Do you think that internet censorship will be obsolete in the near future? -

[malt ipecac]

Lynchings don't reveal a democratic justice system. Censorship doesn't reveal a democratic architecture.

When I say "democratic", I'm referring to a political system ruled by a majority (or a plurality) of its people.

The protection of free speech is a liberal value, and though in practice we've seen this protection most commonly in democracies, liberal values are not inherent to democracy.

For example: Let's look at a country like Pakistan. Let's say that 80% of people are in favor of the death penalty for blaspheming Mohamed and also believe any media in which he is blasphemed should be burned. The democratic thing to do would be to implement and enforce these policies.

 

[Jewelsmakerguy]

Internet censorship may let up, but it'll never fully go away. Of course, there's no way to tell whether or not it'll get worse than it already has before getting better, or if we're in for a long ride of this.

 

[From The Uncanny Valley]

Today the Merriam-Webster literally modified the definition of the word "sexual preference" to be "offensive" around 24 hours AFTER Barret used it during the SCOTUS hearing yesterday. They're literally changing the definitions of words now to make them offensive after they're spoken.
https://www.pinknews.co.uk/2020/10/...onary-definition-offensive-amy-coney-barrett/
https://archive.vn/zvMkp

But remember, gay conversion doesn't exist

 

[Jazz never died!]

Censorship will never go away as long as people have the freedom to talk about anything they want. Idiots who see things as ruining the children and those who get offended at everything, not to mention power hungry politicians who want to control the nation 100% will always censor. As for the internet it won't be as free as the wild west days but it'll be more free than now but this thing with twitter and facebook....... Will happen again with companies who have the flow of the normies on the net get to control what they see hear and say. Unfortunate to see some of my friends seeing it as normal and ok with this.

 

[Brahma]

I'm hopeful that once musk gets his Arcnet Defense system built and gives the world satellite broadband, he'll introduce hosting capabilities etc to bypass the terrestrial bottlenecks altogether

 

[moocow]

They'll keep changing and censoring various internet services until they stop being useful for the average person, then people will stop using them as much. They'll fall by the wayside and something else will replace them. This is how it's always been.

This ended up being much longer than I'd planned, so I've spoilered it to spare unwary eyes.

Spoiler: Autistic sperging about social media

Minor powerlevel: I worked for a prominent market research company for a few years and developed software to analyze social media posts for trends, sentiment, network relationships, and so on. Twitter is literally useless for market analysis. We stopped paying for access to their "firehose" feed years ago when we realized this. At a few industry conferences that year, where company reps' lips tend to be more loose than usual, we found that our peers and competitors in the industry had reached the same conclusion. If you find a market research company that boasts they include Twitter in their internet-based analyses, they're full of shit, and you should run away very fast.

Twitter makes money by selling user data (including public posts) to interested third parties (like us). It's in their best interest (at least financially) to constantly grow their installed user base as much as possible to make the data they sell more valuable and attractive to buyers. The trouble is, they're lying about their real user count. They just tend to report two figures in their marketing efforts: total registered accounts in good standing, and total "active" accounts that have had any kind of activity (even just logging in once counts as "activity" for this purpose) in the past, say, year. And you have to nag them a bit to get that second figure. And it's always approximate.

And even that "total active accounts" figure is grossly overstated. I don't have the numbers in front of me, but I know there have been studies and other efforts to quantify Twitter's actual user base, and an overwhelming majority of activity on Twitter is generated by bots, not humans, and among the activity produced by humans, something like 90% of that is produced by only 10% of the active human users (so-called "power users"). So not only is most of Twitter's traffic complete garbage generated by machines, but what comparatively little human-generated traffic flows through Twitter is almost entirely the product of just a tenth of those active humans. And as it turns out, that runs afoul of some very basic requirements for useful analysis -- sample size, demographics, geographic distribution, etc.

What this means in real terms is that almost all of Twitter's content is trash. Unusable. No more interesting than static. And what's left is equally useless -- "power user"-flavored static. They're not even remotely representative of any kind of discernible market. That little sliver of 10% of human traffic that's generated by the other 90% of the real, active human user base is simply not big enough to yield a good enough sample size to perform a useful analysis.

Twitter knows all this. They certainly know they're selling a worthless product (we straight up told them, and so have others). They certainly know most of their traffic is generated by bots. They certainly know most of the remaining traffic is generated by a small number of "power users."

So what's Twitter's reaction to this? How do they try to counteract this trend and get more genuine human interaction on the platform from a broader range of humans? Widespread censorship (reducing overall human-generated traffic). Ban more humans over "hurt feelings." At a time when they desperately need more actual people using their site, they're enthusiastically shrinking their human user count and patting themselves on the back as they do it. It's aggressively self-destructive, but they're doing it anyway.

Obviously that's partly because they've gone full woke (which has consistently proven to be catastrophic to a company's bottom line once it metastasizes enough) and they're going all-in on beating Trump, but it's also partly because they're just really fucking stupid. They seem to care more about keeping the power users happy rather than attracting a broader user base and encouraging more users to be more active on the platform. What they don't seem to realize (but the market research industry figured out years ago) is that their power users are retards and nothing they have to say has any real value.

So this directly impacts their bottom line. Fewer paying customers are lining up to buy their data because we've all figured out it's worthless. Apart from their stock, that's their only source of income, and they're actively killing it. Wokeness doesn't pay the bills, and eventually Twitter is going to starve itself to death. Even if they pull a heel-face turn by stopping all censorship, ceasing manipulation of trends, stopping all the idiotic bans and enforcing their rules evenly and equally regardless of political bent, it's not salvageable at this point. They've permanently chased away too many people who will never come back no matter what.

Facebook is equally useless, but for a different reason. The Cambridge Analytics thing freaked them the fuck out, and they cut off everyone entirely and never let people back in. All you can do as far as "market research" on Facebook nowadays is paying to run ads for off-site surveys, and combining that data with whatever analytics Facebook provides for your ad buys. It's generally not worth it, so again, the industry stopped using Facebook.

The less said about Reddit, the better. It's worse than Twitter. Bots as far as the eye can see, and power users dominate the site.

And there's one last problem. Even if you could wave a magic wand and get a firehose from any of the big platforms that contains only legitimate, genuine, human-generated traffic, it's all so fucking left-leaning that you absolutely cannot get a good read at all of public sentiment or trends. It's impossible. You can certainly determine Twitter's sentiments on something, but it can't ever be squared with information coming from other proven survey methods (like opinion polls, phone surveys, online (controlled) surveys, etc.). It never lines up. It's so far removed from reality that it really isn't useful.

To be honest, behind closed doors, the industry pretty universally believes social media is worthless and has stopped focusing on it entirely. And as an aside, they're helping Trump win by keeping his name on everyone's lips and chasing off his supporters (who might otherwise actually help temper that a bit), and they don't even realize it. And when he wins, they won't have any idea how it happened.

Censorship plays into all this. It further shrinks an already unusably-small user base by driving people away, and it destroys all efforts to accurately gauge sentiment and trends by reinforcing one specific set of opinions and skewing everything towards them. It's a great big echo chamber. It's already effectively useless for a broad swath of people, and it's getting worse by the day.

Everyone who gets pushed out of it just ends up going somewhere else. They don't just "disappear" from the world. They find new ways to communicate, and go back to using old ones. Churches, living rooms, backyard cookouts, bars, bowling alleys, gun ranges, parks, beaches, sports arenas and water coolers at the office are still major social gathering spots where all sorts of "leftist-incompatible" conversations happen well outside the censors' grasp (even with kung flu shutdowns, you can't stop people just walking next door to shoot the shit with their neighbors).

Marketers are very interested in these people outside the bubbles. They actually spend money. They reliably vote. They have real jobs and accomplish real work. They don't "live" for social media and don't give a shit if they get kicked out. They just continue being productive members of society. The chaff inside the bubble? Not so much. Those people don't spend money, they frequently forget to vote (or are too lazy to bother), rarely work real jobs and rarely produce anything of value. The keepers of the bubbles don't really have much to offer the world except angry flash mobs, karens, and cancel culture. Those things don't sell products.

Facebook is only really useful anymore to most people as a way to stay in touch with family, share funny animal pictures and videos, and join knitting groups. Twitter's not useful for much of anything anymore besides virtue signaling. Same with Reddit. All three are ripe for replacement by something better, whether that something exists today or not. MySpace seemed insurmountably popular -- too big to fail. But it did, despite its massive user base. Same with Digg. They made one (big) change to their site and alienated practically all their users overnight, and they mostly fled to Reddit, Fark and Metafilter. Youtube's equally ripe for replacement because of its continued slide into shitsville, but because what they do is so fucking expensive at that scale it's going to take a billionaire deciding to troll Google by bankrolling a free-speech competitor to make them sweat a little.

We joke about how funny it'd be if Trump were to announce he was leaving Twitter entirely to switch over to Gab. But that's exactly the sort of thing that could actually topple Twitter. His departure would absolutely devastate their traffic and user engagement. Even a good chunk of the bots there would fall silent because the fuckwits who run them all suffer from severe TDS and have focused all their attention on Trump's account, forsaking all other interests.

Yes, there'd be some virtual gravedancing and celebrations for a week or two, but that would quickly dwindle. And once people can't just give hot takes and add @realDonaldTrump to it to drive up engagement and get attention, that will all die down. Remember Trump's posts all get tens of thousands of direct replies (at least) and just as many (if not more) retweets and quotes, all with their own message chains. If he moved to Gab and closed his Twitter account, that's potentially hundreds of thousands (or maybe even millions) of posts that wouldn't be made anymore simply because the focal point is gone.

Not to mention what a godsend that would be for Gab. Their traffic would skyrocket, and a lot of Trump's hecklers would bravely follow him there only to discover it's not quite as "ban-happy" as Twitter was, and then go to pieces when they catch endless shit from the kind of people they got banned from Twitter and can't do anything to stop it. And being the official social media home of the fucking POTUS would give Gab enough clout to go back to the payment processors, Visa, Mastercard, Amex, etc., and say "alright faggots, listen up, here's how it's gonna be" and get themselves "re-platformed."

That specific thing is not likely to happen, but it's exactly the kind of thing that could take out a dominant player and give a competitor a leg up. It only takes one. And remember, there's a lot of really smart technical people out there who can build those competitors. They don't buy into the woke shit, and they don't work for Big Tech. They just need to pounce at the right moment when one of the big boys makes a big mistake or there's some kind of major shakeup, and they can swoop in and provide a refuge for all those fleeing users.

 

[tuka]

Don't conflate censorship (there's almost none in the west, barring some copyright or terrorism bullshit) and deplatforming.

The latter is inevitable due to normie sep 1993 gravitional pull: Real open platforms (IRC, Usenet etc) are replicated as editorialized walled gardens because thats what normies want - big daddy quasi-censor where normies voluntarily seek protection from the icky, because free internet is too brutal for em. Network effects then brings everybody else into that fold. Farms and other sites like it exist solely because it deliberately violates normie rules (mostly dox in this instance).

This is also why various bitcoin and torrent autism (zeronet, ipfs etc) works only for the very same exceptional individuals on the fringes. Way too spergy for a normie who wants just shit to work with minimal effort, and who cares zuck can see your every move along the way.

This is the story of wild west all over again - frontier self-governance is a transient state for rugged pioneers who value their freedom over convenience, but it never lasts.

 

[Seventh Star]

Today the Merriam-Webster literally modified the definition of the word "sexual preference" to be "offensive" around 24 hours AFTER Barret used it during the SCOTUS hearing yesterday. They're literally changing the definitions of words now to make them offensive after they're spoken.
https://www.pinknews.co.uk/2020/10/...onary-definition-offensive-amy-coney-barrett/
https://archive.vn/zvMkp

Based RAE doesn't bend the knee.

 

[stares at error messages]

They'll keep changing and censoring various internet services until they stop being useful for the average person, then people will stop using them as much. They'll fall by the wayside and something else will replace them. This is how it's always been.

This ended up being much longer than I'd planned, so I've spoilered it to spare unwary eyes.

Spoiler: Autistic sperging about social media

Minor powerlevel: I worked for a prominent market research company for a few years and developed software to analyze social media posts for trends, sentiment, network relationships, and so on. Twitter is literally useless for market analysis. We stopped paying for access to their "firehose" feed years ago when we realized this. At a few industry conferences that year, where company reps' lips tend to be more loose than usual, we found that our peers and competitors in the industry had reached the same conclusion. If you find a market research company that boasts they include Twitter in their internet-based analyses, they're full of shit, and you should run away very fast.

Twitter makes money by selling user data (including public posts) to interested third parties (like us). It's in their best interest (at least financially) to constantly grow their installed user base as much as possible to make the data they sell more valuable and attractive to buyers. The trouble is, they're lying about their real user count. They just tend to report two figures in their marketing efforts: total registered accounts in good standing, and total "active" accounts that have had any kind of activity (even just logging in once counts as "activity" for this purpose) in the past, say, year. And you have to nag them a bit to get that second figure. And it's always approximate.

And even that "total active accounts" figure is grossly overstated. I don't have the numbers in front of me, but I know there have been studies and other efforts to quantify Twitter's actual user base, and an overwhelming majority of activity on Twitter is generated by bots, not humans, and among the activity produced by humans, something like 90% of that is produced by only 10% of the active human users (so-called "power users"). So not only is most of Twitter's traffic complete garbage generated by machines, but what comparatively little human-generated traffic flows through Twitter is almost entirely the product of just a tenth of those active humans. And as it turns out, that runs afoul of some very basic requirements for useful analysis -- sample size, demographics, geographic distribution, etc.

What this means in real terms is that almost all of Twitter's content is trash. Unusable. No more interesting than static. And what's left is equally useless -- "power user"-flavored static. They're not even remotely representative of any kind of discernible market. That little sliver of 10% of human traffic that's generated by the other 90% of the real, active human user base is simply not big enough to yield a good enough sample size to perform a useful analysis.

Twitter knows all this. They certainly know they're selling a worthless product (we straight up told them, and so have others). They certainly know most of their traffic is generated by bots. They certainly know most of the remaining traffic is generated by a small number of "power users."

So what's Twitter's reaction to this? How do they try to counteract this trend and get more genuine human interaction on the platform from a broader range of humans? Widespread censorship (reducing overall human-generated traffic). Ban more humans over "hurt feelings." At a time when they desperately need more actual people using their site, they're enthusiastically shrinking their human user count and patting themselves on the back as they do it. It's aggressively self-destructive, but they're doing it anyway.

Obviously that's partly because they've gone full woke (which has consistently proven to be catastrophic to a company's bottom line once it metastasizes enough) and they're going all-in on beating Trump, but it's also partly because they're just really fucking stupid. They seem to care more about keeping the power users happy rather than attracting a broader user base and encouraging more users to be more active on the platform. What they don't seem to realize (but the market research industry figured out years ago) is that their power users are retards and nothing they have to say has any real value.

So this directly impacts their bottom line. Fewer paying customers are lining up to buy their data because we've all figured out it's worthless. Apart from their stock, that's their only source of income, and they're actively killing it. Wokeness doesn't pay the bills, and eventually Twitter is going to starve itself to death. Even if they pull a heel-face turn by stopping all censorship, ceasing manipulation of trends, stopping all the idiotic bans and enforcing their rules evenly and equally regardless of political bent, it's not salvageable at this point. They've permanently chased away too many people who will never come back no matter what.

Facebook is equally useless, but for a different reason. The Cambridge Analytics thing freaked them the fuck out, and they cut off everyone entirely and never let people back in. All you can do as far as "market research" on Facebook nowadays is paying to run ads for off-site surveys, and combining that data with whatever analytics Facebook provides for your ad buys. It's generally not worth it, so again, the industry stopped using Facebook.

The less said about Reddit, the better. It's worse than Twitter. Bots as far as the eye can see, and power users dominate the site.

And there's one last problem. Even if you could wave a magic wand and get a firehose from any of the big platforms that contains only legitimate, genuine, human-generated traffic, it's all so fucking left-leaning that you absolutely cannot get a good read at all of public sentiment or trends. It's impossible. You can certainly determine Twitter's sentiments on something, but it can't ever be squared with information coming from other proven survey methods (like opinion polls, phone surveys, online (controlled) surveys, etc.). It never lines up. It's so far removed from reality that it really isn't useful.

To be honest, behind closed doors, the industry pretty universally believes social media is worthless and has stopped focusing on it entirely. And as an aside, they're helping Trump win by keeping his name on everyone's lips and chasing off his supporters (who might otherwise actually help temper that a bit), and they don't even realize it. And when he wins, they won't have any idea how it happened.

Censorship plays into all this. It further shrinks an already unusably-small user base by driving people away, and it destroys all efforts to accurately gauge sentiment and trends by reinforcing one specific set of opinions and skewing everything towards them. It's a great big echo chamber. It's already effectively useless for a broad swath of people, and it's getting worse by the day.

Everyone who gets pushed out of it just ends up going somewhere else. They don't just "disappear" from the world. They find new ways to communicate, and go back to using old ones. Churches, living rooms, backyard cookouts, bars, bowling alleys, gun ranges, parks, beaches, sports arenas and water coolers at the office are still major social gathering spots where all sorts of "leftist-incompatible" conversations happen well outside the censors' grasp (even with kung flu shutdowns, you can't stop people just walking next door to shoot the shit with their neighbors).

Marketers are very interested in these people outside the bubbles. They actually spend money. They reliably vote. They have real jobs and accomplish real work. They don't "live" for social media and don't give a shit if they get kicked out. They just continue being productive members of society. The chaff inside the bubble? Not so much. Those people don't spend money, they frequently forget to vote (or are too lazy to bother), rarely work real jobs and rarely produce anything of value. The keepers of the bubbles don't really have much to offer the world except angry flash mobs, karens, and cancel culture. Those things don't sell products.

Facebook is only really useful anymore to most people as a way to stay in touch with family, share funny animal pictures and videos, and join knitting groups. Twitter's not useful for much of anything anymore besides virtue signaling. Same with Reddit. All three are ripe for replacement by something better, whether that something exists today or not. MySpace seemed insurmountably popular -- too big to fail. But it did, despite its massive user base. Same with Digg. They made one (big) change to their site and alienated practically all their users overnight, and they mostly fled to Reddit, Fark and Metafilter. Youtube's equally ripe for replacement because of its continued slide into shitsville, but because what they do is so fucking expensive at that scale it's going to take a billionaire deciding to troll Google by bankrolling a free-speech competitor to make them sweat a little.

We joke about how funny it'd be if Trump were to announce he was leaving Twitter entirely to switch over to Gab. But that's exactly the sort of thing that could actually topple Twitter. His departure would absolutely devastate their traffic and user engagement. Even a good chunk of the bots there would fall silent because the fuckwits who run them all suffer from severe TDS and have focused all their attention on Trump's account, forsaking all other interests.

Yes, there'd be some virtual gravedancing and celebrations for a week or two, but that would quickly dwindle. And once people can't just give hot takes and add @realDonaldTrump to it to drive up engagement and get attention, that will all die down. Remember Trump's posts all get tens of thousands of direct replies (at least) and just as many (if not more) retweets and quotes, all with their own message chains. If he moved to Gab and closed his Twitter account, that's potentially hundreds of thousands (or maybe even millions) of posts that wouldn't be made anymore simply because the focal point is gone.

Not to mention what a godsend that would be for Gab. Their traffic would skyrocket, and a lot of Trump's hecklers would bravely follow him there only to discover it's not quite as "ban-happy" as Twitter was, and then go to pieces when they catch endless shit from the kind of people they got banned from Twitter and can't do anything to stop it. And being the official social media home of the fucking POTUS would give Gab enough clout to go back to the payment processors, Visa, Mastercard, Amex, etc., and say "alright faggots, listen up, here's how it's gonna be" and get themselves "re-platformed."

That specific thing is not likely to happen, but it's exactly the kind of thing that could take out a dominant player and give a competitor a leg up. It only takes one. And remember, there's a lot of really smart technical people out there who can build those competitors. They don't buy into the woke shit, and they don't work for Big Tech. They just need to pounce at the right moment when one of the big boys makes a big mistake or there's some kind of major shakeup, and they can swoop in and provide a refuge for all those fleeing users.

Made my week. Great to hear they're all naked.

https://seekingalpha.com/article/4069736-s-and-p-495-s-and-p-500

I can't wait.

 

[serious n00b]

I... don't think you know what you're talking about. As long as some speech is deemed undesirable by those with power, most of those with power will try to in some way marginalize or suppress it. Realizing this allows you to see the issue with the proper lense: "free speech" on the internet is just a SIGINT arms race bound by law. You need the tools to make your speech resilient, and the legal protections to use them. The encryption and clipper chip debate in the US is the perfect example of this. In a perfect world everything would be self-hosted and federated, but no one's bothered to make the tools to make that easy, so we compromise our trust chain by trusting third party enterprises to make our speech resilient for us. It's pretty obvious that between backdoors, political machinations, lack of legal protection and simple lack of buy-in from the populace means that there isn't a lot of resilient speech on the net, what is resilient is typically difficult to access and has a bad reputation because the tools themselves have been successfully character assassinated. The move towards greater centralization and the advent of machine learning bode well for the censors, and what legal development has occurred has generally supported the censors.

please format this wall of text

 

[Tree]

China's system looks admirable compared to where we're going. At least in some instances they're trying to improve poor behavior in ways that benefit society.

Yeah, they're retarded bug people but at least they're high functioning enough to not let obvious subversives ruin their country in obvious ways.

People really need to stop giving a single shit about "discrimination" or "oppression". If a functional system is oppressing you, then maybe it fucking should be.

 

[3119967d0c]

Yeah, they're retarded bug people but at least they're high functioning enough to not let obvious subversives ruin their country in obvious ways.

People really need to stop giving a single shit about "discrimination" or "oppression". If a functional system is oppressing you, then maybe it fucking should be.

The idea that the social credit system is aimed against political dissidents primarily or even in large part is a real misconception about the system.

Until fairly recently, like literally in the last decade, the Chinese government didn't even have a unified database of criminal records across their nation. With increased mobility, that posed a real problem. Criminals, especially petty fraudster types, could run around staying ahead of the police.

China to establish unified criminals record system - People's Daily Online

BEIJING,July5(Xinhua)--Chinawillestablishanunifiedcriminalsrecordsystemtobetterholdc

en.people.cn

So, the government developed a project for the computerization of this sort of data, so that criminals could no longer take advantage of such gaps.

At the same time, the government realized that there was a serious problem with access to credit for small businesses and individuals, it was difficult to get loans, at least on a... formal basis, and that retarded economic development and gave opportunities to organized crime. So they worked with a number of financial companies like AliPay to develop a diversity of credit scoring systems- drawing from the various newly computerized databases- that could be used to enable lending services. Unlike credit scores in the US, these generally take things like criminal history into account, which allows for a more 'complete' credit score that can be used by automated algorithms to approve or disapprove loans instantaneously.

Officers of companies also have regulatory action against their companies taken into account, so if you're the owner of an abattoir who illegally dumps a bunch of offal (implying that there is anything the Chinese won't eat) into a river and the company is dealt with over this, you personally will lose social credit as a result.

These developments are still a work in progress, and I'm unsure as to whether the central government intend to settle on any one social credit system from the various companies (various lower level administrative regions have chosen to go with one or the other) or take the best of the options from all of them, so it will be interesting to see how this develops.

Obviously, not everyone is happy about stuff like this, that's why you get people like the fake 'Chinese spy' with a bunch of fraud convictions who turned up in Aus earlier this year claiming all sorts of shit he couldn't back up. He really was being 'persecuted' by the Chinese government.. insofar as that they were making it harder for him to defraud people.

 

[Never Scored]

Let's make a distinction here there's the Internet, the underlying network that connects everyone's devices that's been around for 50 years and there's the World Wide Web, a system that connects hypertext documents invented in the early 1990s.

The World Wide Web used to be contained to browsers, but most apps today are built on the linked hypertext documents paradigm and I would consider them part of the Web. The World Wide Web was made more and more accessible and when people figured out they could make money off it, it started being censored to appeal to the lowest common denominator, like all bland corporate gruel that is spoon fed to the masses.

Do I think that censorship will stop? No.

All the other internet communication shit like, email, IRC, telnet BBS, Usenet, XMPP, etc some of which have been around as far back as the 1970s still remain largely uncensored and most likely will stay that way because your average person is too stupid to do more than open an app or Google something. The type of people who would want to censor speech don't even know how to set up Usenet client, and most likely don't even know it exists and most likely never will unless someone figures a way to monetise it and tries to make it accessible to retards.

 

[Tismguide]

Let's make a distinction here there's the Internet, the underlying network that connects everyone's devices that's been around for 50 years and there's the World Wide Web, a system that connects hypertext documents invented in the early 1990s.

The World Wide Web used to be contained to browsers, but most apps today are built on the linked hypertext documents paradigm and I would consider them part of the Web. The World Wide Web was made more and more accessible and when people figured out they could make money off it, it started being censored to appeal to the lowest common denominator, like all bland corporate gruel that is spoon fed to the masses.

Do I think that censorship will stop? No.

All the other internet communication shit like, email, IRC, telnet BBS, Usenet, XMPP, etc some of which have been around as far back as the 1970s still remain largely uncensored and most likely will stay that way because your average person is too stupid to do more than open an app or Google something. The type of people who would want to censor speech don't even know how to set up Usenet client, and most likely don't even know it exists and most likely never will unless someone figures a way to monetise it and tries to make it accessible to retards.

Most of these older platforms are still somewhat reliant on infrastructure that is vulnerable to pressure campaigns, all the more so by being niche. The mob may not have heard about it yet but I don't see any reason it'll stop at the WWW's edge, it's just that you'll have to go after all the IRC nodes instead of a single "main" one. Many of which are the result of corporate donations of hardware and live in an ecosystem of good will. They've even tried to go after open source clients like Fedilab for not banning Gab. It's salami slicing, just along a popularity spectrum rather than ideological.

Closing the border on your community would probably be effective for avoiding notice (like many file sharing communities did back when), and censorship resistant protocols stand a better chance.

I don't realistically see them being able to entirely shut down the means for technically minded people to continue to communicate online, but I do think that a little censorship on search engines can go a long way to preventing them from attracting new members and ensure they die a slow death, combined with targeting any communities that get too popular. Letting radicalized people get angry in tiny quarantined spaces helps stabilize the system more than trying to smash them entirely, you just don't want them to get big or organized.

 

[Cool Dog]

To be honest, behind closed doors, the industry pretty universally believes social media is worthless and has stopped focusing on it entirely. And as an aside, they're helping Trump win by keeping his name on everyone's lips and chasing off his supporters (who might otherwise actually help temper that a bit), and they don't even realize it. And when he wins, they won't have any idea how it happened.

This aged like milk, starting to think the OP was just one of those idiots who has been saying "get woke go broke" for half a decade as these woke companies keep raking in the cash