America's internet is splitting along party lines | Hacker News Reader

America's internet is splitting along party lines

axios.com

This article is confusing or confused. It conflates the people and companies that use the internet with the network itself, and then supports its argument that the internet is splitting by talking about what's going on with TV networks. There's a lot of division going on in America, but I think they've failed to see its shape.

Agreed. I think the premise is sound. I feel like the US needs to incorporate a new right, similar to the separation of church and state but instead focused on the separation of politics and companies. I have no idea how politics would be defined or how it would be enforced. However similar to the premise of this article I think the one thing both sides can agree on is all of this became worse and jaded when companies became self aware and brandished a political agenda.

I mean if we want free speech how can their be disinformation? Even if crazy earl wants to talk about the “good old days” where women stayed home and cooked all day why does a company need to take a stand on eliminating that post?

Why do people working at companies feel compelled to incorporate their beliefs into their work? Disney makes movies for kids. I understand that a small % of the population feels marginalized because they don’t have direct representation in media, but kids are inpressional, and if we want to be “Fair” we’d present ALL sides, from straight, to gay, from hero to terrorist. Or Disney could go back to making neutral kids movies about fictional talking animals struggling through life. Why do they need to take a stance on something.

If disney made all their characters white, people would call that political; if they made their characters diverse, people would call that political too. Media doesn't exist outside the political sphere.

Many people call for apolitical media, but I'm not sure that's possible without avoiding any contentious issue whatsoever, and basically everything is contentious at the moment.

Your suggestion goes directly against freedom of association. Also there really isn't such a thing as being "neutral" like you describe, "neutral" is just when everyone agrees to the point where they don't release there's something to disagree about.

However your comment does seem to touch on one the major deficit/contradictions in small-l liberalism: you don't really solve disagreements by pushing them into the private sphere, you just avoid them, and eventually that avoidance can tear society apart.

Even if crazy earl wants to talk about the “good old days” where women stayed home and cooked all day why does a company need to take a stand on eliminating that post?

Um, because those women buy a crap-ton of product. Depending on your business, probably a lot more than men. If they boycott you, (which incidentally happens to be a right guaranteed to them by the 1st restricting the government from decreeing its denial), there goes your bottom line.

I'm always the big, bad, Halliburton capitalist in my social circle, but I'm actually not the jackhole people think I am when they see the suit coming. What happens is that liberals and conservatives have ideas that are detrimental to the efficient function of market capitalism and I point that fact out. Why should a business owner and his employees suffer to ensure the right of some beer gutted unemployed Bubba to offend women who probably worked their posteriors off to be able to afford your product?

If you want to keep politics out of business, then keep the politicians out of my businesses.

At a government level, you can not banish politics without infringing on speech. Your proposal directly conflicts with the first amendment.

If Disinformation was simply promoting outdated chauvinism, it wouldn't be perceived as such a threat to society. But that's not what's happening. Disinformation campaigns are convincing people that the election was rigged and the current government is illegitimate.

Even your "present all sides" idea has flaws because it's a tactic used in propaganda. You ostensibly take two "experts" and hold a mock debate. One of those experts is going to take a dive, looking like a fool, and as a result, your chosen side appears to prevail.

Half of Americans do not identify with either major party. They are not nearly as "split" as the partisans that try to control the political discourse.

Yet most unaffiliated voters “lean”, often very strongly, towards one party or the other. Most estimates put true independent/swing voters at only 3-4% of the electorate.

There's a big equivocation between your post and GP's: "American" => "voter". But people who are not well-represented by the two major parties are probably less likely to vote.

If they're not Americans then how are they voting?

Because the very least of two evils is neither.

First 8chan, then Parler. Tomorrow it might be you.

At some point the service providers have to be able to stand on a utility status and provide equal access to all comers.

Yep, but censors (on both sides) cheer for this, because it's not them... yet.. atleast not on 'that' platform.

Sadly, even on HN we have people arguing for that. You are labeled 'absolutist' if you argue against censorship. It is fascinating really.

You won't find any sympathy for that position here because nobody complaining about social media is actually arguing against censorship, they're arguing against moderation. HN is also not an unmoderated forum. You don't get to post whatever you want here. I also don't get to post whatever I want here, and I'm willing to make that compromise so nobody ruins the place with toxicity and spam and conspiracy theories. You can very easily witness the consequences of not doing that, by taking a look at 8chan or Parler.

I am not fishing for sympathy. I am arguing for a set of values that are a supposed foundations of US.

Now, I personally find it troubling that so many people seem to want to upend that foundation.

The private freedom of association is just as foundational to the US (and liberal society broadly) as the freedom to speak without government intervention.

Is it a private association when the extent of a reach of a given entity rivals that of a nation-state? I am not disagreeing with your argument in principle. There has to be balance. Right now, that balance is out of whack.

Yes. The public can choose to create a legal structure that does not let private entities grow so large, but we have not chosen to do so, and that choice does not mean that private entities are de facto public.

Those structures already exist. They are typically categorized under anti-trust category. The issue is that between regulatory capture, revolving door, dual party system and average voter distracted by carefully selected social issues, the choice is theoretical.

I am not automatically arguing they should be public. I am saying they should be cut down to size.

>I am saying they should be cut down to size.

I've heard that a countless number of times and yet nobody has been able to come up with a good way to do that or even demonstrate that it needs to be done, or demonstrate what it would accomplish, or demonstrate that it would not make the problem worse. Every congressional hearing I've seen has ended with a failure to even explain the basic reasons why it's being done. It all seems to eventually revert back on a list of personal grievances that some individual or group might have with the company, which do not require antitrust action to correct, and the judges notice this and throw the case out.

I would be much more in favor of something like GDPR, but the US has no political will to enact something like that, it's all personal grievances all the way down, on both sides of the aisle.

> foundations of US.

I'm not sure if you are meaning United States or emphasizing humanity, but in either direction: a private company's social media application gets to chose the content that goes on the platform. I'm all for free speech as intended by the constitution. I can say hateful things, and cannot be prosecuted by it. BUT I'm perfectly fine in a world where if I say something against a "Do no harm" policy of a website, I get kicked off that platform.

> You are labeled 'absolutist' if you argue against censorship. It is fascinating really

what's fascinating is that you are writing it on a website that "censors" opinions, based on your definition.

There are degrees of difference between moderation and censorship. At one end of the spectrum, it makes Keanu Reeves not exist in China and books banned in former USSR republics; at another, it makes 4chan look like reasonable chaps by comparison.

I am saying it is fascinating, because the label implies fervor of sorts that irrationality disliked on HN. The term was designed to work in HN. What is fascinating to me that even here, propaganda spreads well.

> What is fascinating to me that even here, propaganda spreads well.

of course it does.

even the "freedom of speech should be absolute" is propaganda.

No it's not. It's a normative opinion. The opinions against it all have horrible repercussions and difficult questions to answer such as "who should be in charge of moderating or censoring?" and "how can we trust them?"

The first one is always "my party" and the latter answer is always "because they protect my interests, and your interests doesn't count."

Meanwhile most people agree that cursing, pornography or spam - and things otherwise clearly outside the bounds of the law - should be censored. And perhaps also obvious ad hominems. But that's not what we're discussing right now. Instead we're discussing whether a Democrat should have the right to speak on a Republican forum and spread Democrat opinions there. Today that is precluded because "it's a private enterprise."

Meanwhile if freedom of speech was better governed, you would have to defend against flaws and lies with facts and logic instead of censorship, or even moderation.

But then there isn't anything precluding private enterprises from making such a place. And I happen to think people would flock to such a place. There would certainly be a lot to win for the enterprise to have so many people there, but so far the only model that seems to have worked is one where all those masses are somehow guarded against each other in sub-forums, such as on Reddit or even on Facebook. But perhaps Musk can revolutionize Twitter? What do you think?

Ok just stop with the one sided arguing gab, parler and all the "freedom of speech" titled social networks are worse in censoring than your primetime twitter or Facebook they at least pretend to be neutral.

Just conveniently ignoring the content of these sites/services that gets them banned in the first place...

If it's illegal, the governments should take care to punish the reponsible ones via the court system.

If it's legal, the service provides should have no say.

This is like christan toll-bridge operator not allowing people to pass the bridge, if they drove in from the direction of a brothel.

> If it's illegal, the governments should take care to punish the reponsible ones via the court system

if it's abusive of the people patience and potentially dangerous, the government can and should shut it down.

it's not illegal to carry arms in most of the US, but in some places they can ban you if you carry one, because they don't want to deal with you or be responsible for what you could do with it.

it's not illegal to drink in many parts of the Globe, but some people could not want you to drink in the children's playground at 9 in the morning and if you don't leave on your own they might call the police.

society has rules other than legal/illegal.

it's the perk of living in what's called "a free country".

Yes, and some parents influence the schools to ban harry potter, because of anti-god magic, and those parents then organize book burnings (yes, this year - https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/feb/04/book-burning... )

Some of us consider this a bad thing, even though it's still done in some societies (eg. USA).

If someone starts a harry potter microbloging platform, and the content there is legal, and the technology works in a way, where a want-to-be-offended pastor has to actively type in the url/name in the browser, to see the content and get offended, this should not be a reason to ban that platform. The same with eg. not being able to disallow customers of the shop that sells harry potter to use public roads.

Internet services and payment processors should be treated the same as other utilities... as long as it's legal, the services/processors should not be able to deny service due to political reasons, because they believe harry potter is against gods will.

> Some of us consider this a bad thing, even though it's still done in some societies (eg. USA).

it's not good or bad.

it's the price of freedom.

what's the alternative?

having the police to beat those people burning the books?

silence them?

kick them out the society/country?

> Internet services and payment processors should be treated the same as other utilities

I'm of the opinion that depending on the service they should have much more responsibilities than service providers.

For example social networks that algorithmically propose content should be considered editors/publishers and be treated as such, including being responsible for the content they publish.

> the service provides should have no say

Who’s the censor in this conversation again?

I’m having a hard time squaring the idea of free speech maximalism with “a certain group of people should have no say.”

Service providers should act as an utility, such as roads, waterworks, sewers, etc.

We have laws set in place where we decide who can drive on roads using which kinds of vehicles, and road operators and owners (not sure how road system works in USA, in my country, some roads are country-owned, some are owned by the municipality, and some private ones can join the road system - eg. the long road from the main street to the IKEA entrance), and if the driver has a licence and a stret legal vehicle, s/he can drive on all those roads, even if he carries gay porn and anal dildos, and the municipality is full of christian/muslim radicalists.

So, as long as the content is legal (regarding the laws of the country), no service provider should be allowed to block you from using that service and/or connection to view that content.

> no service provider should be allowed to block you from using that service and/or connection to view that content.

that's not how it really works.

what you are describing is a totally nuclear society, where everyone is on their own and mind their own business.

if in the car you've mentioned in your example there's a kid sitting in the back, I would alert the authorities.

Not because it's illegal to dive kids in a car full of gay porn and dildos, not because the content is for gay people or because dildos are not toys for kids, it's not even because I believe in some weird story about magic eternal beings that have nothing better to do that dictate books to their disciples about what I should or should not do, but because it should ring a bell to everybody.

What effect do you feel your policy might have on service providers such as HN?

Yeah, you don't want that because if they get regulated that either their user must be identifiable or that they are responsible for what's written on the platform there won't be a platform for much longer or with serious restriction on what you can topics are allowed on these platforms and as long as corps have one incentive alone and that's maximising profits they will subdue unpopular but loud minorities.

That's an oddly specific example, did this happen somewhere?

It was just an example of a public utility blocking access to a service they disagree with, but the service is still legal.

The first idea was EU blocking rt.com (and some other russian sites), even though their content is perfectly legal, but EU doesn't want the people to look at that content there.

EU was sanctioning Russia, and cut off sources of income (advertising and eyeballs) to a Russian state media organization. Not because they didn't want people to look at the content, but because they are going along with sanctions.

Advertising income can be dealt with differently, but 'eyeballs' is effectivly political censorship, which was until now a thing of the "bad guys" (political dictators, etc.).

I mean, even the taliban are allowed to keep their twitter accounts - https://finance.yahoo.com/news/why-twitter-allows-taliban-ma... - but not russia?

I doubt you're going to win your argument using RT as an example. We're one whoopsie away from war. That's very different than regular censorship.

We're always one whoopsie away from a war, and some of us (i'm from the balkans) have had a few whoopsies not that long ago here and not that far from my location.

Globally speaking, in the same time, US (and nato and other "allies") attacked quite a few other countries, iraq, afghanistan, syria, libya, they're bombing somalia, bombed pakistan, etc., and none of the media was blocked back then.

Even the taliban are allowed to maintain their twitter accounts ( https://finance.yahoo.com/news/why-twitter-allows-taliban-ma... ).

And now, we're blocking RT, for what?

The article is documenting reaction to the banning; which is to create a parallel set of products.

Personally, this is no different than people setting up a rival newspaper or magazine that caters to a different POV. Eventually, the dominant platforms on both sides will regress to the content/banning mean.

I don't understand this.

There are well-known arguments for not tolerating intolerant people.

Do those who advocate for tolerating intolerant people act in good faith, or are they simply part of them?

There are also arguments for avoiding the breakdown of communication by expressly favoring the most strongly censored and unfashionable ideas at any given time and striving to platform them everywhere, even irrespective of their actual merits. This is what Herbert Marcuse calls for in his Repressive Tolerance. The point there is not to defend society against anything inherently problematic, but merely to push the very notion and social norm of a "managed", fad-driven discourse to its breaking point. It's a "chaos monkey" approach to the whole problem of communication 'filter bubbles' and 'echo chambers', or pretty much the trollish 4chan model under a different name.

Most of the people getting caught up in all this banning aren't rabid racist or misogynist or whatever ism or ist they are being smeared with. They are non hateful individuals who don't fall in line with the "current thing" and have a non-approved view point. The woke crowd somehow has been given a monopoly on who has a voice in the modern era. Is someone a "transphobe" and intolerant of trans people because they think the definition of a woman is the same as sex? This isn't intolerance this is a disagreement on the nature of reality.

I accept the right of others to say things I find absolutely abhorrent because I recognize that I sometimes say things I believe to be perfectly rational and someone else finds intolerable.

Fighting disagreeable speech with more free speech is harder than just banning it, but generations that follow will be better off for it.

Just seeing the Russia v Ukraine conflict and seeing how one country can enforce a narrative by law and arrest people as being sympathizers of an “intolerant” regime should be enough to make people aware that regulating verbal “intolerance” is a bad idea.

>Just seeing the Russia v Ukraine conflict and seeing how one country can enforce a narrative by law and arrest people as being sympathizers of an “intolerant” regime should be enough to make people aware that regulating verbal “intolerance” is a bad idea.

The fun bit here is understanding that there's no way to tell which country you're talking about

The irony of course being that the American political demographic, MAGA, with the biggest grievances regarding tech “censorship” also appear to be most willing to make excuses for or deny Russian war crimes.

I can go on Twitter and see a lot of examples of this and generate that impression, but then I don’t see it in real life.

What’s real? How do we know our perception of reality isn’t being distorted by algorithms and sampling bias?

The question would be a lot easier to resolve if the major MAGA thought leaders would stop making excuses for genocide. Anecdotally, my dad is MAGA-leaning right, and while he opposes the invasion and is happy to see the Russian army destroyed, his immediate response when I brought up the mass graves was “how much of that is propaganda though?”. Skepticism about what we are told about a war is always warranted, but right wing Americans are being actively persuaded right now to deny or doubt Russian war crimes despite overwhelming evidence.

What overwhelming evidence? At this point it’s allegations. The crimes haven’t actually been investigated.

They should be. But “overwhelming evidence” should be rephrased as “lots of allegations.”

Photographs corroborated by satellite and drone imagery, which is consistent with the public arguments being made by [Russian state media](https://medium.com/@kravchenko_mm/what-should-russia-do-with...) (yes I’m aware the translator has a horse in this race and no I do not read Russian myself but obviously she is not the only one who has reported on the content of what Russian state media is saying needs to be done) calling for ethnic cleansing/genocide. But I’m sure my inability to think critically has caused me to irrationally preclude the possibility that these civilians simply killed themselves.

Now also corroborated by radio intercepts: https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/possible-eviden...

Ukraine has stationed soldiers in schools. Russia bombed schools for that reason.

Is Ukraine committing war crimes? I am not pro-Russia by any stretch, but the actions taken by both sides in that war aren’t so black and white.

Watching this war as a dispassionate observer, it’s a study in propaganda. Zelensky broadcasting using a green screen to make it look like he’s on the streets for instance. The famous “I don’t need a ride, I need ammo” quote. The so called Ghost pilot who supposedly shot down a bunch of Russian fighters (which didn’t happen by the way.)

There is also the stories of torture — stories being given to the media by the Ukraine government. At least some of which are unverifiable: https://www.reuters.com/world/pentagon-cant-independently-co...

Other media outlets have run stories of torture based on materials given to them by a government that has a vested interest in anti-Russian sentiment.

And still other confusion on the air strike on the materai it y hospital: https://thegrayzone.com/2022/04/03/testimony-mariupol-hospit...

https://www.hrw.org/news/2016/02/11/ukraine-attacks-military...

So we aren’t making excuses for Russia (why would I, an American in Texas, give any fucks about Russia?) — but we are used to the media lying and lying over the past several years.

Case in point: Hunter Biden’s laptop. Whether or not it matters, the point is that a bunch of media and intelligence types told us it was “Russian disinformation.” Yet two years later WaPo and The NY Times have confirmed the authenticity of the laptop contents. Two years after they made a big point of suppressing or discrediting it.

So we’re supposed to believe those same media outlets when they are getting hand-fed by one of the participants in the Ukraine War?

A lot of people have lost the ability to think critically. Read the North Korean News Agency sometime. The language isn’t much different than how the western media frames the Ukraine War. One sided, with a strong propaganda diction.

Was the Russian invasion wrong? Possibly. But what’s the other side of the story? What’s the background? What exactly was the situation in the Russian-speaking regions of the Ukraine? Are there actual neo-Nazis in Ukraine? What’s the real story of the Azov battalion?

War is messy. Propaganda can never be trusted. And calling the other side a war criminal serves a valuable purpose. To be clear, I am not saying war crimes haven’t happened. I am saying that such claims ought to be dispassionately evaluated. Using schools to base troops and them complaining when Russia bombs a school — that seems a bit ridiculous. That’s the same tactic Hamas uses. And it works. It generates sufficient international outrage because apparently a large portion of the world lacks the ability to think critically

So no, not making excuses for Russia — but also not blindly cheerleading Ukraine. I don’t know enough about the background of that conflict to have much of an opinion. My opinion is more in line with media criticism rather than any version of the facts.

Congrats on your contrarianism. Forgive me if my simplicity and inability to think critically causes me to think less of you.

> Read the North Korean News Agency sometime. The language isn’t much different than how the western media frames the Ukraine War. One sided, with a strong propaganda diction.

May as well just go ahead and believe North Korean propaganda at this rate. Maybe the world is covering up the truth. We haven't been there so we really can't know though (honestly).

You can go and watch Putin's speeches directly. He goes from saying it's to simply protect Russians in Donbass, to saying it's actually to stop NATO's expansion (countries should be free to choose their alliances--people ally with NATO because they don't want Russia invading their country, and invading their country only makes NATO seem more necessary), to saying it's really that Ukraine is entirely controlled by Nazis and needs to be de-nazified... by sending in the nazi Wagner mercenary group to kill a country run by a Jewish president who pretended to be gay on TV, to outright denying the historical existence of the Ukrainian people or their country and that it's just supposed to be Russian territory. All these speeches were in the span of literal days and show he just gave up on trying to hide his actual reasons.

You can completely ignore all western media if you like. You can completely assume all of what Ukraine says is absolute lies. All you need to do is listen to the words directly out of Putin's mouth and it's immediately obvious that it's the most transparent bullshit to justify a land grab that there ever was.

Would you want a corporation or government to decide for you which of your neighbors you shouldn't tolerate, without letting you get to know them, or would you like to make an informed decision yourself?

No Corporation has decided anything like that. Corporations are responding to their customers requesting those users to not be tolerated. This isn't Twitter banning anyone because they want to. It's Twitter deciding that enough users have decided that tolerance has run its course. They were in response to campaigns of users to deplatform those who we consider harmful.

Corporations seem to be responding to tiny but very vocal mobs of activists. These groups don't necessarily represent the majority point of view.

Are you sure? I know a huge number of users that advocate for Users that expose bigoted views or misinformation to be de-platformed. See the recent Joe Rogan podcast push. That wasn't a tiny percentage of users.

Arguments aren't axioms. Karl Popper is not some inherent authority.

There are well known excuses.

And this in turn makes you intolerant, and I won't tolerate this.

Free speech is important and should be protected, even if k__ disagrees with what you said.

This is actually a good point, and it's important to realize that even Karl Popper acknowledged this. He explicitly argues that some limited tolerance should be extended even to the intolerant to the extent practical, since this helps promote the norm of tolerance in the first place even when intolerant ideas might otherwise appear to be prevalent. The Paradox of Tolerance is more about acknowledging that limits to tolerance must exist somewhere than an actual argument for narrowing those limits.

Twitter has just as vile content as anything you can find in the other cesspool. It just happens to overwhelmingly lean the right way politically, so is not only still around but treated as some legitimate source of news.

twitter itself is left-leaning (in the liberal sense), yes - are we pretending that progressivism and far-right ideology have equal legitimacy? parler was founded to be a haven for the latter.

I might be out on a limb with this, but I don't think we should be giving far-right people a platform to spread their views.

So you think we should be able to label a group of people and restrict their rights? You don't see how this could be a problem?

I think that if your views include "we should kill people because of their race", your views should be banned off every platform, yes. Trying to imply that that's the same as racism is a false equivalence.

Let's not pretend that this is just about progressivism (though it's not like even Progressive ideas were ever exempt from being highly problematic: eugenics anyone?). You could find plenty of literal tankies posting on Twitter before Putin made the whole 'tankie' thing rather unpopular.

are tankies progressive? I think their primary axiom is hating America.

Either way, I agree that there's a range of legitimate discourse and it shouldn't just be the current flavour of progressivism. I was more cutting out a negative exception for the far right than a positive exception for libsocs.

If there's no 8chan to host the horse porn, who will?

The hand wringing and gnashing of teeth in this article is a bit much. Is America splitting by sexuality because different dating apps and media properties are popular with each group? Some balkanization is inevitable when systems with network effects and low initial switching costs serve a heterogenous population.

simple minds are attracted to simple "realizations" .. the Internet by definition has hundreds of dimensions of "splitting" .. someone call the Principal Component Analysis crew and give these journalists a time-out.

"America's internet"

The first two words of the headline are wrong. Applications are not the Internet. This must be some kind of record for HN headlines.

> "America's internet"

> The first two words of the headline are wrong. Applications are not the Internet. This must be some kind of record for HN headlines.

It's not actually wrong: you just have to realize that words have different meanings. The internet is simultaneously: a TCP/IP network and the collection of applications built on top of that network that people use. The first meaning is technical jargon, the second is a more colloquial meaning. Technical meanings are not more correct than other kinds of meanings.

OK fine, but going with this logic is how you get to "a series of tubes"

>> It's not actually wrong: you just have to realize that words have different meanings. The internet is simultaneously: a TCP/IP network and the collection of applications built on top of that network that people use. The first meaning is technical jargon, the second is a more colloquial meaning. Technical meanings are not more correct than other kinds of meanings.

> OK fine, but going with this logic is how you get to "a series of tubes"

No, obviously not. You get to "series of tubes" when you try force a layman grasp the technical TCP/IP network definition instead of accepting their use of the colloquial definition centered on applications.

Sorry, I don't follow. Colloquial diction is unacceptable in business, legal, and engineering contexts because it causes confusion. Using laymen terms such as "internet" in a headline yields more misinformation and confusion about what the system actually is. I agree colloquial word choice is not wrong for a blog, however applications are not the network, and they will need to do better if they want my click.

Colloquial may be the wrong term, think "non-technical" instead.

> Using laymen terms such as "internet" in a headline yields more misinformation and confusion about what the system actually is.

No it doesn't. It's just a fact that "internet" has technical and non-technical definitions that diverge somewhat. That ship sailed a long time ago, and no amount of pedantic complaining will change it.

And frankly, it's not reasonable to expect laymen to understand how their applications work at a technical level (e.g. distinguish between the internet and the web). It's incumbent on the people who do understand those distinctions to adapt to their audience and the multiple definitions in use.

The picture implies a segregation way below the app/social media tier, into the space where the right-oriented xSPs (x = M, I, etc.) and large network providers of such orientation will no longer advertise their IP space outside their own routing areas, with maybe some exceptions for common/shared services (financials, gov, transportation, logistics, supply chains, etc., etc.), and also blackhole the left ones, and the other way around. The right-oriented networks could expand to include the to-be-new Russian IP space, maybe bringing along North Korea, Belarus and the likes. Firewalls could also be built, between right and left, where some [tightly controlled] traffic will be necessary. Interesting times ahead ...

idk I don't have data to back this, but I feel like the Internet was always split between "party lines". You can always find what you want to find on the Internet, regardless of whether it's "right" or "wrong."

Hell, Google Maps represents countries completely differently depending on where you're using the product. Hell, Google isn't even really a thing in China! That's a huge part of Western internet that is represented completely differently elsewhere.

Well, when the media and politicians work so hard to keep American’s disagreeing, and then hating one another, this is bound to happen. The media, the corporate owned cable television streaming media, is the enemy of the people.

This is where censorship and propaganda leads.

The split is as much of (or more) a reaction to Big Tech and Big Media collusion than it is political. If truth and discourse weren't censored there would be no need for this.

Customers should boycott products they disagree with or that are opposed to their beliefs. New companies springing up to meet the market demand is capitalism working as expected. A monopoly of companies controlling public free speech is not.

I'm not that familiar with axios but by the looks of things they are left-wing. Left of center for sure.

This is important context because it's wonderful to see their point of view for what is going down.

They are focusing on dailywire vs disney and other symptoms of the problem.

>Progressives are focused on making sure that the existing media and online platforms crack down on misinformation.

But who gets to define what is misinformation. Obviously progressives have taken this upon themselves to define.

>Conservatives increasingly feel disenfranchised by media from mainstream news outlets to social platforms and have begun to invest in alternatives.

because of... oh wait we just discussed it. Progressives have taken it upon themselves to define what is misinformation and are censoring conservatives. The conservatives then look at their criticisms fairly. Lab Leak was misinformation and censored. Oh wait that's pretty much fact now. Hunter Biden's laptop suddenly found to be legit? Nope, misinformation and needs to be censored.

And they are investing in alternatives? No no. that was years ago. There's now a dozen that are self-sufficient and better yet, growing to the size they are unstoppable.

The progressives who were pretty happy to censor legitimate stories are now pissed off they suddenly have no power anymore. They can't get on parler and censor their 'misinformation' stories.

>On the right, Donald Trump's new social network, which is struggling to launch

Shrug? It was years late. It's not even a big contender at all.

>Conservative billionaire Rebekah Mercer co-founded and funded conservative Twitter alternative Parler.

Yes but oh look again those progressives tried to cancel parler as well. Parler going offline for awhile kind of killed it.

>Media companies and online platforms in the past have thrived by serving as big an audience as possible without regard to political bent.

Who is creating this split? One side takes sole blame here.

>Zoom out: Since the aftermath of the January 6th Capitol riot when most internet companies de-platformed former President Donald Trump, conservatives have been aggressively building out alternative communications infrastructure, including their own cloud storage and cryptocurrency companies.

You're starting to see the picture. You dont even see 1/4 of the picture year but you're starting to see it.

>The bottom line: As this trend continues, companies that have long positioned themselves as apolitical will face overwhelming pressure to choose sides.

This doesn't make sense. You can be on twitter and parler at the same time. You dont have to pick sides. Companies that are apolitical can continue to do so.

In fact, what's more important is to see why they even say this. It's the same reason this article doesn't even name the actual replacements. They want to say Trump's new network is floundering. Attack, attack, attack.

The 'progressives' built their platforms on the backs of everyone and then ejected the right. Then are now angry that the conservatives didn't just roll over and die? What did you think would happen?

At least we have an Internet. Imagine the bad old days of the 1980s when everyone had to get their news from CNN! For all the bellyaching conservatives do the fact is that information is freer today than it was in the past. Ultimately we all found out about Hunter Biden’s laptop notwithstanding the Facebook and Twitter blackout. (And when it turned out to be real, I’m sure the Facebook and Twitter censors felt shame, at least the ones who are capable of feeling shame.) That wouldn’t have been true 30 years ago.

I don't mean for this to sound like a defense of the article, which it emphatically is not.

>Imagine the bad old days of the 1980s when everyone had to get their news from CNN!

Important to remember in this that they would have had 1980s CNN, which I presume is significantly different from modern CNN. NPR, for example, was a mostly even-keeled news source as recently as 20 years ago; no one was surprised to find a dedicated NPR listener who was conservative in 1980, which is certainly not true today. Without having any personal experience of CNN, past or present, I imagine they have followed a similar trend.

so, yet again, the censors were wrong. I've said it before, if you're going to censor you better be right 100% of the time. The moment you get it wrong all credibility and benefit-of-the-doubt is gone and now you must censor by authority and not out of good will.

The first case i recall is the lab leak theory censoring and now the laptop thing. The platforms should stop censoring except for content defined as prohibited by law.

>content defined as prohibited by law

They weren't wrong, deleting illegal content is exactly what they were doing. Revenge porn is illegal in almost all US states.

They were wrong about a crapload of things. They completely censored the Biden Laptop story and called it Russian propaganda. Twitter and facebook banned accounts that posted links to the story, for example. Just because you don't want to believe it doesn't mean it isn't true.

No, again they weren't wrong. Where did I say I don't believe something? My statement was that these sites don't want to host links to illegal revenge porn. They were absolutely not wrong to delete that, and I bet you would feel the same way if it was revenge porn of you or your loved ones that was being shared so indiscriminately. We're here talking about the story, and I've probably heard about this story thousands of times in the last year, so any statement about it being censored is complete nonsense. Please avoid this type of rhetoric.

There was a time when most papers in Norway were party papers. And it was totally fine! The reason for it being totally fine was because you'd already know where the paper stood on a certain topic, and with whom. And so when you read an article from that sender, with that very clear affiliation, you could ironically also trust them more, because you would be weary of any attempts of manipulation beforehand, and perhaps you'd even know their "tribal language" as it were. And so it would be much easier to decide for yourself whether it was something you'd believe in, or concern yourself with, or react to. Those who were hardcore "tribalists" would of course only read "their" party's papers, but those who wanted a more balanced view, would simply buy papers from the other parties. For that reason most households would hold several papers from different, and often opposing parties in order to stay up to date. So if the USA's web pages are tribalizing, that isn't necessarily a bad thing, because you can always just peek at the competition to get a more even view on things. With that said, it still is a bad thing if our collective "town squares" are monopolized by just one side. That's why I remain positive to Elon Musk's majority buy-up of Twitter stocks, knowing that he's a free speech absolutist. Whether it'll be "good for Twitter" remains to be seen, however I remain hopeful.

> There was a time when most papers in Norway were party papers. And it was totally fine!

And that's exactly how most newspapers started in the US too.

Then they realized that advertising only to their side left out half of the potential readership and therefore lowered the advertising rates they could charge.

Now that we have (re-)targeting advertising platforms based not only on the topic of this specific page but informed by the last 2000 sites and pages you visited and products you viewed, the advertising rates are better and targeting a niche becomes a viable option.. but even then, that's only if the financial aspects are the motivators. Sometimes it's a moral cause, not a financial.

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