t want your speech, I mean abusive spam, suppressed, but you better not call it that.” Cute except Timothy May called this line out in 1996—so you can rebrand censorship into whatever you’d like to fool FOSS devs, but calling it cypherpunk is not one you’ll win.