‘We Need 30 Different Words for Censorship”, Feat. Andreas M. Antonopoulos

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• Who are they censoring from and how do we unpack this manipulation?
• The rallying cry of the totalitarian is always “He farted first”
• Who gets to decide what is censored?
• The squeaky wheel of child pornography gets the attention, the much more insidious problem of silencing certain voices, or giving preference to other voices. 
• Propaganda goes hand-in-hand with censorship
• Propaganda is harder to detect ‘reverse censorship’
• Private platform curation have the right to moderate which can be interpreted as censorship.
• You have to choose if you’re a publisher or a platform
• What if AT&T listened to your phone calls, sold ads against them and disconnected you whenever you say something that would trouble sponsors?
• Common carriers vs. publishers
• FOSTA, SESTA and turning platforms into publishers 
• Crony capitalism will always co-opt government
• The only way to win is not to play
• The only way to not be coopted as a protocol is to have it not be owned by anyone.
• It may be impossible to be a platform if you’re not a protocol
• Information overload and compartmentalization
• Are the solutions that are being proposed the solution that we need to solve this problem?
• What kind of side effects does the solution have?
• It’s one thing to say “there are idiots out there who have not developed critical thinking and are easily swayed and we need to fix this” and a whole other thing to say “And that’s why only the landed gentry should vote”

• Do tech companies think they’re helping?
• Benevolent fascism is still fascism
• The public school system was never meant for the average person to be able to form their own opinion, “it is for factory men not philosophers”
• Manufacturing consent with the power to control, censor, frame, set up the base assumptions of belief and then seek to nail them down.
• A dictatorship of the mind is far more effective than a dictatorship of violence.
• If Let’s Talk Bitcoin! Were on Youtube, we wouldn’t be able to say the word Covid-19. Avoiding totalitarian controls means missing opportunities presented by big would-be platforms.
• Government surveillance vs. private surveillance provided to the government
• What we learned from Edward Snowden
• Does China commercialize surveillance?
• If both systems have produced the same outcome, is there much of a difference between them?
• A virtual prison camp
• Suppression of information does not translate to changing reality
• Biblical verses in the blockchain and 
• “A platform puts data out but search is editorialism”
• Phone numbers, the yellow pages, cocaine and liability
• Privacy, anonymity and another form of censorship
• We need 30 different words for different kinds of censorship
• Is it censorship when private companies do it?
• Where did the word censorship come from and what words should we be using?
• “The problem with censorship is not the content, it’s the person in which the control is vested”
• Is this worse because of growing polarization and partisanship?
• Was the internet free-er when nobody used it?
• Letters to the editor and platforms that amplify
• Even more insidious than censorship are the algorithms choosing what is seen and by who.
• Geographic boundaries vs. idealogical boundaries and the demise of newspaper monopolies on local discourse
• 5G and Coronavirus: Niche ideas wouldn’t propagate if censorship worked
• The Streisand effect, reach and survivor bias
• The influence that Google’s page-rank has on congressional primaries
• A generational divide in social media management skills and critical thinking
• Masks, conspiracy theories and narrative control
• Manipulating the wisdom of the crowds as manipulating the wisdom of society
• Censorship by private forces for profit and by government for state control, and the coalition of the two. 
• Censorship as controlling access to the publishing of information vs. controlling what is amplified vs. how much reach it has.
• A big difference is visible in implementation of severe consequences for speech
• The chilling effect of harsh penalties and being “disappeared” for speech
• Ostracism, state punishment or private corporate consequences
• What are your favorite words or terms for specific kinds of censorship? Send us an email at [email protected] 
• If you light your brainfarts on fire, is that flaring?

Listen/subscribe to the CoinDesk Podcast feed for unique perspectives and fresh daily insight with Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pocketcasts, Google Podcasts, Castbox, Stitcher, RadioPublica, IHeartRadio or RSS.