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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 es
by 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 agoA 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...
- FeepingCreature 5y agoAlso elaborated in the latter Neutral vs Conservative: The Eternal Struggle https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/01/neutral-vs-conservative-the-eternal-struggle/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/01/neutral-vs-conservativ...