This episode’s vocabulary
Censorship
noun — a system in which an authority limits the ideas that people are allowed to express and prevents books, films, works of art, documents, or other kinds of communication from being seen or made available to the public, because they include or support certain ideas.
To break
verb — to fail to keep a law, rule, or promise.
To subvert
verb — to try to destroy or damage something, especially an established political system.
To resolve
verb — to solve or end a problem or difficulty.
To muzzle
verb — to stop a person or organization from expressing independent opinions.
To enforce
verb — to make people obey a law, or to make a particular situation happen or be accepted.
Whiner
noun — a person, especially a child, who complains or expresses disappointment or unhappiness repeatedly.
Vote with your feet
idiom — to show your opinion by leaving an organization or by no longer supporting, using, or buying something.
To conform
verb — to behave according to the usual standards of behaviour that are expected by a group or society.
Regulation
noun — an official rule or the act of controlling something.
Questions and answers
Rory, are you all ready?
I am ready to go.
Rock and roll.
So probably like everyone else at this stage, I can't stand the censorship rules various platforms and institutions have. And when I can get away with it, I try to break or subvert such rules regardless of what I'm doing. The reasons for this should be obvious to everyone by now, they don't work. And they might actually make things worse. Pretty much everything about them either is or feels wrong. And I suspect that everyone knows that. In more detail, you need to be able to have open conversations about problems in order to resolve them. So if you just muzzle someone's speech or everyone's speech, then you're actively preventing that. Even worse, some places and services just pay lip service to the rules. And they only enforce them when it comes to people who are disliked by large groups of whiners. So, if you're popular, you can get away with breaking them, which is hardly fair. As if that wasn't bad enough, these rules might actually damage platforms themselves. Once people find out a rule isn't being enforced consistently, or prevents them from learning things, then they vote with their feet, and their wallets, taking their money and time with them. For all the places with these rules go on about caring about freedom of speech, they obviously aren't worried enough to make sure their rules are actually fair or workable for them or the people using their platforms. So for all these reasons, I either don't follow them, or I tried to get around them when I can. Everyone else might be thrilled with conforming to these silly regulations and filtering their information by what they prefer, rather than by what's real, but I am never going along with it. -