As with the suspension of Trump (and on a much, much lesser scale, me) progressives cheered the deplatformings the way public lynchings used to attract a picnicking crowd. The left controls social media (as well as most mainstream media) and so day by day their unreal world becomes ethically more cleansed, more free of things they do not like, and with all the bad news (Hunter Biden) made to go away. The world online is the way they want it to be, with the real world held at bay behind the screen. Like living in The Villages in Florida, or maybe in the Matrix.
It is very much the same for what we’ll call social media 3D, things like renaming high schools and tearing down statues. Those acts are the equivalent of tweets. Nothing changes because of them, but everyone feels more righteous. Might as well send the 45 cents a day to one of those TV charities and think you are solving hunger in Africa. Or posting on Facebook that everyone should get vaccinated. Or, at least when gays were still performing as victims, changing your photo to a rainbow flag.
You see it also in the blurred lines between fiction and reality. A touchpoint for understanding Trump was the dismal novel The Handmaid’s Tale. Black empowerment? Wakanda. Economic equality is fictionalized by replacing every white person in a TV commercial with a black actor, and every other Hallmark romance with a same-sex couple. Same thing when our society over-celebrates the first transgender Jeopardy! winner or another children’s book where the cuddly caterpillar who does good deeds is nonbinary. NYC’s Shakespeare in the Park this year featured Richard III with the lead played by a black woman, no doubt as some imagine the Bard secretly intended.
But this detachment from reality, the appearance of action instead of action, is why progressives continue to have to “raise awareness” for the same old things over and over. In the end, nothing that happens online matters. Online is just propaganda of unknown real-world effectiveness. The left celebrates the deplatforming of Marjorie Taylor Greene, forgetting she is still a sitting congresswoman. Votes count, “likes” do not. Joe Rogan talks to 11 million people a week; Neil Young, his one-time media nemesis, not so many.
The danger of all this, as every purple-haired undergrad eventually realizes, is it creates learned helplessness. …
Yesterday was a flagship day in corporate media. It was the day they were forced to explicitly state what has long been clear: they not only favor censorship but desperately crave and depend on it.
Even if Musk doesn't buy Twitter, never forget what yesterday revealed.
Of all the hysterical leftist reactions to Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter on Monday, MSNBC host Ari Melber’s was easily the most revealing.
“If you own all of Twitter or Facebook or what have you, you don’t have to explain yourself,” he gravely intoned during his show Monday evening. “You don’t even have to be transparent. You could secretly ban one party’s candidate or all of its candidates, all of its nominees, or you could just secretly turn down the reach of their stuff and turn up the reach of something else, and the rest of us might not even find out about it ‘til after the election.”
You don’t say. This was in fact the way the left used social media to win the 2020 presidential election. They even admitted it openly in a stunning yet largely forgotten February 2021 article in Time magazine entitled “The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign that Saved the 2020 Election.”
“For more than a year, a loosely organized coalition of operatives scrambled to shore up America’s institutions as they came under simultaneous attack from a remorseless pandemic and an autocratically inclined President,” wrote reporter Molly Ball. “Their work touched every aspect of the election.” Read the rest of this entry »
Social media platforms are all petty little left-wing dictatorships featuring censorship systems administered by deviants and neurotics.
There are bitter jokes going around all the time about Facebook’s “Community Standards” enforcers resembling the cast of Portlandia.
The Blaze reports on a classic case illustrating just who is in charge around here. This particular example pertains to Twitch, “a video live streaming service operated by Twitch Interactive, a subsidiary of Amazon. Introduced in June 2011 as a spin-off of the general-interest streaming platform Justin.tv, the site primarily focuses on video game live streaming, including broadcasts of esports competition.”
[There is] a new member of the Twitch moderation team: a transgender who identifies as a deer and who openly threatened to ban Twitch users with less “diverse” opinions.
“I have power, they can’t take it away from me,” bragged Steph Loehr, also known as FerociouslySteph. “And honestly there are some people that should be afraid of me, and they are because I represent moderation and diversity and I’m gonna come for harmful people. If you’re a really sh**ty person – I’m gonna stand up against you. Period. And Twitch is endorsing me to do that.” …
Loehr [has] explain[ed] how she likes to “prance around and eat grass,” as well as having a “deergasm.”
I am watching this, and I usually avoid long videos, principally because it is interesting to see, and hear, the superhumanly energetic figure who manages to teach law, write lots of books, and produce the single most important conservative blog at a scale of productivity that continues to astound.
His take on Big Tech Social Media is also obviously of considerable interest. Glenn Reynolds is already on the record as advocating the break-up of those “Internet monopolies,” a basically incongruous position for such a libertarian thinker.
He may be, of course, a just a trifle prejudiced here. Big Tech Social Media came along and turned out to be a powerfully effective competitor to the blogosphere. It cut my traffic down into only a fraction of what it used to be, and I expect its impact on the Instapundit blog was also impressive.
I’d normally myself be totally against Antitrust persecution of corporations, but the Big Tech leviathans are themselves hypocritical political partisans systematically misusing the power that’s fallen into their laps to create totalitarian satrapies in which non-politically-correct, often merely conservative speech is stomped out.
I’m currently serving my second 30-day sentence in Facebook jail. This time based on a stupid misinterpretation of my technical description of the characteristics of Fascism as a pro-Nazi posting, doubtless by some low-level employee with English as a second language.
13 guys posting opinions on social media successfully interfered with the lawful functioning of an American presidential election overruling the wishes of 127+ million voters? Wow!
Iowahawk (David Burge) caused massive distress by announcing last night on Facebook that he intends to take time off from social media.
I’ve had some folks ask me to elaborate, so here goes…
1. no, nobody paid me the million bucks.
2. no, it had nothing to do with the Sam Wang twitter thing.
Fact is this has been on my to-do list for some time. I’ve never been paid for anything I’ve done online, nor have I wanted to. Even if I went balls-out and threw myself into writing full time, I could never hope to make a third of what I make in my boring (yet fulfilling) day job. It’s always been a lark, a tertiary hobby for me.
I abandoned the blog largely because the posts were fairly time consuming and Twitter allowed me to drop a quick mini-satire in between real life stuff. Over the last 2 years, though, I found myself questioning why I do any of it in the first place. I don’t need the money, so why bother? Answers weren’t very reassuring. The only honest answer I can give you is my own narcissism, and addiction to attention/approval.
There’s certain high provided by follows, RTs & upthumbs, but in the end it’s fleeting and empty. I have a pretty damn kickass real life, and the time I spend on social media subtracts, rather than adds, to it. One kiss from Tammi Jo still beats the hell out of all the retweets in the world.
So basically I’ve decided to lay off the social media crack for a while and enjoy myself, without the constant need to post about it. I’m keeping my Twitter account, but only for DM communication; observer rather than participant. May go back there at some point, don’t know.
As for FB, I’ll be nuking this account in a few days. If you’re a real-life buddy, who knows, maybe I’ll reappear somewhere elsewhere around here on Planet Zuckerberg.
He is uniquely brilliant and talented, and however long he is absent the loss will be incalculable.
Regular readers are undoubtedly aware that I am not a leading admirer of the Alt-Right. I do believe, however, in giving even the devil his due, and I was just reading this morning of a rather clever victory by the Alt-Right over commercial social media censorship.
The Alt-Right crowd on 4-chan has initiated “Operation Google” which aims to defeat social media algorithms designed to detect, identify, and punish postings deemed “sexist, racist, transphobic, Islamophobic,†etc.
