Censorship On Amiga.org...

[MarkTime]

I think people don't understand the word censorship.

They toss out ideas, such as that freedom of speech doesn't trump private property rights.

Well that isn't actually always true - private property rights in the United States are not always sacrosanct.

The problem here is 'censorship' is such a loaded word, that people dont' usually want to admit they censor.  But you do censor.  You censor yourself - you don't hall off and let everyone 'have it' if they make you mad, you temper your own responses.

You censor your children, you censor threads.

Yes censorship is not merely removing or deleting someones words but also - inhibiting speech.

Locking a thread to prevent it from going off topic, is censorship.

Now, is it the type of censorship we should object to?

Well the original poster actually laid out some smart argument as to why it might be - the number of people who participated in the thread, read the thread - what little actual harm it was causing.

And few people here have laid out any counter argument, just going off topic with your misunderstandings and musings about free speech issues.

Inhibiting speech will always be a form of censorship.  Some forms of censorship will always be allowed.

I think the original poster is correct.  Unlock the thread.   It's not my site - for those that are confused I'm not claiming a private property right - this is whats called an 'opinion'.

[MarkTime]

Just to give you further 'food for thought' why censorship does not require merely deleting or removing speech - but does include blocking speech -

consider this, the words were never deleted or removed.  But because new posts couldn't be added, it never again appeared at the top level of the site - that's inhibiting the ability to find the post.  It's 11,000 reads show popularity, but we all know this thread has been killed.  Without the ability to float back to the top level page and become a 'recent' it's going to die.

What if instead of deleting or removing any post, it was simply removed from amiga.org entirely and nobody could find it at all - or see it again.  

The mere fact that it exists on a hard drive somewhere, means its not censored?

Imagine a government agency, said you can't talk about politics unless you pay a $100,000 fee.   Is the fact that talking about politics is legal and allowed - mean no censorship occurred or did the fee have a chilling effect on speech?

Of course, it should be plain and obvious that locking a thread is censorship - the proper course of action is to defend the censorship.

The real counter argument is that by censoring the site, the overall quality of the site improves. (which is absolutely true - by deleting spam, by not allowing porn, by prohibiting discussion of illegal activity - the site is a higher quality site).

So did censoring this off-topic and tedious thread improve the site - that's the counter argument, if you ask me.

Denying the censorship, that is just either intellectual dishonesty, or just some kind of quick response that wasn't well thought out.