Thread by @caitoz

How Did People Have Conversations Back Before Tech Oligarchs Were There To Police Them?

"Rollouts of corporate & state power collaborating to control speech are not a response to a threat to democracy, they’re a response to a threat to narrative control."
medium.com/@caityjohnston…

Twitter has announced the rollout of even more censorship policies in the lead-up to the November US presidential election. “Credible information” here means information from the same mass media outlets who’ve lied to us about every American war.

https://twitter.com/TwitterSupport/status/1314603498101587969?s=20

Thanks Twitter, the social media echo chamber we already had wasn't turning us into idiots fast enough.

https://twitter.com/TwitterSupport/status/1314603539398709254

This is just the latest censorship measure Silicon Valley tech corporations have been rolling out in coordination with the US government under the banner of protecting American democracy. We may be certain that none of these measures will be rolled back when the election is over.

As my regular readers are no doubt tired of hearing me repeat by now, when you have monopolistic tech corporations which attract the bulk of online communication coordinating with governments to censor speech, what you have is government censorship.

As @mtaibbi recently wrote, this censorship regime is continually expanding and this expansion is likely to continue, especially in the direction of those who oppose these same establishment power structures that are promoting this censorship.
taibbi.substack.com/p/after-the-qa…

It’s just so brazenly authoritarian. The only reason people are putting up with it is because they’ve spent years being bombarded with horror stories about Russian propaganda and right-wing disinformation by the same MSM that are now being upheld as “authoritative sources”.

Imagine if you were at a party and guys with clipboards who work for the government were going around from group to group listening to the conversations people were having and forcibly removing anyone who said anything they deemed false or disruptive. Would you be okay with this?

Well it’s not normal. How do people think conversations happened back before there were monopolistic tech oligarchs policing their words in coordination with the government to make sure they weren’t hazardous to democracy? Did they forget that this didn't used to happen?

No, people just talked to each other. Sometimes what people said was true, sometimes it was false, sometimes it was an idiotic urban legend about a celebrity putting rodents in their butt, but at no time did anyone think they needed a team of oligarchs and feds policing them.

From Taibbi’s aforementioned article:

This coordination between corporate and state power to censor speech has gotten more and more egregious ever since, just as it was designed to be.

You can’t reach billionaire levels of influence and wealth control in the current system without collaborating with existing power structures; if your collaboration isn’t trusted you’ll find yourself targeted like TikTok and WeChat.
theguardian.com/technology/202…

This is why free market types who say censorship can be fought by moving to a different platform are false; no platform is going to be allowed to get big unless it aligns itself with the same power structures that are pushing censorship on those platforms. Attempts to do so fail.

These platforms were built with the help of establishment power structures, and they are maintained with the consent of those power structures.
qz.com/1145669/google…

Giant platforms sucking up all human conversation to then censor those conversations in alignment with establishment interests is an extremely valuable asset to the powerful, and they’re not going to let it go easily. It’s an extremely effective weapon against dissident thought.