Note
(I use the term “censorship” here in a colloquial way, not in a technical or legal way where we would be referring to government sanctions.)
This is full on content-based censorship… Censorship of that kind brings heavy social ramifications. It is, in principle, authoritarian and doesn’t take into account the necessary context that gives things nuance. Considering the fact that the thing in question is a religious text, analysis of this requires more nuance than usual.
This is a good counter and aligns more with content-neutral censorship. It acknowledges the nuance of the situation. Content-neutral censorship invites us to create what are called “time, place, and manner restrictions”. Blanket bans on content in-and-of-itself should always be suspicious because the content itself is never self-justifying or self-revealing to be bannable. We look at its context because social life is always contextual, and banning is a social phenomenon.
We label things (like porn apps) NSFW and therefore censor them not because they have some intrinsic property that makes them worthy of censoring, but because of the consequences they bring in particular contexts.
The question is not (a) whether religious texts have or don’t have NSFW content, but rather (b) whether or not the consequences of having them publicly available is the same as the consequences of having the things we already label as NSFW publicly available. The answer is a clear no, in my opinion. There is clearly a distinct difference between things like porn and things like religious text, which are molded from hundreds of thousands of years of human storytelling and mythmaking.
Claiming that religious texts have the same consequences as the things we already currently label as NSFW solely in virtue of the fact that they contain the same content is highly uncharitable and removes any nuance.
I am not a lawyer, but I am pretty sure content-neutral censorship has the same logical reasoning as the fair use doctrine. “Time, place, and manner”, as it were, provides the necessary context to conclude whether or not something is considered a violation of copyright. If it is for educational purposes, it is not a violation; if it is for critique or massively transform the copyrighted material, it is not a violation; so on and so forth.
In the example of the fair use doctrine, we again see that context matters. We label things as “violations” not because there is some intrinsic property of the act that makes it as such. It is because of the consequences it has in daily life that we call it a violation. We construct definitions like “NSFW” and “violations of copyright law” because they are useful and socially functional. When it turns out that it is not functional, we create new boundaries and definitions to fit our purposes. We are not subject to them, we use them for our own purposes.
When you say that religious texts ought to be labelled as NSFW, your position is not “Erm, actually, religious texts have NSFW content in them.”
What you’re actually saying is, “Banning religous texts is functionally the same/has the same purpose as banning porn.”
So when you claim or assert that you agree with religious texts being labelled as NSFW, at least say what you’re actually saying instead of playing a definitions game.
I haven’t read the whole GitLab thread, but the author of that merge request (@linsui) seems to be playing the definitions game because they are only pointing to the content of the religious texts. I do not know if they are intentionally pulling this fallacy or not. It could be that they are unconsciously relying on the fallacy even though they may have nuanced takes of their own (but are unable to articulate it) about the consequences of religious text. But maybe they just do not care about context. I don’t know.
