It's like asking the prisoners in the panopticon whether they behave differently due to the risk of being watched. The answer is 100% yes, whether they know it or not. That's the point.

I started feeling that way around the time ICE illegally broke, entered and ransacked a low-income housing building in Chicago, terrorizing residents regardless of citizenship or immigration status. Once I realized that fear of reprisal was preventing me from expressing how I felt about it online, I resolved instead to get louder and more strident in my public speech than I had been in years.

I think as I've gotten older, the fear of expressing myself has increasingly turned into a sense of duty to do it anyway. The more people feel pressured into silence, the more important it seems not to be.

I lived in China for a while, and my wife is from China. We moved out almost 5 years ago, and she still was a bit freaked out about a picture of Xi Jinping's book next to Winnie Pooh book I took at a Book Expo here in Germany. Once you lived 1-2 generations with censorship, this gets from "chilling" (as in, you're aware of the thought but suppress it) to "not even thinking about it".

I don't know if it's a net negative on society, in the end in China people are very apathetic towards all of this, their lives are fine, they can get food delivered in 5 minutes, trains run on time, flying cars, and all that. Bread and circuses, bread and circuses.

Mostly with how easy it has become in a corporate setting.

Before they had an easy access to the data but the barrier was their capacity to go through it. Nowadays any middle manager with data access and an OpenAI subscription can potentially get a sentiment and summary of your public (or even private with some saas plans) conversations.

I’m more careful with my words than I ever was.

I've always used a pseudonym. I have never felt free to speak my mind on the internet under my own name, the cancel mobs scared me away long before the state did

Absolutely XXXXXXX XX XXXXX XXXX because I XXX XX XXXXXXX XX XX XXXXXX even if the state XXXX XXX XXXXXXXXX XXX XX XXXXX XXXXXXXX.

(This joke would be funnier if HN allowed unicode Full Block characters)

Hmm, probably a little. I am a fairly public person but I wouldn't want to be one of the characters in So You've Been Publicly Shamed by Jon Ronson. It's nice to see that Sacco got her job back eventually, but that grade of internet mob cancellation goes after some random person and then that's the end of it. Sometimes it works out like in the Brendan Eich case but other times it doesn't.

From the government, a little, but I think as a non-American in the US I was always a bit careful on that front. Better not to get in any trouble you know.

The speech might be judged socially but the punishment is always economic.

Not especially (I don't live in the USA though).

I do wonder if I could automate the expression of uncontroversial opinions in the public sphere though. For example things about movies, music, or sporting events. These are valid interests that I simply don't have. I have at times been regarded with (I think) unfair suspicion for not engaging with social media to a meaningful degree.

So many platforms banning people for not having the site’s chosen position was a bigger impact than anything that’s happened in the last 5 years. I think online speech was dead well before that. It’s just a bunch of people agreeing with each other, because everyone else has been banned or is afraid of being banned.

I'm in Australia, so we have a pretty open approach to online speech unless you're being really, really awful. Like really awful.

OR. You want to say something about US oil and gas companies, or Israel. Those two things will get you scrutinised.

100% yes, it has. I used to post under my real name, but when Trump was re-elected I deleted all my old social media accounts and created this pseudonym. Even still, I don't say everything I want to say because if the government wants to find my real identity it wouldn't be hard for them to get it.

Look at NPSM-7 [1], which basically says anyone who doesn't like capitalism or Christianity is likely a terrorist. Look at that Texas judge who threw a guy in prison for 30 years simply for moving a box of political contraband [2]. Look at the state department's recent report that labels everything from the DSA to the Black Lives Matter movement as secret agents of Cuba [3].

It's pretty clear that this administration is bent on throwing its political opponents in prison, whether they be actual politicians, protestors, or just bloggers.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSPM-7 2: https://freedom.press/issues/texas-man-sentenced-to-30-years... 3: https://www.state.gov/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/Cuba-Report...

Yes, as AI models will now be slurping up everything for indefinite amounts of time

It's not formal institutions, it's the hate mob.

And for things that might seriously attract the ire of people who consider political violence a positive good, there's always TOR.

Risk? Or correctly assumed truth that surveillance is occurring?

Yes.

There are things I'd like to say on the web but which I haven't because I fear I could be arrested in some countries I am likely to visit in the future.

Yes. Entering the US is now a risk factor for anyone from abroad with even moderate political opinions.

Meh https://GOPsucks.net

No.

The risk of being denied entry to US and my lack of interest in visiting US share a reason. That's the only change vs 5 years ago as far as governments are concerned.

As for corporate I've always assumed no internal communication was private.

Surveillance? Somewhat. HR culture? Absolutely.

Totes mcgoats. Its why I use unnamed sock puppet accounts.

Yes.

uggcf://fnynanir-ehalba.bet/ureovr.ugzy comes to mind.

Also uggcf://fnynanir-ehalba.bet/2026-07-04--lpbzovangbe-prafbefuvc.cat

Don’t forget COVID misinformation debates on free speech.

This is a deep topic which I’ve not given its due attention. But I have wondered about my likes and saves and chats on platforms such as Reddit.

This title of a webpage about says it all, “Read our full archive of Graham Platner’s deleted Reddit comments”.

Whatever you think about the former Maine US Senate Candidate, this type of published outrage goes hand-in-hand with his sibling “surveillance”.

As someone who lives in the UK 100%.

There are things I don't say online anymore, not because I don't think they're correct, but because my opinion could be deemed offensive.

Whenever I say something I think could risk being seen as offensive, I tend to add a lot of footnotes explaining my reasoning for the things I'm saying and why I'm not trying to offend.

I also never share remotely offensive humour to friends over social media or messaging apps anymore, which used to be fun. Lots of people have been arrested for jokes so just not worth it tbh. Even if I don't think it's that offensive the law is too subjective to take the risk.

I've been under surveillance since I was 15 mainly because people made money off of me saying funny stuff. I'm used to it after 17 years. Personal computing was a mistake.

No, not a government or corporate surveillance.

But a modern platform consolidation, zero tolerance practices and shitty spaghetti code written by a cheapest contractor - does.

Remember good old days of "forums"? Apart from some of the outliers on both ends (both cesspools and invite only elitists) a majority of the forums had this concept of warnings. So a user may have been rude or broke a rule or just got unlucky, he get a warning. Then maybe additional warnings. Or next there is "TEMPORARY" ban (absolutely alien concept nowadays), for a few days, then a few months, then a year. And it was actually possible to come back after a year long ban and see that the admins honored their own rules and did indeed unban you. I know a friend who was a frequent posted on a city automotive forum who served two year-long bans and he still posts there, soon it will be 3 decades or so :) . And the list of issuers, bans, dates and ban reason was usually public for all.

So all of that culture of being nice and polite is gone now. There are no warnings anymore (well, HN is tiny little exception, even then warnings are informal here, no automation like it was done in the previous century). Bans are instant and permanent, there are no temporary bans anywhere anymore, except for some deliberately gloating bans, like "you are banned until 2126, haha". And in case a discussion platform is owned by a corpo providing other services, they will ban user everywhere too. And mods are often using some crappy code to autoban users based on some primitive pattern matching. Write an ambiguously interpreted comment and poof, off you go. Some platforms even officially allow report abuse, like FB where a bot owner can take down any post, regardless of its content.

Ironically, the lack of niceness culture and extra harsh extra fast punishments didn't lead to the better talking spaces. Instead people are now using hundreds of throwaway twink accounts and now they don't moderate themselves. Why would they, the punishment to a rabid foaming at the mouth crazy user registered 1 day ago and to a old timer registered 15 years ago and who said some less radical comment in a latest political discourse or doubted some newest fad or whatever, maybe he was simply genuinely mistaken as happens to all - well, the punishment is the same. So why bother? Why write 4 paragraphs of reasoning to explain why entity A is bad in some specific way and the reasons for that, when user can just fire off a one liner hate message and get the same results? And so on.

As a weirdo who never uses twink accounts I'm in a minority and by old habits I still post as if I'm on some oldschool sane forums, but I do often stop and rewrite parts, to avoid being automodded into oblivion. And I certainly don't post on FB or Instagram or YT or other platforms anymore. The collateral damage over there would be catastrophic.

We live in the USA. I had a friend tell me they won't use Chinese models because models like K3 only have moonshot as the provider which is in China. They were afraid of surveillance. My rebuttal was that the Chinese can't send police to our door based on the conversation you have with their models while US companies can.

I'd rather the Chinese have my data over a US company because... what could they do? I live here, not China.

Absolutely. People have already gotten in trouble with US immigration just for posting negative opinions on social media, or simply speech that the government doesn't like (see all the recent pro-Palestine protestors whose visas were cancelled). The state department/homeland/etc. can choose or not choose to let people in based on just about any criteria they want. If they find out I said something critical of the government, I could either be denied entry, or kicked out, and both have already been happening to people in the last year and a half.

Even if what they're doing isn't legal, that doesn't stop them from potentially ruining your life in the process, maybe even getting away with it.

Yes. AI makes it more trivial than ever to extract your sentiments, and when you combine that with a government that's eager to crush dissent then things get tricky.

Not really, at least in the UK ( where "apparently" everyone is being jailed for free speech violations). I've moved to the position where I wouldn't post anything online that I wouldn't say in person, and I very rarely post anything work related.

Absolutely. Nothing on the internet is ever forgotten, and "they" will use it to hang you one day.

I semi-frequently discuss my opinions about government officials who should be sent to prison for their crimes, agencies who everyone should boycott, and laws that I no longer consider legitimate. I've never had anyone from the government talk to me about this or been punished in any other way. Perhaps I've gotten lucky, but I really do think that free speech protections remain strong in the US, despite the attempts from the aforementioned criminals to change that.

No.

In general, no. But I'd never make anything but anonymous throwaway posts here because this is the one place that doesn't let me delete my posts. (I know you can make manual requests, but if it's not self-service I can't rely on it.)

yes

If so, the solution may well be making more private speech more public, rather than making more public speech more private.

Imagine if every email provider had an option to "publicize" next to the ability to star an email or email thread.

It's the private, anti-free speech stuff that would be interesting to see up close. And I'm just talking about email communications.

Yes it is

Yes.

Surveillance no, but potentially being banned, yes. Reddit is Exhibit A for this for me when I think about how I used to use it versus how I use it today. I wish Musk was actually serious about that whole free speech absolutist shit because the straight jacket gets tighter every day on every platform.

Not at all. I for one welcome our new overlords.

The internet was also heavily surveilled 5 years ago, not much different from how it is today.

Are you referring to anything in particular?

Not exactly. I don't really have much interesting to say. I'm trying to use the internet less in general not because of surveillance, but because of overall enshittification. Reddit has become a normie platform at this point and there's no point using it. 4chan still allows free speech but truth is, I'm not an interesting person and nobody cares about my personal issues. There are quite a few intelligent people on HN but the culture here promotes staying on topic and being civil, which is good for productive debate, but not really fun.

A few years ago, you would've been banned for questioning the results of the U.S. election. And this was when "progressives" were in charge.

If anything, you're more free to "express yourself" now.

The "less likely to express" isn't from surveillance, but from the professional shills that moderate every site which makes it worthless to put any effort into posting anything because it will just be removed with no justification.

"do you find yourself expressing yourself less freely on the internet than you did five years ago?"

No, because five years ago was probably the high point of online speech restriction. A time where people were banned from platforms like Twitter and Facebook for expressing political opinions or stating scientific facts