Censorship is the act of suppressing words, images, or ideas that are deemed offensive, harmful, or inappropriate by a particular entity or group. This can be done by governments, private institutions, or even individuals themselves, and can target a wide range of media, including books, movies, music, and online content. Essentially, censorship attempts to control what information is available to the public and what ideas can be expressed.
! [Hidden Spoiler Text] I fucking hate talking about censorship on Hive.
! [Hidden Spoiler Text] Because people are bloody stupid.
While I hate starting things off with a definition, the above paragraph is an AI result for "define censorship", and it gives enough of a basic understanding for most people, and aligns with the dictionaries. And it also uses the operative "suppress" in the first line, which is a key to understanding censorship on Hive. So, another definiton.
Suppress
/səˈprɛs/
verb
forcibly put an end to.
Put an end to.
And why this is key to censorship resistance on Hive, is as long as an account has been created and has enough resource credits to push a transaction to be recorded by the blockchain, anyone can say anything they want on the blockchain. And this brings up another point to clarify - Hive isn't an interface, a game, a platform, a magazine, a business, a government... it is...
And what the witnesses do is process the transactions so that there is a record of everything that gets written to the blockchain. They don't read each letter or number and decide whether it is worthy of spending immutable eternity on the blockchain, the witness (a machine) just faithfully records, silently, without judgement - no matter how vile.
But many people conflate Hive the blockchain with the interface they are using, because that is the way they interact with it, and that is their "view" of the blockchain. And this throws up the arguments of censorship "on Hive" when what they are actually complaining about is being blocked on a particular interface. Those interfaces are not Hive, they are a filtered view of Hive. All the interfaces pick and choose what bits of the blockchain recordings they choose to show, which is why this post isn't going to appear in the Splinterlands interface, and the Splinterlands battle I just lost isn't going to appear on my Peakd blog interface - even though both are recorded on Hive.
But not on Hive.
Going on the entry paragraph, this would be content that is "inappropriate" for either interface. One is a game, the other a blog, and the owners and developers of each interface experience can choose what gets shown on their platform. However, the information is still recorded to the blockchain, no matter what it is. It is a bit like polarized glasses, that don't let some light wavelengths through - but you can always take off the glasses.
The complaint of censorship on Hive is that when people get downvoted to oblivion in reputation, most interfaces will hide their content, requiring an extra click to see anything new they write. But, click, and there it is still on the blockchain, unsupporessed. The interfaces that are not Hive can choose what they show and hide from the blockchain, but there is nothing stopping anyone from building an interface that doesn't hide anything on Hive, or, only shows the hidden content with reputations below zero, if they choose. The reason no one has created that interface though, is because no one wants to see that shit as it is a terrible experience, so there is nu business model in there to attract users. It is a bit like going to a restaurant and ordering filet mignon, and them bringing you a bucket of horse shit and calling it a steak.
That isn't what you wanted.
Probably.
But as said, people often confuse their access point to the blockchain for the blockchain itself, without realising the way they view it is a simple window that doesn't show the entire contents. And that window is tinted. It is tinted by the interfaces in attempt to provide an attractive experience for the interface users. Technically, there is nothing to stop them putting in options to auto show/hide interface hidden options, but there is also nothing stopping them from giving an option to example, hide everything that has a KE ratio over a particular number. For instance, if I choose to only see content from people with no more than a 3 KE ratio, then the interface could autohide it for me through a setting toggle.
Censored?
Not on the blockchain.
To censor on Hive, it would have to be through stopping the writing of it onto the blockchain, which is pretty hard to do considering that it would have to be done at the witness level upon submission. It isn't impossible, but Hive is censorship resistant only. It could be that witnesses could fork the chain to put in a blacklist of accounts to stop them from ever posting again - but the likelihood of that is .... approaching zero.
I hope this clears up a few things around Hive censorship resistance in a simple enough manner.
However, the biggest complaints about censorship don't actually come from the people who care about the technical details on definitions of censorship, they come from people who feel that they should be able to say what they want, when and how they want, without having any social consequence to their behaviour. It is from people who think that they are entitled to earn Hive emissions on their content, no matter what they say or do. It is from people who get downvoted, often not because of what they write, but how they do it and their other behaviours.
Downvotes are not censorship.
They can take potential rewards from a post, but they can't take HIVE or HBD from a wallet, as there it is owned by an account. A post with votes on it doesn't own that HIVE, until it is emitted from the blockchain at pay out time and transferred into the owner's Hive wallet. And the people downvoting for whatever their reasoning is, are not Hive either. They have an account and own the rights to commit a transaction to the blockchain - and they submitted a downvote. They are people, with opinions and ideas of their own, and they will behave as they choose. Hive does not suppress them, in the same way it doesn't suppress any particular content.
Everything written on the Hive blockchain is publicly accessible.
Clear enough?
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]
Be part of the Hive discussion.
And you may be rewarded.
