• zifnab25 [he/him, any]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    Musk pulled all the wires out of the walls when he bought Twitter, because he didn’t understand what they did. He fired all the engineers who put those wires in, because engineers cost money. He’s paywalled everything mainstream, under the theory that he can extort all the other media orgs who reference his site. And now all that’s left is various flavors of shitpost, gray/black market trade, and competing strains of propaganda.

    I don’t think censorship on Twitter is really possible in the way it was before it was sold. Not when you’ve downsized the department responsible for censoring because shit costs money.

    It’s an incredible cognitive disconnect where they think that Chinese government curating information to remove harmful content is evil and nefarious, but their own government doing it is good and wholesome.

    The fight with China illustrates the power of mass media and the means by which it is weaponized. One could compare digital “free speech” with the same “gun rights” debate we were fixated on a decade ago. What’s being argued over isn’t freedom but control.

    An Australian plutocrat curating content on a corporate news feed in order to influence public opinion to the benefit of a bunch of Murray Rothbard die-hards is totally cool under a government by and for Silicon Valley AnCaps. In the same way, a bunch of hogs buying AR-15s from a Texas factory run by an open fascist is totally cool under a government by and for white nationalists.

    Any opposition to said Australian plutocrat injecting bigotry-laden gossip and hysteria-inducing pseudoscience into public media is subversive from the perspective of the AnCap state leadership. In the same way, any effort to disarm a bunch of white nationalists intent on corralling brown people into labor camps and exterminating dissidents is subversive from the perspective of the Fascist state leadership.

    So I wouldn’t call it dissonant, save for the way in which the language is abused to provoke sympathy from a gullible audience.

    • ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆@lemmygrad.ml
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      1 year ago

      I agree, but there is still a case of applying a different standard to increasing domestic censorship. And we’re seeing it being done fairly brazenly now. For example, Canada just passed bill C-11 which is vaguely worded and gives the government a lot of broad powers to censor content. We’re starting to see similar laws passed in EU as well. The government having the authority to decide what content constitutes misinformation, and to censor content that it considers harmful is precisely what liberals criticize in China saying that makes Chinese system authoritarian.

      • zifnab25 [he/him, any]@hexbear.net
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        1 year ago

        The government having the authority to decide what content constitutes misinformation, and to censor content that it considers harmful is precisely what liberals criticize in China saying that makes Chinese system authoritarian.

        Its what they say they’re complaining about. But more practically, what they’re complaining about is the inability to disseminate their own misinformation within a rival nation’s borders. They do not have any interest in Chinese media inundating American media centers, as evidenced by the banning of Confucius Centers around American Universities and the closure of the Houston Consulate office, as well as the threatened state censorship of TikTok and Tencent inside the US.

        The criticism ultimately boils down to the specific content of the message. Only “true” messages can be considered subject to censorship. Anything we flag as “false” is treated as a form of attack by a rival power or subversive fifth column, not a legitimate expression of speech.

        • ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆@lemmygrad.ml
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          1 year ago

          Exactly, what it really comes down to is that they just want their narrative to be dominant. And we see this with libs on lemmy as well. They get very upset when they’re exposed to contrary views. All the rhetoric about freedom of expression is just that.