Isnt taking down illegal content censorship?
If not you can get around the absolute statement “censorship is always bad” by just making more things illegal.
I think censorship is so clearly good in some scenarios that we would never think to even debate it. Like child porn.
Everyone into childporn use uncensored models/sites deeply hidden from the public. Every single part of censorship is having a bad effect on the common world where normal people try to operate normally. The ones caught at this levels are not the interesting ones you want to catch.
Just to be sure to point out the obvious here, I think the main police effort should be on catching the sources of such material. There is the root problem. In a world were we’re ruled by Epstein friends, this is probably not gonna happen though
Anything you want to censor has at least 5 stages:
Creator, first share (direct), second order sharing (public-ish website), third order sharing (indexed resharing), and finally the consumer wanting it presented.
In the way there are things we clearly want to censor for being awful, there are things we must never allow to be censored. Eg knowledge of a genocide.
But the solution kind of rights itself. To censor something you need as many actors as possible in that enormous graph of sharing nodes to clearly want to censor that thing we all agree we clearly want to censor. I.e. a public library doesn't censorship child porn because they are required to.
> Isnt taking down illegal content censorship?
So yes this is censorship, but 'illegal' content is too vague.
We want to know about the censorship beyond the natural baseline.
Censorship, usually, means the extraordinary request for powers to control the web of communications - in the context of what and why.