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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
Mar 24
To make fact-checking work during the closure of the Internet, social media platforms had to know the ground truth of claims. Since this is not precisely knowable, they outsourced determining the truth to a web of news organizations and NGOs. Thread on these. Image
Most official fact-checking organizations were certified by other the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) or the European Fact-Checking Standards Network (EFCSN), which created a chokepoint in the ecosystem. Image
The IFCN was founded by the Poynter Institute, a school of journalism, in 2015, after a $1M foundation grant. They hired an ex-SPLC employee to create a list of 515 orgs to be used in ad blacklists, including mainstream conservative ones like the Washington Examiner. Image
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Read 22 tweets
arctotherium Profile picture
Mar 24
Canada provides several privileges for officially-recognized media organizations, such as tax refunds up to 35% of labor costs and huge transfers directly from platforms where their content is posted. Australia, UK, South Africa, Brazil, and NZ have similar programs. Image
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France subsidizes officially-recognized journalists to the tune of a billion pounds a year. The Nordics have a similar program. France and Italy also provide recognized journalists with tax credits. Image
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Unsurprisingly (it is basically the UK with good weather and Silicon Valley), California is going down a similar route of state-subsidized media. Image
Read 5 tweets
arctotherium Profile picture
Mar 23
Thread on the role of Western government's in the closure of the Internet. Germany's 2017 NetzDG act, which forced large platforms to hire thousands of moderators or potentially face huge fines for hosting illegal content even outside of Germany, was the first major law. Image
This German law served as the template for similar laws in other authoritarian despotisms, such as Russia, Belarus, Venezuela, Vietnam, the United Kingdom, and India. Image
The EU has also exercised informal pressure, imposing a "Code of conduct on countering illegal hate speech online" on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Microsoft in 2016. Image
Read 19 tweets
arctotherium Profile picture
Mar 17
This paper's analysis ofsocial science abstracts over time. Economics is slightly left-of-center but has been roughly consistent since 1960. The rest were solidly left of center in 1960, grew dramatically moreso 1960-70, and have continued trending left since then. Image
Between 1960 and 1970 you had physical violent takeovers of many colleges by leftist radicals, who succeeded in creating fake leftist academic fields and thereby institutionally capturing academia over the course of generations.
Because social sciences academia relies on consensus for promotion, without much feedback from reality, once an intolerant clique gains sufficient cohesion and numerical dominance, which happened 1960-70, they can kickstart a positive feedback loop with no self-correction. Image
Read 4 tweets
arctotherium Profile picture
Mar 16
An admin for one of the biggest right-wing Facebook groups DM'd me with his impressions/experience with Facebook moderation and censorship (and gave me permission to post this thread). RW Facebook was big in 2016/17. Image
The big crackdown began in summer 2017; it did not take the form of bans for hate speech but rather all publicly-known admin accounts getting suspended for no reason, leading to the pages disappearing. Image
This included device bans which permanently destroyed most of the pages. Image
Read 5 tweets
arctotherium Profile picture
Mar 15
Thread on Apple's role in the closure of the Internet. From 2016 to 2023, Apple's App Store, half the mobile duopoly, went from a curated software marketplace to one of the most important content control systems on Earth.
In June 2016, Apple completely reorganized their App Store Review Guidelines into five pillars: Safety, Performance, Business, Design, and Legal. Image
Most of Apple's big decisions were not policy ones but specific removals that had a chilling effect on future discourse. In Aug 2018, Apple removed 5/6 Alex Jones podcasts for hate speech. This was done jointly with similar actions from Facebook, YouTube, and Spotify. Image
Read 13 tweets

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