by Brett Stevens on March 1, 2020

Silicon Valley continues to navigate through a loophole in American law: as private industry, it has no obligation to support free speech, but has also been given a legal carve-out removing liability for things that its users have posted under the Communications Decency Act § 230.

This inverts the normal order, which is for publishers who curate content to have full responsibility for it, and for common carriers who do not curate content, like telephone services, to be liable for none of it.

The latter makes sense since no one can in real time catch all of the illegal content that internet users post. The former makes less sense. The internet thrived on being a common carrier and a bit of a “Wild West” because in with all the crazy, good content appeared and rose to the top.

That goes against the business model of social media, which just like daytime television in the 1980s, thrives on producing lots of the same old thing, and dressing it up as new. They want content churn because most people are interested in the same stuff, day after day.

This also portends doom for them because they misunderstand that markets are ecosystems. If you ask them, people want the same old stuff, but obviously based on the past, they react well to the wildcat content posted by the few who are creative and thoughtful.

Instead of acquiring the broad audience by supporting this ecosystem, social media hopes to focus on those who are its most active users, and they tend to like clicking on dressed-up versions of the usual. Much like in the fashion industry, this “creativity” is simply oddball novelty.

Since our Establishment™ went Leftist after WW2, the new insurgents, rebels, and outsider thinkers are conservatives or at least realists; they are those not in love with “equality” as the singular goal and principle of civilization.

Social media has responded to these as if they were toxic, since their presence disturbs those who are repeating the past by clicking on the same old stuff dressed up as the “new,” because that which is actually different reveals how much the same old thing is, well, old and tired.

Reddit took this to new levels lately by deciding that it would punish users who upvote controversial content and remove moderators who support it on the pro-Trump forum that took the site by storm:

(Former, as of minutes ago, top mod of the last few years here) First they changed upvote algorithms to keep us from reaching the masses. Next, they outright censored us from /all. Then, they quarantined us, to make it difficult to even see our words, much less spread them. Then, one by one, they added new rules to stifle what would could even say behind the quarantine. Users were sitewide banned, automod size increased to prevent you from speaking freely. Still not enough, they decided to start banning us for even liking content we see, things we didn’t personally even create. Wrongthink. Now, they’ve removed half of our mods, and will be installing their own. Reddit never wanted to remove The_Donald, but they have wanted to kill us. Not by shutting us down, but by starving us out. Censoring our good content, making it less interesting, making you fear what you can post, or even upvote. It makes less negative press for them to slowly kill us off and replace us than to outright ban us. Reddit is dead. The_Donald is dead.

Instead of outright banning the sub, Reddit has decided to play nanny state and instead target specific content by targeting specific individuals, essentially removing anyone who does not toe the line and installing its own moderators to enforce Leftism in the name of conservatism.

We know this old drill. Like political correctness or the neoconservative takeover of the Republican party, it removes anything but Leftism, leaving the false appearance of community agreement that Leftism is good and in fact, that conservatism is a variety of Leftism.

This continues a policy by other social media — Twitter, Facebook, Google, and Amazon — of removing conservatives who actually threaten Leftism and leaving those who think the primary goal of conservatives is to be “principled” (but controlled) opposition to the Left.

Leftists always take this approach. In their view, equality should be the unifying principle of civilization and constitutes the singular morality which is acceptable. When all who disagree are dead, they rationalize, then society can “move forward” toward Equality Utopia.

Tags: censorship, reddit

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