WatDabney

Citizens United was a death sentence for the ideal of the government representing the will of the people.

Trump’s election is the final nail in its coffin. He hasn’t even taken office yet and he’s already brazenly selling influence

And if he and the oligarchs have their way about it, it won’t he long before we won’t even be able to say things like that. Not because the oligarchy will do something so doomed to failure as trying to censor it themselves, but because sites that don’t “choose” to censor whatever they want censored will be banned.

The point of taking down TikTok is twofold. One, they have a Boogeyman they can use to push it through. Two, if they can shut down an app with 170 million users then they can shut down anyone.

Exactly.

They needed a pretense for taking down a social media site in spite of the fact that it’s not violating any existing laws and in spite of widespread opposition to the takedown,and TikTok served both of those purposes.

And now, armed with Supreme Court approval, they can set about barring access to pretty much any site they want, for whatever reason they want, regardless of public opinion.

That’s true, and that’s why so many internet censorship it spying bills are officially to counter pedophiles.

Yes.

But that was just an interim strategy, and could never serve their long-term goal, since all it could allow them to do is to institutionalize the authority to censor in cases of activity already deemed criminal.

The difference with the TikTok ban is that neither TikTok nor its users have been accused of any crime. This ban is being enacted in spite of the fact that there’s nothing criminal about the site, and that’s a new power.

I honestly don’t think it’s trying to soften people up to the government banning social media.

I guarantee that that’s exactly what it’s about.

It’s not a coincidence that all of the domestic social media overlords have already lined up to swear their fealty to Trump (and to hand him big piles of money). They know which way the wind is blowing, and they’re ensuring that they don’t get TikToked.

Pornhub is different though, because they could base it in existing laws barring minors from accessing pornography. It didn’t really establish any new precedents, but instead simply expanded enforcement of existing statutes to the internet.

That’s not to say it was a good thing - it just doesn’t pose the same sort of existential threat that this poses.

The difference here is that there are no existing laws that pertain to TikTok, so it’s not justvthe application of existing law to the internet. This is an entirely new power - the authority to simply pass a law decreeing that a particular site is to be banned in the US, entirely regardless of the legal standing of the site or its content, but solely because those with the authority to do so have decided that that’s what they want to do

No government ever oppresses its citizenry by announcing that they’re setting out to oppress the citizenry.

They always, without exception, do it by first targeting someone the bulk of the populace thinks deserves it, and then only later incrementally expanding their reach.

Whether or not this particular ban is enforced is irrelevant. The point was simply to establish the precedent that the government can restrict citizens’ access to social media.

A government that can ban social media sites is going to base their choices of which ones to ban on their preferences - not yours.

Just the latest salvo in the proxy class war.

The bigoted, hateful hard right-wingers have been and are being very deliberately and methodically indoctrinated into serving as the footsoldiers in the privileged parasite class’s proxy war against the left.

And Meta is ready to play its part.

Gotta love the brazen irony of eliminating fact checkers in order to encourage political content in the wake of Trump’s election.

How is anyone caught off guard by this?

The Republican strategy for at least the 50 or so years that I’ve been aware enough to pay attention has exactly and explicitly been to get the base all riled up with brazenly racist anti-immigrant rhetoric, make lots noise and spends lots of money intercepting/deporting some number of people, but ensure that enough still get/stay in, and are desperate enough, to meet the business demand for cheap and exploitable labor.

Trump and his cultists have been extra hateful and extra loud, but aside from that, this is all just business as usual.

Are there actually people who didn’t already know rhat Trump doesn’t pay bills?

Yeeeeaah… but see, your analogy not coincidentally fails, since the kitten is just ignorant.

It would be more accurate if the kitten ran into the burning house because some fat, smelly old tom told it that if it did, the tom and his buddies would destroy the lives of everyone the kitten hates.

So yeah - there’s a lot of ignorance there, but the foundation that makes that ignorance relevant and effective is bigotry and hatred and an utter and complete lack of empathy or integrity. If the kitten wasn’t so blinded by its hatred and cruelty, “run into this burning house to destroy someone else’s life” wouldn’t have been an effective appeal.

Imagine how ethically and intellectually bankrupt you have to be to note that publicizing something you do undermines public trust in your office, then conclude not that you’re wrong to do it, but that other people are wrong to publicize it.

Of course she doesn’t, but the ruling class needs to make an example of someone - they’re not about to let us peasants get away with defying them.

I assumed that they were at least anarchism-adjacent - it’s pretty much a prerequisite for the bulk of their focus.

I hadn’t really looked into their political posting much though, and yeah - even with just a cursory glance, it’s promising.

And I hadn’t thought about that distinction between people who simply hold a position and people who “officially” wear the label in the context of anarchism (though I’ve noted it often with atheists), but yeah, there’s undoubtedly some truth there.

Thanks for the heads-up.

i’d like a stronger anarchist/libertarian community on lemmy.

That’s one thing that I’ve been both disappointed and surprised to not see.

The anarchist community on Reddit is fairly large, but not very anarchist. There’s a very strong authoritarian bent to their claimed anarchism. I had hopes that the nature of this place would invite a community that was anarchist not only in name but in spirit, but I’ve seen surprisingly little sign of that, or even really of anarchism at all.

I guess it could be counted as a weakness as far as attracting new users go, but I think it’s a strength overall.

It would be sort of nice if there was a stronger right-wing presence here, but at this point in our history, the right is overtly toxic. They’ve completely lost touch with honesty, empathy, integrity and simple human decency. Their entire identity at this point is built on hatred, bigotry and callous disregard for anyone other than themselves. They poison everything they touch, so the fact that they can’t gain a foothold here is very much to our benefit.

If we survive this era of Trump/Putin/Netanyahu/Polievre/Le Pen/Modi/Meloni/Hanson/etc., then hopefully the right will reconnect with reality, integrity and simple decency enough that they can take part in a community without turning it into a cesspool of hatred and lies, but unless and until that happens, this place is absolutely better off without them.

Antisemitism gets harder to resist every day.

It’s not an accident that the US has militarized police granted essentially free reign, the largest prison system in the world and plans in the works for internment camps.

Human history broadly runs in cycles, yes.

But the history of a particular civilization is strictly linear, with a beginning, a middle and an end.