Censorship in Eklektix's Linux Weekly News (LWN)
Medieval system of speech, where the monarchs (Linux Foundation) dictate what's permissible to say
LAST week the LWN site became more censorious than it had already been for years. Steven Vaughan-Nichols wrote about the reason, having already covered it in January 2023. We prefer not to touch the politics of the matter (this happened in our IRC network already) and all related coverage is assembled here. Instead we want to talk about the censorship.
As we noted here before, when trans people spoke out in support of Richard Stallman, refuting the accusations that he was "transphobic", the editor of LWN jumped in and expressed anger (see screenshots at the bottom). As if it's not OK to defend an innocent. This editor works for the Linux Foundation (part time) and it didn't seem to bother him that someone had been wrongly accused. In his coverage of Daniel Pocock he did more or less the same, but at least he occasionally mentioned Pocock winning legal cases.
In recent months LWN publicly said - on numerous occasions in fact - that it was exploring a way to overhaul the commenting system to suppress/censor "unwanted" comments, openly admitting there was an "issue" and that in order to be more "advertiser-friendly" (or subscriber-friendly) it'll need to silence people. That would make LWN more of a filter of views, where the filtering is dictated by the editors, notably Jon (Linux Foundation). So that's just something to be aware of and keep in mind when reading LWN comments. Social-engineering by elimination of people/viewpoints is social control media ballpark. █
The latest:
This has history to it (same editor):
This was the editor's reaction:
It seems quite patronising; he tells trans people what they can and cannot say about trans issues. It's "wrongthink" to say anything that defends RMS. This is how intellectualism dies.