A German ISP changed their DNS to block my website

I would. Appetite for censorship should be measured against something I find unpalatable. When one starts down the road of making decisions for others - it is only a question of time before someone does the same for you with possibly a different perspective. The moment one finds themselves outside the groupthink on spaces vs tabs, I'd like that bar to be as far away as possible.

> The moment one finds themselves outside the groupthink

The RT ban is not about what RT publishes, you are free to publish their arguments more or less verbatim on your own site without getting sanctioned in Europe (which indeed some people do). The RT ban is about RT being a state owned propaganda network owned by the government thats waging an active war against Europe.

>I would. Appetite for censorship should be measured against something I find unpalatable.

In your country if say some public TV would publish hard core porn mid day for children to see, would there be consequences? like fines and license removal? I am sure in civilized countries that TV station will be punished.

Now imagine you have a Ruzzian TV station publishing hard core porn for children to see, how to you punsish them without paid trolls claiming censorship ? Because this si what happens, in Romania Romanian TV station need to respect the Romanian laws , liek for example pay fines and retract any falsehoods and mistakes, but Ruzzians can publish fake documents and videos and if we want them to respect the laws of our countries we it is censorship... blocking faked documents is bad, blocking boobs is good in the land of the free

> In your country if say some public TV would publish hard core porn mid day for children to see, would there be consequences? like fines and license removal? I am sure in civilized countries that TV station will be punished

rt hasn't done this and there are concrete laws against doing this, if rt violated them, they would/should fined/suspended, it's really that simple, do you have any real examples of illegal things they've carried out?

and if you're implying that extrajudicial measures are the only effective method to deal w/ situations like these, then there's an issue w/ the laws

just because censorship is carried out against a cause you don't like, doesn't make it justified, since it's very likely to be used in less benevolent ways in the future

> The RT ban is about RT being a state owned propaganda network owned by the government thats waging an active war against Europe.

And ... ?

I don’t think your porn comparison works because normally what happens is governments set rules about what content can be shown at what times. In the UK, we call it the “watershed”.

Setting limits on what content can be shown at what times isn’t censorship because you’re not actually censoring content. What you’re doing is setting rules about scheduling content.

Right, but as long as you wage genocide against non-Europeans then Europe will not only support you, but will go after the people protesting it. That's the morals of European leaders today.

So why haven't we banned Israeli news sites and companies for their war/genocide in Gaza?

It is similar to the problem of pornography online.

If you are a parent, it is your responsibility to watch your kids and install a porn filter on their computer / tv / phones. It is pointless to have websites to verify that you are old enough, as there always be websites from abroad who will not respect the law, and it forces you to leak your identity (who becomes tied to your IP address).

If you are not happy with propaganda, it is your role and the role of schools to educate people around about how to consume information and look with a critical view.

What you actually need is to have a feature on iPhone / Android (and on the home Wi-Fi) to block porn and that parents can enter a pin-code to unlock that, if you consider this is non-acceptable in your family.

Do you think allowing an enemy state free reign to broadcast propaganda to your population makes good tactical sense?

Because Israel is not engaged in a war against Europe.

Freedom of speech rarely makes "tactical sense", which is why we as citizens need to continually fight for it.

If there's nothing wrong with what is being said, then why should it matter who says it? Does propaganda somehow gain effectiveness because it comes "from the source"?

This is inconsistent with the upthread argument:

> The RT ban is not about what RT publishes, you are free to publish their arguments more or less verbatim on your own site without getting sanctioned in Europe (which indeed some people do).

Propaganda affects everyone, not just kids. It even affects people with university studies but who have given up thinking for themselves. The problem is that they authorities are banning websites, while social media is riddled with propaganda. They claim to do something which clearly doesn't work.

The Internet used to be cool in the '90 when it wasn't regulated and Meta, Google and Tiktok didn't exist. Now it's all ads, propaganda and hate speech.

Every person and institution have a limited number of flips to give

My GAF meter is pretty low for anti-secular groups that shot first. And their own neighbours who were "supposed" to be their allied seem to think the same

Some people really do not need their holidays north of Seoul prevented

Sanctions are about impinging others freedom because they’re behaving badly.

“Why can’t I play with the kid who is in timeout? Is it because you hate my freedom?”

Russia has attacked Ukraine. Not Europe.

Neither Ukraine nor Israel is part of EU or NATO.

I would think that enforcing economic sanctions would be a far more effective use of time and effort.

If you believe in any kind of system of morality, it's absolutely possible for one's own government to be in the moral wrong and the enemy government to be in the moral right. Censorship means the citizens may never learn that their country is the bad guy in that case.

Apart from the fact that you seem to be equating a whole people with one group, you also seem to conveniently not realize that the government committing the genocide is a non-secular messianic one, with a deep seated belief of the superiority of their own religious group over any other, but particularly feel themselves superior to the people they occupy for decades, who of course despite them being occupied are always supposed to find compassion and understanding for their occupier first, otherwise the occupation cannot end, right?

There were and are plenty of reasonable groups one could work with, but the genocide is about grabbing land, asserting dominance and exacting revenge, while feeding a victimhood complex that is never able to acknowledge its own mistakes.

There is a difference I think between unpalatable content (that you disagree with, that you find incorrect, and so on) and content generated with the specific purpose of deceiving the reader.

I used to be a hardline freedom of information defender, but we must face the fact that humanity has become way too good at manufactoring opinions and even facts. We're exposed to this threat at all levels, from your local company invading your feed with hidden ads in legitimate tiktok content to nation states influencing your political worldview.

Considering yourself immune to this manipulation is as naive as thinking you don't need vaccines - depressingly, we've far beyond the point where individual protection is enough.

somehow missed the fact that the EU has declared war already

i would like to remind you that Germany was one of the biggest recipients of russian gas in Europe, and worked actively to keep it flowing despite the war, and didn't try to break away from their dependence for a very long time.

It's pure hypocrisy coupled with conformity - or rather virtue signalling. Send junk weapons to Ukraine to showcase that you do support the cause, meanwhile keep buying gas the same time go after their propaganda because that looks nice.

paradox of tolerance

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

> ads, propaganda and hate speech

Just think about this (which is not 100% correct, but for the sake of discussion): it's probably not meta, google and tiktok. It's the internet peoples who are the source of all that. It's peoples who say hate, who push for ideas they believe in, and they also (surprise!) publish ads! (While google et cetera are just a medium, with lots of moderation, yep.).

Shutting down a business = economic sanctions. Blocking domain of a web publication is part of shutting it down.

What do you prefer instead, to make domain registrars enforce sanctions instead of blocking on DNS level? That would quickly make so that no one with Russian passport is able to register a domain no matter how much we are against russia or putin

The difference is they're not an enemy sovereign state. This isn't contradictory or illogical.

You don't need to declare war to have enemies. After all, Russia has launched chemical and radiological attacks on EU states.

It is not. People are allowed to do what they will, as long as those people are not the outlet itself. The propaganda outlet loses control over it and cannot push the media through, only hope that others pull it from them.

Some broadcasters do already have this feature. For example if you watch adult content (doesn’t have to be nudity, could be violent shows or other content that isnt considered appropriate for children) on SkyTV (UK satellite) then then you get promoted for a pin if its before 9pm.

The thing I referred to in my previous comment is more of a historical thing before smart TVs and similar tech. Current RF technology is still just an evolution of the same signals sent 70+ years ago. So they’d moderate content via scheduling. “Terrestrial TV” still works that way today.

Except your analogy here should be more "there's a kid on timeout so nobody gets to play, just in case"

The irony of freedom of speech, much like democracy in general, is that it can destroy itself.

Russia is also not engaged in a direct war with Europe yet we still sanction them because they are by proxy, similar to Israel: Israel's actions in Gaza are creating waves of refugees that Europe has to take in, and then we have the potential terrorist attacks by those people as revenge for Europe's military aid to Israel who see Europe as partly to blame for destruction of their home country.

Israel definitely should be sanctioned till it stops its war crimes because doing nothing will directly affect us.

> Russia has attacked Ukraine. Not Europe.

Ukraine is most definitely a part of Europe.

Yes, and so is big parts of Russia. Attacking one country is not the same as attacking a continent.

> Russia has attacked Ukraine.

Moldova and Georgia and Ukraine, as relates to its aggression in Europe.

Because the people writing the laws within the EU are also acutely aware that phrasing this ban too broadly constrains freedom of speech. The way the ban is handed is walking the fine line between impinging freedom of speech and denying a enemy state from waging an information war. Romania had to rerun an election due to Russian inference, this isn’t just a phantom the EU made up to censor opinions it doesn’t like.

>If you are not happy with propaganda, it is your role and the role of schools to educate people around about how to consume information and look with a critical view.

This is as pointless as saying that is my role as a consumer to test the food that I buy to ensure it is not contaminated with shit, so instead of punishing the companies that have contaminated food we should allow them to sell if even if we know it contains literal shit and instead teach our children in school how to use equipment to test the food.

Sorry for the Ruzzian puppets but soem countries are not retarded and they decided to block the toxic food today and not ignore the victims, as I said in the original comments we have laws and the fact that you are from Ruzzia should not put you above our laws, RT shoudl stay banned until they open a local branch where we can apply the fine to them equaly as we apply to our own media.

Also there are a lot of Ruzzian money wasted on social media to spread actual fake shit, priovable fake shit that I think we need to really go further in identifying the source of behind those fake crap and arrest, fine and sanction the individuals behind that shit, no level of education can just make a person intelligent or make them do investigative work to confirm that some information that he really, really loves is in fact false.

And I know some fascist here will claim that trush is not objective, and my response is that a photoshoped document is 100% fake in all natural logic systems. The strategy used in Romanian presidential campaign by the Ruzzian aligned side was to put faked documents or information on social media then have media people share in on social media and then bringt the faked document in discussion on TV.

So don't cry for the regular idiot they still get their conspiracies and faked information from Ruzzia on social media and sometimes even in the mail, as an example they sent people faked official looking letters that they are getting called to military service to go and fight in Ukraine.

So please freedom of media but there must be consequences for external media not only for local one.

My point is about consequences, my question is what happens if a TV station in UK is not following that rule?

It takes a lot of mental gymnastics to completely ignore the historical context of these two conflicts. There is no question that Russia's war in Ukraine is a proxy war against the West - they say so directly by justifying it as a defense against "NATO encroachment" and making demands that the Ukraine can never, say, join the EU.

Israel should be sanctioned because of the war crimes and the genocide perpetrated by their government, I agree, but that's a different thing.

Their very justification for the war is supposed "NATO encroachment". It is very clearly a proxy war against the EU.

They would get fined.

It's really the bots and algorithms are the source of all of that, promoting somebody's agenda. Now AI too. Remember, Tay the Microsoft bot that they put on Twitter and it became nazi the next day? It's that multiplied by the number of stars in the visible universe.

The only safer places are heavily moderated hobby related forums with actual people. Anti vaxxing is not a hobby btw.

>They would get fined.

Right, so my local TV gets fined if they published something fake, like for example they had a news about some bullshit happening in Romania but they were showing a video from a different country, the TV claimed it was stupidity and not manipulation, they got fined.

So I want RT and other media to respect the exact same laws, if they do not want to respect our laws and continue to publish fake shit we block them until they pay their fines and start respecting the laws.

And trust me there is no communism censorship here in Romania, the TV is terrible still , you get tons of commercial to shitty suppliments and gambling, you get politicians presenting their bullshit conspiracies, you get the hosts claiming that Soros is doing everything that is wrong in the country and this days also Macron and France are big villains (because they upset Putin and the Zeds are super, duper butt hurt )), you can see ladies presenting themselves as "doctors in energy-shit-karma-bullshit" and claiming the vaccines caused a giant number of allergies and other crap that she and her company with ehr supplements will sell.

We still let people to be idiots but we need to not be idiots like a society and let paid and organized attacks on our population to continue, and we need to do more against this state organized attacks. (as I mentioned previously but maybe in other comment faked documents were sent by mail to people, this is clearly a state sponsored action, they had names and addresses, they falsified documents and then paid for physical mail delivery to make it look more authentic )