U.S. government websites have gone dark as agencies scrambled to comply with President Donald Trump’s executive orders declaring his administration would recognize only two genders and ordering an end to diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.
“Already done” it was when most people were on social media. It’s a self-supporting censorship machine requiring no government intervention. Censorship is usually defined as government censorship, and a private business on their platform has right to do whatever they want about speech. And that’s fine when those private businesses are physical diners, rented spaces for events and so on. But if there were 2 or 3 owners of all the spaces you can rent to have a meeting, and those would have policy on speech, you’d have effective non-governmental censorship IRL. Same with the Internet.
Then platform owners do that censorship simply because they can and it’s convenient too.
Whatever governments order them comes much later and doesn’t change much. We already have censorship for 10-15 years, affecting all we do.
The problem isn’t that Meta and X and TikTok censor content…it never has been…that’s entirely within their rights, as businesses, to do.
The problem is that these 2-3 companies, run by 2-3 people with strong political allegiances and bottomless pocketbooks, control nearly every beer hall, Elks Lodge, KoC, and corner-grocer corkboard, in the world.
One of the biggest ways our government failed us was by letting these companies get so damn big and influencial.
The founders, while themselves wealthy slave-owning pieces of shit, did have some good ideas…but I don’t think they ever expected there to be just a couple of unelected private businessmen in charge of every soapbox in the country.
Oh, and also all of the press. Not them, but a different small handful of unelected private businessmen. Obviously they expected private ownership of the press. That’s somewhat of a necessity…but the level of consolidation is absurd.
“Already done” it was when most people were on social media. It’s a self-supporting censorship machine requiring no government intervention. Censorship is usually defined as government censorship, and a private business on their platform has right to do whatever they want about speech. And that’s fine when those private businesses are physical diners, rented spaces for events and so on. But if there were 2 or 3 owners of all the spaces you can rent to have a meeting, and those would have policy on speech, you’d have effective non-governmental censorship IRL. Same with the Internet.
Then platform owners do that censorship simply because they can and it’s convenient too.
Whatever governments order them comes much later and doesn’t change much. We already have censorship for 10-15 years, affecting all we do.
Thank you.
The problem isn’t that Meta and X and TikTok censor content…it never has been…that’s entirely within their rights, as businesses, to do.
The problem is that these 2-3 companies, run by 2-3 people with strong political allegiances and bottomless pocketbooks, control nearly every beer hall, Elks Lodge, KoC, and corner-grocer corkboard, in the world.
One of the biggest ways our government failed us was by letting these companies get so damn big and influencial.
The founders, while themselves wealthy slave-owning pieces of shit, did have some good ideas…but I don’t think they ever expected there to be just a couple of unelected private businessmen in charge of every soapbox in the country.
Oh, and also all of the press. Not them, but a different small handful of unelected private businessmen. Obviously they expected private ownership of the press. That’s somewhat of a necessity…but the level of consolidation is absurd.