Prelude to the Apocalypse

[Mischief Maker]

Oh hey, here come the "real progressives" here to say left and right populism are the same thing, and Antifa just might be funded by George Soros, and while they condemn the actions of QAnon you've got to admit they've got a point on several salient issues, and since the neoliberals hate Trump maybe that means minimizing his actions will advance the cause of socialism, and hey have you heard of this exciting new group called the NazBols?



What could be sadder than doing COINTELPRO shit without being paid?

[emphatic]

Oh hey, here come the "real progressives" here to say left and right populism are the same thing, and Antifa just might be funded by George Soros, and while they condemn the actions of QAnon you've got to admit they've got a point on several salient issues, and since the neoliberals hate Trump maybe that means minimizing his actions will advance the cause of socialism, and hey have you heard of this exciting new group called the NazBols?



What could be sadder than doing COINTELPRO shit without being paid?

Nice straw man you've built for yourself.

[Mischief Maker]

Nice straw man you've built for yourself.

Well I am Nancy Pelosi's biggest supporter around here, so whaddya gonna do?

[Durandal]

This is quite the paradoxical situation you have attempted to paint. First of all, BLM is an organization, and it's one that is backed by wealthy donors and large corporations: Hyundai, Nike, Airbnb, Walmart, Target, Sony, etc. the list goes on, all stated publicly that they were giving cash to BLM. How can it be spontaneous and unorganized when you just called it the BLM riot?

I scooted over that bit in the interest of brevity, but apparently also clarity. I was referring to the riots that sparked as a reaction to George Floyd's death.

The next question is what news did those people get and how did they get it? Information about George Floyd was selectively disseminated by the corporate media and via Big Tech platforms. Police body cam footage was not released for months. The coroner's report was not yet available. No official investigations had been carried out. But Big Tech, the MSM, BLM, and whoever else released a cell phone video and various commentary which set off the riots

Like the leaked porn tapes of a celebrity, shit like that spreads like fire on social media and keeps popping up no matter what you do. Once the cat's out of the bag and onto social media, realistically you can hardly succeed at getting people to stop talking about it, unless you want social media to globally go into a total lockdown mode whenever some kind of shit somewhere hits the fan.

Does that apply to the most recent event which everyone is freaking out about or is it yet another double standard?

You're going to have to elaborate on that because I'm not sure what you're referring to, especially considering how you're defaulting to the 'double standards' button like your life's depending on it.
Honestly, I just tune out when someone is complaining about hypocrisy or double standards, considering how especially recently everyone is accusing each other of doing it to the other. It is repetitive, and incredibly boring. But most of all it is terribly unhelpful for understanding platforms and positions. Pointing out hypocrisy is so easy that even a child can do it, so now you've got people everywhere using "yeah but they" as the central pillar for their public political orientation. All it nets you is people who are sooner motivated by being against other people than they are being for something. And that kind of contrarianism only leads to honest tribalists who will end up logic trapping themselves by standards they've previously set forth as circumstances change, or it will lead to half-assed LARPers. Like reddit atheists being an embarrassing response to Bush-era religious fundies, or teenage male nationalist tradcath LARPers who don't even go to sunday mass and are sooner in it to own the libs, or zoommunists who don't even read any of the material they espouse and are sooner in it to own the alt-right.

Not to say that I'm hoping for people to learn to skip this step towards the bashing-in-eachothers'-skulls part (although I'll feel strongly compelled to if after reading all this you're still coming at me with the hypocrisy angle), but if we know that hypocrisy is a constant on both sides of an algebraic expression, then we can simplify the expression and make it easier to read for everyone involved, and so get to the actual meat of things.

[Specineff]

Meanwhile, I'm here munching popcorn every time a Maga-Tard that invaded the capitol gets detained. I've bought a big box of Redenbacher's for that purpose:

Spoiler

Eric Gavelek Munchell and Larry Rendell Brock have been detained and charged with disorderly conduct, entering a restricted building, and violent entry. Hope they also get charged with sedition and conspiracy to commit insurrection.

Any Trump fans care to chime in? Also, there are still 9 days left in Trump's administration, so do you have any ideas to make my country pay for the wall you were so smug about? Wouldn't want the fine folks like the ones in that pic to be put in danger by the rapists and criminals who Mexico is obviously sending, right?

[BryanM]

Much like the stairway to heaven, the wall is more a metaphorical construct in our hearts and general public policy, than an actual brick construct surrounded by a moat with laser sharks swimming in it. Even during the 2016 debates, the theoretical additional fencing was pretty freaking lame. As Clinton herself said, the fences she put up were only a couple feet shorter than what our prestigious figurehead was calling for.

Let's have a moment of silence and memory of this postponed dream.

[Steamflogger Boss]

There might be more march on capitol bullshit on Jan 17th. Trying to figure out if it's a meme or serious...

[GaijinPunch]

Much like the stairway to heaven, the wall is more a metaphorical construct in our hearts and general public policy, than an actual brick construct surrounded by a moat with laser sharks swimming in it. Even during the 2016 debates, the theoretical additional fencing was pretty freaking lame. As Clinton herself said, the fences she put up were only a couple feet shorter than what our prestigious figurehead was calling for.

Yeah, in 2016 I bet the majority of Trump's base took pause, put a finger on their chin, and thought "he must be speaking metaphorically... about policies that will bring back American jobs... and those Mexicans will pay for those policies... even if they are abstract".

[ED-057]

Oh hey, here come the "real progressives" here to say left and right populism are the same thing

No. I compared one riot to some other riots, and pointed out that the MSM and Big Tech demonize one and apologize for the other.

I wouldn't be so quick to equate riots and populism. Do you want to 'own' BLM/Anitfa rioters as being part of the Democrat base? Because there have been mixed messages about this. Many people at the time claimed that criminal activity was being done by agents provocateur who weren't part of their protest (Trump supporters are also saying this, BTW). But then there was the scuffle in Kenosha between Kyle and three attackers shot by him. A lot of Democrat types seemed to automatically take sides against Kyle, even though those three men had no claim to being peaceful protestors. One of them had a gun (and said on social media that he wished he had used it) and another was a convicted felon. Do you want to count them in your camp?

And that's before we even consider whether Democrats are 'left' or whether something with corporate sponsorship is populist. Where does this leave the Green Party or antiwar.com?

since the neoliberals hate Trump maybe that means minimizing his actions will advance the cause of socialism

Obviously not, but neither does teaming up with corporate Dems. The enemy of your enemy is not your friend. The two party system and the left-right false dichotomy are designed to obfuscate this. Rather than a conflict between left and right, a more accurate description of reality is that the TOP is waging an economic and information war against the BOTTOM. The problem is not that our leaders' policies are influenced by the wrong flavor of ideology, it's that they are governing on behalf of special interests and barely pretending to give a crap about the people.

It's true that I haven't devoted much time to posting about Trump's actual errors and offences. Do I really need to do this when there is already an entire industry devoted to it? Besides, Trump did say he was going to end the wars at least. Dem voters could have been on board with this even if they hate his hairdo and don't want a wall, but they let themselves be bamboozled by DNC talking points that went in favor of war mongers every time. There was so much anti-Trump noise already that it was leaving little room to talk about anything constructive.

[ED-057]

Like the leaked porn tapes of a celebrity, shit like that spreads like fire on social media and keeps popping up no matter what you do. Once the cat's out of the bag and onto social media, realistically you can hardly succeed at getting people to stop talking about it, unless you want social media to globally go into a total lockdown mode whenever some kind of shit somewhere hits the fan.

Sorry, not buying it. When it comes to censoring what they want to censor, they aren't throwing up their hands and saying "it's too hard!" They are just doing it, by all reports very effectively. To the point where entire sites lose their hosting just to be sure.

You're going to have to elaborate on that because I'm not sure what you're referring to, especially considering how you're defaulting to the 'double standards' button like your life's depending on it.

The point of highlighting the double standard is an effort to convince people to stop uncritically accepting establishment narratives, not to justify something. John Doe of the general public doesn't generally have the resources to personally verify what is claimed by the MSM or government officials. What John Doe CAN do, is listen for all the contradictions, revisionism, and blatant bias, thereby gaining some means of evaluating what is credible and what isn't.

[Durandal]

They are just doing it, by all reports very effectively.

No.
The targets in question have found a way to skirt around algorithmic biases and filters by sharing links amongst their own social groups to gain popularity before they get booted, see:

YouTube was playing a by-now familiar game of social media whack-a-mole. A video that violated YouTube's rules would emerge and rapidly gain views, then YouTube would take it down. But it wasn't clear that recommendations were key to these sudden viral spikes. On August 14, a 90-minute video by Millie Weaver, a contributor to the far-right conspiracist site Infowars, went online, filled with claims of a deep state arrayed against President Trump. It was linked and shared in a number of right-wing circles. Dozens of Reddit threads passed it on (“Watch it before it's gone,” one redditor wrote), and it was shared more than 53,000 times on Facebook, as well as on scores of right-wing YouTube channels, including by many followers of QAnon, one of the fastest-growing—and most dangerous—conspiracy theories in the nation. YouTube took it down a day later, saying it violated its hate-speech rules. But within that 24 hours, it amassed over a million views.

This old-fashioned spread—a mix of organic link-sharing and astroturfed, bot-propelled promotion—is powerful and, say observers, may sideline any changes to YouTube's recommendation system. It also suggests that users are adapting and that the recommendation system may be less important, for good and ill, to the spread of misinformation today. In a study for the think tank Data & Society, the researcher Becca Lewis mapped out the galaxy of right-wing commentators on YouTube who routinely spread borderline material. Many of those creators, she says, have built their often massive audiences not only through YouTube recommendations but also via networking. In their videos they'll give shout-outs to one another and hype each other's work, much as YouTubers all enthusiastically promoted Millie Weaver's fabricated musings.

The only way this could have been prevented was to prematurely nip these radical splinter groups in the bud before they could codify their language and calcify in social circles. And it's a very good question indeed, why Big Tech only decided now of all times to crack down on these groups despite being very aware of their existence and potential threat for a long time. If the answer to that is 'they needed a valid excuse', then that either means Big Tech isn't as powerful as they're implied to be if they need public approval to go ahead with their machinations, or that they're not as ideologically motivated as they're implied to be.

The point of highlighting the double standard is an effort to convince people to stop uncritically accepting establishment narratives, not to justify something. John Doe of the general public doesn't generally have the resources to personally verify what is claimed by the MSM or government officials. What John Doe CAN do, is listen for all the contradictions, revisionism, and blatant bias, thereby gaining some means of evaluating what is credible and what isn't.

From what I've seen, this mostly takes the form of uncritically accepting (or at the very least putting disproportionally more faith in) self-described 'alternative' and 'skeptical' talking heads on YouTube or other social media, and the ensuing total erosion of trust in any institution except for the ones that claim they're anti-mainstream.

[BryanM]

Yeah, in 2016 I bet the majority of Trump's base took pause, put a finger on their chin, and thought "he must be speaking metaphorically... about policies that will bring back American jobs... and those Mexicans will pay for those policies... even if they are abstract".

You're being really, really weird. They thought "Fuck Mexicans". And the Mexicans got fucked a bit more than before. That's what I said, wasn't it?

They don't fucking care about the wall, they care about the misery it represents. You care more about the material reality of it than they do, which is the entire point of these religious in/out group signifiers. The wackier the symbol, the more loyal someone has to be to believe it. And the more likely anyone not in the cult will think it's crazy and waste finite time and energy talking about shit that doesn't matter. Which also serves as a rallying force by always having an enemy to fight. That's why things like invisible sky wizards are so popular in them.

Obviously the average pleb isn't sophisticated enough to understand such memes act as a filtering sieve.

If you want to laugh and feel smug about them not getting their laser sharks, great. Super. That's totally... fighting the fash... real well........

........ while you're doing that, could you please take 0.0001% of your time reminding everyone slavery is still legal here and we should, like, make it not legal? The fash screams and hisses when you actually talk about stuff like that, fyi. You can be juuuust anti-capitalist enough to support ending slavery, can't you? .... can you?

these religious in/out group signifiers

An example would be the racial purity that Stormfront claims is so important. In order to grow membership, they can't be overly stringent on membership requirements. So "on paper", you have to be 100% 'white' in order to join the club house, the actual requirement in the real world is "you just have to feel like you're white".

That's just how rules work in social groups. There's always some fake written ones, and some very real unwritten ones. Drives robots like me up the wall.

[Steamflogger Boss]

https://twitter.com/HotlineJosh/status/ ... 1685154818

[Mischief Maker]

But then there was the scuffle in Kenosha between Kyle and three attackers shot by him. A lot of Democrat types seemed to automatically take sides against Kyle, even though those three men had no claim to being peaceful protestors. One of them had a gun (and said on social media that he wished he had used it) and another was a convicted felon. Do you want to count them in your camp?

@emphatic, I demand you take back your accusation that I was straw-manning, because here's ED-057 singing the praises of the 'lil chudlette that illegally crossed state lines with an assault rifle to do a double-homicide because like most teenagers, he just cared so dang much about whether some random-ass gas station in another state was defaced with graffiti. There's a reason why we in Wisconsin refer to Illinois tourists with the acronym F.I.S.H.

But let's set aside whether or not this Muppet Babies Travis Bickle was a bad person. How could you bring up the behavior of the Kenosha cops around these militia crazies and not see it as the rotting canary in the coal mine for what happened in DC? The fraternizing and material support for these militia crazies while in the background other cops are barking orders at the BLM protesters in the Robocop voice. The failure to even detain someone running up to their car and confessing to murder then being waved past because he was on "their side?"

Why wouldn't the chuds on January 6th think they can burst through the doors without resistance? What kind of institutional rot caused the DC police to be as blase about the frothing crowds of chuds as the Kenosha cop blithely popping the hatch on his urban tank to pass out waters without the slightest worry that there might be cop-killing Boogaloo Boys among the militia crazies?

since the neoliberals hate Trump maybe that means minimizing his actions will advance the cause of socialism

Obviously not, but neither does teaming up with corporate Dems. The enemy of your enemy is not your friend. The two party system and the left-right false dichotomy are designed to obfuscate this. Rather than a conflict between left and right, a more accurate description of reality is that the TOP is waging an economic and information war against the BOTTOM. The problem is not that our leaders' policies are influenced by the wrong flavor of ideology, it's that they are governing on behalf of special interests and barely pretending to give a crap about the people.

It's true that I haven't devoted much time to posting about Trump's actual errors and offences. Do I really need to do this when there is already an entire industry devoted to it? Besides, Trump did say he was going to end the wars at least. Dem voters could have been on board with this even if they hate his hairdo and don't want a wall, but they let themselves be bamboozled by DNC talking points that went in favor of war mongers every time. There was so much anti-Trump noise already that it was leaving little room to talk about anything constructive.

Well first of all, Biden is presently abandoning austerity in favor of massive stimulus to get us out of this depression. With Bernie sneaking in a medicare age requirement reduction that's actually the first step of the medicare for all transition in his original plan. All of which is enabled by the PAYGO carveouts that the Squad successfully leveraged their Pelosi votes to get.

Whereas the "constructive" thing you were yelling about for the last couple pages was a worthless virtue-signal vote that was guaranteed to lose, and would undoubtedly lead to a loss of power for the squad at the hands of a vengeful Pelosi.

Maybe, just maybe, these people are smarter than the left-identifying talk show host who fell for the Seth Rich conspiracy theory. LOL

[BulletMagnet]

self-described 'alternative' and 'skeptical' talking heads

Who, it must be added, would never say whatever damn fool thing it takes to reinforce the existing worldview of their intended "marginalized" audience, knowing that the latter will seldom, if ever, question their assertions once they've found someone, anyone, willing to at last vindicate them. Only the lamestream is ever shameless enough to do that.

Especially since we haven't experienced anything remotely like this over the past few years or anything, especially not perhaps the most egregious such onslaught of cynical, focus-grouped cockeyed apocalyptic cult nonsense in memory.

[GaijinPunch]

Yeah, in 2016 I bet the majority of Trump's base took pause, put a finger on their chin, and thought "he must be speaking metaphorically... about policies that will bring back American jobs... and those Mexicans will pay for those policies... even if they are abstract".

You're being really, really weird. They thought "Fuck Mexicans". And the Mexicans got fucked a bit more than before. That's what I said, wasn't it?

They don't fucking care about the wall, they care about the misery it represents.

Which by and large doesn't exist w/o the wall... hence all that dick swinging during the election.

[ED-057]

The targets in question have found a way to skirt around algorithmic biases and filters by sharing links amongst their own social groups to gain popularity before they get booted

Who are the targets in question? That someone can post something undesirable and have it stay up for a whole day is not at all relevant to what was being discussed.

The only way this could have been prevented was to prematurely nip these radical splinter groups in the bud before they could codify their language and calcify in social circles.

Hi! Welcome to the USSR. Your papers, please.

why Big Tech only decided now of all times to crack down on these groups despite being very aware of their existence and potential threat for a long time

This is only one in a long series of crackdowns. And again, what "groups"?

From what I've seen, this mostly takes the form of uncritically accepting

Wrong. The whole point is not doing that.

because here's ED-057 singing the praises

LOL. Stopped reading right there.

[Mischief Maker]

LOL. Stopped reading right there.

Oh, thank god!

[Mortificator]

Police body cam footage was not released for months. The coroner's report was not yet available. No official investigations had been carried out. But Big Tech, the MSM, BLM, and whoever else released a cell phone video and various commentary which set off the riots, leading to over $2 billion in damage and a number of homicides. Are they responsible for that?

I'm pretty sure the group responsible for the consequences of ganging-up on and murdering someone are the group that ganged-up on and murdered someone.

The state's SOP is to 'forget' to turn on body cams and destroy incriminating footage, chalk up deaths to conditions undiagnosed or completely imaginary (e.g. excited delirium), and investigate themselves and find they did nothing wrong. There shouldn't be a question mark appearing above your head as to why that is.

Tell that to the independant garage owner who lost everything. Has someone told him it's ok because it was for a good cause?

How many of the victims of US police brutality, a number larger by orders of magnitude, have you told it's fine because the status quo's not uncomfortable to you personally?

[Mischief Maker]

BryanM, do you still have that link to the old political cartoon about MLK saying he's planning another nonviolent demonstration?

[Durandal]

The only way this could have been prevented was to prematurely nip these radical splinter groups in the bud before they could codify their language and calcify in social circles.

Hi! Welcome to the USSR. Your papers, please.

As you're already seeing for yourself, the fact that social media platforms haven't done something this ruthlessly oppressive a long time ago--when it would have been the most effective, should at least point to Big Tech not being as ideologically motivated as they're made out to be, or conveniently being simultaneously incompetent and powerful scheming ideologues that should be feared.

why Big Tech only decided now of all times to crack down on these groups despite being very aware of their existence and potential threat for a long time

This is only one in a long series of crackdowns.

True, yet none of them were as decidedly comprehensive as the one you're seeing right now, especially now that after a failed insurrection the reputation of QAnon and the Trump brand has become radioactive, and businesses of all types are pulling out. This has less to do with ideological differences, but moreso that associating with people that are being investigated by the feds is simply bad for business.

From what I've seen, this mostly takes the form of uncritically accepting

Wrong. The whole point is not doing that.

Yes, and the Bible says "thou shalt not kill", but reality is funny about things like that. Skeptic communities have this clever construction where newcomers are told to "do their own research" and to not trust mainstream sources, but because the potential scope of their individual research is limited within this community (can't trust the lamestream, after all), there's only one potential conclusion that they can reach, and that's usually that there's a powerful entity called X using Y to accomplish his goals of Z.

This completely self-obtained conclusion is met with positive reinforcement by the community, whereas trying to present this conclusion outside it is often met with negativity (you can probably imagine why)--pushing you back into the loving arms of those who do understand what you're talking about. The beauty here is that the newcomer believes they arrived at this conclusion mostly by themselves, which is much stronger than having these conclusions forced onto you by an external party. The kicker then, is being able to control the scope of the information landscape of the newcomer in a way where they'll eventually reach the desired conclusion.

Although someone could control this, stuff like this more or less happens unintentionally on account of users choosing to stay of their own volition in a particular webspace where the users happen to be particularly-minded, or by personalization algorithms leading users into isolating themselves into their own hyper-personalized online bubbles on a given platform. Social media moguls were long aware of their personalization algorithms doing the latter, but opted for the longest time to not really do anything about it, because more personalization increases clicks, after all.

[BryanM]

Why of course I do.



A favorite MLK moment is when people were talking about him personally going on one of the freedom rides (that's interracial bus riding, for those unaware) and he felt like he had to give a long sermon in order to say "no thank you". A real moment of a leader feeling obligated to appear more than human - all he had to say was that he expected to get killed one day, but didn't want to make it easy for them to do it. The people in the church would have nodded their heads and accepted it. Christ, they happily busted the heads of white women in those things, there's no way he could have survived one of those rides.

Which by and large doesn't exist w/o the wall... hence all that dick swinging during the election.

Nah, it seriously is just a monument so they can feel like they're scoring points and winning. You saw how they were like "Jews will not replace us!" the second a General Lee statue came down, it's that kind of thing.

Separating kids from their parents is one thing; an additional one is doing everything they could to scrounge up more deportations. Since Obama already did such a good job deportin' people, this meant going after the people who were at the end of the line. The infamous "self deportation" people Romney talked about during his election, who'd in theory have a chance at acquiring legal status if there was ever a mechanism for them to do so.

These people are invisible, and I'm sure you've never thought about, say, the rapes that happen in California work crews that go unreported because the victims don't want to be deported. And they usually continue to get raped since they need a stable income to live. The status quo is not great for them.

[orange808]

1. What if we made a clear policy regarding our borders and the numbers of people we would allow over fixed time periods?
No. Can't do that. The right loves to score points saying "lock them all out" while simultaneously exploiting immigration to drive down wages. The centrists also love exploiting a "free open borders" lie that isn't economically or socially feasible while simultaneously using immigration to drive down wages. We can't have immigrants participating in collective bargaining or asking to have their human rights protected!

2. What if we stopped basing admission on "merit", because that favors mostly men from wealthy families that managed to get educations in poor nations?
Nope. See #1.

3. What if we offered a direct path to full citizenship for our quota of immigrants--instead of holding deportation over their heads with various visas?
Nope. See #1.

But, I'm supposedly a "Trumper"! It's a red herring to protect the status quo.

[Mischief Maker]

Gotta be honest, I think the twitter ban hurt Trump more than impeachment or the death of his little brother from covid this year.

[BulletMagnet]

As you're already seeing for yourself, the fact that social media platforms haven't done something this ruthlessly oppressive a long time ago--when it would have been the most effective, should at least point to Big Tech not being as ideologically motivated as they're made out to be, or conveniently being simultaneously incompetent and powerful scheming ideologues that should be feared.

I frankly find it mind-boggling that, after the uninterrupted years of donations, of lobbying, of revolving-door hires, of open support and/or acquiescent silence, anyone could believe for a moment that what's happening now could be anything other than an utterly routine bottom-line calculation stating that currently the potential benefits of staying the course are now outweighed by the potential bottom-line downsides.

In otherwords, the free market operating as intended. Or do we need approximately the millionth and first reminder of what the constantly-invoked First Amendment actually applies to?

Wrong. The whole point is not doing that.

Because if there's one thing you can state with the utmost confidence about the folks who (say they) believe that the world is run by a cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles operating out of pizza parlors, it's that they're relentlessly meticulous about "doing their homework".

[Mischief Maker]

FYI: The Trump administration killed Net Neutrality.

[Specineff]

In otherwords, the free market operating as intended. Or do we need approximately the millionth and first reminder of what the constantly-invoked First Amendment actually applies to?

I've been having a ball reminding my Bible-thumping relatives about how the same principle applies to Twitter refusing to do business with Trump (now that they're crying censorship), as when that cake shop refused to bake a cake for a gay couple because it went against the owner's religious beliefs. Because God forbid that the government attempt to regulate businesses' behavior.

[ED-057]

As you're already seeing for yourself, the fact that social media platforms haven't done something this ruthlessly oppressive a long time ago--when it would have been the most effective, should at least point to Big Tech not being as ideologically motivated as they're made out to be, or conveniently being simultaneously incompetent and powerful scheming ideologues that should be feared.

I don't agree that doing it sooner would have been more effective. It would have alienated more people at a time when they had less market share. Also, you didn't answer my question.

Skeptic communities have this clever construction where newcomers are told to "do their own research" and to not trust mainstream sources, but because the potential scope of their individual research is limited within this community

You're speaking as if there is one mainstream doctrine and one alternative doctrine. In reality, even the corporate press isn't in lockstep, and people outside of that are all over the map. Declining to believe one thing does not in any way necessitate believing any other thing. Even if the question is "true or false?" one has the option of remaining agnostic or answering "currently undetermined."

[Sengoku Strider]

As you're already seeing for yourself, the fact that social media platforms haven't done something this ruthlessly oppressive a long time ago--when it would have been the most effective, should at least point to Big Tech not being as ideologically motivated as they're made out to be, or conveniently being simultaneously incompetent and powerful scheming ideologues that should be feared.

I frankly find it mind-boggling that, after the uninterrupted years of donations, of lobbying, of revolving-door hires, of open support and/or acquiescent silence, anyone could believe for a moment that what's happening now could be anything other than an utterly routine bottom-line calculation stating that currently the potential benefits of staying the course are now outweighed by the potential bottom-line downsides.

In otherwords, the free market operating as intended. Or do we need approximately the millionth and first reminder of what the constantly-invoked First Amendment actually applies to?

While the market angle is usually the right one, in this situation I think it's more complicated.

The fact that they were staring down the barrel of becoming accessories to murder and outright treason by broadcasting unprotected speech, or allowing the posts of weasel-word masters like Trump who spend their lives dogwhistling along that line, had a lot to do with the timing.

The other bit of it is that they were 10 days away from a new administration they were on the verge of massively pissing off. There has been a lot of talk floating anti-trust rulings against Facebook lately. This was not the hill to die on.

And the last part is that the major platforms had spent a year with employees in near revolt over continuing to host this stuff. The atmosphere internally at Facebook & Twitter was very passionately against it. While management was not looking to alienate tens of millions of users, I don't know that it was all that hard a sell.

[Durandal]

While the market angle is usually the right one, in this situation I think it's more complicated.

The fact that they were staring down the barrel of becoming accessories to murder and outright treason by broadcasting unprotected speech, or allowing the posts of weasel-word masters like Trump who spend their lives dogwhistling along that line, had a lot to do with the timing.

The other bit of it is that they were 10 days away from a new administration they were on the verge of massively pissing off. There has been a lot of talk floating anti-trust rulings against Facebook lately. This was not the hill to die on.

And the last part is that the major platforms had spent a year with employees in near revolt over continuing to host this stuff. The atmosphere internally at Facebook & Twitter was very passionately against it. While management was not looking to alienate tens of millions of users, I don't know that it was all that hard a sell.

I do agree with all this; I was being a bit too reductive in my prior posts.

I figure management would have preferred to do the bare minimum to appear like they're really doing something about the borderliners but without truly alienating them, while hopefully not pissing off their employees and the new administration too much--but with this situation the internal and external pressures to 'actually do something about it' were too great. You can somewhat claim plausible deniability when a group of civilians that were on nobody's radar are using your platform to organize riots and cause property damage, but when a powerful political figure like the President of the United States is using your platform for a long-ass time to be seditious and incite an insurrection at a government building, while you just stood there and let it happen, then that's not really something you can sweep under the rug.

The thing about giants exercising their awesome power, like when the first nuclear bombs were dropped, is that it creates geopolitical shockwaves throughout the world. Now politicians all over, seeing how much tech giants are capable of disarming people like Trump and his followers, are thinking to themselves: "holy shit, that could be me next!". And if anything motivates politicians to do something, it's the fear of losing their own position, and now governments everywhere are discussing what to do with the increasing influence of Big Tech.

This is also why I find the thought of "Big Tech wants to control what everyone thinks!" incredibly flimsy, because when Big Tech does publicly exercise its power to do so--as they have now, all the spotlights are directed at them, and people start to get more fearful of them. With all the consequences that entails. It's safer to just accrue influence and power in the background until people realize way too late that you run the whole thing, which in a way is what Big Tech has done (and will try to continue doing) until they were forced into a damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don't situation (which, I may add, is the result of their own continued negligence in allowing the social landscape to become this polarized).

It may not seem like it, but in a way this is also a rather optimal outcome: by Big Tech displaying their power instead of doing nothing, there is now a greater interest in breaking up Big Tech's power and adopting decentralized alternatives that better respect your privacy. Although the latter remains to be seen, since The Exiled tend to be technologically illiterate, and also want to have both a safe space and to be able to bask in their sense of victimization in front of all other people. I also hope that leftists online won't get too complacent in this regard by getting way too high off all the schadenfreude from this last week.