Does the Internet Route Around Damage? – Baltic Sea Cable Cuts

By the way, the original adage from John Gilmore ("The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it") was referring to a behavior of Usenet rather than of the Internet. In particular, if articles didn't reach a node by one path, the node would still accept that they were missing (according to Usenet routing rules) and accept those articles from a different path. Thus, one could not prevent Usenet messages or newsgroups from reaching most of Usenet merely by deleting or not forwarding them on a single node. Another way of putting this is that the connectivity of Usenet was (in general though not everywhere) a web rather than a tree, and the Usenet software didn't assume that messages had to be forwarded along some particular path, if another path was available.

As with Jon Postel's maxim (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robustness_principle) people have also subsequently applied this to human behavior, not just the behavior of particular software.

There were ultimately more technically sophisticated means of censorship available on Usenet that were somewhat more effective.

It turns out that flooding your own lies is far more effective than trying to censor information.

A counter point to this adage in modern times is that censorship seems to spread as a result of users sharing content across platforms with varying levels of moderation. I've seen many examples of "shorts" being shared on FB or Instagram which originated from TikTok and which feature heavy use of either euphemism (eg. "unalived" instead of "murdered") or even explicitly silenced language.

Platforms which do not heavily moderate content will nonetheless still have heavily self-censored content as a result of users being conditioned by other platforms into self-censorship.

I thought Gilmore was referring to the earlier idea that the Internet could survive a nuclear war. https://www.wired.com/story/h-bomb-and-the-internet/

Yep. The internet is an infinite copy machine. All you have to do is copy the lies an order of magnitude more than the truth, and Bob’s your uncle (whether you’re related to Bob or not).

I don't think there would have been a straightforward way to connect that to the effects of censorship.

I have started quoting the robustness principle when people ask me what my politics are.

The robustness principle is really just another way of stating the Golden Rule.

The crime of polluting information to control it was perhaps the most unforgivable sin of our Information Age.

"interprets damage as censorship and..." where these terms are being treated as equivalent

Made possible in turn by giving safe haven for user content on the big social networks. Turned out to be a double edged sword.

When Rupert tried to lie about voting machines, he was fined couple of hundred mils. All the social networks mouthpiece accounts spouting nonsense suffer no repercussions whatsoever.