Stream: Short History of the Left’s Tech Efforts To Shut Out the Right

In the early days of our interconnected world, when people carped at each other over whether spam was legal on Usenet, there existed things called flame wars.

Flame wars generated a lot of heat, a great deal of abuse, but little resolution, and were fought over such scintillating questions as Which is better, MINX or Linux? (Obviously, it’s Linux.)

After the glory of Usenet faded, one species of soldiers from these battles migrated to web-logs, a.k.a. blogs, to carry on their search for e-blood: flamers, a.k.a. trolls.

Trolling

A troll would show up at a pro-life blog on a post about legal restrictions on killing the lives inside would-be mothers and start hurling insults and irrelevancies and would do his best to make a nuisance of himself and distract regulars from the point at hand.

Some trolls were so effective they found paying work astroturfing, i.e. making it seem that identical counter-arguments showing up at blogs and mainline site comment boxes were spontaneous grassroots efforts.

Enter the Social Justice Warrior

There was always an organized Left, but it was about this time Social Justice Warriors recognized themselves as a force. SJWs were younger and more militant than old-guard leftists. Doxxing, i.e. revealing the personal information of a heretofore anonymous online entity, began to be used as an official tactic.

Yet as a strategy to silence the Right, trolling and doxxing was recognized to be limited and slow. Luckily, this recognition happened at the time when social media sites exploded in growth.

There were, and still are, SJW trolls on sites like Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, and even YouTube, but hardcore SJWs took a new tack and concentrated their energies on the leadership and infrastructure of these companies.

Outright and shadow-banning

False and nonsensical complaints of “abuse”, “offensiveness”, and “hate” were lodged. This caused some members of the Right to lose or be locked out of their accounts. It also led to shadow-banning, i.e. where a person is allowed to keep their account, but their activities are not visible to the community at large. Large mainline (i.e. Left) sites began to close their comment boxes, finding them too difficult to police.

Searches began to be censored. This expensive solution requires live staff working at internal Ministries of Truth. This is because no person or algorithm can predict what new hashtag or phrase will become popular on the Right.

The fix is in

Searches were also modified to promote SJW fancies, such as their obsession with race. For example, contrast the Google image search “white couples” versus “black couples“. Or try “American inventors“.

It is, of course, impossible to show results for results which have been purged, but all the best sites censor.

The next escalation was clever. It’s fine to get right-wing users kicked off of Facebook, but what do you do when these right wingers have their own website? Complaining to the site owners is useless, and trolling is passé.

Why not go after the website’s hosting and domain name services?

Kill the host

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