Interesting effortpost dropped about institutional level internet censorship calling it the "closure of the internet". It's very tl;dr but it goes into detail what many of the top social media sites did from 2015-22, and breaks it down into two phases, the post Trump/Brexit era of 15-19, and the COVID lockdown era of 2020-22.

Also it tellingly mentions that it never ended, Twitter just dialed back and everyone else has the infrastructure in place.

Of course there are also people who will deny with a smile that this actually happened.

https://arctotherium.substack.com/p/the-closure-of-the-internet

arctotherium.substack.comThe Closure of the InternetThe Most Important Social Phenomenon of the Late 2010s

Replying to @⁨sendpaws@mitra.pawslut.party⁩

@sendpaws most people don't really know what the word "enclosure" is who probably should. it's exactly what the tech sector has been slowly being drug through post-dot com boom.

there's a book "technofeudalism" about it--amazon et all quietly becoming inescapable commons places (every photographer must be on instagram or doesn't exist, every product must be on amazon or doesn't exist) despite not being subject to commons-esque social regulation (amazon does what it wants and is backed by DOD money, making it relatively immune to boycotts)

i think open communication proved to be too powerful for nation states and its been a really protracted fight to revoke it without causing An Event. (i liken it to a game where controllers are trying to maximize the size of a shape without ever touching the death triangle; a shape that causes you to lose, but there is no way to know that you have found it, as intersecting it causes whoever does so to die.)

Replying to @⁨icedquinn@blob.cat⁩

@sendpaws basically we have known fail states which are few but well identified

- when food costs more than about 50% of day wages, peasant revolt is guaranteed
- when privileges are granted and summarily revoked, riots are very likely

its basically a long con of measuring out how much you can take back at a time, normalizing it, and repeating, the "boiling the frog" strategy, where by the time a resistance forms they implicitly accept most of your control anyway (they're arguing to undo your latest power grab, not that your entire paradigm of control was never valid to begin with)
en

Replying to @⁨icedquinn@blob.cat⁩

@icedquinn That's why this post is so good, it basically says that internet clampdowns did not change public opinion but rather radicalized people harder because "the jews did this" wasn't a funny joke anymore after seeing the people you like be targeted by the NGOs.

It also failed at a lot of goals, from keeping Trump out to the rise of the populist right in Europe, to trying to keep people up to date with the latest COVID script because turns out all it did was make people lose trust. Instead, those ended up happening because of how people felt about real world issues.

Replying to @⁨subnetter@shitposter.world⁩

@subnetter @sendpaws yeah but israel sponsors this particular narrative.

they need the hitler story to buy legitimacy and people have been exceptionally generous with selling it to them. the more the state starts acting like literal hitler i think the more people have gotten cross with this.

britain has even outright said shit like "they act in ways that make it difficult for their allies to support them"