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

[Carsten Bormann <[e-mail]>]

On 2020-05-29, at 13:08, Niels ten Oever <[e-mail]> wrote:
> 
> This document does not say that every time such a technique is used, it is called censorship.

That’s not what the title suggests.

“Censorship techniques” to me strongly suggests it is about techniques specifically applied for censorship.  Maybe that misunderstanding is easily fixed, e.g. “techniques employed for censorship”.

> It also does not say whether it is right or wrong. 

Outside of a small set of people who have really thought about the problem (and probably even among those), “censorship” is a rather pejorative term; it always applies wrongdoing in common usage.

That is why it usually is reserved for state-controlled suppression of information, and typically only for those cases where that suppression is not necessitated by violation of other basic rights.

On 2020-05-27, at 01:56, Joseph Lorenzo Hall <[e-mail]> wrote:
> 
> entities adversarially messing with information flows is censorship

That is certainly not a definition that comes to mind among intellectuals in my country, many of which would have a hard time with categorizing, e.g., privacy laws under censorship (unless they are actually also employed for censorship, but I don’t want to open the whole can here).


I’m writing this because I think such a document is very useful, and I don’t want to see it devalued by terminology that will be seen by many as distorted beyond recognition by mindless activism.

Grüße, Carsten