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I read something today which I have long thought deep down, but hadn’t really seen spelled out elsewhere.
Namely, the censoring done by the liberal left, while there, is rather mild in the scheme of things and is probably much less than the same left would be censored by the people it currently censors if that group was in power.
The quote that brought it to my mind was from here, on Richard Hannania’s substack. After a post discussing being banned by Twitter, he drops this at the end of the article.
https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/saying-goodbye-to-twitter
The attitude of censoring opponents seemed to have crystallized for the left around 2016, where I distinctly remember the conversation centering around the limits of tolerating intolerant ideologies. (Which seems to have become fully settled by now, interesting to observe an ideological movement update in real time in that way).
Does Hannania have a point here? Is the issue that the right takes offense with censorship itself, or would the right if it actually gained back power censor in a much more strict and comprehensive way?
Among the first social networks, Facebook and Myspace, were founded in 2004 and 2003 . Twitter came later , in 2007. Things were going well until 2016, when a certain favored candidate lost an important election. We're still reeling from the aftermath of that. The left is not going to let this go.
I’d peg the shift a few years earlier, in the mid Obama years. Occupy Wall Street started in late 2011 and used social networking to tap a bunch of anti-elite sentiment. You could arguably go a little earlier to grassroots-friendly political protests like the Tea Partiers; people were starting to use Twitter and Facebook as word-of-mouth.
Maybe journalism took a little longer to completely pivot to Twitter. At the absolute latest, GamerGate was in 2014. If that’s not social media drama, I don’t know what is.
I consider GamerGate to be the start of the online Culture War proper. It was the first time I recall seeing random companies and youtube channels putting out official statements about internet bullshit that doesn't affect them. Nobody with a comments section could claim to be "apolitical" after that.
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