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arctotherium Profile picture
@arctotherium42
Mar 27 • 22 tweets • 6 min read • Read on X
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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. Image
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. Image
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.

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More from @arctotherium42

arctotherium Profile picture
May 9
Since 2009, medical schools have had to prove they sufficiently discriminate against white men ("achieve mission-appropriate diversity outcomes") to get accredited. Image
White men are now significantly underrepresented among med school students. Image
Fortunately, competence isn't that important in doctors, so purging white men in favor of "underrepresented minorities" (blacks, LatinX) who can't pass clinical exams shouldn't matter. Image
Read 5 tweets
arctotherium Profile picture
May 8
European IQ's rising due to natural selection (as measured by PGS) continuing into the modern era whereas it stalled in East Asia could have been predicted from Gregory Clark's genealogical studies in both regions. Image
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Clark found that "survival of the richest" was the rule in England from 1300-1880 or so, with huge differences in surviving offspring by class and this was much weaker in Qing China because higher class women didn't have more kids due to elite polygamy. Image
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(IQ is not the only trait that goes into income or wealth, of course, so selection for wealth is only indirectly selection for IQ and also selects for a package of other traits, some of which are collective goods like IQ and some of which are not.)
Read 9 tweets
arctotherium Profile picture
May 8
The Bancroft Prize (one of the most prestigious history awards, given by a panel of historians for works on diplomacy or the history of the Americas) was given in 2000 to someone claiming guns were really rare in colonial America (he committed fraud by changing quotes).
historynewsnetwork.org/article/what-c…
This should have been obvious nonsense to anyone who knows anything at all about colonial America, of course, and yet a panel of professional historians thought it was work at the pinnacle of the field until some random blogger pointed out all the fraud.
Read 4 tweets
arctotherium Profile picture
May 3
I very strongly appreciate this essay and wish there were a hundred more like it for other orgs. The SPLC is one of the biggest and most important nodes in the closure of the Internet, coordinating debanking and censorship outside the formal state. Image
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Amazon, for example, incorporated SPLC judgements into their pipeline automatically, and this is the norm in the financial industry. Image
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The SPLC coordinated pressure campaigns against the private sector 2017-2022, specifically Internet companies and payment processors. The easy for any individual company to do is knuckle under, especially since most decision-making managers will be sympathetic to begin with. Image
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Read 12 tweets
arctotherium Profile picture
May 3
A common normie folk belief is that AIDS was ignored by The Establishment out of homophobia. The opposite is true; AIDS became the most researched disease in human history within a few years, and gay orgs strenuously fought measures that might have stopped it.
The attitude of gay orgs during the peak of AIDS was:
1) The REAL epidemic is stigma (it was not, it was HIV)
2) You (meaning mainstream society) must do absolutely everything in your power to save us without us having to change our own behavior in any way at all
Gays were eventually bailed out of the consequences of their own behavior by extraordinary amounts of public research (mostly conducted and paid for by non-gays) plus expensive and continuing public funding of medicine for them (PrEP).
Read 4 tweets
arctotherium Profile picture
May 3
My view: the Great Awokening is over, but, by default, will be back even worse in 20 years. This cycle has already happened twice, with the 60s/70s New Left and 90s PC. Each time, some of the worst excesses are undone but nowhere near enough to reverse the previous wave.
What I think causes the ~20 year cycle is the education system; the natural result of paying attention in school is to be an insane leftist.
Every major conflict in US history, and most in world history, is taught as left vs right (sometimes "reformers" vs conservatives"), with the left always winning, always being in the right, and always vindicated by history. It's very simple to extrapolate from that!
Read 7 tweets

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