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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 29, 2025

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I'm going to start a social media site called "YourByte". User posts may be any byte 0-255. The algorithmic display will select and order these bytes in a way that coincidentally forms my preferred propaganda.

This is a post about TikTok.


It's completely outside of the Overton window and has been for several years, but this is all downstream of "algorithmic" social media being allowed despite it being a blatant violation of Section 230. If social media sites weren't publishers pretending not to be, then who controlled them would matter a lot less.

The special regime for social media was a trojan horse for censorship since day one.

If we lived in a sane world, the fact that these algorithms are increasingly using AI would convince people to make algorithmic social media publishers (unless you can pick the algorithm)

But we don't so what's gonna happen instead is we'll get regulation of what the AI are allowed to be like instead.

No U-turns allowed on the Road to Serfdom.