The Social-Media Panic

nationalreview ^

[ChicagoConservative27]

All that matters to the center-Left is whether Silicon Valley will keep them in power. ‘Make no mistake: 2016 will never happen again.” Historians are not always reliable predictors of the future, but Niall Ferguson’s analysis of how Silicon Valley and the center-Left would react to the successive and surprise victories of Brexit and Donald Trump is proving correct. Conservatives and populists will not be allowed to use the same tools as Democrats and liberals again, or at least not use them effectively.

Silicon Valley is working with its media and governmental critics to limit the damage to the center-Left going forward. You can see the dynamic in the way that the media generates a moral panic out of stories about how Brexit and the Trump election happened, and the way Silicon Valley responds. Fake news becomes a problem, and Silicon Valley responds by hiring progressive journalists as censors. I mean “fact-checkers.” You can see it in the demonetization of YouTube videos. Or in the new sets of regulation being imposed in European countries that deputize the social-media networks themselves as an all seeing social censor.

[bk1000]

“Conservatives and populists will not be allowed to use the same tools as Democrats and liberals again, or at least not use them effectively.”

I really think they would prefer we use their “tools” than ours.

[MeganC]

The left has yet to realize that conservatives are so deafened by leftist propaganda that it simply doesn’t have any impact on us anymore.

[cgbg]

We will find a way to circumvent the censors.

Count on it.

[The Toll]

This is just more proof that a large portion of the public knows nothing of the world unless it is fed to them by Late Night Comedy shows.

[DoughtyOne]

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[aspasia]

Conservative activists and publishers need to think long and hard about how to reach their audience when the tech giants are proving themselves willing to filter out their content, and when they’ve come up with tools for alternately repressing speech and enabling political manipulation, so long as it goes the right way.

This is all we get from Dougherty, the antipopulist scaremonger at NRO.

[Ancesthntr]

Charge them ALL with violations of the Sherman Antitrust Act, and break them ALL up into tiny little pieces.

Of course, that’d require an Attorney General who wakes up for things besides someone lighting up a doobie.

[Gen-X-Dad]

Silicon valley censorship will accomplish a few things,

1) Silicon valley social media companies will lose customers as they will never appease the left and have lost their neutrality with the right
2) The Alt-Tech replacement companies will thrive and are coming on line, they will surge as people move on from boring uniformity and PR talking points being promoted by the existing companies
3) The internet will evolve to a more hardened and less centralized peer-to-peer system to protect people from being shut down and deplatformed
4) A new economy will rise up around crypto-currencies as these groups will crowd source their activities

In short, the cyberpunk novelists of the 70s predicted the censoring of the net by corporations and governments and how that would set the stage for the next version to be birthed. Each version is more robust, harder to control, and technically advanced over it’s predecessor.