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arctotherium Profile picture
arctotherium
@arctotherium42
Baby Boom II https://t.co/yHjmcR0aOY
May 3 • 12 tweets • 6 min read
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
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May 3 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
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
May 2 • 9 tweets • 3 min read
Because there's an obvious answer that will get you fired (and sometimes beaten in the streets) for saying: Koreans are (for genetic reasons) a lot smarter than Bolivians. Image Why did Koreans being smarter than Bolivians let them became a frontier economy? Should be obvious: far more people with the ability to become engineers, scientists, inventors, and entrepreneurs, and even manual factory workers and janitors and farmers are much more competent.
Apr 26 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
Rule of law, European Court of Human Rights: the ECHR decided in 2024 that Article 8 (right to privacy and family life) implied a right to protection from climate change and Switzerland was violating human rights by not having sufficiently-strong climate policies. Image You might recognize Article 8 from all of those stories of MENA or African rapists and murderers being undeportable (it would violate their right to family life).
Apr 20 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Brazil is Woke Utopia. Racism is illegal (unbailable, worse than homicide), so is transphobia and damaging a woman's feelings. Everyone is mixed and the country is heavily black, but also there's extremely strong (50%+ quotas) affirmative action, and a judge rules by decree. Extremely strong gun control laws, which are not enforced against actual criminals.
Apr 17 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
This is a conceptual error. The whole reason Orban became enemy #1 for European libs was refusing "Syrian refugees" in 2015. It has nothing to do with "vulgarity" or foreign associations (which came later as an attempt to survive EU hostility). Those are just excuses. You can't actually trick libs into being OK with "no Africans and Middle Easterners" by being polite about it.
Apr 16 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
This is even more true in Britain. The non-US Anglosphere is incredibly illiberal (not just in commerce, but also in freedom of speech and group-rights frameworks) even by the standards of an already long-post-liberal West. My view is that major Western countries transitioned from broadly liberal to broadly socialist/social-democratic around the Great Depression, and then from there to New Left (with more continuity, but still big changes around things like technology) in the 1960s.
Mar 31 • 34 tweets • 15 min read
Thread with excerpts from "The Information State" by Jacob Siegel (2026). Thesis: The Information State is a new form of political regime that "governs by controlling the codes and protocols of the digital public arena, which it uses to engineer the public’s compliance." Image Siegel traces what he calls the information state to the GWOT, when the 1990s libertarian ethos and hostility to the state of tech was replaced with a public-private infrastructure for, initially, mass surveillance and debanking of potential terrorists. Image
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Mar 27 • 22 tweets • 6 min read
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.
Mar 24 • 22 tweets • 10 min read
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
Mar 24 • 5 tweets • 4 min read
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
Image 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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Mar 23 • 19 tweets • 10 min read
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
Mar 17 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
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.
Mar 16 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
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
Mar 15 • 13 tweets • 8 min read
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
Mar 15 • 8 tweets • 4 min read
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. Image 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). Image
Mar 14 • 21 tweets • 9 min read
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. Image
Mar 14 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
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). Image The same outcome but for sex rather than race. Image
Mar 13 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
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. Image
Image 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. Image
Mar 8 • 12 tweets • 5 min read
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.
Mar 6 • 14 tweets • 8 min read
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. Image 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.