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orbat  ·  2262 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: It's the (Democracy-Poisoning) Golden Age of Free Speech

Great article. I've been thinking around the same themes lately, and one thing that stuck out was the argument that banning someone from e.g. Facebook isn't as close to censorship as "meddling with trust and attention." While I absolutely agree that these new tactics powered by behavioral data really do amount to censorship, I'd say that the big platforms have such a disproportionate impact on our lives that bans are effectively censorship; just because someone can still access the Internet doesn't mean a unilateral Google or Facebook ban couldn't have a tremendous impact.

The simplest case would be a political dissident getting banned from Facebook, but it doesn't have to be anything that "foreign" to most of us. Many of us are completely reliant on the megaplatforms for data storage, mail, calendars, communication and so on; our lives are increasingly digital, and whoever serves your digital life to you is the one holding the reins