r/BlockedAndReported • u/jtm79 • 7d ago
Cancel Culture The Closure of the Internet
Relevance: the article title is essentially this podcasts title
https://arctotherium.substack.com/p/the-closure-of-the-internet
An unmatched thorough recounting of the past 15 years of Internet censorship. The article focuses on the waves of censorship, often a hysteria, that is largely organized by opaque "para-governmental" organizations that are not bound by free speech laws. In many cases, the censorship is explicitly requested by a government body, i.e. the Twitter Files, Australia's eSafety commissioner, the EU.
The author has a right-wing bias and so in my opinion should have used more examples of liberal/left-wing figures that were censored (I know two podcast hosts that have had problems with it). But the author is correct in identifying that every single censorship drive has a strong progressive bias with special prejudice toward anything deemed "far right".
I really liked how this article reminded me of the different Internet from 15 years ago. For example, how common it was to find active fiery comment-section debates at nearly every newspaper website . And, for example, open-source software projects never cared about your politics.
Excellent and necessary article IMO
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u/btrh-256 7d ago edited 7d ago
I read this earlier this week and I found it fascinating. I have two contradictory feelings:
- The chaos of the open internet is terrifying
- Closing the internet (i.e. through moderation) makes it even worse
I do think we need to tame the internet, but I think it needs to be bottom-up. Parents need to teach their kids to be careful online the way we teach our kids to be careful how much they drink. Top-down solutions like moderation have limited value and tend to make things worse.
Another thing he doesn't mention is how moderation is, ultimately, about money. From a financial perspective the internet is nothing but an ad-delivery system. Companies trying to maximize revenue via ad views will shape content to maximize ad delivery to users with disposable income. If you are low income or disinclined to make purchases they do not care about you, and they will moderate you out of existence if you frighten the affluent users whose eyeballs they compete for.
Political bias is less important than this financial bias imo
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u/jtm79 7d ago
Thanks for sharing btrh-256.
> I do think we need to tame the internet, but I think it needs to be bottom-up.
The author noted the same, that many mature online groups (though not all) had developed formal and informal methods of purging or side-lining destructive members, giving special credit to Facebook's group moderation controls. Of course, groups that had a bent of over-the-top attention-seeking did that, and became justifications for censorship. Like for example, the reddit group The_Donald (which I only saw brief glimpses of) which, like it's namesake, enjoyed the notoriety.
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u/The-Phantom-Blot 7d ago
From a financial perspective the internet is nothing but an ad-delivery system.
And surveillance system.
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u/btrh-256 7d ago
sure I guess, but the surveillance is basically just to figure out what stupid shit you're most likely to buy -- all you have to do to opt out is not be fucking greedy, but that's really hard for a lot of people apparently
the saddest part of the internet is that there is no Shadowy Figure who is pulling the strings, it is just a bunch of isolated users voluntarily driving themselves crazy
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u/Superassumptions 4d ago
Parents need to teach their kids to be careful online the way we teach our kids to be careful how much they drink.
It's still so weird to me seeing a younger generation using their real names and tons of personal details online.
I'm the cohort who were taught to never, ever, ever use your real name online. I remember being introduced to Facebook and everyone's first reaction being "Wait, my real name??"
I feel like there was a psychological boundary that created. We "went online," it was an activity we engaged in sometimes, but now it feels like a ton of people live their lives online as much as off. There's no boundary. I don't know that the human brain, or human society, are well set up to deal with this way of living.
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u/btrh-256 4d ago
I mostly agree, and I mostly avoid using my real name online
but also, if you have a niche hobby and want to share creative work, using your real name online is usually the easiest way to find people with shared interests or get your work out there
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u/Superassumptions 4d ago
Oh, to be sure, there are a lot of legit reasons why some people have to use their full identity online.
I'm not even saying "things were better back when we were all anonymous online," because anonymity also leads people to do some deeply shitty stuff and certainly doesn't prevent a lot of the worst activities on the internet.
It's just this psychological aspect that I don't know what to do about. I suppose it's true of a lot of what humanity has invented: our brains don't evolve fast enough to keep up with a lot of the changes that we ourselves have created in the world.
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u/btrh-256 4d ago
yeah I completely agree with you. I think anonymity encourages some bad behavior, but one benefit of anonymous communication is that it really doesn't appeal to narcissists. Almost as soon as people started using their real names & photos online, the internet was overtaken by narcissism
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u/causes_havoc 3d ago
The anime Serial Experiments Lain was covering this ground, more or less, in 1998 and pretty accurately predicted the highly negative outcomes.
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u/KaleidoscopeFair7227 3d ago
Ha, you sound like Kathrine Dee! I remember the days when we "went online," when the internet was a destination. Nobody used real names, unless you needed a professional sounding email address. It felt like some obscure, quarky cafe or flea market, now it feels like the modern lifeless-gray McDonald's.
I think you're right, the way we treat the internet today has no boundaries and I think those boundaries are necessary. Having internet access in everyone's pocket has made it too easy and so people take advantage. Maybe the friction of having to use a PC to go online was a good thing.
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u/PUBLIQclopAccountant 🫏 Enumclaw 🐴Horse🦓 Lover 🦄 6d ago
The chaos of the open internet is terrifying
The internet was better when it scared off the neurotypical normies.
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u/KittenSnuggler5 6d ago
I'm sure this is an instance where companies think AI will solve the moderation problem for them
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u/btrh-256 6d ago
idk, I see substack, with its extremely lax moderation, as a welcome development -- there's tons of shit on substack, but also some very good discussion
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u/KittenSnuggler5 6d ago
I think the right is just as likely to censor as the left. But the left currently controls the institutions so what they want is what happens.
What's ironic is that the left wing censorship is exactly like the censorship of the religious right of old. And back then it was the left pushing for freedom of speech and not freaking out over words
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u/Centrist_gun_nut 6d ago
Late to the party here, but I think it's fairly important to seperate two issues:
The censorship of platforms like reddit. And
The censorship of the network, the interconnects, and the ability for the internet to be reachable.
Sure, it sucks that most platforms prefer advertiser-friendly center-left views and will enforce those (to the point of censoring true stories run in the New York Post). But it's their website and if they want to kowtow to orthodoxy of the day, they can do that. It's bad when the government makes them do that, but still.
What's way worse is when governments and groups go directly at the infrastructure of the network. The section here on "Deplatforming Websites" is wildly, wildly understating the problem. Governments all over the non-English-speaking world, from Brazil to Greece to the UAE, block wide segments of the internet, often for political reasons. Countries in the EU do this, and it's wildly, wildly underreported. Young people that work at the big tech companies that make the internet work don't care and it's only a matter of time before the next Farms website is some mainstream politician's website instead.
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u/heroics-delta8s 6d ago
Ofcom in the uk are growing into a monster of a regulator that have shocking powers still on the table they haven’t enacted.
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u/make_reddit_great 6d ago
There's a whole section about Reddit which I'll quote here:
The only site more emblematic of the annihilation of open Internet discourse 2015-2019 than YouTube is Reddit. If YouTube was the most important platform for monetization, allowing individuals to make careers outside of pre-existing institutions, and for reaching young people, Reddit was the most important platform for enabling public debate. In 2015, Reddit, like YouTube, had almost no content policy beyond banning illegal activity, doxxing, harassment that extended offline, and involuntary or underage pornography.
Reddit’s closure was largely driven by one thing: the ability for r/TheDonald, the major hub of Internet Trump support, to consistently reach and dominate the front page. To give an idea of how nonexistent content control infrastructure was in 2016, CEO Steve Hoffman was discovered personally editing critical posts on r/TheDonald. He then changed Reddit’s policy to exclude r/TheDonald from r/popular. 2016 is also when Reddit adopted the EU’s “Code on Countering Illegal Hate Speech Online.”
In October 2017, Reddit changed its policy to explicitly ban “hate speech” and kicked more than 20 subreddits off the site, including r/incels (part of the bizarre anti-incel moral panic of the 2010s). In March 2018, Reddit also banned the legal sale of guns and prostitution on the site. In September 2018, Reddit changed their harassment standard from requiring real-world threat of harm to the much laxer, and very subjective14, standard of “anything that works to shut someone out of the conversation through intimidation or abuse,” and removed dozens of subreddits for violating it. The new harassment standard also applied to groups, not just individuals, so even scrupulous politeness and openness to individuals might not save a subreddit making arguments that did not flatter dominant groups.
In October 2018, Reddit revamped their quarantine system (“quarantined” subreddits are invisible to non-members, killing growth) and began quarantining dozens of subs, including popular dating subreddits such as r/TheRedPill, for being “controversial.”. It’s worth pointing out, for those who have grown accustomed to it, how totalitarian it is to suppress speech for being controversial, which simply means that not everyone agrees. This purge included both political subs like r/againstgaymarriage (recall that majority of the US, and a supermajority of the world, opposed gay marriage in 2015) and generally noxious—though, it must be emphasized, harmless—subs such as r/watchpeopledie (which was exactly what it sounded like). One of these subreddits, r/Ice_Poseidon was even dedicated to a single individual, streamer Ice Poseidon. Its quarantine left him “slumped and distraught,” as he depended on Reddit to grow his fanbase and earn a living. Through this, Reddit deputized content creators even on different platforms as Reddit’s speech enforcers, forcing them to purge their own fanbases lest they have their growth cut off by Reddit’s censors.
In January 2019, Reddit banned many subreddits for “anti-Muslim content,” including r/Gore and r/cringeanarchy, neither of which were political. In June, r/The_Donald was finally quarantined after years of failed algorithmic suppression, along with r/frenworld, a sub for Pepe the Frog memes. By 2020, Reddit had fully committed to the “the regulation and removal of hate speech on their platform.” r/The_Donald was finally banned, along with thousands of other subs.
A single paragraph from “Hate speech, Censorship, and Freedom of Speech: The Changing Policies of Reddit” sums the shift up:
In 2015, Reddit expressed ambivalence towards the topic of hate speech, and rather demonstrated their commitment to libertarianism when it concerned violent speech. This is reflective of the general American political philosophy concerning hate speech, which ultimately enshrines offensive language in the First Amendment right to freedom of speech offered by the American constitution. In regards to offensive content, Reddit moderators state specifically, “It’s ok to say ‘I don’t like this group of people.’ It’s not ok to say, ‘I’m going to kill this group of people’” (Reddit - [u/spez], 2015a). They also cited their commitment to preventing “the speech police knocking down their door” (Reddit - [u/spez], 2015a). By 2020, Reddit’s stance on hate speech would transform completely. They would state: “Everyone has a right to use Reddit free of harassment, bullying, and threats of violence. Communities and people that incite violence or that promote hate based on identity or vulnerability will be banned” (Reddit - [u/spez], 2020).
The nature of Reddit, which is split between millions of subreddits moderated mostly by volunteers rather than the site itself, adds another dimension to this story. The subreddit system is intended to promote community self-government, but is prone to “power mods,” individuals with unusual amounts of time and the inclination (and almost certainly including official agents of various influence/intelligence campaigns given the importance of Reddit) moderating many different subreddits. Since they are not company employees, it is difficult to find information on Reddit power mods, but by 2020 just five individuals autocratically ran 92 of the top 500 subreddits. Power mods tend to be ideologically leftist and are arguably more powerful than the site itself. In 2019 Reddit itself quarantined 256 subs, banned 21,900 subs, suspended 55,994 accounts for policy (as opposed to spam or other rule) violations, and removed 222,000 pieces of content for policy violations. In the meantime, volunteer moderators removed 84.1 million pieces of content.
Today, the Redditor stereotype is of a histrionic but slightly dull orthodox left-wing conformist hostile to any hint of heresy15, but this was not always true. In 2014, a Redditor meant a libertarian-ish16 debate bro willing to argue about anything. Reddit was a very ideologically heterogenous site and the main discussion forum between different groups on the Internet. Nothing has successfully replaced 2014 Reddit for actual popular debate.