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> The range of opinion that Big Tech deems permissible seems to be getting narrower and narrower I'm not affiliated with Substack, but I'm having difficulty wi

> The range of opinion that Big Tech deems permissible seems to be getting narrower and narrower I'm not affiliated with Substack, but I'm having difficulty with your premise here. There's literally a Trump app on the App Store right now dedicated to spreading falsehoods about the 2020 presidential election. What opinions is "Big Tech" "censoring" and why should one think there's any validity to your slippery slope argument?

meowface 5y ago
They're probably using Big Tech as a stand-in for Big Social Media Platforms (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter).
- nelsondev 5y ago
  Amazon AWS also deplatformed right leaning services.
  - Mavvie 5y ago
    Yes, but not because they were right leaning. According to them, it was due to the lack of moderation and dangerous content being hosted.
    - kodah 5y ago
      I don't mind Parler being deplatformed as long as similar standards are held for others. Given that Facebook was also a major contributor to the organizing of January 6th I think it makes sense people were asking for their deplatforming as well. That never happened though, and goes unanswered w.r.t. the logic that you've shared.
      - cudgy 5y ago
        Deplatform all of them, right? How about the telephone companies that transmitted their conversations? Or the hotels and AirBnb for housing them? And the restaurants that served them? And Uber and airlines that transported them? And the sporting goods store that supplied them? And …
        kodah 5y ago
        I mean, I'd prefer deplatforming not being an option, but the momentum for it as a tool is far too strong. It's far more expedient that the folks that are championing that as an option also have to use it on institutions they're associated with or favor for similar actions.
    - briandear 5y ago
      The definition of “dangerous” has become rather flimsy these days.
    - native_samples 5y ago
      But they define dangerous content as anything right leaning, and lack of moderation as lack of deletion of said content.
scott_paul 5y ago
Well, for starters Gab is banned from the App Store for their near-absolutist stance on free speech. More than that is the general culture of suppression of the "wrong" view of reality. Most people who were merely to the right of center moderates in the 00's are now accused of being absolute evil if they voice any opinions. I've been told by well more than a dozen former co-workers that they're afraid to say anything or let anyone at work find out about their political opinions because they're afraid of getting fired & won't be able to feed their families. The suppression and censorship is very real. One or two exceptional counterexamples do more to prove the rule than to disprove it.
- edmundsauto 5y ago
  > I've been told by well more than a dozen former co-workers that they're afraid to say anything or let anyone at work find out about their political opinions because they're afraid of getting fired In fairness, there are multiple explanations that don’t involve this being objectively true, while also being how these people perceive their situation.
  - coldtea 5y ago
    Yes, they're not persecuted. They're delluded. As Stalin would say.
    - FeepingCreature 5y ago
      The appearance of persecution has always been a tool of censorship. Chilling effects etc. It's a lot easier to create the appearance of a threat than to actually persecute lots of people, especially in the current social media landscape.
  - brigandish 5y ago
    True, but as long as people are willing to self censor then it doesn't matter if they would be punished if they spoke out, because they won't. Perceived risk is indistinguishable from actual risk if that risk is avoided by total avoidance. Aside from that, there are a lot of "cancellations" in the news, even if they're exceptional and only highlighted as a result of sensationalist reporting (or, more conspiratorially, behavioural control) the risk may still be actually too high. You only probably only have to be de-personed once for it to have a lifetime effect.
hihihihi1234 5y ago
Parler got booted from everywhere based on alleged connections to Jan 6th that, in my estimation, were very tenuous, no worse than what had been seen on more established platforms, and seemed to me to be little more than a convenient pretext to shut down an upstart competitor. Whatever your take on Parler, the episode was a sobering lesson in just how difficult the big players in this industry can make it to do business if they decide they really want to get rid of you. Maybe the word "censorship" is too loaded, but the claim that big tech platforms permit a narrower range of expression than they used to is so uncontroversial that it's barely worth defending. That's not always a bad thing; many of the people who've been banned in recent years are noxious pricks whom I don't miss, but what happens when the people who've been banned from Twitter and YouTube, kicked off AWS, terminated by Cloudflare and blocked by Visa and MasterCard decide to start a Substack because its commitment to free speech means it's the only place that will host them? I won't name names but I can think of, for example, a couple of semi-prominent figures who have been banned from other platforms due to their, ahem, "heterodox" views on vaccines, who now write on Substack and reportedly make a very healthy income from doing so. And worse actors might join the platform if they haven't already. Is it really such a conspiratorial "slippery slope" to suggest that if the people who've been banned from everywhere else grow a huge, lucrative audience on Substack, then Substack is going to come under increasing amounts of pressure to kick them off - pressure far greater than what it's received so far in the face of lesser controversies? What form might this pressure take?
- dasyatidprime 5y ago
  A scenario much like what you describe has sometimes been discussed by someone who did wind up moving their writing efforts to Substack later on: > HL Mencken once said that “the trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one’s time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.” > There’s an unfortunate corollary to this, which is that if you try to create a libertarian paradise, you will attract three deeply virtuous people with a strong committment to the principle of universal freedom, plus millions of scoundrels. Declare that you’re going to stop holding witch hunts, and your coalition is certain to include more than its share of witches. > So while some small percent of Reddit’s average users moved over, a very large percent of its witches did. Sometimes the witchcraft was nothing worse than questioning Reddit’s political consensus. Other times, it was harassment, hate groups, and creepy porn. https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/07/22/freedom-on-the-centralized-web/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/07/22/freedom-on-the-central...
Lascaille 5y ago
BurningFrog 5y ago
Feels weird to have to say this, but Trump is the leading candidate to become US president in 2024, not some fringe extremist.
- krapp 5y ago
  Trump was always going to be the leading candidate. He could have won a second term if not for his fumbling over COVID and his meltdown over secret commies stealing his votes. No one was ever going to vote for Biden twice, the left only hates him less than they hate Trump and half the country never stopped drinking the Trump Kool-Aid. You can't beat a man who has a cult and started a revolution with... whatever the hell Biden has going for him. Once again the Democrats will probably snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
  - blisterpeanuts 5y ago
    Are you saying Trump could have won in 2020? I think the pandemic killed his presidency... it's like 1932 when Herbert Hoover got voted out because of the Great Depression, regardless of whose fault it was. It was that, and mail-in balloting and dropboxes, which the Democrats used to great advantage, blindsiding the Republicans in all the swing districts. It seems to me the Democrats snatched victory from the jaws of defeat in 2020. However in 2022... mathematically, they're almost guaranteed to cede the House and maybe the Senate as well, depending on how events in Europe and general economic trends play out.
    - krapp 5y ago
      Yes, I said that if not for those events I think Trump could have won. Better leadership with COVID along with his (somewhat fictitious but still compelling) narrative of turning around the economy would probably have put him over Biden. Even though Biden won by a sizeable margin of popular votes - and as a candidate, he received more votes than any other candidate in history - he won with fewer electoral votes (the only votes that actually matter) than the 78,000 votes in three swing states which got Trump over in 2016.
briandear 5y ago
[flagged]
- chalst 5y ago
  > Substack is great because at least there are some voices out there getting heard. Alex Berenson and Glen Greenwald among the best. I've mixed feelings about Greenwald, but he is smart and occasionally makes good observations. What good things can be said about Alex Berenson, who The Atlantic memorably called The Pandemic’s Wrongest Man [1]? He seems to depend on basic scientific illiteracy in his readers. Where Greenwald would respond to a substantive critique like the Atlantic's, Berenson seems to hope his readers remain unaware of the critique. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/04/pandemics-wrongest-man/618475/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/04/pandemics-...
  - native_samples 5y ago
    Berenson responds to that laughable description all the time. He loves nothing more than to call himself that when he gets proven right - again - often at the expense of writers in the Atlantic; I'd guess a quarter of his posts consist of "ha ha" type responses where he juxtaposes a tweet he made early in the pandemic alongside a government announcement or newly released scientific paper saying the same thing. https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/the-pandemics-wrongest-man-snl-edition/comments?s=r https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/the-pandemics-wrongest-m... https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/cdc-director-walensky-reveals-she/comments?s=r https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/cdc-director-walensky-re... https://www.google.com/search?q=%22pandemics+wrongest+man%22+site%3Aalexberenson.substack.com&oq=%22pandemics+wrongest+man%22+site%3Aalexberenson.substack.com&aqs=chrome..69i57.9452j0j4&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 https://www.google.com/search?q=%22pandemics+wrongest+man%22... If you think he didn't respond to that then surely you don't actually read his blog.
    - chalst 5y ago
      I don't read his blog. Neither of the two links you provide to his blog take any of the claims from the Atlantic piece and refute it. He mocks the title of the Atlantic piece but does not respond to its content. As far as I can see, it's bluster, pure rhetoric Do you have any instances of Berenson actually attempting to refute specific claims made in the Atlantic piece?
coldtea 5y ago
>There's literally a Trump app on the App Store right now dedicated to spreading falsehoods about the 2020 presidential election. Well, touting the fact that the App Store, in its benevolence, allows an app by an ex-POTUS, like it's some sort of triumph of free speech speaks volumes, doesn't it? The ability of an ex-president to have such reach would go without saying in the past. Now it's up to the whims of Big Tech - and Twitter and others had already cancelled them.
- TimeBearingDown 5y ago
  I was just about to point out, there’s no great likelihood that all will survive the next election, either…

meowface 5y ago

They're probably using Big Tech as a stand-in for Big Social Media Platforms (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter).

nelsondev 5y ago
Amazon AWS also deplatformed right leaning services.
- Mavvie 5y ago
  Yes, but not because they were right leaning. According to them, it was due to the lack of moderation and dangerous content being hosted.
  - kodah 5y ago
    I don't mind Parler being deplatformed as long as similar standards are held for others. Given that Facebook was also a major contributor to the organizing of January 6th I think it makes sense people were asking for their deplatforming as well. That never happened though, and goes unanswered w.r.t. the logic that you've shared.
    - cudgy 5y ago
      Deplatform all of them, right? How about the telephone companies that transmitted their conversations? Or the hotels and AirBnb for housing them? And the restaurants that served them? And Uber and airlines that transported them? And the sporting goods store that supplied them? And …
      - kodah 5y ago
        I mean, I'd prefer deplatforming not being an option, but the momentum for it as a tool is far too strong. It's far more expedient that the folks that are championing that as an option also have to use it on institutions they're associated with or favor for similar actions.
  - briandear 5y ago
    The definition of “dangerous” has become rather flimsy these days.
  - native_samples 5y ago
    But they define dangerous content as anything right leaning, and lack of moderation as lack of deletion of said content.

scott_paul 5y ago

Well, for starters Gab is banned from the App Store for their near-absolutist stance on free speech. More than that is the general culture of suppression of the "wrong" view of reality. Most people who were merely to the right of center moderates in the 00's are now accused of being absolute evil if they voice any opinions. I've been told by well more than a dozen former co-workers that they're afraid to say anything or let anyone at work find out about their political opinions because they're afraid of getting fired & won't be able to feed their families. The suppression and censorship is very real. One or two exceptional counterexamples do more to prove the rule than to disprove it.

edmundsauto 5y ago
> I've been told by well more than a dozen former co-workers that they're afraid to say anything or let anyone at work find out about their political opinions because they're afraid of getting fired In fairness, there are multiple explanations that don’t involve this being objectively true, while also being how these people perceive their situation.
- coldtea 5y ago
  Yes, they're not persecuted. They're delluded. As Stalin would say.
  - FeepingCreature 5y ago
    The appearance of persecution has always been a tool of censorship. Chilling effects etc. It's a lot easier to create the appearance of a threat than to actually persecute lots of people, especially in the current social media landscape.
- brigandish 5y ago
  True, but as long as people are willing to self censor then it doesn't matter if they would be punished if they spoke out, because they won't. Perceived risk is indistinguishable from actual risk if that risk is avoided by total avoidance. Aside from that, there are a lot of "cancellations" in the news, even if they're exceptional and only highlighted as a result of sensationalist reporting (or, more conspiratorially, behavioural control) the risk may still be actually too high. You only probably only have to be de-personed once for it to have a lifetime effect.

hihihihi1234 5y ago

Parler got booted from everywhere based on alleged connections to Jan 6th that, in my estimation, were very tenuous, no worse than what had been seen on more established platforms, and seemed to me to be little more than a convenient pretext to shut down an upstart competitor. Whatever your take on Parler, the episode was a sobering lesson in just how difficult the big players in this industry can make it to do business if they decide they really want to get rid of you. Maybe the word "censorship" is too loaded, but the claim that big tech platforms permit a narrower range of expression than they used to is so uncontroversial that it's barely worth defending. That's not always a bad thing; many of the people who've been banned in recent years are noxious pricks whom I don't miss, but what happens when the people who've been banned from Twitter and YouTube, kicked off AWS, terminated by Cloudflare and blocked by Visa and MasterCard decide to start a Substack because its commitment to free speech means it's the only place that will host them? I won't name names but I can think of, for example, a couple of semi-prominent figures who have been banned from other platforms due to their, ahem, "heterodox" views on vaccines, who now write on Substack and reportedly make a very healthy income from doing so. And worse actors might join the platform if they haven't already. Is it really such a conspiratorial "slippery slope" to suggest that if the people who've been banned from everywhere else grow a huge, lucrative audience on Substack, then Substack is going to come under increasing amounts of pressure to kick them off - pressure far greater than what it's received so far in the face of lesser controversies? What form might this pressure take?

dasyatidprime 5y ago
A scenario much like what you describe has sometimes been discussed by someone who did wind up moving their writing efforts to Substack later on: > HL Mencken once said that “the trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one’s time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.” > There’s an unfortunate corollary to this, which is that if you try to create a libertarian paradise, you will attract three deeply virtuous people with a strong committment to the principle of universal freedom, plus millions of scoundrels. Declare that you’re going to stop holding witch hunts, and your coalition is certain to include more than its share of witches. > So while some small percent of Reddit’s average users moved over, a very large percent of its witches did. Sometimes the witchcraft was nothing worse than questioning Reddit’s political consensus. Other times, it was harassment, hate groups, and creepy porn. https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/07/22/freedom-on-the-centralized-web/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/07/22/freedom-on-the-central...

Lascaille 5y ago

BurningFrog 5y ago

Feels weird to have to say this, but Trump is the leading candidate to become US president in 2024, not some fringe extremist.

krapp 5y ago
Trump was always going to be the leading candidate. He could have won a second term if not for his fumbling over COVID and his meltdown over secret commies stealing his votes. No one was ever going to vote for Biden twice, the left only hates him less than they hate Trump and half the country never stopped drinking the Trump Kool-Aid. You can't beat a man who has a cult and started a revolution with... whatever the hell Biden has going for him. Once again the Democrats will probably snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
- blisterpeanuts 5y ago
  Are you saying Trump could have won in 2020? I think the pandemic killed his presidency... it's like 1932 when Herbert Hoover got voted out because of the Great Depression, regardless of whose fault it was. It was that, and mail-in balloting and dropboxes, which the Democrats used to great advantage, blindsiding the Republicans in all the swing districts. It seems to me the Democrats snatched victory from the jaws of defeat in 2020. However in 2022... mathematically, they're almost guaranteed to cede the House and maybe the Senate as well, depending on how events in Europe and general economic trends play out.
  - krapp 5y ago
    Yes, I said that if not for those events I think Trump could have won. Better leadership with COVID along with his (somewhat fictitious but still compelling) narrative of turning around the economy would probably have put him over Biden. Even though Biden won by a sizeable margin of popular votes - and as a candidate, he received more votes than any other candidate in history - he won with fewer electoral votes (the only votes that actually matter) than the 78,000 votes in three swing states which got Trump over in 2016.

briandear 5y ago

[flagged]

chalst 5y ago
> Substack is great because at least there are some voices out there getting heard. Alex Berenson and Glen Greenwald among the best. I've mixed feelings about Greenwald, but he is smart and occasionally makes good observations. What good things can be said about Alex Berenson, who The Atlantic memorably called The Pandemic’s Wrongest Man [1]? He seems to depend on basic scientific illiteracy in his readers. Where Greenwald would respond to a substantive critique like the Atlantic's, Berenson seems to hope his readers remain unaware of the critique. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/04/pandemics-wrongest-man/618475/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/04/pandemics-...
- native_samples 5y ago
  Berenson responds to that laughable description all the time. He loves nothing more than to call himself that when he gets proven right - again - often at the expense of writers in the Atlantic; I'd guess a quarter of his posts consist of "ha ha" type responses where he juxtaposes a tweet he made early in the pandemic alongside a government announcement or newly released scientific paper saying the same thing. https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/the-pandemics-wrongest-man-snl-edition/comments?s=r https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/the-pandemics-wrongest-m... https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/cdc-director-walensky-reveals-she/comments?s=r https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/cdc-director-walensky-re... https://www.google.com/search?q=%22pandemics+wrongest+man%22+site%3Aalexberenson.substack.com&oq=%22pandemics+wrongest+man%22+site%3Aalexberenson.substack.com&aqs=chrome..69i57.9452j0j4&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 https://www.google.com/search?q=%22pandemics+wrongest+man%22... If you think he didn't respond to that then surely you don't actually read his blog.
  - chalst 5y ago
    I don't read his blog. Neither of the two links you provide to his blog take any of the claims from the Atlantic piece and refute it. He mocks the title of the Atlantic piece but does not respond to its content. As far as I can see, it's bluster, pure rhetoric Do you have any instances of Berenson actually attempting to refute specific claims made in the Atlantic piece?

coldtea 5y ago

>There's literally a Trump app on the App Store right now dedicated to spreading falsehoods about the 2020 presidential election. Well, touting the fact that the App Store, in its benevolence, allows an app by an ex-POTUS, like it's some sort of triumph of free speech speaks volumes, doesn't it? The ability of an ex-president to have such reach would go without saying in the past. Now it's up to the whims of Big Tech - and Twitter and others had already cancelled them.

TimeBearingDown 5y ago
I was just about to point out, there’s no great likelihood that all will survive the next election, either…