Everyone has moved on, but there’s an unusually historically thorough blogpost about the censorship campaign across social media platforms of the latter half of the 2010s. It is both more thorough as a research piece and showed more insight than I was inspecting.
Maybe I’m being dim, but at present I don’t see anywhere in the LW post a link to the original piece, which I think is https://arctotherium.substack.com/p/the-closure-of-the-internet.
I am unfortunately time-constrained right now and haven’t read that original piece; I hope it doesn’t, as the extracts quoted here rather suggest, conflate “leftists were wrong about some specific things” with “leftists were globally wrong in the same sort of way as creationists”. Every[1] group is wrong about some specific things and it may well be that leftists were systematically wrong about some specific things that perhaps the article specifies. It might in fact be true that leftists are wrong about all the key things that distinguish them from rightists and that that’s why they’re wrong about those specific things. But not necessarily, and the former would not be strong evidence for the latter, and (politics being what it is) I am worried that part of the point of the article might be to encourage to believe the latter by giving evidence of the former. But, again, time-constrained, haven’t read it properly, so hopefully my cynicism is unwarranted in this case.
[1] Yesyesyes, all universal generalizations are false.
Fixed the link and removed the highlight as I feel it doesn’t do the post justice.
I would appreciate this more if, instead of being a link post, it was you rewriting just the parts you agree with. I don’t like the way claims are laundered into coalition building here, seems like it plays into the hands of the pro censorship coalition for the people who are most anti censorship to be people whose views are quite unpopular. If you are not a person who holds, uh, all of the views expressed in this piece, I’d appreciate seeing what views you actually would defend.
Thank you, that was a very good read. I lived through that, I remember it, I was paying attention, and it’s still a shock to see the whole story of censorship clearly laid out like that.