it's the effect of trying to avoid regulation by self-regulating. after trump got elected, one of the big media narratives was that it happened because of misinformation ("fake news"); the response has been censorship by platform owners to avoid the charge in the future and any potential federal action
Why do you think so? How do you know it's not the response to multiple attempts to put liability for content on platform owners like Google and Facebook? How do you know they did not respond strongly because most governments have declared state of crisis, which means more severe punishment, and punishment of things that would be OK otherwise (and of course nobody knows what that actually means, let alone all around the world)?
there can be more than one reason, but the censorship began in earnest after trump's election and before covid.[1] this isn't even a controversial position and i'm nowhere near the only person to have remarked upon it.
It didn't start after Trump's election. It started with the "cancel culture" thing a couple of years before that and pressure on companies to participate in the war on crimethink.
I tend to think that it contributed to Trump's election, because it has the effect of creating massive polarization.
You can't segregate sites by viewpoint and thought filter everything in favor of one side or the other and expect it not to devolve into extremist conflict.
But the people doing this didn't want to admit that they caused the problem to begin with, so instead they double down.
The modern polarization of the media began in the 1990s with Newt Gingrich...with help from his patron Rupert Murdoch, an ultra-conservative Australian who owned television stations, tabloids, and newspapers in the US, Australia, and the UK.
Before them, politics was still very cutthroat but not polarized along party lines.
True - but something happened in the 2010's when Big Tech started taking sides in a way it hadn't before. I cannot picture Google doing this when it was still Google.
> The modern polarization of the media began in the 1990s with Newt Gingrich...with help from his patron Rupert Murdoch, an ultra-conservative Australian who owned television stations, tabloids, and newspapers in the US, Australia, and the UK.
That was certainly a thing that happened, but as far as I know Rupert Murdoch never got Gore Vidal blacklisted by book publishers or whatever.
It's one thing to say your piece, something else to stop the other guy saying theirs.
I could say the same about disney, their ownership of certain networks and their ability to influence politica to single handledly redefine trademark laws on behalf of the US government
It seems very similar to McCarthyism and the anti-communist messages from the late '40s and early '50s like the "loyalty review boards", just with wider media available in the modern world. McCarthyism also adopted similar conspiracy theories concerning vaccinations, mental health care, and fluoridation.
There were sweeping purges on Twitter after the elections. The official story was that these were 'bots' or 'trolls', but lots of good accounts got permanently deleted. It happened two or three times as I recall. You'd wake up and see that your follower count had mysteriously plunged overnight indicating another crop of bannings.
