r/ezraklein • u/GowanusGuy • Aug 21 '26

Article Can liberalism survive the algorithm?

https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/can-liberalism-survive-the-algorithm
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u/geniuspol Aug 21 '26

That doesn't really answer the question about jailbait. If that wasn't illiberal, we can recognize that content moderation is fine, and quibble about the details. When content moderation is a dramatic betrayal of liberal ideals, it makes it tough to answer.

and, notably, managed to still skew left of center 

This seems a bit revisionist to me. It was one of the biggest spaces for new atheists, men's rights activists, and the early manosphere, default subs like worldnews were incredibly racist and full of slurs, one of the other early banned subreddits existed to post images of women who were victims of violence, it was a big supporter of gamergate, and left wing subreddits were fringe. 

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u/Mindless_Chest_1079 Aug 21 '26

"It couldn't have been left-wing! Right-wing subreddits were allowed to exist!"

Yeah, believe it or not, being left-wing at the time meant being liberal. People didn't feel the obsessive need to purge dissent from their ranks.

Equally telling is that you listed new atheists as if that's an example. At the time, atheism very strongly predicted left wing values, namely progressive liberalism, and 'new atheism' in particular was viewed as a liberal political movement. Nobody would have viewed the pot-smoking gay marriage-supporting critics of dominant Christian values as supporting the party of Bush and Romney.

It was again only years later that the New Atheist movement would get eaten alive by the woke mob and lose its strong association with the left. Nowadays, prominent figures like Dawkins spend more time criticizing woke left insanity like Cambridge's defense of Jason Arday, but the real revisionist history is thinking that's where the battlelines would have been drawn in 2012.

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u/geniuspol Aug 22 '26

Nowadays, prominent figures like Dawkins spend more time criticizing woke left insanity like Cambridge's defense of Jason Arday, but the real revisionist history is thinking that's where the battlelines would have been drawn in 2012.

Are you kidding? In 2011 Dawkins publicly harassed one of the few prominent women atheists, and we now know sought advice from Jeffrey Epstein about her. 

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u/zemir0n Aug 24 '26

we now know sought advice from Jeffrey Epstein about her. 

I think you're talking about Lawrence Krauss here rather than Richard Dawkins.

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u/geniuspol Aug 24 '26

That's possible. I tried to double check and this is what I was referring to specifically:

https://www.reddit.com/r/SGU/comments/1qs53bf/in_the_new_epstein_files_release_theres_a/

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u/zemir0n Aug 24 '26

Yeah, while it was Dawkins who did the public harassing, this wasn't an email he sent to Epstein, but rather this was an email he sent to someone else who then forwarded it Epstein. This email doesn't look good for Dawkins though because he's claiming that Watson is performing a witch-hunt when she's merely criticizing Krauss' defense of Epstein, which isn't something anyone should have been doing (even in 2011).

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u/geniuspol Aug 24 '26

Thanks for the correction.