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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   8855 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 2, 2026

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The far-right didn't have anything with the size and algorithmic subtlety of Twitter back then, now it does. When I say that, I'm not saying that Twitter is a far-right site, cause it's not. I'm just saying that you can go there and be pretty much as far-right as you want if you don't explicitly call for violence

That used to be how the entire internet worked. Every social media platform let you be as far-right as you wanted. Then we went through a period where figures like Alex Jones were banned from Youtube and websites like Stormfront were denied payment processing.

I might just have missed it at the time, but did MySpace in its heydey have trouble with political extremists? Independent PhpBB fora generally never promised not to ban users that I recall. And I'm not quite old enough to remember Usenet or whatever AOL was doing.

ETA: I remember Slashdot was always at odds, if less deeply divisively, with veritable armies of troll posters. Moderation was always an ongoing concern, although it seemed to mostly settle after a while.

Not really? It wasn't MySpace's problem. Most social media platforms did not consider it to be their problem. Who cares what your opinions were? Complaining that "Shakes posted something mean" would be up there with "And his lunch smells too". Nobody cared. Why would anybody care? The internet was for posting. I remember debating gay marriage on Pokemon forums. Facebook wasn't going to ban you if you called somebody an idiot. Reddit did not care. AOL didn't care. Nobody cared.

I'm trying to come up with a neutral example that would have offended people. 9/11 conspiracies and jokes? If you posted, circa 2002, conspiracy theories that 9/11 was an inside job, people would get offended. 9/11 jokes were in very bad taste. It wasn't something normal people did. But nobody would say that you should get banned from the internet for saying it. That wasn't even really technically possible, the tech stacks were so much simpler then, anybody could spin up a website and lots of people did. DDOS wasn't a thing, you didn't have Cloudflare filtering out malicious traffic, your bank wasn't going to cut off your credit card because you were using it for a bad website. There wasn't even any money in the internet. You could say whatever you wanted.

There was gradually some censorship, there was a sense that Facebook was less anonymous, Reddit modding was arbitrary, 4chan was where you went if you deliberately wanted racism or gore. You probably wouldn't get along well on tumblr if that was what you liked. But nobody thought of racism on 4chan as a problem to be solved, either.

And this wasn't a partisan thing. This was normal cultural default. Everyone was a lot more normal, actually. Well, a lot of views that were normal then would be considered "extremist" today. But there were fewer extremists by their own standards.

Well, now I'm reminiscing so I'm going to cut myself off. And I know that I have a reputation as The Trump Guy but I have to emphasize here -- it really did all change with Donald Trump. This whole online political ecosystem that exists now did not exist before Trump, and the former parts that did exist could not have fathomed being important enough to play big roles in presidential-level politics. I don't know if you were there and I don't know who reading this was there, but it was surreal watching 4chan get put on TV next to discussions about the president. I don't know how to describe it to anybody who wasn't there. It was one of the most surreal things I've ever seen, it would be life if your private dreams started making the evening news. Imagine if we started having big national debates about banning green-skinned aliens out of your wet dreams, that's about how if would feel if you went back to the late aughts and said we need to police MySpace because there could be white supremacists there.

I'm trying to come up with a neutral example that would have offended people. 9/11 conspiracies and jokes? If you posted, circa 2002, conspiracy theories that 9/11 was an inside job, people would get offended. 9/11 jokes were in very bad taste.

tribute.avi (9/11 footage set to Yakkety Sax) was 2002 and there was no effort to ban Something Awful. As far as I can tell there wasn't even an effort to shame Something Awful.

Alone's last post on The Last Psychiatrist blog was "Who Bullies the Bullies?"...about how there was now a consensus among the media, politicians, and economic interests that the Wild West, anonymous Internet had to go, that the internet was dangerous, in that women were scared, and Something Must Be Done. This was published in May 2014, well before Trump, and more importantly, well behind the curve. It was already the case that elites had decided to go with censorship, they just needed time to propogandize the masses to accept it, and better tools to enforce it. Trump was just the biggest victim of it; recall that it wasn't until the 2020 elections that they decided they could silence him too, long after they'd made it the default that his supporters could be deplatformed, debanked, etc.

In July 2012, the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) unanimously adopted a landmark resolution affirming a simple proposition: “The same rights that people have offline must also be protected online, in particular freedom of expression, which is applicable regardless of frontiers and through any media of one’s choice.” Writing in The New York Times, Carl Bildt, Sweden’s foreign minister [at the time], hailed the vote as a “breakthrough of fundamental importance,” insisting that “the free flow of information on the Internet is a global call and not something pushed only by a few Western states.” For a brief moment, it seemed as if the world’s democracies had accepted that the open Internet would be the nervous system of modern liberty.

Anyone reading these statements and believing the UNHRC and Carl Bildt genuinely thought this included Steve Sailor citing racial differences in IQ tests, Tradcons saying "maybe women actually would be better off taking care of the home," or any pushback whatsoever on infinity immigrantion (to say nothing of "Tits or GTFO") is, as the kids say, ngmi. "We believe in the free flow of information" has, to this class of person, always meant "spreading neoliberal ideals," hopefully with Color Revolultions, "Girls in STEM!" movements in countries that end in -stan, and endless funding for NGOs, not serious debate on if we need to go in some other direction.

You're right, even Stormfront only started getting really cracked down upon in the 2010s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stormfront_(website)

Thinking back now, the censorship of the leaked AACS keys (09 F9 11...) was one of the first prominent examples. But that was the self-immolation of Digg and drove a lot of traffic to Reddit. Hard to believe it's been almost two decades since that.

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