Web 2.0: Censorship

While the internet is still evolving technologically, it's obvious expanse is brought into question by governments concerned with it as a whole.

Before the internet we know now, there were Bulletin Boards that people would dial into to have discussions of share files. Physical Bulletin Boards as you should know are basically boards that exist in Academies, Institutes and even Offices for sharing general information with people that use those facilities. In essence a place to "Write on the Wall" to share with everyone else. (A nice lesson in Socialism I guess.)

Governments are getting to a point now where they realise that the writing on the wall is potentially listened to more than them and they are becoming threatened, so much so that there are a lot of public and clandestinely private decisions being made about the future of the internet.

This is of course slowly trickling down to even the running of this simple humble forum.

Notably a few rather brazen individuals who think it's neat to rebel against the moderators seemingly underestimate what is technically at stake. While they might complain about the "freedom of speech" and "liberties" that seem to be curbed on a "Privately owned" forum, they tend to neglect to realise that the very future of the forum itself could rest on what is and isn't censored here.

For instance if a Manual for producing a dirty bomb was published here (or a particular poster exercises anti-[insert xenophobia] views), nearly every government in every land would do their utmost to see the forum shutdown. If they can't shut it, they will block it where they can and the problem with blocking is that the companies that generate "blacklists" share this blacklist information with other people who initially weren't blocking, so before you know it an entire website becomes "shunned".

Basically the Moderators here on this website attempt to stop this site suffering these blacklists or blockades and when individuals "kick and scream" about their particular tantrum being deleted, I hope they will have enough intelligence to understand that it's not about them, it's about "US", it's about the Forum and all the other members that would potentially lose this place of discussion if too many boundaries were pushed.

So if you think the evil axis of moderators here are deleting posts, threads or otherwise banning people needlessly, please think that they are potentially working in the interests of keeping this website up and running. If you want to push boundaries, go hang out at wikileaks (I'm sure the government will collect your number).

 

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I got a PM today asking me change my user title which said in German that I am an antizionist as it is unacceptable and to change it to something which is not hate speech or antisemitism. Is antizionism now classified as hate speech? Is that why my thread on the topic was deleted?

As I already told Plazma if there is a problem with antizionism on this board, I would like to know, so I can avoid creating problems for the board. I don't think its too much to expect a civilised response from the admin or mods, is it?

Could we have a list of the censored topics so that we are not in breach of any TOS?

 

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I think that you of all people here who have been banned so many times, should know what most of them are.

 

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SAM, you have to remember this is a forum available to an international community. some of them are likely Zionists and they will likely be upset and cause problems is they feel the forum is at fault.

All your anti-zionist semantics for the most part means nothing to the Moderation team, we couldn't give a rats ass who you like or dislike as an individual or group, the only reason why you might think anyone does is because we are concerned with how it effects the forum as a whole.

(Btw, it was pretty poor taste to put it in German. The German government to my knowledge attempts to distance itself from the past atrocities as much as possible and this does for most part mean censorship of things that attempt to reignite old tensions. Your title would have been one such thing that would of stirred the pot.)

We want to try and maintain the forum to be open to as many people as possible without worry about one or other group complaining. We obviously conclude that a persons own views are their own, however the search engine companies and governments don't see it like this when they come calling. They see the allowance of one person shouting louder than others being the spokesperson for a site.

While it can be repetitively stated: "THIS ISN'T A BLOG SITE, it's a DISCUSSION FORUM" for those companies/governments that need to have that explained, they can pretty much tar it with the same tar (bigots).

As for:

quite simply we can't write one for you to follow, this list is constantly changing and technically it's a PC list meant to keep the forum live rather than be closed down for one or other reason. (We don't make the upper decision on what is "censored", that's what the governments and companies do currently. Ask them, Email google and the various governments and ask them "what is censored?".

 

Inconsistency

This is where people get confused. Zionism is a form of supremacism. Just like White Supremacism and male chauvinism.

Admittedly, Germany is in a particularly specific situation, but I'm puzzled at how its concern about past supremacism on a grotesque scale should bring it to endorse a new form of supremacism.

That's ... just ... strange.

Do we worry about Indonesia?

Clearly, Sciforums violates all sorts of blasphemy laws, but do we care if we, or our advertisers, are on the air in Indonesia. Obviously not.

Do we care if some radical finds out about us and decides to take action? Quite clearly, no.

It's not that I don't get the principle, but, rather, it seems inconsistent: We shouldn't be hard on a form of supremacism because it might upset the Germans; we shouldn't care about blatant Islamophobia because Muslims don't really matter.

 

So I assume I shouldn't state that I am anti-KKK. Some clan members might find it offensive, and we don't want to piss them off, do we???

And I am not even going to bring up my anti-stupidity viewpoints, because about 40% of the readership..... oh, nevermind..

 

There is more to this than simple anti-this or anti-that. There is also a long winding history in regards to some members requiring a rise through attention seeking... n/m.

 

I understand. Some of the this is more powerful/influental than the other that.

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Hmm lets see

I joined sciforums in Feb or Mar 2006.

I was banned for 'trolling' for 14 days for the first time on Sep 11, 2009 by James R as an experiment along with Buffalo Roam and pjdude - apparently we were too excited about world events and it was a way to cool us all down

Next I was banned for one month in Dec 2009 [forget exact date ] for refusing to apologise to James R over the issue debated in the James and Sam thread

I was then banned for six or seven days because James only read part of my post and decided I was threatening to kill a fellow member. After being reacquainted with the English language and the complete post by, inter alia, tiassa, madanthonywayne and GeoffP, James either reduced or rescinded the ban this was before the 30 day ban on edit: it was Dec 15.

There was a one day ban for some reason that I forget sometime this year or maybe it was a three day ban changed to a one day ban, I did not care too much by that time

There was a one day ban which lasted for less than 10 minutes today which was over my refusal to change my user title to something less offensive than a declaration of being antizionist

What, based on these "numerous" bans, are the censored topics on sciforums, according to you?

 

Or every other instance of nationalism in human history.