Amerika

Censorship on the internet took many forms. At first, it grew out of the need to limit spam, or unsolicited commercial postings. Then it became political, ensuring that the small percentage of people who are always online would stay online at the site doing the censoring.

Now it has entered its final and most honest dimension: social media censorship exists to protect advertisers by eliminating scary and upsetting stuff from the pages on which you find their safe and pleasant ads:

Back in 2017, a wave of advertiser boycotts over “hateful” and “controversial” content sent the platform scrambling. The solution? Stricter guidelines are needed to ensure that only the most sanitized, brand-safe content remains.

They are selling comfort, safety, and the illusion of stability. For this reason, the censorship regime will go even farther, and portray political stability as a means to encourage buying. When culture is dead and people depend on entertainment for their values, only those sites which sell a vision of stability will win.

For this reason, political content becomes mandator, but in shades of Political Correctness, only the bourgeois complacency content will be pitched:

Threads and Instagram users will no longer be able to opt out of being shown political content from people they do not follow, parent company Meta has announced.

This means that, ironically, in the name of selling stuff to people who are already Leftist, social media will be adopting a political propaganda machine, and justifying it as a kind of anti-spam measure to remove misinformation through fact-checks:

There’s also the question of what claims are deemed as requiring a “fact check” or scrutinized for containing “misinformation” instead of being handled in the ordinary course of journalistic business. I suspect these are often precisely those claims that are either unresolved or unresolvable. Matters of opinion more than facts qua facts. But claims that are politically inconvenient to one side.

If a claim were easily refuted through regular journalistic methods, it would be. What filters through to the fact-checkers, who are rarely the journalists on the front lines of a story, are often the edge cases: half-truths and political hyperbole, or claims for which there’s “no evidence” either way, but a particular null hypothesis is privileged. Labeling these claims as “dangerous” misinformation or otherwise cordoning them off as out of bounds is essentially a bluff.

This tells us what we need to know about the internet: the people with nothing better to do have become its mainstay audience, echoing a prediction from sixteen years ago that 8% of the userbase is responsible for 85% of interactions:

The updated results based on March 2009 Comscore data…indicated that the number of people who click on display ads in a month has fallen from 32 percent of Internet users in July 2007 to only 16 percent in March 2009, with an even smaller core of people (representing 8 percent of the Internet user base) accounting for the vast majority (85 percent) of all clicks.

Never mind that unpersoning people is not just dystopian, but wrecks the utility of social media as a communications medium:

“As 2024 ended, Meta permanently disabled my personal Facebook account, saying it ‘doesn’t follow our Community Standards on account integrity.’ No idea why. My appeal was denied without explanation or recourse. Now I have no access to any of my content or contacts. What now?”

The incident might not be worth airing in public, were it not a glimpse of the world we are all hurtling toward. Someday, we will not just get booted off of social media but admitted to — or rejected from — college without human eyes ever weighing credentials or reading essays. Medical procedures will be permitted, or denied, without an actual doctor glancing at a file.

It turns out that peace and anarchy are as destructive as war and authoritarianism, since even the idea of no one having power results in some sociopath being attracted to whatever power remains. Instead of choosing to have responsible leaders, we have defaulted to robots who frequently destroy things.

On television, we see a small segment of the population pretending to speak for the opinions of the whole. The same occurs in polls, and in politics, where a small group is most active. If you observe a social group, you will see that even a small group stands for the whole there.

Leftists have weaponized this to create symbolic representation of the group so that others are swayed by what they believe is the majority opinion. This allows Leftism to grow like a fungus, slowly taking over everything and consuming it, converting it to more of its body.

Tags: censorship, political correctness, propaganda, social media