The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

I’m Pretty Sure That InfoWars And Gab Aren’t Signs Of A Crackdown

Posted on | August 9, 2018 | Comments Off on I’m Pretty Sure That InfoWars And Gab Aren’t Signs Of A Crackdown

by Smitty

First, the recent unpleasantness with the redirect appears to have been caused by some Memorandum code that was likely out of date. Maintenance happens.

Second, while I’ve been as big a fan of Alex Jones as homosexuality, I’ve never thought that suppressing either was particularly helpful. But the deplatforming of Jones is apparently just a brick in the wall:

(Why don’t I just go to Gab? I looked at the comments to Torba’s post and found even some of the account names on Gab are just not anything I care to see, sorry. Not snowflakery: merely selectivity about where my precious time goes.)

Third, alarmism isn’t my style. History is a noisy signal, and you can draw tangents going in any desired direction. So, what? Underreaction keeps the head clear.

Still, we’ve seen:

  • The Left go cuckoo for cocoa puffs since the 2016 election.
  • The willingness of outfits like CNN to bully people for making fun of them.
  • Increasing heavihandedness, from the demise of Stacy’s first Twitter account to underbussing Alex Jones, and now a little prise de fer from a cloud provider, hinting that content must be managed to the host’s taste without a hint of illegality.

I’m looking at Mastodon as we speak, to see if it has the right blend of interoperability with existing platforms, while not seeming quite so Orwellian.

It’s all good in the long run. The tech oligarchs are going to have all of the success of King George III controlling the pampleteers in colonial times. It’s just a vast distraction wading through all of the turbulence to get there.

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