Comment by sjsdaiuasgdia 10 days ago
The government never prevented anyone from speaking. Free speech was not violated when assholes were banned from platforms for being assholes. The owners of those platforms are not the government.
You wouldn't have to keep referencing a tenuous connection in The Twitter Files (cue: X-Files theme music) if you came around to seeing government and corpos as quite similar creatures on a spectrum of coercion rather than as completely disjoint and disparate things.
So called "conservatives" were soooo close to being able to have this realization before they regained the power of the government, vested it all in a unitary execuking, and went back to seeing that extraconstitutional coercion as a feature (like many "progressives" had for ~10 years or so).
Yes actually, i've been ranting about this for a long time, sufficiently powerful corporations are a form of government. I'm not conservative though despite being anti-dei so make of that what you will, i think a lot of people on the left are being lumped in with people on the right because we oppose the types of discrimination and racism now popular with the "left".
Great! It sounds like we're coming from a similar place. I wouldn't describe myself as "on the left" - more of a general libertarian that sees the merits and flaws in both rightist and leftist thinking. I had never voted for a major party in a national election until 2020, after the Republican party went batshit crazy.
The reason I judge The Twitter Files as a rightist talking point is that it's trying to pigeonhole the motivation for censorship solely onto the government. If an argument is simply about the coercive power wielded by corporations and governments, you don't need a smoking gun of cooperation/direction to tie the two - seeing them as similar organizations with similar top-down motivations suffices. That evidence is only important if you're aiming for reform using the first amendment (an understandable desire, but the wrong tool for the job), or trying to absolve the corpos as mere victims of the de jure government (delusional).
You mean the Twitter files, which relied on Matt Taibbi getting the name of a government agency wrong to form the key connection he then turned into a conspiracy?
Read the Twitter files. The government was actively involved in censorship. Zuckerberg has also stated the FBI was demanding certain posts be removed / demoted, users shadow banned, etc. The CIA also infiltrates and subverts many organizations and platforms. Wouldn't be surprised if they operate here, they've definitely been manipulating Reddit for at least the past decade.