The internet has altered what it means to censor and what censorship is. I always grew up thinking of censorship as the silencing of voices unjustly, specifically by big forces like a government or religion. Now I think of censorship as the destruction of any content against the creator’s initial or considered wishes. I should expound on that. I believe and support self censorship and peer censorship. Scenarios when you want to hone a message or remove your message(from view or access or existence itself) are scenarios when censorship is legitimate. Peer censorship is when a person has an equal and that equal decides to censor something of that person’s creation. Community guidelines typically also censor bullying or harrassing, but those are vague and ill defined. Censorship should not even claim offensive and unproducctive speech in my view, but again, self and peer censorship is legitimate and who is your peer? I had a friend, once upon a time, who I recorded a conversation with and posted it on tiktok. When I toold him he over reacted telling me to delete it and post screen shots of its deletion. I did not, instead making it public. I guess I did it to chide him and because I’m a wiretapper. Friends fuck with each other like that. He cut off all ties and wrote me a dear john message describing a childhood experience he had where an elder had abused him and then used some recordings to blackmail my friend so that he wouldn’t tell ab9out the abuse. When he sent this message I took the video down right away and apologized, but the damage was done and we never spoke again. I wasn’t the person who abused him, but I am a wiretapper and I support all recordings as speech. We must reduce censorship’s role in oppressing us all.

The whole point of this blog, though, is that self and peer censorship are the only l4egitimate forms of censorship….. 🙂