A big dislike. Sorry there isn't a button I could push. Maybe a dislike button is what we should require of all public "intellectuals". That way, we could neg Tucker and Richard at the same time.
Richard is far too kind to the left's censorship regime and gives hardly any credit to non-lefties for having forced a recentering. This is an understatement, big time.
If the Left had had its way, Ibram Kendi would be mandatory reading in middle schools. Gender science would be a fact. Climate Catastrophism would be an article of faith and disagreeing with any of the above would be grounds for social and economic excommunication.
The Prog Left hasn't changed one bit and they still fully understand how to apply power. No "moderation" regime can withstand institutional capture, particularly one that is left in its collective outlook from the beginning.
If the world is batshit crazy these days, we are just going to have to man up and fight back. Quashing dissent never works and the quashers are never going to work themselves out of a job. They and their supporters will never run out of arguments to limit those who contest prevailing, approved views.
Statement like these are obvious cases of social desirability bias. If quashing different really didn't work authoritarian times around the world wouldn't keep doing it.
Maybe he meant that quashing dissent doesn't work w/o a dictatorship. I kinda prefer letting Candace go on spouting nonsense if that is the alternative.
Is there really a “recentering” happening, though? We just traded one set of nonsense for another. AND we’re still getting the censorship. So no, we haven’t quite regressed to the mean.
Why? Extremists have a vested interest in getting even more extreme, because they are more entertaining that way. This opens up a space for reason in the center.
You overlook the vested interests of the ruling class / conspirators? Their interest is divide and conquers and, worse, transformation to feudal tyranny! You are buying into Establishment nonsense.
“If the Left had had its way, Ibram Kendi would be mandatory reading in middle schools. Gender science would be a fact. Climate Catastrophism would be an article of faith and disagreeing with any of the above would be grounds for social and economic excommunication. “
What hilarious and ironic is that these things will happen in 2029 because the right is handing the blueprint to the left on how to do this effectively. That you can’t see this is rather funny. But sure, keep on owning dem libs. I’m gonna laugh when president Newson orders Fox News off the air.
Newsom is one of the few democrats who might manage to lose to Vance even in the current tired-of-Trump's-shennanigans climate. Given the past 10 years, that means he'll probably win the primary.
He seems reasonable enough; Josh Shapiro too. Either of them would be moderate and reality-based enough to let the 2032 election be decided by policy issues rather than tribalism. Or at least, that's the hope.
If you think I'm going to disagree with you, you are mistaken. I think the Progressive Left is just as capable of DJT's dictatorial regime as is DJT. Under Biden, the Left tried to dress up their program in conventional language. DJT has no conventional vocabulary, so we get his unvarnished and clearly authoritarian rhetoric. But, if your point is that the Left will take the Trump model and be even more aggressive, yes, I think you are correct.
Exactly. So then, why cheer on tit for tat retribution? A better strategy would be, you know, being an adult. If you hate cancel culture now, you’re REALLY gonna hate it 4 years from now, and comments like your OP are gonna be the reason why you’re going through it. So decide - succumb to fleeting smug satisfaction over “payback” in the short term, or hold this stupid assed administration accountable for its hypocrisy. Cause you’re not gonna like what happens next.
Ok, we are not on the same page. RH wants content moderation of the internet and public media generally, i.e. censorship. I oppose censorship. I think the correct approach is direct confrontation--peaceful, persuasive confrontation--of the nutbags. That is all I am saying.
My comments about the left were to demonstrate that the status quo ante that RH is calling for, in fact, did create it's own nutbag environment and the last thing I want is for either side to impose their agenda and to censor challenges and debate.
“I think the correct approach is direct confrontation--peaceful, persuasive confrontation--of the nutbags.”
But we’re seeing how this looks in practice. This “peaceful confrontation” is simply repeating the same stupid shit the far left did, but, arguably, worse.
I can sympathise with your claim, but I think you're far too certain. As a leftist, I spent years slowly convincing other leftists that they were wrong. It takes time, but it can happen.
anti vaxx becoming mainstream is inexcusable in a first world country-idgaf how many trans try to play ladies field hockey. This is life or death. Stupid shit should not be taking over. At least the ny times will analyze trans data sooner or later, but tucker doesn’t care how many old people he helped usher to their deaths
Amazing that the LEFT takes on faith the kept / bought and paid for intellectuals. Bought and paid for by the planet's MOST POWERFUL CAPITALISTS! At one time I thought maybe the LEFT would grasp this.
I'm not sure it's really possible to put the cat back in the bag. The problem is not free-speech policy per se, it's the technology. If you let youtube et al restrict the influence of crazies, and they do, people will just find another platform that doesn't. If the market demands something, you're not going, ultimately, to find the market refusing to provide it.
You either abandon the whole concept of free-speech, even at a state level, and have government censorship everywhere; or you let people decide what speech they want to consume (and they'll consume rubbish). "Gentleman's agreement" gatekeeping only worked in the days of print media with relatively large barriers to entry that enforced a certain level of competence. Also, there's a vicious-circle effect where you can keep, say, vaccine phobia, down in a market while relatively few people believe it, so there isn't much demand for it; but once belief exeeds a certain level, it's almost impossible to stop because there is enough money to be made in promoting it.
And I'm not sure how you're going to get government censorship anyway, even if you want it. The government is elected by the same idiots who believe all this rubbish. So that will basically amount to censorship of unpopular views. Which isn't helpful becauase false unpopular views aren't really a problem, and true unpopular views very much need to be aired.
Yes, Richard's diagnosis is correct but his proposed treatment won't work (and might have some nasty side effects). Misinformation is a demand-driven problem and technological advances in communications will allow suppliers to find a way to meet that demand despite any but the most draconian restrictions. Case study, Tucker gets deplatformed from Fox and a couple years later is back with the top podcast.
Unless we want China-level centralization and censorship, the only way out is through. It's going to be a rough few years though while we gradually build up antibodies to the most virulent strains in the new information ecosystem. Richard can help by repeatedly shouting "this is so stupid, you're all low IQ!" at them.
The solution is for sensible people to do the hard work of actually debating the idiots, and presenting the evidence that refutes them in a logical organized way that even an idiot can understand.
Yes, people really need to go back and read about how insane newspapers were historically before the domesticated mid twentieth century. The literate Gribbles were out buying cheap broadsheet rags for centuries and this was a known component of many conflicts. Marat, that Tucker Carlson of the French Revolution, lauded as a martyr? The existential dread some had about abolitionist newspapers before the Civil War, so much so that a guy was murdered in Illinois and his press was thrown in the river? The pamphlet wars during the massive bloodshed of the Protestant/Catholic wars in the 1600s?
This isn't new and you can't put technology genies back in the bottle.
> "Gentleman's agreement" gatekeeping only worked in the days of print media with relatively large barriers to entry that enforced a certain level of competence.
Hm, but are you sure you aren't underestimating the barriers to entry of setting up competitive alternatives to YouTube etc.?
That people will have to install a new social media app or go to a new website, make a new account, start curating their interests, further fragment and increase the number of apps they flick through, is a barrier enough. Not to mention the barrier of obscurity you get by these being darker less inhabited corners.
When it's on X, it's getting hundreds or thousands of times more views, accelerating faster, reaching more people.
Like, there's a reason Rumble was (and still is) tiny. Conspiracy content on Rumble will not reach the same number of people as conspiracy content on YouTube.
And there's also a effect of keeping the dumb stuff nipped in the bud. If you censor popular conspiracies, sure, people might flee. But you're also preventing the growth of future potentially popular conspiracies.
"We’ve seen a move away from trans extremism and BLM excesses – albeit with right-wing pressure having had an influence".
"albeit" seems to be understating it. What evidence is there that the move away from trans extremism and BLM excesses would have have happened without right-wing pressure?
I can only offer a theoretical argument based on personal experience, but trans extremism and BLM excesses, like many woke excesses, might have provoked a grassroots backlash regardless. Most of my friends came to resent the woke left by one excess or another, and the counterexample became disillusioned. Per Haniana's reasoning, even true believers seem, gradually, swayed by argument. Woke strategy ran on cruelty and was self contradictory in places; many woke people are kind in their personal lives and care more about logical coherence in other areas than they do in the political sphere. They seem swayable.
Put a less complete but more vivid way, broad swathes of the intelligensia seem receptive to the idea that Americans reenacting the politics of Lord of the Flies is concerning.
This is fundamentally the issue with the progressive left's reaction to the Klein/Coates debate podcast. They still haven't grasped the fact that they are losing elections because of their own shitty behavior towards literally every single person that disagrees with them on any subject whatsoever. How dare Klein suggest that maybe we should have conversations with people instead of deplatforming them. For shame! And they seem not to understand that the deplatforming / cancel culture went way beyond just well known celebrity figures but extended deep into private society destroying freindships and family relationships. You can't cancel so many people you become a minority.
Have you seen Klein speak to with Sarah McBride? Oddly that conversation and the one with Ben Shapiro struck similar themes of tolerance and constructive politics where you, well, persuade people.
People resented it for a long time, as the Marxist Freddie DeBoer discussed in "Of course, there's the backchannel" https://medium.com/@jesse.singal/of-course-theres-the-backchannel-762790f9fce2 But they didn't do anything about it. In academia there wasn't really a right-wing present, so the liberals just got marginalized by the leftists, and then Republican state governments instead were the ones who cracked down on them.
That's an interesting article and a valid take: perhaps the academic/leftwing equilibrium was stable enough that everyone would have continued to public join in witch hunts to protect themselves from being the next victim. In that essay though, DeBoer presents and alternative to right wing pressure that I think requires invalidation: courage to say witch hunts are fucked up. Jessie Singal posting DeBoer shows that people did actually start to do things about it using the ordinary intraparty political process. Freddie DeBoer, Coleman Hughes, and Jessie Singal all built brands around calling dangerous inanity by its name.
All that being said, I actually think Trump's re-election did a lot to free up speech. It made more credible the harm of pursing extremist policies, and, in my opinion, made it harder to use as hyperbolic slurs ideologies that were now getting genuine political runtime. With luck, America is shifting to a conception of fascism and racism that is more consistent with international and historical realities.
If you remove the 30% of the population that identifies as conservative, trans issues become like maybe 60/40 against trans extremism, with almost large elite approval. I think that's very foolish to think that woke wouldn't have continued unabated when it's already not even close to being defeated.
Having existed in quite liberal spaces (UCI graduate housing, therapy programs), the number of people some mix of a) exasperated by the beatings or b) relieved to allow them not to continue seems considerable. Perhaps I am not fully apprehending what form conservative pressure took or am mentally defining it differently than you, but I suspect morale would have improved regardless.
The move towards trans extremism and BLM excesses intensified during the first Trump administration and moderated during the Biden administration. So that indicates that what party has the power to jawbone major platforms is not neccessarily correlated with the level extremism. During the Biden administration the left was in power, but they moderated instead of tightening the screws.
Musk's 2022 purchase of Twitter doubtless bears some responsibility for the loss of influence by BLM and trans extremists. But I think the trend was happening even before then.
BLM excess was largely mitigated due to the rise in crime from 2020 to 2022. The median Black voter was never really on board with the defund the police stuff anyway. The Trans stuff is not really material to anybody's life, so it will probably be just a local issue now.
And don’t underestimate the amplification and weaponisation of these fringe views that are still today being used to tarnish a whole political spectrum
Basically every government in Western and Northern Europe (who progressives otherwise tend to worship) pulling a "wait a minute" on the Dutch Protocol was beginning to make trans maximalists look very stupid. Musk buying Twitter was a watershed moment, but so was the collapse of Tavistock in Britain. Tavistock could be so thoroughly investigated *because* it was a nationalized healthcare operation and was legally required to relinquish its records to the public.
Musk prevented the trans lynch mobs which opened space for dissent, but he did not convince any center left people in positions of power that trans maximalism was stupid. That was done by other left side of spectrum elites like Jesse Singal and the Euros.
After you read enough pseudo-intellectual slop from Carlson/Candace/Fuentes fans you get desensitized to it
But it's so funny too because every time I read a comment that attempts to sound smart or thoughtful, they just HAVE to throw in the low-IQ Fox News/Rogan slop into it.
It's initially jarring to read what you think is going to be a sensible comment, and then your eyes come across the phrase "Trans Liberal Marxist brainwashing of middle schools" and "suicidal cultural feminization by wokeists".
Every one of those comments just cements my belief that the right aren't against the supposed Ivory Tower/Elitism/pretentiousness they claim the left has. They're just... Jealous. Left out. And now they get to LARP as academics, as intellectuals, as thought leaders. But they're still retarded Fox News/Joe Rogan watchers at the end of the day. It's like taking a hobo, slapping a suit on him, and thinking he can be a lawyer cause he knows the phrase "your honor"
They've fetishized intellectualism -- it's on par for conservatives to secretly have fetishes on the things they publicly denounce I guess
Between lefty academics working tirelessly for decades to drain language of meaning, and Fuentes-types calling themselves “conservatives” instead of “reactionaries”, it’s become really difficult to communicate.
We need an American glossary of newspeak.
I have that same experience sometimes, where I’m reading a note that sounds sensible, but then devolves into a diatribe against “woke”, another concept with a meaning that only exists in the speaker, not in the receiver.
Glad to see this conversation moving forward. Having written about these issues, I think the practical solution is clear: professionalize content governance at the platform level. Facebook, for example, has taken meaningful steps in this direction with its Oversight Board.
We shouldn’t have to choose between extremes: a free-speech free-for-all (4chan), ideologically biased moderation (Twitter), erratic rule-by-owner (X), or state-driven control of discourse depending on who’s in power (Biden, Trump).
Professionalized content governance is not a perfect answer, but it represents the next evolution, an imperfect synthesis of free expression and responsible moderation.
I can’t believe you wrote a giant screed against free speech (which hurts everyone’s epistemology by restricting access to information) instead of just saying we shouldn’t let stupid people vote.
Once we’ve accepted the premise that the masses are too stupid to form accurate models of how the world works, why let them vote? If their opinions can be swayed by top-down media pressure, then whoever controls the top-down media pressure can control the votes of the masses. It leaves a giant “press to subvert democracy” button on the table that someone will inevitably use to crush political dissent.
Restricting the franchise is not the same as authoritarianism. Setting aside the question of racial prohibitions on voting, America had property requirements for voting for many years without being authoritarian. Reimposing a property or IQ requirement would not be the same as imposing authoritarianism
Sounds like a bad idea. Don’t you think those with power would change IQ tests to produce a constituency that preserves their power? Just look at lobbying and institutional capture to guide your thinking on this.
Social media only came into existence recently. In that past, there used to be numerous newspapers, so openly partisan that many of their names linger on with party labels. Newspapers as local quasi-monopolies came later. That was not "the American model" earlier.
I think it's pretty clear that "intelligence" can be highly compartmentalized. There are plenty of smart engineers, lawyers, and doctors who are still bought into ridiculous QAnon, Antivax, and other conspiracies. I'm skeptical that a nebulous intelligence meaningfully translates into voting for good policies
I find the smarter conservatives tend to buy into higher-brow conservative propaganda, not the Q-Anon stuff. The few that do are probably grifters of some kind, like a chiropractor that hocs supplements to his patients and realizes that sales go up when he talks about miracles and government conspiracies.
This is a horrendously bad take. We already went down that road and it was much much worse than you are allowing here. The fact that Substack has brave leaders and Elon bought Twitter is the only thing that broke the woke madness which was just getting worse and worse.
The Times would *never* have course corrected at all on race and trans insanity if they hadn't been forced to.
This article is ultimately just shouting into the void. It's not like gatekeepers lost their power because someone made an executive decision to strip them of their powers; rather, technological change rendered them powerless, which can't be helped by any policy. Arguing about whether or not the gatekeepers should have more power is futile, because the fact is that, rightly or wrongly, they aren't trusted by the public.
When people feel that their freedom of speech is being suppressed, they tend to react poorly and double down on stupidity. If Twitter or any other social network gets more aggressive about gatekeeping, people will move to a different platform that advertises more open 'debate' about demons and autism. So even if you believe that the gatekeepers of recent history (or the aspiring gatekeepers of today) do a good job of mediating discourse, there's no shoving this back into Pandora's box.
Even if it were possible, it's not clear why you would assume that future gatekeepers will maintain any integrity just because you think they've done a good job so far. A world where gatekeepers have a lot more power is also a world where they can be pressured to exercise that power on behalf of those with real authority. Currently, the most powerful politician in America is Donald Trump, whose appetite for misinformation and basic hostility to the idea of free speech is legendary. If we allow gatekeepers to suppress content on the internet, it's only a matter of time before the stupidest people seize power and seek to use this power to censor good ideas. The censorious nature of today's elites aside, stupid people tend to be even less supportive of the free exchange of ideas, because they lack the cognitive skillset to defend their own.
So it's unclear to me how any of this would work. Ultimately, freedom of speech is better than the alternative, and it's not possible to suppress very much anymore anyway.
Actually, all curating takes is (1) deplatforming harmful disinformation spreaders, and (2) monitoring/restricting comments and posts. This would probably not be able to be done now that Trump is in charge, as he could go after/shake down companies who do this, but it could happen in a future Democratic administration.
If say all the Tuckers/Candaces/and average Joe racists had to leave Twitter or whatnot and go out to 4Chan and Truth Social, those spaces could be more socially stigmatized. Also, once you confine a bunch of crazies to a certain space, that space will become more and more of a madhouse, which could scare off the merely crazy-adjacent.
The problem we have today is that Trump and his cronies have created an environment where crazy people work alongside normal people, which only validates and normalizes the crazy shit.
One way the left could hit back today is to have their own conspriacy wing that spreads conspriacy theories about Trump and his goons. This is not all that far fetched as the Birther conspiracy was actually invented by the 2008 Hillary Campaign.
This is a somewhat semantic point, but I'll defend this conspiracy theory: "there were ancient human civilizations that predated recorded history." Obviously certain theories like Hyperborea and Agartha, hollow Earth, Lemuria, Atlantis are all mythical. But since recorded history only begins around 3400 BC, it's entirely reasonable to suggest that the Vinca symbols in the Balkans represent a real literate "civilized culture," one which we unfortunately cannot decode.
Cities, writing, and agriculture are the components of civilization, and all of them pre-date "recorded history," by which we mean those writings which we can decipher. Jericho and Göbeklitepe are both evidence of civilizations which predate "recorded history" by thousands of years.
I've thought for a while that it might have taken humanity a long time, like 100,000+ years to get on the path of modern civilization. Like what if a culture 50,000 years ago developed written language, pottery, metalworking, etc. But then got completely wiped out by a famine or an ice age? What if this happened hundreds of times, before the ideas spread widely enough that even a particular civilization disappearing wasn't enough to end progress?
But that doesn't mean I believe in Ancient Aliens or any shit like that.
You speak of democracy. But it seems to me that this touches on the distinction between democracy, that is, the direct translation of majority opinion into policy, and republic, where the majority gets to choose which faction of the elite get to decide on policy. The differences between those have been understood for centuries.
I agree with you in that we should go back to treating free speech as a negative right, but I am far more skeptical of internet gatekeepers than you. Especially when many of these gatekeepers were collaborating with the government to censor speech. It's not even worth arguing on the premise of free speech as a positive right. The "common good" cannot exist in a society of individuals.
"This is going to be true regardless of whether elites behave well or not"
Is this actually true though? That chart shows vaccine skepticism rising among Republicans during peak internet censorship, years before Elon bought Twitter. It's not just the censorship that lost trust in elites, it's also that the frequency in which elites got things wrong was increasing. Also look how Republican and Democrats are equally skeptical of vaccines until Covid. This further suggests that elites and their perceived partisanship were the cause of the divergence rather than misinformation. Misinformation seems like a cope to protect elites from being held accountable. Why is it that when things go well, the elites get the credit, but when things go wrong, they get none of the blame?
"He was the main figure who normalized anti-vaxx content while much of his elderly audience was still immunologically naive to Covid, leading to hundreds of thousands of deaths."
So what? This is an acceptable cost of keeping the government from regulating speech. If conservatives want to drink Ivermectin and refuse to get vaccinated then let them. We are not the property of the state. For the most part, anti-vaxxers internalize the cost of their own stupidity anyways.
I also feel as though the Iron Law of Prohibition applies to information. For example, It's likely that the suppression of the lab leak theory actually led to more extreme Covid conspiracy theories circulating, as people were denied access to information that was actually based in reality and had to settle for worse alternatives.
The missing lemma here is the extent to which this cashes out as worse government, which I'm not sure it does. Restricting what the dumbest/loopiest 30% of Americans can hear on the basis that 10pp of them could be swayed either way only matters if it makes things worse for the US overall, presumably through making the Republicans govern much worse than they otherwise would. I don't think it does make them significantly worse, but I think it does make the Democrats better.
Other than RFK (who's an outlier in other ways),* most of Trump's downsides in terms of actual things the government does are either corrupt/nepotistic, his own idiosyncratic obsessions or ideas from the extreme but non-populist right (eg Doge). Carlson, Owens etc aren't moving the needle much on anything except maybe immigration, but hostility to immigration comes up everywhere and would likely be present in whatever purely-opinion Conservatism was still allowed through most gatekeeping. Trump himself isn't really a consequence of the decline of gatekeeping, having risen mostly during the gatekeeping era.**
In contrast, the Democrats have started to noticeably improve as gatekeeping/censorship weakens, because any actually existing system of gatekeeping will push things about twice as far towards leftism as it does towards improvement. Leftism that no-one's allowed to criticise tends to be the worse form of Leftism, and woke-Left policies did have real consequences in government.
If the above is right, and more gatekeeping makes Republicans 5% better but Democrats 30% worse (while not affecting election results, which I'm not convinced it really does), then overall gatekeeping tends to reduce the quality of American governance. 10% of these worse-governed Americans might have a marginally more accurate worldview, but that's a value trade-off for whether it's more important to be factually correct than free (with freedom trading at a fairly high exchange rate to factual correctness). Consequentially, it pushes in the wrong direction.
*RFK's wackiness was an explicit consequence of coalition-building during the election, but RFK's support base of vaccine-skeptics had mostly emerged pre-gatekeeping. His fusion with the Trump base happened before this during Covid for very path-dependant reasons, but may have stalled had there been more gatekeeping.
**I'm taking the gatekeeping era to include moderated Twitter/Facebook/etc, and to have ended in the early 2020s (28th October 2022 was when Musk bought Twitter, and might be the easiest cutoff date).
I think expanding the Community Notes system is the only way this can work. A gatekept system with bad gatekeepers is unstable. But the gatekeepers will always be incentivized to use their power for selfish political ends. That's why the gatekeepets can't be individuals, it needs to be a system like Community Notes. Bring it to Youtube, bring it to Facebook, hell bring to New York Times front page itself.
The issue I have with the traditional gatekeepers is that they are not truth aligned. They are "niceness" or "decorum" aligned. This is an obnoxious and highly consistent part of the center left worldview. "Don't be mean" is basically sacred to them and they consistently can't or won't define what "don't be mean" even entails in concrete terms. It's extremely vibes-based, and these people usually have an above average case of bleeding-heart so they are not the best people to be making vibes-based decisions of what is and isn't mean. They roll over and show their bellies any time some "vulnerable" person accuses them of being mean. Go read that latest Ezra Klein/Ta-Nahesi Coates conversation (or various other ones they have had over the years). Ezra consistently melts when this guy accuses him of opinions that help "hate" spread. I don't even think Coates is wrong all the time, but Klein is not bending because he's hearing truth. He's bending because his nice liberal soul started twisting. Obviously wishy-washy "niceness" is better than the based ritual or intentional performative cruelness.
I guess if I *have* to choose between women's tears and the based ritual I will choose women's tears. Actual truth is still better than both.
*Edit* Klein actually pushes back more in this interview than he typically does, but I don't think it undermines my point as much as it seems. Coates is basically accusing him of being too nice to Charlie Kirk and Klein is defending his decision to be nice in the moment. He melts when accused of being mean and will fight back when you tell him he is too nice. I do think there is way more going on with him than just this, but this dynamic is a consistent and major one if you look for it.
I think you're basically wrong here. There's been research into what leads to conspiracy theorizing, and it's not free speech. It's the opposite. Rather, what's led to the rise of the insane right is that it's a direct reaction against the left's deplatforming efforts. Trying to suppress disfavored speech makes it more popular, not less. This is bourne out by what happens under authortitarian governments. When the central state controls the media, does conspiracy theorizing go away? No, it actually gets crazier. The middle east, for instance, long ruled by authoritarian states, is a hotbed of conspiracy theorists. The CIA controls everything!
If you really want to defeat this nonsense you don't want to suppress it, you want to shine a light on it. Actually have someone knowledgeable go on Joe Rogan and debate this stuff. The fact that the left hasn't been doing this is the problem. They let the crazies OWN the field. Yeah, they have their own TV shows, sure, but if they aren't directly addressing the specific points, to the specific audience that listens to it, that's not much help. Joe Rogan's listeners aren't going to go to NPR for a counterpoint, as if NPR was even airing counterpoints.
I remember when there used to be people who made it their life mission to go around debunking conspiracy theories. Like James Randi, who would go around exposing "psychics" as frauds and charlatans. Like the Skeptics Society. I remember when scientists would actually debate creationists! The problem is the left abandoned that in favor of deplatforming, not that there wasn't enough deplatforming. As always always always, the answer to speech is more speech. Attempting to suppress it is just going to make it more popular. We need more James Randi's, not more gatekeeping.
I think a big driver of this discourse is that the discourse-makers (including Richard) are unique in that they are essentially forced by their job to constantly interact with the worst aspects of social media/the internet. As is the case in this article, the grievances are often dressed up as concern for democratic policy-making, but I supsect that the underlying motivation is that Richard (and people in similar positions) is simply tired of being beset by retards in his replies.
Everyone knows that famous people attract weirdos and nutcases. People that are internet-famous are in a uniquely bad position, because their earnings depend specifically on their being on the internet and interacting with these people. Everyone else can simply curate their feed to avoid them, or simply walk away from the screen à la Tyler the Creator.
A big dislike. Sorry there isn't a button I could push. Maybe a dislike button is what we should require of all public "intellectuals". That way, we could neg Tucker and Richard at the same time.
Richard is far too kind to the left's censorship regime and gives hardly any credit to non-lefties for having forced a recentering. This is an understatement, big time.
If the Left had had its way, Ibram Kendi would be mandatory reading in middle schools. Gender science would be a fact. Climate Catastrophism would be an article of faith and disagreeing with any of the above would be grounds for social and economic excommunication.
The Prog Left hasn't changed one bit and they still fully understand how to apply power. No "moderation" regime can withstand institutional capture, particularly one that is left in its collective outlook from the beginning.
If the world is batshit crazy these days, we are just going to have to man up and fight back. Quashing dissent never works and the quashers are never going to work themselves out of a job. They and their supporters will never run out of arguments to limit those who contest prevailing, approved views.
Hard pass.
"Quashing dissent never works"
??
Statement like these are obvious cases of social desirability bias. If quashing different really didn't work authoritarian times around the world wouldn't keep doing it.
Maybe he meant that quashing dissent doesn't work w/o a dictatorship. I kinda prefer letting Candace go on spouting nonsense if that is the alternative.
I live in China. Quashing dissent is highly effective and I can point to dozens of examples.
Is there really a “recentering” happening, though? We just traded one set of nonsense for another. AND we’re still getting the censorship. So no, we haven’t quite regressed to the mean.
The pendulum swings rather far these days. We are nowhere near a "center".
The CENTER is the stupidest area of the intellectual spectrum.
Idk.. this comments a contender. Does it fall on the intellectual spectrum?
Why? Extremists have a vested interest in getting even more extreme, because they are more entertaining that way. This opens up a space for reason in the center.
You overlook the vested interests of the ruling class / conspirators? Their interest is divide and conquers and, worse, transformation to feudal tyranny! You are buying into Establishment nonsense.
“If the Left had had its way, Ibram Kendi would be mandatory reading in middle schools. Gender science would be a fact. Climate Catastrophism would be an article of faith and disagreeing with any of the above would be grounds for social and economic excommunication. “
What hilarious and ironic is that these things will happen in 2029 because the right is handing the blueprint to the left on how to do this effectively. That you can’t see this is rather funny. But sure, keep on owning dem libs. I’m gonna laugh when president Newson orders Fox News off the air.
Newsom is one of the few democrats who might manage to lose to Vance even in the current tired-of-Trump's-shennanigans climate. Given the past 10 years, that means he'll probably win the primary.
I mentioned Newsom just to use an example. Fill in whoever else you'd like (personally, I want Bashear to get into the race, but, whatever).
Or Gallego
He seems reasonable enough; Josh Shapiro too. Either of them would be moderate and reality-based enough to let the 2032 election be decided by policy issues rather than tribalism. Or at least, that's the hope.
If you think I'm going to disagree with you, you are mistaken. I think the Progressive Left is just as capable of DJT's dictatorial regime as is DJT. Under Biden, the Left tried to dress up their program in conventional language. DJT has no conventional vocabulary, so we get his unvarnished and clearly authoritarian rhetoric. But, if your point is that the Left will take the Trump model and be even more aggressive, yes, I think you are correct.
Exactly. So then, why cheer on tit for tat retribution? A better strategy would be, you know, being an adult. If you hate cancel culture now, you’re REALLY gonna hate it 4 years from now, and comments like your OP are gonna be the reason why you’re going through it. So decide - succumb to fleeting smug satisfaction over “payback” in the short term, or hold this stupid assed administration accountable for its hypocrisy. Cause you’re not gonna like what happens next.
Ok, we are not on the same page. RH wants content moderation of the internet and public media generally, i.e. censorship. I oppose censorship. I think the correct approach is direct confrontation--peaceful, persuasive confrontation--of the nutbags. That is all I am saying.
My comments about the left were to demonstrate that the status quo ante that RH is calling for, in fact, did create it's own nutbag environment and the last thing I want is for either side to impose their agenda and to censor challenges and debate.
What about simply calling for more usage of community notes?
“I think the correct approach is direct confrontation--peaceful, persuasive confrontation--of the nutbags.”
But we’re seeing how this looks in practice. This “peaceful confrontation” is simply repeating the same stupid shit the far left did, but, arguably, worse.
I can sympathise with your claim, but I think you're far too certain. As a leftist, I spent years slowly convincing other leftists that they were wrong. It takes time, but it can happen.
anti vaxx becoming mainstream is inexcusable in a first world country-idgaf how many trans try to play ladies field hockey. This is life or death. Stupid shit should not be taking over. At least the ny times will analyze trans data sooner or later, but tucker doesn’t care how many old people he helped usher to their deaths
I agree with you but Richard’s main point still stands correct I think
Amazing that the LEFT takes on faith the kept / bought and paid for intellectuals. Bought and paid for by the planet's MOST POWERFUL CAPITALISTS! At one time I thought maybe the LEFT would grasp this.
I'm not sure it's really possible to put the cat back in the bag. The problem is not free-speech policy per se, it's the technology. If you let youtube et al restrict the influence of crazies, and they do, people will just find another platform that doesn't. If the market demands something, you're not going, ultimately, to find the market refusing to provide it.
You either abandon the whole concept of free-speech, even at a state level, and have government censorship everywhere; or you let people decide what speech they want to consume (and they'll consume rubbish). "Gentleman's agreement" gatekeeping only worked in the days of print media with relatively large barriers to entry that enforced a certain level of competence. Also, there's a vicious-circle effect where you can keep, say, vaccine phobia, down in a market while relatively few people believe it, so there isn't much demand for it; but once belief exeeds a certain level, it's almost impossible to stop because there is enough money to be made in promoting it.
And I'm not sure how you're going to get government censorship anyway, even if you want it. The government is elected by the same idiots who believe all this rubbish. So that will basically amount to censorship of unpopular views. Which isn't helpful becauase false unpopular views aren't really a problem, and true unpopular views very much need to be aired.
Yes, Richard's diagnosis is correct but his proposed treatment won't work (and might have some nasty side effects). Misinformation is a demand-driven problem and technological advances in communications will allow suppliers to find a way to meet that demand despite any but the most draconian restrictions. Case study, Tucker gets deplatformed from Fox and a couple years later is back with the top podcast.
Unless we want China-level centralization and censorship, the only way out is through. It's going to be a rough few years though while we gradually build up antibodies to the most virulent strains in the new information ecosystem. Richard can help by repeatedly shouting "this is so stupid, you're all low IQ!" at them.
The solution is for sensible people to do the hard work of actually debating the idiots, and presenting the evidence that refutes them in a logical organized way that even an idiot can understand.
Yes, people really need to go back and read about how insane newspapers were historically before the domesticated mid twentieth century. The literate Gribbles were out buying cheap broadsheet rags for centuries and this was a known component of many conflicts. Marat, that Tucker Carlson of the French Revolution, lauded as a martyr? The existential dread some had about abolitionist newspapers before the Civil War, so much so that a guy was murdered in Illinois and his press was thrown in the river? The pamphlet wars during the massive bloodshed of the Protestant/Catholic wars in the 1600s?
This isn't new and you can't put technology genies back in the bottle.
Suffering will eventually put the cat back in the bag. We need to learn why we needed gatekeepers in the first place.
> "Gentleman's agreement" gatekeeping only worked in the days of print media with relatively large barriers to entry that enforced a certain level of competence.
Hm, but are you sure you aren't underestimating the barriers to entry of setting up competitive alternatives to YouTube etc.?
That people will have to install a new social media app or go to a new website, make a new account, start curating their interests, further fragment and increase the number of apps they flick through, is a barrier enough. Not to mention the barrier of obscurity you get by these being darker less inhabited corners.
When it's on X, it's getting hundreds or thousands of times more views, accelerating faster, reaching more people.
Like, there's a reason Rumble was (and still is) tiny. Conspiracy content on Rumble will not reach the same number of people as conspiracy content on YouTube.
And there's also a effect of keeping the dumb stuff nipped in the bud. If you censor popular conspiracies, sure, people might flee. But you're also preventing the growth of future potentially popular conspiracies.
"We’ve seen a move away from trans extremism and BLM excesses – albeit with right-wing pressure having had an influence".
"albeit" seems to be understating it. What evidence is there that the move away from trans extremism and BLM excesses would have have happened without right-wing pressure?
I can only offer a theoretical argument based on personal experience, but trans extremism and BLM excesses, like many woke excesses, might have provoked a grassroots backlash regardless. Most of my friends came to resent the woke left by one excess or another, and the counterexample became disillusioned. Per Haniana's reasoning, even true believers seem, gradually, swayed by argument. Woke strategy ran on cruelty and was self contradictory in places; many woke people are kind in their personal lives and care more about logical coherence in other areas than they do in the political sphere. They seem swayable.
Put a less complete but more vivid way, broad swathes of the intelligensia seem receptive to the idea that Americans reenacting the politics of Lord of the Flies is concerning.
This is fundamentally the issue with the progressive left's reaction to the Klein/Coates debate podcast. They still haven't grasped the fact that they are losing elections because of their own shitty behavior towards literally every single person that disagrees with them on any subject whatsoever. How dare Klein suggest that maybe we should have conversations with people instead of deplatforming them. For shame! And they seem not to understand that the deplatforming / cancel culture went way beyond just well known celebrity figures but extended deep into private society destroying freindships and family relationships. You can't cancel so many people you become a minority.
Have you seen Klein speak to with Sarah McBride? Oddly that conversation and the one with Ben Shapiro struck similar themes of tolerance and constructive politics where you, well, persuade people.
People resented it for a long time, as the Marxist Freddie DeBoer discussed in "Of course, there's the backchannel" https://medium.com/@jesse.singal/of-course-theres-the-backchannel-762790f9fce2 But they didn't do anything about it. In academia there wasn't really a right-wing present, so the liberals just got marginalized by the leftists, and then Republican state governments instead were the ones who cracked down on them.
That's an interesting article and a valid take: perhaps the academic/leftwing equilibrium was stable enough that everyone would have continued to public join in witch hunts to protect themselves from being the next victim. In that essay though, DeBoer presents and alternative to right wing pressure that I think requires invalidation: courage to say witch hunts are fucked up. Jessie Singal posting DeBoer shows that people did actually start to do things about it using the ordinary intraparty political process. Freddie DeBoer, Coleman Hughes, and Jessie Singal all built brands around calling dangerous inanity by its name.
All that being said, I actually think Trump's re-election did a lot to free up speech. It made more credible the harm of pursing extremist policies, and, in my opinion, made it harder to use as hyperbolic slurs ideologies that were now getting genuine political runtime. With luck, America is shifting to a conception of fascism and racism that is more consistent with international and historical realities.
If you remove the 30% of the population that identifies as conservative, trans issues become like maybe 60/40 against trans extremism, with almost large elite approval. I think that's very foolish to think that woke wouldn't have continued unabated when it's already not even close to being defeated.
Having existed in quite liberal spaces (UCI graduate housing, therapy programs), the number of people some mix of a) exasperated by the beatings or b) relieved to allow them not to continue seems considerable. Perhaps I am not fully apprehending what form conservative pressure took or am mentally defining it differently than you, but I suspect morale would have improved regardless.
The move towards trans extremism and BLM excesses intensified during the first Trump administration and moderated during the Biden administration. So that indicates that what party has the power to jawbone major platforms is not neccessarily correlated with the level extremism. During the Biden administration the left was in power, but they moderated instead of tightening the screws.
Musk's 2022 purchase of Twitter doubtless bears some responsibility for the loss of influence by BLM and trans extremists. But I think the trend was happening even before then.
BLM excess was largely mitigated due to the rise in crime from 2020 to 2022. The median Black voter was never really on board with the defund the police stuff anyway. The Trans stuff is not really material to anybody's life, so it will probably be just a local issue now.
And don’t underestimate the amplification and weaponisation of these fringe views that are still today being used to tarnish a whole political spectrum
It was never as bad as they were painting it
But I’m just a watcher in the uk so
Basically every government in Western and Northern Europe (who progressives otherwise tend to worship) pulling a "wait a minute" on the Dutch Protocol was beginning to make trans maximalists look very stupid. Musk buying Twitter was a watershed moment, but so was the collapse of Tavistock in Britain. Tavistock could be so thoroughly investigated *because* it was a nationalized healthcare operation and was legally required to relinquish its records to the public.
Musk prevented the trans lynch mobs which opened space for dissent, but he did not convince any center left people in positions of power that trans maximalism was stupid. That was done by other left side of spectrum elites like Jesse Singal and the Euros.
Yeah the idea that liberal institutions self corrected on transgenderism and BLM style views of race is, to put it mildly, incorrect.
Great piece. Nice touch, using your comments section to illustrate your arguments.
Dude it's crazy everything in here is just regurgitated tucker carlson
After you read enough pseudo-intellectual slop from Carlson/Candace/Fuentes fans you get desensitized to it
But it's so funny too because every time I read a comment that attempts to sound smart or thoughtful, they just HAVE to throw in the low-IQ Fox News/Rogan slop into it.
It's initially jarring to read what you think is going to be a sensible comment, and then your eyes come across the phrase "Trans Liberal Marxist brainwashing of middle schools" and "suicidal cultural feminization by wokeists".
Every one of those comments just cements my belief that the right aren't against the supposed Ivory Tower/Elitism/pretentiousness they claim the left has. They're just... Jealous. Left out. And now they get to LARP as academics, as intellectuals, as thought leaders. But they're still retarded Fox News/Joe Rogan watchers at the end of the day. It's like taking a hobo, slapping a suit on him, and thinking he can be a lawyer cause he knows the phrase "your honor"
They've fetishized intellectualism -- it's on par for conservatives to secretly have fetishes on the things they publicly denounce I guess
So brutal, but so true!
💯
Between lefty academics working tirelessly for decades to drain language of meaning, and Fuentes-types calling themselves “conservatives” instead of “reactionaries”, it’s become really difficult to communicate.
We need an American glossary of newspeak.
I have that same experience sometimes, where I’m reading a note that sounds sensible, but then devolves into a diatribe against “woke”, another concept with a meaning that only exists in the speaker, not in the receiver.
And Tucker doesn’t get any better regurgitated. Just as 🤮 the second time (and the third, ad nauseum, pun only sort of intended).
Great comment, A++
Glad to see this conversation moving forward. Having written about these issues, I think the practical solution is clear: professionalize content governance at the platform level. Facebook, for example, has taken meaningful steps in this direction with its Oversight Board.
We shouldn’t have to choose between extremes: a free-speech free-for-all (4chan), ideologically biased moderation (Twitter), erratic rule-by-owner (X), or state-driven control of discourse depending on who’s in power (Biden, Trump).
Professionalized content governance is not a perfect answer, but it represents the next evolution, an imperfect synthesis of free expression and responsible moderation.
Can you elaborate on your idea of "professionalized content governance"? I'm so curious for a proposal that doesn't feel authoritarian.
Look at the Facebook Oversight Board as one example.
How does that work? I haven't used facebook in years.
How can any private governing body maintain its reputation and profit?
They'd call out the excesses of both sides of the aisle, then become hated by both sides.
I can’t believe you wrote a giant screed against free speech (which hurts everyone’s epistemology by restricting access to information) instead of just saying we shouldn’t let stupid people vote.
Once we’ve accepted the premise that the masses are too stupid to form accurate models of how the world works, why let them vote? If their opinions can be swayed by top-down media pressure, then whoever controls the top-down media pressure can control the votes of the masses. It leaves a giant “press to subvert democracy” button on the table that someone will inevitably use to crush political dissent.
Because democracy with gate keeping has a pretty good history, being the American model up to a few years ago, while authoritarianism doesn’t.
Restricting the franchise is not the same as authoritarianism. Setting aside the question of racial prohibitions on voting, America had property requirements for voting for many years without being authoritarian. Reimposing a property or IQ requirement would not be the same as imposing authoritarianism
Sounds like a bad idea. Don’t you think those with power would change IQ tests to produce a constituency that preserves their power? Just look at lobbying and institutional capture to guide your thinking on this.
Social media only came into existence recently. In that past, there used to be numerous newspapers, so openly partisan that many of their names linger on with party labels. Newspapers as local quasi-monopolies came later. That was not "the American model" earlier.
MAGAs: let's end voting and make JD Vance an absolute dictator, what could go wrong? We're so Based!
I think it's pretty clear that "intelligence" can be highly compartmentalized. There are plenty of smart engineers, lawyers, and doctors who are still bought into ridiculous QAnon, Antivax, and other conspiracies. I'm skeptical that a nebulous intelligence meaningfully translates into voting for good policies
I find the smarter conservatives tend to buy into higher-brow conservative propaganda, not the Q-Anon stuff. The few that do are probably grifters of some kind, like a chiropractor that hocs supplements to his patients and realizes that sales go up when he talks about miracles and government conspiracies.
This is a horrendously bad take. We already went down that road and it was much much worse than you are allowing here. The fact that Substack has brave leaders and Elon bought Twitter is the only thing that broke the woke madness which was just getting worse and worse.
The Times would *never* have course corrected at all on race and trans insanity if they hadn't been forced to.
This article is ultimately just shouting into the void. It's not like gatekeepers lost their power because someone made an executive decision to strip them of their powers; rather, technological change rendered them powerless, which can't be helped by any policy. Arguing about whether or not the gatekeepers should have more power is futile, because the fact is that, rightly or wrongly, they aren't trusted by the public.
When people feel that their freedom of speech is being suppressed, they tend to react poorly and double down on stupidity. If Twitter or any other social network gets more aggressive about gatekeeping, people will move to a different platform that advertises more open 'debate' about demons and autism. So even if you believe that the gatekeepers of recent history (or the aspiring gatekeepers of today) do a good job of mediating discourse, there's no shoving this back into Pandora's box.
Even if it were possible, it's not clear why you would assume that future gatekeepers will maintain any integrity just because you think they've done a good job so far. A world where gatekeepers have a lot more power is also a world where they can be pressured to exercise that power on behalf of those with real authority. Currently, the most powerful politician in America is Donald Trump, whose appetite for misinformation and basic hostility to the idea of free speech is legendary. If we allow gatekeepers to suppress content on the internet, it's only a matter of time before the stupidest people seize power and seek to use this power to censor good ideas. The censorious nature of today's elites aside, stupid people tend to be even less supportive of the free exchange of ideas, because they lack the cognitive skillset to defend their own.
So it's unclear to me how any of this would work. Ultimately, freedom of speech is better than the alternative, and it's not possible to suppress very much anymore anyway.
Actually, all curating takes is (1) deplatforming harmful disinformation spreaders, and (2) monitoring/restricting comments and posts. This would probably not be able to be done now that Trump is in charge, as he could go after/shake down companies who do this, but it could happen in a future Democratic administration.
If say all the Tuckers/Candaces/and average Joe racists had to leave Twitter or whatnot and go out to 4Chan and Truth Social, those spaces could be more socially stigmatized. Also, once you confine a bunch of crazies to a certain space, that space will become more and more of a madhouse, which could scare off the merely crazy-adjacent.
The problem we have today is that Trump and his cronies have created an environment where crazy people work alongside normal people, which only validates and normalizes the crazy shit.
One way the left could hit back today is to have their own conspriacy wing that spreads conspriacy theories about Trump and his goons. This is not all that far fetched as the Birther conspiracy was actually invented by the 2008 Hillary Campaign.
This is a somewhat semantic point, but I'll defend this conspiracy theory: "there were ancient human civilizations that predated recorded history." Obviously certain theories like Hyperborea and Agartha, hollow Earth, Lemuria, Atlantis are all mythical. But since recorded history only begins around 3400 BC, it's entirely reasonable to suggest that the Vinca symbols in the Balkans represent a real literate "civilized culture," one which we unfortunately cannot decode.
Cities, writing, and agriculture are the components of civilization, and all of them pre-date "recorded history," by which we mean those writings which we can decipher. Jericho and Göbeklitepe are both evidence of civilizations which predate "recorded history" by thousands of years.
I've thought for a while that it might have taken humanity a long time, like 100,000+ years to get on the path of modern civilization. Like what if a culture 50,000 years ago developed written language, pottery, metalworking, etc. But then got completely wiped out by a famine or an ice age? What if this happened hundreds of times, before the ideas spread widely enough that even a particular civilization disappearing wasn't enough to end progress?
But that doesn't mean I believe in Ancient Aliens or any shit like that.
Yea I think he just misspoke and mean pre-agricultural revolution or something.
Also: "Guy who, upon seeing a list of wrong beliefs, goes through them one by one to interrogate whether they are actually false".
You speak of democracy. But it seems to me that this touches on the distinction between democracy, that is, the direct translation of majority opinion into policy, and republic, where the majority gets to choose which faction of the elite get to decide on policy. The differences between those have been understood for centuries.
I agree with you in that we should go back to treating free speech as a negative right, but I am far more skeptical of internet gatekeepers than you. Especially when many of these gatekeepers were collaborating with the government to censor speech. It's not even worth arguing on the premise of free speech as a positive right. The "common good" cannot exist in a society of individuals.
"This is going to be true regardless of whether elites behave well or not"
Is this actually true though? That chart shows vaccine skepticism rising among Republicans during peak internet censorship, years before Elon bought Twitter. It's not just the censorship that lost trust in elites, it's also that the frequency in which elites got things wrong was increasing. Also look how Republican and Democrats are equally skeptical of vaccines until Covid. This further suggests that elites and their perceived partisanship were the cause of the divergence rather than misinformation. Misinformation seems like a cope to protect elites from being held accountable. Why is it that when things go well, the elites get the credit, but when things go wrong, they get none of the blame?
"He was the main figure who normalized anti-vaxx content while much of his elderly audience was still immunologically naive to Covid, leading to hundreds of thousands of deaths."
So what? This is an acceptable cost of keeping the government from regulating speech. If conservatives want to drink Ivermectin and refuse to get vaccinated then let them. We are not the property of the state. For the most part, anti-vaxxers internalize the cost of their own stupidity anyways.
I also feel as though the Iron Law of Prohibition applies to information. For example, It's likely that the suppression of the lab leak theory actually led to more extreme Covid conspiracy theories circulating, as people were denied access to information that was actually based in reality and had to settle for worse alternatives.
The missing lemma here is the extent to which this cashes out as worse government, which I'm not sure it does. Restricting what the dumbest/loopiest 30% of Americans can hear on the basis that 10pp of them could be swayed either way only matters if it makes things worse for the US overall, presumably through making the Republicans govern much worse than they otherwise would. I don't think it does make them significantly worse, but I think it does make the Democrats better.
Other than RFK (who's an outlier in other ways),* most of Trump's downsides in terms of actual things the government does are either corrupt/nepotistic, his own idiosyncratic obsessions or ideas from the extreme but non-populist right (eg Doge). Carlson, Owens etc aren't moving the needle much on anything except maybe immigration, but hostility to immigration comes up everywhere and would likely be present in whatever purely-opinion Conservatism was still allowed through most gatekeeping. Trump himself isn't really a consequence of the decline of gatekeeping, having risen mostly during the gatekeeping era.**
In contrast, the Democrats have started to noticeably improve as gatekeeping/censorship weakens, because any actually existing system of gatekeeping will push things about twice as far towards leftism as it does towards improvement. Leftism that no-one's allowed to criticise tends to be the worse form of Leftism, and woke-Left policies did have real consequences in government.
If the above is right, and more gatekeeping makes Republicans 5% better but Democrats 30% worse (while not affecting election results, which I'm not convinced it really does), then overall gatekeeping tends to reduce the quality of American governance. 10% of these worse-governed Americans might have a marginally more accurate worldview, but that's a value trade-off for whether it's more important to be factually correct than free (with freedom trading at a fairly high exchange rate to factual correctness). Consequentially, it pushes in the wrong direction.
*RFK's wackiness was an explicit consequence of coalition-building during the election, but RFK's support base of vaccine-skeptics had mostly emerged pre-gatekeeping. His fusion with the Trump base happened before this during Covid for very path-dependant reasons, but may have stalled had there been more gatekeeping.
**I'm taking the gatekeeping era to include moderated Twitter/Facebook/etc, and to have ended in the early 2020s (28th October 2022 was when Musk bought Twitter, and might be the easiest cutoff date).
I think expanding the Community Notes system is the only way this can work. A gatekept system with bad gatekeepers is unstable. But the gatekeepers will always be incentivized to use their power for selfish political ends. That's why the gatekeepets can't be individuals, it needs to be a system like Community Notes. Bring it to Youtube, bring it to Facebook, hell bring to New York Times front page itself.
The issue I have with the traditional gatekeepers is that they are not truth aligned. They are "niceness" or "decorum" aligned. This is an obnoxious and highly consistent part of the center left worldview. "Don't be mean" is basically sacred to them and they consistently can't or won't define what "don't be mean" even entails in concrete terms. It's extremely vibes-based, and these people usually have an above average case of bleeding-heart so they are not the best people to be making vibes-based decisions of what is and isn't mean. They roll over and show their bellies any time some "vulnerable" person accuses them of being mean. Go read that latest Ezra Klein/Ta-Nahesi Coates conversation (or various other ones they have had over the years). Ezra consistently melts when this guy accuses him of opinions that help "hate" spread. I don't even think Coates is wrong all the time, but Klein is not bending because he's hearing truth. He's bending because his nice liberal soul started twisting. Obviously wishy-washy "niceness" is better than the based ritual or intentional performative cruelness.
I guess if I *have* to choose between women's tears and the based ritual I will choose women's tears. Actual truth is still better than both.
*Edit* Klein actually pushes back more in this interview than he typically does, but I don't think it undermines my point as much as it seems. Coates is basically accusing him of being too nice to Charlie Kirk and Klein is defending his decision to be nice in the moment. He melts when accused of being mean and will fight back when you tell him he is too nice. I do think there is way more going on with him than just this, but this dynamic is a consistent and major one if you look for it.
I think you're basically wrong here. There's been research into what leads to conspiracy theorizing, and it's not free speech. It's the opposite. Rather, what's led to the rise of the insane right is that it's a direct reaction against the left's deplatforming efforts. Trying to suppress disfavored speech makes it more popular, not less. This is bourne out by what happens under authortitarian governments. When the central state controls the media, does conspiracy theorizing go away? No, it actually gets crazier. The middle east, for instance, long ruled by authoritarian states, is a hotbed of conspiracy theorists. The CIA controls everything!
If you really want to defeat this nonsense you don't want to suppress it, you want to shine a light on it. Actually have someone knowledgeable go on Joe Rogan and debate this stuff. The fact that the left hasn't been doing this is the problem. They let the crazies OWN the field. Yeah, they have their own TV shows, sure, but if they aren't directly addressing the specific points, to the specific audience that listens to it, that's not much help. Joe Rogan's listeners aren't going to go to NPR for a counterpoint, as if NPR was even airing counterpoints.
I remember when there used to be people who made it their life mission to go around debunking conspiracy theories. Like James Randi, who would go around exposing "psychics" as frauds and charlatans. Like the Skeptics Society. I remember when scientists would actually debate creationists! The problem is the left abandoned that in favor of deplatforming, not that there wasn't enough deplatforming. As always always always, the answer to speech is more speech. Attempting to suppress it is just going to make it more popular. We need more James Randi's, not more gatekeeping.
I think a big driver of this discourse is that the discourse-makers (including Richard) are unique in that they are essentially forced by their job to constantly interact with the worst aspects of social media/the internet. As is the case in this article, the grievances are often dressed up as concern for democratic policy-making, but I supsect that the underlying motivation is that Richard (and people in similar positions) is simply tired of being beset by retards in his replies.
Everyone knows that famous people attract weirdos and nutcases. People that are internet-famous are in a uniquely bad position, because their earnings depend specifically on their being on the internet and interacting with these people. Everyone else can simply curate their feed to avoid them, or simply walk away from the screen à la Tyler the Creator.