Until 2015, an optimistic and liberal (in the best sense) ethos pervaded the Internet. Major Internet platforms were open and had little content policy beyond bans on real-life criminal activity (stalking, selling illegal goods, child pornography, etc). Aside from these narrow and reasonable explicit exceptions, anyone could go online and converse with interested people around the world about whatever they wanted in public. These platforms had no real means to control what people talked about on them even if they wanted to, which they didn’t; to the extent an organization can have views all believed in free1 and open online discourse, which promised to make censorship impossible and end the hegemony of 20th century broadcast media.
In this, they were backed up by major non-tech institutions, such as the UN, the EU, the US State Department, and the New York Times, all of which saw Internet freedom as a corollary of offline freedom, and one which would liberalize the world’s remaining non-democratic states in time. These institutions both supported Internet freedom rhetorically and spent hundreds of millions of dollars creating and disseminating technical tools to evade Internet censorship and preserve online anonymity.
I remember the old internet. It was a better place.
(IMO, this was a substantive, interesting, clarifying and necessary read)….thanks for linking and posting.
I was aware that the FBI and a few of the intelligence agencies had liasons working hand in hand with the social media outlets. And, that they were influencing how they operated. I had even known that certain FBI (and DOJ) representatives were participating in Skype / Zoom staff meetings of these social media outlets. I had not known that over 80 FBI agents were assigned to censoring and influencing social media with a direct line to get someone banned or suspended. I had only been able to document four or five specific such law enforcement individuals.
____________________________________________
((When Elon Musk purchased the site in 2022, he released the Twitter Files detailing how the company’s censorship worked. No such equivalent exists for the other major platforms, but it is reasonable to assume the broad strokes are similar there. First, these files confirmed Twitter, along with other social media platforms, was working closely with US intelligence, with “constant and pervasive” contact with the FBI, with the FBI having a force of over 80 agents dedicated to social media. The FBI had a portal to report Tweets or accounts to Twitter for banning or suppression, and used it regularly, including for tiny accounts and joke tweets.
Second, the Twitter Files revealed that Twitter had many different hidden blacklists and suppression mechanisms beyond a formal, public ban, which were often used for bigger accounts. These included search blacklists (so accounts wouldn’t appear when searched), “do not amplify” lists, trends blacklists, and visibility filtering/shadowbanning, all of which Twitter had publicly denied doing. Some accounts targeted this way included Jay Bhattacharya, LibsOfTikTok, Charlie Kirk, and Dan Bongino. Unlike formal bans, which had to have some sort of rules-based justification, even if after 2015 the rules extremely broad and subjective, these shadowbans and suppression mechanisms were decided secretly by two internal bodies, SRT-GET and SIP-PES, a secret group including the “Head of Legal, Policy, and Trust (Vijaya Gadde), the Global Head of Trust & Safety (Yoel Roth), subsequent CEOs Jack Dorsey and Parag Agrawal, and others.”))
“I remember the old internet.”
Yes, me too. It was a lot more fun than what we have now, that’s for sure.
But that was a generation ago now. Once I became aware that the US government (and others, of course) recorded every single bit, a lot of the fun went out of it.
Now of course one must be cautious what one says. Which is super fun, I must say. Large institutions protecting your human rights by denying you your human rights. What a blast.
Well, I am always scrupulously cautious about what I say. [Farts prodigiously.]
In 2015 Google still operated under “Don’t be Evil.”
The parent company, Alphabet, which was formed in 2015, shifted to
“Do the Right Thing.”
In 2018 Google dropped “Don’t be Evil.”
“remember the old internet”
-The scale of censorship has no precedent; tens of millions of accounts suppressed or banned, billions of posts removed.-
Yes. In 2021 Kate censored my posts for arguing that the not-a-vaccine was not -in fact- a vaccine.
Then she erased everything I had ever written on SDA. Thousands of hours of comments since 2006.
Why was I so sure that the mRNA jab was not a vaccine?
Because the inventor of the technology, Dr. Thomas Malone specifically said so in an interview on the Joe Rogan show. That’s why.
Yes, it’s her blog and she can do what she wants with it.
She can even rail against censorship while being a censor herself.
It all springs from the concept that there is something far better and far more … Just. … than Free Speech. It’s Controlled Speech. ‘Hate’ Speech and ‘Hurtful’ Speech curated and removed. Nay, Removed and Punished.
In all nations other than America, those Laws still exist. Proudly. And Loudly. And they’re regarded as far more civilized than that olllllllld dead white forefather shit. They almost took down our US Constitution… but Musk gave it a reprieve … now they’re assaulting it again … with the DSA uprising.
When the First Amendment dies, so does mankind.
Timely post Kate. I got an email from “X” today saying my account was being suspended for “inauthentic behaviors” whatever that means.
When Elon Musk bought Twitter for $44Billion he had a serious BOT problem.
They had to get rid of the bots somehow. Long story short, they think you’re a bot.
Either that or he’s farting unconvincingly. Never happens to me, damn.
You’re nobody until you’ve been banned on Twitter. The more we ban censored sites from our own Internet sessions, of course, the sooner the “big” paid accounts of people with delusions about the Internet needing them to “be gatekeepers of public discourse” will dry up and blow away, finding that just screaming at one another without a willing audience won’t pay…
This is more of a private, personal site than Twitter was, so our hosts have the right to censor comments just because they’re tired of reading about topics people want to bring up. But, with no hard feelings, that’s going to drive us to other sites where people want to discuss our topics. At Dr. Malone’s Substack nobody’s likely to be censored for agreeing with something Dr. Malone said. . . .
Individuals and companies do have the right to make their web sites what they want them to be. I have a Substack that’s exclusively for light verse–mine and, I hope, readers’. To serve its niche that site has a few rules. Content posted has to be cheerful, not very controversial, content in some recognizable verse form, or constructive comments on others’ verse. Would I censor someone who wanted to post prose updates on the fun she had with her grandchildren last week? Probably. I might link to that on my Blogspot, which is a hodgepodge, but still censor it from my Substack just because it’d be out of place.
The difference between editing a private site (necessary!) and censorship (evil) has to depend partly on whether there are other, equally good, venues for posting content that just doesn’t fit on a certain site, and whether the site advertises itself as being a place where anybody can say anything. Twitter was supposed to be a site for anybody to say anything, so its censoring content as inoffensive as a politician’s campaign tweets (“With Official X in Town Y”) *did* seem like a betrayal of its users. Still does. This is a site for Canadian political dissent, so it could censor content like comments on US elections or on issues its hosts are tired of debating without disappointing its users…very much.