Literally noone could have seen this coming. /s
edit: XCabbage better explains what I was trying to say. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21191253
Of course it's not, but you're missing the point. They're simply taking advantage of this incoherence in the current western value.
No, it’s using good old greater-pile-of-money diplomacy. SJWs aren’t running around rooting for Xi. This is a company with major economic exposure to China bowing to censors’ wills.
Saying it didn't make it true. Do us all the favor of a more convincing argument.
Besides, are we really talking about censorship in "the East"? Blizzard is based in California.
Tiananmen square is an immediate and obvious pick. People who publicly referenced the events of Tiananmen square were not allowed to interact with China on a business level. If Hearthstone had existed back then and the streamer had mentioned Tiananmen square, Blizzard would (I think) have taken exactly the same approach as they did today. There's no co-opting of Western politicking here.
> Besides, are we really talking about censorship in "the East"? Blizzard is based in California.
Blizzard is heavily integrated with Tencent in China. The actions they took are to preserve that relationship. Ergo the censorship of China is what we're looking at here - without it this event would not have occurred.
Since 20th century, isn’t it? Or are there any historical sources confirming that political censorship across provinces of China under Qing dynasty was comparable to the one currently under CCP?
When tomp says that China coopted the machinery of censorship laid by SJWs for its own purposes, he's entirely correct.
> Engaging in any act that, in Blizzard’s sole discretion, brings you into public disrepute, offends a portion or group of the public, or otherwise damages Blizzard image
They're saying that cancel culture has normalized private sector political censorship in the west prior to this, making it a smaller reach.
The $ considerations are certainly there in all cases.
I note that the exact phrase "offends a portion or group of the public" has only ever been used in Blizzard's rules as far as I can tell (you can use a date-filtered Google search to confirm; prior to today there are only a handful of results, all Blizzard-related). So at the very least, they didn't lift it verbatim from sports contracts. If there used to be equivalent language in sports contracts a decade ago, I'd like to see it.
Now I state for the record that I know these are the censorious actions of a private firm, not those of the USA federal government. It is of course possible to value speech outside a strict 1A framework. In previous decades, many Americans did so value free speech.
'Cancel culture' may not be censorship in its technical definition, but isn't that effectively what it's achieving? A comedian, for example, tweets some half-baked remark that some (loud minority) find offensive. Of course, they do respond to this negatively but the media also runs with it and this group of loud people call for the cancellation of shows, appearances, and sometimes even call for the firing of the person.
You are correct in that this person, even after all of this, has outlets and ways to practice their freedom of speech - but it's essentially sending other people a not-so-subtle sign that there are certain things they simply shouldn't say, lest they would like a twitter mob aimed at them.
Occasionally, older public remarks are even dug up by journalists and used to smear the character of those people who made the remarks today. There needs to be some form of restitution, but one currently does not seem to be well defined.
1. Kaepernick wasn't fired. He simply wasn't signed by anyone team after his contract with the 49ers ended.
2. It's a matter of factual controversy whether his treatment by the NFL was affected by his advocacy at all. As far as I know, no manager has explicitly admitted to making different choices about how to deal with him based on his kneeling.
3. It was never suggested by anybody that Kaepernick's kneeling might be a breach of his contract.
4. Kaepernick was not denied his pay for matches he'd already played in as a consequence of his kneeling.
Assuming I am correct on the facts, there is, at the very least, a significant difference in degree between that case and this one. Do you claim that anything I say above is wrong?
It also seems relevant here that basically all coverage I saw of Kaepernick's case - from the nearly-exclusively right-wing commentators I follow - was harshly critical of the minority on the right who were calling for him to be punished. By contrast, I have never seen anyone on the left criticise speech codes or corporate censorship. I do not think it is reasonable to try to draw an equivalence between the right and left on these issues by comparing the positions of a minority on the right, heavily criticised by other right-wingers, with the position of an unchallenged hegemony on the left. There is a real asymmetry here, both in terms of what the majority position of each coalition is and the extent to which they actually punish the speech they disfavour in practice.
As long as you get people fired from their jobs for having the wrong opinions about social issues in the US, you have no right to demand that companies not censor what the Chinese censors dislike. Now do you realize the value of free speech as a general principle?
Moreover, my above comment is grayed out right now as some people downvote it. Let's all think about that irony for a moment.
And I'd like to add that the deal with Kaepernick isn't that no team would sign him. It's not even if it was due to his political stance. Kaepernick's entire beef was whether or not the league was colluding to keep him from being signed.
To put it as simply as I can: It's ok that teams like the Patriots who don't need a quarterback didn't sign him. It's ok if a team didn't sign him because of his opinions. It's ok is no team at all wants to sign him.
What isn't ok is if hypothetically the Browns and the Bills agree that neither will sign Kaepernick. You don't even need all 32 teams in on it, 2 would have been enough.
Censorship is the simple act of not allowing someone to say something.
Companies censor all the time. Movie studios. Recording companies.
I've noticed this trend with people, they identify something as negative, in this case censorship, and then they try and contort definitions to excuse their involvement in it. Because that's a bad thing and they're good people and good people don't do bad things.
I'm going to come in with a hot take: censorship isn't inherently bad. It just is. Censorship can be used to focus discussion on what's important. To keep garbage out of discourse. Those are good uses of it. Yes, it can be used to simply silence dissent. That is a bad use. But just because it can be used in a bad way doesn't make it bad itself.
How do you figure that cancel culture isn't defacto censorship? Deplatforming somebody because you don't agree with their viewpoints is absolutely censorship in a moral sense.
Calling people "childish" who don't agree with you is a weasel tactic. Those tactics should invalidate the whole argument, but for some reason they don't. Make the argument without the weasel tactics if you want people to listen.
> The USOC issued an apologetic statement condemning the athletes’ “untypical exhibitionism,” which violated “the basic standards of good manners and sportsmanship, which are so highly valued in the United States.” [0]
Morals clauses for athletes have existed since for athletes at least 1922, according to Wikipedia [1].
Also, there's an argument to be had over the unbacked assertion that "SJWs" were the reason behind the "offends a portion or group of the public", as opposed to, the actual thing that that clause is now being used to punish. You know what else happened around the same time as the "SJW era"? China becoming a world-dominant economic and political force.
[0] https://www.outsideonline.com/2402740/john-carlos-tommie-smi...
Seems strange for the NFL to risk a First Amendment controversy with that rule if the NFL were truly unperturbed by Kaepernick's advocacy.
You have this reversed. Blue checkmarks learned these tactics from the original Maosists and Stalinists.
Unless you're saying that you have an issue with free association as well.
Is your argument so weak that you have to just lie?
The point was that “ China is co-opting modern liberal censorship” to advance its agenda.
That’s simply not the case. One is driven by mass outrage—bottom up. The other by central diktat—top down. They’re separate and unconnected vectors.
The default response to any problem is now censorship and banning. We've trained corporations to take the easiest path and never stand up for speech or unpopular views being pushed on their platforms.
This idea that we can easily define was is 'not okay' to say on the internet from a rational leftist perspective and expect it all to just work out in the end is laughable and constantly being proven wrong.
These same left leaning people would never hold this sort of trust in big institutions to make these decisions in any other case. It's actually scary that so many people are so happy to throw the baby out with the bathwater to serve some political ends.
There's a very good reason ACLU defended the right for neo-Nazis to protest in the streets for decades (including their work allowing Charlottesville to happen). Precedent matter.
Blizzard et al should have taken a stand against regulating the speech of their customers private lives long ago. And I'm not talking about forum moderation in individual communities which has its own rules of civil discourse.
This strategy of demanding proof for something that is easily discoverable through any simple google search ("history of censorship") is such an exhausting argumentative tactic.
The Chinese view of ownership is that the CCP ultimately owns everything. For instance there are no land deeds in China, just rental agreements from the party. Tencent, as one of the largest telecommunications companies in China is very much an adjunct of the CCP.
Don't accuse someone of lying just because you don't understand the underlying facts.
No it isn't. That is to say, censorship and banning are less of a problem now than they've been at any other time in US history.
We have something special here where we can make a stand and protect our internet celebrities the same way we have if it wasn't on the internet. Far too many people are cynically willing to give it up either for political ends and ignore the early censorship by nation states believing both would be contained within a manageable subset and won't be both broaded used against legitimate dissents or openly abused to silence ideological opponents.
This is the natural and predictable outcome, the conditional free speech policy thing doesn't when it faces the reality on the ground.
And as I've said multiple times today this has nothing to do with how discourse is moderated on internet forums. The rules of civil discourse in individual communities is much more flexible than defining it purely on the loudest complainers political redlines.
No it isn't. This is alarmism.