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.

https://x.com/arctotherium42/status/2028271179291574365

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. 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.

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.
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.

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. 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.

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.

https://twitter.com/Theory_Society/status/2033604101896806649

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.

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. 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.

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.

Thread on Anglosphere intelligence's role in the 2015-2023 closure of the Internet. Not a ton of evidence on the topic (obviously), so this thread isn't super dense. There was a huge surge in tech hiring of ex-FBI employees in 2018. It is not inherently suspicious that ex-spooks go to Silicon Valley companies; many have expertise in cybersecurity and related fields. What IS suspicious is that so many flock to the content control/moderation roles (Trust and Safety etc).

Deplatforming of websites thread. This is when private web infrastructure actors (cloud providers, payment processors, DNS providers, DDoS protectors) coordinate to purge websites. Several layers of the web stack are oligopolies, so this can happen sans explicit coordination. The first major case of infrastructure-level deplatforming was WikiLeaks in 2010, for releasing classified information obtained illegally (US diplomatic cables), referred to as "Cablegate," by AWS, EveryDNS, PayPal, Visa, Mastercard, and Bank of America.

In realistic resume-study settings, previous-generation (Sonnet 4) LLMs consistently prefer black to white and female to male applicants. These preferences are invisible in model chains-of-thought, which are thus unfaithful (don't correspond to actual decision process). The same outcome but for sex rather than race.

The entire male Manchu population was turned into fighters by the Aisin-Gioro clan (Qing) to conquer China. They were forbidden from doing anything but fight, and given privileges and Chinese slaves to sustain them. Over time, this made them decadent and useless.
Despite many Qing attempts to reverse Manchu decay, they, banned from working, eventually found themselves economically subjugated by their economically-productive and hardworking Chinese subjects. Sort of like Hegel's parable of the master and the slave.

The most interesting thing in Facebook's evolution from mostly-free (albeit without pseudonymity) platform to aggressively controlled between 2015 and 2020 is how involved European governments were in the process (thread). The most important thing about Facebook is that it can be used to reach the great mass of Gen X and Boomer adults who are not Internet natives and comprise most swing voters. Dark Facebook Manipulation from Russia and Vote Leave was blamed for both Trump 2016 and Brexit.

In 2015, Twitter was "the free speech wing of the free speech party" according to CEO Jack Dorsey, even avoiding collaboration with the NSA (unlike Google, Facebook). By 2019 it was one of the most censored, monitored, and controlled social media networks in the world. YouTube was the biggest and most monetizable platform, Reddit the most important discussion forum, Amazon needed for authors and websites, and Google Search the only way to surface niche info sources. Twitter mattered as the social network of the intelligentsia.

Alaric on 2010s feminism and sexual norms. He sees it as a concrete, sharp break in 2014 alien to anything that came before. which almost overnight made anti-male sentiment the most pervasive cultural force in the Western world.

2014 saw a huge top-down feminist media campaign both motivating and caused by government initiatives and international institutions. This was the true start of Woke as a feminist and internationalist movement, before it became more racialist and parochial.

Another thread on the closure of the Internet. Amazon, like other major tech giants, had little content policy beyond "no illegal content, spam or scams/fraud" in 2015 and by 2020 had a well developed censorship infrastructure for both the web store and AWS. Amazon is particularly important for two reasons: (1) AWS making it, like Google Search, a major Internet chokepoint and (2) 50% book and 80% e-book market share; Amazon banning a book is the closest a non-classified book can really come to being banned in the US.

WIRED: Silicon Valley gay networks are so influential because gays are "cross-generational" allowing settings where "established wealth meets emerging talent." Gays run Silicon Valley, lesbians and fat people hardest hit.

There is a common Hollywood upwards mobility narrative for early 20th century European immigrants. It's not really true; for most origins earnings for both first and second generation were similar and were already above average in generation 1. Relative rank order didn't change much either.

More on the 2016-2019 closure of the Internet. In 2015, Reddit, like YouTube, had almost no content policy beyond banning illegal activity, doxxing, harassment, and involuntary or underage pornography. By 2020, Reddit had purged political dissent from the site.
Much of Reddit's shift was motivated by one thing: that r/The_Donald, the hub of internet Trump support, could consistently reach and dominate the front page. Reddit repeatedly changed their algorithm and policies specifically to suppress r/The_Donald before banning it.

The most important platform to be closed off 2017-2019 was YouTube. Before 2017, YouTube was a very open platform, with easy monetization and almost no moderation of legal content. By the end of 2019, thoughtcrime (anything to the right of Ben Shapiro) was thoroughly purged. In March 2017, several news organizations (The Times of London, the Guardian, WSJ) published coordinated articles about ads appearing next to "problematic" content on YouTube. This led to the British government summoning Google to explain and an advertiser boycott.

It is stunning how quickly the Internet was closed off 2017-2023. Perhaps most importantly, Google began politicizing search results in April 2017 with "Project Owl," which sought to suppress "problematic searches" [their term, not mine]. To accomplish this, Google began removing "problematic" autocomplete selections. Since then, there have been a number of cases of Google's autocomplete bias getting so heavy-handed it went viral on other platforms, but the thumb on the scale is usually invisible.

It is completely false that redlining was "explicit racial gatekeeping." 92% of redlined homes were white! Redlining was based on bureaucrats trying to predict if home values in an area would go up or down so as to avoid wasting taxpayer money on bad loans.

https://twitter.com/Handrev/status/2026893079504949716

Almost all black neighborhoods were redlined because black neighborhoods tend to be poor, violent, dirty, and getting worse (because of black behavior), and so not places people want to move to. This was true in 1936, it was true in 1966, and it is true today.