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Comment by chroem- | Hacker News Reader

This will be an extremely unpopular comment and will probably be the end of my ability to post on HN, but it needs to be said:

What we saw today was precipitated by mass deplatforming and censorship. When you take away the ability of people to participate in peaceful political discourse, you push them towards violence. Half of the American electorate currently feels profoundly unheard. They've lost their public voice and their ability to vouch for themselves, which has enabled mass media to flood every publication channel with parodies of them. The longer this continues, the greater the risk of violence will become. You can't make people's beliefs go away by silencing them.

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The actions today were dictated from the top, by a large portion of Republican leadership. They created the lies, promoted them, and made sure the people heard them wherever they could reach them. It's not the media's fault for taking action against these lies, and in doing so offended people so much that they had to resort to sedition.

It's absurd to me to hear that people just needed to talk it out more openly! If only someone could nicely tell them the truth! As if all these people were discussing things in good faith and would listen to reality about their conspiracy theories. Must we really coddle and give a voice to dangerous conspiracy theorists that have steadily gotten more and more extreme and violent? They are being groomed and egged on by Republican leadership - surely that's the source of the problem, and one that nobody seems to be able to do anything about.

> As if all these people were discussing things in good faith and would listen to reality about their conspiracy theories.

Was the "Russian collusion" narrative peddled 24/7 by the mainstream media for over two years a conspiracy theory?

Is what we saw in Portland and at BLM riots not extreme and violent?

This is not just about Republicans.

Regarding the Russian collusion... manafort is in jail over those crimes. Flynn and others were charged with obstruction of justice. You don't obstruct justice because it's fun and dandy.

The trump campaign and admin has made huge efforts to cover up crimes relating to it's behavior with respects to Russia. What exactly are they hiding?

I personally believe it isn't as deep as it seems, but it is also very serious. I don't think Trump is given orders by Russia, or that there was deep cooperation. However, even somewhat of coordination and discussions of sensitive information is criminal.

So yes, the Russian collusion narrative is entirely true. The only reason Trump wasn't charged with obstruction of justice is because of a memo saying they shouldn't charge their boss, not because there isn't enough evidence.

One of the big differences between what happened in Portland and DC is INTENT. The insurrectionists yesterday intended on forcing the joint session to declare Trump the winner of the presidential election. They were attempted to do by force what they failed to do at the ballot box, and at the court house. The fact they were inept and failed does not excuse them at all.

That does not compare even slightly to what happened in Portland. Protests that turns into riots aren't good. However, there was not an intent to overthrow the presidential election there at all.

This kind of whataboutism needs to stop.

>The actions today were dictated from the top, by a large portion of Republican leadership. They created the lies, promoted them, and made sure the people heard them wherever they could reach them.

None of this is tantamount to incitement, or sedition. Which is why despite whatever bloviating we're not going to see any prosecutions of public officials (at least not regarding the Republican efforts to contest the election.) This is 2020's version of "Lock Her Up!"

These sorts of rhetorical exaggerations are contributing to the problem, and are scarcely better than the outright lies on the other side.

Right, except the protesters were sheep led by Trump and his Republican goons. This was nothing short of a failed coup. That can't be an exaggeration.

Stephen Colbert did a great job of bringing this up in his interview with ex-prosecutor Sen. Klobuchar who went straight back to work with her traitor colleagues. She dodged the question of whether more public officials should be prosecuted with a tactful deflection of laying it all on Trump. That bugged me.

https://youtu.be/5PiA9mJommE?t=414

>This was nothing short of a failed coup. That can't be an exaggeration.

Yes it can be, given that Republicans have always framed their arguments in terms of "preventing electoral fraud" and not "overthrowing democracy." You may personally feel like the former is a pretextual cover for the latter but you probably wouldn't be able to prove this in a court of law.

>the former is a pretextual cover for the latter

Setting aside completely how I feel because it absolutely does not matter, the question should be, was it the latter or wasn't it?

> but you probably wouldn't be able to prove this in a court of law.

Exactly. And for this to be the standard for how we certify the truth is at the heart of American absurdism. It's how we let politicians, big banks, Wall Street, et al get away with being full of shit. And I am not exaggerating. The partisan impeachment vote, Wells Fargo's fake bank account, and the financial crisis are all examples of absurdism.

Here is Matt Gaetz after the raid. Do you know why they applaud? Because he gave them the well formed arguments they need to get away with betraying their country. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NfmyACLmZ7s

None of this is an exaggeration.

It's not merely that the prosecutions aren't going to happen, it's that they're not going to receive widespread support among legal experts because that's the tricky thing about the law - you can't just throw people in jail based on tribal hatred, you have to actually assert a definition of concepts like "sedition" or "incitement" or "terrorism" that apply universally and are prosecuted consistently. And there's not going to be a functional definition of these terms that applies especially to the speech of Republican politicians or rioters in the past couple months.

I am not talking about tribal hatred or matters of perspective or what the public thinks or votes about anything here.

I am talking about the masterminds and their intent. Trump clearly intended to steal the election. Wells Fargo and Wall Street clearly intended to cheat for profit.

It's as if intent doesn't matter, when it truly is the source and agency of the bad actors. Wrongful intent continues to enjoy protection in America under the "tricky things about the law", to borrow your words.

You shouldn't be able to steal something just because the lawyers agree with you. In America, that's how it's done (probably everywhere else too, but).

Are you saying you think this was a failed coup? On what basis? It looks nothing like the coups I'm familiar with.

Trump has always gotten away with the things he was gravely incompetent at on the basis of his incompetence. This is just another case. He was pushing Pence to use power he didn't have. His allies all pushed the fraud narrative. And he provoked a riot that proceeded to follow his orders and storm the capital.

This is what a weak coup looks like in 2020 America. None of the action above were based on preserving order or upholding the constitution or fullfilling his oath of office or protecting our democracy or being in the right. It was a power grab doomed from the start, but never the less, a power grab and a sorry attempt at a coup.

That's an interesting and reasonable perspective. If you stretch the definition of a coup to include totally incoherent, incompetent, ineffectual raging that could never actually achieve the outcome, it could qualify. But it still feels like a stretch to me based on what I know of coups (sadly some personal experience there).

I also think calling it a coup inflames tensions and risks credibility for no real benefit. A sober and precise description of events is damning enough.

The struggle over vocabulary is evident. The truth is it could be called all or none of these things. There was a professor on NPR who also said how each term (terrorism, insurrection, coup) has legal connotations. But I call BS on all of it. Getting people to not say coup is already evidence of damage control against the factual, universal, objective, scientific "coup-ness" nature of it all. Semmantics is always arguable, but I am not lying, I have no agenda, and I am not gaming anything with how I express the situation. Like with most "normal" people with no power or say in the situation.

But of course, whether anything crosses legal lines in accordance to legal vocabulary is all these bent politicians are concerned about, because that's the only thing that would stop them by landing them in jail. That's why most of them are lawyers. The non-lawyers have a hard time surviving. We'll see what happens with Trump.

Both points apply to both sides.

That's a fair position to take. We just have different definitions of what constitutes a coup.

I certainly agree politics is way too corrupt and the constant lawfare is harmful.

Some of the Republican leadership, including the President, have presented evidence of election irregularities. Much of this evidence is worrisome, even if it does not impact a single vote. For instance - if you run a poll monitoring system and the county operations team cheers and claps when one party's monitors are asked to leave, it does not inspire confidence in the process. If you rely on a voting machine vendor whom both parties have expressed strong reservations against, it does not inspire confidence either.

When people do not have confidence in the most basic aspect of democracy, you start to see what you did in DC. Regardless of party or country. Absolutely nothing has been done to assuage these concerns, and most responses have been dismissive. It is most likely going to reoccur whenever something like this happens.

When you examine the specific actions here, the President's remarks immediately prior to the incident exonerate him because he said in plain language to "peacefully and patriotically protest at the Capitol". There is no way to credibly accuse him of inciting a mob to be violent, but one could certainly accuse him of inciting a protest. This would not be unusual since there have been many peaceful protests at the Capitol during supreme court hearings and gun control related protests.

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/01/06/us/fact-check-electo...

I'm not a trump supporter, but I sure as hell don't trust main stream media. They lost the ability to supply me with objective fact long, long ago

Who do you trust to supply you with "objective facts" about politics? Why not at least take a look at the New York Times article? Are you afraid you'll forget you don't trust them and take everything at face value?

Even if you don't trust the journalists and editors at the NYT, the article links to primary sources from the US Supreme Court, Wisconsin Supreme Court, Pennsylvania Department of State and more so you can do your own research.

As a non-Trump-supporter who doesn't trust the mainstream media, where do you get your objective facts about politics? Do you just watch CSPAN or something? It seems like you'd miss out on a lot of important news that way.

There are powerful reality filters embedded in the culture of organisations, of classes of people, and with political groups. It is extremely difficult to tease things apart and find the truth in this environment. By exposing yourself to a source you are opening yourself to be being unduly swayed by that source. Unless I am prepared to sit down and investigate the story, the sources found in the story and follow up with my own research, then I will not expose myself to it.

I have not investigated this story thoroughly, but I have tried to get to the bottom of many other stories. Usually at the bottom I find uncertainty. I find lack of evidence. Confusion, bending, warping of reality to fit an agenda. There so much noise it's almost deafening.

"Believe none of what you hear and half of what you see". We are like children in the school playground spinning tales for each other. Imprinting our own thoughts and values and goals into the stories we tell. Barely aware of our own motives.

There are rules for poll monitors. They have to follow specific rules and laws to participate. They cannot talk to workers. They can only ask questions to supervisors and inspectors only. They cannot be disruptive. I mean how would you like to be trying to count things and get interrupted by "poll monitors"?

That is what happened here. The GOP poll monitors kept on breaking the rules and acting like asses. And they were eventually kicked out, totally legally and according to the rules they signed up for. And the Democratic poll watchers clapped, which may be 'unseemly' but isn't proof of "elections irregularities".

The president, with the 1/4 billion he raised, the full support of the GOP and their allies and supporters _at every level of every government_ and with the backing of the federal government were unable to raise a lawsuit that could convince even judges appointed by Trump. If there was evidence of fraud that could sway the election they would have found it, period. They didn't, ergo it doesn't exist.

The reason people didn't have confidence in the most basic aspect of democracy is because they have been lied to endlessly. Without ANY knowledge of how the system works, they took these lies at their face value. Many things were done to assuage those concerns, and they dismissed the evidence out of hand.

For example, Georgia.... does paper ballots counted by optical tabulators. They did a by-hand recount. The hand-counted totals matched the machine tabulation. This totally rules out any computer or machine problems. But people STILL bring up the 'dominion changed the votes' lies.

And you are encouraging it with your irresponsible comment. You're feeding the lies, by encouraging a sense of 'uncertantity' when there is NOT uncertantity. The GOP Secretary of State in Georgia just presided over 2 elections which delivered major Democratic wins. Suggesting that he is 'on the take' just illustrates the sheer desperation of the losers of this election will take to cast any shadow of doubt on anyone if it comforts the sting of their loss, even as they know that their wild accusations will never have an end, and now resembles a literal witch hunt. When your cast of enemies has to grow to include the GOP leaders in the Senate, and the VP, both of who have endlessly protected Trump, then you really don't have reality on your side.

Based on polling there are plenty of folks in both parties who think things were fishy with the election. I am confident that if you took each claim and systematically argued it out in public you would have seen that number go down drastically to an insignificant one.

I think GOP lawmakers had the right idea to hold some kind of public audit of it. Giuliani had a lot of incorrect / blatantly false facts and so he was dismissed out of hand, but many of his witnesses came across as credible and describe things very differently from your explanations.

Logistically I don't think anyone wanted to back the election fraud argument for political reasons but there is still very much a need for it because plenty of people feel like it was stolen.

As for the President - whether he's making it up or whether he's among those who believe it was stolen, nobody reads minds so you cant know one way or another unless you add your own personal bias into it.

Now you can be very angry about the fraud claims because they are baseless etc and be emotional about it or be a problem solver and recognize that those people are fellow citizens and there is no divorce option. Railing against Trump 24x7 actually makes the problem worse because nobody is going to be persuaded. You can also call me also irresponsible for bringing their concerns up, but what you can't really do without being dishonest is to deny that there are millions who believe this stuff, out of whom a few dozen got mad enough about it want to break in to the Capitol, and succeeded.

The fact remains that the media does a tremendous disservice to the public by not casting a wide tent, and the President capitalised on this because frankly what other option is there if you want to win? The American media hoaxed the public into thinking he called Nazis very fine people when he instead said they should be condemned totally, and was said in the context of the broader debate about statues of controversial historical figures.

Now you can again cheerlead for the media and say they are the finest journalists on the planet, but the fact is that more than half the country doesn't believe them. You can dismiss them all as brainwashed or stupid or whatever you like but they're going to be around for a very long time.

> It's absurd to me to hear that people just needed to talk it out more openly! If only someone could nicely tell them the truth! As if all these people were discussing things in good faith and would listen to reality about their conspiracy theories. Must we really coddle and give a voice to dangerous conspiracy theorists that have steadily gotten more and more extreme and violent?

Blue-collar America (manufacturing, middle class) used to be a pretty stalwart blue supporting constituency. Now this group is welcoming populism and is pretty red. We've seen not just jobs but entire INDUSTRIES shipped abroad to the lowest bidder (it's cheaper to make something with slave labor, of course).

You might not care to "listen" but I think they have something interesting to talk about.

Sure, I'm not saying people who vote republican don't have important issues in mind. But those issues aren't censored - they are mainstream non-partisan talking points. That's all I heard about for the past 6 years, from both parties. It's not exactly taboo to talk about trade.

But if a party dilutes their message by embracing conspiracy theories, outlandish lies, bigotry, and authoritarian rhetoric, then what the hell? How is political discussion supposed to be in good faith anymore? If people want to talk to me about trade, they can talk to me about trade on whatever platform they want. I listen to them all the time. If they want to talk to me about how voting machines are rigged by Hugo Chavez, then they're probably not going to say, "oh, your right" when I show them facts that say otherwise.

When "let us go back to work, my family is starving and we're going to lose the house!" is characterized as "they just want to get haircuts!" it's worse than censorship. It's mockery of people's suffering.

Move down the hierarchy of needs a bit and listen to what people are discussing. It's not trade policy.

Lets be clear though, those people would have been better supported such that they wouldn't have needed to make a choice between eating and the pandemic if the outgoing Federal government hadn't made such a mess of their response (and refused point blank to support state and local governments who cannot borrow).

Local governments took as much money as they could to shore up their own finances including and especially their payrolls.

Props to the food banks and other organizations that did so much with so little.

Again, that's a mainstream topic that you see everywhere. Everyone is concerned about that, it's not some secret qualm.

> If they want to talk to me about how voting machines are rigged by Hugo Chavez

Even if you don’t agree with that statement, are you honestly okay with our voting technology being outsourced and owned by a Venezuelan company?

I think there’s some sort of “orange man bad” blindness that is getting people to accept things they otherwise would never tolerate.

What does any of that have to do with storming the capital building and attempting to halt the election process? There were no protest signs looking to be heard about this issue or that, only Trump flags, union jacks and maga hats.

We're supposed to believe this was a coherent protest for populism and not just sour grapes flamed by the president?

union jacks

The national flag of Great Britain?

Fine, don't answer the question. I actually checked https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_Jack_(disambiguation) before asking, but I still don't get what "union jack" refers to in this context.

Excuse me, confederate battle flag. Its been a long day.

My reaction was directed at the downvoters, not at you. Thanks for answering!

WTF are you saying? " It's not the media's fault for taking action against these lies"

The job of media is to report falsities not to take "actions" against them and assuming they know what's in people's minds

Why should the media report falsities?

Honestly, that came out wrong; I meant, _report_ what the society will see as unacceptable deviations (e.g the lies) not actually lie themselves.

Its a great feeling when you are the good guy, and everything the other people think that you disagree with is a conspiracy theory.

> What we saw today was precipitated by mass deplatforming and censorship

Nah, social media was the hub of misinformation and was abused and here we are. What they eventually did was too little and too late. There was a lot of fake news on FB, Twitter, YouTube, Reddit etc. that radicalized all these folks. Platforms like YouTube amplified it because it resulted in more views.

>When you take away the ability of people to participate in peaceful political discourse, you push them towards violence

Nah, the violence is mostly because they believe the election was stolen, based on fake news spread originating from 4chan and then spread on social media and high level politicians.

> You can't make people's beliefs go away by silencing them

But you can restrict the spread. No one objects when phishing scams and fraud targeting the elderly and others are blocked by social media and email platforms, why is there an objection when bullshit qanon and 5g conspiracies are blocked?

There was hardly any blocking on social media till about 2017, and things got way worse with these folks as the right wing and alt right abused the platforms. And now folks like you claim things will somehow get better if fake news is allowed to be spread unrestricted? I don't buy it one bit.

The problem is blocking it almost legitimizes it because they say "big tech" is suppressing the information. It is the same effect you get when you try to ban a book. Everyone wants to read it to get the juicy details.

The way you counter misinformation is by debunking it and showing it is fake.

Nope. Experience with social media shows that this is Empirically untrue.

There is also boat loads of research showing that just seeing false headlines results in people using that information to make decisions - even if they KNOW the headline was retracted.

You can debunk whatever you like, but at that pace of information flow today, this is essentially pissing into the wind.

By the time you have debunked one thing, many other topics have been generated and the conversation has moved on.

Its far easier to create content, and far harder to verify content. Our brains have some easily hackable ways to verify content.

That might have been the case in the past, but debunking something takes a lot more time than creating a fake claim.

We live in a time where one side is spending all their time and energy to create as much fake content as fast as possible. Even if we had infinite time and energy to expose and debunk it all, the attention of the viewer is limited.

As result, we'll never be able to convince people who've read this fake content that what they read is false.

There's only two ways this can end:

1. We block this kind of fake, unverified content

2. We accept living in postfactual times where truth is up to the highest bidder and fake content decides elections.

3. We accept living in postfactual times where truth is up to the people for whom a grasp on the truth is for them an economic imperative.

Mine's not a clear vision, but I imagine this will become a critical issue for a generation and more.

Some future hipsters may come to see Donald Troll as a useful harbinger.

The genie isnt going back in the bottle. Your 1. is not happening. Just consider who we would need to be, in a future world of effectivly infinite information channels.

Your 2. Is unappealing but appears to be a false dichotomy.

We don't know how best to proceed: interesting times. Let's remain open to various possibilities, especially if driven by ICT.

Where do you draw the line? Should posts saying lockdowns don't work be blocked? How about posts saying masks don't work? Being against mandatory vaccination should be blocked or not?

> No one objects when phishing scams and fraud targeting the elderly and others are blocked by social media and email platforms, why is there an objection when bullshit qanon and 5g conspiracies are blocked?

I do object to both. Breaking end to end communications on the internet is censorship.

If you are set up to censor phishing, you are set up to censor dissent when the state puts a machine gun in the face of your sysadmin.

This will be an extremely unpopular comment and will probably be the end of my ability to post on HN

Pre-emptive victim posturing to gain sympathy for your argument. Do better.

What we saw today was precipitated by mass deplatforming and censorship. When you take away the ability of people to participate in peaceful political discourse, you push them towards violence.

Bullshit. I've deplatformed quite a lot of people. It doesn't happen by accident, someone has to be openly promoting genocide or the like before I'm willing to spend time, effort, and reputational capital in pushing them out of the room.

Half of the American electorate currently feels profoundly unheard.

Why, did they accidentally mute Fox News, OAN, or talk radio? There's an entire industry based around airing the grievances of Trump and the sort of people who support him.

Pre-emptive victim posturing to gain sympathy for your argument. Do better.

You need to re-read the community guidelines, specifically the 'In comments' section, in the interest of self-improvement and doing better.

The GP starting off by painting himself as the underdog about to speak out against all us hiveminded folks is a more severe violation of the rules than the parent pointing it out.

“Industry” is the key word. It’s all about making money from the fan base

shit; I meant, do you see a _saint_ in the mirror? Silly me!

How it could be that half of the population is deplatformed and censored when the most popular media(Fox) in that country caters for that demographic, had elected a president and the president was in power for 4 full years when the events happened, the events were organised by the said president?

What else these people demand? Not being called out for their behaviour?

What kind of platform they are looking for? What exactly could be changed to de-victimise those people?

People being relegated to digital ghettos (Parler) is not a sign of healthy discourse. This is about individuals not feeling like they can speak publicly.

Speech has consequences. The snowflakes should stick to The Donald and Parler - where, by the way, I probably wouldn’t be able to speak publically.

But why can't they exist on the same domain as you? Reddit is federated by design, it should be equally open to right-leaning and left-leaning subs.

There are both right and left leaning subs on reddit and it works ok.

Reddit occasionally bans subreddits for various reasons (see r/fatpeplehate and the predecessor to r/hydrohomies). True, r/thedonald was banned, but not because of political leaning (r/conservative is running just fine), but because of how it was spreading misinformation and calling for violence.

>There are both right and left leaning subs on reddit and it works ok.

But for any given sub that isn't political, there probably are not right and left-leaning subs. And given that viewpoint-based moderation is overwhelmingly-common on Reddit, this means that on non-politics based subreddits then engaging on any political issue as a right-leaning individual carries a decent risk of getting some sort of wrongthink ban. It's extremely common, sadly, and even though one can avoid politics entirely it's hard to just watch people circlejerk and mock people who hold your views when these issues do arise.

Being told that you are unwanted in a community and shown the door is not censorship. It is simply a matter of that community signaling that you are not welcome and telling you to leave.

Any community is free to set its own rules for who they consider welcome and you are more than able to join or create an alternative community where you feel more welcome.

That said, claiming that only right-leaning folks are being mocked or told to leave communities is highly disingenuous. Think about being a liberal/left-leaning gun owner and trying to participate in the vast majority of gun forums online. Or hunting forums. Or a lot of survivalist/bushcraft forums. Or militaria forums. Or car forums.

>Being told that you are unwanted in a community and shown the door is not censorship.

Didn't claim it was.

>That said, claiming that only right-leaning folks are being mocked or told to leave communities is highly disingenuous. Think about being a liberal/left-leaning gun owner and trying to participate in the vast majority of gun forums online.

I didn't claim this either, and quite frankly your eagerness to put words in my mouth is telling. In any case I'd be surprised if most gun forums that aren't on Reddit will just straight-up ban you for being liberal. But Reddit's viewpoint-based moderation goes much deeper than in subreddits that have ancillary ties to politics; for example it's very common for regional-based subreddits to have viewpoint-based discrimination that excises conservatives. If this is egregious enough it can cause schisms where you get left-wing/right-wing versions of the same sub, but usually that doesn't happen.

I do think you're leaving out a lot of contaxt when claiming that simply posting as a right-leaning individual in a non-political subreddit will somehow get you banned. Unless you're directly attacking others or posting really hateful stuff, getting banned will first involve some kind of escalation and very often also one or more moderators asking to tone it down or disengage. If you decide to stick to your guns at that point instead of taking a break, that's when forced timeouts and bans start to happen.

As an example of you probably leaving out a lot of context, you used the phrasing "wrongthink ban", which almost always goes hand-in-hand with (false) claims of being censored.

You also wrote that engaging in political discussion from a right-leaning viewpoint in non-political subreddits "carries a decent risk of getting some sort of wrongthink ban".

Dragging politics into spaces where they're not welcome is a bad idea, and will quite rightly upset the people in those spaces. It's their space and they get to choose what is welcome in it. Someone trying to forcibly insert themselves or their viewpoints into other people's space, when they are not welcome, is bound to create friction and anger.

Reddit doesn't promise that anyone has any right to participate in whichever subreddit they want to. That is up to the users and moderators of any given subreddit, no matter how arbitrary their rules may seem. You are free to find other subreddits to participate in. If your politics or general attitude is generally so that you find yourself unwelcome in most subreddits, that should be an indicator to perhaps be a little more diplomatic yourself, honestly. Or just disengage from Reddit entirely, you'll be fine without it.

Being of the belief that you should be welcome in all spaces and greeted on friendly terms by everyone is a really privileged position to hold. Not everyone is welcome everywhere.

>Unless you're directly attacking others or posting really hateful stuff, getting banned will first involve some kind of escalation and very often also one or more moderators asking to tone it down or disengage.

Sometimes it will and oftentimes it won't. Again, this is my actual experience, and the experience of many others. If it comforts you to believe that I probably deserved it somehow, that I have to affirm my lived experience over your baseline skepticism, then it's not worth my time to try to shake you from that sort of complacency.

For example, as I relayed elsewhere on this thread, I was recently banned on a travel forum when a discussion of traveling during COVID arose and I took the position that it wasn't obviously selfish/ignorant to travel if officials in all the relevant jurisdictions approved of it. For this I was simply permanently banned, and my modmail inquiries were ignored. Now if you want to assume that I must've laced my posts with racial slurs or whatever I'll tell you that that's wrong but I'm not going to be able to prove it to you. But this is just how things work on many parts of Reddit.

Whenever you are in a space that is not your own, you have to read the room at least to some extent. If your views are against the general views held by the members of that space, you have to choose your words more carefully and present your opinions more diplomatically than if you were in your own space or a space that is at least more in agreement with you.

This really shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone. Not everyone is equally welcome everywhere. Different owners/moderators set different limits, often based on precious situations, which you may not be aware of.

Specifically the argument of doing things that a lot of people consider irresponsible, even if they are not disallowed, is a very sore subject with a lot of people during this pandemic. Authorities in a lot of countries have been way too lax in imposing lockdowns and restrictions, leading to much higher numbers of infected and dead than would otherwise have occurred in the same amount of time.

Odds are that the travel subreddit you mention has seen a lot of people arguing that if there is no travel ban, they should be free to travel wherever they want and however they want, which really rubs a lot of people the wrong way, especially those who have lost loved ones and consider such behavior highly irresponsible. Odds are also that the moderators previously made an announcement or even rule changes prohibiting those sorts of discussions, because of how they rile people up.

In the eyes of the moderator, you transgressed the rules of the subreddit, so they firmly showed you the door. I make no judgment on whether whatever you posted was morally reprehensible, what matters is that the proprietor of that particular space found it so.

Reddit is a collection of many little kingdoms. Some of them have kings that just don't like you, for whatever reason. That's their prerogative and there's nothing you can do about it, except maybe creating a rival subreddit that potentially becomes more popular.

>If your views are against the general views held by the members of that space, you have to choose your words more carefully and present your opinions more diplomatically than if you were in your own space or a space that is at least more in agreement with you.

Yes, and we know what they say about wearing short skirts and sexual assault as well. I know how to read a room, but the point is that the mere fact of the double-standard is offputting.

>Reddit is a collection of many little kingdoms. Some of them have kings that just don't like you, for whatever reason. That's their prerogative and there's nothing you can do about it, except maybe creating a rival subreddit that potentially becomes more popular.

Ultimately I don't disagree, I'm just pointing out how this viewpoint-based moderation creates a bad experience for a lot of people that will lead to their turning to alternatives, and that the scale to which this is happening probably is not just Reddit "working as intended." And it's not like you can just casually jump from say a hobby subreddit that bans all Trump supporters on sight to a right-wing version of the subreddit that offers a remotely-similar experience. My point is a lot weaker than you're acting like it is, which is telling. "Moderators don't act like this, but if they do it's your fault, and if it's not your fault then you need to accept that this is how Reddit works." Do I though?

Interestingly, Reddit has stepped in when moderators have tried to get too forceful with eliminationism - for example, there have been attempts to create shared user blacklists across subreddits but these have largely been quashed by admins.

> "the double-standard is offputting"

You bring it up because you were affected by it, I'm not sure you would react in the same way if the tables were turned. There are double standards everywhere, affecting everyone in some way and to different extents. Some face a lot more double standards than others. Consider that your experience is not unique to you nor to those who agree with you politically. Far from it.

> "And it's not like you can just casually jump from say a hobby subreddit that bans all Trump supporters on sight to a right-wing version of the subreddit that offers a remotely-similar experience."

In that case, if you wish to genuinely participate in that particular subreddit, you keep your politics to yourself and stick to the relevant subject matter. You quickly learn to segregate subjects, some forums are fit for one type of discussion, some for other types. Some have a very strict enforcement of tone, some are basically free-for-all.

Even if someone posts a political opinion that you disagree with, you are not obligated to react, in fact reacting may show your hand and sour everyone else to you, for something that is unrelated to the subject matter of the forum.

Discretion is the better part of valor, after all.

None of this really disagrees with anything I've actually asserted. I'm saying "just accept the viewpoint discrimination or leave" is really not an attitude that would be embraced by many. But hey, if you're willing to grant the possible reality of widespread viewpoint discrimination then I'm impressed.

There really is no such thing as "widespread viewpoint discrimination", except the impossibility of genuinely discussing alternatives to capitalism in the US, without resorting to name-calling.

What you're experiencing is simply that you are not automatically welcome in all spaces you try to enter. Some people have experienced that for decades and centuries.

I think you are confusing right learning opinions with outright racism, anti-Semitism and calling for violence against various minority groups.

>I think you are confusing right learning opinions with outright racism, anti-Semitism and calling for violence against various minority groups.

I'm not. For example, I was banned like a week ago from a sub for arguing that it's not obviously selfish/evil for someone to travel during COVID if one is allowed to do so. It was on a travel-related subreddit where there were no rules to this effect, but a mod felt that this sort of attitude was tantamount to advocating manslaughter.

Most subs will not have "no conservatives allowed" rules but the enforcement patterns often will not follow the rules.

> but because of how it was spreading misinformation and calling for violence

That's the rhetoric Reddit used but I was completely unconvinced. They spent the better part of a year looking for a reason to ban /r/td, going as far as to invent "quarantining" as a soft-ban, and when they finally did so the cited evidence was extremely unconvincing.

Because they used that as a way to harass everyone around the world by manipulating the front page?

They would brigade and attack other forums?

They were a collection site for bad actors and even more dangerous content to the point that a large site like Reddit could get shut down.

There is some wishful thinking going on that all speech is equal, and that such speech was being conducted here.

As a very occasional reader of /r/td I saw a lot more accusations of this type of behavior than actual instances of it. Certainly no more so than other extreme subreddits like /r/latestagecapitalism or even /r/politics.

I think those types of subs are/were annoying and filter most of them from my homepage. That said I never found /r/td to be anywhere near egregious as is said here, even the justification for the final banning was incredibly watery.

I was a non reader of T_d, but their front page manipulation was on everyone, you needed no subscription to their sub to be afflicted by their shenanigans.

I mean Reddit changed their algorithms to ensure this never happened again.

T_D was 4chan tier stuff built around “owning the libs” and rubbing it in everyone’s face. The grace of a boozed uncle who wants to dance on your grave.

The other fun part is how long T_D was allowed to run Amok. Special gloves to avoid looking bad, something that’s also forgotten.

If you want to know how bad it is, simply see what their voat/ parler versions look like.

And I’m also not the kind of person who actually did the history digging and detective work on user accounts. This is all passive observation of internet drama.

The T_d crowd was happy with dog whistles and coded racism. For them to find r/politics or any other sub offensive is but natural.

There's right-leaning and then there's racism. Additionally, Reddit has the right to block whatever it wants from its platform, just as the mods here can delete posts etc.

Freedom of speech isn't the right to speak wherever you like. I don't have to let you speak on my lawn, on my stage. You just shouldn't disappear for disagreeing with the government.

To me there's an obvious double standard here: there's a tacit acceptance that social media has the power to actively sway elections (e.g. FB in 2016). How could it be that banning certain political groups from these platforms is not a form of censorship?

To refit your analogy: what if your stage is the only stage there is?

Reddit is absolutely not federated. It's a single centralized site run by a single centralized entity that has the right to censor anything or everything on it at will.

White ethno-nationalists are not "right leaning".

Because left-wing activists run reddit and they enjoy censoring the right-wing. So most get fed up and go to the alt right websites instead.

Guess what they do there? "Hey have you heard about white genocide??" etc.

There are even people that specifically go to reddit to encourage people to leave and go to the alt right website. It is a form of recruiting for the cause so to speak.

That’s exactly the problem. They can’t talk to you and you can’t talk to them. You don’t get to tell them why they’re wrong or work to find common ground anymore. Their ideas are allowed to fester in their protected bubble. This is extremely destructive to democracy and open discourse.

> where, by the way, I probably wouldn’t be able to speak publically.

I had a look at Parler earlier.

People like you are loud and vocal there too, you can start with the parody account Breitfart for example, the difference is that others are allowed to be loud and vocal there too.

So in a way equally bad as Twitter, just a bit more "nuanced" and even more noisy.

Sure but how is this the other half’s fault?

Are the other people obligated to accept lies and bigotry?

What’s the plan here? Maybe the people who are into alternative facts should not annoy people who are into facts?

You have to discuss with them diplomatically instead of say "haha, dumb trumper" or something similar. There are left-wing trolls that basically do that lol and the right-wing people just leave to go to the alt-right websites instead. Why do you think there are so many of these right-wing "talk shows" on places like youtube?

This is an anachronistic view, and empirically ineffective.

Then they shouldn't have violated policies that resulted in their account getting banned. They weren't banned for their political beliefs, they were banned in large part because they were doing one of the following: doxxing, harassing, threatening, inciting violence, etc.

Not to mention talk radio which reaches like 50% of the population, and is a major hub of misinformation/

Fox is the most popular single media source because it's the only (mainstream) source that "caters for that demographic". Dozens, perhaps hundreds, of other sources are actively hostile to that demographic.

What is the argument here? Are they deplatformed unless everyone says the things they like?

Breitbart, a huge network of News Corp, 4Chan, many subreddits, many youtube channels, many podcasts, radio channels etc are all dominated by those people.

Does everyone have to agree with them so they don’t feel deplatformed?

> Deplatform: Prevent (a person...) from contributing to a forum or debate, especially by blocking them on a particular website.[1]

Everytime someone is removed from a platform they've been deplatformed[2]. The existence of a few remaining platforms that aren't participating in that effort doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

And don't be fooled; it is an active, organized effort whose ultimate goal is to make disagreement impossible. Hell, the term for it in the UK is "no-platform", which makes the goal quite clear. You seem to be arguing that movement doesn't exist, simply because it hasn't completely succeeded.

1: https://www.lexico.com/definition/deplatform

Is everyone deplatformed? I know of several sub-reddits and websites where people on the left are not be allowed to post.

Are half of the US population removed from this platform? Which platform exactly are those 160 million Americans removed from?

People also feel threatened and silenced when someone else who publicly expresses their point of view is deplatformed for it. Do you really think people don't or shouldn't respond to the deplatforming of other people?

Deplatforming was also problematic on school campuses with anti-free-speech students protesting, disrupting, and aggressively preventing visits by speakers with whom they disagree.

> What we saw today was precipitated by mass deplatforming and censorship.

Seems rather like the opposite: a mob got riled up by misinfo and conspiracy theories that they never would've read or seen if [your outgroup here] were any good at censorship and deplatforming.

This sounds to me like kind of a roundabout way of saying we should all just accept the status quo without questioning it.

Let's talk about some other status quo questions you should accept:

1. Encryption is bad because the police need to catch bad guys.

2. It's fine and good for Google et all to sell your personal information.

3. Drones are good. We've been in Iraq for 20 years and that's fine and normal.

I'm 100% with you. I don't care for these people or their politics, but the way the media, politicians, and the public are reacting, this is going to only make this so much worse.

They truly believe there's a deep state that rigged the election. Throwing around using the 25th Amendment, calling them all terrorists committing treason/sedition, is only going to reinforce that the deep state is not only real but using every tool they have to attack them. The constant attempts to silence them by deplatforming and a whole host of other shadowy methods is confirming that the media, big tech, higher education, is full of people that not only despise them but with they would go away forever.

If we keep going down this path I guarantee violence is coming. 50 years from now we'll end up seeing the Oklahoma bombing as the opening salvo to what came next. McVeigh went full terrorist after Waco/Ruby Ridge. Don't give these people the confirmation they're looking for.

>They truly believe there's a deep state that rigged the election.

This is a fallacy. People can convince themselves of pretty much anything with the help of tribalism and leaders willing to lie. That doesn't mean you should sympathize with their desire for violence.

I think the poster above is worried about more violence. In which way do you read that as "sympathize with their desire for violence"?

It means that they're not guilty of sedition/treason, which is what they're being accused of by the other tribe with its own desire for violence.

Pre-2016 if you would have asked me "Are electronic voting systems vulnerable to hacking?" I would have said "Absolutely yes." Post 2020 if you ask me "Are electronic voting systems vulnerable to hacking" my answer is still "Absolutely yes"

Weird so many people did some kind of dipsy-doo flip-aroo with elections in 2016/2020.

But the question is not whether they are vulnerable, but whether they were actually abused. Big difference. We have evidence of the former. And virtually no evidence of the latter.

There’s almost no way you could know. Personally I don’t like our voting technology coming from Venezula but maybe that’s just me.

I don't like the machines either. But you can't go from "could have" to "did" without evidence. Luckily where I live I get to vote on paper. It prevents such debates.

How about electronic voting systems backed by paper ballots?

Do you remember 2000 and the Diebold controversy? We had an Diebold engineer testifying on record about the deficiencies of these systems. I know it’s been 20 years, but I do think we need to take the integrity of our elections more seriously (and I say that being VERY happy that Trump lost the election).

Well, I don't think anyone claims that electronic voting systems should be the source of truth for vote-count; it's mostly there for convenience and if there is any doubt at all about its integrity, the paper ballots can always (and often are) busted out to be counted by hand.

Paper ballots help, but it’s still not a properly secure system.

> They truly believe there's a deep state that rigged the election. Throwing around using the 25th Amendment, calling them all terrorists committing treason/sedition, is only going to reinforce that the deep state is not only real but using every tool they have to attack them.

In the words of Obama in one of his last discourses as president (or perhaps his firsts as ex-president?), "reality has a way of catching up with you". The more your beliefs deviate from reality, the more you're going to be hitting your head against a wall.

What should an appropiate reaction be to people that believe that a deep state rigged the election storming a government building, and a president fueling that?

> What should an appropiate reaction be to people that believe that a deep state rigged the election storming a government building, and a president fueling that?

Transparency.

What information do you feel that you're missing or being kept away from?

If the deep state wanted to rig the election in favor of Dems, why not give them a bunch of state governments in 2020 so they can undo the Republicans' house gerrymandering?

Yeah dude, the “Camp Auschwitz” guy has been deplatformed so many times he became a nazi. Got it.

Why do they feel "unheard"? Every election results in close to 50% of the voters not getting the candidate they voted for. It doesn't mean their issues weren't discussed.

Now more than ever, anyone can have a voice. A child can make videos unboxing toys and millions will watch. You can tweet, blog, video, write essays, make podcasts and so on. I'm not aware of any point in history when people could be heard more than now.

As can someone pretending to be a child. And they can make 5 accounts pretending to be different people. If it is revealed that they take money from Big Toy then, provided they protected their identity enough, they can just move on to another account.

Our mindset is based around a form of discourse where we stop listening to people when we discover they're using their free speech to lie. Now you don't know who the liars are.

> Every election results in close to 50% of the voters not getting the candidate they voted for.

Every election in the USA. Plenty of countries manage to have a proportional electoral system, where a large fraction of people get to feel appropriately represented.

With such a bipartisan division in politics, it doesn't matter whether the issues were "discussed": there won't be compromise across the centre line.

You completely nailed it there.

Perfect example is reddit banned "the donald" sub and they went on to create thedonald.win. It is now the 430th largest website in the USA per Alexa.

> Perfect example is reddit banned "the donald" sub and they went on to create thedonald.win.

Which turned into a even bigger echochamber than previosuly. At least, while they were on reddit, on the frontpage you were exposed to posts from both sides.

Now each side just browse its own version of the online ghetto, without being exposed to posts from the other side calling out the conspiracy theories, the partially reported news, the plain bullshit.

> Half of the American electorate currently feels profoundly unheard.

They voted, they lost by 7+ million votes, which they stormed the Capitol to overturn. Why should I have to keep sparing their feelings?

These people need to stop being appeased.

Can you provide evidence supporting massive de-platforming. As far as I know a few far right people who blatantly abused the TOS were banned. Most of these guys can freely post on Twitter and Facebook.

This is a ludicrous conclusion to draw.

If it makes you feel any better the same thing it's happening across the Atlantic, with the Yellow Vests movement which is being made fun of in France, the Brexiters which are derided in UK and people in my country (Romania) laughing at the people who didn't want to wear masks at some point because "their mouths smell" (yeah, not anyone can afford dental work).

I think the problem is more subtle than that. There is a general evaporation of trust levels in societies across the world, not just the U.S. The world is becoming a very low-trust place.

Deplatforming and censorship are only some factors in this process, but there are others. Remember Trump's original claim to "drain the swamp"? In the age of the Internet, anyone who pays attention to politics is overwhelmed by examples of bad behavior from the top guys and gals. People, being partisan creatures, will mostly concentrate on the top guys and gals from the other side, but contemporary democratic world is transparent enough not to let you doubt that the basic institutions are rotten to the core. Once upon a time, random people could have (positive) illusions about what takes place in the palaces of power in Brussel, London, Paris or Washington. Now they know it down to the last dirty detail and I believe that some of them just cannot cope.

At the same time, China notices this and does its utmost to suppress any disagreeing voices within, much more so than 15 years ago. The end result should probably be a curated, polished image of the country and its system with no visible flaws. I doubt that they can sell this to the outside observers, but they may get their own population to believe that without reservations: "we are the champions".

What peaceful discourse? In no universe are people coming together and breaking bread with racists and confederate sympathizers. You feel unheard because your ideas are toxic and unintegratable. Let it be split down the middle, because coming together is not happening.

hey, thanks for this comment. i'm inclined to disagree, but i'm genuinely curious about your point of view.

one question i have is -- are there any topics you believe deserve to be censored by social media? or maybe i should say any "political" topics? like, i guess you'd probably be okay with some kinds of sex work being censored, but i maybe sex work is also a form of politics...

anyway, i guess i'm curious if you're a free-speech absolutist, or, if otherwise, how would you do draw a line to avoid "mass" deplatforming and have it be targeted deplatforming.

Are they unable to talk on Parler?

We can’t talk to them on Parler. It’s just an echo chamber. We’ve killed free discourse between opposite political ideologies.

That was already dead, I mean the_donald spamming the front page to perfectly align "GOD EMPEROR" or whatever before reddit had to change their front page algorithm was not discourse.

And this is now, after people are distracted by social media. American Political discourse died soon after Fox news came on the stage. People seem to have forgotten how that era was because this era is simply worse.

Fox has been around for quite a while, and it was never “QAnon level crazy”. Fox was here since the Bush era, and I regularly had political debates and discussions with people I disagreed with back then. Sure, I could have never turned a Republican against the war, but I certainly was able to find common ground on PATRIOT/etc. Not anymore.

As I said its gotten worse, the trend is undeniable.

I mean take a look at some of the greatest hits - it was the FOX news cycle that gave credence to creationism and the debate whether Evolution existed worked. Remember "teach the debate"?

This was a level of FUD that completely outperformed previous work which simply distracted or confused over more recent science like climate change.

Here an entirely established piece of science which is used everyday, even now in vaccines - was made invalid.

The divorce from reality was achieved by lots of hard work by ad and content people, along with the news networks.

They can, but let's not pretend that Parler won't be targeted for destruction somehow if it gets a critical mass of users. We've seen this strategy employed before on right-wing platforms that catch too much negative media attention. Their infrastructure platforms will be targeted, their distribution channels will be targeted, their payment systems will be targeted, their code licenses will be targeted, the media will try to dig up whatever negative stories about the firm or its owners that they can, etc. Eventually some platform will be able to resist this but it's an ugly process.

Are they restricted from setting up their own Twitters, FB, IG?

This is, frankly, irresponsible. The events of today were precipitated by hatred, propaganda, a rejection of personal responsibility, and an embracing of hypocrisy, committed mostly by Trump's supporters over a long time. It's the expected behavior of the minority of people with the least intelligence and integrity when tribalism escalates.

And yet still, even if none of that were the case, it's deeply immoral to paint violence as a somehow justifiable reaction to being shouted off Twitter for being a "racial realist", and other hills Trump supporters insist on dying on.

I don't see any "mass deplatforming and censorship". Trump and his supporters have had massive airtime and been given ample opportunity to say their peace on mainstream media in the last few years.

Some people will criticize and ridicule that, yes. That's part of free speech. And if everyone is ridiculing you, then perhaps there might be the possibility you're saying ridiculous things?

Deplatformed conservatives eh? This has got to be one of the oldest conservative tropes.

FoxNews screams conservatives have no voice, while patting themselves on the back for being the most watched cable channel. [1] Rush Limbaugh is the most listened to Radio show in the United States. [2]

Conservatives scream they have no platform on Facebook, yet the top 10 shared links of Facebook are almost exclusively conservative. [3], and you can observe this trend holding over time.

Conservatives have plenty of other platforms to go to. No one is deplatforming conservatives on 4chan, or Parler, or hell, even Reddit.

The 'deplatformed' narrative is a manufactured, and used to drive a persecution complex. Its not real, and used to rile the base.

[1] https://www.foxnews.com/media/fox-news-finishes-2020-as-most...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rush_Limbaugh#cite_note-late-3

[3] https://twitter.com/FacebooksTop10/status/134648457323691212...

Regarding reddit, that is plainly not true. If you were conservative minded, it would take all of 10 seconds to realise that the hive mind is antagonist to your beliefs.

I'm not from the US, and from an outsiders perspective, it is clear as day that reddit is liberal and votes democrat, and they think you are an idiot if you do otherwise.

You can go to /r/conservative right now, and write any crap you want. You're conflating the notion of deplatforming with the notion of a place having a certain political leaning.

I can go comment liberal ideas on Breitbart and immediately be shouted down as a commie CCP bootlicker and be blocked. I guess by your logic that means liberals are getting deplatformed too!

> You can go to /r/conservative right now, and write any crap you want.

You chose the worst example. /r/conservative has been getting brigaded since before this election. One of the reasons for which /r/thedonald was quarantined in 2019. I know because everytime a big news from US get published in my country national papers, i used to open several subreddits in order to hear both sides of the story.

> I can go comment liberal ideas on Breitbart and immediately be shouted down as a commie CCP bootlicker and be blocked.

The same happens on the other virtual side of aisle. And it's not something unique to the US. I'm not American, but in my country the political discourse has been polarized the same way, with one side accused of been Putin's puppet, and those voting for them being accused of being fascists, and the other side now getting accused of being on China's payroll and getting called comunists.

The side controlling the biggest subreddit in my country, is the same that believes in the "russian puppets" story.

If you post from your personal account about some scandal that is on the national newspapers regarding the side they believe in, people start scraping your profile searching for information in order to dox you, and start sending you private messages insulting you.

If you post by using a throwaway because you don't want to risk receiving death threats just for having a different opinion, they start with the usual "this account is new, it's a russian propaganda troll".

The moderators delete threads and comments about arguments that damage their side, and if you politely ask for an explanation for the removal they insult you, ban you and mute you.

They got to the point that when some polital topics became damaging to their side because of huge mistakes that were made, they banned those topics with the excuse that "they bring brigaders and propaganda accounts".

This is not something that's only happening in right leaning echochambers.

And I don't think that this is something that helps keep an healty political discussion.

I'm liberal, and I frequently visit forums that happen to be majority conservative (not to talk politics). The prevailing voices there are antagonistic to my beliefs, to put it mildly. They say out loud way, way worse things about me than simply implying that I am an "idiot". And yet I don't lament that their platform is politically biased and run away and call myself deplatformed. They are calling normal reactions to the things they say a persecution. It's a victim complex, and a deeply hypocritical one rooted in purest hatred for liberals.

It goes hand-in-glove with the conflicting ideas that "the other side is so stupid and incompetent" while at the same time "the other side is so sly and crafty with their diabolical plans." I'm pretty sure some folks in 1930s Germany used similar tactics.

>Half of the American electorate

We need to be very clear here, we're explicitly talking about LESS THAN HALF of the electorate. Donald Trump did not win the popular vote in either presidential election he participated in.

An alternative perspective is these protests aren't actually all that unprecedented. Protesting against a new president is fairly routine (they did that for Trump) and violence is not so unexpected in economically tough years (like 2020).

The sensible response to not being heard is to establish a voice, not to riot. So riots are probably not a sign of that.

Deplatforming is a persistent right wing fantasy. If you don't openly misinform regarding public safety or very explicitly promote hate you can largely get away with saying almost anything else on Twitter, etc. When Trump blatantly spreads dangerous misinformation about Covid, for example, there is a lot of whining about deplatforming. Don't be fooled.

Furthermore, claiming deplatforming (a delusion) is the cause of political violence is nothing more than a grotesque distortion and justification.

So Trump got kicked off twitter, and people can get kicked off various platforms for saying extreme things, but deplatforming does not exist because you agree with the reasons why those people got kicked off, and therefore other people are delusional and living in fantasies, and you have an opinion on if this concept which does not exist causes violence.

First definition I found https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/deplatform (transitive, formal) deplatform 1: To prevent someone from utilizing a platform to express their opinion.

If you rely on the literal definition devoid of further context, every single person alive has been deplatformed.

Yes, and?

You think it's worse to interpret a word literally if that literal definition is broad, than it is to interpret a word in a way that makes the other person seem delusional and nonsensical? In the context of a specific conversation, its more reasonable to interpret somebodies words in a way that makes their words make sense, than in a way that makes them sound delusional.

> Half of the American electorate currently feels profoundly unheard

Well they're wrong to think that and they should be discouraged from nursing that false belief. Conservatives have controlled the entire government for the last four years, including a conservative supermajority in the SCOTUS that will last for decades. In reality, those Americans are the most heard if by "heard" we mean having their political will effected by means of their government and not "permitted to shitpost on twitter".

Conservatives controlled America for all but 2 years in this century, only in 2008-2010 both executive and legislative branches were under Democrats. Republicans heavily gerrymandered country in their favor in 2010 and given that 2020 census is practically a failure, that advantage is going to stay. Conservatives get to control the SCOTUS for decades. Voters from the red states enjoy unfair influence their vote gives them via Senate.

If after all this the electorate feels profoundly unheard maybe they should look at who they vote for.

I don't think there's much validity to this conservative persecution complex when you subject it to analysis. There's a difference between what feels to be the case and what is.

Social media are about emotional impulses and endorphin triggers, not rationality or reality. Conflating the two is undermining societies across the world.

The American right isn't being censored in general. It's a vehicle for disinformation, to a somewhat greater degree than the American left. It's mainly that disinformation that's being censored on social media. In other media: those are as segregated between the two parties as they have been for decades.

As far as de-platforming, review bombing and the like: it's not the right being excluded, it's anyone who doesn't conform to the fringe left's concepts of orthodoxy and political correctness. You know, the "woke" crowd.

What happened at the Capitol was not the result of mass de-platforming and censorship. It was the result of ideological self-isolation, ignorance of historical context (among other things) and blindly parroting partisan talking points without exercising critical thought. This has been happening since Vietnam, before social media or even the Internet were invented. It culminated in the election of Trump, the emergence of Proud Boys, BLM and Antifa, the state of particularly the GOP and yesterday's events.

For all the so-called differences between the two sides in American politics, they share a surprising amount of traits: ideological bubbles, authoritarian leanings, tribal sentiments, demonising the other side, distrust in corporate media and feeling oppressed/disenfranchised. There's at least a hint to the shared American subconscious there.

Yeah, I mostly agree. I'm not sure if the deplatforming push is good or not but I see moves like this only accelerating it, which is going to lead to a deepening "red internet / blue internet" schism that's probably not good for either side. It's obvious that the left feels that they can keep shutting down right-wing media by various sorts of economic pressure and legislation, but I think we're seeing this strategy start to hit sharply diminishing returns but at this point the echo chambers have been so strongly reinforced that it's hard to imagine any other strategy getting support.

Its not like there was enlightened discourse going on in the first place.

When The_donald was busy tea bagging the front page to get the submissions titles just right and spelling out something like "own the libs", no great bi-partisan agreement was being reached.

I think it just became clear to the democrat and "left" that the right had stopped caring for years.

This idea that there was a conversation is simply revisionist, and blaming the left is to blame the laggard for imitating the front runner.

>no great bi-partisan agreement was being reached.

No, but it's not like things couldn't be worse, and I don't think that the sort of eliminationist tactics that are being embraced are going to make things better. The left will manage to deplatform the right off of a bunch of major sites but they'll just reconvene elsewhere, out of reach. Will this be good or bad for discourse?

If this is the part of the journey that you are waking up during, then unfortunately there’s only bad news. What you see coming up was already baked in.

I dare say, so are the natural counter reactions to it.

If it’s unclear, remember the quaint days of the Fox News effect. America was pulling away for a long time, and the right was the first one to realize the political advantage of it.

Frankly I doubt America, especially the American right, can currently sit down and figure out how it got here.

This isn’t an unfair criticism mind you, you can simply see how the right has gone from the river boat (?) days to the tea party to the Trump days of today, to track how hyper partisan it’s become internally.

The media structures at play, such as Fox News, are determined to sell a partisan story.

The Republican Party is so unable to work with the dems that they even rejected “Obama care” - which was built around a Republican program -Romneycare.

This is simply one example, to highlight that what you are seeing is momentum at play.

The machines that spin it up - namely the political:media structures, are fully active.

Plus it’s been frightfully effective for the right.

When Obama came to power, the right had suffered a massive demoralizing loss. They had nothing and were demoralized.

Instead they got together and found strength in sheer force of will and used the term “one term president” to invigorate themselves and fight Obama at every turn.

This dogged will to fight at all costs is impressive, and it resulted in styling Obama, and even gave them Trump.

The Trump years have been amazing for the Republicans and so many core Republican goals have been fulfilled, especially the Supreme Court judges.

The republicans approach simply works. Why wouldn’t the left pick up that lesson?

You’ll even see that the rise of the left in the democrats is a mirror of the same process on the right.

TLDR: sorry man, bipartisanship is long dead in your country.

What should worry you even more - these processes aren’t unique to America. Fully expect to see this same break down around the world.

How do you feel about subreddits like r/MurderedByAOC, r/AOC, r/LeopardsAteMyFace, r/ToiletPaperUSA, and others doing the exact same thing to the front page?

Well since the algo changed, and they can't do it I don't feel anything.

Also, they don't do crap like this : https://imgur.com/gallery/YM5HM

And this is mild versions of their brigading and tea bagging. What, you think this is ok?

Honestly, I don't see the difference. If you're talking about general low quality posts, look no further than r/PoliticalHumor. And, even though the algorithm has changed, The Donald was ONE pro-trump subreddit and they got banned. They are gone now, mission accomplished.

Now you have about a dozen progressive subreddits hitting the front page on a daily basis with nothing more than screenshots of tweets. How is that any better?

> You can't make people's beliefs go away by silencing them.

Actually you can, but that's not what I want to get at right now.

The problem is that these people there went to the Capitol for the sake of violence and not for the sake of being heard. What I am going to say is not true about conservatives overall, but definitely true for every single MAGA cultist out there.

They generally have completely baseless opinions and are not ready to discuss anything, have an argument, learn or compromise. This is what democracy is based on: compromise. Therefore, they are fundamentally undemocratic and if you're being honest they are fascists.

So fuck their ability to spout their violent garbage online. These are dehumanizing assholes incapable of discussing with liberals and finding compromise. They just want a dictatorship suppressing and killing liberals, if possible.

Good luck America, you need it.

Are you sure about this?

The news network they praise as gospel is quite literally the most watched thing on cable TV within the United States.

What are you basing your assumptions on? They seem to be very much incorrect.

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