We need to denounce censorship always, _especially_ when we disagree with those being censored.
I mean, it is kind of obvious, Trump is now in power and Zuckerberg does not like problems. Or would you rather have a technical scapegoat explanation, that some intern messed up?
(also there's a lot of false equivalence going on here - 'democrat' isn't a slur!)
Republics fall, progress isn't linear. Even c. 2000 years ago people were writing about how democracy falls to tyranny. The world is a lot more global now, but the Roman Republic would also have seemed rather "global" too, yet was replaced by the Roman Empire not long after Cicero was writing.
I have no dog in this fight and I want to see all ideas surface. Then people will be able to judge for themselves. I do not want any kind of filtration by either communists or conservatives.
He didn't say they did, he said America did, and everyone is along for the ride.
But in a way we did, by letting US (or China) control all our social medias.
There is a lot of witless verbiage about the "town square", but precious little acknowledgement of the obvious fact that every town has its OWN square, and that's the point.
For the last decade my feeds have been polluted by "content" about Brexit and Trump, almost all of which has been noise/distraction/propaganda. I'm sick to the back teeth of it, and it's time to make it stop.
There is no monetization, corporate decisions, manipulative algorithms; just self-hosted open source instances as far as the eye can see. Certainly there are rough edges and a perceptible decrease in dopamine from using them, but surely that's worth toughing out as they shape up if it means stopping the unfathomable destruction of society that we're experiencing in real time from big tech?
In Manufacturing Consent, Noam Chomsky makes a powerful argument that independent, citizen owned media is of critical importance if we're to pull society to a better, more collaborative place. It doesn't get more 'citizen owned' than a web of interconnected self-hosted servers.
It's been good to see Bluesky up its video game in response to the TikTok nonsense. I'd like to think that the Fediverse could evolve to meet the expectations of people fleeing Facebook, Twitter & co, but it's not there yet. Those of us who are highly motivated (and I am, after recent events!) will make do, but I think it needs to be easier in order to get the critical mass required.
This was equal part pragmatic foreign policy and a desire by the French elite to hold onto their colonies, an institution strongly opposed by the United States since around WWI.
disclosure: i was not planning on this in any way, it was only for testing purposes
If anything, it just shows that they are censoring based on facts: if there are established facts about Hunter Biden's laptop, then the information cannot be censored.
It is obvious to me that any brand new story is first "unestablished". They are indistinguishable from rumors. If you start choosing and picking "this story sounds nice to me, so let's not censor it even if it's not confirmed yet, this story is not confirmed yet either but let's censor it", then, it is arbitrary. The fact that a story starts as not confirmed and then turn out to be confirmed is not the proof something is wrong, on the opposite.
I think it's the problem of people who think "facts" are just "opinions" and that you can modify them as you want. They don't understand how "facts" work, and that it requires time for the confidence to grow. I also think that they sometimes get confused because they want very much to believe in some "opinions" or "fake news", but then people are saying, correctly, that this is not based on facts, so their only resort is to pretend this "opinion" or "fake news" is as factual as the other facts, but therefore it means that indeed, "facts" have no objectivity, everyone can just say "it's a fact" or "it's not a fact" based on what they want to hear.