Re: [Pearg] Research Group Last Call for "A Survey of Worldwide Censorship Techniques"

[Niels ten Oever <[e-mail]>]

On 5/29/20 12:48 PM, Vittorio Bertola wrote:
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>> Il 28/05/2020 12:23 Niels ten Oever <[e-mail]> ha scritto:
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>> I don't think it is, it is a descriptive term. The study of censorship regimes is a whole field in political science and communication. With 'censorship regimes' one does not mean authoritarian regimes, but every authority that sets rules, cultural or social norms on the limitation of the dissemination of information. 'Good taste', for example, is also a censorship regime. 
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> Unfortunately, this is not how the word "censorship" is used outside of that small circle, and it is not how it will be perceived by people in the broader Internet governance environment when reading this document. 

What is you method of knowing how the term is understood in 'the Internet governance environment'? Are the authors not part of that as well? Seem quite a big claim to make.

There seems to be a clear disconnect in the perception of these terms between different audiences. So, to avoid misunderstandings, the document could rather just focus on describing techniques for content access control and removal without calling them names.
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>> Il 29/05/2020 12:14 Lars Eggert <[e-mail]> ha scritto:
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>> I don't know who "we" here is, but there are certainly many cases where domain names have been seized that *some* consider censorship. For example: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/09/cat-domain-casualty-catalonian-independence-crackdown
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> That's exactly the problem: mention that in this document as "censorship", and the document will (or, at least, will appear to) be a declaration of support for those that think that that behaviour is censorship, against those that think that it is not censorship (which include the national Spanish government and the European Union). We can try to tell the Spanish government that we are using "censorship" in the strictly academic sense of "enforcement of court rulings on online content", but I don't know how well this would fly.
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This document does not say that every time such a technique is used, it is called censorship. It also does not say whether it is right or wrong. 


-- 
Niels ten Oever
Researcher and PhD Candidate
Datactive Research Group
University of Amsterdam

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