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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31233 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 9, 2023

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Two articles are popping today that I believe are related. Both are reasons for censorship or reasons the left has used to justify censorship.

  • Dr. Gottlieb cited his “safety” as a reason to censor doctors criticizing COVID vaccines. Here are his tweets showing “violence” against himself.

https://twitter.com/scottgottliebmd/status/1612548694762745856?s=46&t=0qCqhJLXqMO-wn5FoPsWKg

The best he has is some anonymous account saying “execute this bastard”. Obviously with anonymous accounts anyone can just randomly vent and say something mean. It could even be Scott Gottlieb saying this about himself so that he can then asks for censorship of others in the name of “violence”.

Obviously people shouldn’t be threatened but a random message board comment I don’t think rises to the occasion of a real threat - though I’d agree those accounts should be suspended banned that make violent threats. They shouldn’t be used to censor non violent debates.

And the rest of the tweets he cited are not threats but calling him a murder and bastard. Being that he’s citing tweets that are not calls to violence does that means he total received only one anonymous threat to justify censorship of dissenting scientist?

  • Turns out NYU did a study and found that Russian trolls were barely seen by anyone on Twitter. And the trolls mostly interacted with people that were extremely highly likely to vote GOP and in the end there’s no statistical argument that Russian troll bots led to any changed votes.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/01/09/russian-trolls-twitter-had-little-influence-2016-voters/

Another claim for censorship especially in 2020 and especially for the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian troll/bots interferes with the 2016 election and now we need to censor people. NYPost/Zerohedge got censored on these justifications.

At first I thought these were both solid culture war stories to post about but didn’t feel like doing two posts. Then I realized their connected and both are weak reasons that have been used for significant censorship and deplatforming.

The doctor being upset about anonymous low-credibility twitter threats is just a modern manifestation of the classic 'high-status individual makes the mistake of venturing outside their high-status bubble & gets roundly jeered by the crowd'.

Demanding that the rabble be taught a lesson or silenced is likewise the traditional response.

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