It feels like the web is becoming more closed every year — fewer open forums, more platforms locking away data and communities behind logins. What do you think are the biggest forces driving the decline of the open internet? Are walled gardens like Discord the main problem, or is it something else like artificial intelligence, corporate consolidation, surveillance, or changing user habits?
While you are looking at them censoring people using slurs on big social media thinking it’s a win, they are also censoring people using ugly words like rape, genocide, suicide, and silencing a lot of important channels about important themes because it’s “sensitive” content.
We went from “I don’t like that shit, so I’m not gonna go to that place/interact with those people” to “I don’t like that shit, so people are not allowed to do it/talk about it”. And this is affecting everyone.
Ok? This is actually now a different conversation because someone deciding that they don’t want to spend time with you or be in your company is not censorship, you fucking baby. No one owes you their attention or time. Or a ‘debate’ whenever you feel like it. And expecting, for example, trans people in a trans space to sit at the fucking table and sing kumbaya with people who think they are subhuman is just insane.
Also, who is the “they” that is censoring you? I’ve been on Facebook quite a lot over this last year and my feed is full of people talking about genocide. And feminist pages that don’t shy away from subjects like rape. In fact, here we are using these words right now, waiting for the man in black to come and make it disappear.
Unless you’re making a habit of going into spaces that specifically don’t want these topics and doing it anyway? In which case, you’re the asshole. Which would make you just like a maga that gets banned from a queer page for using slurs, then acts like their rights are being infringed because of it.
“who is the they” - big social media
The biggest social media of all is YouTube, and even mentioning those words screw your reach, get you demonetized and later deplataformed. They killed most critical channels about history and war reporting, and these pages you see on Facebook, ask about their reach any of these days, you will see that they barely reach their own followers.
ps: Sorry, the original commenter was talking about people “censoring” each other - if it means just blocking, I fully support it (but usually it means reporting everything they don’t like and getting it banned). I was talking about social media itself censoring everyone.