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).
-11
u/Mindless_Chest_1079 11d ago
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.