Comment by BrainVirus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by BrainVirus | Hacker News Reader

I just love how the pro-censorship crowd here is faking moderation and exasperated reasonableness, while the rest of us know full well how this game is played. We see it on literally all major social media platforms right now. It started (roughly) with banning Alex Jones and a few others. Why would you be opposed to banning of that screaming crazy person, right?

Fast forward just a few years, it's now impossible to use use social media to coherently discuss any major issues affecting our society if you don't mince words and don't subscribe to orthodoxy de jour. And the worst part is the smug, obnoxious gaslighting about it all that happens all the time.

"Twitter doesn't delete content for political purposes. wink wink"

Hunter Biden laptop story? Unity 2020? Suspension of people like Jordan Peterson? James Lindsey? Hundreds of other high-profile accounts. Probably tens of thousand of lower profile accounts.

"It's not censorship of it's a private company. node nod"

https://thepostmillennial.com/breaking-biden-admin-held-week...

https://nypost.com/2022/08/28/fbi-put-the-hunter-biden-story...

"We're just doing commons sense stuff. Like following science."

https://reclaimthenet.org/youtube-quietly-dropped-covid-cens...

Etc, etc.

All these cliche arguments have been revealed to be entirely in bad faith, so I have absolutely no reason to trust people here who are now claiming that they want some sort of "reasonable" policy from infrastructure providers. It has been demonstrated time and time again that people who don't oppose deplatforming on principle are actually fine with it whenever it suits them.

There are two parts of the issue at hand:

1. By denying people the opportunity to voice and discuss their disagreements in a civil manner by means of deplatforming, targeted harassment (cancel culture) and other forms of witch hunting, it pushes them to participate in platforms and groups they otherwise would never associate with. Think prohibition act and what it did to the ABV of the drinks people were consuming;

2. Every crisis that doesn't outright kill a particular system or group of people either forces it to evolve or develop maladaptive mitigations. Regular social networks are a good example of the latter, becoming completely unusable and losing the very value they used to deliver. Eventually, this might encompass services like CloudFlare, the walled (or not so) gardens that Android and iOS are built upon, etc.

However, the incentives stay - it seems the amount of people who are simply unable to voice their mild opinion that does not conform to the blind and hypocritical fit of praise to shtick of the day is reaching critical mass.

Maybe we'll finally see the technology start moving back towards decentralization, which was the initial premise of the Internet, but now with very solid theory and research behind Tor, I2P and other networks/protocols yet to be invented. I don't mind that we all will be paying for hosting a little (more), as long as it kills the current adtech and puritan conformity-driven everything riddled with perverse incentives and absolute centralization of control.

The scary part is this whole thing right here is very much about preventing the last part of your post.. Or at the very least asserting dominion over what a newly re-decentralized net would permit. (i.e. a decentralized system forcing the same rules and standards as now) I mean look at how cries of "disinformation" and "hate" are treated already. Look at what the owner of KF was willing to do to keep the site up.. creating his own internet infrastructure. And look how this is turning out. people literally melting down because an infrastructure company won't leave the site open to criminal (DDoS) attacks. A few hundred people are all that it takes to create a shit storm that leads to enforcement of their standards on the rest of society.

And by doing so, they are proving the very value and necessity of free speech; they're unwittingly making their opponents' arguments for them.

This is what happens when all tech platforms are ideologically biased because of the employee base is almost all progressives.

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