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Aren't most of them leftist? Hollywood is pretty left wing. Divorcees are known for splashing cash indiscriminately through the NGO sphere. It's like in China - the Party is fine with wealth so long as you uphold the predominance of the Party and obey the Party line.
Tech billionaires are thought to insufficiently uphold the predominance of the Party, they didn't ban all the right, didn't stop them radicalizing people via the algorithms. Something dodgy was happening with Russia and Cambridge Analytica and they weren't doing enough. Musk is even against the Party and so draws a lot of flak.
Tech is more valuable than oil. Tech is where minds are moulded, not just little polyethylene disposables. Oil is on the way out anyway, that was the plan, the oil companies were supposed to pivot to clean energy projects or 'green hydrogen' or something. There's no replacing the technology sector!
They did, though. Or are our memories that short?
Tech billionaires like money/power/impact first and foremost, but their natural inclinations are toward Democrats. The party strategy should have been to continue and strengthen the alliance of the early and mid Obama era. Information would be controlled, every one of the various progressive causes could have gotten their handouts and more, Pax America would rule the world undisputed, and everyone would be much, much richer.
I meant 'that's what they think' in that paragraph.
Donald Trump was still on twitter until 2021! T_D was a thing. In the back of my head there's also this Arctotherium essay where he talks about the closure of the internet and, surprisingly, gives Zuckerberg a little credit for pushing back a little bit: https://substack.com/home/post/p-209852382
But there was a lot of banning going on, for sure. We're all the way out here after all, not banned per se but suppressed on reddit.
Is "we didn't ban the sitting / former President of the United States yet" really an appropriate example of how lax the censorship was?
Ah, the classic 2021 Yglesias tweet:
I'm not sure if I've seen him comment on that one with recent hindsight.
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Not lax in an absolute or reasonable sense but lax in proportion to what some people thought.
Kamala Harris wanted Trump banned from twitter back in 2019 and wrote a letter to twitter about it. There were earlier demands too back when he was tweeting about the size of his nuclear button with regard to Kim Jong Un. Or for inciting harassment or other such things.
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Nah, your standards are too low. Their level of support is insufficient to partisans because they at least gesture at evenhandedness and classical liberal tendencies.
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