Comment by msgodel
6 months ago
It's the same thing a lot of the people on the right were complaining about ten years ago. Most people don't seem to understand these contradictions until it affects them.
Watching this happen twice has really killed the idea that polls are a useful way to determine mandates for government policy in my mind. Most of the population probably just shouldn't be involved.
What legal censorship were conservatives facing ten years ago? There is no real precedent for this that I can think of since maybe the Red Scare in the 50s.
Well there's all the fake censorship where private parties exercised their First Amendment rights to control which content they carried. According to modern "conservatives", private actors should be compelled by the state to carry certain kinds of speech (their kind, obviously).
They will claim the government pressured private platforms despite 1) the platforms never claiming coercion, 2) the moderation actions aligning with the platforms' own content policies, 3) the platforms routinely denying government requests for content moderation, 4) there being no evidence of an implicit or explicit government threat towards the platforms.
> private actors should be compelled by the state to carry certain kinds of speech
Restrictions on speech far predate either social media or section 230. If you want to call this censorship—sure, by all means. I don't personally think it is very objectionable appropriately characterized in a situation with consequences.
> Most people don't seem to understand these contradictions until it affects them.
And, by design, it won't affect most people. Except the people who have the chutzpah to speak out against israel, of course—good luck finding that on cable tv or the opinion column. That shit is only on social media.