Bull. You can't lie to me about ordinary Internet in the 2000s, because I was there.
For context, this is a sampling of literal front page content from Twitter, on an new account with no cookies or follows, via a VPN, from a day in late August when I ran this little experiment:
- A meme of a dark-skinned man saying 'You never wuz been judged by yo skeen cola' and a white man replying 'How are you in college?'
- 'The Mirror Test: White Babies Recognize Themselves at 15 Months, Black Children Not Until 6 Years (Science Video)', with the caption: 'I'm guessing this is what a 30 point higher IQ average does'
- A still from a Hilter speech, Nazi flag visisble in the background, caption 'the world owes this man an apology'
- An image of "Fr. Leonard Feeny" with the quote 'Having a television in your home is like having a Jew in your living room'.
- A meme of Sully from Monsters Inc. smiling, with the caption 'Mfs entering heaven when they see Adolf'
Again, I want to stress this, this is the Twitter front page. To suggest that Facebook and MySpace were suggesting content anywhere near this revolting to average accounts on Facebook or MySpace is just a lie. They were not. Did racist content exist somewhere in the dark recesses of those websites? Probably. Was it being suggested to the average person within thirty seconds of opening the equivalent to the front page? Absolutely not.
Convincing the average American that ordinary moderation of content like the above is 'extreme censorship' is how you get Americans who decide they're actually OK with that.