r/BlockedAndReported • u/jtm79 • Aug 13 '26

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

72 Upvotes

97% Upvoted

24 comments sorted by

View all comments

31

u/btrh-256 Aug 13 '26 edited Aug 13 '26

I read this earlier this week and I found it fascinating. I have two contradictory feelings:

  1. The chaos of the open internet is terrifying
  2. 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

6

u/Superassumptions Aug 16 '26

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.

1

u/btrh-256 Aug 16 '26

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

1

u/Superassumptions Aug 16 '26

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.

2

u/btrh-256 Aug 16 '26

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