> Spotify seems to be intensifying its efforts to combat fraud with actions that could leave the door open to censorship.
Unless the government is planning to get involved somehow, censorship is the wrong word. Even setting that aside, though, it's hard to understand what that sentence might mean. Best guess is that the author means Spotify would remove spam. I can't imagine any justification for using a word like censorship to describe an action like that.
If the government openly pressures Spotify, that is government censorship, which is literally what just happened.
Second:
Because there isn’t a good alternative for distribution.
There really isn’t.
Because the press employs less people nationwide than any time since … who knows, before the 1950s.
We need good information. We need uncensored information and this includes misinformation. We need to hear opinions and points of view including contrarian, controversial, and fringe ones.
I got an something important out of that Alex Jones returns episode. No one else I know thought it had any value, but for whatever reason I saw value in it.
What is the uncensored alternative? Truly.
If cloudflare can shut down whoever they want, if social media shuts down whoever they want, what is the real solution?
If we don’t have an answer, we don’t have free speech, so talking about Spotify being a private company is true but it can’t be viewed in isolation.
> If we want to go down this route, then we could argue that every platform censors content. Hacker News censors content when it removes rule-breaking content.
Yes, that's true. But for most platforms, like Hacker News, that's not a concern, because they don't have that many users.
> The radio station down the road is censoring you because they won't play your music.
That's not really what censorship means, because the radio station only has limited time, and they have to choose what music to play. (This limit on time also creates competition: Since one radio station can't play everything, there will always be many different radio stations, they same isn't true for social networks.)
> there’s a goddamn paper trail of who asked for it and then the entity performed it
Wait, what? The government asked somebody to censor something and instead they made a copy of what was censored and made that available? If so, I'm totally fine with that and will make that my feed, but that's not how I read this - when the government asks for something to be censored, it's unavailable for anybody to see what it was or that it ever existed (that's the point of censorship after all).
Bit of a side issue, but that's an interesting statement, I've never heard that before. A quick google doesn't seem to back that up, so I wonder what I'm missing, or why you said that?
> I fail to see how this is censorship... They're not censoring content that you are able to access legitimately
Legitimately doesn't come into it.
censorship
noun
"the suppression or prohibition of any parts of books, films, news, etc. that
are considered obscene, politically unacceptable, or a threat to security."
> it's a private company doing the censoring and there's no issue with that
That's certainly not a universally agreed upon perspective. Just because you're a private company doesn't mean you can do anything you want (eg. discrimination), hence the existence of regulations.
How do you know? This is about Spotify's intentions, do you know them? Do they follow orders from, or are they pressured by gov't(s)?
And what about the eps that were removed, do they show a pattern as to what could by Spotify reasons for removing them?
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