Raheem Kassam got suspended from Twitter for this...

submitted by Orangutan from (i.redd.it)

sorted by:
top
newinsightfulfun
you are viewing a single comment's thread.

view the rest of the comments →

[–]magnora7 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (3 children)

Yeah that was like a blacklist of big-names from certain clubs and organizations. This is like... corporations reflexively deleting conversation from the public square out of fear while governments simultaneously mandate lockdowns

[–]wristaction 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

Also, during the Cold War, there was legitimate predicate for looking at communists as potential agents of a foreign power. There is no foreign power here. There is only a suppression of domestic political groups under the same kind of language as used in the Soviet Union. No one is a "dissident". They are terrorists. No one is exercising free speech. They are endangering public safety by spreading misinformation.

[–]magnora7 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

That's true. Although you could argue now that warfare has evolved mostly to soft power, to influencing cultures via media. And there are definitely shilling groups from foreign governments pushing their opinions in English with the goal of influencing America in directions that are favorable to those governments. So I don't think we can ignore that type of media manipulation.

But most of the English-language manipulation is coming from inside the country, from the political groups like Cambridge Analytica and Shareblue. And also from corporations who are pushing agendas. Monsanto shills have been a thing for a very long time.

And as the prevalence of paid shills increases, and the use of chatbots pretending to be people as the technology gets more advanced, we're looking at an internet that will be 90% propaganda and very hard to find real people.

But twitter censoring guys like the OP is clearly not the solution to this, and is just making it worse by creating echo chambers of propaganda themselves.

[–]wristaction 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

What if the problem you're talking about is as old as print and requires no novel solutions in the current era?

What if the people weilding the power to silence people aren't trying to solve the problem you've posed? It makes a difference because if the problem they're trying to solve is the existence of political opposition, they certainly seem capable of solving it completely by the methods they're applying.

The thing which is sinister about censorship is not that it forces the "bad guys" into the shadows. The censors are the bad guys. And they're not doing anything which is counterproductive to their ends.

Kind of a masochistic take. I mean, do you think you're a bad guy? You think the only thing wrong with being banned from reddit is that now you're on a less mainstream site and now you can speak more freely with likeminded bad guys who will influence you to become more evil?