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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 2, 2023

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Previously I've written about how Musk can Make Twitter Great Again with Celebs&Sports.

But now let me discuss how Musk can use twitter to subvert the regime without even trying: just allow people to have a clear and unfiltered look at the world.

As an example of this, consider the most recent viral content on twitter - more popular than an NBA game happening simultaneously - #wafflehousefight.

As the mainstream media might describe it, "some drunken revelers at a Waffle House in Austin, TX engaged in an altercation with Waffle House employees." At least that's what they might write if they covered it, but only yahoo and foxnews have bothered to actually cover it. And of course the reason is clear: the story is a group of morbidly obese angry black women assaulting a pretty-ish blonde (and clearly red tribe working class) waffle house employee after demanding the "white girl" make them waffles while they sat in a closed off area. The blonde white woman is clearly the hero of the engagement. It's a clear glimpse of what the mainstream media + tech companies normally try to hide: a disproportionate amount of crime is just black people getting angry and doing dumb stuff.

Quite a lot of tech and media tries to cover things like this up. Reddit has banned factual subreddits like /r/hatecrimehoaxes, /r/greatapes (black people doing crimes) and similar. The mainstream media similarly downplays stories such as black nationalist terrorists shooting up subways, as well as using tactics like not including the attackers photo.

Numbers, for anyone curious. Newspaper have also stopped publishing mugshot galleries to prevent people from noticing.

When the entire network works together to suppress facts, they generally succeed. But twitter can change that.

Twitter is popular because of celebrities and sports, and the content most people consume there will continue to be 90%+ celebrities and sports. But with stories like #wafflehousefight, Musk has an opportunity to give people a glimpse of what is being hidden from them. People may begin to realize that their eyes aren't lying, it's merely a set of elites who are gaslighting them.

I don't think reddit or any social media should be censoring anyone, but if reddit banned a subreddit about black people committing crimes that called itself "great apes," I rather suspect that reddit was motivated by something other than the desire to hide the truth, and that those who created the subreddit were motivated by something other than pure truth telling.

I rather suspect that reddit was motivated by something other than the desire to hide the truth,

It's not clear what "reddit was motivated" means. Are you suggesting that many of the reddit jannies/"anti evil operations"/etc who suppressed true facts are not motivated by preventing people from learning these true facts and taking on "wrong" beliefs?

I don't know about reddit, but journalists have openly admitted their motivation in this is preventing people from forming true beliefs they don't like: https://www.poynter.org/reporting-editing/2012/ap-stylebook-updates-entry-on-racial-ids-in-news-stories/ https://www.poynter.org/reporting-editing/2020/more-newspapers-are-cutting-mugshots-galleries/

"Reinforcing stereotypes" is the term they use, of course.

...those who created the subreddit were motivated by something other than pure truth telling.

Why do you believe this is relevant?

I don't know why you say, "It's not clear what "reddit was motivated" means", given that your entire post is a claim that reddit, and the media in general, is motivated by a desire to suppress the truth.

I don't know why you say, "It's not clear what "reddit was motivated" means"

No, I'm making the claim that individuals in media are motivated to hide facts that hinder the narrative.

I avoid the claim "reddit was motivated" because reddit is an organization with multiple individuals (e.g. jannies, AEO, advertising directors, data scientists), and a common leftist dissembling tactic is gloss over the specific individuals doing a thing and instead demand proof that the organization as a whole does a thing. But of course, you only really need the jannies and AEO in most cases.

Look dude, I'm very much on the side of free speech and I'd prefer we still had the reddit that an odious subreddit like that could exist. But we don't have that reddit. We have the one that bans legal consensual porn subreddits for giving them a bad look. It is not fear of the truth that caused them to ban a subreddit that in the very name compares black people to apes. Pretending otherwise is not helpful for our side.