1. Platform‑level vs. government/ISP censorship – which is the “real” censorship?
- like_any_other: “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: “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.”
- howunfortunate: “I'd wager the vast majority of internet censorship is within platform, like that done by Reddit mods.”
2. Perceived trends: Is censorship increasing or decreasing?
- howunfortunate: “Twitter is unarguably far less censored than it was before … censorship in particular seems to be on the backswing, if anything.”
- geraneum: “It’s too soon for such a conclusion IMO. The pervasive Iran‑like censorship I was talking about will rear its ugly head when those authoritarian regimes are established.”
- ACCount39: “Multiple jurisdictions have tried to play the stupid games of 'we'll make a dumb fuck law that creates problems for you, the website operator, and if you don't conform, we'll sinkhole you at ISP level' … The 'age verification' push is a big move in that direction in Western countries.”
3. Difficulty of measuring censorship, especially internal moderation
- walrus01: “It doesn't measure censorship at what we would call layers 4‑7 in the OSI model. It's concerned with IP reachability and layer 3.”
- eigenspace: “If you count platform moderation as 'censorship' then there's practically no uncensored public spaces on the internet.”
- howunfortunate: “Depends on the platform. On Reddit, definitely yes, as almost all censorship is 'deletion style' … But your point is well taken, it's definitely more challenging and expensive than what's being done here.”