I suspect that this was something of a test case, with the regulator flexing their censorship muscle, and I’m glad it didn’t work out.
This was a POV stabbing video that people spread around to glorify violence. It’s in the same category as beheading videos.
America may have decided that child porn is the only media exception to free speech, but other more sane countries draw the line a little bit more broadly to include all forms of extremely violent crime filmed for to be glorified, including things like murder, attempted murder, torture, and the rape of adults.
If you want to operate a business in places like Australia or New Zealand, you cannot be distributing violent gore videos within their borders.
I hope they revisit this as X users are pretty routinely celebrating things like the Christchurch shooting and other violent extremist incidents. Sometimes censorship makes sense, and when people are antagonistically spreading videos of people being maimed and killed, the “free speech” argument absolutely doesn’t fucking cut it.
astro_ray@piefed.social 3 months ago
The stabbing was literally live streamed and they were trying to block a very graphic footage to be viral on Twitter. I would have blocked the instance if any fediverse instance didn't remove such a video from their platform.
CarbonIceDragon@pawb.social 3 months ago
And that’d be reasonable for you to do. However, having a network choose to remove something, or cut ties with servers in the network that don’t in an attempt to persuade them to remove that thing, isn’t exactly the same as a government ordering a thing be removed. The former doesn’t give much avenue for a malicious actor to suppress something that isn’t in their interest, because they can hardly control the collective actions of users on the network, but the latter does by creating a single point of decision making on the network’s content from the outside. Not that the motivations in wanting that video gone were bad, but there is an element of risk to making it possible for a government entity to remove something from a social network, even if the thing they want gone this time is something that really shouldn’t be there.