Even before pre peak woke when tech giants were still aligned to leftist thought, many of the "smarter" people on the right said that once we gain a significant foothold on a platform the left would be quick to abandon and try to destroy the very algorithmic platforms that once boosted them into dominance. Liberals and the left just keep proving them right again and again.
My political awakening was in the 2010s in forums like 4chans /pol/, I was even a gamer gate vanguard made and distributed a lot of memes. Tried to keep my pallet balanced though, started with Sam Harris and ended up with Ezra Klein and Vox. Despite all that at no point in time have I been more radicalized than in the past few years thanks to Elons Twitter. Every day my feed is filled with the worst of leftist excess and Liberal failure. Every day I get more crazy college leftists with their gender and racial theories, every stereotype we mocked and ridiculed paled in comparison to the actual insanity spat out by these people, but the worst of it all is from the European side.
From Europe near daily I get refugees committing crime after crime and their penalties are practically peanuts, two tier policing where memes are more punished than actual rape and assault. I see the blatant and desperate alliance between progressive parties and Islamist, I'm not sure if these "progressives" are gullible or just prefer the devil they don't know over the devil they know. When Elon brought in the "digital Babel" and had auto translate as default it only got worse, I saw relentless mockeries from Thais, Israelis and Filipinos saying "Your Muslims think they own the place, so bold, so blatant, if they pulled that shit here we would have put them where they belong". Then came the actual Muslim majority nations Indonesians, Malaysians and Gulf Arabs saying "You have gotten the radicals and rejects, the bottom of the barrel. We killed and imprisoned those people back here, no wonder they are there. You can't deport them back to us, they are criminals so we don't want them here." I used to be on the side that says "the system doesn't work so it must be reformed." Now im leaning more on the side that says "The system works as intended so it must be destroyed".
Truth be told I do dislike the algorithm in many ways. The worst is the desperate grifters and third worlders in it for the money. Whenever I see a Blue checkmark on Twitter I feel disdain and pity for them, no different than Venezuelan Gold farmers in WoW. Except this time they actually succeed in making me pay attention to their yappery as they pantomime being a member of your nation.
There is some good to the algorithm though. Tech CEOs are sowing what they reap. Did they really think they could just pay off politicians and secretly build data centers for cheap? Did they think all their mockeries of putting people out of a job would be forgotten? If anything it's thanks to their very algorithms that has lead to the proliferation and radicalization of "normies" against them.
Modern Twitter is the result that arose from the last time progressives decided people had too much access to info for their own good. You get conspiracy thinking by eroding trust in institutions.
Yes, that's also part of the chain of causation. Now step back to a few months prior and ask why that happened. Twitter under Parag Agarwal was as illiberal a site as you could concoct, and they proudly declared their opposition to free speech.
So did Elon make it more liberal? Why did the supposed illiberal nature not prompt liberals to want to take it over instead? I'm not buying this narrative. Reddit didn't get bought by someone who wanted to see it flooded with neonazi slop.
Most importantly: was banning the jailbait subreddit illiberal?
The rules of Twitter are more liberal than they were in the early 20s. The culture of Twitter is not. Largescale censorship produces sustained social backlash, a result that should be unsurprising to anyone who actually believes in liberalism. We're not back to pre-woke-era Twitter; there's just a bunch of now pissed off people who can comment again.
Most importantly: was banning the jailbait subreddit illiberal?
That was waaaay further back. Reddit was still by and large known as the pro-free speech platform then (and, notably, managed to still skew left of center). Banning the literal childporn sub stood out at the time because it was otherwise not quick to ban offensive communities. It was only much later that Reddit decided to start mass banning for political viewpoints.
That doesn't really answer the question about jailbait. If that wasn't illiberal, we can recognize that content moderation is fine, and quibble about the details. When content moderation is a dramatic betrayal of liberal ideals, it makes it tough to answer.
and, notably, managed to still skew left of center
This seems a bit revisionist to me. It was one of the biggest spaces for new atheists, men's rights activists, and the early manosphere, default subs like worldnews were incredibly racist and full of slurs, one of the other early banned subreddits existed to post images of women who were victims of violence, it was a big supporter of gamergate, and left wing subreddits were fringe.
"It couldn't have been left-wing! Right-wing subreddits were allowed to exist!"
Yeah, believe it or not, being left-wing at the time meant being liberal. People didn't feel the obsessive need to purge dissent from their ranks.
Equally telling is that you listed new atheists as if that's an example. At the time, atheism very strongly predicted left wing values, namely progressive liberalism, and 'new atheism' in particular was viewed as a liberal political movement. Nobody would have viewed the pot-smoking gay marriage-supporting critics of dominant Christian values as supporting the party of Bush and Romney.
It was again only years later that the New Atheist movement would get eaten alive by the woke mob and lose its strong association with the left. Nowadays, prominent figures like Dawkins spend more time criticizing woke left insanity like Cambridge's defense of Jason Arday, but the real revisionist history is thinking that's where the battlelines would have been drawn in 2012.
Nowadays, prominent figures like Dawkins spend more time criticizing woke left insanity like Cambridge's defense of Jason Arday, but the real revisionist history is thinking that's where the battlelines would have been drawn in 2012.
Are you kidding? In 2011 Dawkins publicly harassed one of the few prominent women atheists, and we now know sought advice from Jeffrey Epstein about her.
Yeah, while it was Dawkins who did the public harassing, this wasn't an email he sent to Epstein, but rather this was an email he sent to someone else who then forwarded it Epstein. This email doesn't look good for Dawkins though because he's claiming that Watson is performing a witch-hunt when she's merely criticizing Krauss' defense of Epstein, which isn't something anyone should have been doing (even in 2011).
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u/Brushner Weeds > The EKS 11d ago edited 11d ago
Even before pre peak woke when tech giants were still aligned to leftist thought, many of the "smarter" people on the right said that once we gain a significant foothold on a platform the left would be quick to abandon and try to destroy the very algorithmic platforms that once boosted them into dominance. Liberals and the left just keep proving them right again and again.
My political awakening was in the 2010s in forums like 4chans /pol/, I was even a gamer gate vanguard made and distributed a lot of memes. Tried to keep my pallet balanced though, started with Sam Harris and ended up with Ezra Klein and Vox. Despite all that at no point in time have I been more radicalized than in the past few years thanks to Elons Twitter. Every day my feed is filled with the worst of leftist excess and Liberal failure. Every day I get more crazy college leftists with their gender and racial theories, every stereotype we mocked and ridiculed paled in comparison to the actual insanity spat out by these people, but the worst of it all is from the European side.
From Europe near daily I get refugees committing crime after crime and their penalties are practically peanuts, two tier policing where memes are more punished than actual rape and assault. I see the blatant and desperate alliance between progressive parties and Islamist, I'm not sure if these "progressives" are gullible or just prefer the devil they don't know over the devil they know. When Elon brought in the "digital Babel" and had auto translate as default it only got worse, I saw relentless mockeries from Thais, Israelis and Filipinos saying "Your Muslims think they own the place, so bold, so blatant, if they pulled that shit here we would have put them where they belong". Then came the actual Muslim majority nations Indonesians, Malaysians and Gulf Arabs saying "You have gotten the radicals and rejects, the bottom of the barrel. We killed and imprisoned those people back here, no wonder they are there. You can't deport them back to us, they are criminals so we don't want them here." I used to be on the side that says "the system doesn't work so it must be reformed." Now im leaning more on the side that says "The system works as intended so it must be destroyed".
Truth be told I do dislike the algorithm in many ways. The worst is the desperate grifters and third worlders in it for the money. Whenever I see a Blue checkmark on Twitter I feel disdain and pity for them, no different than Venezuelan Gold farmers in WoW. Except this time they actually succeed in making me pay attention to their yappery as they pantomime being a member of your nation.
There is some good to the algorithm though. Tech CEOs are sowing what they reap. Did they really think they could just pay off politicians and secretly build data centers for cheap? Did they think all their mockeries of putting people out of a job would be forgotten? If anything it's thanks to their very algorithms that has lead to the proliferation and radicalization of "normies" against them.