== Quote from Jeff Nowakowski ([email protected])'s article > BCS wrote: > > > > Group = citizens of china > > controller = government of china > > > > for the case in question (this NG) > > > > group = people posting on NG > > controller = people in NG wanting someone banned. > > > > I see a difference > The government of China are Chinese people. I see no difference. Once > you create a "controller" class in the newsgroup, they become the > government.
The difference IMHO has nothing to do with how democratic the process is. It has everything to do with the intention and with how much recourse the censored person has. There are two differences between government censorship in a democracy and censorship of a newsgroup: 1. The former is meant to prevent the exchange of ideas that those in power find disagreeable or don't want to be exchanged. The latter isn't intended to **prevent** the exchange of any idea, only to improve the signal to noise ratio by mildly limiting **where** they can be expressed. 2. If the government censors you, you don't have any recourse short of picking up your entire life and moving to a different country. If a newsgroup mod censors you, the barrier to posting whatever you want to post somewhere else is very low. If noone reads it because you end up having to post it to alt.spam or something, well, freedom of speech doesn't mean people have to listen to you if they aren't interested in what you have to say.
