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Social media censorship is basically the same thing, and there's been plenty of that.
The difference is that hiring reddit moderators to delete wrongthink only works on reddit, hiring actual shills to say positive things about your position can work on any online platform and can theoretically convince people to parrot your talking points IRL, which is way more impactful than reducing your opponents arguments to [message deleted] in one tiny sliver of the internet
This occurred on reddit, youtube, facebook, pre-Musk twitter, and very likely others. That is not a tiny sliver of the internet.
i'm talking about converting money into political capital, not about how broad censorship can be. Paying off youtube is probably possible but not cheap, and to cover all your bases it would be very expensive (or require already having political power as we have seen before)
If i had a million bucks to run a fucky political campaign id buy more shills and pay off less censors.
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