Unlike the earlier so-called 'Wild West' of the 90's and early 2000's internet, with their profusion of personal web pages, forums, and people posting whatever they want, the modern internet is characterized by revolving around highly homogenized social media giants. This isn't entirely organic, as many of these webpages have run at a loss, and been propped up by speculative investors to monopolize an area of the internet. Sites like Reddit or Twitter are just another example of this, because they centralise the function previously played by forums and smaller online communities, in a way that leads to a corporate pseudo-monopoly being granted the keys to public discourse. After the spread of smartphones and social media led to widespread adoption of the internet among the masses, the internet has steadily declined into homogeneity, authoritarianism and conformity, just like the USSR descended into Stalinist famine and oppression after the Bolsheviks' populist revolution.
Unsurprisingly, there has been a recent trend of politically-motivated censorship on social media websites. This has been applauded by modern liberals, who claim to oppose corporations but in practice always walk in lockstep with them.
The recent move by corporations and their allied corporate-backed pseudo-liberal websites to bar disliked politics should be seen as disturbing. They have no right whatsoever to dictate people's politics or to make political statements, as they are themselves one of the bigger problems with modern politics.
We should not be encouraging (as some 'leftists' do) this setting up of monopolising corporate ideology as the standard of political acceptability in various channels of communication. Calling Trump 'fascist' is not only blatantly false, but has become a justification for liberals to support widespread corporate censorship. That is merely ignorance and alarmism which ignores the bigger picture.
Monday, 1 October 2018
'Trust Our Corporation to Inform You'
One consequence of the modern centralization of the internet is the increasing role of corporations in censoring political ideas which they disapprove of.
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True that!
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