I block people on social media, which amounts to the whole internet. I also remove comments that link to websites I’m not familiar with. I don’t report content much, but i could see me doing that. For awhile TikTok had a feeling of pedophobia towards me which felt awful and I did report a video which was made on the premise that I’m a habitual child abuser. I always grew up to abhor censorship. I read banned books and focused on government overreach which in the US is hypocritical, I thought. I have never censored an entire book or piece of art. All this is preamble. The meat of this post is that online censorship sometimes amounts to steering your ship, so to speak. You guide your experience towards what you want. Nowadays bigotry has been split into a thousand taboos and the toxicity of anonymous can lead you to environments that are profoundly unhealthy. If you prevent a person from commenting on your site, video, blog post etc you are not preventing that person from posting in other places on the internet. Now ideally there would be no barriers and everyone could post any way they want anywhere. My mental health has become contingent upon success in various endeavors though and so I do restrict other people’s behaviors to achieve those goals. I do not issue fatwahs or have a list of banned books, but some people are not compatible with me and I block them in many forms from interacting with me. Perhaps this makes me a bad person, I am willing to admit that, and I strive towards freedom and prosperity. I want to legalize and regulate cocaine and heroin for goodness sakes! I am less than perfect though and when I decry censorship you can consider me hypocritical in various particulars.

The truth is that we all sometimes close others off from our lives in various ways for various reasons. If it comes down to something that matters, we all should attempt to overcome censorship and dissuasion. Discussing censorship at the level of moderation seems like a distraction though. I’ve just spent about 300 words on it and I failed to give you a single new idea. To me, that is disgusting. The New American Dollar could be an inherently volatile monetary system where occasional dollars are deleted from existence for the increase in value of all other NADs. There. There’s my new idea for this blog post. By far my biggest problem is self censorship by my lights. No hate to anyone, don’t be a bigot or fail to advance good ideas and stop being petty. That is all.