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I think there are actually two issues here: the incidence of violence and use of a "Content Killswitch". By a content killswitch, I mean that concerted action b
by jlos 6y ago
I think there are actually two issues here: the incidence of violence and use of a "Content Killswitch". By a content killswitch, I mean that concerted action by 3 companies to basicaly scrub the entire internet of source materia in 24-48 hours and leave only articles giving their spin on the events.
I remember the same thing happened when that stupid "Plandemic" movie came out earlier last year. Even while I had no sympathy at all for the point of view in the movie, I at least wanted to view it to make up my own mind and discuss its flaws with the family members who had recommended it to me. But it was almost impossible to find, and that was only within a day or so of it going viral.
While I have no sympathy for the viewpoint censored in both cases, the ability to kill content this broadly and quickly is an extremely powerful tool. All you have to do is imagine if your particular political boogeyman with their finger on that button.
- chopin24 6y agoUnfortunately, all you have here is a stance. Having a stance is easy: it's not your company that's hosting the material, it's not your work that's being co-opted to facilitate violence, it's not your legal team that has to go to court when the company gets sued. I've got lots of stances on things that will never impact me, too. Everyone here is saying the same thing, but no one is willing to engage with the very real, actual outcomes of that stance.
- acdha 6y agoI think this argument works better as a question about decentralization: those three companies didn’t “scrub the entire Internet” — they simply chose not to provide free hosting and promotion for it on their own servers. If the authors had registered plandemic.com they’d be easy to find, but then they’d have to pay out of pocket for hosting. I think this is something a lot of us older people forget: if you experienced the internet back when there were thousands of hosting companies and people ran their own servers for everything, this seems weird since there was always another place for anyone substantially less odious than stormfr*nt. After the 2010s, though, an awful lot of people got out of that way of thinking and there are now entire businesses which only have Facebook/Instagram/Twitter/YouTube accounts. I find these “victims” detestable but it definitely doesn’t make me happy that Facebook, Google, and Apple have a huge degree of control over what the average internet user sees even if there are tons of sites which they don’t control.
- DenisM 6y agoTheir sacks of money are so heavy they cause all content and services to fall into their gravity well, which is where it gets scrubbed. Decentralization is stalling in the face of the economy of scale.
- acdha 6y agoYou’re not wrong. YouTube is relatively easy to beat on UX but it’s hard to compete with free bandwidth and a massive promotion engine.
- aliakhtar 6y agoThe fact that this has never happened before except when literal incitement of violence was being carried out (google for screenshots) and not being stopped, shows there's no reason to worry this will happen to you.
- inawarminister 6y agoDid Plandemic have literal incitement of violence? That was what OP was talking about. I see a typical Anti-Vac propaganda movie, but the Wikipedia page and news articles didn't seem to mention any calls to violence...
- thinkingemote 6y agoThat is using the same flawed logic for implementing the Patriot Act. "Why worry? It's only an emergency thing and won't be used against others*