Share this page!

Enter URL or ID to Unroll

You can paste full URL like: https://x.com/threadreaderapp/status/1644127596119195649
or just the ID like: 1644127596119195649

How to get URL link on X (Twitter) App

  1. On the Twitter thread, click on or icon on the bottom
  2. Click again on or Share Via icon
  3. Click on Copy Link to Tweet
  4. Paste it above and click "Unroll Thread"!
  5. More info at Twitter Help
arctotherium Profile picture
@arctotherium42
May 3 • 12 tweets • 6 min read • Read on X
Scrolly
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
Image
Amazon, for example, incorporated SPLC judgements into their pipeline automatically, and this is the norm in the financial industry. Image
Image
Image
Image
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
Image
Major threats included "coordinated negative public messaging" and also legislative, executive, and regulatory action. Image
Industry employees are, right now, in 2026, afraid for their physical safety if they say things that hurt the SPLC. Image
The timeline: debanking really starts in earnest in 2017 in response to the election of Donald Trump, and was supercharged after Charlottesville. Image
Image
Image
The SPLC explicitly included elected politicians and extremely high profile normal conservative political figures in their list of individuals and accounts to be debanked and censored. This is, eg, responsible for the ad boycott of Tucker Carlson*. Image
*And no, this isn't retroactively justified by Carlson being crazy; there are many crazy media figures.
The SPLC seamlessly moved from "debank actual terrorist organization" to "debank regular elected politicians." Image
What makes this all really funny is the SPLC getting hoisted on their own petard; they were the major voice calling for nonprofit financial transactions to be more heavily scrutinized by the government! Image
Image
Organization called "Free Press" 2021 EoY communication: "Our efforts have yielded numerous concrete changes. After years of pressure from Free Press and our allies, Twitter finally banned Trump... We’re now pushing [Facebook[ to permanently ban Trump." We're nonpartisan BTW. Image
Image
Anyways, I'd like to publicly thank Patrick McKenzie for writing this. I recommend all of my followers read the whole thing and purchase a paid subscription to McKenzie.

• • •

Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to force a refresh
　

Keep Current with arctotherium

arctotherium Profile picture

Stay in touch and get notified when new unrolls are available from this author!

Read all threads

This Thread may be Removed Anytime!

PDF

Twitter may remove this content at anytime! Save it as PDF for later use!

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

how to unroll video
  1. Follow @ThreadReaderApp to mention us!

  2. From a Twitter thread mention us with a keyword "unroll"
@threadreaderapp unroll

Practice here first or read more on our help page!

More from @arctotherium42

arctotherium Profile picture
Jul 25
This is generically true - across almost all rich countries, women are 2-2.5x as likely to work for the state as men. Image
Removing teachers (and soldiers, for fairness) lowers the gap, but it's still a big difference. Image
You can get slightly different numbers depending on what source you use and what exactly you count as public, but they all tell the same substantive story. Image
Read 4 tweets
arctotherium Profile picture
Jul 19
New blog post (link below). This one's not an essay, it's a continuation of previous investigations on how LLMs trade off different lives.

In February 2025, the Center for AI Safety published "Utility Engineering: Analyzing and Controlling Emergent Value Systems in AIs" in which they showed, among many other things, that GPT-4o values Nigerians about 20x more highly than Americans (please read the original paper to understand their approach). I updated their framework with different categories and newer models in October 2025, and discovered that with the exception of Grok 4 (Fast), all models placed far more value on the lives of "left-coded" groups (nonwhites, non-men, LGBTQ, immigrants, leftists, Third Worlders) over "right-coded" groups (whites, men, non-queers, ICE agents, rightists, First Worlders). For example, Sonnet 4.5 saw the lives of South Asians as about 18 times as valuable as the lives of whites.

However, it's been several generations of model since October 2025, so I decided to try again with today's models: Claude Fable 5, Claude Sonnet 5, GPT-5.6 Sol, Grok 4.5, and Kimi K3. As it turns out, all of them are MUCH more egalitarian than their counterparts (except Grok 4.5, since Grok 4 was already egalitarian) from a year ago.

Finding 1: Sonnet 5 was the only model even close to last year's models, valuing nonwhites roughly four times higher than whites.

Finding 2: GPT-5.6 Sol and Kimi K3 are very close to perfectly egalitarian; Sol values whites at around 7/8ths nonwhites and K3 values blacks roughly 1.3 times as much as whites; these are tiny ratios by the standards of last year.

Finding 3: Claude Fable is pretty much perfectly egalitarian. This is very, very different from last year's Claude models. Grok 4.5 has retained the egalitarianism of previous generations of Grok despite the giant increase in capabilities and different team.

Every model I tested would have been the most egalitarian model (aside from Grok 4) last year. All models have come to resemble Grok in their exchange rates.Image
Image
Image
Image
Here is the link: arctotherium.substack.com/p/llm-exchange…
Here's the original investigation.
Read 12 tweets
arctotherium Profile picture
Jul 19
This is wrong. Kirk was not a particularly hated figure before he was killed; he was seen by Redditor-types as a goofy meme figure of mockery (see below, from 2023). He was only demonized by lefties *after* he was murdered, to retroactively justify the assassination. Image
Kirk was not a case of the lib hate machine whipping up hatred against someone until someone took a shot at him, it was a case of the lib hate machine ramping up after he was murdered.
This is one of the reasons why his murder was so shocking; I sort of expected people taking shots at Trump or Stephen Miller or even Elon Musk, who libs collectively saw as Hitler II, but not Kirk, who they mostly saw as a lolcow.
Read 5 tweets
arctotherium Profile picture
Jul 13
Thread with excerpts from "Foundations, their power and influence" (1958), by the former chairman of the Reece Committee, a Congressional committee to investigate the conduct of tax-exempt foundations. Image
The administrators of the great foundations formed an interlocking cartel wielding (illegally) immense political and cultural influence using other people's money, as the foundations are tax exempt. Image
Foundations are tax-exempt because they are supposed to be run for public benefit. Image
Read 32 tweets
arctotherium Profile picture
Jul 11
Thread with excerpts from "The French Intifada: The Long War Between France and its Arabs" (2014). This book, by a leftist (participant in communes) author, portrays race riots by Arab immigrants to France as simply one more episode in a centuries-long war between the two. Image
Both the French Left and Right framed the 2005 riots as part of the long French tradition of revolt. But they were wrong; the protestors were mostly Arabs rioting against France itself, not against "the bosses" or "the state." Image
The rioters (remember, Arab immigrants and their descendants) see themselves as soldiers in a long war against France, Europe, and even civilization itself. Recall that the author is on their side. Image
Read 21 tweets
arctotherium Profile picture
Jul 3
'The Unknown Warriors' (2006) is a collection of WWII veteran's views on modern Britain gathered via newspaper ad. So what did WWII veterans think of the 2006 UK? They hated it; 134 responses were negative vs only 6 positive (plus 31 N/A and 13 neutral). Excerpts below. Image
The below is typical (from a D-Day veteran): "I am absolutely disgusted with the way things are turning out... and sometimes wonder if it was worth all the suffering of a war." Image
"I have many, many misgivings on how matters have turned out. Problems seem to be resolved, by more and more legislation, instead of action at the source... What many veterans abhor, is the acceptance of homosexuality as the norm." Image
Read 57 tweets

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Support us! We are indie developers!

This site is made by just two indie developers on a laptop doing marketing, support and development! Read more about the story.

Become a Premium Member ($3/month or $30/year) and get exclusive features!

Become Premium

Don't want to be a Premium member but still want to support us?

Make a small donation by buying us coffee ($5) or help with server cost ($10)

Donate via Paypal

Or Donate anonymously using crypto!

Ethereum

0xfe58350B80634f60Fa6Dc149a72b4DFbc17D341E copy

Bitcoin

3ATGMxNzCUFzxpMCHL5sWSt4DVtS8UqXpi copy

Thank you for your support!

Follow Us!

Send Email!

:(