Thread by @arctotherium42

Master thread on the 2015-2022 closure of the Internet, the process by which every major Internet platform went from broadly open with a few basic guidelines to strict narrative enforcement, often with the collaboration of govts and outsourcing moderation power to NGOs.

YouTube was the most important platform for reaching The Youth and also uniquely compatible with monetization, allowing independent political/intellectual entrepreneurs to make a career. Closed 2015-2019.

Reddit was known for its "anything goes" speech policy in 2015, and was the hub for text-based debate between normal people on opposing sides of issues. Turned into a leftist echo-chamber to spite r/TheDonald.

Amazon, with its dominance of the e-book and e-commerce markets, played a similar political commissar role for aspiring authors and merch sellers.

Twitter, which dominated among cultural elites (journos, academics, politicians) went from "the free speech wing of the free speech party" to an extension of a partisan FBI with many different tiers of algorithmic manipulation for disfavored stories.

Facebook's closure was closely linked to German, EU, and British pressure after it was (mostly wrongly) blamed for opposition to the 2015 migrant crisis and Brexit. Significant because Facebook allowed the Internet to reach the Great Boomer Voter Mass.

Another thread, this one from DMs with a major Facebook group admin, on what was lost with Facebook's closure and the timeline (2015 migrant crisis to Biden's inauguration).

Apple's role was more through intimidation/chilling effects than direct censorship; there were only a few removals but given Apple mobile dominance they had a big effect.

You might say "it's OK, it's the Internet, even if you're kicked off the major platforms you can make your own website/forum and people can find you"... except Google also changed their search algorithm to avoid non-mainstream sites and sources.

...and if you can survive getting booted off every major platform and Google search, your cloud providers/payment processors/DDoS protection/ISPs/domain registrars might coordinate to nuke you off the Internet anyways.

I don't think it matters, but our political vocabulary is much better at fighting formal state tyranny than decentralized networks controlling a handful of nominally private chokepoints, so it's worth pointing out 5eyes was probably involved.

On top of covert involvement, many Western governments participated directly and formally with wide-ranging moderation and censorship laws and "guidelines," especially Germany, Britain, the EU, and Australia.

The EU, with its phenomenal market size and lack of meaningful internal opposition, was particularly important.

In order to do this moderation, tech companies needed "ground truth," which was outsourced to an ostensibly neutral (in reality very partisan) network of NGO fact-checkers.

Funnily enough, just as tech was making their ostensible roles (uncovering and disseminating info) obsolete, journalists became deputized as truth oracles and gained official subsidies and privileges (like exemptions from German speech laws).

In all cases, there was a very clear progression: each platform started by going after Neo-Nazis and similarly unsympathetic groups and within a couple of years escalated to alt-center, mainstream conservatives and mild-mannered academic types (psychometrics).

I gave the timeline as 2015-2022, but it's never actually stopped, just somewhat receded thanks to the Musk thaw, the extreme excess during the lockdowns (eg shutting down lab leak discussion) provoking a backlash, and Republican officials wising up to what was going on.

There were two distinct phases:
1) 2015-2019, started by the migrant crisis, Brexit, and Trump I, which destroyed the Internet Right.
2) 2020-2022, related to the 2020 election and the lockdowns, which massively intensified everything and went after normies.

The effect of this on Internet discourse was to not only shift it extremely far to the left but to dumb it down. Like unpredictable environments leading to r-selection, ubiquitous censorship discouraged original research or high-effort books/essays/videos in favor of memes.

Seeing this happen in real time was immensely blackpilling and the fact that it isn't even widely-known and discussed that this happened (almost entirely in the last 11 years) is a travesty. "Closure of the Internet" is 1000 times worse than McCarthyism ever was.

I regret not being able to do this topic justice; it really needs a proper book/documentary/TV series, with interviews with key participants (eg Vijaya Gadde) and a look through archives of major institutions. Tweet threads and essays are not enough.

Someone needs to hunt down the journalists who initially began the anti-YouTube ad press campaign and interview them.