[Trumpi]

> Is it censorship when your email provider removes spam?

No, but only in situations where it is user controlled. In other words, tools that empower a user to control what they read is not censorship. In the case of spam, false positives and false negatives can be addressed by the user by adding/removing email from a spam folder. If the user does not have this kind of control, then it can be argued that this is censorship because, after all, who decides what is spam?

If the publisher is prevented from publishing despite having an audience that wants to read them, that is censorship.

[josephcsible]

Exactly. If Alice wants to talk but Bob doesn't want to listen, it's not censorship to keep him from having to. But if he does want to listen, it is censorship to keep him from being able to.

[tmottabr]

yeah.. the problem is that you are forgetting about charlie...

Alice want to talk and bob want to listen, but they need charlie to grab tapes recorded by alice with what she said recorded on them and transport them all the way to bob so he can listen to whatever alice said in those recordings..

The problem is that charlie find alice to be assholes and do not want anything to do with her, and thus is refusing to transport the tapes she record..

Now, Alice can still record the tapes and she can even go and deliver the tapes herself and bob can listen to those tapes when he get those, but neither of then can force charlies to transport the tapes for them..

[insanitybit]

I've updated my post to address this. While some of that is in the user's control lots of this happens behind the scenes ie: AWS banning users of SES who send out spam emails, GMail banning the spam accounts, hosting providers removing domains or infra that host malware/C2 infra, etc. This is all happening constantly behind the scenes to stop what is very literally "speech", what might even be legally protected speech (certainly you can put the source code for malware online, you can even write and deploy malware - people do it all the time for pentesting).

[LordOfMeese]

"What if this entirely different situation that is in no way comparable, huh? Bet you didn't think about that, huh?"

[simplotek]

> No, but only in situations where it is user controlled. In other words, tools that empower a user to control what they read is not censorship.

That makes no sense. A paper supplier is not censoring anyone if they can't or won't provide printing paper.

You're somehow conflating not actively supporting a cause with censoring someone. It's ok if you feel yo have something to say to the world, but that does not give you the right to coerce everyone around you to support your personal project.

[snapplebobapple]

As an aside, this is only true if the paper supplier has no market power. Generally, if the next best supplier of paper is significantly worse than the one refusing to supply you then yes, they are definitely censoring you.Your position is correct in a competitive market because there are lots of other sellers willing to give the same terms but in the real world it's mostly oligopolies and monopolies with significant market power across broad swaths of the economy who definitely can suppress speech by choosing to not do business with someone.

[Trumpi]

> You're somehow conflating not actively supporting a cause with censoring someone.

No, I'm merely making the argument that spam control tools are not censorship because the user decides. I'm not sure how the paper supplier fits in to this argument. Perhaps it is a good analogy for the original topic.